Welsh Journals

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(Over the Tidejield' PETER GILL I ROUNDED the comer into Constellation Street and paused for a moment to look at the street; and recollected how, at this very point, when I was younger and returned from an afternoon in town or at the baths I would become suddenly tired and long to lie down. This was the point where, having crossed Adamsdown Square, a sudden tired- ness of walking would come over me and the short journey up the street and over the bridge into Splott seemed a terrible self-inflicted torture. How long even the shortest journey seemed to me then, and how the thought of a whole hour of doing anything seemed un- endurable when I was younger. I remembered walking through Tremorfa on a winter night-the small windows of the council houses seeming suddenly beautiful and full of the night's glamour when the curtains were drawn, the room lights behind making them into squares of glowing pretty colour. The plain green or red linen ones I liked best, as they glowed vivid and sensuous within the neat framework of their windows that in the day were drab and cheap; while frightened and subdued windows turned in the day time into the heaviest and expensive materials of weave or brocade. School seemed then an all important factor in my life. My constant lateness, the unrealised desire to mitch, the awful guilt when something had been stolen and I tortured myself with the thought that I might have done it without knowing, or someone have planted it in my desk; all my days filled with some project in my imagination or with the terror of some new catastrophe-a lost cap or undone homework; dawdling home from school and the stopping to look as the double- decker bus passed full of retarded children from 'special' schools: I would wait and watch that bus stop and start again and look at the people inside: the older ones, made more stupid by their age, laughing tastelessly; the ones with big heads and normal bodies sitting mute like tulips. I had been told when I was younger that they were 'simple'. Simplicity seemed an enviable quality, but what they were didn't