Chapter 2
Failures and Futures
Scholarship day approaches. And I am led to believe there will be a new bike and all sorts of kudos for me. If I pass the entrance test for the grammar school. Apparently, kids who get through the exam become solicitors, barristers, doctors and the like. Those who don’t are relegated to become workers on the tools, or delivery drivers and such. No thought is given to their possible happiness or satisfaction in life. On the fateful day, the excitement builds in the morning.
‘Don’t forget to do your best’
‘OK Mum, I will’
‘You’ll get a new bike if you pass.
‘OK then, Mum’
I rush off to school in a fever of heightened anticipation, agitation and distress at the prospect of failing.
The first paper is Maths, my weakest subject.
I get confused with some of the arithmetic. I am excited, worried about failing. I cannot really get out of this emotional state. But I somehow reach Question 9.‘Below is a diagram of a fireplace which is in the shape of a 5ft.square with the space for the grate a 2ft. square. What is the area of the shaded part?’
Wow. So I multiply thelength of the fireplace with the breadth (It’s a square, right?) five times five equals twenty five. I subtract the four square foot from it and get twenty-one. Easy. Next question…
However, come the afternoon session and it’s English, my favourite. I thought I would do well. I’m still thinking more about where I’ll go on my shiny new bike.
The usual grammar questions are a bit tricky, but I do OK. Then comes the comprehension test.I’m sweating, confused and angry. How would I know this? It’s an extract from John Buchan’s ‘Greenmantle’. All I can remember now is this passage:
‘It was Mrs Jimson who received me as I descended from the station fly…. a large red woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in a gown which both in shape and material, seemed to have been modelled on a chintz curtain.’
Question 1 is ‘What is ‘the station fly?’’ I know what a fly is – an insect. But it couldn’t have been that. So I answer ‘I don’t know’.
I have no idea what a gown is. Perhaps it is a frock, but I’m not sure, so I write ‘I don’t know’.
I‘venever heard of ‘a chintz curtain’ and anyway we didn’t have any curtains in my house, so I guess ‘A special kind of curtain.’The results come out later in school. ‘Those who have passed to the grammar school sit on the floor at the front’ the teacher says.
The teacher calls out the names. The best kids move forward. My name is not called out.
‘What? I’ve failed? Never! It can’t be true.’I’m dismayed, troubled, worried and most of all shocked.
My Dad goes down the school to find out what happened. I was in the top six in class, for goodness sake. Apparently, my name is the very last on the list of one hundred and twenty pupils in the town who have passed. But only a certain quota can qualify to go to the grammar school this year. Mr Bryant, the head teacher, explains that I and the rest can resit the exam again. But we are soon to leave, because Mum and Dad are taking up a residential post at an orphanage in another town far from here.
‘Maybe George could live with Aunty Myfannwy on the farm and try again from there’, thinks Mum. But it isn’t to be. And we all jump in the removal van to Swansea with Mike Henwood, the driver, and arrive to start our new life with me,bikeless, back in Junior School.
Dot and Perry revolutionise the care home. They change it from a Late-Victorian institution. They ate lentil soup and ladled-out rice pudding in dark Dickensian kitchens. There are outside earth privies for toilets, and no bathrooms. Mum and Dad, with the help of a modernising Children’s Department run by Margaret Collins (Miss Collins), make it a modern family unit. The kids are taken out shopping for their individual clothing and leather sandals. They turn it into a happy, fun based cottage home. It now has en suite bathrooms, individual rooms for every kid, proper fire escapes and security.
Each foster mother in the social unit would encourage and share her love with the children in her care. We all go on holidays to Ilfracombe. We take the paddle steamer ‘The Halcyon’ from Mumbles Pier across the wild Bristol Channel and love every minute in the bracing, open air. We exchange houses with a Home in Fishponds, Bristol. I explore the ‘dumb waiter’ in the dining room, pulling the rope up and down with me travelling inside. Bus trips to the city centre are made exciting by Dad, who says that the petty cash money he’s carrying has to be referred to as ‘the sandwiches’not to attract attention.Other excursions are to Pembroke Dock, Fishguard and St David’s in Pembrokeshire.
The children go out to local schools and hopefully are able to integrate into the community without being regarded as ‘from the Cottage Homes’. Subsequent developments have reduced the size of such units, making it easier for us to mix in. The idea is that the cottage homes are too large and still remain similar to institutions. Rather than unidentifiable places in the community.
But suddenly I look around and discover that I have lost my parents. I am an orphan, too. They now belong to sixty other kids who they love more than they do me and Jane. Being brought up like an orphan is an interesting experience.
‘Eat your afternoon tea, George!’ says Mrs Willkie, the foster mother. If you don’t grab the first piece of bread and butter on the table you won’t get any to eat. Living among the kids at the outstation in Mumbles Road means that I get to attend a fairly decent school – Oystermouth Secondary. But it arises that I get to empathise and connect emotionally with my pals. Most of them have lost parents, are orphaned, or perhaps put in a home, because of economic or drink related problems. I am glad to get away from the local secondarymodern. The only activity there seemed to be following football teams. And mine is allocated to be the Spurs at White Hart Lane. I am taught about their white strip when I’m thirsting for Latin, Algebra and Science.
The following years are spent trout fishing in streams. I learn the art of casting a fly and all the varieties of lures available. I get my practice in Cockett pond, where the minnows and tiddlers are my first prize. Surprising that, all alone, I don’t fall in and drown. Cockett pond was extremely deep with cliff - like sides and treacherous muddy banks. As I stooped over, alone, to catch my newts and tadpoles in a borrowed jam jar there was an imminent threat of drowning, and George had heard of a case of someone who had fallen in and, getting cramp from the cold, icy water, had been lost. The other dangers were from gases escaping to the surface rising from old mining works which were capable of asphyxiating someone on the nearby banks. Anyway, I trekked home to the orphanage with my prized catch of pond fauna. I suppose it's part of progress that the pond is now filled in and that housing has been built above on the scruffy area that abuts the railway line to Llanelli.
Fishing off Mumbles at high tide is a great delight. It provides me with a view right across to Devonshire. I like seeing the oil tankers out in the bay, and the way the majestic land mass is so carved out by nature. One can see the tower of the Guildhall and the round Community Centre building on the top of Greenhill. The houses of the town stand out in their higgledy piggedly symmetry. Mumbles Head has a lighthouse and (now newly rebuilt) lifeboat house. The fog warning flashes out its coded message - three long one short: three long…
Langland Bay is pure delight. Canoeing is a sport for anyone with a canoe. It was a fairly recent development as with growing affluence in the nineteen – fifties families, or at least some sections of the middle classes, could afford such luxuries. We tie them up on the top of the foreshore just above the pebbled part of the beach by the café. Going for a trip with Brian around the Mumbles Head is an exciting and perhaps dangerous adventure for two teenage lads. Me, I paddle at the back and Bri’ steers at the front.
‘Don’t go too far out to sea’ I caution nervously.
Brian feels far more confident than I do. I imagine a giant wave heading laterally towards us, turning us over and, clinging to the wreckage, we’d have to propel our lively craft back to the shore with our legs kicking out violently in the sea water. Bri’ reminds me that it’s just a lovely Summer’s day in Mumbles and it would be most unlikely to happen. I can’t get used to the endless pitching and rolling of the boat, the translucent eddies and flows of the quickening current and feel seasick, apprehensive and frankly scared. But we go on round the head, seeing the two islands like two mammaries, mummeries, mumblies, mumbles? that are cut off at high water. We reach the pier. Then, waving to the passengers on the ‘SS Waverley’, we turn back. We arrive safely, surfing in majestically on a wave then jumping out into the waist - high water to steady the canoe and return it to its resting place above the beach.
We are lucky enough to win a lottery draw for one of the chalets at Langland. That means we can now go down every weekend and have marvellous picnics, swim all day, and play tennis at the courts behind the chalets. We sunbathe and attend for high tea in the Langland Bay hotel. We walk over the cliff up to Rotherslade and buy lollies and candy floss at the concrete monstrosity built to hold up the crumbling sand. We spend holidays at a monthly rented house on the promontory nearby. And my speciality is making rock pools with my cousin David Gittins. Aunt Doris, down from London, (whose ration book is pictured) takes pictures with her ‘Brownie’ camera.
The circus is in town. We play rugby on the Oystermouth Road Recreation ground. It is now the car park for the Ospreys Rugby stadium. The elephants are quartered in the middle of the pitch. Each Wednesday afternoon, we have sports at the rec’ ground. The following week, tackling the opposing team and landing in the elephant cow pats is a disturbing and unpleasant experience.
Playing away from home, we have an extra player surplus to our numbers. We loan him to the home team. We are playing on the typical Welsh sloping field and we are facing uphill. I’m playing wing three-quarter. Denzil, our player, is running down the hill. I run in for the tackle bending low and ready to fling my arms around his thrusting thighs. He catches me with his knee in the middle of my forehead. I am knocked out cold. I carry on playing after a cold compress is applied to my face. No blood bins in those days!
Mr Elias, the headmaster, had the intriguing ability to predict examination questions. ‘Now boys and girls.What will you get in the exam? Let me think’, he says putting his hand mockingly to his brow. ‘Yes… Henry the Eighth... How many wives? Six. Catherine, Ann, Jane, Ann, Catherine, Catherine. Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. The Tudor reign… Mary and Elizabeth. Who was put in The Tower..? Mary.’ We go home for the weekend and swot it up, parrot fashion. Come Monday, the questions are, sure enough, identical. There were no locked cupboards for exam papers in those days. Or, the head had an uncanny ability to know exactly what questions the syllabus required. We all sail through.
Now I get to go to real grammar school. Not that Dumbarton is bad. After all, it produced Catherine Zeta Jones. With five GCE (sic) ‘O’ levels under my belt, I move on to year twelve at Dynevor Secondary Grammar in Delabeche Road. A training in using the brain rationally is on offer at the sixth form. Bunny concentrated on our writing skills and honed them into acute analysis using facts, dates and ideas. Brynley (‘from the Latin’) would lick his lips and then expound for minutes on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse. (It’s an iambic pentameter, he would explain.) Bennet gives us a love of Wordsworth. His analysis of the nature poems deepens our understanding of the effect a vernal wood could have on a solitary man who could imbibe its messages.
With ‘Top Cat’ we enjoyed Racine, Maupassant and Balzac. We translated freely and learned French poetry by heart, ‘Ainsi, toujours pousse vers de nouveaux rivages’. And discovered in ‘Father Goriot’ how a parent could be driven to penury by the parasitical behaviour of his upcoming daughter. He borrows at interest to provide her with the luxuries she craves. He goes without food and every necessity to pay the money back to his creditors. He dies in abject poverty.
In Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ a wife spends thousands of francs for a diamond necklace. She wears it to a ball and then loses it. She buys another as a replacement, obtaining the money by borrowing from her friends. And it turns out to have been made of paste. I didn’t apprehend the venality of man and the possibilities for corruption of purpose then.
Our classroom is conveniently next to the ancient Albert Hall cinema where we could debunk during library periods. One wet Thursday afternoon, I watch ‘Only Two Can Play’ with Peter Sellers and Mai Zetterling. It is based on the novel by Swansea university’s Kingsley Amis. Filmed on location in Swansea, there’s even a glimpse of the cottage homes in the background of one scene where Sellers and Mai Zettterling are driving along Cockett Road up to Townhill in an open convertible. The taxi firm, Glamtax, is the one that provides the taxis for the outdoor scenes. Later, I do my holiday jobs with them as a driver. Mai Zetterling, with an alluring show of her legs, alights from the taxi to meet the sexually deprived librarian, played inimically by Sellers. John Lewis is portrayed as dull and bored. He has a stifling home life. The excitement of meeting the attractive Norwegian wife of a local business magnate could help him in his career ambitions. The plot develops along amusing and socially perceptive lines. Especially about suburban life in Swansea.
Our school produces Harry Secombe, the lovable goon, Mr Neddie Seegoon of the Goon Show. (‘He’s fallen in da water…’ ‘Wat key, Neddie?’ ‘Jayne Mansfield’s on fire, folks!’ ‘Did you put her out?’ ‘No. The man next to her.’) An amazing tenor voice, reared in the chapels of Bethesda, Bethany and Calvaria. He has a strikingly successful career in show business. Harry goes on to an all-time record of musicals with ’Oliver!’ many films and songs, especially the huge hit, ’If I Ruled the World’. His career reaches a loving and adored apogee in Sunday evenings’ ‘Songs of Praise’. It is little known that his charitable giving in the area made him the true Christian that his school and family wanted him to become.
Talking about Christians, an intellectual giant, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams used to be a pupil at Dynevor. He is a powerful voice for world peace and reconciliation. An impressive theologian, speaker and writer. He managed to get a hearing at Westminster and everywhere else for his ideas on toleration and cross faith understanding. His activities in Southern Sudan may not come to as much notice. He brings to light the atrocities there. It has been a crime of this century that his outspokenness has caused the capitalists who run our world to squeeze him out. Now Dean of Magdalene College. His voice is still being heard.
We were the ‘skiffle’ generation. With a double bass made from a tea chest, a broom handle and a length of string, we make music. Me on an old kettle drum and one of my schoolmates on his guitar, we mimic the Lonnie Donnegan‘’Rock Island Line’ tunes fashionable at the time. The hobbies exhibition is held in the school gym to the consternation of Budgie, the sports master. It allows many learners to show their skills in stamp collecting, ornithology, birds’ eggs collections, scientific experiments and so forth.
The Spencer Davis Group came out of this melting pot of the talents. Spencer Davis made a number of very successful pop records on organ, guitar and vocals. ‘Keep on Running’ is a Number One and his albums, ’It’s Been So Long’ and ‘Mousetrap’ sold some copies.The school has produced professors, broadcasters, musicians, artists, scientists, business men,lorry drivers, the unemployed, and similarly members of the House of Lords.
The school organises an exchange visit to Germany. We set off by train from Swansea High Street Station. Mr Griffiths insists that we safety-pin our passports in the inside pocket of our regulation uniform jackets. A habit that has stayed with me on my travels to this day. George is allocated to a family in Backnang near Stuttgart. It turns out that a chav like me gets to stay with a millionaire industrialist’s family. They manufacture railway engines and steam rollers. Dad has a massive Merc and we drive down the autobahns – he with a large Havana cigar in his mouth – at speeds I’d never before experienced in my life. Son Carl Reiner takes me to go water skiing at their log cabin in the Black Forest near the Bodensee Lake. That’s me surging through the water trying to stay upright. I try to remember that I’m on an international exchange visit to promote harmony, reconciliation and hope to British and German families. The war is a still recent memory. Dresden, Cologne, Duisburg and the Ruhr towns had been severely carpet bombed by the Allies. Germany is still occupied by the Russian, American and British forces. We’re the new generation. We must never do it again. But I digress…
That night at the log cabin, we are awakened by an almighty thunder and lightning storm with terrifying winds and a gale so severe the cabin roof is bending. The sound of the crashing thunder is the loudest sound I have ever heard in my short life. We chat and tell jokes in my rudimentary German:
‘Lehrer zum Schüler’: 'Für diese Frechheit schreibst Du hundert Mal, 'Ich bin ein fauler Kerl' und lässtes anschließend von Deinem Vater unterschreiben!' (Teacher to pupil: ‘For this cheek you must write one hundred times, ‘I am a lazy guy 'and by your father it can then be signed.’)
The following year we return to Stuttgart in a convoy of two cars. Bri’ in his Dad’s Ford Anglia with me and Handel, and Col’ and Dudley in his MG sports. We take in the Nurnberg Ring with me driving at 120 mph around the circuit. Unfortunately, Colin’s sports car breaks down in Cologne and we have to wait for repairs to be effected. There is more water skiing on the Bodensee and we cement our friendships with the Reiner Shads who visit us occasionally thereafter in Swansea.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth has got married whilst in university with an Iraqi refugee from the King Faisel II regime in Iraq. Moazeem, her husband, needs to learn how to drive. So as they are family friends, Perry jumps into his car to teach him driving. Moazeem has a
battered, aged, Morris 12 with no brakes. In those pre MOT days the cars were wrecks built before the war. ‘Slow down, Moazzem, for Christ’s sake’ Dad says. Mo swerves the car from side to side to assist with the braking action. ‘You need to get these brakes fixed’ my Dad implores him. ‘Don’t worry Perry. It’ll be alright’ he says with his usual Middle Eastern insouciance and unconcern.
I get to drive Dad’s car, too. The Morris Minor traveller with wooden side panels belongs to the care home. So I drive around the private grounds on my own trying to learn how to drive. It is the time of the Suez Emergency. The government in its wisdom decides that learner drivers from age seventeen can go out alone. Without a qualified accompanying driver. The idea is that, apparently, it would save the nation’s fuel when oil supplies had been cut off after the closure of the Suez Canal by President Nasser of Egypt. In 1956 the Egyptian government had nationalised the canal and turned it over to Egyptian national ownership. Israel, Britain and France invaded the country without the political support of the Americans, who, piqued by Britain’s attempt to rule the world without them, put a halt to the invasion known as the Tripartite Aggression. Their rightful claim to a canal on their own territory was being suborned. The three attacking countries were forced to pull out and stop their invasion, leading to Britain’s subsequent isolation in the world from anything to do with attempts at world hegemony without American consent.
A year later this is me, my Test passed with flying colours, driving the actual taxi that took Mai Zetterling to the Swansea Public Library (it was outside the BBC offices and the museum opposite the library, in the film) to meet the Librarian, Peter Sellers.
My holiday jobs have their moments. Driving backwards up Townhill Road on Christmas morning to reverse the mileage on the milometer is one trick I learn. Other drivers, reputedly, unscrew the speedo cable to the back of the dial on the dashboard. And secure it with a clothes peg, to run around with POB ‘passengerson board’ to obtain free mileage. And pocket the fare that should go to the company. I’m coming into the real world now!
I inherit an Austin 7 from Uncle Angus. He’s getting a new Rover 12 with walnut fascia panel and leather seats. So it’s mine for fifteen pounds. I individualise it with a Sparklets Soda Syphon top fixed on a cork inserted into the filler hole of the radiator as a bonnet badge. Swish! It has a starting handle at the front for when you need it to start the engine. ‘Whir.Clunk. Whir. Mind your thumb.’ It back kicks like the horse that kicked Perry in the goolies at the school field. Similarly to Moazzem’s car, the brakes are rubbish. Coming down Glanmor Hill into the Uplands, I open the frontward-facing driver’s door. I put out my foot. I brake the jalopy using my shoe leather.
Then later that’s me driving it around the Langland Bay golf course car park to impress all my pals. I make a swerving turn downhill. And the front wheel comes off running away into the distance, ending in a round open storm drain. ‘Hole in One!’ I exclaim, totally betrayed in front of my friends. ‘Ok. I’ll get another car somehow.’Never mind. Aunty Winnie wants to sells me her Morris 8 for only fifteen quid. I go for it. But the clutch is slipping. ‘Can I get to town in it?’ I wonder. Probably made it, as I remember.
My next purchase from my National Savings Certificates issued after the war is a 1947 Rover 10. It boasts the new body shape and chassis. Undoubtedly, the best car I have ever owned. It has rod action brakes that can stop on a yard’s length. The Rover has a fluid flywheel with syncromesh that allows the driver to select either manual or automatic transmission. You turn a wheel on the fascia panel and then you can change gear without using the clutch. It is only needed to start and stop. Going over Plynlimon Pass in it returning from a trip to Dublin via Holyhead, there is a snow storm. And the roads are treacherous. The car is slipping and sliding. Sinead O’Flaherty is screaming. The baby asleep.Finally, it slips again into the ‘off’ road side and is saved from a two thousand foot drop by a single strand of barbed wire. My adventures begin…