My Dad’s Take Over 5 - CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY

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 final one in my dad’s takeover week. Thanks Dad. Hope you come back again for my next break. 

I was worried – just when most ten year olds had finished with that sort of thing, I had started to wet the bed.

I had come to live in Cardiff having spent an idyllic early childhood in the Rhondda Valley. Cardiff could have been Garmisch-Partenkirchen as far as I was concerned. It was a world where freshly scrubbed kids wore socks without holes, a world where my mother put on a posh accent when talking to the neighbours and where my uncle, whose butcher shop we lived behind - as we had done in the Rhondda - started fiddling his middle class customers, a thing he would almost never have done up in the valleys.

At Whitchurch Junior School they didn’t know what to do with this Welshy, podgy little urchin in his bendy, tortoiseshell National Health specs. Eventually they stuck me in the back row of Standard 4A. Sitting the Scholarship fever was gripping the school and as well as grooming Standard 5A swots for the exam, they entered a few children from Standard 4A ‘just for the experience’.

Dear reader – I passed the Scholarship!

I took the letter home from ‘Tosser’ Thomas, our Headmaster.

‘I doan wanna go, Mam’.

‘Lets see what your father says when he comes home from work

shall we, cariad?’

‘I doan wanna go, Dad’.

‘You’re bloody going and that’s it!’

And so I was to become the youngest kid ever to Amo Amas Amat and to add insult to injury, I wouldn’t be going to the school right opposite us in Whitchurch, instead I was going to have to travel daily to some posh place the other side of Cardiff.

Now this is where the worry and the lack of urine retention I mentioned earlier comes in as they started to interfere with my inside leg at Bon Marche and put a tape-measure around my head so that I could be togged up to go to something they called a grammar school – and one that was 10 miles away by train in the bargain.

 At ten past seven on the first morning, underneath a massive plastic satchel and luminous cap and blazer and gripping my season ticket for the train, I started the long trudge down to the station.

I will not bore you with every detail of my first day at Penarth County Grammar School. Suffice it to say that the Initiation Ceremony on the train, masterminded by the Lunatic Fringe of Form 3C, saw my season ticket ritualistically ripped in half and each half placed in each of my shoes which, in turn, were thrown up onto the luggage rack. But they didn’t have it all their own way for I did manage to deploy my pencil - sharpened to perfection by my father the previous evening - sufficiently well to put Fatty Llewelyn off and so prevent my cap from going out of the train window during the ‘I throw/ you pull up the window strap’ part of the proceedings.

Wetting my new short trousers because I didn’t know what the word ‘urinal’ meant seemed quite a catastrophe but thankfully Pongo Daniels, my form teacher, came to my rescue by forcing me to stand facing the radiator, a punishment for eating my Marmite sandwiches while singing Forty Years On in Assembly.

My fear of the unknown continued into the afternoon manifesting itself dramatically when the effect of eating my first ever portion of school dinners’ frogspawn coincided with my first ever intake of

breath in the Physics Lab.

The train journey home was fairly uneventful except that a girl from Form 2B, Myfanwy Evans (from the rougher end of Llandaff North) took a fancy to me. Trouble was, the way to pledge undying love in her neck of the woods was to smash the object of your affection full in the mouth!

I arrived home with the strap of my plastic satchel broken, the yellow braid of my erstwhile pristine blazer a horrible brown colour, the stiffening of the peak of my cap poking out and with half a season ticket clasped in each hand.

My mother, who was out talking politely to the neighbours, took all of this in instantly, as mothers do, as well as noticing the blood down the front of my white shirt from Myfanwy Evans’s uppercut, not to mention catching a whiff of the stale urine wafting upwards from my trouser area.

‘My poor little cariad’ my mother shouted, regressing into her Rhondda Valley vernacular to the disgust of the neighbours, ‘whatever sort of first day have you had at Big School, my bachgen bach?’

‘Duw Mam’ I said, ‘it was brilliant!’
Peter Davies