MORNING SERIAL

HIS old man had been to Spain before package holidays. He said he’d gone as a fellow traveller, and grinned, with the alibi of art-history research as excuse for the stuffed money belt he’d worn for the Party.

It was always the only Party, even when he stopped working and voting for it. Mona had fretted but gone with him. Was it there, Billy would wonder, that he was conceived in 1957? Bill Paynter himself, now the president in South Wales, had gripped the old man’s hand and asked him to go.

The old man said you could never forget Paynter’s handshake nor his unrelenting eyes. No forgiveness in them. Not for himself anyway. His own first wife had died in childbirth, in 1940, leaving the young revolutionary with twins to raise.

*****

HIS old man had thought of Ceri as a son until he considered him to be yet another prodigal. Early on, joining the old man’s class he was soon, by calculated choice, attached to an older generation as an acolyte.

And so perfectly positioned to link generations, though cannily dismissive of his own contemporaries when it mattered. A potential leader. The working-class hero he would fashion himself into, both for himself and for the needs of others, in the 1970s.

By then the leather jacket and rolled Brylceemed quiff had given way to a more classuniversal garb, one that was more suburban Rolling Stones than subterranean rock ’n’ roll.

Either way, whether on his home patch or further afield, Ceri, with his easy, self-assured manner and gentle, yet chiding, malice, offered himself as knowable and serious and exotic and welcoming, open to a future that embraced change, not as tribal as the more common ingrowing political follicle.

One like the old man soon seemed to be. Ceri would hug you close and clap you to his confidence. He was difficult to resist. The act was no act, the authenticity was sincere, and not to believe in him was to show a lack of faith in the purpose.