Semi-Detached (6 page)

My own
son had nobody but a little sister to fight with so I had to wrestle with him,
but fathers say, ‘Not now,’ and laugh at key assaults, whereas brothers, given
a hefty kick getting into the car, respond in kind and get themselves into
trouble. You could karate-chop an older brother to see if it really hurt. He in
his turn didn’t just ‘play’ at fighting. He liked to win. (‘No punching! No
biting!’) If he shouted, ‘Submit,’ there was always the last resort of pushing
him to the limit so that he actually hurt me. I could yowl seriously then,
provoking Mother to leave
Mrs Dale’s Diary
and demand furiously why
William, who was the oldest
,
didn’t know his own strength. And look, he
had actually hurt his brother, and we had better stop fighting and go outside,
otherwise our father would hear of it. Temporarily gathered up into a bosomy,
powdery hug, I could be the brave one. Then I could follow him outside and
whack him with a stick.

I was
put up for things: songs, recitations, kisses. My mother recalls a visit to an
end-of-the-pier show in Bognor. The family sat up with glassy-eyed attention
when, during a break in the musical light entertainment, the cast were joined
by a four-year-old boy who came on and sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. The
grisly child was me.

I knew
how to suck up. Our earliest holidays were at a place called Gorran Haven in
Cornwall. We stayed in a flat above a crab—fisherman’s locker and played on the
beach, while my father paced about in a distracted fashion on a cliff until
it
was ice-cream time. Here, I recall, I made a
paper knife out of a
spider crab’s leg and a bit of charred driftwood. I solemnly presented it to
my mother. It hung around the house smelling noxiously for most of my
childhood.

Occasionally
we travelled to Cardiff, on a deathly visit to Nain, my father’s mother, the
white-haired matriarch of the family. She was spoken of in awed
if
not
quite respectful tones. From the perspective of the back of the car, as it
rumbled through the four thousand traffic lights on the way from Sussex to
Cardiff, she seemed to be a powerful brake on the independence of our rulers.

We were
ordered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, to keep out of the way, to make no
noise, not to fight or argue, and to make use of our two Welsh phrases, ‘Nos da’,
good night, and ‘Boredar’, good morning. This wasn’t because she spoke Welsh
herself (though all the ancient crones of Wales usually had it in them
somewhere). Nain (North-Waleian-Welsh for ‘Granny’) had long been settled in English-speaking
Cardiff. The Welsh was only designed to make us look cute.

It
would appear that we children were the principal reason for the excruciatingly
long journey in the first place. And she, Nain, despite being sensitive to the
slightest flaw in our upbringing, like some ant-eater able to sniff out wriggly
behaviour, was also apparently frail, not used to young children and in need
of long periods of complete inertia in her gloomy house in the suburban street
in Pen y Lan, the quiet, posh bit of north Cardiff.

Her
husband, Taid (North-Waleian Welsh for grandfather), had originally come to
Cardiff to supervise the Western Region for Jesse Boots, always a slightly
mythological presence in my father’s side of the family (There were ‘shares’,
spoken of in hushed tones.) William Rhys Jones the Elder was a chemist who had
worked in London and Southampton, having originally come from Betws-y-coed. He
was a Senior Deacon of the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel and preached himself.
He always entertained the visiting ministers. Three times every Sunday my
father was forced to walk the mile to the chapel, and they always discussed
last night’s film on the way Whether the film did for coming back, too, my
mother couldn’t tell me. Taid was a charismatic man who died at the age of
sixty-five, when my father was still at university, but my father was the runt
of the family, ten years younger than his older brother, Ieaun.

Nan and
Uncle Ieaun took over the running of the Rhys Joneses. This seemed to have
included a fierce duty to prevent the two daughters marrying. Any man who came
back to Elan Road was virtually run out of the house. My aunt Gwyneth had to
pretend to take my father, the little one, for a walk to get down to the tennis
club and eventually escaped to Gloucester with a minister (although I can’t
think that he played tennis). But Megan had to stay I sat with her in the Park
Hotel towards the end of her life, when I was touring to Cardiff and its
impossible New Theatre stage, and she remembered the dances she had been to
there with tears rolling down her face.

As
children, we always arrived in Cardiff after dark. Wales
is
forever
associated with inedible salad. It was ‘impossible’ to have a ‘proper’ supper,
because nobody could guess when we might arrive, so big, weeping chunks of
boiled ham were laid out with hard—boiled eggs, bitter 1950s lettuce and blobs
of salad cream: that vile yellow gloop that puckered the mouth and just about
smothered the taste of the over-ripe tomatoes. My father loved it. To us it
seemed a poor reward after sitting for six hours in the back of the Morris
Traveller. And worse, after Megan had cleaned the plates away into some smelly
back bit of the gloomy, under-lit house (though it was Nain who did all the
cooking, my mother assured me) it would be announced that it was immediately
time for bed, even for my brother, who, although he was the oldest, must be
tired out after the long journey.

So we
were lined up to kiss the old woman with the long, bright-white witch’s hair, a
passable imitation of my father in drag, and then, God help me, I remember
hugging her and piping up, like Shirley Temple
in Wee Willie Winkie,
‘There’s
a kiss from Mummy, there’s a kiss from Daddy, there’s a kiss from Helen and a
kiss from William.’ And the old dear raised a withered hand to stroke my
bulging baby cheeks and wipe a tear from her eye. ‘Ahh, Griffith Bach’ (meant
this time — my father only used it as a prelude to some expression of severe
disappointment). My brother looked on with undisguised disgust.

It had
not been puritanism that influenced my uncle’s protection of his women-folk, it
was snobbery. My mother is convinced he believed that Elwyn had married beneath
himself, and in turn she disapproved of Ieaun and his playboy ways. Her
deepest distrust was reserved for Joan, his wife. ‘When we first went there
with William and they came down to the car, Elwyn passed the baby to Joan, who
said, “Don’t give it to me.”‘

Joan
was admittedly a pretty stupid woman, but the pair were dead sophisticated for
Glamorgan. They had a Bentley and a sequence of houses decorated in
excruciating South of France taste, with lurid patterned wallpapers and
gold-encrusted bibelots.. They modelled themselves on the Duke and Duchess of
Windsor, even down to their smelly, noisy, asthmatic pug dogs: all pretty
glamorous for a consultant anaesthetist from Cardiff. My uncle came across as a
Welsh cross between Rex Harrison and Bertie Wooster. He was a squadron leader
during the war, and was the only man I ever met who actually said ‘what?’ at
the end of his sentences.

There
was a picture of him when he was in his twenties, stood on the top of a cliff,
in a trench coat and plus fours, next to a
low sports car, wearing an
outrageous jumper. He was the polar opposite of my father. Naturally I found
him rather interesting.

My
mother can still work herself up into a fit over the indignities of their
visits to our humble dwellings. ‘I didn’t think you lived in anything like
this,’ was Joan’s comment on first seeing their house in Epping. Ieaun was
driving in the car, quite possibly his Bentley, and turned on us children. ‘We’ll
have to stop this car unless you lot can be quiet.’

‘But
you used to say that all the time,’ I countered.

My
mother snorted. ‘You were perfectly quiet at the time.’ She giggled. William
had been turned out of his bed to accommodate the visiting potentate and stood
in front of him and said, ‘When are you going home? We’re fed up with having
you here.’

What my
mother resented was their concentration on luxury when she and my father were
struggling to bring up their children. All their lives Ieaun and Joan danced
attendance on a rich old aunt called Dolly, at the races, at Claridges and in
the South of France. Dolly had married a
French banker. She had become
estranged from her own daughter and gave Joan a dress allowance and paid for
her to come up to London once a month to have her hair and nails done. My mother
liked Dolly ‘Oh, she was a lot of fun.’ A measure of her wealth was that she
always booked two seats in the theatre — one for her mink.

Ieaun
and Joan never got the money. The French inheritance laws intervened. I felt
my mother was quietly satisfied. She had never forgiven Ieaun’s silly
assumptions about the superiority of surgeons over physicians. It had led to a
row the night before my father’s funeral. Ieaun, already getting woolly-minded
with the onset of Alzheimer’s, had claimed that Elwyn probably did not
understand, during his final illness, what was happening to him.

It
still caused my mother to flare up fourteen years after the event, with Ieaun
long dead too. ‘What nonsense you speak,’ she had told him. ‘Of course he knew
He was a Fellow.’ She resented the way that Aunty Megs had tried to shush her,
as if she were some junior even then. But she could also pity Ieaun now For
Mummy, her family was everything, and his lack of children left Ieaun to die
lonely and forgotten, whereas she sees her children every week, would do every
day if she could.

My
father obviously felt oppressed by his brother and would have nothing to do
with his Glamorgan snootiness. He had plans, even before we left Sussex, to
move me from my posh kindergarten and once took me for a frightening glimpse of
the noisy local state primary school.

Perhaps
he was worried about the fees. He told me he thought there were too many girls
at Conifers. I got out the school photograph to check. What was he on about?
There were plenty of boys. There was Charles Hume and Graham Stott and my best
friend, Jimmy Summers, who lost an eye in an accident after I left. (I was
deeply upset by the news and went up to the back of the garden to cry.)

Perhaps
Conifers was a bit girly … I rather liked it. There was a ‘Wendy house’ in
the grounds of the tiny school, where only girls played during the break. Once
we managed in a moment of heightened excitement, deafened by squealing and
blushing, to ‘penetrate’ this forbidden bastion of femininity, and I remember,
as we rushed through, that, to our surprise, behind the clapboard walls and the
dirty curtained windows there was just a bare, planked room and nothing to see
at all, the conclusion of most sexual curiosity at that age.

Otherwise,
we boys did everything that the girls did. We played rounders rather than
football, so I never matured into blokeyness. (I still loathe the beautiful
game.) We did an awful lot of skipping and we learned to sew (excellently
useful, though I’ve forgotten how to do the chain-stitch). I made a scarlet
swimming-costume bag with a bright white rope pull in one of the sunny upstairs
classrooms in what was, after all, little more than a suburban house near the
outskirts of Midhurst.

I can
bang away at the doors of memory here, but nothing really comes out. Images,
perhaps: the new gym built round the back, with the beautiful, varnished,
yellow wood climbing frames and the clean, new smell of the suede-covered
vaulting horses (not sensations commonly associated with school gyms). I
presented a current affairs project on the independence of Sierra Leone there. And
rows of Wellington boots under the awning on the veranda. But I only know that
because they were still there when I drove past a few years ago; as was the
conifer tree that gave the place its name, with a
big bowed branch where
we used to sit at breaks. All other lessons, personalities, friends, teachers,
pottery classes, infant school food and serious application have gone, except
for
Hiawatha
and the
Little White Bull.

The
school presented an elaborate pageant every year.
Hiawatha
was
memorable, not because of the Itchigumi and of the fur he made him slippers of,
but because it involved dressing up as Indians. We wore sacks, chopped with
ragged fringes at the bottom and tied with coloured belts. We wore head bands.
Our faces were daubed, gratifyingly, with war-paint, made from those great jars
of children’s pure floury colour.

The
next year Longfellow was supplanted by Tommy Steele. Tommy must have already
abandoned his good-rocking persona and adopted the cheeky nudge-nudge narrative
style which was to become his forte for the rest of the twentieth century. He ‘sang’
the story of the ‘li’l why bawl!’ (Chorus, loudly and with a note of mania: ‘Little
White Bull!!’) And the bull, which was deficient, in some ugly-duckling way,
scored a comical triumph in the bull ring (before being slaughtered, I assume).

It is
the first pop song I remember, because we had to listen to it hundreds of
times. I was the back legs, my first major part. The bull itself was made out
of chicken wire and that infant-school staple, papier-mâché. We legs wore big
white trousers, and it was an early experience of the unexpected trails of
theatre as spectacle. Naturally, my brother, who was older, was the front.
After weeks of rehearsal, of clutching his waist and gaily tripping hither and
thither in time to the music, the dress rehearsal was a fearful shock. No
Mexican penitent, shouldering a painted Madonna, could have been less prepared
for the actuality of the performance than I was. My brother seemed to have all
the advantages. It was preposterously unfair. He could at least see. He could
actually breathe. He was upright. His big bull’s head gave him relative freedom
of action. He was not continually pronged and lacerated by the razor-wire edges
of the inexpertly trimmed chicken-wire carapace. He could also assess the
inevitable discrepancy between the routine as devised over months in the tiny
gym and the routine as performed on the expansive prairie of the school
playing-field across the road. So he romped away with frisky white bullish
spirit. Admittedly, this was to keep up with the toreadors, matadors and
picadors who were skipping spiritedly away ahead of him, energized, as is often
the case, by a rush of adrenalin.