MORNING SERIAL
“DEAR Billy,
I’ve often toyed with the idea of writing you a letter when you’re too young – not quite 10 yet – to understand it and yet when, with a life to come, I can speak more openly and fully to you here than, perhaps, when you are older and, believe me, face to face is often less than transparent.
But then it seems so artificial and I would not wish to write like some latter-day on-high purveyor of advice. So this is not, wherever this finds you and whatever you will have done by this time of reading, any advice at all. We will, no doubt, exhaust that, wastefully I suspect, as you grow up and away from me. No, this is information. Of a sort. Information I include here with the notes and for a work of research I began and will not now finish.
That I started at all is down to your mother. Shortly after we married in 1953 – amidst the ballyhoo of a Coronation year and the stupid b ****** s with their flag-bedecked street parties. Here, of all places, but I do go on, don’t I, so I’ll stop Here! – I showed the two love letters to her. Gwennie was my mother. I had had nothing to do with her and no contact with her until the letters came through the post in late 1952. They’d been sent to the address of my cousin Jimmy’s mother, her sister, long deceased, and so then passed onto me by him. It seems I had a half-brother and he wrote, at her “dying request” he said, from Birmingham to give me the correspondence. Nothing else. No message. No explanation. Frankly, I did nothing. Not even a reply.
Your own mother’s curiosity was something else. She worked out Llanwern to be, possibly, the country house, ironically enough demolished in 1952, and “David” or “Dai” to be DA Thomas, the coalowner of ill repute, so far as I’m concerned, who became Lord Rhondda. Well, well, I hear you say. If true, the capitalist b ***** d was shagging my proletarian mam. Joke here, eh Billy? And, bigger joke yet, I was the b ***** d she was carrying, to be born on December 28, Holy Innocents’ Day, 1915. Or not so wholly innocent, as it turned out.
CONTINUES TOMORROW