MORNING SERIAL

OURS was the Gordon Lennox Club in Nixonville, named after a Tory Party election agent of the nineteenth century.

It was a great red-brick-andstone built building with several bars, a dance hall and a snooker room.

It even had a balcony over the street on the first floor, constructed, I cannot help but suppose, for the use of any Tory candidate that might be courageous enough to make a speech from it.

As far as I am aware, none ever did. “The Gordons”, as we called it, lay directly on the route home to Cottrell Street from my grandparents’ house in Crescent Street.

In later years my grandfather would often walk me along Nixonville, holding my hand, taking me home after a day at school followed by tea at number 19.

Strangely, when we got to that part of the street he always guided me to the other side of the road and we would literally “pass by on the other side” of The Gordons, walking past the pithead baths, opposite, instead.

He never explained why he did this and in my childish acceptance of things I never asked him.

Looking back in adulthood I realised that he would not even walk on the pavement outside a Con club, let alone enter one.

I loved those short walks with my grandfather, usually my only time alone with him.

We’d walk along hand in hand, me chattering incessantly and asking the kind of questions children ask in a never ending stream, him taciturn and full of forbearance.

He was a thin wiry man, but with those powerful hands and arms that come as a legacy of a life spent shovelling coal.

At this point in his life he was beginning to stoop just a little, and he breathed heavily after we had been walking even a short way, his lungs having been damaged by coal dust.

One winter, as the days grew shorter, he bought me a little battery-powered “Pifco” torch from Woolworth’s in Merthyr so I could light our way in the gathering dark.