The Other Side of Hell: Thank God for the Ladies of the Night

By Red Morgan

The Author has written this story in his own unique way - unique because it is a story about the love and hell raising of the men with courage, who fought against incredible odds and won. These were the men of the Merchant Navy. It is a story of life at sea (which was hell) and, above all, life on shore in every port of call during World War ll. There were tears, laughter and one hell of a lot of loving going on during those dreaded war years.
During his years in the Merchant Navy while serving on petrol tankers, the most dangerous ships afloat, the author tells it all - warts and all. After reading this book, the reader may think that the only things the Merchant Seamen did was to get pissed and visit the ladies of the night, but be assured, that their time in port was very short compared to
the very long and dangerous days and nights spent on the cruel seas, transporting much needed equipment and petrol for the war effort - which now allows you to read this book in peace and freedom.

Let the Good Times Roll !

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 12, 2009
• ISBN: 9781483523484

Book preview

Honey

Prologue

I HAD JUST SAID GOODBYE to my friends. We had been to the pictures but were unable to sit together because I had no money for a ticket and had to sneak in with their help as decoys. They had their tickets and would create a bit of a stir at the black curtain, used to keep the light out, by walking past the ticket collector who would then chase after them. They would then give him their tickets and receive a smack across the back of the head for being smart buggers. All this took the attention away from me while I was sneaking in the side door. My choice of seat was the first available in the semi darkness.

I lived just around the corner from the theatre and my friends lived in the opposite direction. The picture we had just seen was called ‘The Invisible Man’ which had scared the hell out of all of us. They had each other’s company on their walk home but I was alone.

On parting they yelled out, Watch out the Invisible Man don’t get you Sam.

The trouble was you could not see where he was unless he had his glasses or clothes on. Even then you still could not see his face or hands and that’s what scared me now. All I wanted to do was to get home and slam the front door behind me.

Suddenly there was this loud noise above me. Looking up I saw a flying machine just above the rooftops. Its propellers were on the top, and on the front, the big blades whirling around slowly. Standing there dumbfounded, with fear in my heart and this machine, the likes I had never seen before hovering above me, I thought, this is it; the invisible man is going to get me for sneaking into the pictures without paying. Now for a youngster like me and a believer in God, all sorts of thoughts came to my mind and one was that I would never go into the pictures again without a ticket.

With this machine still hovering above me I raced like a scared deer until I reached home. Stumbling up the front steps, crashing the front door open, slamming it behind me, I stood in the hallway panting for breath. A voice from behind me was my father’s (very unusual to be home this time of day) asking, What the hell is wrong with you?

Turning to face him I could see that he had been drinking. I told him what I had seen in the air but not about the picture I had just seen, as that would have meant me having to tell him where the money came from to waste on the pictures. That thing you saw above you is what they call an autogyro. It’s going to be the flying machine of the future and don’t let it scare you son or you will never get on in life.

So much for the Invisible Man.

Chapter 1

Swansea

MY FATHER WAS BORN on February 25, 1882 at Tyrback Llansamlet, Swansea, South Wales. He was christened George Morgan, served in World War One in the 25th Royal Welsh Fusiliers, was gassed badly and hospitalised in France, and was demobbed at Shrewsbury, England.

My mother (pictured overleaf) was born on October 4, 1886 at 21 Richards Terrace, Swansea, South Wales. She was christened Amy Hale and married dad on November 28, 1914.

My father, on left, in hospital after being badly gassed in France.

My mother dressed in her Sunday best.

I was born on February 11, 1925 at Carmarthen Road, Swansea where my parents lived. I was christened Samuel Morgan and baptised in the sea at Swansea beach, the reason for me liking the sea in my later life. They say the bugger who baptised me nearly lost me to the sea when a wave came and all but washed me out of his hands.

I was the second youngest in a family of five children. I had two sisters and two brothers. My eldest brother, Ted, was ten years older than me, my eldest sister, Elsie, was six years older, second eldest sister, Beryl, was three years older and my youngest brother, Jackie, was three years younger than me. Jackie was born in the same house as I was and the others were born in previous houses. In the future we were to move to many more houses before I left home and it seemed as if the rent man was hot on dad’s tail every move we made.

On December 24, 1929 at the age of eighteen months, Jackie was stricken with polio and paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life, only to be able to rock his head from side to side and move one hand. Little could be done in those days for polio (infantile paralysis) except to keep the patient in bed flat on their back. He was admitted to Hillhouse Isolation Hospital where he would stay for many years.

A few years later I had measles and pneumonia and had to be kept warm sitting in a chair with a shawl wrapped around me. I nearly lost my life from pneumonia and it was touch and go for a while. Beryl also had measles but she was able to run around the house.

My first pair of boots

AS THE YEARS WENT BY I was starting to notice how other people lived and how we as a family lived. Then when I started school and saw the other children with clothes that were not patched, fitted well and were not second hand and their lunch boxes were full, I realised that we were of a poorer class. My clothes were patched hand me downs from other families and were either too big or too small.

I remember my mother taking me to a second hand boot shop to buy a pair of boots. She told me that boots would last longer than shoes as they were made much stronger and would protect my ankles if I went over on them. I always thought my foot was there to stop me going over on anything. The shop owner gave me about six pair of boots to try on and three pair would have fitted my father with big socks on. Mum looked at him with disgust saying, They’re no damn good to him, he can swim in the things.

Picking up the boots and with his eyes rolling and eyelids fluttering I heard him mutter to mum, The language ma’am.

Eventually I tried on a pair that was a bit tight on me. With the man now fussing around tapping the boots, doing up the laces and giving the toes a quick rub over with the sleeve of his jumper, he looked at Mum with a big smile on his face as if he had just fitted me with a hundred pound pair of boots and remarked, There!.

Mum asked, How do they fit Sam?

I was nearly going to tell her that they were a bit tight but changed my mind, thinking that if I did she would not let me have them and I would never get a pair of boots for winter or ever. Mum had always said that growing children should always have things too big so they could grow into them.

I like them Mum I answered.

Do they fit? she asked again.

While feeling them all over I replied, Yes they do, I like them.

How much? she asked the man.

One shilling ma’am and he’s got a good pair of boots.

They had better be for that price,she remarked.

We were just a few streets from home when I stopped to adjust the laces. What’s the matter Sam, are they too tight?

Just a little Mum but they will be alright.

We spent nearly an hour in that shop and it cost me a shilling and now you tell me the damn boots are too tight,said Mum I looked up at her like the man in the shop with my eyes rolling and eyelids fluttering but not with a smile and did not say a bloody word. My father fixed the boots by packing them with wet newspaper each night to stretch the leather.

Moving

AS I SAID EARLIER, we would move a lot in the future and we had now been to High Street, Swansea, then to Dyfatty Street, then to Boneymaen east side of the River Tawe. Here we lived in an old Borstal School turned into apartments. We had an old Pot Belly stove to keep the place warm. I can recall Mum standing so close to it with her bum to the stove it would turn the backs of her legs a bright red and when she moved away a little she was freezing. We were all actually freezing. Then we moved to Mount Pleasant hill right opposite the Swansea Boys Grammar School where Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, went to school.

Yes there were a few more moves before our last move in Swansea, which was to No. 6, Dynevor Place, just at the foot of Mount Pleasant, right opposite a church and college. Dynevor Place was about two blocks long and was also the bus terminal for the outskirts of Swansea. The rent man must have given up the chase or dad had given him the slip because we seemed to have settled here for some time. This was the street I was racing home to after seeing the picture, ‘The Invisible Man’.

This street was right in the middle of Swansea with a row of two storey terraced houses all with cast iron railings in the front and two sandstone steps leading up from the footpath which were washed every day, why I will never know. Mum said it was tradition. Each had a short pathway leading to the front door then one step up into the hallway. All the houses looked the same. There was also the shop with a mixture of goods in the front window such as jokes, puzzles, post cards, stink bombs and a multitude of other things that young children should not see such as Spanish Fly and French Letters in small boxes with a pretty half dressed lady on the front. It was owned by the Jews who would tell us, If you don’t vont to buy anthing, get away from my bloody vindow,when we stood for too long staring in wonderment at the items before us. Then there was the Italian cafe with its bright lights at night and a beautiful smell of cooked food drifting out onto the footpath; an office building, dark and gloomy; then the pub on the corner, which was always full of life at night.

No. 6 Dynevor Place had no electricity, hardly any furniture, smelt of dampness in every room and was as cold as hell in the winter, as my father used to say. This I could not understand because every time I did something wrong, which seemed to be a lot of the time considering the number of times I got told it, he would tell me I would never go to heaven where the angels are but down to hell where the devil and his big fires were. I often thought that it would be a good place to go while I lay shivering with the cold in bed at night. The gas was on but only used for cooking and boiling water when Mum had a spare penny to put in the meter. My friends would tell me how to trip the gas meter with a piece of wire when the penny ran out but as much as I tried I could not get free gas. On cold winter nights Mum would put house bricks in the oven to get them hot then she would wrap them in old towels and place them in our beds to warm us up. On cold, bleak afternoons we would sit on our beds and catch fleas from the hem of our blankets and crack them between our thumbnails. The fatter the flea the bigger the crack. We would also squash the bed bugs crawling up the walls. The bug squashing did not last long because the stench was unbearable. To try and get rid of them mum used to hang the blankets on the line when the weather permitted but this only made them harder to catch because in the cold, Welsh winters the fleas would go deeper into the hem of the blanket instead of dropping off, making them even harder to find.

Stale Cake Run

AT THIS STAGE IN MY LIFE I had not realised how hard life had been but now I could see that things were changing for the worse. Ted, Elsie and Beryl had all their chores allotted to them. Ted would go to the gas works every morning, snow or sunshine, to collect coke from the coke heaps to try and keep the house warm. Beryl would go for a penny’s worth of stale cakes from the cake shops. The cakes were supposed to be yesterday’s bake but sometimes they seemed like last year’s, as they were so hard to chew on. Elsie would stay at home to get whatever food was available for our school lunches and bear the brunt of Mum and Dad’s bad tempers. These were their jobs every morning before going to school, regardless of the weather. Ted and Beryl also had the task of going to the fish market with a canvas bag for sixpence worth of fish. The fishmonger would throw the unwanted fish or scraps into a bin and Ted and Beryl would get as much fish into the bag as they could carry home.

Ted enlisted in the British Army, The Royal Artillery, in 1934 so I was enlisted into the morning cake run and Beryl transferred to the laver bread run at Swansea markets. Lava bread was made from seaweed and when cooked was as black as ink and was one of the Welsh staple diets. She would have to go from stall to stall to get three pence worth of left overs. Three pence worth of lava bread was a lot but by the time she arrived home, after dipping her finger into it all the way, there was not much left, as she loved it.

The cake run was terrifying for me at first. Sometimes I would get to the shop before it was open and be about third in line but by the time the shop opened the line had grown to the end of the block. With only one kid allowed in the shop at a time it was a long wait because every time I went to move into the shop the bullies in the line would push me to the one behind me. They in turn would push me to the one behind them and so on. Being new to all this I would usuallyend up at the end of the bloody line with no stale cakes left so it was on to the next shop until I had my pennies worth of cake.

Mum was now telling me that I was not as good as Beryl on the cake run with remarks like, She gets a lot more cakes than you do Sam and they are a lot fresher and she is only a girl. I dared not tell Mum that even the girls push me to the back of the line for she would tell my father to have a word with me then he in turn would ask me if I would rather be wearing a dress. It seemed that fathers always wanted their sons to be men before they were out of their boyhood. I knew I had to do some- thing to stop being pushed to the end of the line and maybe get the chance to take some fresher stale cakes home to Mum. So I decided to join the street gang because they were the ones who pushed the kids around in the cake lines. To join the gang you had to be tough or look and act tough and get the oldies to yell at you to, Get home you little toughies.

I knew I wasn’t tough but I was going to let them make me tough or make me look tough. They had a hard job on their hands because I was so skinny that if I turned sideways you would miss me. My first task to prove myself was to wrestle the leader of the gang who was a much bigger boy than me. It wasn’t that you had to beat the leader; it was only to build his ego by showing the members of his gang that he had beaten you. This advice I got as one boy whispered in my ear, Don’t beat him or you will never be able to join the gang, and give up after about three falls.

With the gang now forming a circle on the footpath, about six or seven members in all, the wrestle began. If you had paid money to see this you would have wanted your money back and the challenger hanged. The wrestle was over in about one minute after I had been thrown to the pavement five or six times while I was trying to get enough breath to yell out, I give up.

While licking my bruises the boy who had warned me asked, Why didn’t you bloody give up after the third fall?

Because I had lost bloody count of how many falls I had had, they were so quick,I replied.

There were a few more tasks I had to do like sticking my finger up at the bloke standing in the doorway of the joke shop; yelling out at the bus driver to stop as there was a dog under his back wheel then run like hell; walking on the top of the wall which had broken glass stuck in concrete and so on. I was now a member of the Dynevor Street Gang. Our gang! I found it a lot easier in the cake lines and Mum was now telling me I was doing a lot better. The only thing that sometimes bothered me was when the girls smiled at me I fell in the arse but if they poked their tongues out at me in defiance they went to the back of the line.

There was a lot of talk about this thing called a depression with no work, no money and very little food. I often heard Mum asking Dad what she was going to do to feed the children if this depression gets worse. There was not much of an answer from Dad, only a shrug of his shoulders. It did not seem to worry me a great deal because in the past all I had to wear was hand me downs from other families and not much from my brother Ted as he was a lot older than me and I would have to wait a few years before his clothes would fit me. Most of my meals were stale cakes and laver bread and dripping, the bottom of the dripping tin being the best, so what did I have to lose? Our greatest treat now and again was rabbit stew or bacon bone stew with dumplings made from flour. Mum would send me down to the meat shop with one shilling and three pence to buy a rabbit, with strict instructions to get one with plenty of fat around the kidneys and with the skin on. That baffled me a little, as I didn’t like the thought of eating the skin in our stew. The truth was that the skin was worth sixpence when taken back or sold to the rag and bone man. I often wondered why the butcher didn’t skin the rabbit first then I realised that the rabbits would not look very nice hanging outside the bloody butcher shop with a skewer through the necks and the heads chopped off and the stomach slit open showing the kidneys with the fat around them. At least they did look a lot more decent with the coat on, poor buggers. Beryl in turn would buy the bacon bones. So you could see that we were not living like toffs but just surviving.

Paper Roses and No Ice Cream

MY FATHER AND SISTER ELSIE were always fighting. They only had to look at each other and they would fight. Elsie was now old enough to know that Dad was not being a good father to us and she would tell him so and get a hiding for it. She was the only one who stood up to him. Ted was away in the army, Jackie was unable to, Beryl did not like to disturb the peace, and I was too young at the time and knew that I would get a kick in the arse if I did.

Dad would make flowers out of crepe paper, roses mostly, in all colours with wire for the stems and green crepe paper to cover it. He was good at it and the flowers looked so real and he taught me how to make them. Maybe he thought I would need them one day in the future. He made a shield from plywood, like the African Zulu shield, with handgrips at the back and rows of elastic in the front. Every Friday and Saturday he would fill the rows of elastic with his flowers and head for the pub in the evening. The shield was very large and carried a large number of flowers and at a penny each would have amounted to about two pound so my sisters said. This would have kept the family in food for a week or more.

Before leaving for the pub Dad would tidy himself up and would look very smart in what clothes he had. When about to open the front door he would turn around and tell us all not to worry that he would be home shortly and we could all have ice cream tomorrow. My father would arrive home shortly after the pub had closed at 10 p.m, drunk and with no flowers on his shield. I didn’t care about him being drunk as long as we could have ice cream tomorrow but when he told us that he had no money left from the sale of the flowers, only enough to buy more crepe paper and wire (about three pence) our hearts would sink. When Mum asked where all the money had gone he would say that he owed a little money down at the pub and that he couldn’t have sold all of the flowers so some of them must have been stolen while he was getting his pint of beer at the bar. My thoughts were that he gave most of the flowers away to the ladies in the ladies lounge and shouted his bloody mates a beer with the rest of it and to hell with his family waiting at home. I would go to bed crying and hungry. This went on for months on end until we all gave up on having ice cream on Sundays.

My father could turn rags into riches, like cleaning out the garages or sheds of the rich peoples’ rubbish and selling it at the houses or pubs of Swansea. Some of the items were not really rubbish but being the charmer he was to the ladies (he could charm the balls off a brass monkey as the saying goes) he may have picked the items up by mistake. This work was called the Rag and Bone trade but with all the money dad made Mum only got a fraction of it to feed and clothe us the best she could.

Dad had a few pubs he used to drink at in Swansea, one being the Cross Keys in Wine Street, which was a fair walk from home at Dynevor Place. Drunks in the pubs were a bit of a nuisance to the pub owners and had to be gotten rid of without causing a scene, so the owner would put a mixture in their beer to make them want to go to the toilet in a hurry and then he would shut them out of the pub. I can remember the time when Dad must have been a nuisance at the Cross Keys and couldn’t even make it to the toilet and shit himself then had to walk all the way home in that state. Sometimes Mum would send me to find Dad at one of the pubs he drank at and I knew them all. She would say, Sam, go and find your father and tell him to come home with what money he has left or give it to you as I have no money to buy food for dinner tonight. That would mean his dinner because he was the only one who got fed well.

As she looked me in the eyes, with a slight scowl on her face, she would say, If you can get your hand into his pocket without him knowing, get out as much money as you can. This was a big order because I knew even with trying to get a fist full of anything out of my own pocket was pretty near impossible. I never tried this with Dad because I knew that a flying backhand was faster than getting my empty hand into anyone’s pocket, drunk or sober, let alone trying to get a fist fullout. My father was pretty alert to these things when sober, semi alert when drunk and oblivious to anything when he had fallen asleep at the table. So I suggested to Mum that the best time to dig his pockets would be when he fell asleep. Her reply was, That’s no good Sam, he’d have no money left by then,and her final words were, Tell him I’ll lock him out if he comes home drunk. I knew this threat would never be carried out as I had seen her try it before with Mum coming off the worst.

Mum and Dad were fighting a lot more now over the lack of money, food, clothing and Dad’s drinking and sometimes it came to blows aimed at Mum which I had to stand and watch and could not do a thing to help while Elsie would step in to try and protect Mum and get a few blows herself from Dad. With the little money Mum was getting from Dad she tried to make it go as far as she could to try and keep us as healthy as possible.

On Saturday mornings she would give us all senna tea for our bowels, cod liver oil and malt to help keep our bodies warm, and fluoride tablets for our teeth to stop them falling out. The senna tea was the worst as the taste was awful and the smell was that of the squashed bed bugs. Elsie and Beryl would give me a halfpenny each if I would take theirs. Sometimes Mum would stand and watch us all take our dose. If something distracted her I would gulp their senna tea down before Mum turned around. The only problem with taking three doses was that I was unable to move more than a couple of feet from the toilet door before the tea worked or I would end up doing what Dad did at the pub.

Mum would try her best to keep our bellies full like making what she called jam turnovers which were made from the stale bread we sometimes got with the stale cakes. They were made from a slice of bread with no butter; jam spread on both sides, placed in a frying pan with a little dripping then warmed over the fire and turned over very quickly. That was a jam turnover and we loved them. They were a bit messy to handle and to put down on the tablecloth. The table clothes were very cheap, free in fact, and did not need washing. They were old newspapers that we picked up at the markets. Apart from being a throwaway item they also gave us yesterday’s news of the world. We could read as we ate and as Mum explained to us, by using newspaper we could have a clean tablecloth every day. We all knew she was trying to make things brighter for us as lack of money forced her to use newspaper.

My sister, Elsie, had now left home to become a live in domestic for a doctor and his family. She could not stand our home life any more with the conditions we lived in, the shortage of food etc. and the ongoing fighting between Mum and Dad. She later went to London to train as a nurse at Archway Hospital, North London. This meant more chores for Beryl and me to do.

Farewell My Adenoids and Tonsils

THERE WAS A GOVERNMENT DOCTOR and nurse who visited the schools every few months to check the health of the under privileged children which I was one of. The doctor would dig at me all over with his finger and would remark to the nurse, A bit more food wouldn’t hurt him. He would then put things in his ears and a metal disc on my chest and listen to my heart and then on my back and tell me to breathe in and out. He would then put a flat piece of wood in my mouth, press my tongue down hard and tell me to say ah, and again, ah. Why couldn’t he tell me to say ah without putting that bloody wood in my mouth and nearly choking me? The nurse would then look me over for bruises, cuts, sores or boils. If she found bruises she would ask how I got them, the cuts she would spread black ointment over them with a flat piece of wood like the doctor had used. This ointment looked like the stuff that they dipped the pirate Long John Silver’s leg into after they cut his foot off, tar that they use on the roads. The sores and boils she dressed the same way with no questions asked. She knew they could only be due to the lack of good healthy food.

Before leaving school that day the headmaster gave me a note to take home to Mum. On reading it Mum told me that I had to go to the clinic the next day to have my tonsils and adenoids taken out. The clinic was just around the corner and Mum told me I could walk there and she would get Dad to bring me home if he was sober enough. Walking to the clinic the following day I was as scared as hell with thoughts going through my mind like, do they cut my throat to get to my tonsils or cut my nose off to find my adenoids. Mum had told me where they were but not how they removed them. I was so scared that I even looked up to see if the Invisible Man was flying above me.

The clinic was not a large building from the outside but on entering it had a very large room like some sort of a dance hall. There were lines of children lying on the floor with just enough room to walk between them. Some were not moving at all with blood coming out of their nose and mouth; others were bellowing their heads off, while others who had not been operated on were clinging to their parents with the look of fear in their eyes. Others were standing around on their own like me waiting for the dreaded moment to come. I felt like running out of the hall and playing truant from school for the rest of my school days but I knew my shaking legs would not get me to the door.

The action was quick as they walked me to a room on the side of the hall where they put a mask over my nose and mouth, lay me on a bed, connected the mask to a pipe and that was all I could remember of that room. I woke up lying on the floor with a pillow under my head and children crying all around me and a terrible smell that I had often smelt before in some of the houses we had lived in. It was the smell of gas that they had used to put me to sleep before operating on me.

I lay on the floor for a long time listening to all the bawling going on around me before my father came to take me home. Wiping the blood from my nose and mouth, he lifted me onto his back and headed home. The journey was the roughest piggyback I could remember having. Dad must have had a few pints beforehand. It was a split second after Dad had lifted me off his back that I vomited. It must have been the rough journey home and the effects of the gas. I often wondered afterwards what would have happened to me if I had vomited over Dad’s back. Would I have got a clip across the ear hole? Days later I was back at school.

The boys in the gang knew a lot more ways of getting things for nothing, like getting into the pictures for free with a ticket; getting handouts of touched fruit (cuts); when you had a halfpenny to spare make it into sixpence; pinching the empty flagon beer bottles at the pubs, and the last resort was the market tip. The gang boys had been in the area longer than me and were older. To get a halfpenny you could help an old lady across the busy road. You might get a farthing or a halfpenny or you might get just a big smile and a thank you from her. Or instead of spending the penny that Dad or Mum gave you to buy your daffodil on Saint David’s Day, the Saint of Wales, you could buy a half dead daffodil instead for a halfpenny. I used to think to myself, poor old Saint David won’t know, he’s been dead a long time and Mum used to tell us it was a sin to not wear a daffodil on Saint David’s day.

With the halfpenny I had left I would go to the markets and buy a broken wooden fruit box, break the box into three bundles of kindling for fire lighting and then go from door to door until I had sold the kindling for a halfpenny a bundle. I would now have three pennies and would then go back to the markets and repeat the performance until I had sixpence. This gave me four pence into the pictures, a penny worth of spearmint bouncers, which, if dropped on the pavement would bounce like a table tennis ball, and one penny worth of hot chips. The problem with doing this was that I had to spend Friday after school and Saturday morning trying, which could be a lot of time wasted for a boy always in a hurry, as you may not make the sixpence because of the competition of other boys with the same idea.

The Pictures with a Ticket

THE LYRIC THEATRE, just outside the town centre, was a small, drab looking place painted cream with a smaller entrance than other picture theatres and hardly any foyer. To the left of the ticket box was the ground floor and to the right was a spiral stairway, which led to the upper floor, which we called the ‘Gods’. There was a brick wall on both sides of the stairway, which hid you from sight after the first few steps. The plan was for one of the gang who had a ticket to go with another without a ticket and wait out of sight on the stairway. The rest of the gang would stand at the foot of the steps and wait for a likely looking victim (who we called Lord Fontoroys) to start up the stairway with his ticket clutched in one hand and his bag of lollies in the other. We would get a warning shout to tell us one was on his way.

Meanwhile, the gang at the foot of the stairway would also try and stop the other kids going up the stairway for a few seconds, as the action had to be quick. When the victim came into sight (which was never a girl) we would grab his ticket and if possible, his lollies, before he dropped them in fright, turn him around and push him down the stairs. We would then hurry (never run) up the rest of the stairs while little Lord Fontoroy was crying his eyes out for his mummy, give our ticket to the man at the curtains and join the throng of noisy kids all yelling for the lights to go out and the picture to start. I did say earlier that I would never go to the pictures again without a ticket. The attendants did not care about the noise and kids running around, as this was a children’s matinee held every Saturday afternoon, showing cowboy pictures and the never ending serial of ‘Rin Tin Tin’ the wonder dog and they knew the noise would soon end. The rest of the gang would join us, the lights would flicker, kids scrambled for their seats, there was one hell of a hooray when the lion on the screen roared and then silence while Gene Autry rode across the screen on his horse named Silver and his big cowboy hat on.

There were other ways of getting a few pennies and feeding yourself if you were game enough, like pinching the empty flagon beer bottles from the back yard of pubs (which were worth two pence when returned) with the risk of getting one hell of a kick up the arse and a clip across the ear hole if you were caught. If all else failed in regard to getting food, you could search Swansea market tip and risk getting sick which was really the last resort. It was situated in the market itself with three high walls, one back, and two sides with a ceiling and lighting and a very low wall in front.

All the garbage from the stalls was dumped here like fruit, vegies, cardboard boxes, paper, dead and dying chooks and anything that could not be sold, and it stank. We would scrounge and search for any fruit that we thought was good enough to eat with not too many bad spots on it. We would wipe the fruit on our shirt or jacket, bite out the bad spots and spit them out and carry on chewing. You could buy this sort of fruit at the fruit shops up town if you had the money. It was called ‘touched’ or ‘cuts’ which meant you could cut the touched parts out.

One day while searching for bad fruit at the tip, a man came with a box of dying young chickens and picking them out of the box one by one. He would bash their heads against the brick wall to kill them. He then yelled out at us, Get out of there you bloody urchins or you’ll end up in hospital. While scrambling out of the tip, thinking I was going to get a clip across the ear, he stopped us and gave us a penny each, telling us to go and buy a bag of cuts at the fruit shop. He wasn’t really angry with us. He must have been thinking of our well-being. The market management eventually stopped this practice of scrounging.

My Lost Dream – My Goldfish

I LIKED GOING TO SCHOOL at Terrace Road. All my friends were there and it made things a lot easier for me to fight the bullies off at playtime with their help. Most of the children were like me, on the poverty line, so it made me feel more comfortable. One or two of the gang were not rich but were better dressed than I was and had a full lunch box, sometimes including an apple. Their clothes and full lunch box was a sure sign that their fathers had a job and money was coming into their homes. Whenever one of them was eating an apple I would yell out, I bags the core,and if you were the first to yell out, you would get the core. That was a promise made by the apple eater and sometimes I was first, other times I missed out. The most frustrating time was watching the apple getting smaller and smaller and wondering would he ever stop eating it. If it was a sweet apple he would eat most of it and you would only get the smell of the apple left on the core, but if it was a sour apple and the boy didn’t like it, it was well worth the wait. The rest of the boys in the gang were like myself, hungry and with the arse hanging out of their shorts, as were many others who attended this school.

The only problems with the school were some of the teachers and where it was situated. It was half way up Mount Pleasant hill, which was very steep and was a hell of a climb when you were running late. Double decker buses ran on the hill and their speed was in low, low gear, slower than I could run. This gave all the boys the idea of hanging onto the back of the bus by any means possible. It could be the hand bar at the centre of the platform while the conductor was upstairs collecting fares, or the tail lights, or whatever gave a grip to hang onto to pull us up the hill. When the conductor had finished collecting the fares and came downstairs he would stand on the platform and kick at us kids to force us to let go. The first to go were the ones hanging onto the hand bar, and then he would try to kick us off the back but couldn’t reach us. He would even try to spit at us but the wind blew it away. By now we had reached Terrace Road and let go. This was a lot easier than trudging up the hill.

Most of the teachers were Welsh but some were English. The English teachers treated us with a great deal of disrespect and often had heated words with the Welsh teachers over the teaching of the Welsh language. They often voiced their opinions in class that if they had their way they would cut out the teaching of the Welsh language altogether in schools, even though it was only a half hour a week lesson. That is all that was allowed by the English Government, hardly enough time to learn a few words of Welsh. It was different in North Wales where it was mostly farming and no industries. The people there spoke only Welsh and did not welcome people who spoke English. These farmers were defying the English ruling by speaking the Welsh language openly. My father used to tell us that in his father’s day the Welsh language was forbidden by English law in all schools in Wales and if children were heard speaking Welsh at school they were punished. Even in my father’s younger days, the Welsh speaking people had been reduced to fifty percent. He would go on to say that South Wales was industrialised by the English and that all the copper, coal, slate, steel and tin mines and industries were owned and run by the English. Even the bloody pubs were owned by the English and he had to drink English beer. The labour force, being Welsh, worked long hours in the mines and furnaces, in harsh and dangerous conditions, for a pittance in wages. These industries produced vast wealth for the English. He also said that we would have home rule in Wales one day. I would think to myself, Shit, there’s enough rules at home now without any more. The English had tried to wipe out the Welsh language and destroy the Welsh culture for many hundreds of years but had not succeeded.

As I said earlier, I liked Terrace Road school because the Welsh teachers were good to us and most of the children were from working class families (if their old man worked) and it made you feel no different to any one else. The thing was to stay out of reach of the English teachers who would twig your ear until it hurt, for no reason at all.

One day the rag and bone man was at the gates of the school and as we were leaving he called out to us all that he would be at the school gates tomorrow after school with gold fish and for one or two old garments he would give us a nice, big gold fish. We had to bring our own jar or tin but he would have plenty of water. Racing home down the hill (no bus needed down hill) and into the house, my task was to find a tin or jar. Every tin or jar in the house, and there were plenty, were full of odds and ends as Mum put it. She would say they would come in handy sometime or other. I raced down to the shop to see if they had an empty jar or tin and they had both. I took the jar, thinking I could watch the fish swimming as I walked home.

The next thing was to get some old garments. I knew this would be hard, searching through the old hand me downs, as there was nothing I could take without Mum knowing. The next thing was to look through my sisters’ clothes, and in Beryl’s bedroom l found an old jumper, which I believed, had been Elsie’s. This was good, as l knew it would not be missed as Elsie had left home and would not be looking for it. After smuggling it out the front door I put it under a bush near the front steps to pick up in the morning on my way to school. With that accomplished it was out to play while the daylight lasted.

Picking up the jumper the following morning I realised that it had rained overnight which made the jumper wet and heavy. I now had a problem. With the jumper in one hand and the jar and a jam sandwich for my lunch in the other, I was unable to hang onto the bus so I had to walk up the hill. Reaching school I realised how much easier it would have been hanging on behind the bus. The jumper had now dried out a little and I placed it and the jar under my desk and guarded it all day. Being wool and wet, it stank a little but not enough to attract the attention of the teacher as I was in the back row of the class, never being a teacher’s pet. Had he got a whiff of it he would have told me to throw it in the garbage bin.

After school there were boys and girls scrambling for a position at the big tank the man had at the gate. Some of the clothes they had to give him looked new to me with some getting two fish for more than two items of clothing. There were all shapes and sizes of jars (with big, fat goldfish swimming around in them), some with wire handles, some with string but mine had neither. It was now my turn to get my fish and taking hold of the jumper the man remarked, Well what have we got here boyo? Did your father dip this in water to make it feel heavier? There’s not much left of it.

My heart was beating fast now at the thought of not getting a fish for the old jumper. Some of the kids were now starting to giggle at my plight, which made me want to punch them on the nose, but getting my fish was more important.

No sir, it rained last night and I had it hidden outside so my mother wouldn’t see it,I answered.

With his head tilted to one side and one eye closed he said, Alright boyo, let’s see what we can catch for you. It wasn’t a big fish but it shone like gold and it was mine. There we are boyo. Take it home and give it some bread crumbs,he said with a wink and a smile. He knew my circumstances and probably had been through it himself. I said thank you and headed home.

I could not take my eyes away from this beautiful fish swimming around the jar. I was about halfway home when I tripped over the uneven footpath. I didn’t fall but I dropped the jar and it broke into pieces when it hit the footpath. With the fish wriggling and flopping on its side in a section of the bottom of the jar, which held a little drop of water, there was one thought in my mind. I was not going to lose this fish.

I picked up the broken section with the fish in it, placed my hand over the broken glass to try and keep the fish in the little drop of water, and raced down the hill for home. Coming to Alexandria Road at the foot of the hill, I ignored the Belisha beacon (pedestrian crossing lights) and raced across the road into the line of traffic. I had to stop for a second to let a car pass and I could feel the fish flopping against the palm of my hand.

Racing on, I now reached the other side of the road but I was on the wrong side of Dynevor Place. My heart was thumping like hell but I was not going to lose this fish. Racing between the buses, heading for Mount Pleasant hill, I finally reached home but the fish had now stopped flapping. Pushing the front door open, I raced for the kitchen sink, put water into a bowl and gently placed the fish in. It flapped once or twice, went to the bottom of the bowl and then floated to the top on its side. Mum was standing behind me now and she said, Sam, I think it is dead. The tears were now streaming down my cheeks. It was my dream to have a gold fish and I had one for about ten minutes. I buried it in the back yard, put a small cross with no name on it over the grave and just stood there and cried.

My Brother Jackie

MY SISTER BERYL had now left school and was working in the Italian cafe just down the street from where we lived. Her wage (which was not much for a 14 year old) and the food she sometimes brought home such as bread, left over sandwiches, some cold meat slices and occasionally a chicken carcass was a great help to Mum and of course to Beryl and me. The sorry part about it was that if any flesh was left on the carcass it would be kept for Dad’s dinner.

Jackie had now been sent home from hospital for Mum and Dad to look after. I could not understand why the hospital had sent him home when Mum and Dad could only just look after me. Whilst in hospital Jackie had been fitted with leg irons, or as the authorities liked to call them, leg braces, which fitted into holes in the heels of his boots. There were leather straps all the way up his legs with a pad in the centre so that his knees could not protrude outside the irons. They were strapped up so tight that it hurt him at times and he would ask me to loosen the straps. I asked Mum why he had to wear these heavy irons and she explained that the hospital staff had told her that Jackie had to be lifted out of bed every day and helped to walk for a half hour and that the irons were to keep his legs straight. Even at my young age I could see that this boy, my brother, was not ever to walk again. His legs were a little thicker than the leg irons and skinnier than my arms (which were pretty skinny) and with the heavy boots there was no way he was going to lift his feet off the ground.

With Ted in the Army, Elsie in London and Beryl working, there was no one left to take up the task (or in my own words, the joy) of looking after Jackie. Jackie was an easy person to look after and when you did anything for him he would show you his appreciation, not with a thank you, but with his big open smile showing his beautiful, square, white teeth.

The only means of getting him out and about was with an old English pram, the type you would see the nannies of the rich pushing through the parks on Sundays, with a big hood to keep the sun off the baby, whenever it did shine. The body of the pram was big enough to carry two sets of twins and it was sprung like a sulky. I removed the hood and replaced it with a long length of plywood on top of the pram. Mum and I would lift Jackie onto the plywood, cover him with a blanket and then strap his legs and chest to the pram with canvas straps. It seemed that my father was never around so Mum and I would get him down the front steps onto the pavement and Mum’s last words would always be, Don’t be late home Sam.

To be late home never worried Jackie and me because it was great to stay out of the house as long as we could and only tiredness drove us in.

In the evenings of the summer months, when twilight lasted until midnight, I would take Jackie to where the gang was playing down near the shops at the end of the street. The shop and pub were set back much further than the front fence of the houses which meant that we had a bigger area to play in away from the road and also plenty of light from the window of the shop. Tonight the game was to do battle with the gang from a couple of streets away. Placing the pram against the wall of one of the buildings, all the boys from both gangs would come over to say hello to Jackie and tell him who was going to win tonight.

With our swords and shields at the ready (made from very light material, sometimes an old cardboard box) we would go into battle like the actors in the pictures did, yelling and shouting our heads off. This was no fight to the death battle, just a game. The rules were that after a few minutes, if no one had been killed with an imaginary thrust to the heart, or a swipe to the neck cutting off the head, then the leaders of the gang would call it off. Some battle! There was nothing more satisfying to us all to see Jackie’s big, beaming smile when it was all over with same of the boys asking, Who do you think won Jack?

Some people had stopped to watch us and were giving us small hand claps with the advice that we should all be at home at this time of night. We dispersed and went our separate ways, some coming with Jackie and me to help me get Jackie up the front steps and into the hallway with the pram. The front door was never locked until Dad came home. Jackie and I would then have a cup of Bovril and then off to bed.

The task now was to get Jackie out of the pram and upstairs to our bedroom. He had to be carried flat on his back, feet first up the stairs with the leg braces on so that he did not bend his knees. I would go first, walking backwards up the stairs while holding Jackie’s feet and pulling at the same time to take some of the weight from Mum. While getting him into bed Mum would say, You are getting a bit much for me Jackie. Jackie and I slept in the same bed, which was good as it helped to keep us warm.

Sometimes when it was too wet to go outside, I would manage to get Jackie out of bed, stand him upright and walk him over to the window. I just had to face him towards the window and lift his feet off the floor one at a time, and at the same time hold him upright. He was unable to hold on to me, as he had no use of his arms. I would get him to the window and was able to feel the excitement going through his frail body at being able to stand at the window. We would stand there and look at the street lights and the buses heading for Mount Pleasant and he would ask, What’s it like to ride on a big bus Sam? I could not answer that, as I had never been on a double decker before.

After a while he would say his legs were aching. Putting him back to bed was the hard part and I would work him onto the bed inch by inch. It was time to say goodnight to Jackie, knowing that all we were doing for him was useless as he would never be able to walk.

There was a lot to do in Swansea for boys of my age but most of it would get us into trouble, like going down to the dockyards and throwing rocks at the glass windows of the old buildings that were falling down through age and lack of repair. We would also jump onto the tugboats that were moving from one dock to another through the raised bridges. The sailors would then give us a big, square biscuit like a dog biscuit and very hard to chew. They would also give us a mug of hot, black tea to dip the biscuit in to soften it up saying, Up with it boyo. You got to get off at the next jetty. It was