It was at this time, shortly after leaving Cathays High School at the age of fifteen and leaving home some months later that while in “digs” I met several people who were to become lifelong friends, and many more whom I would never see again, and whom I would completely forget, until prompted to remember much later in the undergrowth of the jungle of life.
I was not of drinking age, though the stress of having a mother in psychiatric hospital, the untimely loss of a brother, and an abusive and alcoholic father, and having just started my first job as a trainee buyer in David Morgan’s of Cardiff, must have all been hewn into my face and anxiety-furrowed brow, because, other than offering a faintly disbelieving frown and a dentured tut-tut, Doris Swan in The Wine Bar in The Wyndham Arcade did not query my claim to maturity, and served up the drinks accordingly.
The Wine Bar had not suffered any modernization since its original interior had been decorated and furnished in a vintage Victorian style in the Edwardian Era.
There were beaten copper topped round and oblong oak tables and cushioned settles and a terrazzo floor, and half-window brass-hooped velvet curtains drawn on gleaming brass poles, and a long marble-topped bar, defended against all comers by Doris Swan & her second-in-command, Molly.
John Porter from Louisa Street on The Docks, Brian Smith from Albany Road, Roath Park, David Gould from Tonyrefail, and I , and various others would meet there for “a sherry” and listen to Brian’s hilarious stories and acerbic and irreverent descriptions of the people whom we mutually knew. And to his experiences running the gauntlet of his religion and his church, The “New” Church in Wales.
Several ardent seminary students of the Anglican persuasion were also friends and maybe two who belonged to the church we all feared and dreaded, namely because we had all been repeatedly told to fear and dread it. But you know what young men are like. Tell them something is forbidden and they feel duty bound to experiment with it, as in sex, drugs, and rock n’roll. However, we were dealing with something far more dangerous than sex, drugs, and rock n’roll. We were dealing with religious views.
It was intellectual seduction. We went in and out of High Church, and in and out of Baptist Chapels, and in – and swiftly out – of The Church of The Inquisition, Miracles, Saints, and suffocating incense.
This bunch of pseudo-intellectuals, gulping cheap sherry and laughing knowingly and a little too long and too shrilly and too ingratiatingly at “clever” jokes so that we would be accepted as fully paid up members of this highly insecure and emotionally vulnerable clique had to walk the uncertain length of The Wyndham Arcade to reach or leave The Wine Bar.
The test of our “Christian” values occurred without us even being aware of it.
It was a rundown area of Cardiff. Busy at lunchtime. Busy in the early evening with people using the arcade as a short-cut to their buses home.
At most times there were some homeless characters, sheltering from the cold and damp in the doorways of some of the closed for the night shops.
And often, there was a woman. Deranged. Crying. Sobbing. Lying on the ground, wringing her hands. Wet and bedraggled. Screaming unintelligibly from time to time.
And always descending into a mournful dirge as if grieving for the dead.
I remember her red coat. It was made of a coarse wool. Streaks of red dye ran down her blue-veined legs. Sometimes, even when it was freezing cold she would be wet from the icy rain and sit in a drenched chattering huddle as people passing hurriedly veered away from her, semi-circling the poor wretch and awkwardly walking on, hoping that she would not accost them. Which she never did.
We did the same.
I cannot recall one of us attempting to become The Good Samaritan.
Guiltily, or with repugnance, or with a chill fear of the unknown, we passed, walking the same wide berth of the avoidance semi-circle.
I of all people should have done something about her plight. I, whose mother was confined to a mental institution. But in my ignorance and fear I passed the stranger and left her to her uncertain fate.
Sometimes I see her in my dreams. I am reaching out to her but cannot get to her. Then she is gone and I am in another part of an unresolved dream, perhaps destined to live out for an eternity of restless remorseful unconscious conscience, a fatally lost challenge, set by unknown forces or pure chance, whatever your beliefs, to help another in need.
Years later The Wine Shop went through one of those metamorphoses of ownership which led to a complete ripping out of the interior and “modernization”. The beloved familiar was replaced by the odious faux. But the new generation made it theirs, and we and our friends were as forgotten as the lady in the red coat.
Someone told me once that she had been a buyer for Howell’s of Cardiff. That, if true, is profoundly ironic, as I have spent my entire life as a buyer and merchandise controller of several large and independent retail stores, and now I have been “retired” like a limited edition Toby Jug or “Spitting Image” puppet. Without the fame or infamy or achievement of the inspiration for either.

Invoking a childhood long past sometimes recalls the funniest memories.
Because our mother was confined in the psychiatric hospital, our father had no option but to take his two small children to the cinema with him.
He had for some unaccountable reason developed a love of the cinema.
In those days, in the early nineteen-fifties, there wasn’t the hard and fast rule about what kids would be allowed in to see, so we ended up sitting in the darkened cinema watching all sorts of horrors which passed for normal everyday life, and all sorts of magical glitter and laughter and dancing and singing which passed for normal everyday life. Whether Barbara Stanwyck was shooting her victims, or Betty Davis menacingly threatening, or Marilyn Monroe on a window ledge, or a frantic German mother searching for her lost son in war-torn Berlin, or Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire soaring in the air in satins, feathers, and tails, or Joan Crawford in diamonds and furs about to throw herself in the sea, or Ida Lupino climbing to deafening music, or John Wayne circling the wagons, or Marlene Dietrich as notorious rancher…………..well, you know what I mean.
The funny thing was, Dad spent very little time watching the picture.
The screen was obscured by thick cigarette smoke and the large heads of adults towering above us in the seats in front. We would upturn the seats and sit precariously on the edge.
Dad would disappear, and leave us there. On one occasion my little sister asked me what the man was doing to the woman pressed up against the wall with a look of resigned disgust and misery on her face. I couldn’t really tell her. “SShussh !” someone hissed when I said: “They do that in Chicago…….”
Then one time when we were sitting with “Wall’s ice-ream” wafers dripping their artificial contents down on to our clothes, someone came in late and opened the door to the brightly lit foyer, casting a huge elongated shadow on the wall. We didn’t notice for a second, until everyone began to laugh and point……… and then we saw it. A man, whose silhouette looked very much like Dad’s seemed to be wrestling with the silhouette of the lady who carried the tray of cigarettes and ice-cream and lollipops. I didn’t know she also sold bras, but there it was, plain as the nose on your face, passing hands in a great shadow stretched to breaking point along the wall.
The light disappeared. The laughter and shouting went on. I heard my father’s name called out several times. He rushed back to his seat.
The ice-cream lady’s torch jittered nervously, and she wobbled past us with an air of recovered dignity, until she caught her heel in the worn carpet. She must have been out in the wind, I thought, because her hair was all over the place. She was a complete mess.
“Ice-Creams ! Cigarettes ! Sweets !” she called out shrilly, until someone asked her for something else. I couldn’t hear what it was and the whole cinema broke into rowdy laughter.
Our visits to The Plaza Cinema on North Road stopped for while, but very soon the whole routine resumed and went on for several years.
There is no sign of The Plaza Cinema anymore. The bronze doors and marbled foyer and ticket kiosk are gone, along with the building which created escapist magic for dull lives.