In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Read Free Book Online

cello.
    As a serving soldier my father was incensed that, quite apart from anything else, this person was not opposing the Germans in the trenches. His anger was as much martial as marital.
    He strode from his seat and put his twin points of view to the cellist. Something of a fracas ensued which I like to think may have been complementary to some silent slapstick fisticuffs on the screen. The reason that the cellist was not on active service became apparent at once because he raised an artificial leg, which he had unstrapped during his work, and struck my father a felling blow on the temple. Gunner Thomas had travelled from the hell of the battlefield to be sorely wounded in the orchestra pit of a Birmingham cinema.
    In any event he won back his wife because my mother's recollections of the war were predictably melodramatic. 'When your brother Hally was a tiny, tiny baby,' she recalled by the fireside one night. 'He was screaming his head off in the early hours of the morning. There was I, all alone, your dad away at the fighting, and I couldn't stand it any longer. I threw that baby down the bottom of the bed. Then I saw a vision, yes a vision, of Jim Thomas standing straight in his uniform at the foot of the bed, holding up his hand and saying to me: "Steady, Dolly, steady. Don't throw the baby about like that! I'll be coming home soon."'
    Generally, however, it was my father who had the visions. They usually occurred shortly after closing time.
    I have often wondered what those two people, my mother and my father, were really like. Physically, he was thin and I believe quite tall (it is difficult to remember people's heights from your childhood), a spare and sinewy man hardened by a life of shovelling coal into the boilers of ships pitching on the world's oceans. He had low eyebrows, little other hair, and a bit of a hook at the end of his nose, so that I recall him as looking quite fierce. He had a habit of talking out of the corner of his mouth as if passing on confidential information. His hands were like nuts and bolts and he had tattoos hidden among the hair of his forearms. When ashore he wore a trilby hat and a white silk scarf with which my mother several times tried to throttle him.
    'You old soak!' she used to shout. For some reason, in my childish manner, I imagined that the scarf was called a 'soak' and I thought so for many years.
    Dolly was tiny, with a bird's bright eyes. I have two photographs of her, one taken as a young woman with an elegant profile and a mass of lovely hair done like a cottage loaf; the other is with Roy and me and must have been taken only months before her death. Perhaps she knew it would be the final picture for she had expended the money to go to a photographer's studio in Newport. We two little boys are in our best suits, our mother wearing a flowered blouse stands between us. Her eyes gleam fiercely.
    Do I remember them only as caricatures now, plucking from the past only the things they did and said that were noteworthy enough to remain in my boy's memory? Perhaps it is true that you only really get to know your parents when you have grown up and by that time mine were dead. Over the years I have met a good many people who knew my father, mostly men who had sailed with him, and they invariably have some legend to relate. 'Nothing was too hot or too heavy for Jim Thomas to handle,' one old shipmate told me. And as the others always did he smiled at the memory. Apart from my mother I have never found anyone who would say a bad word about him.
    She saw him in a lesser light. Sometimes when he rolled home awash with beer she would not let him into the house so he would break some windows and all the neighbours would peer into the street to see what was going on. It was always enjoyable to hear a fight happening somewhere else. During the war when the windows had once more been damaged by Dad, I told my Cub mistress that a small German bomb which had landed in the garden was to blame.