My grandfather was a handsome man. He always wore sharp three-piece suits with his father’s heavy gold watch chain, adorned with a sovereign in a gaudy gold holder. When he died in 1964, one of the few things he left his son were his pocket diaries, in which he’d marked off the days when he’d met his fancy women in Swansea parks.
He neglected his son Mervyn and couldn’t bear to live with his wife Lillian. He took little interest in his son’s schooling and never read a book in his life. Mervyn was always deeply repelled by his father’s philistinism; one reason, perhaps, that he himself became so bookish and studious. From time to time William would assert his paternal authority arbitrarily over a son he certainly sensed was cleverer than himself, refusing to lend Mervyn his precious tools or scoffing at his lack of physical toughness.
The humiliations inflicted by his father echoed through Mervyn’s whole life. In the letters he was to write to his Russian fiancée, Mervyn comes back time and again to his father’s cruelty and selfishness. Their shared experience of neglect in childhood became a powerful bond between Mervyn and Mila.
‘Your joyless, nasty, humiliated childhood, the constant lack of warmth and affection, kindness, respect, all your humiliations, illnesses, tears, I understand them all, to the point of pain,’ wrote Mila to Mervyn in 1965. ‘How I hated your father because he refused to give you his wood plane when you wanted to make yourself something out of wood. What horrible cruelty, what a lack of respect for a person – I suffered the same a thousand times! I so wanted to return those for ever lost minutes and buy you a whole workshop, to give you everything you wanted, to make your life rich and happy.’
Mervyn grew up a rather lonely boy, I think. He liked to spend hours wandering alone through the shunting yards of the great docks and the machine houses of the collieries which ringed the grimy city, admiring the steam engines. On Sundays he would walk to the tops of the vast colliery slag heaps and look down on the ships in the channel, and the Irish Sea beyond, and he would dream, in the manner ascribed to young boys who end up following unusual destinies, of travelling to distant lands.
He spent much of his childhood with his mother Lillian and his crippled grandmother. The family’s life was punctuated by screaming rows between his parents, which either ended in one of his father’s regular walk-outs, or by his mother taking little Mervyn and running away to stay with her mother. Mervyn’s mother was an emotional woman, prone to hysterics. Her son was the focus of her hopes, and she lived entirely for him – and Mervyn was to devote much energy to getting as far away from his mother’s intense, controlling love as possible. In later years, Mervyn frequently complained to Mila that his mother, addicted to hyperbole, would accuse him of ‘killing your old mother with your thoughtlessness’.
Lillian’s emotional volatility is hardly surprising. Her life had been permanently scarred at the age of nineteen when she became pregnant by a married man, a local solicitor who refused to recognize the child. In the stern, Methodist world of South Wales, a child born out of wedlock was a stain for life. When William Matthews married her she was a fallen woman, a fact which coloured their relationship for ever. My father was brought up believing that his half-brother Jack was his uncle, and only learned the truth in his late teens.
The coming of the Second World War provided a deeply thrilling interlude in Mervyn’s boyhood. His stories of the war filled my own childhood – the drone of bombers on moonless nights, the sight of the docks and railway lines bombed. At the war’s outbreak, along with his schoolmates, Mervyn was hastily evacuated to the flower-filled meadows of Gwendraeth on the Gower Peninsula, clutching a small cardboard suitcase with his name and address carefully pencilled on to it. But most of the children soon returned from evacuation after their mothers decided the dangers had been exaggerated.
They were wrong. Mervyn was in Swansea during the heaviest bombing raids of 1941. He remembers the great thundering of the bombs slamming into the town, and the excitement of scurrying to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden with candles and an old brass miner’s lamp.
Just before one of the worst air raids, Mervyn’s mother took the boy to spend the night at his grandparents’ house. There was no particular reason for her decision; she had simply been seized by a powerful desire to get out of her house. As Mervyn and his mother crested the hill to Lamb Street the next morning, walking hand in hand, they found that their house had been completely demolished by a direct hit from a German bomb. Half the street had disintegrated into a pile of smoking bricks, and many of their neighbours had been buried alive in their Anderson shelters. Mervyn was horrified, and, as any little boy would be, profoundly impressed.
Every father, I think, re-visits his own boyhood when he plays with his son. And by the same token, every small boy shares his father’s passions, until puberty interposes the desire to break free. The landscape of my own childhood in London was populated by mementoes of my father’s youth. More so, I think, than my schoolfellows, I had a very 1930s childhood. One of the first books I remember reading was my father’s copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, produced for the 1937 Disney film and illustrated with three-dimensional pictures you viewed through a pair of cardboard spectacles with red and green celluloid lenses. Later I loved his old Boys’ Own annuals and thick adventure books filled with biplanes and menacing fuzzy-wuzzies. On the morning of my eighth Christmas I discovered a great hessian-covered suitcase standing in my bedroom. It contained a wonderful a-gauge Hornby electric train set, with a magnificent green locomotive called the Caerphilly Castle. It had been one of the few gifts my grandfather had given to my father, for the Christmas of 1939. Another year my father gave me his boyhood Meccano set, in a special wooden box with drawers and compartments for the bolts and girders and accompanied by wonderfully illustrated instruction books featuring boys in shorts and long socks. I would spend hours, alone, sitting on the floor of my attic bedroom constructing elaborate gantry cranes, armoured trains and suspension bridges for the Caerphilly Castle to cross over.
Sometimes my father would set his collection of model steam engines spluttering into life, powered by a little boiler fired with a methylated spirit lamp. I loved the smell of hot engine oil and steam. At weekends we’d drive to the East End to see the Thames barges at St Katharine’s dock, or we’d go scavenging for bits of clay pipes and old bottles on the mud flats of the Thames at low tide. When I grew a little older, we’d go for long walks every evening through Pimlico. We’d ignore the neat white Thomas Cubitt facades of the main streets and turn instead down Turpentine Lane, a short cut which led us down to the great, sluggish Thames opposite Battersea Power Station. Of all the streets I’ve seen in London, Turpentine Lane, with its smoke-blackened brickwork and tiny backyards, looks the most like a South Wales backstreet.
We made model sailing boats together, not from kits but carved out of giant blocks of wood we’d scavenge from skips. We made the spars, sails and tackle with a little vice, a Stanley knife and an old pair of pliers. With special pride, he gave me a lovely wood plane with which I fashioned a large and beautiful Thames barge.
The turning point of my father’s boyhood came when he broke his pelvis falling off a bicycle, aged fifteen. The break revealed that Mervyn had been suffering from a rare, wasting bone condition. To heal the pelvis and his brittle right hip, doctors prescribed a course of traction. Mervyn was strapped into a special bed and his legs were encased in plaster and weights attached to them. For hours at a time he couldn’t move, or see anything but the hospital ceiling.