In My Wildest Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

the main street too, but they knocked that down and built a flat-roofed store instead. You could see the hands of the clock from Stow Hill and, it was rumoured, even further. I remember that town hall well because on the night that Japan surrendered and the war was finally over I went down there dressed as a girl. It was only in fun (the nuances would have been lost on me then) and the boy next door encouraged me. The clothes were his sister's. During the general dancing and celebrations a soldier grabbed me and shouted 'We've won! We've won!' and he kissed me on the lips.
    Along the river bank from the Transporter Bridge was a wharf beside the steelworks. One morning in the unemployed nineteen-thirties, my father took me there to act as bait in getting a job aboard a little coaster. 'Suck your cheeks in. Try to look half-starved,' he suggested as we went aboard. It was not difficult. I had seen my mother burst into tears when, having seen the plates put out for tea, I enquired: 'Well, there's the plates – all we want now is something to put on them.'
    The skipper of the coaster was presumably impressed by the waif because he not only gave my father the job as a stoker on his weekly boat (so named because it went to Ireland and back in a week) but took us to his cabin where he spread out a hundred or more coins on his polished table. It was like a treasure and my eyes shone. 'Let's see what we can give the boy' ruminated the captain. He shuffled the wealth about while I trembled with anticipation but eventually decided that every coin was foreign except one, a halfpenny, which he pressed with ceremony into my hand.
    During his workless times, and they lasted weeks and months, my father used to look disconsolately for odd jobs ashore, sit at home eating bread and cheese (all he ever ate) or go to the public library to stare at the papers. When he got his dole money my mother would escort him to make sure he did not head for the nearest public bar. Once, the money in his pocket, he abruptly announced that he had been informed in a vision that our house was on fire. Before she could stop him (I was with them and she was holding my hand and that of my young brother) he had loped off into the dusk. He came home at midnight, plastered and penniless, and she threw the chamber pot over his head. Hurt and in a huff he went away and we did not see him again for nearly two years. Then he turned up in the middle of the night. He had been on a ship to Argentina and was dressed in a goucho's outfit and plucking a guitar. He said he thought it would make her laugh.
    There was an announcement one day that a free concert was to be given for the children of the unemployed. It was held at an extraordinary Grecian building with white portico and marble columns, which sat incongruously amid the straight streets and was the steel works social institute. My father took me and I sat enthralled by the various acts that attempted to temporarily alleviate the misery of the workless. We sang with feeling a song called 'I Do Like Potatoes And Gravy', a social commentary if ever there was one. One performance thrilled me more than any, a whistler who whistled through his fingers while adopting various poses, on a bicycle, on a chair, and standing on his head. It seemed to me that he whistled better when he was upside down than he did when the right way up. When he had finished the applause shook the Grecian columns. 'Oh, Dad,' I enthused. 'He was good, wasn't he!'
    His reply was heartfelt: 'There's too many of them,' he said. Both my parents were born in Barry, Glamorgan, twenty-five miles or so inside Wales, west of Cardiff, a town which managed to combine the difficult functions of being both a seaside resort and a coaling port. More than one hundred years ago, the importance of coal transformed it from a village of fewer than one hundred inhabitants into a major town. 1 have heard it described as Sin City and the Candyfloss Capital of the Western