Small Man in a Book (6 page)

A little put out by the arrival of my brother Pete.

Plotting his demise …

I think back on the eight years before Pete was born as years in which I was an only child, but this is not the case. In April of 1971 Mum gave birth to my brother Jeremy. I was about to turn six in May. I’m afraid I have no memories at all of Jeremy, the only image I can conjure up when I think of him is of my mother sitting on the settee at Woodside, crying. Jeremy died, without warning or explanation, in August of that year, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. I can’t imagine how this affected my parents; it is unbearable to try.

As a young child I can remember a comforting glow of certainty in my surroundings; while Dad was often away at work, Mum was always with me, ferrying me around here, there and everywhere, to Swansea, Neath, Briton Ferry … you name it, we went there. In my hazy childhood memory we’re in a Vauxhall Viva, the one with the rectangular speedometer. We’re waiting, Nan and I, in the car outside C&A while Mum pops in for something. It’s raining hard and the wipers are flapping across the windscreen.

I have a very strong memory of being snug between Mum and Dad in bed and feeling that all was well with the world. ‘Snug as a bug in a rug,’ as Dad would say. Dad was always as much a friend as a father. He was also quite flashy; he had a way with words that betrayed his profession, that of a salesman. He sold cars. When I was little, he sold them from a large showroom in Margam that is now buried deep under the M4 motorway as it prepares for its flight of avoidance over Port Talbot; after Margam Abbey Motors he struck out on his own and set up a second-hand car dealership. I would join him on trips to the car auctions at Southampton. It was always raining and the trips always smelled of cigarettes – this, for me, was the smell of the seventies. Mum and Dad both smoked; they were quite keen, and it is them I have to thank for my never having been tempted. Without knowing it they carried out an early form of aversion therapy and I grew up with an almost pathological dislike for cigarettes, matches, ashtrays. In fact, any of the paraphernalia connected with smoking. I even disliked holding an unopened packet.

When I would hear The Beatles singing ‘She’s Leaving Home’, I’d always love the line about the man who worked in the motor trade. That was my dad, he was a man from the motor trade. As part of his devotion to this trade he had a Jet garage for a while. I remember the orange glow of the lights as they indicated a pump being used, and the
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
exoticism of the little safe that was built into the floor under the cashier’s chair. I would gaze down at it from the swivel chair and imagine a masked criminal forcing me to unlock it and empty the contents into a bag.

In Spain with Dad and Pete. Mum is on the other side of the camera.

At home I would hear Dad talk on the telephone to clients and he would be full of energy and charm, his voice shifting from its natural soft Port Talbot lilt and edging towards a mild mid-Atlantic twang. It was the seventies, so the phone in question was a Trimphone or Slimphone; I forget the name now. It was one of those narrow phones and it was probably a shade of green. Whatever the colour, it was undoubtedly the phone of the day, the very latest in telecommunications style.

We were in many ways early adopters in the area of consumer durable technology. A Sony cassette deck was purchased one Saturday afternoon on a trip to Swansea, soon to be augmented by tapes of Barry White, the Carpenters, the
Doctor Zhivago
soundtrack and Herb Alpert. I imagine it was quite swish in its day, with its FM tuner, slider volume controls and dark-wood casing and speakers. I used to play a double cassette on it that I’d received for Christmas, a compilation of hits of the day that included ‘Sad Sweet Dreamer’ by Sweet Sensation and ‘Devil Gate Drive’ by Suzi Quatro. I also enjoyed sliding the volume controls and making the transporter-room noise from
Star Trek
, pretending that I was beaming down to another planet. The room also had a rug with two circles on it, which to me represented the platforms in the transporter room from which Captain Kirk would teleport. Although state of the art, it wasn’t long before the Sony cassette deck became faulty and started chewing up the tapes, which would then have to be painstakingly removed before a pencil was inserted into the spool and careful rewinding began. On future plays, whenever the mangled bit of tape was reached the sound would acquire an odd ‘underwater’ quality that would last for as long as the damage stretched, before the music would come into the clear again, as though waking from a fitful sweaty sleep or emerging unscathed from a dense forest of thorns.

My pretend beaming would take place in the lounge, the ‘best’ room. It wasn’t a ‘best’ room in the traditional Welsh sense – that is to say, we
did
use it all year round – but it was also the room that grandparents would sit in on a Sunday. I can see my father’s mother with a cup of tea; Nanny Margam, she was known as (given that she was my nan and she came from Margam). She still lived, as a widow now, in the house that my dad had grown up in, number 51 Wern Road, just up the street from Anthony Hopkins and his parents. Hopkins’s father was a baker, and it was from his bakery that Dad and my Aunty Margaret and uncles Colin and Leighton bought their bread. My only memory of my grandfather Emlyn is of standing at the foot of his bed while paying a visit to the house; he died when I was very young.

Nanny Margam would come to our house on Sundays, always bearing a freshly made egg custard tart (still the best I have tasted), and we would discuss that week’s show by our shared favourite, Benny Hill. I would recount one of his sketches and she would tut under her breath, ‘Well well, there’s comical …’ before we’d listen together to ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’.

My fourth birthday and Nanny Margam is disappointed by the quality of the catering.

For the rest of the week this best room was somewhat underused, and I remember it now for just two reasons. It had a glass fireplace, which I once put my head through after twirling round and round in an effort to make myself dizzy. When I think of the room, I always remember that incident. The other memory was of Saturday mornings spent sitting on the floor cross-legged with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and copies of
Roy of the Rovers
and
Tiger
laid out on the carpet in front of me. They would be delivered on a Saturday morning and I would rush downstairs full of excitement, while Mum and Dad slept on above me.

I’ve always felt that, as a child, I had an above-average interest in several things; comedy was one of them, but magazines were also high up on the list. I had an ability then – and still do, to a lesser extent – to fixate on something and to elevate it to a loftier position than it deserves. Every week along with
Roy of the Rovers
and
Tiger
, I would also get
Look-in
. This was a TV-oriented magazine with features on shows such as
Supersonic
,
The Six Million Dollar Man
and other hits of the day. One week it was giving away a dragon pendant, cashing in on the success of the
Kung Fu
TV series. When my copy arrived the pendant had already gone and there ensued a quest, which lasted for some weeks, as I tried to track down another. I can’t remember whether or not I turned up anything, but the smell of magazines will take me right back to opening the comic and the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I realized that the prized free gift was missing.

I must have spent a lot of time in newsagents as a child; the smell of newsprint, especially on a cold frosty morning, is one of the most evocative for me as an adult, right up there with the leather of my satchel at St John’s. Mulling it over, perhaps the comics weren’t delivered; perhaps I went down to Flares, the newsagent just down the hill on the corner, and bought my comics myself, hurriedly bringing them back in time for
Swap Shop
– a fine BBC programme, and one to which I was devoted.

It’s fair to say that I was a BBC child, faithful to
Blue Peter
and
Swap Shop
, with only occasional forays into the racier fields of
Magpie
and
Tiswas
, which seemed, as Alan Bennett’s mother would say, ‘common’. This is not to say that we never dipped our toes in the murky waters of ITV – far from it. We loved
Rising Damp
,
Only When I Laugh
and
The Kenny Everett Video Show
but were really more naturally at home with the BBC where, like millions of others, we were regular viewers of
The Two Ronnies
,
Top of the Pops
,
Mike Yarwood
and
The Generation Game
.

A lot of my childhood seems to have been spent in front of the television, and yet I was just as content outdoors, roaming around Baglan with my friend Robert George. Robert was known as Georgie and loved the outdoors even more than I did. Together we climbed trees looking for birds’ eggs, a pursuit rightly frowned upon now but at the time it was all the rage and not seen as being at all cruel. We would cross over the main road and on to the marshy fields with their tiny waterways, where we built makeshift rafts with bits of wood and discarded plastic barrels. Once constructed, these fine vessels would carry us off to uncharted territories. While on the marshy ground we would collect frogspawn and bring it home in buckets, to be transferred into a water-filled bin just outside the back door, where it would sit until the frogs arrived. We were forever building dens, and this meant that I was always gathering sticks, boughs and branches, dragging them back to the house and trying to make some kind of shelter or hideaway with them.

From 1971 we lived on what might be called the nursery slope of a larger hill in Baglan and had a steep narrow lawn at the front of the house, perfect for sending Action Man hurtling down on a suicide mission in his jeep. I was very fond of Action Man and loved nothing more than suspending him on a length of string and dangling him from the top of the stairs, out through the banisters and down the wall at the side. I’d do this for hours, perfectly happy to watch him swing back and forth like a pendulum. In my mind he was scaling a cliff face or the walls of the castle to reach the lair of an evil mastermind. He would often have been stripped of his uniform long ago and, in a form of exhibitionism frowned on by the military, be attempting his mission naked. This was quite common in Action Men. I had several of them, almost a platoon, and within minutes of emerging from their boxes they’d be naked, huddled together in a heap like a drunken support group. With their toned muscular bodies, crew cuts and gripping hands, one wonders with hindsight exactly what sort of action these men were looking for.