Recollections

TO KNOW YOU

RECOLLECTIONS

We knew more or less that he wasn't coming home. It was a time, looking
back, when I didn't care if the world should end tomorrow. A child's
mind operates in black and white, no space for consequential extras. I
thought I'd try to see if it was a bad dream. Perhaps, if I called as
usual I would hear his heavy pitter-patter on the linoleum.
'Bobby,' 'Bo...' I choked on the second call, knowing in that split
second grief that my world had changed forever. Bobby wouldn't come
running, he would never come to see me again. As I hung my head a tear
fell and landed on the floor. I sniffed hard. My face felt wet. As I
wept I caught sight of a hair on my shorts, one of Bobby's. I fell to
my knees brokenhearted. That moment introduced me to hate. If that was
the opposite to love, the love I had for Bobby, hate then was natural.
Yes, I hated him.

When my father committed suicide in 1973 he was found with a three
quarters full bottle of dark rum, and the empty bottles from two months
supply of Mandrax. He left a short note. It was a note to himself
really: 'apart from my children my life has been a failure. I have
lacked wisdom and lived in a state of perpetual fear. I suppose I leave
this world as I entered it - with nothing to say.'
Of course I never really hated him. I mean not at the time that Bobby
had to be 'destroyed': or ever, other than in the child's mind of the
time. I was twenty-one when he decided to end his life. I remember
thinking how cruel his note must have felt to my mother. After all, his
words made no mention of her. No last expression of fondness. No final
recall of past joys shared over a lifetime. O.K. there was the
reference to us two boys, their children, yet nothing, no reference to
anything personal, intimate between just the two of them. But, as I
say, it wasn't a goodbye note, rather, a note to himself, ultimately
selfish, full of despair. Looking back I wonder if even the 'my
children' bit wasn't more to do with some deep-rooted parental
obligation dimly realized, than actual raw emotion. Or maybe dad was
thinking more of Colin, his eldest son, than me. Why wouldn't he be
more proud of my brother? He had never disrespected his father as I had
done. Dad would say to me, 'If you're determined in your life that you
don't care, please try to do so well armed - not in ignorance.' Dad: at
best I was disappointed in the man I thought I knew him to be. No less,
I'm certain, was the disappointment he felt in me. Herein lay the
tragedy. Long after my father's death I discovered his life. I learned
to truly love him. By then of course it was too late. Perhaps the most
important relationship in a man's life had been wasted.
Sometimes I wonder what he would make of me now. I went to university
fourteen years after he died. Following that, for all intents and
purposes as they say, I ceased to be working class, becoming petit
bourgeois. I joined the lower middle classes. My father was nothing,
ever, other than working class. There were a number of harsh realities
that defined his world for him for all time. The first, harshest and
most telling event was the accident of his birth. Through a fact that
he could never quite grasp was no fault of his own, he was born in a
Cardiff workhouse in 1910. Later on it was told to me that his father
spent the greater part of that same year in prison in England. I would
like to think my grandfather - who I vaguely recollect and, oddly,
associate with the powerful smell of old petrol lighter fuel - was
imprisoned for some act of defiance at the start of a great labour
unrest that convulsed the country between 1910-1914. The truth is
probably more prosaic, and he was detained for petty theft or some such
ignominy. Whatever the facts, this was my father's heritage.
Intelligent, uneducated, these facts resonated in him, gnawed at him,
and, God bless him ultimately crippled him forever.
My earliest image of my father is of a tall man, (he was probably no
more than 'five-eight'), sweeping me up in his arms and jigging about.
He is wearing a long navy blue mackintosh and a flat cap: the type of
article ubiquitous amongst the working class between roughly the 1880s
to the late 1950s. I can sense he loved me madly back then, just as I
adored him. He was a hard-working member of what came to be understood
as "respectable working class." In a way that was perhaps his peak
aspiration. He would consciously have owned the ambition to be a better
man than his father. Whilst there were lapses - usually through too
much drink on too many memories, and again later on when he struggled
with his mortality and the ordinariness of his existence - he pretty
much succeeded as a good enough parent and provider. From bits I
remember told to me by my mother, my petrol lighter fuel grandfather
had been essentially a ner'do well. I gather he was a poor provider
whose wife and ten children lived in fear of him. The Colemans were
looked down on in Morgan Street, a fact my mother never let my father
forget. Although she was a kind and lovely person I believe she had
unwittingly been his confidence-buster-in-chief. They lived practically
next door to each other growing up. He used to say, 'even when I heard
her cough I'd feel a thrill.' But, after they married, he 28 she 25, as
their youth left them, I sense they grew older emotionally isolated one
from the other.
My mother was a handsome young woman in the few crinkled black and
white photographs that remain of her. She was short in stature, slim,
with a magnificent head of black ringlets. She, too, came from a large
family of ten brothers and sisters. They were the Hudsons, pedigree
south Welsh; unlike the Colemans who were cursed with both English and
Irish lines. Not unusual today, yet one wonders what difficulties
impelled folk hundreds of miles from home. Escaping from what, in
search of what? They met and eventually gave life to me, for that I am
grateful. My Grandfather Hudson was a blacksmith, a tradesman,
evidently someone not unlike thousands of others, who made up the solid
backbone of industrial south Wales in the late Victorian period. His
wife I believe to have been a martinet; the 'Mam' pivotal at the heart
of Welsh family life. By the 1960s her kind had practically
disappeared. These, my maternal grandparents, I never met. I was born
in 1952, a few months before my mother's fortieth birthday.
My parents were married on the sixth of August 1939. On their marriage
certificate, for him, under Rank or Profession, it reads 'Engineer's
Labourer'. For her there is a pen stroke. I don't know why. She had the
reputation throughout the family for being mad about children. And I
know she worked as a Nanny right up to her marriage, looking after
young children of the privileged class. Come to think of it, that would
be right: she would be nothing, preparing for her duties as a
housewife, for motherhood. Two virgins, then, bound together for
better, for worse, in sickness and in health, coming together with what
in mind? Respectability, love and lust no doubt on Bill's part:
children and more children on Gwen's. Did they anticipate the outbreak
of war just weeks later?
During the Second World War Bill Coleman served in the merchant navy.
Gwen Coleman worked in an 'arms factory' as she termed it. The young
couple moved to London in 1939, shortly after their marriage and the
declaration of war. They, or at least, my mother, first, returned to
south Wales in 1945. And here they resettled and lived out the rest of
their lives. It was a fact I remember as a child recalling with some
amusement. To my shame, I also recall thinking how ridiculous that
seemed. The only time they chose to do something remotely progressive,
and it's off to London for the blitz! That symbolized what my parents
represented to me - they couldn't wait to redeploy themselves to the
aching dullness of Wales. By 1947, a cruel year of continuing privation
and bitter, bitter winter, they were still childless. With neither fuss
nor ceremony from the authorities, they adopted a child. My brother,
Colin, joined them at two days old.

My greatest regret is that I never really talked to my father. The
reason for this lay on both sides. By the time I entered my teens he
was in his mid-fifties, already silently reflecting on his place in the
world. He would not have been happy. Yet in his life this man, my
father, contributed and had accomplished things far beyond the common
realities known to me within my worldview. If there is a story to
follow, it is about those significant events in life that cause us to
become what we are. We cannot escape them as they unfold, any more than
we can avoid them, as we grow old. Bill's history is told partly from
what I know, and what I feel. The chapters of my experience are as
accurate as my memory allows. Our lives are separated by four decades,
and a whole world of difference; two men who happen to be father and
son.