Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1963)

Continued from page 46 would certainly become — a professional football player. But the war changed that. And other things. But to keep up with his idols as a child, to get muscles like them, he would eat and eat. He’d love ham and grilled cheese. And eggs, of course. And most important — bacon and lava bread. What’s lava bread? Oh, it’s a most unsightly thing to look at. All black, with oatmeal. But Rich would always walk into the house and ask, first thing: ‘Any lava bread, Sis?’ And then he’d begin to eat it, and he’d say, ‘If there is better food in heaven, I am in a hurry to be there.’ ” She remembers that he was wonderful friendly : “He had more good friends than you could count on the fingers of both hands. People just liked to be with him. The boys — they adored him. And oh yes, he had plenty of girl friends, too. That is, the girls liked Rich. But until he was fourteen or fifteen he didn’t have much use for them. There were one or two — sweet-looking girls, nice as you can imagine — who’d actually come up to the house and sit around with me, just chatting and asking if they could help and generally wasting time, just waiting for Rich to come in with the hope that he might notice them. And when he would come in, he’d just look at them with this funny askance look and say ‘Hi’ for hello and ‘Ta’ for goodbye. And those sweet-looking girls, they would just be so sad.” She remembers that he was wonderful religious: “As a small boy he would love to attend chapel with us. Sometimes he’d even get up into the pulpit and give a little sermon of his own after the main service was over. Or else he’d go to the back of the chapel and sit playing the organ. He’d learned to play by himself, mind you. And he’d sit there and play all the hymns. I can still hear him, now, playing and singing his favorite — ‘0 Iesu Mawr Rhodt Anial Bur.’ So lovely he sang. So lovely.” She remembers that he was wonderful close to the family: “He just idolized his dad and all his brothers and sisters. Every week came and like clockwork I’d have to bring him back to Pontrhydyfen to visit them all and to see his little baby brother, Graham, now living with Tom and his wife. And if I were busy of a weekend and said that I didn’t think we could make it this time — well, Rich just made such a fuss that I had to take him. That’s how much he loved them all.” And she remembers, most of all, that he was wonderful kind and considerate: “Things were bad here in Wales when Rich was a boy. There was the depression. And the miners were out striking a lot of the time. There was always enough for food, we always had a nice table, and clean— but sometimes, you must admit, it was hard going, rough going. And one day, just a little chubby thing he was, I called Richard into the kitchen to give him his Saturday penny. “And he said to me, ‘Do you know what, Sis?’ “And I said, ‘What, Rich?’ “And he said to me, ‘You wait. But someday I’ll be man. And I’ll be working. And I’ll be earning ten pounds a week. And then, you wait — but then I’ll help you and Elfed the way you’ve both helped me. Yes, he was an angel young Richard was. Just as others, close to Richard in his childhood days, remember the other side of him — the proper little devil that he obviously was, too. Like Dillwyn Dummer — a jolly and lusty young man. Who, it happens, is second cousin to Richard. And wbo was his very best friend for many years. First, because they were the same age. Second, because they lived next door to one another — Richard at No. 3 Inkerman, Dillwyn at No. 2 (where he still lives). And third, because, says Dillwyn, “We were both rascals, and just tended together. Oh we were bad.” His best friend remembers! Dillwyn remembers, for instance, that time with the pipes: “My grandfather had this rack of pipes, you see? And one day — I guess we were both about six and not a minute older — Rich and I decided what fun it would be to sneak out the pipes and have ourselves a few good puffs. We went to the backyard. We lit a pipe apiece and we smoked away. We didn’t feel very well after that. An uncle of mine — Ivor — who sat watching us from an upstairs window swears we were the same color of the grass by the time we were finished. Uncle Ivor laughed all through it. But when my grandfather found out what we had done, he didn’t laugh a bit. In fact, a regular hiding Rich and I got from him.” Dillwyn remembers, too, about Rich and his organ playing: “He did learn to play by himself, that’s true. Next door to my grandmother’s on the great big old organ she had bought as a bride. He would sit there and practice, and play away, all those hymns. And Rich’s sister would be so proud. And my grandmother would be so pleased. She would say, ‘How lovely— what lovely stuff he plays. Oh, I can’t wait to hear him in chapel come Sunday.’ Only what she didn’t know — what practically no one else knew — was that Rich was less interested in playing in chapel on Sunday than he was in running down on Monday night to our local pub — The Somerset Arms, that’s its proper name, though we used to call it The Scare — and sit himself at the organ they had there and play for all the halftanked blokes who were just itching for anyone to come along and accompany them in their half-tanked singsongs.” Dillwyn remembers the games he and Richard used to play together: “Good jokes they were really. We’d clown around so much my mother used to be afraid to have Rich knock on the door for fear of what we’d get up to. Like we’d run out of the house and go over hedges and through gates, climbing rock outcrop, brushing our way through the bramble and the gorse — just for the silly fun of running. Or we’d go to someone’s garden and pinch carrots. And we used to play rat-tat — that’s knocking on somebody’s door and then running away, fast. Or we’d put a cord on a tin can and put it through the knocker of a door, stand way back and pull it. And run again. Run like hell.” He remembers their Saturday afternoons at the movies: “Regular weekly clients we were over at the Taibach Picture Dome. And the more noise and racket we made, the happier we were. Especially if it was one of those love pictures. These especially used to bore Richard to tears. He’d sit there making the biggest kind of racket — ‘All this kissing and smooching,’ he’d say, ‘ha ha ha ha ha!’ — until the people around us used to call out to hisht and for shame.” Dillwyn remembers, very well, what happened to them both one Saturday night right after the movies: “Part of the pleasure of our going to the cinema was to smoke. And many an empty packet of fags we chucked over , the bridge and into the railway yard on our way home. And this one night — it was right at the beginning of the war, blackout time, pitch dark; we must have been all of twelve or thirteen by now — we were crossing the bridge and were down to our last two cigarettes, which we somehow hadn’t managed to smoke yet. “‘Got a match?’ Rich asked me. “ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m all out.’ “ ‘Got two fags left,’ Rich said. “ ‘Guess we’ll just have to get rid of them,’ I said. ‘You know what will happen if someone finds them in our pockets.’ “ ‘Nonsense,’ Rich said. ‘We’ll grab a light from someone. Ah here — ’ he said, ‘here comes some fellow.’ “I looked to where Rich was pointing and yes, I could see him, in the darkness, this fellow coming. “ ‘Can I have a light, please?’ I heard Ri^h aclf tnpn “ ‘Hullo? What’s that?’ this fellow said, in a voice proper angry. “This fellow, it turned out, was my father. And we got a light all right. Smack on the seat of our pants. “A Rolls-Royce for me” Not far from the railway bridge where the cigarette incident took place, and at the foot of Constant Hill, sits the small schoolhouse Richard attended as a boy — Dyffryn Grammar, it is called. While many of the men who taught there in the early ’40s are gone — either dead or retired or moved into other towns, other schools — a few remain who remember Richard. One of these, who prefers to be nameless, remembers him perhaps better than anyone else: “He was a bright boy — not that there weren’t brighter. For a while I thought of him as one of those many children from poor circumstances who would just be weighed down by the poverty and go on to lead an ordinary hum-drum life, the brightness going for nought. But I believe that in Richard’s case there were factors — despite himself — that tended to lift him from such a fate. “One was his intense devotion to his sister, that fine and lovely woman Cecelia — a desire to pay her back somehow for 56