'Bloody bunny rabbits,' cursed my mother.
The previous time he had left the train on the opposite side to the platform was as my mother had told the policeman, after my grandfather's funeral. On that occasion some concerned people had hauled him up and sent him home in a taxi. I remember him now, standing by my bedside, getting undressed, festooned with long underpants (my mother refused to sleep with him) and looking very bruised and sad.
'Did you cry?' I enquired.
'Oh no,' he boasted thoughtfully. 'Not when I fell out of the train, not at the cemetery either.' His testicles were hanging like prunes from a hole in his pants. 'No, men don't cry, son. Not even over somebody dead. Worry is what men do. Worry.'
Throughout his life he collected a formidable catalogue of injuries and tales through a combination of inebriation and transportation. Not only did he plummet from trains but from other vehicles, and from the platform of a bus that was going over a bridge, ending up strung across the parapet wall, and God knows how many times he had fallen into docks throughout the world. Once he came home plastered, literally, his ribs all caved in and bandages around his shoulders. He took his shirt off and walked around for a bit like this and my mother pretended not to notice. Eventually she said: 'Missed the ship again, did you?' He had. Apparently by several feet.
He was, nevertheless, spontaneously good-hearted. His second weakness was whist drives at which he frequently won prizes. If he were in some port in another part of the country he would send the prizes home. One evening he was in Swansea, just before Christmas, and he won a goose at whist. Full of good-will and undoubtedly spirits, he wrapped the goose up, took it to the post office and dispatched it home. It arrived several days after the holiday on a bike, stinking to hell, with a green-faced postman propelling it.
It would not be too difficult to deduce that my mother was long-suffering. The uncertainties of her life are endorsed for me in a single cameo. After being for months on the dole and then having, for his customary reason, failed to sail on a ship he was supposed to join, my father finally got himself a berth on a vessel leaving Newport for some place so distant that it even pleased my mother. There was a chance he might be gone for two years. Her anxiety was two-rooted: she wanted him to go away and some money to come in. They had spent a long time rowing miserably, calling each other 'wet-weeks', a recurring insult, a combination of malice and meteorology. Now he was leaving, his kitbag packed, the first week's allotment money only seven days away.
When he left the house she even went so far as to kiss him. She went up to the bathroom and watched him trudging down the hill and up again with his kitbag on his shoulder; like a lookout Indian she observed him waiting at the distant bus stop and eventually boarding the bus. She came down and sat quiet for a long time, studying the clock. Eventually she gave me the final two pennies from her purse, and instructed me to go to Mrs so-and-so's house about a mile away, and ask if they would mind telephoning the dock gates to make sure my father's ship had actually sailed. She explained to me that she was too ashamed to go to the telephone herself. I had the name of the vessel written on a piece of paper and the woman with the telephone, grumbling about the imposition, made the call and told me to tell my mother that the ship had left. I returned happily with the news and had just related it to my relieved mother when the smile dropped like a stone from her lips and she pointed in disbelief out of the window. There he was, in the distance, kitbag on his shoulder and on his way home. There had, he said, been some sort of misunderstanding . . .
Despite it all she managed to make a home for us in that boxy council house on the hill. It had an iron boiler in the narrow back kitchen, which was at the front of the
The previous time he had left the train on the opposite side to the platform was as my mother had told the policeman, after my grandfather's funeral. On that occasion some concerned people had hauled him up and sent him home in a taxi. I remember him now, standing by my bedside, getting undressed, festooned with long underpants (my mother refused to sleep with him) and looking very bruised and sad.
'Did you cry?' I enquired.
'Oh no,' he boasted thoughtfully. 'Not when I fell out of the train, not at the cemetery either.' His testicles were hanging like prunes from a hole in his pants. 'No, men don't cry, son. Not even over somebody dead. Worry is what men do. Worry.'
Throughout his life he collected a formidable catalogue of injuries and tales through a combination of inebriation and transportation. Not only did he plummet from trains but from other vehicles, and from the platform of a bus that was going over a bridge, ending up strung across the parapet wall, and God knows how many times he had fallen into docks throughout the world. Once he came home plastered, literally, his ribs all caved in and bandages around his shoulders. He took his shirt off and walked around for a bit like this and my mother pretended not to notice. Eventually she said: 'Missed the ship again, did you?' He had. Apparently by several feet.
He was, nevertheless, spontaneously good-hearted. His second weakness was whist drives at which he frequently won prizes. If he were in some port in another part of the country he would send the prizes home. One evening he was in Swansea, just before Christmas, and he won a goose at whist. Full of good-will and undoubtedly spirits, he wrapped the goose up, took it to the post office and dispatched it home. It arrived several days after the holiday on a bike, stinking to hell, with a green-faced postman propelling it.
It would not be too difficult to deduce that my mother was long-suffering. The uncertainties of her life are endorsed for me in a single cameo. After being for months on the dole and then having, for his customary reason, failed to sail on a ship he was supposed to join, my father finally got himself a berth on a vessel leaving Newport for some place so distant that it even pleased my mother. There was a chance he might be gone for two years. Her anxiety was two-rooted: she wanted him to go away and some money to come in. They had spent a long time rowing miserably, calling each other 'wet-weeks', a recurring insult, a combination of malice and meteorology. Now he was leaving, his kitbag packed, the first week's allotment money only seven days away.
When he left the house she even went so far as to kiss him. She went up to the bathroom and watched him trudging down the hill and up again with his kitbag on his shoulder; like a lookout Indian she observed him waiting at the distant bus stop and eventually boarding the bus. She came down and sat quiet for a long time, studying the clock. Eventually she gave me the final two pennies from her purse, and instructed me to go to Mrs so-and-so's house about a mile away, and ask if they would mind telephoning the dock gates to make sure my father's ship had actually sailed. She explained to me that she was too ashamed to go to the telephone herself. I had the name of the vessel written on a piece of paper and the woman with the telephone, grumbling about the imposition, made the call and told me to tell my mother that the ship had left. I returned happily with the news and had just related it to my relieved mother when the smile dropped like a stone from her lips and she pointed in disbelief out of the window. There he was, in the distance, kitbag on his shoulder and on his way home. There had, he said, been some sort of misunderstanding . . .
Despite it all she managed to make a home for us in that boxy council house on the hill. It had an iron boiler in the narrow back kitchen, which was at the front of the
Similar Books
