Chapter 41 - 45
Chapter 36. At The Secondary School
the
For wherever we went on the small island (population about 260,000) we saw far too many men merely hanging around - sometimes in idle groups, sometimes alone, sometimes standing around, more often sitting on garden or sea walls. These were the men who, in times past, might have made a living from fishing - but who had seen their industry ruined by the EC’s policies. Others might have made a living from the banana trade - for bananas are
And the sight of these badly-clothed, often unshaven, idle men reminded me of 1930s Aberavon. For wherever I went - along the main road to St Joseph’s, past the nearby Labour Exchange, to evening Church or youth club - there were the hundreds of idle men - some in groups around the Walnut Tree Hotel, others grouped in the Market Square, smaller groups along the pavements and hanging over the bridges over the Avon. And if I had gone elsewhere in the town - Sandfields, Margam, Cwmavon - I would have found the same sort of idle groups. One man in three was out of work - not as bad a rate of unemployment as was found in Merthyr (two out of three) or Jarrow (four out of five), but enough to provide me with a bleak background to my growing up. Small wonder that Teresa’s parents had their children pray each day “for Dad to hold on to his job.”
Many men had imitated Normans Tebbitt’s father and ‘got on their bikes’ to find work elsewhere. Tommy Johnson’s family (friends of ours) moved to
Having ‘passed the scholarship’ and gained admission to the grammar school, I was supposedly on a path which might help keep me out of the dole queue and out of the idle gangs of the unemployed. I wasn’t aware of much of this in September 1936 when, satchel on back, with its box of coloured crayons (for geography lessons?), new fountain pen in sport’s coat jacket (for I never had a school blazer), and shining shoes I walked the few hundred yards to the Secondary School (‘the Sec.). Apart from one conversation with the much older Gerard O’Donovan, I had no idea of what to expect. In my twopenny weekly, the Hotspur, I had read dozens of stories of life in public schools (George Orwell would, later wonder at the reasons why working class boys read such stories dealing with lives of boys from rich homes.) So, in 1936, I wondered if there would be peculiar initiation ceremonies for new entrants? Would there be fagging? Would prefects have the right to beat smaller boys?
The reality was very different. First I was lost in the huge building with its many classrooms, laboratories and specialist rooms. Quite unlike the small, comfortable, if dingy, Catholic school which I had left behind. Then I was at sea in a non-Catholic world: no holy pictures, no statues, no prayers before and after class, no Angelus at
But worst of all was the loneliness of the single Catholic in a class of non-Catholic, mainly chapel going boys and girls, many of whom spoke Welsh as their first language, almost all of whom had come to the school with several of their former schoolmates, so that they had a social ease which I never had. In a social sense this was a comprehensive school. There were children of works’ managers, shop managers, steelworkers, coal miners, local government workers - and of the unemployed. There were children from expensive private estates, from subsidised council housing estates, from rented housing such as ours and from run down areas such as Taibach: the names of the cottages rows tell their own story - Balaclava Terrace, Sebastopol Street, Cardigan Row - these two roomed cottages must have been built in the 1860s when the memory of the Crimean War was till fresh.
Most of the children came from homes where they were either the only child or where there was only one other child. Most of the boys with whom I would, over time, become friendly were only boys, a few having a sister but no brother. Bernard Watts (an only child) Cliff Owen (a younger sister) Richie Davies and Gerwyn Williams (both only children)... In this sense I was even more odd that I would already have been as a Catholic: for the Lanes already had six children which gave to much sneering by cruel teachers influenced no doubt by the Stopes anti-family campaign and by the sociology which taught that ‘children from large families never do as well as children from smaller ones.’ There was, too, our lack of money which meant that I would never go for a week-end camp at Kenfig Hill - for Dad couldn’t afford to get me a sleeping bag and the shilling which the camp cost. And with the cruelty of small boys everywhere, I was too often reminded of my relative poverty.
“The happiest days of my life?” Never. Although there were many things for which, maybe on reflection, I am grateful. I am glad that I lived before the once-influential, Tony Crossland, became Minister of Education. In the 1960s he vowed that he would “destroy every f...... grammar school in the country” and make everyone - except those of his own richer class - go to some comprehensive factory. I fear that I would have sunk without trace in such schools. As it was, in ‘the Sec. I was one of sixty first-year pupils (for some reason we started off in Form 2: whatever happened to Form 1?). And in such a small school, I was taught by almost all the teachers, whereas in a larger school I might have been taught only by the poorest - as happened to too many children of less ability in too many modern schools. So I remember with some affection a chemistry teacher, Gomer Rees (later headmaster) who had a metal plate in his head - the result of an injury suffered in the First War. I remember the awesome Miss Daniels (‘Fatty’ to distinguished her from her cousin who taught Domestic Science to the girls) who helped me love French and on whom I would model myself as a teacher in later years. Somehow I imbibed her method of controlling even the toughest classes with a glare - although, I admit, both in Fatty’s 1930s and my 1950s, there was a conventional respect for authority which has gone, so that teachers have a harder task to-day than we had in the past.
I remember the massive figure of my English teacher, Phil Burton, who like all good teachers allowed himself the freedom to leave off the immediate subject to tell some illustrative story or other. I can’t remember what he was illustrating when he told us of what ‘Harlequin’s
Evening dreams of childhood heroes.
As I rush towards my 65th birthday, my reading becomes ever more eclectic; Today’s choice is Kingsley Amis’s edition of G K Chesterton’s: Selected Stories: here I find all the old companions of former days - Father Brown, of course, Valentine and the members of the Club of Queer Trades.
Unconsciously imitating Amis, I was sipping my evening wine as I read the story of The Blue Cross. I know not whether it was third glass of wine, the simpler joy of reading about the
In those English lessons, in addition to ‘doing’ Macbeth and some Romantic poetry, we also had to study a volume of Selected English Essays. I still remember the joy of reading Hazlitt for the first of many times: so, too, the pleasure of meeting Lucas, Lynd and many other writers as then unknown to me.
But above all I remember - and remembered as I read Amis’s selection - my pleasurable pride as my much-admired teacher took us through essays by Chesterton and Belloc. For these were family favourites in my Welsh-Irish Catholic home headed by a father who read widely and often wisely.
From him, as a mere child, I had come to enjoy Woodhouse, as well as Wallace and other ‘dreadfuls’. Through him, too, I had learned to dip into, if not read well, books and articles by Chester Belloc as the twain were sometimes known.
And here I was, the only Catholic in the form, watching some 30 or so of what in more tolerant times I would come to call ‘my separated brethren’ coming to terms with my Catholic mentors. Did it strike them as more than odd that they should be asked to admire the work of two of ‘them Catholics’?
Here in English class, the Catholic writers were held up as models of style, of logic, of thought. I cannot even begin today to try to recall what this meant to me. My own children and theirs, who have grown up in more tolerant times do not understand the attitudes of those times. Televisual Popes, politically active Cardinals and Archbishops, Catholic Cabinet Ministers and respected MPs, these show my children that their religion is no longer suspect, no longer a bar. However, my children will never know the pleasure I have just enjoyed of reading Chesterton essay which could stimulate memories of “other days around us”.
It was Philip Burton who rescued Richie Jenkins from the Co-op tailoring department and took him into his bachelor home and back to the Secondary School and Higher Certificate. One other memory of
Part of the prize was a year-long holiday in
(Western Mail
In my second year at ‘the Sec. the Education Authority built, or laid down six hard tennis courts on what had been wasteland near the local park. Next to the courts was ‘the dole school’ where boys aged; 14 - 16 went to learn some trade or other - an early version of current attempts to cope with youth unemployment. We, relatively speaking, ‘masters of the universe’ were more fortunate in that we could book courts as soon as we got to school in the morning. We weren’t allowed to book a court for a whole evening, or, at weekends and holidays, for a whole day. But, since there were six courts, we could book on our own and friends’ names, Court 1 for an hour, Court 2 for the next hour and so on. To get the
Down Memory Lane
New values of the paper round
“School age children work at part-time jobs,” cried a January report from the Low Pay Unit. It listed the jobs which some of these young people were doing: Newspaper boys get £1.40 a day I read; and there I was, off down Memory Lane to the cold winter days of 1937 when I shoved morning papers through letterboxes in Port Talbot.
I am not sure which part of that statement most gripped me. Was it the sum of money? For, I recall, in January 1937 I got only five shillings (now a mere 25 pence) - and not ‘a day’. Five shillings for six days delivery. And for my five shillings, I was down at the
Then it was off - on rusting bicycle in my case or on foot in others - to get the papers into the homes of the reading public. In hindsight, it was always cold, frequently raining and often windy. I remember, too, that I was always tired.
But before the violins begin to play and the tears fall, I have to confess that I held down this job for two weeks. Then, my ambition to be a wage earner faded and I accepted the invitation of my parents to “give it up.”
Only now, perhaps, can I explain to myself why I worked for only two weeks. Because in the January sales of 1937, I bought a brand new Slazenger tennis racquet at the local Fussells.
And for that, Fred Perry name and all, I paid seven shillings and sixpence. Imagine it 37 & 1/2p of modern confetti-like currency for a racquet which I last used on the beach in
I have read the morning paper which the newspaper boy has pushed through our letterbox and am waiting for him to come back so that he can eat his porridge.
You see, my newspaper boy is one of my sons. Because I have followed in my father’s footsteps and my sons have trod in mine. Each of them, in turn, has been allowed, and encouraged, to earn ‘my money’. Each of the older ones quickly realised that there are easier ways of making out than working - so they went to university and, presumably, wait for the papers to drop through their letterboxes. I hope that the youngest one - out there this morning - learns the lesson, too.
(Western Mail
And so began my love affair with tennis, a game which I might never have played if I had not gone to ‘the Sec.’ and had the availability of its courts. Games, and those who taught and played them, loomed large in my young life. Jack Nicholas, our Maths teacher, was in charge of Junior Rugby. In my first year, he chose me to be in the squad from which he meant to choose his teams: I can only suppose that he got my name from Mickie Callaghan, my last teacher at
I was much happier at being chosen to play for the cricket teams as I made my way through the school. In the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of War, our under-fifteen team won the Roath Challenge Shield for which all
That photograph reminds me, too, of the prevailing anti-Catholic bias among teachers in all our schools. Our opponents in the final of the Shield competition had been
Dad made sure that all three of us went to the Trial. And all three of us did well. The team to be selected by Meredith Jones, a teacher at the Eastern School to which Ritchie Jenkins had gone before ‘passing the scholarship.’ Meredith was a giant of a man who did an immense amount of good for boys in many spheres - drama, rugby, youth clubs, cricket: he was the very model of a devoted teacher. But he was a bigotted chapel-going anti-Catholic: it is ironic that both his sons married Catholic girls from Aberavon, one a friend of my sister, Mary, the other a sister of Gerard’s wife, Muriel, and that one of the sons would become a Catholic whom I would meet later as a fellow-Catenian.
But back to their father. When Meredith named the Town side, none of the three Catholics was listed. At this pointed enter Eddie Downey, a second-row forward of massive frame, himself a bachelor and a relatively easygoing and hard drinking Catholic. I don’t know how he found out that none of us had been named, or why he should have been interested. But I do know that, on the afternoon of the Thursday on which our side was to travel to play against Neath, he went down to the Eastern School, walked into Meredith’s classroom and threatened him with dire consequences if the Catholics were not given a fair crack of the whip. The upshot is that I was called from class at
Other memories of my ‘Sec. days’ come flooding in when I talk to Paul’s Ben about his first year in his High School. For his experiences are similar to mine: the size of the Sixth Formers, some with embryonic moustaches, more flamboyant clothes and hairstyles. How I wished that I had my name like William Edward Graham Griffiths (or WEG for short). How I admired the bandy-legged walk of Glyn Jones, School Rugby Captain and Secondary Schools International (and later in charge of
Chapter 37. At the Sec. - 1938-39
In yesterday’s paper (
The success of the four of us who left
In the ‘battle for the schools’ in the 1870s and after, Church leaders had been inspired by the fear that if Catholic children did not have a Catholic education, they might well forget their religion and lapse. I remember my headmaster at the grammar school, an awesome ‘Daddy’ Reynolds, telling my Dad that, in all his years at ‘the Sec. he had never known any Catholic child to have given up his or her religious practice. Indeed, he boasted, some of this former pupils were leaders in our community - as altar servers, teachers and so on.
It may well be that our adherence to the faith was strengthened rather than weakened by our being thrown into a non-Catholic, often hostile, atmosphere. I am reminded of talking to a friend, Brother Eugene, when we were in the De La Salle novitiate in 1942. We were watching the Brother-farmer leading a team of horses who were dragging a heavy stone roller across a field of freshly-sprung wheat. The foot or so high blades of wheat were seemingly crushed by the roller. That, explained
And our Church made sure that our religious education was not ignored. Each Monday afternoon, those of us who were in the grammar schools had to go down to
Along with my fellow pupils at ‘the Sec. I had, in one sense, left the ghetto behind me. Certainly I’d left behind me boys and girls with whom I had been friendly and with some of whom I might have made friends. I can think now of only Jack Folland and Roy Howells as such friends from my Catholic school. For the rest, they went into a world of work or unemployment which I was never to know - for I was not going to go to work until I was sixteen by which time many of my classmates had had two years in the works, mines or factories. I remember seeing Sheila O’Sullivan, a notable runner at the age of 12, coming from her job in the tinworks, her clothes protected by an ugly sacking overall, her face streaked with the dirt of the works. I could understand why Cronin, Kennedy and others walked from work in heavy boots and dirty clothes. But girls? I obviously knew nothing of nineteenth century Dowlais.
But in many senses, I never left the ghetto. Unlike Pat, Gerard and John, I never gave up membership of the Guild of St Aloysius and, later the Catholic Young Men’s Society which took me into Catholic company in Church and Hall. I never joined the YMCA, as did the three younger Lanes so I never made close games-playing friends of boys as easily as they did. I had friends from ‘the Sec., of course, otherwise I would never have played tennis let alone soccer and cricket in the Park. But I only ever went to one of their homes for an evening’s games of billiards on a small table, and I only ever invited two of them to our home when, in time, Dad got us such a table. The other boys, in contrast, had many non-Catholic friends who came to the house and to whose houses they went ‘normally’. I was never at such ease.
My life continued to centre on the Church: serving Mass’ on weekday mornings and, every other week, on Sundays: either serving on the altar or singing in the choir at Sunday evening Benediction: Confession every fortnight and a visit to the Hall at least once a week - more often than I went to the cinema then.
And, because of my conditioned observance and adherence to my Church, I was at odds with almost everyone else in ‘the Sec. when, in 1936 Franco led his revolt against the Republican government of
One of the paradoxes of the Spanish Civil War was that, among Franco’s main opponents were the fervently Catholic people of the Basque country. In 1937 some of these came as refugees to live in a camp at
My support for Franco was part of another rite of passage. For it was in the mid-thirties that I first became politically aware. And, almost from the outset, and not surprisingly, I absorbed my father’s pragmatic approach. He had been, as we have seen, an active Labour worker who, to the distaste of many fellow-Catholics, had campaigned for the return of the Tory, Karl Wehrle, to the local council. I was with him at the declaration of a local poll at the nearby
A good and intelligent Catholic, he nevertheless strongly opposed priests’ attempts to become overly involved in political affairs. I may already have quoted him on “in so far as man wears a priest’s collar and talks of theology, then listen to him with care, for that is his ‘trade’: but in so far as, with his priest’s collar, he talks of secular affairs, then listen to him as you might listen to anyone else, for that is not his ‘trade’.’ In March 1938, my father, along with the mass of politically conscious Catholics welcomed the arrival of Joe Kennedy as US Ambassador in
It did much for Catholic esteem to have this man and this family in
Nor did my father take the more popular view over the issue of the Abdication of Edward V11 in December 1936. Too many ordinary people had been brainwashed in the 1920s to see him as ‘Prince Charming’, ‘the Boy David’ who might, at some future date, lead the country away from government by old and tired men, many of whom, in Baldwin’s words, ‘had done well out of the War.’ My father was in a minority who saw him as a selfish man who was unable or unwilling to accept the responsibilities which went with his role as Prince and Heir to the Throne.
So my political inheritance was a mixed one: Catholic but anti-clerical, pragmatically socialist but anti-Communist, socially concerned for the unemployed and deprived but pro-self help and private efforts to get on. And
while I sang, with thoughtful pride Faith of Our Fathers and Full in the Panting heart of Rome, I also sang The Red Flag - unaware, then, that is had been written by an Irish Home Ruler in 1887.
This lunchtime,
The Creation Of Thuggery
Is soccer violence the result of social deprivation and are we all to blame? Historian Peter
Lane does not think so...
“We are all to blame.” Neil Kinnock’s reaction to the recent outbreak of soccer violence was predictable. It is sure that he gave no thought to the insult he was offering to the many who have had no part in the creation of thuggery. Twenty years ago this Saturday, I took my young sons to what turned out to be our last soccer game. God forgive me, I had thought as they were growing up that I would share their interests in the hope that, in time, they might share some of my values.
Saturday after rainy Saturday I stood on what had once been a tanner bank to watch, if you believe it, Plymouth Argyle. Such parental devotion to duty; Plymouth Argyle. Mind you, the alternative, Plymouth Albion’s rugby, was even worse, save when a Welsh touring side came down.
With my lads I enjoyed the pictures on television of the scenes on foreign grounds. Crowds penned behind huge chain-link fences; deep moats to separate spectators from playing area; armed police parading with their guard dogs. Not like good old
They scored, unfortunately, but ... even the ranks of
But in 1964 we had left
I took my lads home - and that was our last soccer game. Since then I have read about the rising tide of mindless violence; at one time it was
I have listened to the Kinnock-like lemmings as they wheel out their excuses. “What can you expect in the face of unemployment?” I can’t help wondering where these apparently unemployed get the money to pay to go (from, for example,
I am also mindful of the 1930s when Aberavon was chock full of the unemployed.
But I don’t remember any of them running amok, even when
I am told, by the psycho-pundits that “violence is the result of social deprivation”. Such smooth talkers, such lively ways with words, such thoughtless excuses. Was there no deprivation in the 1930s? I am reminded of the young social worker who found one of the victims of violence outside her home. As she picked up the battered child she was heard to murmur, “Dear me, whoever did this to you needs some help”.
We had gone to live in Croydon because I had a post in a
Radical-chic lecturers did their best to ensure that Bob Dylan’s words came true The times they are a-changing. Sandals on feet, they trod a revolutionary path - urging students to call them ‘Sid’ or ‘Harry’ or ‘mate’ if that’s what grabbed them.
I tried to understand what these highly-trained bearded wonders meant by ‘creativity’ and ‘freedom of expression.' I failed to understand why they sneered at the poor historian’s pleas for “spelling”, “grammar, sentence formation and the like of what I thought as normalcy.” I didn’t see that the pseudo-psychos were busy creating that ‘caring and civilised community’ of which Roy Jenkins was the Home Secretary-advocate.
Students were taught - and in turn handed on to their pupils - that they all had something called ‘rights.’ The BBC, for example produced a series of programmes on sex education - for nine-year-olds. It was then that I found that my rights-teaching colleagues lacked any sense of humour, because, idiot-like, I asked “what ‘creativity’, what ‘freedom of expression’ do we expect the children to develop after they’ve seen these explicit programmes.” Seemed sensible to me then; seems even more so today as I look at the rising graphs for illegitimacy, broken homes, abortions, numbers at VD clinics and the rest.
I got very worried about this question of ‘rights’ - partly as a teacher, partly as a parent. I arrived at a ‘Modus vivendi’ with students and family alike after I had developed with them the idea that one person’s rights were someone else’s duties. Thus, my students had a right to expect me to prepare my work and teach properly. That was my duty. However, as a teacher, I had a right to expect them to do the reading and other work that I set’ that was their duty as students. The ‘Modus vivendi?’ I suggested that I wouldn’t insist on my rights if they didn’t insist on their often outlandish rights.
The idiot mobs rampaging through
Speak for yourself, chum.”
(Western Mail Wednesday, April 3, 1995)
On the Sunday before I was to start my final year at ‘the Sec. and prepare for my School Certificate examination, Neville Chamberlain addressed the country via the ‘wireless’ and told us that we were, once again, at war with Germany. Aunty Carey told how our Gerard was at her home after Sunday morning Mass when the broadcast was made. As Chamberlain ended, and the siren rang out, Gerard said, “I think I’d better go home to Mam now.’ She and he could remember ever more where they were as war was declared.
Chapter 38. A Mum’s Life
At the end of Chapter 2 of Luke’s Gospel we read the sentence which sums up the so-called ‘hidden childhood’ of Jesus at
“... they went back to
None of the Lane children had a ‘hidden childhood’: indeed, for some of our neighbours wherever we lived, our lives were very public - playing in streets and lanes, going out to the Park as a small tribe, piling into cars for Sunday Mass, going or walking a la crocodile back home from Church clutching our twopenny weekly.
Nor would any of us want to claim to have advanced much other than, inevitably, in ‘age’ as Jesus did. I do claim, however, that during my secondary schooling (1936-40) I became increasingly aware of the role of my mother.
I have already written much about my father’s role as I saw it – outgoing generous, provider, somewhat manic-depressive, encourager, disciplinarian, arguer.... But, until the late 30s I had taken my mother’s role as natural. It was only now, in my early teens that I saw her as a person in her own right, playing a series of vital roles in our lives. If Dad was the ebullient one, she was the calmer; if he flew off the handle, she cooled things down, if he had a bad week, she still provided.
Recently I read of some American public figure, Martha Stewart (whoever she may be) who has ‘come out’ for the role of women as homemakers. The arch feminist Camille Paglia wrote of her:
“She is someone who has done an enormous service for ordinary women who identify with the roles of mother, wife and home-maker. She has star quality...”
It is a sign of the troubled times through which we have lived in recent years that being ‘mother, wife and home-maker’ should merit ‘star quality.’ For my mother, along, I may say, with countless millions of others, played those roles, in what, pace St Luke, we may call ‘the hidden womanhood’.
Maybe one of the reasons why I came to appreciate Mum’s role was that I was often kept home from school during the winter with a variety of real or imagined illnesses. I enjoyed the first day or two at home when I was allowed
to spend the days in the large, comfortable bed in Dad and Mum’s bedroom. The there’d be a day or two when, up for breakfast, I’d be allowed to stay in the warm living room while Mam went about her work - having first got three or four off to school and settled the two or so younger ones to play. In time, I constructed a sort of Mam’s timetable for her week and her days. There was the long task of bed making: why didn’t she do as my Teresa did and get us to make our own beds? Regularly, each Thursday as long as it wasn’t raining, every mattress was stripped and put to hang out of open window for an hour or two while rooms were vacuumed and dusted. Then there was the endless cooking for the growing tribe:
Sunday: a joint and several vegetables followed by a pudding:
Monday: cottage pie from the left-overs, an easy meal which ‘did’ while she got on with the awful task of clothes-washing - in days when there were no washing machines, but coal fired coppers in the scullery and/or huge steel basins put to boil on the gas stove. Coming home for lunch on Monday meant fighting through clouds of steam and inhaling Persil-filled fumes. Then there was the problem of drying all those sheets, shirts, towels, undies and the rest - in a
Tuesday: liver and onions done quickly so that Mam had time for the long process of ironing all those clothes. Irons had to be heated on gas stove or open fire in the living room: I enjoyed the way Mam tested to see if the iron was hot enough - a spit, a sizzle and seemingly OK. Never understood the science which lay behind the tested method.
Wednesday: Irish stew from a neck of lamb with all the vegetables you can think of. This, again, was a relatively simple meal to prepare, giving Mam a chance to shop and get ready for her evening out at the meeting of the Catholics Mothers’
I can’t remember what the regular dish was for Thursday but Friday was either boiled fish and parsley sauce while Saturday was sausage and mash - and the afternoon at the
And the baking: oh, the baking. At weekends there was ‘the big bake’ when Mam made three or four huge tarts - apple, rhubarb, jam, and, in summer time, blackberry. We used to be sent out morning and afternoon in summertime to collect blackberries in basins, jars, pots and whatever. The best ones were to be found up the mountain near Goytre where lived the toughest of the anti-Catholic gangs. One such was led by a monster boy from the Kingdom family: at Damien’s wedding, while talking to Colin Jenkins about life in the 1930s, he brought up the subject of the Kingdoms. “Remember them, Pete?” he asked. Remember them? With nightmares. They went about in a gang of six or so, terrifying everyone - including, it seems, Colin. But Catholic children were their special prey - and we were they. But, in spite of them and because we soon learned to hide when they came along the road or mountain path, we got our blackberries, and Mam baked those lovely tarts and pies. And sponges - plain,
chocolate, jam: and, from stale bread, the huge dish of bread pudding to be best eaten cold.
We were allowed a small part in this baking game: coring apples and peeling them (and fighting over the peelings): shelling peas from their pods, which, in memory, I associate with Saturday evenings and Music Hall on the ‘wireless’: stoning plums - and nicking the odd one or two (“Mam, Mam, he’s taking another one.”) We were not merely allowed, but forced, by Dad to take a hand in other things. There were dishes to be washed and wiped after every meal - and that’s a lot of meals and dishes, with a fiery father insisting that cup handles were washed properly (seemed to be a phobia as I recall): there were the brasses to be done every Saturday - candlesticks which were now merely ornamental although they had once been in daily use in pre-gas and pre-electricity days: there were stair carpets to be brushed down and the rods which kept them in place to be taken out and polished: there was the Ewbank cleaner to be pushed around the living room after every meal to gather up the bits and fallen pieces.
I have already written of the osmotic way in which I learned all the well-known hymns - listening to Mam singing as she went about her many tasks. I am reminded of that lovely voice and the hymns when I sing a modern hymn:
“Be still, for the presence of the Lord,
Is in this holy place...”
If Dad provided us with, as it were, some intellectual framework for our religious belief and practices, Mam gave us the ‘from the heart’ and ‘casually easy’ relationship with the Lord. Modern jargon speaks of ‘the cerebral’ and ‘the emotional’ aspects of belief and practice. I am grateful for the dual contribution made by my parents to my religious development: for, in the words of the song (or almost)
“You can’t have one without the other” (or you ought not to have).
All that baking and cooking and meal-making meant that shopping was another major task - and another in which we were made to play a part. Mum always did the visiting to butcher and fruiterer herself (although, later she trusted me to get bananas and apples). But the massive order from the Co-op grocery stores meant carrying a long list, waiting at the counter for my turn and then handing it over to the girl. She then brought the 6 packets of Cornflakes, twelve pounds of sugar, packets of butter (once they had given up the cutting of butter from a slab and patting it into shape with decorated wooden blocks), of lard, of flour, of tinned goods, of jam ... and so on until the pram was full. Many’s the woman who has recalled seeing one of other of us wheeling this load on the main road to home.
Being sick and at home meant sharing Mam’s luxury of a mid-morning cup of Ovaltine and a Marie biscuit. Such simple pleasures. So, too, was her, and Dads’ social life. There was a weekly visit to the cinema: Mam’s Mother’s Meeting each Wednesday: a call to the Belli’s cafe one evening or, as life got better, a car trip to the luxurious Ice Cream Parlour in Porthcawl. And once or twice only, there were evenings when, both in borrowed plumes, they went to some Ball or other. I hope that someone has the photograph of Dad in someone’s evening suit and Mum is someone’s evening gown. My children won’t think it unusual for their parents to have been ‘dolled up’: it was a very unusual and therefore ‘memorable’ one for my parents.
It was during my early teens that I first came to see that ‘unusual’ could also be applied to my Dad’s role at home. I remember one of my cousins saying that her Dad was so tired when he came from work that he wanted nothing other than to sit down and snooze: she rarely spoke with him and he played little part in her life and those of her brothers and sisters.
Later, in the 1950s, while on a course at
It was, in some senses, a peculiar side to his life - and character – this association with the duckers-and-divers of Aberavon’s limited society. It reminds me of something that Dante wrote:
“In Church with saints and in the tavern with sinners.”
But always, or almost always he played with us and other boys in the lanes. That would be of an evening or week-end afternoon. Maybe even more ‘unusual’ conduct was getting up first every morning, his scrubbing of the tiled passageway, his polishing of the living room linoleum and his black-leading of the grate. Where had he learned this unchauvanistic behaviour? Brought up as a spoilt and only child, later ‘at home’ in the Twomey-Scannell home in
He did not go ‘to church with saints’ on his own. In addition to taking us to Mass and Benediction, he would run old people to Sunday Mass, as many of them recalled later. He helped us to see that the Church was truly ‘Catholic’ i.e.’ Universal’ by showing us photographs of the Kennedys and, most memorably, taking us down to St David’s in Swansea to see the Australian Test players, O’Reilly and McCabe, at Mass on a Sunday on the week-end when they were playing Glamorgan in 1938.
His contacts with ‘the sinners in the tavern’ had taught him that betting was a mug’s game. Indeed, as he pointed out, the newly built home of the most successful local bookmaker, Val Jones, was known as ‘Mug’s Villa’. Dad would meet Val and others in the Castle Hotel in the
Dad rubbed shoulders with some odd characters, but never became a gambler himself. Except, as I well remember, when he had a tip that a horse called Solitaire would win the
And so, but not finally, to the third element in the Lane home - the children, Teresa, our ‘baby’ was born in 1936, the year in which I went to ‘the Sec.. By then, and for the years before I left home in 1942, I acted as baby-sitter when Man and Dad went out, as child-minder at week-ends and holidays when I took the younger ones to play in the Park or, on fine Sundays when we were not going on a car outing, for a pre-lunch walk up the mountain. One such walk I remember only because we wandered into some partially-built houses - jumping from low wall to low wall, only for John to fall on a load of bricks and break his little leg. He was in hospital for some weeks where in the next bed was a boy who had got a spike through his leg while roller-skating. That’s why none of us had roller-skates as we grew up (even if they could be afforded). Hospitals: I remember the three girls being taken from home to the local fever hospital suffering from scarlet fever. The house had to be fumigated and I remember the taping of doors and windows and the dreadful smell of the fumigating material. I remember, too, being sent to the hospital to hand in eggs with the girls’ names written in indelible pencil and looking through the window to see the mites.
Seven young ones all of whom save Anne ‘passed the scholarship’ and went to ‘the Sec., and Dad made sure that Anne wasn’t left out by sending her for secretarial training. The nominal cost of it all - with all of us in school well beyond the leaving age of 14: feeding, clothing, providing books and the rest. The notional ‘lost income’ which might have come if we had done, as most of our peers did, and left school at 14 and gone to some form of work. The sacrifice of parents.
I remember the problem of clothing best of all (because I took the question of food as unasked). First there were clothing cheques: clubs into which Mum paid a few shillings per week until she had a credit balance which allowed her to spend, say, £20 or so. Then there was the wonder of the ‘dividend’ paid by the Cooperative Society each half year: in one year, I recall, the ‘divvy’ was 3 shillings and sixpence in the £: i.e. Mam got 17 1/2p (in today’s money) for each pound she had spent in the Co-op. It was the ‘divvy’ which paid for the annual suit of ‘best clothes’, the school shoes, the winter coat and so on. In one year, must have been a windfall year, I remember all three girls being sent to Mrs O’Brien, a neighbour who was a skilled dressmaker, to be fitted out in mustard coloured coats and hats - and very smart they looked as they went with their ‘Duchess’ mother to church. I remember, too, the ‘divvy’ providing the money for the football boots we had to have in ‘the Sec. and Dad talking to the manager of the department, Mr Corkhill - whom he was to use as a clothing coupon provider in future years - but that’s another story.
Dad’s ‘ducking and diving’ in search of extra income plus his success at his regular job meant that, although there were nine mouths to fill and nine bodies to be clothed, we enjoyed a comfortable life: food, clothes, car, admission money to Aberavon Rugby Club, money for a trip to Neath and Swansea to see Glamorgan play cricket (so that I saw Bradman in 1938 and the West Indies in, I think, 1936 - the fabled Constantine among them), and for an infrequent visit to see Swansea Town play at the Vetch.
But, as I only realised later, behind or below this appearance of comfort, there was often real want. Why else did my Mad and Dad have to sell the beautiful Edwardian sideboard which had graced their home for years? I would wonder at that when I saw it in Aunty Carey’s living room. Why else did we not have a ‘wireless’ in 1938 when I listened to the commentary on Hutton’s record-breaking 364 on the wireless in our neighbour’s house? Why else did I run, shamefully, past my headmaster on a rainy evening wearing not shoes but my clapped out plimsolls.
Everything, as Einstein might have said, is relative. Compared to so many families from our church and from the wider community we were well-off in our relative poverty. Our home was large, even if, in our second home in Tanygroes Street we let out two rooms to Mrs Thomas and her grown up son, Penry, and daughter whose name I can’t recall (and what was their relative place on the poverty scale?). And the home was comfortable, unlike Dan Lynch’s, and clean and sweet smelling compared to too many of the houses in Aberavon. Nor were we ever sockless or shoeless or, as were the Routcliffe boys, shirtless.
Still and all, we shared with the majority of the community what Ernie Bevin would later describe as ‘a poverty of expectation.’ Two illustrations: I remember when Mary was about three asking Mam what she thought Mary might grow up to be. I remember the answer well. “I hope,” said Mam of her first daughter, “that she will find service in a good home.” Maybe she had in mind her own role in a French but Cardiff-based home. Can you imagine our Mary at service in any home? Even “a good home”? The mind boggles. But who then could have foreseen Sixth Form, University, graduation and so on for a Lane girl? Who, indeed, could have foreseen such a career for a Lane boy? For my second illustration comes from the Headmaster’s asking my Fifth Form (about to take their School Certificate exams), how many intended to come back to school for a Sixth Form - if they succeeded in getting the right results. No one put up their hand. “And how many hope to go to College?”, which you could do if you got the right results in the School Cert. exam. I remember only David Evans putting up a hand. Out of a class of thirty, all save one were planning to leave school after School Cert. And these included children of stockbroker, shipbroker, works manager and so on. Indeed, to many in our Catholic community, the Lanes were already pushing at the frontiers of expectations by having in 1940 all four of their sons ‘at the Sec., all having ‘passed the scholarship’.
Somewhere along the line of the thirties, and in spite of the costs of keeping us all in grammar schools, Dad’s income and Mam’s ability at end-meeting, saw us being able to afford the weekly shilling rental for a ‘wireless’ from the local Welsh Dragon Relay Company which, via some cable system or other, fed us, with a number of radio stations. As with other wireless-owning families, much of our evening entertainment centred around this (for us) new invention. Best of all I remember commentaries on rugby games which we followed with the added aid of a squared off page in the Radio Times so that while the commentator was saying, “Wooller passes to Davey...” another with a sepulchral voice added “Square four...” so that we knew where play was taking place. Then there were cricket commentaries, with Mam acting on our listening behalf while we were at school: she became an expert cricketing critic and score keeper. Then, one of my favourites, there were the regular spots for ‘Henry Hall... and this is my guest night’: Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra was merely one of the many big bands of the time; others were led by Carol Gibbons, Bert Ambrose and Roy Fox. Saturday evening, and post-Confession, there were In Town Tonight, a magazine programme, and Music Hall, an hour long light entertainment programme. Drama, serious music, annual speeches by the Pope (when we were made to kneel for his blessing Urbi et Orbi) and a wide spectrum of serials. I can understand why we had a special Children's Hour, but I remain puzzled as to the daily slot on Stocks and Shares: who listened to it then?
As with almost all children of our generation, our playground was the street - and the lane. For while we had the Park for swings and the like, and, for boys, football and organised cricket, we played for hours around the street, then relatively traffic free. There was hopscotch with its squares and jumps, skipping-involved rituals, hide-and-seek, truth-or-dare, statues, marbles, and tennis, played solo against a back wall of our garage door to the annoyance of two spinsters and their crabbed bachelor brother. Having spent many years frowning, chattering and otherwise indicating their unpleasant natures, they would annoy my Mam in later years complimenting her on the children’s successes. “Hypocrites,” she would hiss when they were gone.
There was the weekly visit to the twopenny afternoon cinema show with its Marx brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Cantor or other comic, and Tom Mix, Gene Autry or some other white-hatted cowboy hero who got rid of the black-hatted and always moustached villains. There was the frequent call to the local chip shop where we could get a packet of chips in return for a bundle of newspapers which the chippie would use to wrap up other helpings of cod and chips. Here we could sit at a small table and play a game of ‘put and take’ with the aid of a six sided small top - if the number shown came up ‘plus 2’ you took two chips from the others: if it came down ‘put two’ you handed two over to the rest. I associate this game with the unpleasant memory of the future union leader, Clive Jenkins, who was one of the few I knew who really felt his failure to ‘pass the scholarship.’ I always thought that his future life was scarred by that 11 plus failure.
In the summer time there was always the Beach. Mam would meet us while we were at
It was a simple life in a small and, as I now realise, simple town where almost everyone knew everyone. I knew most of the policemen by name - some, like Arthur Bassett and Jack Thomas because they were great
I knew, called out to, and was acknowledged, by a host of shopkeepers as I went around. Wally Chidzoy who played billiards with my Dad, Saunders the butcher for whom Mam was a good customer and who had two much admired sons who let us go with them as they delivered meat from a van, Thomas the Morfa from whom we bought our pork sausages each Saturday ... hairdressers, newsagents, booksellers, librarians at chain libraries, assistants at Boots the chemist. It was a small town. One illustration: in 1937 when unemployment was still very high and money very short, Patsy Cronin and friends, on their way home from a midweek Mass on St Patrick’s day, stole a barrel of beer from the pavement outside the Castle Hotel - the delivery man being in the cellar re-arranging other barrels which he had rolled down the chute from the pavement. They rolled the barrel the hundred yards or so to the mainly Catholic
Chapter 39. Lanes To War And Work 1939-42
September 1939 and the outbreak of War was of less importance for me that the fact that I was now in my last year at ‘the Sec. with my School Certificate exam to be taken in the summer of 1940. Indeed, the outbreak of the war had been long foreseen; since the autumn of 1938 men had been digging up parts of the Park to create huge air-raid shelters and sometimes in the summer of 1939 men came to our house - and every other house - to dig up the garden and put in a small air raid shelter. I remember that a Catholic, Miah (for Jeremiah?) McGrath was in charge of the gang which did this work in our street. I knew Mr McGrath, who lived near Uncle Johnnie in
Coming home from Mass on the first Sunday of the War, I saw men from the local Territorial Army branch being paraded prior to getting a train to some depot or other. In charge of them was Sergeant Johnny Griffiths, son of the notable Nellie Griffiths of Mountain Row, a dominant lady - of a dominant family - in our parish. He had played at full back for Aberavon - and his grandson was to achieve even more fame as an outstanding player at
But the making of shelters and the drilling of the TA squads could not disguise the fact that
In 1940 the former pacifist, Michael Foot (and others), produced the best-selling Guilty Men. Foot accused
‘Do your worst’
Unfortunately for many millions Hitler did just that. The ‘worst’ was suffered in succession by German Jews, Socialists and Church leaders; then it was the turn of the Austrians, the Czechs and finally the Poles. British pacifism - and appeasement of Hitler - had made martyrs out of millions of people who had had no share in the decision to allow the Nazi dictator to ‘do his worst.’ It is permissible to question whether Lansbury and others had the right to offer these victims on the altar of martyrdom. And while the march of the Nazis might have been halted, fairly easily, by early action, the final cost of bringing the tyranny to an end was a high one - one paid by millions between 1939 and 1945.
(Western Mail Saturday, October 1, 1983)
And while the ‘phoney war’ went on during the autumn and winter of 1939-40, I got on with preparing for School Cert. To get a Certificate in those days one had to pass in at least five subjects, including English Language: a number of people got more than five, but failed English and so no Certificate: many more passed in four subjects and also got no Certificate. It was a hard world. Even more important, if one wanted to get to College or go on to the Sixth Form, one had to get enough and proper subjects to get exemption from matriculation. I can’t properly remember what combination of subjects was needed for this exemption: but I do remember that a pass in Latin and another language was essential as well as a pass in Maths and one Science subject. I knew, from the start, that I couldn’t get Matric. exemption because I hadn’t studied Latin. Indeed, my ‘poverty of desire’ was so real that I would have been happy in September 1939 to settle for a bare Certificate.
There was a popular song about ‘a little dog, lost in the fog, me and my dog, just lost in the fog...’ I was like that little dog in 1939-40, lost in a fog of chemistry experiments, physics equations, mathematical formula and proofs, history, geography... Mum and Dad did so much to help: I had the privilege of having a fire lit in their bedroom so that I could study in the evenings away from the ‘wireless’ and the play of the younger ones. But, to change the metaphor, this guinea pig was lost in the thickets of so much little understood knowledge.
By the time we came to take the oral exam, in French, ‘Fatty’ Daniels had drilled us so well that I felt at optimistic ease as I rattled on about having lived ‘en Cardiff’ and having visited ‘le chateau du Marquis de Bute’ - with such an accent, my dears. That was in February 1940. In May 1940, as we all know now, Hitler’s forces overran Holland, Belgium and France and we had all read about ‘the miracle of Dunkirk.’’ As someone said, ‘Another miracle like that and it’ll all be over.’ And after the fall of
School closed in mid-July and while waiting for the results, I got a job as butcher’s boy to the Catholic, Bernard O’Carroll, who had once been with the Saunders’ family but had recently struck out on his own. Naturally almost all the parish flocked to his shop and so I had the job of cycling around the town delivering the meat they had ordered. I had also to scrub the massive butcher’s block on which Bernard cut up the meat, and turn the handle of the machine into which he fed the scraps and breadcrumbs which, encased in a thin skin, became sausages. Pedalling on the heavy butcher’s boy’s bike was not too hard in fine weather - but was a pig on the rainy days of that summer, 1940.
I wouldn’t call my job with Bernard ‘a rite of passage’ because I thought I knew, and certainly I hoped, that I would get a ‘proper job’ once the exam results came out in late August. But life was changing for me - and everyone else - in many ways. There were the blackout curtains at the windows of our
More welcome was the arrival of a large number of RAF men and women to man barrage balloon sites and anti-aircraft batteries. Some of these men and women came to our Church and our priests invited parishioners to make them welcome in their homes. This led to many friendships, a deal of partying and a mixing of English, Scots and, after the fall of
Then there was a rapid development of the Youth Club movement which, in
This process of assimilation was a major by-product of the War, and was furthered by the efforts of Cardinal Hinsley. Born in
The favourable impression which Hinsley made, and the well publicised heroics of heroes such as ‘Paddy’ Finucane, were to play a part in the next ‘Battle for the Schools’ which began with the debates of 1942-43 and which was to reach fruition with the passage of the 1944 Education Act. This was to abolish fee-paying at secondary (grammar) schools, to say that every child was to leave
What would be the position of such schools when fee-paying was abolished? Would local councils pay the fees for all the Catholics in such schools? What about the vast majority of children for whom there was no place in existing Catholic schools? Would the government and councils help the Church to build and maintain new schools? Not if the TUC had its way. But even if the TUC lost its case, how much money would the government and councils provide to help in the building of new Catholic secondary schools? 25 per cent? 50 per cent? 75 percent? 100 per cent?
It is difficult now to remember that, in the 1940s, Catholics secondary schools were few and far between. In
To help in ‘the Battle’ Hinsley helped create the Catholic Electors’ and Parents’ Association which launched the campaign to amend the 1944 Act so that Catholic schools became government-aided ‘voluntary’ schools, and which persuaded the government to provide 50 per cent of the cost of building Catholic schools. This still left us with awesome task of finding the other 50 per cent, but at least the Catholic population, after 1944, was in a better position vis-à-vis secondary schools that it had been in the 1930s and than it would have been if the TUC had had its way.
Most people will have read one version or another of Dr. Johnson’s famous saying:
“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”.
From May 1940, many feared that they might die, not in a fortnight, but at any moment - whether fighting men and women, or living at home but in danger of death from air raids. This may help to explain why, in common with other churches, attendances at Mass and Benedictions rose sharply during wartime. We made our way through blacked out streets, tripping over pavements, stumbling into lampposts and trying to avoid bumping into people by carrying shaded torches, if we could afford them.
It may be, too, that we said, after every Mass, The Prayer for the Conversion of Russia, with some added fervour after Hitler’s invasion of that country. When did we stop saying that prayer? I have no idea - but I like to think that the vast body of prayer that had gone up for so many years in this cause played some part in the recent changes which have transformed the position of Christianity in the former Soviet Union. When Mum and I went on holiday there, during Gorbachev’s brief regime, we were given many examples of the simple, but deep, devotion of so many Russians of all ages - and this after 70 years of so of atheistic efforts to stamp out Christianity.
Back in Tanygroes Street with its air-raid shelter and black out curtains, the war had meant that all of us had had to go to the nearby Central School to be fitted with gas masks which we had to carry (in a small cardboard box) whenever we went out. Mum had also had to register for, and get, ration books for all nine of us. Her role now involved her own ‘ducking and diving’ as she coped with this number of clothing coupons and that number of meat ones: so much for sugar and so much for fats... and so on down to our own sweet ration. No wonder that so many Mams looked aged before time.
Dad, too, had to duck and dive but even more so. With the outbreak of war there was a sharp drop in the supply of and demand for new furniture, so that he lost his job with the South Wales Furniture Company - and lost the car, too. He got himself a reserved occupation - exempting him from the danger of National Service in the Armed Forces when he became an Auxiliary ambulance driver. I don’t know whether there was any pulling of strings down to get himself this relatively safe niche. I do know, as did all of us in
Dad’s other, and seemingly major, work involved him in the black market which furnished alongside shortages, rationing and licensing of all sorts. In this he was at one with the rogues who seemed to see themselves as some sort of spurious aristocracy (camel hair coats, George Raft hairstyles) below the working class and the honest poor, and who seemed to prosper ostentatiously (cars, cigars, heavy gambling) without working. Dad got on with many of these people - from whom Mam carefully distanced herself while gratefully accepting the rewards which Dad got. Somehow or other he got himself a van - and which of us can’t remember the long-serving van? It carried us to Church along with old ladies who needed a lift on a Sunday. But it also carried Dad into the valleys, from
clothing lengths and all sorts of stuff. Don’t ask me how warehouses got this material: don’t ask me how Dad would know that ‘to-day I’ve got to go to
In any event he prospered and so did we. He’d come from a trip up a valley with half a pig, bags of sugar from grocers whose customer hadn’t taken their ration, fresh eggs, packets of butter ... and on and foodilly on. I learned the names of some of the villains’ leaders: Moshie Green of Neath (whose daughter would become a bus conductress when I later worked at the bus company there) and several local policemen. As Scripture says:
“Quis custidiet custos?” Or, loosely, who is supposed to supervise the police?
Two illustrations. In July 1941 Ritchie Jenkins left ‘the Sec. and went to work in the local Co-operative clothing department. Later, he was rescued from here by Meredith Jones who got Phil Burton to adopt him (so he became Richard Burton) and finance his return to the Sixth Form - but that’s not part of our story. While he was at the Co-op, Dick handled thousands of clothing coupons, some of which ‘disappeared’ to be bought for a few pence each by one or other of the black marketeers who used them either as means of exchange with farmers and others or used them to get clothing supplies from warehouses. Every time I saw Dick in a film or on TV, I saw, behind that increasingly raddled face, the smooth operator at the Co-op.
Closer to home was the case of the local Board of Trade inspector with two of whose children I had been ‘at the Sec.. He called one morning to ask to see Dad, who was out at the time. He told Mam that he would come back later that day to see
Mam was terrified. Dad came home for
“Go home, put 4 packets of sugar on the table along with two five pound notes (when men earned maybe £4 a week if they were lucky). Then when the chap comes in, say - That’s your share, Mr D.”
Dad did just that. The small Inspector came around
May 1940 saw Mussolini enter the war on Hitler’s side - and saw every Italian restaurant and cafe having its windows smashed in our town. Too many Italians, and notably perhaps the influential Belli family, had been proud of Mussolini’s rape of
I remember best two of three of the bombing raids. There were the three nights of so during which
Then came the surprising but welcome results of my School Cert. exam. I could now look for some proper job. Actually, as with so much else in our lives, it was Dad who fixed it for me. I have written about his friendship, via MacDonald’s election as Aberavon’s MP, with Joe Brown, now proprietor of the Somerset Arms in Taibach. Joe’s son, George, had been a purser on the Cunard Line but, newly married, had come ashore and was now office manager of the small Neath depot of the South Wales Transport Bus Company. As luck would have it, his clerical help - maybe better called officer boy - was due to join the RAF so that George was looking for a replacement. So, having gone to
I loved it: setting the ticket machines, checking each conductor’s sales, counting the money, making out rosters, dealing with people who came for season tickets and the like - it was great. I saw bus drivers being exempted from military service although conductors weren’t: I saw young conductors being trained to become drivers and women being recruited to take their places. Among these was the wife of the manager of the local Co-op; my first introduction to the idea that married women really wanted to escape from their traditional role of home keeper. Another conductress was Moshie Green’s married daughter whose husband was in the army. There were several Neath Catholics who knew my Mam and Dad - Charlie Gallop and Arthur Selwood who were beacons of decency in a foul spoken world, and Nancy Ivory whose younger brother had picked me for his team when I was at school in Neath years ago. A small world.
I got thirty shillings a week once Dad had made me write a letter to the Chief Clerk, Mason, to ask for a rise. George Brown wasn’t best pleased that we had sent that letter without talking to him first: but he supported the idea when Mason rang him. So, having given the bulk of the money to Mam I was still unusually ‘rich’ and able to join the ever larger cinema queues where people looked for a change from the rationed, darkened and, for many, dangerous world outside. I could afford to play tennis more often and follow a game with ice cream. I got to see more cricket games - in Swansea as well as in Cardiff where, one memorable summer, Jack Folland joined me on a week when we stayed at Aunty Win’s and enjoyed the company of so many cousins.
On another visit to
VE Day
Loyal to a nation
By visiting
brought comfort and inspiration to a beleaguered nation. In so doing, she also made her Royal Family the
most popular in British history. Royal biographer
“Crowds gather outside
way that the British, accompanied by many Allied servicemen stationed around
started to celebrate the defeat of Hitler on the Sunday. The surrender of the German forces was not
signed until the Monday, and Churchill made the official announcement only on the Tuesday.
of the Queen, dressed in pink, poking her way through the rubble of bomb-damaged Roath, stopping to
speak to ambulance men, ARP workers, knots of housewives and the distressed.
(Western Mail, Thursday, May 9, 1985)
I didn’t know then that I would make money out of writing royal biographies and several articles about various members of that family. I’m sure that my Irish ancestors would have approved - if only because it was making money in a good cause.
During the two years when I worked in Neath, the Church continued to be a central part of my life: altar boy, choir member, Youth Club and Tennis team, and many other activities linked me to the ghetto. And sometime in 1941 I wrote to the Mill Hill Fathers to ask that I might be interviewed with a view to my joining them as a novice. I never had a reply - maybe they couldn’t read my writing, which wouldn’t have been a surprise. Maybe, I now think, a reply came but Mam and Dad kept it from me. I say this because when some nuns from
All of that, and more, came out during an interview I had with Brother Gilbert, then Headmaster at St Illtydd’s - and later the Provincial Superior of the Order. Following that, came several visits from and to Brother Vincent who, while teaching at St Illtydd’s, also acted as guide and mentor to young applicants who wanted to join. I remember Dad driving us up the valleys when we talked, and the talk getting to the subject of Edgar Welch, by then a paratrooper, but previously a highly successful and respected teacher at St Illtydd’s.
So it was that in mid-July 1942 I ended my short period in the world of work, left home and went to
Chapter 40. Life As A Religious Novice
One of the blessing or curses with which I have been visited has been a lack of imagination: I never wondered what I would do if I failed the ‘scholarship’, my School Certificate, or my later (and more important) examinations. I never ever thought that I wouldn’t be a good teacher, a relatively successful writer and house owner. So, in the summer of 1942, I was, happily or unfortunately, relatively unaffected by the thought of the momentous change that was going to take place in my life. There were things to be done - forms from the Brothers to be completed, a list of clothes that had to be bought (three pairs of pyjamas, whoever had such wealth: and a dressing gown - such a Hollywood-like luxury) and travel arrangements to be made.
I remember a super family party when Gran McCarthy and a host of Aunts and Uncles came to Tanygroes to enjoy a long, food-laden and song-filled evening which I spoilt when Dad tried to make a going away speech and I ran out of the room crying. I remember Uncle Ben giving Dad a bit of his bookmaker’s tongue, and coming to comfort me. But that was a small blot on a wonderful evening with, I remember, Gran talking about the price of oranges (now 1942) as compared to 1914. Oldies don’t change with the passing of the generations, for we all do it in our turns.
Then, one day, to Cardiff Station to meet Brother Vincent and a Sixth Former from St Illtydd’s, Noel Barnfield. He had become a Catholic while at the School and had now decided to become a Brother. He was a Welsh swimming champion with a wonderful sense of humour, so that we got on from the start. I last met him at
Last talk to Mam and Dad: I remember, with gratitude, Dad’s last words on the topic of my possibly ‘coming home’: in those days, people who ‘tried their vocation’ and ‘gave up’ were too often despised as ‘spoiled priests’. Certainly I knew even then of at least one priest who admitted to staying the course merely because it would have broken his Irish mother’s heart if he had given up - as he had wanted to. Dad told me that, should I wish to come home - whenever - I was not to think along the lines of ‘spoiled priests’ but was to remember that ‘your home will always be your welcoming home’. In this, as it turned out, he was wiser in his generation than I was in mine.
The blacked-out train took us to Nantwich, via the notorious Crewe Station. At Nantwich we stayed the night at the Approved School run by the Brothers. Here I saw my first indoor heated swimming pool - for Borstal-type juvenile delinquents! Barnfield enjoyed himself.
Next day off to Holyhead where we met a group of eight boys who had spent some years in the Junior Novitiate at
I remember nothing of the ferry crossing to
Then, one morning, to the Quays alongside the Liffey (and the Guinness works) to catch the bus for Castletown,
Out at the village green of Castletown - a village of some twenty or so small Dowlais-like cottages around a green alongside which were the parish church and a massive building - the Brothers’ house. I was to learn that here there was a Junior Novitiate for boys aged 12-16, the novitiate to which I was going, a house for retired Brothers, and a house for those who administered the estate - for that is what it was with its huge vegetable gardens, wheat fields and cattle farms.
Into the novitiate to become one of about 120 or so mainly Irish boys who hoped to become Brothers. There were, too, some 100 or so who had almost finished their novitiate and who were to move on in September to further study elsewhere. In time I would learn my way around: the dormitory with its 120 or so beds where we all slept - and the very large washroom and toilet area alongside: the study hall where we each had a desk and where we had lectures, read and were examined orally every day: the time-table with its bell-warning discipline: up at 5.30: read Imitation of Christ 5.45; morning prayer and meditation until 7.00: Mass at 7.00; bed making; breakfast 8.00; manual labour 8.30-10.00; study until 11.30; then ‘taught meditation’ until 12.00; spiritual reading until lunch at 12.30; more manual labour, study; tea 4.00 and more reading, lectures, study; supper 6.30 recreation (a walk around the grounds in small groups) until evening prayer and bed.
There were breaks in the relentless round: games on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons - when I learned to play Gaelic football and hurling: crocodile walks on Saturday afternoons, come rain or snow, when we tramped through the countryside for mile after green Irish mile: regular picnics in the finer weather when we explored the Slieve Bloom Mountains and got to peaks from where we could see into five counties: swimming in the mill stream.
But no newspapers, no radios, no cinema - nothing ‘of the world’ to distract us from our attempts to become fit for religious life. And, for me, if not for the Irish, ‘the deafening silence’ - no clanking of coal-bearing wagons, no works’ hooters, no clash of blast furnaces, no lighting up of the sky when the blast was opened. For some weeks I found it difficult to get to sleep in the unusual silence - broken only by the occasional braying of a donkey loose on the green outside.
One boy wrote: ‘Every day is like a Sunday, and Sunday is like Christmas Day.’ And in that hothouse atmosphere all of us had the chance to come to terms with ourselves, with what we were about and with our future. Some left after a few weeks, others during the year. For myself I had a chance to reflect on why I was there. I had told Brother Gilbert in
A Reader Reflects On The Role Of The Eucharistic Minister
“Lord I am not worthy to give you”
As I passed the priest at the church door, he said, “Thank you for helping”. I was still suffering from the nervous strain which had led my spouse to give me a special hug at the Kiss of Peace, when she said, “Do not be afraid,” the first line of one of our favourite hymns. All I could do, as I left the Church, was to reply, “Thank you for having asked me.”
I can remember the telephone call during which the priest had asked me if I would allow my name to go forward for considering for commissioning. My initial response had been, ‘No’, partly because I am already involved in a number of church activities and I have a horror of the emergence of a ‘lay caste’ which might be seen as more pervasive than the priestly caste. However, more than that, I felt that the role of the person who offers Jesus to the people, was an awesome one for which I was unfitted.
At various Masses, I have seen some of my fellow-parishioners move from one queue to another to ensure that they receive Jesus from the priest and not from one of the lay ministers.
“I wish, Lord, that I could explain to these reluctant to accept lay ministers that I was an equally reluctant student on the commissioning course. If only I could explain how awe-filled I am as I consider what I have been allowed to do. How, Lord, to explain the sense of unworthiness and the feeling of wonder and joy?”
Catholic Herald
But back to the novitiate. Here I was forced to learn that I wanted to become a Brother so that I, personally, might become holy - and not so that I might do some good or other. Doing good would follow from my first becoming holy. That, of course, was on a par with the well-learned question 2 of my childhood Catechism: Why did God make you? Answer: God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next. Selfish and self-centred? Superficially, yes and, without care, maybe it remained so in reality for some people. But, as our catechism also taught us, we had a series of duties to others - which we would be better fit to perform if we had first got right our primary duty to God and ourselves.
So, if I wanted to ‘go on the mission’, I would be better fitted to do that if I first looked myself and my own development. I remain, all these years later, very grateful for the year of growth which I enjoyed in Castletown and for what some might see as ‘conditioning.’ In my own ‘from age to age...’ prayer, I reflect from time to rare time on the contribution which the Brothers in charge of our study and development made to my own growth.
I have so many memories of this year: my first Retreat of eight days when we were joined by a hundred or so teaching Brothers from all over Ireland: my part in choirs and as Cantor at Vespers and other liturgies: talks with Irish boys and men who helped me understand my own family’s history - with their ‘hands on’ knowledge of the Famine (through which their grandparents had lived) and of emigration (with the Irish tradition of the lighted candle in the window “to light the way home for those who had left”). I remember the first time I was allowed to wear the Brother’s robe - the eve of the Feast of the Rosary, and the taking of my first vows a year later, 1943, following which, as a fully-enrolled Brother, I was off for further study and, hopefully, growth.
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