Up Front…

1

Italy comes to the Valleys

Early in 1965 I was back from America after performing in Oh What a Lovely War, Theatre Workshop’s musical entertainment about the First World War. I’d done the Beatles films, been on talk shows and won a Tony Award. For once, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. The telephone rang. Would I do the David Frost Show? Ten-thirty in the evening, live. ‘Any other guests?’ Yes, Asa Briggs, the historian. I rang home to Wales: ‘Watch the telly tonight. I’ll wave at you. It’s all I can do because I’ve got to go to Paris tomorrow to start a new film.’

The car arrived at six o’clock. Six o’clock? The show didn’t go out until half past ten in the evening. It wasn’t like that on The Jack Paar Show back in New York, and the talk show, as we know it, was practically invented by him. Hardly had you walked through his studio door than you found yourself standing in the wings, hearing – well, this is what I heard: ‘Jack’s guests tonight are Robert Goulet, Phyllis Diller, Victor Spinetti!’ and, God, there was nothing in my head. On this huge, right-across-America show, Jack Paar simply asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ and I told him. I didn’t spend hours and hours accounting for my life to a researcher. We started to converse. That was it. So what was this six o’clock all about? The car pulled up at the BBC.

‘Mr Spinotti?’ That’s the bloke on the door, eyeing me.

‘No.’

He lifted a receiver: ‘I’ve got a Mr Spaghuzzi here. Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Right . . . You’re in there.’

I opened a door and found myself in a dining room, looking at a long table, elaborate drapes, and waiters at the ready, all along the walls. But who was sitting there, leaning back expansively? Huw – one chair for his arm, one chair for his arse – Wheldon, Director of Programmes. We had met before. When I was young and he was editor of the TV arts programme Monitor, I had been taken to see him by John Wain, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, with an idea of mine that John had been keen to write. ‘My dear John,’ This was Huw Wheldon, ‘Lovely to see you. Work for us? Oh, yes, marvellous. Now then, tell me your idea. Shoot.’

‘Actually it’s not my idea. It’s Victor’s.’

‘Ah, Mr Spinetti. You have a very interesting Monmouthshire accent, where do you come from?’

‘Monmouthshire,’ I answered.

‘My father was the Permanent Under Secretary to the Ministry of Education for Wales from 1937 until 1949.’

‘Well, with the education I got, he should be ashamed of himself.’ This was not true but I had to have a comeback. ‘And your idea?’

‘I’d love to see a programme where you saw the beginnings of, say, when Bette Davis became that mannered or when James Stewart began to do that extraordinary drawl. At what moment did that happen? Was it always there or did they start it?’

‘We have those ideas, possibly once a month,’ said Huw Wheldon. ‘Now John, you must come and work for us.’

‘No thank you,’ said John and, together, we left. Outside, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford paused and said, ‘What a cunt.’

I suspect I disappeared up my own wisecrack with that remark about Huw Wheldon’s father. Perhaps I should have said his father had done a wonderful job as the Permanent Under Secretary then I might have been in Doctor Who.

Back to the long table, where, sitting with Huw Wheldon, were Donald Baverstock and quite a few other BBC types, all waiting to eat. They were giving a dinner with roast lamb, mint sauce, fresh vegetables and vintage wine. At the end of the table, like a young schoolboy, saying nothing, sat David Frost. Evidently Asa Briggs and I were the excuse for this meal but having a show to do, we could eat nothing.

Huw Wheldon tucked into his Welsh lamb saying, ‘Now, David is going to ask you these questions.’ He passed bits of paper round the table on which the questions were typed. Nothing so far had come from David Frost himself, stuck as he was somewhere behind the gesturing hand of Huw Weldon, who, referring to Frost always as ‘David’, had taken charge. ‘Question one,’ said Huw. ‘When were you first aware of a state known as drunkenness?’

My heart sank because I was thinking, ‘This is like one of those essays, What did you do during the holiday? or Which do you prefer, the town or the country?’ The dinner was nothing but a rehearsal. What’s more, a rehearsal for a talk show.

‘A state known as drunkenness?’ he repeated.

‘Yes, when I was about five.’

‘Five? What do you mean, five?’

‘I was born above my Dad’s fish-and-chip shop in South Wales. That’s where I slept as a little boy. On Friday nights I could hear down below in the shop the sound of singing or fighting, sometimes both. It was Friday night when the miners got paid, so I associated singing and fighting with drunkenness.’

‘But what about famous drunks? You worked with Richard Burton. You worked with Brendan Be-han.’

‘How about Winston Churchill?’

‘WINSTON CHURCHILL!?’ he bellowed, banging the table and startling poor David.

‘My cousin Elwyn was part of his guard at 10 Downing Street during the war. And he told us there were occasions when they used to carry him up to bed at night. My mother said, Exhausted? and Elwyn said, No, pissed out of his mind.’

‘Are you going to say that?’ Huw asked. ‘May I remind you, Mr Spi-ne-tti. Asa Briggs is here for social comment. You’re here for the laughs.’

As we came out of the studio later on, I having told those stories, Huw Wheldon said, ‘You realise what you’ve done, Mr Spinetti?’

‘No?’

‘Well, now the whole of the United Kingdom will know that your father sold fish and chips.’

‘Pleased with myself,’ I said when I began. It didn’t last long. One only remembers the bad reviews. Still, I’ve introduced my father, Joe Spinetti, a farmer’s son from Italy. How did he come to be selling fish and chips in the Welsh mining village of Cwm? If he hadn’t, this is where the book would end.

Before the First World War, life may have been rougher and tougher than it is today – no National Health Service, no Social Security – but it was also less restricted. We have a Common Market now but in those days we had a very common market. It was called Free Trade. Raw materials could be sold around the world with no import tariffs and people could move about to find work, no questions asked, no favours given. One such person was my grandfather, Giorgio, a farmer in northern Italy. He needed a new plough but had no money. Villagers round about had gone to Wales because they’d heard there was work there, so he went too. He may not have known it but young men were going there from all over Central Europe – Czechs, Poles and Hungarians. The work they got was coal mining, which had started towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Welsh themselves had been far too busy farming at the time, hence the need for foreign labour. So off went Giorgio – no passport, no permit – he didn’t need those, just a sturdy pair of legs to carry him from his home town, Ronchi, across northern Italy and up through France.

Outside Swansea, he found the mining work he’d heard of but as soon as the money for the plough was in his pocket, back to Italy he went. That wasn’t the end of it, obviously. Wales and the opportunities it offered tempted younger members of the family. Life, after all, wasn’t getting any better in Ronchi. Giorgio had two sons, Francesco and Giuseppe and these boys knew, by now, that other families – the Contis, the Sidolis, the Marenghis – had not only gone to Wales but settled and started their own businesses. That’s in catering, not mining. A decision was made: Francesco, the older brother, would go first and, all being well, send word that his younger brother should join him. The message came. Giuseppe needed little encouragement. Being a good Partisan, he spat on the ground to curse Fascism and set off.

The place the two of them wound up in was a mining village outside Ebbw Vale called Cwm. As you would expect, the Italian families already living in the neighbourhood looked out for the boys but so did the Welsh, or some of them, anyway. A young man called Bill Watson took the boys back to his mother’s house where she cooked and did their washing. One of her children – she had nine – was a girl, Lily, eleven years old. Lily took one look at the nineteen-year-old Giuseppe and fell. It was the thick chestnut hair that did it but then suddenly the two Italian boys were back in Italy again, taking money home, no doubt. The most beautiful thing Lily had ever seen in her life had gone forever. She was convinced of it.

She was wrong. There was too much in Wales for Giuseppe to ignore – herself, for a start, but also her big family and work. Giuseppe and Francesco returned to Cwm and took odd jobs. One of them was delivering ice cream from a horse-drawn cart. It wasn’t the odd job Francesco wanted, not surprisingly, as locals picked the lids off the big wooden tubs and threw in horse dung. With one of those lids, he hit them and they fled but still he left for London. Giuseppe stayed. He knew he was making a beginning but what he really wanted was a business of his own, so he started to look. Of course, while he was working and looking, he was courting Lily too. Unusual that. Other Italian boys in Wales courted Italian girls. Perhaps ‘courting’ is not the right word for Giuseppe anyway because, to cut a short story shorter, on 19 August that year, he married his sixteen and a half-year-old sweetheart and on 2 September – with Wall Street crashing and Nazism rearing its head – I arrived. Where? Above the Marine Supper Bar, Marine Street: owner, Giuseppe Spinetti. He was twenty-three.

He didn’t stay Giuseppe for long. In no time it was Joe and so, for that matter, was the Marine Supper Bar. It was always known as Joe’s. While we’re on names, I should tell you, I was christened Vittorio Georgio Andrea, not that I was ever called that. It was just that my father wasn’t familiar with the English versions. For anyone else, it was Victor George Andrew. Victor, after Victor Emmanuel, the Italian king, George after my grandfather, Giorgio, and Andrew after Lily’s father, a Scot. Put that together and you have an Italian Welshman who’s entitled to wear a kilt – the Buchanan tartan, to be precise.

My first memory – that’s even before the drinking and fighting – is of me lying in bed, very early in the morning, listening. What could I hear? At first, boots on the pavement out in the street; miners off the night shift were walking home. As they got closer, there’d be the odd murmur, a stifled cough, a snatch of a popular song, ‘Ama Pola, my pretty little poppy . . .’ sung very softly because they didn’t want to wake anyone up. ‘Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven . . .’ Sometimes I got out of bed and looked out of the window. Below, I could see the glow of cigarettes, the whiteness of scarves and black, black faces – pithead baths hadn’t been introduced yet. The air, cold and clear, was like a refreshing drink. The men gulped it down.

Our shop was on the main street, which was dead straight, so when the sun had risen I could look from one end of Cwm to the other. To the south was the Marine Colliery, which gave its name to our street, and to the north were the steelworks. Those two industries were the entire reason for all of us being there. At regular intervals smaller streets cut across Marine Street as the village was built on a grid system, like Manhattan in fact – but I’m jumping ahead. Nowadays it’s considered a perfect, untouched example of a Welsh mining village. The best bit when I was a child, though, was the mountains either side. They shot straight up, so straight you’d have thought they were supported from behind like a film set. When it rained they were at their most beautiful. It was as if an invisible hand were drawing a silvery-grey curtain slowly across from the West, so that one side glistened while the other side remained dry. It was a show I never tired of.

The first person to stir in our house was my father. Very early each morning, he wheeled a porter’s trolley up to the railway station. There, on the platform, would be a wooden box and inside it, packed in ice, the fish. They had been in the sea only the day before. On to the trolley the box would go and back he’d wheel it to the shop. When I was older, I used to try and help but either I got in the way or the box fell off the trolley. It was hopeless. Behind the shop was an outhouse where Joe set to work. At his back was a vat full of potatoes and a machine for peeling them. In front of him was a marble slab with water constantly running across it. Because of Dad’s demand for freshness, there could be no heating and in the winter it was freezing. There, he scrubbed, scaled and cut up huge great cod and hake. Simply by looking, he could work out how many pieces he could get from a fish and how much money he would make. When it came to the actual cutting, each piece was exactly the same width as the next. Sometimes I watched, intrigued by the little beards under the jaws of the cod. Once I tried to pick one up but to my horror, it burped and I dropped it. The fish was full of air. ‘Out!’ snapped Joe. As far as he was concerned, a place of work was not a place for children. The business was everything to him and he took it very seriously. Even the batter was unique – it had a special ingredient. Don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know – it was a secret. As for the chips, they were so dry they rustled like autumn leaves. In his way, Dad was an artist. Those really were very good fish and chips. People came from all over to eat them.

The shop opened at noon and closed at three in the afternoon. At seven in the evening, it opened again – and stayed open until the last straggler from the last dance or the last pub or the last club came out and down the length of Marine Street, because there was always one light on, The Marine Supper Bar. No, there were two lights – the other one was the glow of Joe’s cigarette as he stood in the doorway looking up and down the street, in case there was one more customer.

Every night, he took the range to pieces and, using piles of newspapers, cleaned it and shined it, so that if you were passing the shop, you wouldn’t know it sold fish and chips because it didn’t smell. Nor did he stop there. He changed the oil in the fryer regularly and every day scrubbed out the fish boxes before they got sent back. They were so clean I could sit in one and pretend it was a rowing boat. On the sides were labels – Grimsby, Hull, Fleetwood, Milford Haven – an early geography lesson.

Joe, you can see, was adapting himself to his new life. What he didn’t like about Italy, he dropped. What he liked about Wales, he took on. It wasn’t an intellectual thing, more a question of making himself comfortable. For a start, his Italian accent faded. ‘Mamma Mia! Bella Italia!’ Forget it, and I never called him ‘Poppa’, it was always ‘Dad’. In the house, he made no attempt to keep up a home-from-home look. Some Italians in the area sent away to Italy for their furniture – heavy baronial stuff, not the elegant tables and chairs of today – Joe didn’t. If anything, his favourite chair was at the British Legion, where he sat in a flat cap, sipping pints of ‘flat, warm, thin, Welsh, bitter beer’ as Dylan Thomas called it. He played darts there too; so well, in fact, that he was a team member for the News of the World darts competition. At billiards he was an ace, at tennis he was a wow and he wasn’t bad at draughts either. As for the whole business of being a Roman Catholic, that went right out the window.

Back in Italy, picking mushrooms had been an early morning activity for him; in Wales, it still was. There was a feast up on those hills for anyone who could be bothered, and no one else could. I thought I’d make myself useful and asked him if I could go too. ‘This one looks good, Dad,’ I said, once I was up there.

‘No, poisonous. Throw it away.’

When I was older, I tried again with shooting. This time, it wasn’t early morning foraging but a social occasion. Dad was respected in the village, so when he went out looking for rabbits and pheasant, it was often with a member of the local constabulary. ‘You’ll only get in the way,’ fretted Dad and sure enough, I did, despite being a good shot.

A cafe, for an Italian family, was a livelihood. For the Welsh, it was something else. The huge, shining espresso machines pushing steam through freshly ground coffee and frothing up the milk for cappuccinos brought a much needed exoticism to the Valleys, while amongst those little tables and chairs and the sawdust on the floor, there was safety, warmth and friendliness. Even walking past and seeing the windows steamed up with condensation gave me a sense of pleasure and I think it did others too. Men had always had pubs and clubs, now women had somewhere. Cafes added a new touch of civilisation. And how convenient it was that the chapels approved of them. Only temperance beverages were served, you see. Although it was a fish-and-chip shop my father was running, it was all part of the same thing. These businesses were popular and so were the people who ran them.

What was I getting up to in those early years? I couldn’t pick up a fish. I couldn’t hit a ball with a racquet. I couldn’t spot an edible mushroom. I was, in Dad’s eyes at least, hopeless. As Lily (that’s Mam) didn’t have another child for some years, I was stuck on my own most of the time. One good thing came from it, though. Simply by osmosis, I learned to read. What I read didn’t matter – advertisements, sauce bottles – you name it, I’d have a go and I got good at it. A useful accomplishment, you’d think, and not one you’d expect to cause controversy. You’d be wrong.

Watch. My father is sitting at tea, slowly reading the headline of the Daily Express and I’m next to him.

‘Look, our Dad. The Queen Mary’s crossed the Atlantic.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘There it is, in the paper.’

A frisson ran through Dad and then Mam. They looked like cartoon characters who’d touched a live wire. What was that all about? I learned soon enough. My father’s tennis serve was devastating, he could pot black and score ‘One hundred and eighty!’ but when it came to reading, he struggled. English was his second language and in Italy he’d been illiterate. I’d accidentally touched a tender spot. His frisson was the shock of realising that I was good at something but worse, it was something he was no good at and he didn’t like it. Instead of being an accomplishment to be applauded, reading was a threat. My mother’s frisson was quite another matter. She was applauding like mad – inwardly, that is. Something wasn’t right between her and Dad. Now, in her bright little boy, she could see a weapon for getting back at her husband. What wasn’t right between her and Joe? I didn’t know, not yet, anyway.

My cousin Elwyn was completely unaware of any inside-the-family conflict. Aged nine, he was far too busy being an entrepreneur and my ability was a nice little sideline. Holding my hand, he led me out into the street and bet children a halfpenny that I could read. ‘He’s not in school yet,’ they said.

‘Ask him,’ said Elwyn, having been careful to take their bets first. A child pointed at a shop sign.

‘Star Supply Stores,’ I said.

‘Someone told you,’ grumbled the six-year-old punter, anxious not to part with his pocket money. ‘What’s that?’ he said, choosing a test of his own.

‘The Ebbw Vale and District Wholesale Cooperative Society.’ Collapse of stout party? You might think so, but children are not reasonable.

‘And that?’

‘Jones’s Omnibus Company.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, it’s Joneseses’ Omnibus Company.’

Still, as there wasn’t much going on in my outside world, I kept on reading. The teachers at the Cwmyrdderch Infants School thought I was so good they put me to work as soon as I started there. While the register was taken, I read to the other children. If I didn’t read, I made up stories. That was fine until the others settled down to their own books and then it was all ‘Aa, Ba, Ca, Da’. What was the matter with them?

I can’t say there was a teacher at Cwmyrdderch who inspired me but there was one who was awe-inspiring – the headmistress, Mrs McBeath. Into the school she swept each morning, her long black dress flowing, her hat pinned firmly to the bun on top of her head and her brolly announcing to the world that she meant business. She was a true Edwardian and looked like Margaret Dumont from the Marx Brothers films. As she worked mostly in her study, she was a distant, magisterial figure. She wasn’t daunting, though. She was kind. Mrs McBeath was the first in a long list of characters, big personalities, who were to intrigue and entertain me in the years to come.

Newcombe Terrace was where she lived, up the valley and above the bridge. ‘Above the bridge’: three simple words, but if you understand their implication, you know how world wars are started.

‘You know that Roberts girl?’

‘What Roberts girl?’

‘You know, the Robertses from Cendl Terrace. She’s going out with that Jenkins boy.’

‘What? From below the bridge? Never? Oh my God.’

Snobbery, envy, resentment were all in those three words. You see, not only did Mrs McBeath live above the bridge but so did Doctor Sullivan and Mr Thomas the Manse, the Presbyterian Minister. You could also find the police station and the C. of E. church. Authority, in other words, and it was posh. The sun shone more brightly on the houses up there and for longer too, the sunniest spot being the cemetery. But then this was the old village, its main buildings established long before the mines. There was sense in its position. The grid system down in the valley was ruthless practicality. Bosses, wanting their workers near the job and giving not a thought to light, had squashed the greatest number of people into the place with the least amount of sun. My father saw the absurdity of this, so after the shop had been doing well for a while, he rented a house owned by Mrs McBeath and that’s where we went to live when I was five. It wasn’t only Newcombe Terrace’s pleasant position, I have to say, that inspired Dad to make the move. He wanted the family well clear of the business too. A free hand was what he needed and we got in the way. If he wanted to play cards in the back during slack times or nip out to the British Legion for a pint, then he could and nobody’d be watching.

He was doing his best, my father, you can see that. I was always well dressed. There was always food on the table and it was good. When I was two, Dad took Mam to Italy and, while he worked in the fields, she stayed behind at the farm and learned to cook in the style of the north. That’s not the tomatoey, garlicky cooking of the Mediterranean, it’s subtler. Garlic is used but the flavour is absorbed slowly so the result is gentle. Here was an example of preserving in Wales an Italian tradition that you really wouldn’t want to lose. Another was drink. We didn’t have beer in the house but wine, Chianti Ruffino, the kind that comes in a flask covered with wicker. Dad used to put a few drops in water for me. That way, drink was never a problem for me in later life. Obviously, the Chianti was more interesting by itself but that was yet to come.

We even had a car, a Sunbeam Talbot with a dicky seat at the back, and there were only two other cars in the whole village. One belonged to the mayor, the other to the doctor. Dad was doing his best, as I said. Unfortunately, there was this thing between him and Lily that wasn’t right.

Caricature Italian, Dad was not. He didn’t wave his hands about, chatter irked him and displays of emotion were frowned on. If I wanted something badly, I had to keep it to myself. Show Dad I was keen on something and I wouldn’t get it. Work was not to be fun, no jokes, no music. It had to be done in deadly earnest. And that thing between him and Mam? It showed itself in a chill or a silence. I could spot it only too easily but I couldn’t explain it and nor could I ask anyone. Mam was so young she was more like a sister than a mother. For her, the effort of standing up to a man who could not or would not communicate his tough upbringing in a far away country was beyond her. I had no ally. This made me keep very quiet, fearful of expressing an opinion. Each morning, I lay curled up in bed with an ache in my stomach that wouldn’t go until Dad left the house for work.

Even the car, which should have been fun, became for me an object of hatred. Like any other family, on a sunny day we’d go for a drive but once I’d climbed in, there was to be no mucking about. I had to sit bolt upright and say nothing. Any excitement about cows and sheep was out. Most children look forward to day trips but I didn’t.

It was on one of those drives that the good and the bad came together. By then I had a brother, Mario. A little friend for Victor, you might have thought. Not really, he was too little. Between him and me was a gap of five years: what he meant was sticky fingers on my books. Still, he too had to sit up straight in the Hillman Minx, BWO 268, the car we had by then. Mam, fox tippet draped elegantly over her shoulders, the claws hanging down, sat stiffly next to Dad. She loved beautiful clothes but they couldn’t break yet another cold silence. Mario and I were sitting in the back. We stopped. At the end of a long dusty drive was a derelict house. I ran up to it. Inside there were no walls and no floors. Instead there was a carpet of pale-green grass and bluebells. I picked as many bluebells as I could and carried them back as a present. Whatever was annoying my father (and still I didn’t know what it was) made him snap. He grabbed the bluebells and threw them on the road. ‘Get back in the car!’ Mario jumped in. I, for once, did not accept what had happened. I’d had it with the power structure imposed by parents. I wouldn’t get back into that car until I had picked up every single, and, by then, wilting, bluebell. When I had, I threw them into a stream. The water gushed blue. It was almost as if my childhood was being carried away. This was a desperate gesture but it was a fight for survival and, at least, I had made a decision. I climbed back into the car and, on the journey home, my eyes bored into the backs of my parents’ heads. As for Mario, his battle was yet to come. Why those chilly silences? Years would have to pass before I found out.

People give you grief. The countryside round Cwm never did. I loved it, still do. Behind our house was a mountain. That’s where I was happiest. Whenever I could, I ran up and across the top, shirt tail flying, past sheep huddled against stone walls, leaping from tussock to tussock like a mountain goat. With tomato sandwiches and a bottle of pop to keep me going, I walked for miles and miles. The idea of inviting someone to come with me never entered my head, I wasn’t used to it. There on the top I sat for hours, the wind whipping round my head, looking all the way along to Ebbw Vale and the great, smoking steelworks. A tiny train went up the valley. A little bus snaked round a hill. A Dinky toy car came over the bridge. It was the best train set in the world. Hamleys? Forget it. ‘Victor! Victor!’ Far, far away, it was Mam and, for a little while, far, far away is where she stayed.

On Saturday nights the shop would get so busy my mother had to help out. I’d be alone in the house then listening to Saturday Night Theatre on the radio, my favourite programme. That’s not to say I was totally sold on radio. Children’s Hour meant nothing to me: ‘Now come along, is there marmalade yet for tea? Nanny’s coming. Oh look, a ginger pussyket!’ Those people and their Lord Reith English were from another world. As for Awr y Plant, that was even more distant. Awr y Plant was Children’s Hour in Welsh but I didn’t speak Welsh and, for that matter, most of Cwm didn’t either. So I had a choice of two languages and didn’t understand either of them. It was most frustrating.

Saturday Night Theatre was different. You just needed a story that gripped and one evening a play by Emlyn Williams Trespass, really did. A medium conjures up a dead person, ‘Piccola!’ and this dead person comes up the path and knocks on the door, ‘Boom, boom, boom’. All the while, the medium is still going, ‘Piccolaaa’. I was terrified – and then the light went out. No shilling in the meter! I couldn’t open the cupboard to get the shilling because I couldn’t move. Worse, the fire was going down and I could not bring myself to go to the back of the scullery to fetch coal. I sat there and sat there in the darkness until Mam and Dad came home. Emlyn Williams, when I told him decades later, regarded this as highly satisfactory.

I didn’t always just listen to the radio. Sometimes I was it. A cupboard in the kitchen became my studio, a tea strainer my microphone, and the gauze-covered holes that let air in and out of the cupboard my dials. Twiddling away, I broadcast to the world. It had to be the world. There wasn’t anyone else.

You might think our little family was a bit isolated, what with Dad having no relatives nearby and Mam being so young and looking on me as little more than a doll. Nevertheless, our Dad was a popular man in the village and Mam at least had plenty of relatives. I wasn’t trapped, not quite.

After we made the move above the bridge, the rooms over the Marine Supper Bar were going a-begging. Uncle Bill, a steelworker – either coal or steel, see what I mean – and his wife, Auntie Min, moved in along with their two daughters, Megan and Ceinwen, and their three sons, Billy, Elwyn and John. That’s Elwyn, the entrepreneur. I loved the home they made of the old place and I was always popping in and out. It