Small Man in a Book (4 page)

It was 1972, I was seven and I remember going with my mother to visit the school for the first time. It was in the Uplands area of Swansea, not a million miles away from The Bryn, where I had made my entrance seven years earlier. We approached the school from the rear, driving down a spectacularly steep hill and stopping at the back entrance, a tiny wooden door lost in the centre of a huge red-brick wall. The bottom of the door didn’t quite reach the ground; visitors had to step up and over perhaps ten inches of red bricks, and for some reason this struck me as very exciting indeed. It gave the place a Narnian, other-worldly quality that remained on entering the school grounds.

The buildings were spread out over perhaps three levels, the main, rather grand Victorian house being the lowest, then up a little for more classrooms and the gymnasium/hall, before going a little higher again for the library and the canteen-cum-art room. The main house possessed a grand central staircase and a smaller side staircase, which had originally been solely for servants. There was also, at one end of a narrow playground on the lowest level, a most remarkable construction that I can only describe as a multi-storey graveyard for desks. Under a corrugated roof, but open on two sides, were piled desk upon desk, stretching upwards far higher than the average child could reach. Again, like the little door in the red-brick wall, this gave the school an air of mystery. What lay inside this labyrinth of old wooden work stations, beyond the empty crisp packets and the variety of balls (tennis and foot) that remained tantalizingly out of reach? Had any pupils ever dared to crawl through the twisting tunnels that lay inside? I was an avid reader of Alfred Hitchcock’s series of books
The Three Investigators
, and the desk cemetery seemed reminiscent of the headquarters described in the books – a large trailer hidden in a junkyard behind and beneath piles of scrap iron and waste from where Jupiter, Pete and Bob would solve many a mystery.

The school was full of higgledy-piggledy bits of architecture, from the home-made table-tennis tables where the bigger boys would congregate at lunch and break times, making the balls spin and hover in the air, to the appallingly Heath Robinson toilet facilities. These were a curious indoor/outdoor affair consisting of an intermittent corrugated-iron sloping roof, a few rickety cubicles and a trough at which we boys would stand while trying not to breathe; the poorly plumbed system and the partly alfresco nature of the arrangement creating a heady aroma of cold damp Swansea air married with stale and fresh urine. While our own sanitary arrangements at home were second to none, I spent enough time at the school to think that this was how all toilets smelled, and over time actually became quite fond of the stench – to the extent that if I now find myself in close contact with shoddy drainage (on, say, a farm or using the external facilities at a very old pub), I’ll be transported back to my schooldays and lost for a while in my happy memories. There must be men and women of my age all over Britain who secretly yearn for an occasional whiff of this acrid perfume. I can’t help wondering if Jo Malone and the boffins at Molton Brown are missing a trick.

The school had been started in 1923 by the head master Elmer Thomas and his brother. When I arrived in the seventies, Mr Thomas’s son and daughter, Aled and Judith, were also teachers there. Both Mr Thomas and his son (known as Mr Aled) were kind men and wonderful teachers, though you wouldn’t have wanted to get on the wrong side of Mr Thomas. In my memory he is strolling around the school, his black gown flapping in the breeze like the Dark Knight, his head a neat blanket of snow-white hair, dropping in on lessons unannounced, or filling in when teachers were taken ill. He would be used as a stick to wave at an unruly class, especially by Mrs Mosford, our Welsh teacher, who in the face of pupil disruption would tilt her ear towards the door in an almost pantomime fashion, her eyes widening as she screamed in a stage whisper, ‘
He’s coming! Mr Thomas is coming! Mr Thomas is coming!
’ He had a way of opening a textbook which, I now realize from my lofty position as a mature and especially wise adult, conveyed a love of and a respect for knowledge. He would open the pages with relish, as though setting off on an adventure, using his thumb to drive a crease down the inside of the spine and ensure that the book remained open and able to do its job.

Each morning we would have an assembly, headed by Mr Thomas, when hymns would be sung to the accompaniment of an upright piano, played with delightful flamboyance by Mr Croote, our history teacher. His favourite appeared to be ‘It Fell Upon a Summer Day’, which he would begin with a positively Liberacean zeal and perform in a rhythm and style reminiscent of the theme tune to the popular seventies BBC sitcom
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
: ‘Meet the gang ’cause the boys are here / The boys to entertain you!’ That was what I and, I’m sure, many of the other children had in mind as we sang:

It fell upon a summer day,

When Jesus walked in Galilee,

The mothers from a village brought

Their children to His knee.

Mr Croote’s history lessons were held on the top floor of the main building. There was a large double window in the classroom, which looked out on to a mature tree in which could be found a family of wood pigeons who would provide a cooing accompaniment to our studies. I would gaze out at them and imagine myself living in the tree with the birds, or flying off to Swansea Bay, and all the while Mr Croote’s sonorous and soothing voice would be humming and bubbling away in the background.

‘In 1536 Henry the Eighth ordered the dissolution of the monasteries …’

His lessons seemed to feature a lot of dictation; we would sit there in rows, hanging on and writing down his every word.

‘New paragraph … However, Thomas Cromwell began to …’

This was one of Mr Croote’s signature moves. He seemed unable to begin a new paragraph with any word other than ‘however’; he had a screenwriter’s instinct for conflict. He would stand at the front of the class, beside a ream of paper, and gently rub his fingers over the top sheet in a circular fashion, causing the pages to fan out symmetrically in such a magical fashion that he wouldn’t have been out of place at Hogwarts. With his colourful rings, slightly powdery face and frequent use of cologne, Mr Croote’s home life was the subject of some conjecture among the pupils and, looking back now, I suspect he was ahead of his time in many ways. He was popular with the children and once referred to me as a ‘little sirocco’; I didn’t know what it meant at the time but now I suspect he was spot on.

March 1st is an important day in Wales; it is St David’s Day, the festival of our patron saint, and tradition dictates that schools across the land put on an eisteddfod, a little festival of music, poetry and performance. Each year we would leave the school en masse and walk two abreast in a slowly snaking crocodile of children, travelling the short distance to the nearby Henrietta Street Chapel. Our joint national symbols, the daffodil and the leek, would be worn on the lapels of our blazers – sometimes little cloth representations, but often the real thing – with some of the rowdier boys competing to see who could attach the largest flower or vegetable to their chest. Once at the chapel we would file into the pews and wait for the proceedings to commence, the air heavy with the scent of leeks and daffodils. It was the one day of the year that we all felt like greengrocers.

When it came time to perform we would gather in small groups for songs, and for our attempts at choral speaking. This was the reciting of a poem as a group, and the poem always seemed to be T. Llew Jones’s ‘
Y Wiwer
’, Welsh for ‘The Squirrel’. As the morning wore on, some of the rowdier boys – those with less regard for authority than me – would crane their necks to one side and begin to chew at their leeks. A few tentative nibbles would soon be followed by full-on unbridled chomping, which would then be complemented by a chorus of belching. Once the eisteddfod was completed, with the air of the small chapel now heavy with the aroma of vegetables and the gaseous emissions of young children, we would return to the school, from where we would disperse for a much-anticipated afternoon off.

These were happy, carefree days at Dumbarton and it was here that I made the first significant relationship of my life, my first best friend. David Williams was three months younger than me; his birthday was in August, a month he would spend much of in Majorca where his family had an apartment in the seaside resort of C’an Pastilla and from where he would return each year with a stomach tanned to mahogany. His father Gwynfa owned a chemist’s shop in Port Talbot, several in other parts of Wales and one in Hounslow, just outside London. He had a debenture in the North Upper Stand at Cardiff Arms Park and I would often go as David’s guest to see Wales play, although my interest in rugby was not especially keen. We would drive up in the family Jaguar with the personalized number plate and park on Cathedral Road where David’s Uncle Em(lyn) had a house, then we would walk down to the ground, stopping at the Beverley for a pre-match drink where David would have a pint and I would have a lemonade. I had no interest in drinking as a child, a youth or indeed as a young man. I had tried beer and found it a most unpleasant taste, so would spend the hour or so in the pub like a Nonconformist minister sent to the Valleys to save the men from themselves.

My best friend David Williams on a school trip to Bristol Zoo.

On leaving the pub we would join a growing throng of men, women and children as it moved slowly down Cathedral Road, over the Castle Street Bridge and onto the ground. The security in those days was not what it is now and it was quite common at this stage of the journey to see opportunistic enthusiasts trying to gain entrance to the ground via the banks of the River Taff, clambering up the slopes, legs wet to the knee, pint precariously balanced in one hand, flag in the other.

There was, and still is, a hell of an atmosphere in Cardiff on match day. We would buy a programme – a modest, far simpler publication than today’s glossy sporting pornography that costs a fortune – then squeeze our way past the scarf and flag sellers, the hot dog and rosette (whatever happened to
them
?) stands before entering what seemed to me to be the largest man-made structure in the world, Cardiff Arms Park. These were the glory days of Welsh rugby, with Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett and J. P. R. Williams on the field and Max Boyce at the top of the charts, but it was all rather lost on me then. Having said that, my lack of interest didn’t stop me from following David for a triumphant trot onto the pitch after Wales’s Grand Slam triumph against France in 1978.

David was a huge sports fan, and his dad also had access to tickets for football matches at Wembley. We went on more than one occasion to see the FA Cup Final, staying at the flat above the chemist shop in Hounslow and getting the tube into central London on the Saturday morning. On one such visit we made a detour into Soho so that David’s brother John, eight years older and about to get married to Sian, could visit the tailor responsible for his morning suit. David and I shuffled along behind the grown-ups, sneakily glancing into the doorways and shopfronts of ill repute. It wasn’t like Swansea.

With his chain of chemist’s shops, David’s father was a very successful and canny businessman, but he took great delight in playing the innocent; perhaps it wrong-footed business adversaries. He came to our house once, shortly after we’d taken delivery of one of the first video recorders in the area, and pretended to be utterly baffled at how the machine could send out pictures when it wasn’t pointing at the screen, like a projector.

This faux naivety masked a sterner side, glimpsed one stormy night in Majorca when David and I returned later than promised to the apartment after an evening spent playing pool in a bar. We tiptoed in an hour later than expected, hoping to find Mr and Mrs Williams tucked up in bed, only to be greeted by the furious silhouette of David’s dad as he stood in front of the double glass doors that led to the balcony. He exploded at David, ‘
Where the hell have you been?
’ As he laid down the law in a most forceful manner, he was beautifully backlit by the lightning as it flashed angrily outside in the stormy night, swiftly followed by deafening claps of thunder. He directed not one word of his dressing-down at me, but nonetheless I was terrified. In a few minutes the ordeal was over and we shuffled off to the bedroom with our tails between our legs. I had never witnessed anything like this from my dad and was in shock as I sat down on my bed. I turned to David to ask if he was all right; he must surely be shocked and upset too, but he just laughed. He’d seen it all before. At breakfast the next day it was as though it had never happened.

I went out to the apartment a few times with David and his parents, and once (when we were in our late teens) just with David, to decorate the flat and have a little holiday at the same time. We had strict instructions as to the colour of paint and trekked off to the local paint shop, returning fully equipped and ready for action. In accordance with my desire to always be at the cutting edge of alternative culture, we worked to the soundtrack of Wham’s album
Make It Big
, their much-anticipated follow-up to
Fantastic
, on vinyl of course, and had the whole place done in a week. We had arrived on the island as boys but now returned home as men; not just any men, but painting and decorating men. It wasn’t until David’s mother went out for a short stay a few months later that it was discovered her cut-price painters and decorators had done the whole place in gloss.