In Passing

Dedicated to my father

Eric Valentine Baker

who started me off down the path of the Unexpected.

In Passing

A Welshman’s bizarre adventures from Merthyr to Mecca

Randall Baker

First impression: 2019

© Copyright Randall Baker and Y Lolfa Cyf., 2019

The contents of this book are subject to copyright, and may not be reproduced by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

Cover illustration:

Text illustrations: Iva Tsankova

ISBN: 978-1-78461-793-6

Published and printed in Wales on paper from well-maintained forests by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

website www.ylolfa.com

e-mail [email protected]

tel 01970 832 304

fax 832 782

Before You Start

There are two questions to be addressed here, viz., What’s this all about? and Why should I read this? Taking them in the order posed, I can only resort to repeating a phrase that has dogged me all my life, namely, Why do these things always happen to you? This has been posed for decades by the politer element among my friends. The less-believing are of the Oh, come off it! school of criticism, and resort to some variant of You’re making this up.

Chief amongst the heretics was my late wife, especially where stories about my brother were concerned,¹ frequently remarking in company apropos of some colourful reminiscence, Oh, that’s just one of his tales.

After we were married, she travelled with me to Wales, and encountered my brother de-hexing his car at midnight from a local witch’s curse. She took me into the corridor and, looking alarmed, said, "You never told me these things were all true!" That moment of truth is offered to all the doubting Thomases out there.

So, the two elements in the book are: (a) there must be something worthwhile in these stories if people consistently challenge their veracity, so they may deserve a wider audience, and (b) they have stood the test of time, starting in the Welsh Valleys of the late 1940s and 1950s, and moving to Fiji and New Zealand in the 1980s and the State of Indiana in the mid ‘Noughties’.

The real theme, since I suppose I am expected to have something to hold this book together, is the continual presence of the unexpected, and sometimes inexplicable, in my life – and I have assembled here but a small sample of such cases. Truly, some of these stories I simply cannot explain – I know only that they happened. Furthermore, the pervasive, rather oblique and offbeat Welsh way of looking at things and, worse, writing about them, must have a significant role in what follows. Truly, some of these episodes were totally disorienting or even alarming at the time (it is hard to find lightheartedness and wry wit in a double homicide in California, commonplace though they may be in that bizarre spot), but that’s just the way it appears when I write it down – probably a ‘Celtic thing’.

I confess, right away, to a lifelong fascination with the bizarre. No, I had better correct that word or it will spawn thousands of videos on YouTube. I mean, the truly unusual and anomalous, such as the fact that Spain has a town situated totally inside France; Germany and Italy have towns totally within Switzerland, and that, oddly, you have to go through Canada to get to two towns in different parts of the USA from the rest of the USA. Just how bad this affliction with anomaly can be is illustrated by the fact that, with my colleague Dr Roger Mallion, I spent 24 years researching why the Prussian-Dutch² border didn’t meet for 100 years after 1815, leaving an entire town in a triangular no-man’s land called the ‘Neutral Territory’. This fascination resulted in a slim, though passably impressive, volume that elicited a comment from HM The King of the Belgians.³

That’s as much as I can do by way of explanation – or was it justification? I am lucky to have worked in over 60 countries, adding a global flavour to what, at first, I took – parochially – to be the recurring weirdness of Wales. I still have no answer to the ‘why me?’ question in terms of the recurrence of these odd events, though I am very grateful for the everlasting interest these happenings have provided. Best of all, they continue.

Acknowledgements

My first thanks must go to the talented young Bulgarian artist Iva Tsankova. She provided all the artwork you see within these pages, and it will also be used in the Bulgarian-language edition of this book.

I’d also like to thank Mumph for his brilliant cover artwork. I think it conveys the bizarreness of the incidents contained in this book admirably!

My assistant, Liliya Hristova has kept me organised in not losing files or forgetting which book I am working on, my name, etc.

I have really enjoyed working with Y Lolfa, especially Carolyn Hodges, who oversaw the editing process, the de-Americanisation of the text, and the tossing overboard of terms that I had not realised had now become archaic (like me, I suppose). Thanks also to Jen Llywelyn for her proofreading skills.

Finally, I have to thank Merthyr for a unique upbringing, including being educated in a castle.

Randall Baker

Tyn y Pant, Powys

April 2019

First instalment:

Being British

1 – Train of thought

Wales, 1940s and 1950s

Though my father could remember the configuration of the braking system on a 1922 Trojan car with wooden wheels, he rarely had much grasp of what had happened during the last 24 hours. Everyone learned to live with this situation, and knew that glasses, gloves, etc. had a half-life of about twenty minutes. He also should never have been allowed to travel by train, for reasons that will become obvious. In fact, I remember only two occasions when I travelled by train with him: the first time was in the 1950s going to London from the south of Wales. I recall that before departing the platform at Paddington, he tipped the driver of the huge green steam locomotive; something that I have never seen done since. The second time was slowly proceeding home from some business in central Wales. This journey was through the Brecon Beacons – one of the loveliest, and least known, landscapes in the country. The train was a ‘local’; the locomotive, of course, being steam powered, and pulling only two very old carriages adorned with sepia prints of people in straw hats in Cornwall around the time of the War of 1914, or of brave viaducts along the route of Brunel’s Great Western Railway – whose logo the carriages still bore. The whole journey had a bucolic timelessness that I remember to this day.

The pace was slow, as befitted the stately dignity of an earlier age: indeed, we could have disembarked and walked alongside much of the way, because it was a mighty climb through the mountains up to the Heads of the Valleys watershed, over which we would eventually have to go. There was a sense of being comfortably trapped in this already 150-year-old means of locomotion, and being required to abide by the mores of another age. My great-grandfather would have found nothing much different about the conditions of our journey that day, click-clacking along in our time capsule following the rails his contemporaries had laid through this wild and sweeping landscape. There was also something wonderfully anthropomorphic about the locomotive’s laboured breathing as it struggled against the continual incline. But no one cared to go any faster; we had, perforce, nothing else to do but sit back and contemplate the wonders of nature, and feel a sense of common cause with the sheep that remained quite unmoved by our passage through their green domain. Furthermore, and I remember this well, the sun was shining – which alone, in Wales, should have burned the day into my memory. At every stop, my father descended to chat with the driver of this timeless beast (whose days were numbered until 1968, when the steam engine was hunted to extinction by ‘Progress’).

Hot work, I imagine? was how he opened the dialogue with the driver.

It’s a ’eck of a sight ’otter for ’im, the driver replied, pointing over his shoulder at the fireman moving coal from tender to firebox.

Shuntin’ see, that’s what this tank engine is for, not bloody mountain-climbing, mun, the fireman remarked, popping up over the driver’s shoulder. Can’t bloody stop shovellin’ for a minute, mun. We’re usin’ every ounce see, every ounce, he emphasised, his face a mixture of sweat and coal dust.

Well then, you’d better get back to it, boyo, the driver remarked, with a big wink at the two of us. You’ve lost us about 2 lbs of ounces just standing there nattering.

You have to understand that for a child of my age at that time, there was nothing more awe-inspiring than the hissing, well-oiled, brass-bound magic that was a locomotive. The people who tamed and controlled this beast were magicians, and it was every boy’s dream to be an engine driver. Of course, at that point, I had never seen an aeroplane or a steamship. So, as I stood in awe, the conversation continued. Maybe if we walk alongside, it will relieve some of the strain and the fireman can have a bit of a rest? my father enquired – his tone serious, but the squeeze of his hand on mine giving away the joke.

No, that’s alright. Not far now, better get in, came the voice of the fireman from somewhere near the jaws of Hell.

Although nothing particularly odd occurred when I travelled with him, things had a tendency to go decidedly awry, if not downright amok, when my father travelled alone by train. Well, actually, that is not entirely accurate, for had he been strictly speaking travelling alone, there would have been no problems. In each case, calamity resulted because an audience was present.

First, contrary to the English reticence about exchanging words with people to whom you have not been introduced – even if you are married to them – the Welsh have absolutely no problem with this. They size you up for a moment, then lead in with some opening line such as: I see Swansea lost again. I wonder why they bother. It’s rediclus.⁴

This approach does not work in England, and is actually not an ice-breaker so much as a way to provoke the onset of another glacial age. This random intrusion of different strangers into one’s personal space is one of the hazards of using public transport, unless you are rich and can avoid the hoi polloi. But even then the nouveau riche can infiltrate if all it takes to do so is money.

My father simply had no sense of this. First of all, he rarely used public transport at the best of times and so, when he did, it was, as he would say, a bit of an occasion. He did, once, however, manage to put public transport to good use without ever getting on board.

We were attempting to stay with old friends in Grays, Essex. My father’s certainty about where they lived proved illusory, and eventually there we were in the car wandering the Essex marshes like some lost souls in an M R James story. God forbid, though, that we should give up and ask someone, or buy a map – no self-respecting man would do that, even now. My father was saying, I’m absolutely sure that it is in this direction, when he suddenly engaged first gear and took us off in the opposite direction. Because of my worsening mood, I thought it best not to say anything. After his sudden change of direction, we continued driving for quite some time. And it was becoming really irritating, because he found it necessary to pull up every time the double-decker bus in front of us stopped.

Look, you have a completely clear road, let’s pass this filthy thing, I exclaimed, for the bus was belching out black clouds of used diesel fuel.

Can’t do that, see, he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

Why ever not? I asked, because we could have passed the bus three times in the period it had taken to have this conversation.

He didn’t answer, but just extended his finger toward the bus. I could not imagine what he meant until I realised that one of the destinations of this bus, displayed on the panel on the back, was Grays. It took a while, and our lungs were probably poisoned, but we arrived in time for lunch.

A falling out among passengers

It was in that very same county of Essex that one of father’s greatest rail adventures began, but at a much earlier time – the late 1940s, in fact. He was in Dagenham, where the Ford Motor Company has a plant the size of a small country. Why he was there I have no idea, and since I was four, I don’t suppose I asked. He was staying with the self-same friends who lived along the bus route mentioned above, but on this occasion, my father travelled each day by train from Grays to Dagenham and vice versa. Things were still pretty austere in that early post-War period, but at least he had the adventure of being in the big city.

As he travelled back each night with the other commuters, he became fascinated by one thing. The passengers seemed to know when to get off without even glancing out of the window. The train would start to slow down, at which signal they would fold their newspapers, put them in their briefcases, and pick up hats and umbrellas. Then they would line up behind the door, and then as the train shuddered to a stop they would step down, and walk determinedly out onto the platform without even the merest glance at the station name. My father, on the other hand, was provincially paranoid about missing his stop and checked every station platform name board along the way many times. So, of course, he was very intrigued to know how they did it. It began to nag at him.

He had plenty of time to work it out, travelling every evening during one of the worst winters ever recorded in Britain (1947). It is necessary to explain here the configuration of the carriage in which he sat each day. There was no corridor, either in the middle or at the side. The carriage was divided by a series of bulkheads into small compartments with two bench seats facing each other and a door at either side of the compartment.

By the time he boarded, many of the passengers were already in place and well into their newspaper. Each evening on the journey home he watched, and it began to drive him mad. How did they do it? He could not fathom this problem but was not going to rest until he had the answer, as is normal for the Welsh. Then he would no longer have to leap up every time the train stopped to see where he was. Unable to work it out, he knew that, eventually, he would have to ask.

And so he worked up the determination to do so, though he wanted to wait until it was just him and one other person, thus reducing the embarrassment for both parties.

Eventually, everything came together. It was a particularly bad night and the temperature was already well below freezing. Shivering passengers exited into the snow until, at last, there was only one person remaining in the compartment with him. He would do it – now.

He thought about how to approach the question, but while he was thinking about that, the switching points froze further up the track, which meant that my father’s train could not move into its next section. There is no danger if this problem occurs, because the signal light that faces the train will remain red, and so the train cannot proceed.

Unaware of the mechanical problem ahead, my father leaned forward and opened his mouth to pose the big question. Before he could utter a single word, the train slowed down rather abruptly and stopped. The man folded his newspaper with military precision, picked up his briefcase, put on his hat, opened the door swiftly, and fell out onto the tracks.

My father watched all this with a sense of wonder, because he had clearly seen that they were in the middle of a frozen nowhere when the train slowed down. Now he would not be able to ask the question. In addition, the system had clearly not had all the kinks worked out of it after all, viz., the lemming passenger who had just dropped out of sight. While he was thinking about that, he suddenly realised that the hapless passenger might be in mortal danger. Or dead, which is immortal danger, I suppose. So he jumped to his feet and peered down from the still-open door. There, below him, was the passenger, soaked, ashen-faced, covered in snow and dazed, but reassuringly still very much of this world, looking back at him.

Here, give me your hand – you can’t stay out there on the tracks, father said and extended his very strong arm. He more or less manhandled the city gent to the safety of the compartment, though the hat was definitely a casualty.

Are you all right? my father asked. No bones broken, that sort of thing?

The man gradually eased himself up from the floor onto the seat he had so recently vacated. He looked intact but very, very embarrassed.

I can’t imagine why I did that, he said, totally puzzled.

Yes, but you are lucky. You could have been killed, you know – the fall, a passing train, and here we are, almost Christmas.

Twenty-one years! said the man, suddenly and loudly.

Twenty-one years what? my father enquired, confused.

"I have travelled this line for twenty-one years. Every working day. Why