Thursday 30 October 2014

My Dad’s Take Over 4 - CAN I DO YOU NOW SIR?

For the time while  I am away on my holidays I have given the keys of my blog to my dad - Peter Davies. I hope he takes good care of it This is the fourth story in my dad’s takeover week.


It was difficult being an eight-year-old towards the end of the Second World War. It wasn’t the things you had to do without like oranges, bananas, best butter or even underpants. In fact, when I finally got to tasting a banana I wondered what the adults were making all the fuss about - even after I discovered you had to peel the things!
No, what got me was the fact that most adults who surrounded me thought that the topics of war, politics and even the boy and girl thing, were their territory alone. Not only did children have to be ‘seen and not heard’ but us eight-year-olds had to pretend we were blind, deaf and brain dead, too.
But wasn’t it us who got evacuated? Wasn’t it me and Ianto who found foreign money up Cwm Field after Italian prisoners of war escaped from Bridgend Camp? Wasn’t it Standard 4 who saw their teacher, Mr Llew Pritchard, safely home in the blackout after he’d got hold of black-market whisky from Viv the Spiv?
Sorry to say all the stuff Freud had spouted pre-war about child emancipation seemed lost on adults inhabiting my corner of the Rhondda Valley in 1945. The truth is that any self-respecting eight-year-old has a congenital need to know yet what were we confronted with? Slogans like WALLS HAVE EARS and, would you believe, BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM!
The situation did not daunt us in the slightest, of course, for us kids listened to Winston Churchill on the wireless, too, and our inquisitiveness wasn’t going to be snuffed out just because of some old war. We fought them in the streets, we fought them in the hills and never in the field of human conflict was so many questions asked by so many kids to so many adults.
‘Who’s Lord Haw Haw please, Mr Lewis?’ I’d never seen Pastor Hezekiah Lewis, our Pentecostal Minister, without hispiano-accordion and he played a loud chord on it and said ‘Alleluia – Praise the Lord’ but, come to think of it,
that was his response to anyone who spoke to him.
‘What are Bile Beans, Mam?’ I thought this was quite a reasonable query but it sent my mother into her ‘I haven’t got time to stand here....’ mode although it didn’t stop a further outburst of ‘...what with your father and rationing and  -look at your hands, have you been on the coal tip again?’ in fact, I nearly didn’t ask her my follow-up question about medically approved laxatives.
It was unwise of me to ask my Dad about wartime coalition governments so soon after he’d boxed my years for singing Mairzy Doats for the umpteenth time. My ARP-weary father uttered several phrases of which Pastor Hezekiah Lewis would have disapproved together with a remarkable suggestion about where he’d stick Income Tax if he ever met someone called Hugh Dalton.
Hence question after question was asked andq uestion after question went unanswered. Once I had to stand in the corner at school facing a big poster which read CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES having had a bet with Ianto that I wouldn’t ask Miss if she was thinner or fatter than Anne Shelton. Then I lost a week’s sweet ration by asking my Aunty Morwen if those pictures of Jane in the Daily Mirror were called strip cartoons because Jane kept taking her clothes off.
The war was coming to an end and I still couldn’t find out why every American GI who gave me some gum wanted to know ifI had a sister, why we needed to hate a bloke called Mussolini and why there might soon be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.
Everyone had collected in the British Restaurant to listen to an announcement about VJ Day on the Home Service. Ianto and I looked around us and started to count all those adults who had avoided answering our questions over the last year. The announcement was made and soon the excited chatter died down. Always eager to take advantage of a room full of adults and a lull in the conversation, I suddenly piped up ‘Dad, why has Hitler only got one...?’
My father had read the situation perfectly and by the time I had finished my question he was past Thomas and Evans and half-way down Llwynypia Street.
It was left to Pastor Hezekiah Lewis to break the horrendous silence that had fallen over the gathering by playing a loud chord on his piano-accordion,

‘Alleluia’ he said, ‘Praise the Lord!’
Peter Davies

1 comment:

  1. Haha:-) a great funny story for the start of the day:-) and that reminded me of "Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling:

    "But there was one Elephant--a new Elephant--an Elephant's Child--who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. And he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his 'satiable curtiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of 'satiable curtiosity! […]
    One fine morning in the middle of the Precession of the Equinoxes this 'satiable Elephant's Child asked a new fine question that he had never asked before. He asked, 'What does the Crocodile have for dinner?' Then everybody said, 'Hush!' in a loud and dretful tone, and they spanked him immediately and directly, without stopping, for a long time".

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