Names – A true flawed tale of memory and conspiracy

Ray started me off on the puzzle. He and I went for refreshment in a Bath teashop a year and a half ago. I drank tea, Ray coffee. Ray’s drink was cold by the time he came to finish it; indeed in his usual fashion it was cold when he came to start it some thousands of words into our exchange. But finish it he did, unlike his report of his doings and his rehearsal of anxieties, which were never close to conclusion in any sense of the word.

We talked about his moving house, he and Tania, and how he was catching up with her in generating enthusiasm for the task. Just as well, because she had already moved late in 2010 and now in 2011 he had yet to follow. We talked about books and the radio and how in memory the two were almost interchangeable. It’s the words, you see.

After he moved we chatted on the phone a last time, though there was no intimation. I was at my desk while he enjoyed spring sunshine looking at last over the river Colne at Wivenhoe, its currents and its boats. At some point my computer’s voice transcription turned itself on. Uncorrected, it did rather badly and recorded even more nonsense than we talked, though without the fun we had. An odd momento, but fitting.

The order of service for the funeral of my friend showed him before I first knew him. Not as a child; it was as an adult that he was being celebrated, a grown-up, father, husband, photographer – innovative in his day – a lover of pictures and books, a keen eye, a teller of stories. The photo was of a younger man, a smoker at that time, in a pose that showed a certain self-regard or perhaps a habit of seeming that way that had persisted into the years when he did not feel so positive at all.

We had often talked about this man – his younger self - and in the teashop that last time we did so again. He had once adopted the conceit of the name Caradoc, just as I had for a while aspired to Llewelyn and took it as a middle name until the need faded. It was not the princely associations that attracted us, but something less presumptuous. The re-infiltration of the Welsh a few score miles back into England lacks the intensity and drama of the Jewish or Irish diasporas or the urgent Bosnian and Somali scatterings. Nonetheless it induces a gentle ache that is of no great trouble and is even pleasurable until it is made acute by the scorn of those for whom the distinction between Wales and England is unimportant, baffling.

This photographer - a visual, picture man - set me off on a trail of names that taught me something of myself. ‘All those Thomases,’ he said while we were comparing books by Welshmen we had just discovered or we knew of old . ‘All those bloody Thomases . Where did the buggers come from?’

‘And you,’ he said, ‘all those Davids. David, and you’re Welsh. It’s not what you’d call distinctive is it?’

*****

I was six in Coronation year. My mother always referred to 1953 in that way, never by the number. At that time in our sitting room – the lounge – there was no TV, but we had a radiogram, a vast, polished, mahogany- veneered piece of kit that begrudgingly shared one wall of the room with the doorway. Under the lid, deep and curved at the front, revolved a turntable for playing records in double quick time, 78rpm, complete with autochanger whose mechanism I had proudly mastered. To its right, knobs and dials promised the esoterica of radio studios in Brussels, Hilversum, Moscow, Droitwich, Lille, Prague, Belgrade as well as the familiar delights of the BBC. The dials glowed amber, especially thrilling in the dark, the Light Programme in deep tones announcing Jet Morgan and his crew in Journey into Space.

The front of the monster was dominated by a triptych of woven cloth panels that concealed the loudspeaker, but to the careful observer also revealed, at its fringes, the glow of diodes for both radio and record amplification. The space my father had, by his extravagant purchase, leased to the muses of broadcast speech and recorded music could not have been far short of a cubic yard, more than ample to kennel a small dog such as might want to listen to his master’s voice.

The earliest news item I can recall and my oldest memory of any of the bloody Thomases are one. Through the good offices of the radiogram I heard the BBC’s announcement that one of their favourite sons had died. But even though I can remember no earlier specific of Dylan, it could not have been my first intelligence of him, for I knew who he was and ran to tell my father.

Whether the same instrument offered us immediately the controversies around Dylan’s death, I do not know, but during tributes it consoled us with his voice, plummy but irrevocably Swansea, its power and that of the giant relaying instrument matching perfectly.

Did I in the same way hear, two months later, the voices of Llarregub come tumbling into the room, passing all my understanding but rolling, rolling around my head like Captain Cat’s dead dears? Was it then or later?

There are few Davids in Dylan’s work to provide the trigger for my name, and my father was more taken with him than my mother in any case. For her, the poet’s failure to be proper outweighed his words. It would have been nicer if he had been nice.

It was around this time that I learned that I was to have been Jennifer Mary.

*****

JBG Thomas – Bryn Thomas – was a rugby writer, the rugby writer, on the Western Mail. I habitually coupled his authoritative opinion with my own massive affiliation to Cardiff Rugby Football Club to form my views on Welsh rugby in general and in particular on whom the ‘Big Five’ selectors should include in the next Wales team. JBG was never a remote figure, whether offering his analysis in print or on the radio or TV. He was accessible. I thought he wrote well and others have said so too. Not the most economical wordsmith, but one who convinced you that he had seen the same game as you.

One Saturday afternoon – it would have been a Saturday as that’s when all matches then were played before the days of floodlights and the tricksy TV schedulers – Cardiff were playing Newport away. For us diehards there was no territory more invested with the quality ‘enemy’ than the home of the Black and Ambers. To go to Ebbw Vale, Bridgend, Swansea was, of course, to visit bandit country, but to tread the streets of Newport was to risk a contamination alleviated only by imperious victory. Even now, on an occasional visit to the Passport Office there, I step out of the station with a feeling that nothing will suffice short of complete capitulation by the functionaries of Her Majesty.

We travelled by train then too. I do not remember whether we went into JBG’s compartment or he came into ours. But we spent the 20 minute journey from Cardiff chatting through the prospects for the game as if we were old chums. We nabbed JBG on the way back too, analysing with him Cardiff’s satisfying win and perhaps hoping to see our insights taken up by the great man and offered to the waiting world in print. Or did I invent the second meeting, not now in distant memory, but later that same day in the minutes before sleep?

Ray was not greatly interested in rugby, and we seldom touched on it. He was, though, almost as keen on old documents as he was on photos as evidence of our experience.

There now, I have found the match programme, a Newport RFC document please remember, still in quarantine all these years later. I lift it with a tweezers. A simple leaflet, a yellow none too approximate to Amber, as unhealthy a colour as one would expect from the presses of the Rodney Parade club. The match was indeed on a Saturday, but beyond that simple well-remembered fact my recall of the day and the iniquities of Newport are challenged.

There on the unarguable cover and in the details inside, I am disarmed by an old fashioned courtesy. My team, the visitors, are presented first, as would be done by a good host. A further moment of inspection and the ‘satisfying win’ of my memory vanishes, banished by my annotation of the programme. A draw, eight all. Perhaps I have the occasion wrong. A further programme, another match, also a draw. The next likewise.

*****

Ray had at one time been assistant to Cecil Beaton. I have one of Ray’s photos of Beaton, and Ray had an overcoat Beaton had passed on to him. As we talked about our coats– both properly long and black, mine from no-one well known, simply a shop in Berlin – Ray was reminded of a wonderful writer who wore a similar coat, though made greatly oversized for him as he headed off to university from the Rhondda. He thought I would like him, was I familiar with him? He’d been a teacher in South Wales and perhaps my father, a grammar school headmaster, knew him.

Gwyn Thomas, Mr Thomas, or Sir, as we were expected to address him, had an observation on my name, David being so very common among my age group. ‘You should have a word with your father to see if he can’t come up with another name for you. Around here,’ at this point he gestured across the school yard, ‘around here it’s like being called “boy” or “dog” or just whistled to. It hardly marks you out as an entity for distinction. Tell him from me.’

There was much Gwyn Thomas would have liked to have told my father, our mutual headmaster, and some he did, but I was not the regular channel for discourse between these educators of such different stripes.

In the school yard and the classroom ‘Killer’ was part teacher, part honorary, conspiratorial pupil, part cool dry observer, uneasy with ways of schooling that depended heavily on imposed discipline. Required by his turn on duty to line us up for re-entry, form by form, into the seat of learning, he had no problem of threatened mutiny on our compliant part, but scarce held in check his own strong inclination to turn us loose. He did not especially enjoy being a teacher, though he found compensation in an intelligent, ready audience, but – and tenses always were important to him – he enjoyed having been one.

In the Three Horseshoes after he had left teaching he held court, and cared even less for the old precedences, welcoming us into a more equal familiarity, a meritocracy of words and wit and the anecdotes of shared experience.

For his writing and broadcasting, London critics with a low tolerance for uppity Welshmen smuggling royalty shillings across Offa’s Dyke dubbed him ‘The Other Thomas’, thereby condescending to both Gwyn and Dylan in one hit. Not a problem for Gwyn who, whatever you called him, could run you through in a sentence if the occasion or your own goading demanded it.

But, as I began lightly to investigate the source of my name, I wondered about that comment from Mr Thomas. There again, perhaps even he, scourge of the corrupt in public office, could not then have suspected the truth.

*****

With chance access to files so secret that they were unreleased even under the 30 year rule, I have seen a memo from Aneurin Bevan to the Registrar General that reveals all.

The challenge of differentiation was a common one for boys born in 1946 or 47 in South East Wales during the riot of Davidic naming that accompanied a spectacularly severe winter. Most of my closest friends were Davids. So were people I didn’t care for. In classrooms, in the school hall we would be a line of Davids. We speculated how this had come about, but came up with no satisfactory theory.

We Davids got by, of course. We referred to each other as Dave, Dafydd, Dai, Loughor, Gadfan, though seldom David itself. An uncle called me Dewi. And the more we got by, the more we looked with pity on those with lesser appellations, the Johns, Glyns and so forth.

All our parents were evasive about how they had made the choice. Mine, having admitted they fully expected me to be their second daughter, had the names Jennifer Mary hovering near the registrar’s pen. I was born a couple of weeks late – and have found timekeeping difficult ever since – and even by that Easter morning the two of them were entirely unprepared for a boy. This left them vulnerable to the dark forces lurking with a name to hand.

For after 65 years we know the full story. It’s the NHS’s fault.

Family doctors, sensing the impending doom of working for a nationalised health service in which they were condemned to become that same nation’s paupers, fashioned a scheme to induce suggestible new parents into a sinister conformity of naming.

‘If we can do this, then they’ll know not to mess with us.’ It was a last, pathetic clutch at sovereignty, or ‘bloody mindedness by the self-interested buggers’ as Nye Bevan’s memo phrases it.

In Glamorgan, where the plot originated, the chosen viral name was David. The county’s doctors recruited colleagues in Hampshire to the conspiracy, but Hampshire’s choice of name, owing more to mediaeval romance than a feeling for the times, fatally wounded the wider plot. Around the Solent and in the see of Winchester in those spartan years few were christened Esmeralda. So Glamorgan was left alone in its insidious nominal achievement, and a surfeit of Davids intrigued Glamorgan infant school head teachers enrolling new pupils five years later.

Nowadays, Ray speculated, we would sue for identity devaluation if not downright theft.