In my first year at Cathays High I remember the religious instruction teacher singling me out frequently for not concentrating and being "sly" .I remember the french teacher sighing at the changes which had taken place with the advent of free education. I remember a fight, which I lost. The french teacher had taught boys from good homes who paid for their education and therefore responded to it, unlike the rabble he was forced to teach under the socialist government. His would hold the lapels of his ragged chalky black gown and proudly talk of education "before the war". Then there was the art teacher who wrote books and kept a farm up near The Wenault, a hill on the outskirts of Cardiff. He wrote books about a sheepdog called "Craig of The Welsh Hills" . He did a pencil drawing of me which I still have almost a half century later. I remember a spoon being held under my testacles and told to cough by a school doctor checking our health. I remember being caned by Mr.Michael, the headmaster, and I remember the day the law changed and the cane was outlawed, and just in case any one of us had any illusions of invincibility, Mr.Thomas, The English Master, took off his shoe and applied it liberally, illustrating that laws were meant to be circumvented !
It was when I was a pupil at Cathays High that I became slowly aware that our family was not like others. Friends had mothers at home and went home for "dinner" at lunchtime. Other friends went home for "lunch". Some children spoke like the people on the televison and the school masters. One day after a school concert in The Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre, my best friend told me that his mother said that he should not mix with "that boy" again. He was well-dressed in a clean school uniform, and I was not. There was another time when a school photograph was to be taken, and the class master asked me to stay in the form-room when everyone else went out side to be photographed. It wasn't just at school that this dawning awareness of difference was happening. My Mother, in one of her short durations at home from the hospital, was visited by a friend she had worked with before she got married. I only remember the lady as "Miss Jones". She arrived in a grand-looking car . She was wearing a suit such as I had never seen before, and a hat and gloves, and, smiling beautifully,she said that she had come to see my mother. Only, my mother would not let her in through the door. She stood weeping on the doorstep telling Miss Jones that she could not invite her in. When she had gone away protesting, my mother wailed that she could not have asked her into the house because she was ashamed of it.
I began to be ashamed of our lives and invented stories to tell my friends, to make our family seem special. Then one day, after my father had in a sober moment bought my mother a present of an apple green swing-coat with a belt at the back, she took us into town and into tea at Howell's . I was terrified that she would go strange at any moment, and begged and pleaded for her to take us out of there, and she knew that I was ashamed and afraid.
She took the belt of the green swing coat and sewed a little matching hat out of it, which looked very nice, only my father told her she destroyed the coat and he lost his temper and shouted at her until she cried.
Yes, I knew we were different. But I now know that if it were not for the determination of successive British Governments to re-build the country through health, housing, and education, we would have been a lot more different still.