Laurie Graham - Mr Starlight

I was six when Sel came on the scene. I’ll never forget the day. We’d had team games that afternoon, out in the yard at Bright Street Infants because it was such a nice day and I’d been called out to the front to show the class good ball control. I was feeling very pleased with myself and then when I got to the corner of Ninevah Street I bumped into Mrs Edkins.

‘Cledwyn,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a new bab at your house so you’d better come to me for your tea tonight.’

I ran home so fast, to see if it was true about the bab and beg Mam not to send me to Mrs E’s. Normally my sister Dilys could have given me my tea. She was fourteen. Only she was on holiday at Aunty Gwenny’s, getting over tonsillitis. But when I ran in the door there she was, back from the country, and Mam was on the couch in her nightie and His Numps lay in a drawer out of the sideboard, all wrapped up in blankets and a woolly bonnet.

First thing I said was, ‘Can Dilys give me my tea? I’ll be good.’

Mam said, ‘Look at you, in a muck sweat. What have I told you about running? See what’s in the crib?’

‘Is it a bab?’ I said. I’d never really seen one close up. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘Under a gooseberry bush,’ Mam said. ‘Now go and wash your face and then you can give him a kiss.’

I said, ‘How long is he stopping?’ and Mam and Dilys both laughed. The main thing was, I didn’t have to go to the Edkinses for my tea, as long as I went about on tiptoe and didn’t wake the baby. I hated going next door. There was nothing to play with and Mrs E smelled of fried bread and sometimes she didn’t button up her blouse properly, so you could see things, unless you closed your eyes tight. Dilys wanted to name the bab Skippy, like in the cartoons, and I wanted him to be called Billy Walker, like the Aston Villa captain, but Mam said neither of those were proper names and he’d to be called Selwyn. Selwyn Amos, like I was Cledwyn Amos, after her brother Amos who’d died in the Battle of the Somme. Dad wasn’t around at that time so he didn’t get a say. Even in 1928 it could be hard finding the right kind of work. A man had to be willing to travel. By the time he turned up again the new bab had opened his eyes properly and was all signed up as Selwyn Amos. It was official. Dad didn’t seem to mind.

According to Mam, our dad had had a college education, though where he’d had it we never knew, and it didn’t appear to have done him much good because he was always getting laid off, or having a falling out that wasn’t his fault and being sent on his way. It was a good thing for us that Mam had a profession.

Mam met our dad when she came to Birmingham before the First World War. She’d been in Oswestry in service, and then she’d come to a big house in Edgbaston, to be a governess to somebody’s kiddies, teaching them their ABC and piano and manners. She was Anne Roberts, from Pentrefoelas, and she was quite the traveller of the Roberts family. Her sister Gwenny married Rhys Elias and never went any further than Denbigh.

Aunty Gwenny and Uncle Rhys had three sons, all named John because only the youngest one lived, and he did pretty well for himself. He ended up in Chester, in wholesale fruit and veg.

Dad’s people were the Boffs and they came from the Shrewsbury area. I don’t think we ever met any of them.

Aunty Gwenny didn’t approve of Dad. ‘You could have done better, Annie,’ she always said and she nicknamed him ‘Gypsy’, which stuck.

But I never heard Mam say a word against him. ‘Gwenny doesn’t understand,’ she’d say. ‘She’s not seen the world the way I have. Your father’s overqualified for the work that’s on offer around here.’ As to why we didn’t all move somewhere nearer to work that was up to his high level of aptitude, that was never gone into. Actually, it quite suited us, his not often being there. It was only a small house and he was a big man. And Mam kept cheerful enough. She had her piano pupils and there was always Uncle Teilo if she needed a new light bulb screwing in.

I’ve often wondered if our dad’s problem was drink. We were teetotal so we never had alcohol in the house, but money did seem to run through his fingers and he used to weep sometimes, too, which might have been brought on by the demon drink.

But Mam always stayed calm. ‘Go down to Sturdy’s,’ she’d say. ‘Mr Edkins says they’re setting men on. Go and ask at the gate.’ She’d give him the bus fare and a bit extra, to help him feel like a man, but she never let him see where she’d fetched it from. Mam had hiding places all over. In her shoe sometimes. In her brassiere. ‘And remember not to mention your college education,’ she’d say.

But he’d usually come back with a long face and a story. He was too old. Or the powers that be had it in for him. I question whether he even went to Sturdy’s gate and asked.

I liked having a bab in the family. After Sel arrived I didn’t get so much attention paid to me, which meant I could stay out in the street later, practising my ball control. And with Dilys helping in the kitchen I could get away with things Mam didn’t allow, like not eating my crusts. Then, just before Sel’s first Christmas, Dilys got a start as a jam tart packer at Oven Fresh, which meant Mam had all the housework to do again and I could get more time on the piano.

I loved my music. Mam had children sent to her for lessons who had to be threatened with the stick before they’d practise, but not me. And I caught on fast, too. Mam wasn’t a great one for dishing out praise but she did tell me once I had natural ability.

Sel was a wakeful type of baby and he only had to see me lift the lid of the piano to start smiling. That’s how I picture us then: him propped up in the corner of the couch, big and bonny, blowing bubbles and dribbling down his bib, and me playing him my little pieces, still too short to reach the pedals.

After he learned to walk he’d tag along behind me everywhere and on school mornings, when I had to go and leave him, he’d cry as though his heart was broken.

Mam’d say, ‘You’re too soft, Cledwyn. Just walk out of the door and don’t be so daft. Babies are meant to cry.’

I never really understood the wisdom of that.

So me and Sel were close from the beginning although, of course, as the years went by we had our ups and downs. By the time he started at Bright Street I was nearly ready to move on to the big school. I didn’t want him trailing behind me, expecting me to play with him like I did at home, but one thing about Sel, wherever he went people liked him. He made some little friends of his own that first week and that was how he carried on. He was no footballer and I don’t even remember him joining in a game of conkers, but he got along with the girls, like Vera Muddimer and Joan Wagstaff, skipping with a rope and playing Kings and Queens and getting up little concerts. He joined the Cub Scouts but he only went once. He said, ‘I’m not going back.’

And Mam said, ‘You don’t have to, darling, not if you don’t like it.’

I said, ‘You made me go. You said I had to persevere.’

‘Selwyn’s cut from a different cloth,’ she said. ‘He’s not tough, like you.’

So he was allowed to stay at home and develop what Mam called ‘the domestic arts’. Stitching an S on all his hankies. Rearranging Mam’s ornaments. Decorating biscuits. Dilys used to bring bags of mis-shapes home from Oven Fresh and he loved titivating them with coloured icing and silver balls. He could be quite artistic. I was already working at Greely’s by the time he passed for the Grammar School. I said to Mam, ‘I hope he’ll get on all right there.’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she said.