Free In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas

boulder on my shoulder, and I often wondered what the little girl was like; me and her on the beach when old Salty Sam had gone home to his cottage or sailed out fishing. There was ample time for fiction in my bed by the fireside.
    With this advertisement used to go a ditty: 'I'm Salty Sam the sailorman . . . I sail the ocean blue,' which we would lustily accompany. Roy's pneumonia made him a bit husky at first but his voice got stronger as his health improved. We also used to sing, two pale faces in the flickering firelight: 'We are the Ovaltinees, happy girls and boys.' We were ever optimistic.
    It was my mother, I realise now, who had to get out of the house. At first she never went beyond the door and, for someone who had known the bright lights of Barry and Birmingham and enjoyed her dreams in the cinema, it must have been an imprisonment. Eventually she broke. She shouted at us for something and then her expression fell as she saw our apologetic faces one each side of the grate. That afternoon she got a girl to come in for a couple of hours and just went for a walk around Newport, not a voluptuous occupation. She promised to bring presents back for us and she did. Lack of funds limited the nature of the gifts but she had been touring Newport market and returned with a dozen old copies of Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories periodical which she gave to my brother and a huge, wonderful glossy book of unending interest which was for me. It was called 'The Littlewood's Catalogue'. I remember the sleek feel of its great bulk as she laid it on the bed. It was like a large woman wearing silk. The catalogue was a couple of years old, she explained, but you could still buy the same things by paying so much a week. Its glossy cover glowed in the firelight. I opened the pages and was lost to the world.
    Ever since I could read, I had been prey to the desire evoked by advertisements in the People, the only newspaper we took regularly and that on account of the astrological assertions of Edward Lyndoe, who unfailingly forecast an improved future for my mother, which, considering her usual circumstances, was not difficult. She always referred to him as 'old Lyndoe' as if he were a friend, which I suppose he was in a way. I always felt her faith misplaced because none of the promises seemed to happen. Indeed, my mother recorded a distinct loss when prompted by Mr Lyndoe's forecast: 'There will be no war – the stars are against it.' She made instant bets of several shillings to this effect. The date was Sunday, September 3rd, 1939, the day war was declared.
    The advertisements in the People, however, enslaved me with their fair words. Double your strength in three weeks; Grow your own raspberries; Make costly jewellery AT HOME; There is BIG money in pigeons; and other such pledges, some promising YOUR Money RETURNED if not satisfied. Imagine someone not being satisfied with his pigeons or his raspberries. There were also drawings of mighty ladies clamped in corsets, looking like the armoured horses of medieval knights. Sunday was a day of guilty thrills.
    Now there was placed before me this compendium. It was as if someone had revealed the secrets of life. You could have anything, absolutely anything, it appeared, and pay for it at two shillings a week, or even less. It was not merely the pages that opened in my rheumaticky fingers, it was a whole new, bright and patently attainable world.
    It was not only the glistening toys, red kiddie-cars, triangles with bells, fire engines, soldiers in forts, animals on wooden farms, skates, guns, scale models and jigsaws, but a far wider enchantment. Lawn mowers, green and powerful, hunched on the verdant frontages of long lush houses with red roofs; a real working, squirting hose, with a pond and statue in the background; picnic hampers cluttered with pies, thermos flasks for instant refreshment, collapsible ironing boards, electric fires, comfortably folded blankets and sheets, unending carpets, plush