Free In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Page A

chairs, kitchen gadgets, and . . . oh, my God, there she was again . . . in her corsets ! Not only her, but several softly coloured pages of her wanton sisters, posing in their peachy bloomers, elastic straining at waist and knee, or garments open to upward draughts and enticingly called French knickers. What did Directoire mean? And what of those things like tureens which well-fed looking ladies had strapped to their chests? That was intriguing because our mother was thin all the way down, but I had noticed that other boys' mams were bulging above the waist. Petticoats there were also, hemmed with looping lace and those corsets again, some bent like tin around the thighs, some, locked with a spanner it seemed, from which the female form might explode at any moment. Guiltily I wished that my mother was a bigger woman. There were so many things I wanted to know. How did these amazing Amazons go to the lav? Did they creak as they crouched?
    'What you looking at?' enquired my brother from across the fireplace after I had been studying the catalogue for several days. He had finished Sunny Stories.
    'Nothing for you,' I said with the brusqueness of the secret sinner.
    'That book's got bloomers,' he confided archly. 'With ladies inside them. I had a decko when you was asleep. They're not as good as our mam's, though.'
    Indeed they were not. For someone who had hardly two pennies to make a clink, Dolly Thomas had the most wonderful silks and fripperies, drawers full of them in the palest of hues with lavish lace and unscrupulous fancy embroider. She had long lovely nighties and silk pyjamas with flopping leg bottoms, negligees that might have graced a window in Paris. And she wore them, too. Where they had originated is anyone's guess – perhaps from her flappier days in Birmingham. All I know is this thin, anxious, hard-pressed, emotional, loving and impoverished lady went to her solitary bed in our council house each night, with all the allure of a favoured duchess.
    On the back cover of our blue school exercise books was a map of the entire known world. Arranged about its edges were the words: Fifty Miles Around Newport. The circumference of my home town was the first geographical fact that ever impressed itself upon me. It encompassed a good deal more than my entire world. The rest of the earth was merely composed of wriggly and possibly untrustworthy lines on the flap of the book. Cardiff was distant, Bristol beyond the sea; London might as well have been Babylon.
    The fifty-mile circle encompassed a gritty town, no stranger to distress, whose history included notable Chartist Riots but little else to excite mankind. Its major son of fame (apart from Donald Peers) was W.H. Davies, who composed the lines: 'Ah, but this life's so full of care, we have not time to stand and stare.' No one seemed quite sure where he was born, least of all himself. They found the street but Davies, when asked, was uncertain of the house. When he died they put a plaque on the wall recording his birth but it turned out to be the wrong place.
    Coal travelled from the Welsh valleys to be loaded aboard ships at the docks, which ran along a district called Pill. The ships sailed away and then eagerly returned for more. Goaldust lay in ledges and littered the narrow streets. Smoke from the steel works, the other great employer, billowed gloomily over the dead-eyed river.
    Pill was a forbidden city to us. My mother said we must never venture there for it was mysterious, full of nameless alarms and, what was more, rough. Pill sounded short and threatening, especially to my mother with her past social standing and her hopes for the future. 'It's wicked,' she warned. 'Never go down there.'
    She was apt to deliver one-sentence sermons which somehow left their message. When I came home from school one day and said: 'Oh, fuck', she took on a stunned aspect and said: 'That is the Devil's personal word—you could drop dead!' I never said it again until I was in