MORNING SERIAL

ON a few occasions Mam had no choice but to take me with her to get her hair done, and I soon learned that the maintenance of those beehives and bouffant styles of the 1960s and early ’70s could become the work of an entire, interminable afternoon. I would sit there amid the enormous helmetshaped hair dryers which whined incessantly, the sickly smells of lacquer and ammonia and peroxide all around, and with nothing to look at save the unreadable back copies of Woman’s Own scattered about the salon. I sat and squirmed for what seemed like an eternity, the tedium driving me to the verge of tears, but afraid to shift from my seat for fear of showing up my mother.

‘He’s good as gold, Marion,’ the women would say to her, and Mam would smile and nod as all the while I silently prayed for an escape, boiling and bubbling inside with boredom like a lidded saucepan.

There might eventually be a reward though. Perhaps a trip to the chip shop where I could order six pen’north of chips as a treat or a bag of ‘bits’ for a penny, and you could administer your own salt and vinegar and so always add too much. I loved the little wooden forks you could get for free.

In those days Aberfan Road also boasted a men’s outfitter, a jeweller, a boutique (all women’s clothes shops had suddenly become ‘boutiques’), two bank branches, a haberdasher and the other branch of Stone’s Family Butcher. Squeezed in between somehow were two pubs: the Aberfan Hotel and the Mackintosh Hotel which were not either of them really hotels at all, as well as, at the very northern end of the street, the Aberfan Social Democratic Club, named for the old Marxist Social Democratic Federation, one of the founding associates of the Labour Party at its foundation, back in 1900.

Any adult, and not just one’s parents, was quite likely to call to you as you played in the street to ask for an errand to be run, with a reward on offer of thruppence, or even a tanner, should you accept the job. It never occurred to me to refuse.