Once by Andrew McNeillie Read Free Book Online Page A

(so confidingly intime ), Beryl Reid, Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe (I thought your father was going to die), Jimmy James and Norman Evans ‘Over the Garden Wall’ (...you can taste that cat in the custard).
    If it seems quaint now, it seemed immortal reality then, like Bob Bananas in the Christmas pantomime, like Mr Alcock’s homemade ice-cream, and the question you loved as you drooled to watch him stack up the cone and round it and firm it into place, deftly, generously, with the back of his scoop: ‘Any flavouring?’ Flavouring being a kind of syrup, orange or strawberry, also used in milkshakes, that he’d drizzle over the ice, and you licked it before you were out of the shop, because it was so lovely. It was possible as a child to recognize the oddity of Mr Alcock, as clearly I did, for so I recall him, in his dairyman’s white or some days buff coat, his little bit of a moustache, selling sweets and ice-cream, in a northern English accent. Two and fro he’d go between the shop and a kind of cold parlour backroom. But you didn’t think of him as anything but a fixture in the world, a given, who’d always been there and always would be, in his little shop near the corner to school, on the Abergele Road, turning an honest penny.
    In the fiscal regime my father oversaw, we McNeillie children had much less pocket money than most of our friends, with fewer and smaller increases. We made do. It was good for us. We weren’t ground down as were many boys I knew at school, some of them heartbreakingly, living in post-war prefabs by the gasworks, fathers away, in the merchant marine or the forces, or just absent without leave. But to my shame I remember once at a hardware counter stealing a Christmas present for my father, for want of enough to buy a little green millstone, with a red handle and a bracket to fix it to a bench, having obtained from a bran-tub in the village hall, for all I had, bars of soap for my mother.
    I found that millstone, still functional, the stone worn down low, among my father’s tools, when he died. Like a ghost, the millstone round the neck of my childish guilt, stared at me, questioning my character.
    So truth will out. And here it is, for a wonder, guilt become shame at last.

    * * *
    When Matthew Arnold visited an Eisteddfod in Llandudno in the 1860s, he famously described our strip of coast as anglicised, and wrote off Wales to the east as not really Welsh. Among many another misjudgement in his outrageously imperialistic essay, this view was a travesty of Wales, even in Wales as I knew it, so many years later. For anglicised Wales was only a coastal ribbon of resort conurbation, half a mile thick, at the most. It’s largely white-settler mentality was as ignorant as any to be found elsewhere across the Empire. But being on England’s doorstep, it was all the more overpowering because not only was it deaf, it was also invisible to itself... as could not be said of arrangements in Asia or Africa. There at least the white man stands out like a sore thumb.
    Truly Welsh Wales was a short walk up the Red Wood road, and Welsh life itself existed in the towns, like an urban fox, and however abused and mocked by incomers, and slighted by Whitehall, it held its ground, in chapels, in bilingual versatility, and would not die, though it was hard to see how it could live, and impossible except as a daydream to imagine it ever flourishing again as now it does, as not so much miraculously as by sustained dissent over centuries, quiet community, native wit, and at last the winds of change reaching home, having nowhere else to go.
    Matthew Arnold had wanted to see the ‘English wedge’ driven into the heart of Welsh Wales. At the same time it was largely by his influence Celtic Studies came into being in Britain. He wanted Welsh to be a dead language, for academic study only. (Not that even the ancient dead languages are dead.) You can’t be