In My Wildest Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

required scaling and it provided additional prosperity. In the eighteen-nineties he was also alleged to have been Harbourmaster of Barry Dock, a boast I have heard many times. His family – there were twelve or thirteen children – lived in a substantial manner. My grandfather was a Liberal candidate in an election in the early years of this century and his election address photograph shows him with a dipping moustache and matching watch chain. Lloyd George knew my grandfather and my grandfather knew Lloyd George and made some attempt to look like him.
    Americans like to hear stories more than any other race apart from Arabs, and many years later I spoke about my Grandad during a New York television programme. I was wearing a watch chain across a grey waistcoat and the interviewer concluded, with no great prompting from me, that this was Grandad's. He plainly required me to elaborate, so, to my shame, I said: 'Yes, this was Papa's watch and chain.' I took the bright and bulbous thing from my pocket and dangled it. 'It arrived,' I related, 'in a package in the post with a note which said "I have always wanted you to have this. It was your grandfather's." There was no signature.' There was no truth either for I had made it up on the spur of the moment and, in fact, the watch was bought by my wife in an antique shop. But I was unable to resist telling them a yarn. They seemed very pleased and interested, too.
    My Auntie Kate, who lived with my silver-haired Uncle Jack Roscoe in Barry (although they did not visit the beach – 'The Sands' – for twenty years or more) and with whom I spent holidays at the end of the war, cooked the Christmas pudding that was Papa's ultimate meal. He expired on the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1938, having retired to the red-velvet front room for a nap after lunch. He had been in the habit of going, rather daringly for him, to auctions held every Saturday night and once he came home with a nice wall clock. Auntie Kate alleged that, like the old song, the clock stopped at the very moment he died and never went again.
    Auntie Kate was as thin as a vein, with red hair tight in a bun; her greatest achievement was catching flies in flight. She could catch them when she was staring absently out of the window, while she was gossiping, or while she was eating cake. It was remarkable. She had not missed a fly in forty years, or so she told me. She never did it, however, when people came to tea. That, she said, would be showing off. She had even caught flies when she was singing. For she was another Welsh singer. At her most exalted note she went into a locked gargle as if she were drowning. If she could not sleep she would get up and smash out midnight hymns on the piano, howling like a glutton. Neighbours feared these moments but lovely old Uncle Jack Roscoe would wake up and, lying back on the pillows, accompany her from bed. One night he heard a cat howling and after ascertaining that Auntie Kate was innocently snoring at his flank, he threw one of his working boots out of the window and never saw it again.
    Of my father's relatives the only ones I knew during my early childhood before the war were this kindly pair. They looked after my grandmother until the old lady died still convinced that Grandad had been elected to Parliament, which was why he did not come home any more. They were simple and childless. 'Children makes you poor,' Kate used to recite a little regretfully. 'Don't go foreign,' was another of her proverbs, warning me against a life at sea. 'Go on the Company', the Company in question being the Great Western Railway. Sometimes she used to cry while laughing as she told me about my father's youth in Barry. How he had ridden the milkman's horse around a field one night so that it was too knackered to pull the milk cart the next morning; how he had once materialised at a roller-skating dance, scattering the participants by zig-zagging between them clad in a bonnet and shawl and with an