MORNING SERIAL

IT IS a rapid, unprecedented growth. My father, builder and architect, prospers. If it is 1904, I am seven and in a preparatory school set across from the park that has been laid out by the Council on land donated for the recreation and leisure of all citizens. At home my mother fusses over me, an only child, and our two live-in maidservants tut-tut over my handicap. In 1910, because in sleep the years shuffle to their own rhythm, I am 13 and a reluctant boarder at an English Public School just across the channel. I am excused sports of all kinds. I do not mind. I do mind being removed from the fervent life of the coalport city. It breathes the air of a future world, of destiny, not the somnolence of the gentlemanly training I am given. I yearned to be home.

To be going with my father, looking up at him, as he strides out. I am determined to keep up. We hurry past the glitter of glass-roofed arcades of shops and the display windows of the cave-like department stores which dominate the city centre. They are both the frippery and the essence of the modern world we know we are blessed to inhabit.

Our destination lies over the bridges, following the churning river which comes to us from the hills to empty itself as a whirlpool of turbulence, into the city’s great Docks. Towering coal hoists filled, and tipping lump coal by day and night into the holds of waiting ships, all moored together as if a continuous set of decks. Coal trucks, mile upon sinuous mile of them backed up on rail tracks, all laden to the brim with best Welsh steam coal, crags of bituminous fuel to make the whole world turn, spun on its axis across all the ocean by this Welsh gold.

And I listen intently to him, Mostyn Arthur Lloyd, architect and speculative dreamer, tell me, Taliesin Arthur Lloyd, called Tal from the beginning by him, my father, who we now are and how we have been fashioned, and of all the world which thereby so knows us, and of what closer acquaintance with it will hold for me.