In My Wildest Dreams Read Online Free PDF

World.
    There was an excellent deep water harbour where the ships would load Welsh steam coal brought down from the valleys, colliers waiting with grey patience out in the Bristol Channel, in Barry Roads, for their turn to berth. This gritty occupation was successfully kept separate from the seaside resort on Barry Island and it was only with a contrary wind that coal dust speckled the ice creams on the beach. Some people thought it was decoration. On the other hand the prevailing breeze often enlivened the dusty environs of the port with the fragrance of ozone and fish and chips.
    Barry Island, which boasted (and may still do so for all I know) of being the nearest seaside resort to Birmingham, is not an island at all. A railway embankment and a road stretch out of the resort with its twin beaches, one of sand and one of globular white pebbles, divided by a headland called Cold Knapp. Between the two are the municipal open-air swimming baths where, in the summer the war ended, I entered for the town aquatic gala. I was three months over fourteen and my sole opponent in the 'Over-14s, Under-18s One-hundred-yards Freestyle Race' was a day under eighteen, a fierce Tarzan-like youth whose leopard-skin swimming trunks, tight around his thighs, contrasted vividly with the two pairs I was wearing of plum-coloured, sagging wool; worn in tandem because the holes in one covered the holes in the other.
    The event had encouraged a large and festive crowd to the pool. They had a bonus as this white ribbed competitor struck the water a measurable time and distance behind his athletic opponent and as he did so both pairs of trunks fell down. As I gamely struck out in the wake of Tarzan they dangled around my knees, leaving me both handicapped and humiliated. Hoots and exclamations were provoked by my bare bum surfacing. 'That boy's lost his knicks!' I heard someone shout coarsely. Somehow I managed to pull them up around my waist again. Tarzan was now just a splash on the horizon and, in truth, by the time I had completed the course the competitors were already lining up for the next race. Nevertheless, there being only two competitors in mine, I was awarded second prize, a pig-skin hairbrush (the first prize had merely the addition of a comb). Much more important, the results were printed in the local newspaper and my aunt and uncle, with whom I was staying, put it around the town that I was a potential Olympic champion. It was also the first time I had ever seen my name in print.
    All that occurred half a century after my grandfather had retired from the adventurous business of rounding Cape Horn on the shrieking deck of a sailing ship. He left the sea, so he said, because he abhorred bad language and one imagines there was a certain degree of that among the calloused crews of those wild waters. It must have been difficult to make a decent comment when you'd just lost a finger. He refused to go to the annual dinners of the Cape Horners for the same reason. 'There is never any excuse for blasphemy,' he used to say to his children.
    Back beyond my grandfather was a long tradition of sailors and sea. There were two great-aunts who had voyaged on sailing ships and who, in their eighties, ascended ladders to clean the upper windows of their house in Cardiff and apparently climbed on to the roof itself to get a better view of the Jubilee procession in 1935.
    We called the old grandfather Papa, a genteel appellation and apparently we were a family of some substance in Barry in those days. He started a business repairing ships in Barry Dock, later to extend to Cardiff, Newport and ports all around the Bristol Channel. He had the good idea that if he had workmen in all these ports then the vessels would not have to interrupt their coastal voyages while repairs were carried out. He was derisive of steamships, often quoting the sailing man's jibe: 'Wooden ships, men of iron – iron ships, men of wood.' Nevertheless the boilers of the steamships