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.

In the spring of 1959, "Alfie" Gower, The Maths Master at Cathays High School for Boys was acting as Careers Master. He looked at me rather ruefully, and sighed a despondent sigh. "What are we going to do with you Lewis?" There was an opening for a trainee buyer at David Morgan's, Cardiff's leading department store. Miss Barnfield, The Staff Manager, as the title was then for employing people, before it became, Personnel Manager, and before it became Director of Human Resources, later, and , just kidding, Payroll Obliterator today, had amongst her other duties, the responsibility for changing the potential employee's local surname, to something more likely to identify a culprit. I mean, there would have been many,many Lewis's, Jones's, and Morgan's, etc....so, cleverly, each new addition to the workforce was given a new name. I must have looked like a big drip, and was given the name "Lake". Another newcomer, Jones, was given the appellation, "Joint", though in those days it would not have had the same connotation which it has today.
"Aspel" was not a problem, so Michael did not have to adopt a new identity.
There were lots and lots of selling staff, and very few managers. Unlike today when the average department store selling staff has been the victim of a ruthless pogrom, to make way for legions of managers to find officious employment developing cause for their existence.
After a spell in the basement hardware department, I found myself behind the counter in the silverware dept, with a Mrs. Nina Tucker, wife of a butcher who had a shop in Rhiwbina. Nina Tucker had a very acute sense of humour. Which made it very difficult to retain the right kind of demeanour when dealing with some of the customers, such as the rather grand lady from Cyncoed who returned the set of Oneida "Hampton Court" soup spoons because her guests and family at dinner made - and she illustrated - long-drawn out slurping sounds unbefitting a family of her distinction. Or, the quiet little man from an overseas country who returned his alarm clock because it did not work. Unwrapping it, springs and bells leapt everywhere, and he explained that he had tried to fix it by opening the back with a tin-opener. In those days, the tin-opener ( can opener) left a jagged ridge just like Popeye's can of spinach when he opened it !
Mrs. Tucker made as if to dust the inside of the counters and got down on the floor, in convulsions, swallowing the laughter which threatened to engulf the entire department. I somewhat restrained myself until he had gone, and then I let go..........
Previously, in the hardware department, a woman had returned a polythene bowl, and when I took it out of the brown paper bag, the bottom of it had burnt through, and burnt plastic hung around the edges of the hole. The customer was extemely indignant. The bowl was inferior. She had boiled her husband's handkerchiefs in it on the range top, and now there was a hole in it.
Mr.Goddard, The Buyer, sniffed and with a glazed expression of devout adherence to policy, apologized to the customer, and suggested an enamel bowl might be better suited to the task at hand.
From time to time, masters from Cathays would pass through the store, and one of my most enduring memories is of Alfie Gower defining existencialism for me while I was assistant buyer of the china and glass department, and while Mr.Forrester, The Buyer, looked on impatiently, because there was work to be done.
I could tell you a whole lot of funny stories about working as a young man in David Morgan's, but that's a whole other blog.
A woman, a widow, old enough to be my mother, took a liking to me. I waited at her place of work to go to tea with her. The buyer there got angry one day and accused her of being a "cradle-snatcher". I had no idea then what all the fuss was about. Later, when she invited me to her house in Barry, and wound up her gramophone, and put a romantic record on the turntable, and gently lowered the head, and when the steel needle moved through the grooves, and she moved up the sofa and gently kissed me, I knew............ and I flew !
David Morgan's closed down this year, 2005, as did the store in which I was working until April 9th of this year. Two over a century old family owned-and managed department stores. The one in which I first commenced work in 1959, and the one in which my almost half-century career in retail ended. And, ironically and uncannily, both have closed in the same year.

Many years after leaving Gabalfa I found myself in a community where the majority of the educated and privileged, the sophisticated and traveled, the lawyers and accountants, and politicians and social figures were black. And we whites were in the minority, locals and expatriates. And, with the exception of a small number of seriously professional players, we British Expatriates did not compare well with the population at large. In fact, to some extent, we were embarrassing. But that is to prejudicially label a group of people largely composed of upright citizens with the more unfavorable characteristics of the few. So, the shoe was definitely on the other foot.
Looking back at my early years in Gabalfa and attending Cathays High School for Boys, Cardiff, I have some defining racial moments.
On the estate was a “coloured” family as the term was used then. One coloured family. Even though below Bute Street Bridge lived a large coloured community. The boys in that family were tough no-nonsense kids who earned our respect and admiration, and became leaders. In Cathays High there was a black boy called Baker ( I can’t recall his first name ) who at lunch one day in the refectory picked up his gravy and potato laden plate and shoved it right in the face of the nasty bully who had been taunting him. We cheered and stamped our feet and threw things in the air and all hell let loose with appropriate canings subsequently. Except in the case of Baker, who was merely standing up for himself, something which we all wished we had the courage to do. There were other boys of light-skinned ethnicity ,mainly from The Docks, who excelled at science, maths, and sports and whom we all revered as our peer group heroes. Not because of their colour but because of their prowess.
A group of Cathays boys were asked to collect examples of rock from Penarth beach. On our return we took the subway tunnel from Penarth to Grangetown, and with our hands full of ominous looking rocks, we walked up what was then the old Bute Street. Black women sachey-d along with bundles of washing on their heads. Arabs sat at the kerbside throwing small stones and catching them on the backs of their hands. An elderly asian man pulled two giggling girls in a rickety rickshaw, and the trams and trolleys went to and fro. Old shopfronts displayed faded dresses and bolts of fabrics in their dusty windows. The Cardiff in which we lived might have been a whole world away from this cosmopolitan world of the dispossessed from all the nations of the earth, and particularly from those countries which were part of The British Commonwealth, and The British Empire, and yet it was just under the Bute Street Bridge between The City and The Docks.
It would be many years before homes and the streets of Cardiff would be filled representatively with the ethnic peoples for whom Wales and Cardiff had been home for more generations than many white people who had migrated to the city.

Whenever my father despaired of my mother and her twin, he would drag up something which happened when they were both young, with their husbands away in the army and the merchant navy.
A Great Aunt Louisa owned properties here and there, and asked the two young mothers to visit her one day at one of her properties. They had children in pushchairs. My brother and my cousin. They paid the call on Great Aunt Louisa, in this dark house that stretched backwards, long and narrow, with hardly any natural light, except in the front parlour, where the blackout-lined linen blinds forbade its presence. In fact the presence of anyone other than a corpse was forbidden in the parlour, which was kept mausoleum-like for just such an eventuality, and for the neighbours to admire the untouched furniture and furnishings which lay in the shadows.
While Aunt Louisa's maid poured tea in the living room, she announced that she was "prepared" to give as a gift to her neices the two adjoining houses so that their families could be brought up in the proper manner, and not in rented flats in North Road, amongst those people there, rather than in Clive Street in Grangetown, where the better people lived.
We will never know what set them off, but the two girls in their cloche hats began by fighting back giggles which soon escaped into hoots of uncontrollable laughter and hysterics , and , unable to contain themselves and act with suitable decorum, Great Aunt Louisa ordered them from the house with instructions never to return again.
And thus ended both sets of parents aspirations to middle-class property ownership amongst "the better people".

A stanger to Cardiff might notice them, but when you live there you never think about them.They are everywhere, and when the weather is inclement, they come in from the sea and shore and fly over the rooftops, making their distinctive call which almost sounds like a warning that a storm is coming. The seagulls. Bigger than I have ever seen anywhere else. With big wingspans, zooming and diving, and soaring and gliding, flapping and walking.... they are everywhere. Once, many years ago when Uncle Maurice was working on the Docks as a HarbourMaster, Auntie Kitty was invited, and took me, to a reception on the paddle steamer which travelled to and fro between Cardiff and the English Coast and Ilfacombe and Steep Holme, I think, but my memory's vague......... I remember the huge gleaming pistons in the engine room and the polished brass sea instruments and clocks, and the ship's wheel, and the huge paddle wheels churning up the muddy waters. I also recall that Aunty Kitty had a huge holdall, which was empty when we came on board, but was somewhow miraculously full and clattering and clunking like cutlery and glasses when we left the ship............I know that my uncle was furious with her about something, but I wasn't party to the row !
About ten years ago, at the annual antiques show in New York, there was a stand of nautical paintings, portraits and instruments. There was a mahogany stick barometer, maybe 19th. century I thought and looked at the $28,000 price tag. Then I saw the maker's name on the faceplate : Reardon Smith, Cardiff Docks, South Wales. And I thought of all that polished brass on the paddle steamer and wondered whose walls in whose homes those instruments now hang.

When my sister and her boyfriend decided , opportunely......, to get married, at the ages of sixteen and seventeen respectively, I was living in an attic flat in Newport Road, near the railway bridge, and they moved in with my father. The house was re-decorated, and they had a nicely-furnished bedroom to call their own. As I look back on it I am amazed that my brother-in-law suffered my father's anger and temper for years before there was a truce between the two. If anyone was ever in any doubt about the boy's devotion to his new wife, one would only have to know how he bore it manfully for so long before letting my father know in no uncertain terms that he was not to be bullied and nagged at any longer. Then, one after another, two children came along, and my father, transformed from the domineering, violent man he was to a tender, loving grandfather who could do no wrong. And, thankfully, that's the only side of him which is fondly remembered by my sister, and her children, who now have children of their own , who will soon be on the verge of having children of their own....................
One day I came back from away and my sister and her husband, with their baby boy in the pram walked to our Auntie Kitty's in Cathedral View. On the way, my brother-in-law began talking very loudly and motioning to something in the opposite distance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father in a garden chair, slink soundlessly to the ground behind the hedge, and a very attractive older woman disappearing quickly into the house. When we had passed this scenario, my brother-in-law whispered to me that this was my father's "girlfriend" about whom my sister knew nothing, and it was better to keep it that way, because even though my mother had been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for many years at this point, they were still married, and my father brought my mother home from the hospital every other weekend.
I was older, and a teeny bit wiser, though not by much, at that time. It occurred to me that it was a stalwart thing to do, to remain loyally attentive to a schitzophrenic wife all those years, so the comforts of a dalliance or mistress was a modest indiscretion to be admired, not resented. It was only after my father's death that my sister knew of "The Other Woman".
Shortly afterwards, the son of another family on the estate, divorced his wife on grounds of mental health, and left her in Whitchurch Hospital. They had hardly been married at all.

Our family in a previous, previous generation was littered with characters. On our Mother's side. Somewhere, way back in the early part of the twentieth century, a cousin of maybe my grandfather's, a Cardiff girl, when the docks were the largest tramp steamer tonnage exporting port in the world, when coal and steel, and railroad track was loaded on to steam ships to be carried to the farthest corners of The Empire, decided that her very ordinary name was not going to sell the milliner's confections which she made by hand. So she called herself "Eva Bogutsky" and opened a shop in Cardiff's then most important shopping thoroughfare, St. Mary Street, Where James Howell's and David Morgan's Department Stores dominated the street. Her business grew, her hats became more and more adventurous, and just ever so slightly risque, providing an opportunity for the Chapel Bible Thumpers to call attention to the frivolous nature of women who bedecked themselves out in finery such as Eva Bogutsky's hats. I like to think that Bogutsky was composed of "bogus" and "guts" and Eva a reference to the woman who started it all by taking a forbidden bite out of a juicy apple.

There was a lot of excitement amongst the family the day that men in grey suits visited my grandmother and asked that family members show up for a meeting at The Royal Hotel because the American side of the family, The Creightons, wanted to fill in the missing blanks in the Welsh branches of The Family Tree. Immediately, the legend of "The Creightons' Millions" was born, and various members of the family in intoxicated states of anticipation planned what they would do with their newfound wealth. Poor Uncle Charlie, who had had an aversion to the notion of "work" since his entrepreneurial attempts to lug coal down from "The Valleys" by horse and cart had failed miserably. Not through bancrupcy or anything like that. After several stops, not to water the horse but to "water" Uncle Charlie, the horse keeled over and died from dehydration, Uncle Charlie not being fully aware that the horse needed sustanance too , if not alcoholic sustanance. Poor Uncle Charlie planned lavish generosity at the local pub where he had been wont to borrow funds from time to time to fund a flow of libations. The meeting was attended by all. The men in grey suits made notes on a blackboard. There were no laptops with Excel in those days. Then they thanked everyone, and left. In time, the curmudgeon-like murmurs grew that "Aunty Glad' and Uncle 'En " had been seen walking through Llandaff Fields, Aunty Glad tightly clutching a sizeable tin box with a brass lock. Aunty Glad, my mother's great aunt, was straight out of a Henry James novel, her attire belonging to The Age of Elegance, darkly dramatic "period costume" which was in fact her everyday attire. Complete with an imposing,veiled, blue-black hat with artificial flowers more becoming a funeral parlour than a person's head. Uncle 'En was small beside her domineering frame, and generally nodded acquiesence, or mumbled pleasantries.
So, The Creighton Millions stayed where they were, in The New World. Unless, of course, the suspicions were correct, that they were locked inside Aunty Glad's locked tin box !

One year heavy rains fell on Wales, I mean heavier than the usual incessant heavy rains. I was staying with my Auntie Kitty & Uncle Maurice and that morning when I looked out of the window towards the shops, my eyes registered something which my brain could not interpret. "It's a flood!" my Uncle said, knocking his pipe against the fireplace. " The river Taff has burst its banks !" I got my bike and ran to the door, refusing to listen to anyone's appeal for calm. I started cycling towards our house and the water got deeper as the slope towards the front of Gabalfa Estate became more pronounced.
I passed people waving from the upstairs window as I waded waist-high, pushing my bike through the dirty, muddy water.
When I got to our street, the water was almost around my shoulders and I felt really embarressed as I passed the neighbours, and as a power-boat washed passed me up the street.
I won't repeat the language my father used when he saw me, my only suit drenched through.
The event made headlines, and many people turned out to help clean up the estate and help get lives back to normal. Seminary students from St.Michael's College, Llandaff came and scrubbed and cleaned away the mud and the coal dust from the river.
And there were generous contributions to buy new furniture and furnishings.
When it was all over, our next door neighbour was hanging out her washing and talking about "The Flood", and couldn't help boasting how much of a donation they had received to replace their things ruined by the deluge. When she heard what my father had been paid she stopped her clothes-pegging, and said in a combination of shock and annoyance : " But, you didn't have anything in there ! You hadn't a thing !" Which was to a large extent true. A boy from school had come to collect me one day, and when he came in he said : "Where's everything ? - Where's all your stuff ? You don't have much here." It hadn't occurred to me til then that a ripped rexine settee ( sofa) and lino on the floor, and an early discard period dining table and chairs and a black and white television didn't constitute "much".
It was only a flood. Like a forewarning of the tragedy which was to hit Wales a few years later.

But I haven't told you about Uncle Maurice's funeral. He was to be buried in Cleethorpes, his home town on the east coast of northern England. Our Auntie Kitty was always screamingly funny, and always saw the funny side of anything serious. On the train to Cleethorpes, she had us in fits of laughter. We were young children looking at an adult's view of the world around her. My cousin, her elder son, was none too amused, and Auntie Kitty kept saying to me : " Now, Our Michael - don't laugh when we get to Cleethorpes and you see Auntie Gert, Uncle Maurice's sister. She'll be on the platform with the rest of the family, dressed in black and looking disapprovingly at me !"
It was the old coal-stoked steam train which stopped at Crew for passengers to change trains before continueing their journeys. When the train's engine steamed to a slow stop at Cleethorpes, sure enough, there they were. All veiled in black, and wearing black astrakan coats, the men in dark grey coats and hombergs. White handkerchiefs rose to runny eyes and noses, and disappeared, clutched in balck gloves.
The only problem was that Uncle Maurice's coffin got on a different train at Crewe. There was a lot of astrakan wailing, and Auntie Kitty, saying to me provocatively - " Now don't laugh, Our Michael !"
The coffin was to be safely located by British Rail and delivered to Auntie Gert's home.
When we arrived at Auntie Gert's ( she wasn't really our Aunt, as she was Uncle Maurice's sister, and Auntie Kitty's sister-in-law ) there were cats and chickens running all around the house. And Auntie Kitty kept nudging me and saying : " Now, Our Michael, don't you dare laugh!"
By the time of the church service everything was seriously sombre, broken by wailing.
At the graveside, Gert, overcome, lost her footing, and almost fell into the grave and had to be held on to firmly by her brothers, and dragged back out. Auntie Kitty looked at me.
It was just then that it became clear that one of the funeral cars did not carry people attending the funderal. Instead it carried the pet chickens and cats. One of the drivers had opened the door in error and there was chaos ! Cats and chickens running everywhere madly, funeral guests running after them. Gert wailing. The vicar reading from the bible. Auntie Kitty daring me to laugh, her eyes full of grieving tears and tears of laughter !
When it was all over and the herd of animals had been rounded up and were securely in the limosine, feathers flying, paws to the glass, the driver, with funeral home aplomb, drove off, and we followed in other cars.
Along route we stopped.
At a fish and chip shop.
The delicious scent of fish and chips wrapped in greaseproof paper and newspaper followed the procession all the way back to Gert's house, where we all alighted and dug in, traumatically - shaken chickens, pecking at breadcrumbs, and visibly unnerved cats pawing at the grease-dripping batter of the cod and hake, fresh from the northern Atlantic seas.
That's how I remember the funeral. Maybe after all these years it has become somewhat exaggerated in my imagination, but I still smell the salt-sea brine of the fish and chips, and see the feathers flying around the driver of the funeral car................

We were much closer to our mother's side of the family. And particularly close to our mother's twin sister, Auntie Kitty, and her husband, Maurice. They lived a few streets away from us in Gabalfa. Their eldest son, my cousin,emigrated to New Zealand. After Uncle Maurice died of cancer, Auntie Kitty was left to rear her youngest son alone. There was no doubt that as well as being my mother's twin, she shared some of her characteristics, "eccentricity" being one of them, for want of a more suitable euphemism. She became convinced that the adjoining neighbours were "raking the grate" to purposefully annoy her. So, she raked back, with her wonderful high-pitched laughter. The garden became a lingering reminder of her husband, with whom the latter years had been spent in aggressive confrontation, over what we never really knew, although there were hints. So, the garden was demolished. The rose-covered trellis was torn down. The plants were uprooted. The weeds grew and consumed the vegetable garden.
Then, things generally deteriorated. And, as they did, the windows were covered up with newspaper and cardboard. And the photographs were burnt. The pictures and ornaments began to disappear. The model ship was thrown out. And the Japanese teapot. And so forth.
I think that in order to survive somewhat intact, she looked at the world as her enemy and brandished a sword at it. Her younger son grew up and got married and went to live in the south of England. In her later years, she went to stay with them, but missed Wales, and came back and stayed for the remainder of her life in a nursing home in Penarth.
But that little vignette omits the years that my sister, already tending to my mother's needs and bringing her home from the hospital every other weekend, was also looking after Auntie Kitty, who stayed with my sister and her husband for some time.
With her husband gone, and both sons living away, she was alone. And one day it jst became too much for her and she arrived at my sister's door in tears, and sobbed that she was lonely.
My sister, Mother Earth, took our beloved Aunt in and never let go of her after that, except when she went to live with her son and daughter-in-law in Cornwall, and when she went to the nursing home in Penarth.
I, personally, have a lot to thank my Auntie Kitty for. When I left home, she took me in again, although she was afraid of my father's wrath. She and my sister were the only two peole in the world who loved me and whom I loved. I pitied my mother, and resented my father. Those emotions cloud out any vestige of love of parent.

When our gran came to Gabalfa from the docks to see us on Saturday afternoons to bring caraway seed cake and my cousin Richard's old shirts, with the collars and cuffs turned, and Richard's old socks, with the holes in the heels darned - I never felt too proud to enjoy the fact that my gran had worked so hard to give me some comforts. Years later, when my life was taking form and I was enticed by the possibility of life, and my gran was dying in hospital, surrounded by her family, my aunt who had taken my sister in when she was little suggested that I go to the hospital...... I hesitated. I was not brave enough to face death. She went surrounded by loved ones, but I wasn't there. I've regretted it ever since.
Talking about regrets, I left home when I was sixteen, after the umpteenth row with my father and the last straw that broke the camel's back : I could take his anger and violence no more. "You drove my mother mad, but you're not driving me mad !" I said and brandished the breadknife at him. Of course, drunk as usual, he lunged angrily towards me, so I had no option but to throw the knife away before any harm could occur, and he beat me to a pulp. What few things I had I put in my suitcase, and as I was doming down the stairs bloody but not bow'd he threatened, "Leave this house now, and you never return!"
But like all family rows, wounds heal and life goes on.
It's not the leaving home I regret, but my virtual abandonment of my young sister. I knew that my father loved her and would never harm her, but, at the same time, I was not there for her when I should have been. Happily, the marriage she made when they were sixteen and seventeen has been a lifelong happiness, marred by tragedy, but bonded by deeply felt love and respect for each other.
I saw her and my father when I visited my mother at the hospital, but to be frank, my teenage years were wild and volatile and undisciplined and unpredictable. There were years where a big gap occurred before my sister and I established the bonds of siblings , largely because I lived away from Cardiff when there were no mobile phones and no internet. But, thankfully, she and her husband and their children came to visit me often, and so over the years we have never lost our closeness.
One cousin, the younger son of my mother's twin sister remains close to us because he was like a younger brother and we looked after him when he was little. But all other cousins are spread wide afield, in Australia, New Zealand, Bristol, and Penarth, which may just as well be another continent as far as our proximity is concerned.
There are many cousins on my father's side of the family. We used to see them at funerals, but that was about all. One became famous as a gymnast, winning a bronze medal at Helsinki, and she has worked tirelessly with the handicapped most of her adult life.

Over the years I have watched as Gabalfa deteriorated. Tenants were now owners, and after a drunken holiday in Costa-del-Mucho, such was the cultural impact that Gabalfa started to display examples of white stucco. Gardens became car ports. Extensions were built. Windows were changed. "Conservatories" were built. And, of course, central heating was installed. Along with cable TV and DSL lines. That's not what I am referring to when I say "deteriorate".
What is also very visible is neglected gardens and old vehicles and oil and tyres lying around in front "car ports". Caravans looking for all the world as if they were salvaged from a scrap metal dump.
Annie's oil-lamp lit cottage and the canal disappeared and was replaced by MacDonald's and Tesco's and a garage and new flats. The castle grounds are still there. You can still walk all the way from Gabalfa, under the Western Avenue bridge past MacDonald's and past the mock mediaval lodge house and the blackweir, into the castle grounds and the gardens, and through the gate into the bustling city centre. In the opposite direction, you can walk to Hayley Park, and across the bridge and to the garden city village of LLandaff and down past the cathedral to Llandaff Fields and Pontcanna fields, through Canton, Grangetown, and all the way to the renovated Docklands.

A deep-rooted prejudice exists in respect of council house living. A few years ago some Cardiffians were visiting my trans-atlantic workplace. Where was I from they asked when they realized I was Welsh. "Cardiff" I said. Delighted, they asked : "From Where ?" . "Gabalfa" I answered, and for a moment they were taken aback, almost in disbelief, then embarressed for their own reaction. Which is so funny when you come to think of it. Gabalfa has been the birthplace of a successful real estate agent, a successful master-builder, an actress of fame, a singer-dancer whom I saw with great astonishment on the London stage in a performance of Aquarious. Jacquie....??..............and many others who may one day come out from their comfortable middle class shells to tell their stories without shame and with justifiable pride.
My sister and her husband are trying to sell their house right now. The house has a large front garden, and a large rear garden, a living room, a diningroom, a kitchen, bathrooms up and down and three bedrooms, and its location is excellent, except that it is where it is, in Gabalfa. Anywhere else and the house would fetch double its asking price. Sooner or later the prejudice will give way to practical necessity, as it did in London, when council flats became the rage for Porsche-driving "yuppies" as we called them then, to move in and buy !

At the top of the hill from Gabalfa, at the junction of Whitchurch and North Roads, adjacent to the trolley bus terminal was a pool hall club and an Andrew Carnegie Library. I can't recall how it was I joined the library, or graduated, at the age of eleven or thereabouts, from reading Richmal Crompton's "William" books to Richmal Crompton's adult novels, Hugh Ross Williamson, Jane Lane, George Eliot, The Uncle Silas novels, and many, many more. I think that somewhere along the line I encountered sadness and tragedy as counterbalance to William's hilarious antics, and manufactured an explanation that I was taking out 2 books a week for my father, and 2 books a week for me. The next thing you know, I was reading Henrik Ibsen and Yates.
The library isn't there any more. I corresponded by email to a librarian in Cardiff and asked where Gabalfa and Mynachdy children would go nowadays for a library. The librarian was at a loss for words. Maybe no-one expects council house kids to want to read about people in the outside world. Maybe I-pods and Blackberries and mobile phones and on-line messaging are too all important and there's no time to develop a joy of reading.
It was my reading which enabled me to overcome inarticulate shyness and step gently from one job to another, enjoying career progression and opportunities which would otherwise have been denied to someone of my social background. It took me years to overcome my sense of inadequacy in the company of middle-class people. To me they seemed as privileged aristocracy.
In my last years at Cathays High School for Boys I enjoyed a group of friends who were exploring music and thought for the first time, and although they subsequently went on to university and I went to work in a shop, we all got together over holidays, and the mother of one of the friends provided her house and cocoa and chocolate biscuits for us all to sit and talk and listen to music and to keep his parents awake. They had a corner grocery store in a street near Malefant Street. I was like an egg hatching in that dynamic, discoursive, voluably competitive clique ! One turned up years later, having departed Canada leaving professional fees taxes unpaid, and four daughters and a wife to support. One became a rabidly conservative Anglo-Catholic Clergyman Seminary Provost. I haven't a clue about the others.

When I was at Cathays High School, the religious insruction master, who also taught English grammar, paid particular attention to my ability to write and encouraged me, and in one summer The South Wales Echo published a story which I had written. The French Master, who also taught history, observed to the class one day that it was very strange for a young boy to write in the first person female. He did not elaborate on his remark other than it was a rare occurance, and a tool used by only a few male writers. I hadn't a clue what he was talking about, and blushed, taking his comments as a compliment.
I have taken the name Annie Cleaver to write this blog. Many years ago, when I arrived to work at Birmingham, near Broad Street there was a vast clearance of derelict buildings, leaving a red earth terrain which stretched out eerily like a vast landscape of another planet. The only building left standing was a junk shop near the road. I bought a photograph album for five shillings. It was composed of postcards from the late nineteenth century right through to the nineteen sixties.......... all addressed to Miss Annie Cleaver who lived at Hall Green. There were first world war postcards decorated with bouquets of dried flowers from the fields of Flanders. There were postcards from Paris and Berlin, and as I read them all I created a picture of who Annie Cleaver must have been. And all that remained as a testament to her existance was this album of postcards. I treasured it for years. Took it to Ireland with me. Left it in the care of an accountant friend when I crossed the Altantic. He died, and heaven knows its fate after that. I just had one postcard which must have fallen from the album, of the Hall Green faux Tudor mud and wattle house which must have belonged to the family as there is a wistful, nostalgic comment on the rear of the postcard. All that remains to define you. A postcard.

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.

By this time I was in Viri Amu Jones Junior School in Mynachdy. I remember Mrs.Evans and Miss Gough, two of the lovliest teachers anyone could wish for, hearts full of tears for children whose futures lay uncertain in the future. I remember Mr.Hunt who put his feet up on his desk and went to sleep. I remember being terrified of Mr. Charles, the headmaster who wielded the cane when it was perfectly legal to ask a boy to bend over and take his trousers down and to leave raw red welts across his inflamed buttocks. But, we deserved it more than we didn't. Miss Gough would rock me on her lap, and I felt wanted and important. And other kids would say that I was her favourite, and I would say the same of them when their time came to be hugged by Miss Gough.
Then the announcement came from an incredulous Mr.Charles that I had passed the eleven plus and was going to grammar school. Most of us woke up at the eleventh hour to the fact that if we did not pass the eleven plus we would remain at Viri Amu Jones forever. It was the greatest inducement to learning that was ever invented.
My father could not be proud of me, and only half-heartedly kitted me out in school cap, blazer and tie. His mind was in grief and shock at the loss of his eldest son, and the incarceration of his psychologically-disturbed wife. Only, in those days they said "insane".
We went to Evan Roberts and bought the school outfit and one shirt and a pair of Clarke's shoes.
I was to wear that outfit long after it fitted me. I washed the shirt and dried it in front of the one bar electric fire, when we had a shilling for the meter, or borrowed one from the next door neighbour until Dad came home.
A week into going to Cathays High, my sister came home and told me that Mr.Charles had announced to the school that a certain boy who had gone to Cathays High had betrayed the name of his dead brother by being caught stealing in Woolworth's. My friend's kind mother at the end of the street covered it up and somehow prevented my father from knowing. Woolworth's security personnel caught my friend and me lifting our bathing towels over the counter to steal something and hide it. They dealt with my friend's mother and she talked to us and instilled the fear of God into us about what could have happened to us, without so much as lifting a finger against us. I never stole anything again, I was so afraid.
Maybe a year or two later she became the victim of depression and her body was dragged from the river Taff. I will always remember her.

When we first moved to Gabalfa from Tremorfa, the estate was not finished, and we scruffy little boys with frayed collars and shoes and socks with holes in them "tormented the watchies" for amusement and the senses of fear and danger which were new to us, and intriguing. Trees still stood along the bank of The Taff, and amongst them, old houses. Magical old houses, with winding staircases and peeling wallpapers from a bygone age. A few of these houses, vacated by their tenants, waited to be pulled down and in the meanwhile suffered the ravages of curious small boys discovering the adrenaline of destruction for the first time.
At that time, the bed of the old canal still could be seen overgrown but there, from Gabalfa heading towards Cardiff Castle Grounds. Along the route of the canal, there was an old canal house, and two cottages with a little stream which you had to cross to get to the cottage where an old lady lived with her son. The old lady's cottage was lit with oil lamps. She sold cigarettes and tobacco and sweets, and was often robbed. Her name was Annie. "Go to Annie's down the canal and get me ten Woodbines" my father would say. Years later, as a grandmother herself, my sister would say that I sent her down that old canal by herself in the dark to buy sweets. I can't remember, but then, I'm not good at remembering my shortcomings.
Soon, my mother's releases and relapses led to longer sojourns at Whichurch Hospital, and my sister and I went back home to live with my father, who stayed out most nights getting drunk.