In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

Since the windows of the neighbours' houses had remained intact she must have wondered just how small the bomb was. She was a nice young woman. We had to call her Akala but her name was really Miss Rabbit.
    Also, I think, my mother must have resented deeply the decline in our social standards from whatever they had been. Even when we moved from the two rented rooms in Milner Street to a council house with a view, boasting a pebbledash facade and a bathroom, she felt the relegation. And to think,' she sniffed, 'that we once-upon-a-time had a motorbike and sidecar.'
    There were always, of course, the possibilities presented by my father's life insurance for the sea was ever a perilous business. There was one notable false alarm. During the Spanish Civil War he was a member of the crew of a ship which was bombed in Barcelona harbour and sent to the bottom with all hands. It was an unusual thrill to hear 'David James Thomas, Stoker' listed as dead on the wireless. As it turned out he was the only survivor. He had been, unofficially I imagine, ashore when the dive bomber dropped a single high explosive down the funnel of the vessel and blew it to bits. When he came home he told the emotive tale: 'All bits and pieces floating on the water,' he said. 'And there . . . bobbing about among it all was the cabin boy's hat . . . Ah, he was a good lad too . . .'
    My brother Lindon, who was also gun-running to one combatant or the other in Spain, returned home trembling from the experience. He had seen his friend killed by soldiers guarding the ship when he and a fellow officer had gone on shore to give some food to famished children. When he and Dad eventually exchanged reminiscences at home it became apparent that something was amiss. What was my father doing in such and such a place in November? After all the other side was occupying it then. Carefully they examined their adventures and concluded they had been running guns and other supplies to opposite sides.
    A family of sailors is rarely together. I never remember a time when we were all in one house, which was just as well because there would only have been further arguments. My second brother Harold, known as Hally, was also at sea as an apprentice and Lin was already a junior officer. The old man remained deep in the stokehold.
    Our move to the council house had at least given us something at which to look. It was on the eastern side of Newport, on a long-backed hill, with the roofs of the other, lower, streets serrated beneath our very feet and behind us the first green fields of the countryside. There was a lady called Auntie Blodwyn, although she was not truly a relative, who lived at the foot of the hill, next to Newport County football ground. One day her chimney caught fire and brought a match to a standstill. Several of the spectators came and demonstrated outside her gate, but others were quick to offer congratulations and say that it was the best thing that had happened that afternoon. Newport were never very inspiring or even aspiring. Just after the war they lost 13–1 to Newcastle United. My sister-in-law, Mary, told me that she had private information that the goalkeeper was in no way to blame. I remember her saying it because it was the day I nearly killed myself when I demolished her old chimney. It was over a ruined outhouse in her back garden and, aged fourteen then, I stood on the wall and, with a sledge-hammer, knocked the bricks away from under my own feet. The heavy chimney, followed by the whole building, collapsed. Fortunately I fell on top.
    Money in the nineteenth-thirties was so scarce as to be a novelty. On my sixth birthday I went to school and rashly boasted that I was having a party. Nobody in those days, in that area, had birthday parties. The eyes of my classmates glowed. The lie, once told, was difficult to retract and with abandon I compounded it by going around the infant class and choosing who was to come to the party and who was not; that