Small Man in a Book Read online

  Nan and Grandpa would often take me to stay with Aunty Ann and Uncle Peter, who lived now in England. My first ever memory of London is of being driven by Uncle Peter along the Embankment and having Cleopatra’s Needle pointed out to me. I wasn’t especially impressed.

  I was a happy little boy, sociable, stoical and keen to entertain, whether it was at home, popping out from behind the long wine-coloured curtains in the living room, or at the little preschool nursery I attended at the age of three, run by Mrs Salvage. I had a group of friends here; we would dress up in a variety of outfits and I would entertain them with songs and jokes. Dressing up was a big part of my life in those early days. Each Christmas I would receive a new outfit and wear it that afternoon when we visited my Aunty Margaret, Uncle Tom and my cousin Jayne who lived further up the hill in Baglan. I would knock on the door, then hide out of sight until Uncle Tom came and expressed shock at the vacant doorstep. This was my cue to leap into view and blast him with my ray gun or pistol (depending on whether I was a spaceman or cowboy), at which point he would feign injury – or sometimes, if I’d been a particularly good shot, death.

  My Napolean complex often led to sudden outbursts of anti-social behaviour.

  Mum and Dad made those early Christmases truly magical. The excitement at the prospect of a visit from Father Christmas was almost as difficult to bear then as it is to comprehend now. The house would fill with satsumas, nuts and tinsel; lights of red, green, gold and blue would be hung on the tree. Like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn, my presents would always appear, as if by magic, at the foot of my bed. I can still remember waking in the early hours and glimpsing their shadowy outline in the darkness, pillowcases stuffed full of surprises and delights. One year I received a Dansette record player in red with a cream-coloured lid and sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor at five o’clock in the morning, playing a Rupert Bear record again and again, marvelling at the sound coming out of the little mono speaker hidden away in the housing of the machine.

  Throughout my childhood I always had all the toys of the moment: Spirograph, Flight Deck, Ker-Plunk, Cluedo, Mastermind, Mouse Trap, Operation, The K-Tel Record Selector. They all came into the house in pristine condition and then left piece by piece, slowly and mysteriously, over the coming years, like British soldiers slipping quietly out of Colditz – oddly enough, the one game I didn’t own.

  I place my mind elsewhere as Santa reaches his own conclusion.

  I’d be happier if I could see his other hand.

  Please do what he says or he will kill me.

  Finally, a Santa I can trust.

  2

  By 1970, just after my fifth birthday, it was time to start school proper. I went to a private school in the nearby coastal town of Porthcawl. St John’s, an idyllic-looking prep school for boys, was set at the end of a tree-lined driveway and had as its motto Virtus, Sapientia, Humilitas (Virtue, Wisdom, Humility). As luck would have it, very much my own watchwords at the time.

  My first day at St John’s was a rather traumatic one. I cried bitterly as my mother tried to extricate herself from my soggy clutches. As she struggled to leave, another boy came over and, straight from the pages of a novel, said, ‘Don’t worry, ma’am, I’ll look after your little boy.’ Such kindness. The school, though in Newton, Porthcawl (on the South Wales coast), is forever frozen in my memory as a minor English public school; it seemed very precise and just so. Dad remembers hearing a teacher once shouting at a pupil from some distance, ‘Wackerbath! Get orf the grass!’

  They were very strict about uniform, not just with the pupils but also with the parents. I don’t mean that fathers had to drop off their sons wearing shorts and a cap, but that the school was especially particular with regard to where the uniform had been purchased. We duly set off for the prescribed outfitter, Evan Roberts on Queen Street in Cardiff, a rather imposing store, from which every item on the long list of garments had to be bought – even the grey V-neck jumpers, which would surely have looked no different if they’d been picked up for a fraction of the price at the Port Talbot Peacock’s. I was kitted out with all the necessary uniform and equipment. Unfeasibly long shorts and socks, along with a still stiff new shirt for rugby (a game that terrified me), all contained in a soft brown cloth drawstring bag. We wore shorts in the summer as part of our uniform along with a blazer and cap. Everything was new, not a hand-me-down in sight, one of the advantages of being the first child. I had a brand-new leather satchel for my first day, a wonderful, robust and shiny vessel that smelled of leather in a way that nothing has smelled of leather before or since. This glorious smell has stayed with me all these years and now, on receiving a gift of a leather diary or perhaps a wallet, I’ll immediately plunge my nose in and stay there for a minute or so. I’m back at St John’s and everything is new and unknown; it’s all to play for.

  It was very much an old-fashioned school inasmuch as competitive sports were encouraged and the food was appalling. Beetroot appeared on the menu with frightening regularity, as did rice pudding, both dishes way too exotic for my limited palate. The competitive sports took place mainly on a large field to the left of the driveway as you approached the school, or on the dreaded rugby pitch over on the other side. I have a collection of Polaroid photographs taken on a bright summer’s Sports Day; in one of them I’m competing in the sack race and still hopping along in my hessian prison while the rest of the course is clear, the other boys all having finished the race, completed the random drugs test and set about preparing themselves mentally for the next event. People often ask if my work is autobiographical, and I’ll typically say no, cleverly throwing them off the scent. In fact, this photo appears in the first episode of Human Remains as an example of my character Peter’s ineptitude at sport.

  It could just as easily be me.

  I remember very little of the actual lessons at St John’s – in fact, try as I might, I can only conjure up two classroom-based memories from my whole time there. The school taught maths in a very peculiar way involving small coloured pieces of wood, each colour corresponding to a particular length of wood and representing a number. There is a name for this method but it escapes me, as did the ability to gain even the most basic understanding of its workings. I remember the colours, though, and the feel of the little wooden sticks, which I would use to build tiny houses while the teacher had turned to face the blackboard. It is in this classroom that my other, far more specific memory is found. It is a sunny day (I have no memories of St John’s where the sky is not clear blue and the sun is not shining), the teacher is talking, it’s maths again and my mind is wandering out through the window and up into the trees from where I can survey the fields and the roofs of the buildings. I have a compass in my hand, the sort used for drawing circles rather than for finding true north. I’m attempting, unsuccessfully, to harpoon the top of the pencil with the point of the compass. Try as I might, it won’t go in. And so I give it one last big push, and in it goes – into my thumb. I look down and see the instrument buried deep in the fleshy pad of my fattest digit and want to say something, ‘Ouch!’ ideally, but know that this would attract attention. So, instead, I calmly remove the compass, wrap my thumb in my handkerchief and carry on as if nothing had happened.

  And that’s about it as far as memories of St John’s go.

  After a couple of years at St John’s I switched schools. Following a bout of measles when I was three I had by now paid a couple of visits to hospital for operations on my ears, and my hearing was far from perfect. Mum was concerned that this was holding me back in class; I was struggling in maths, especially. She remembers the school not being entirely sympathetic or willing to hold my poor hearing solely responsible for my academic shortcomings. They may have had a point. This, and the fact that the promised introduction of a minibus service from Port Talbot to Porthcawl never materialized, was enough to prompt a change. I headed west to Swansea and Dumbarton House School, another private establishment, though this time co-ed.

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bsp; 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 signific
ant 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.