Out in the world

If I had been born a few years later I would not have had the option to leave the regimented education system of the grammar school behind me.

As it was in 1965 the age was still set at 15 even though attempts had begun a year earlier to raise it to 16. Luckily for me the efforts were stalled and the change did not go through until 1972.

Leaving at 15 did me no harm. Thanks to Harold Wilson I did actually go on to tertiary education in the 1990s with the Open University and have the right to put BA (Open) after my name.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however, as in September 1965 I had officially left school and was studying for my GCEs at home.

Without the rigid structure of the grammar school I could study each subject at the time that felt right for me.

It was that joyous moment between school and work when I could start at 8am if I had woken bright and early or 10 if it had not been a good night.

I was still getting up at the same time as when I went to school, after all the household routine didn’t revolve around me. My sister still had to get off to school and Dad had to open the shop.

The living room became my classroom and the big table was my desk – with plenty of room to spread books and papers.

If I wanted more information I only had to go to the library. At school this would have required a note of permission from a teacher and a walk to the old buildings.

Now I could go to the library whenever I felt like it as it was just a walk to the end of our street. The only danger was that I would be distracted by the books that surrounded me.

By the end of September I was well ahead in all the subjects I was studying. That was the moment my big break came out of the blue.

The local newspaper when I was growing up was the Rhyl Journal, which had been around since the 1800s and had incorporated at least one other paper during that time.

In April that year a new weekly newspaper was launched called the Rhyl and Prestatyn Gazette, run by a journalist and an advertising executive.

The journalist was clearly the editor (and editorial director) and his partner was advertising director. The editor was in our shop one day chatting with my father who just happened to mention I wanted to be a journalist. When he heard this he asked my father if I would like a bit of work experience (I’m not sure that was even a concept at that time) – a few hours a week.

The deal was struck and I joined the team the following week. Initially it was a couple of hours on a Monday morning and the same on a Thursday afternoon, the day the paper went to the printers.

The offices were a lock-up shop set over three floors in the building which housed the Odeon Cinema. The Rhyl and Prestatyn Gazette had the middle shop in the row.

The shops in the Odeon building in Rhyl where the Rhyl and Prestatyn Gazette was born in 1965.

Downstairs there was a receptionist and a small room to one side whch housed the filing cabinets for pictures and other editorial cuttings and material as well as a desk. The next floor was the advertising department with a team of reps on phones drumming up business.

The top floor was the page setting and makeup department as well as the editor’s office and a desk for a reporter.

The editorial and ads were set on a system using punched tape to produce typeset material which was cut and pasted on to page layouts.

Nowadays it is all done by computers (which is pretty well what a lot of journalists are these days) but even this form of typesetting was a move on from the hot metal setting used on most newspapers at that time.

My role, for four or five hours a week, mainly consisted of sitting in the downstairs office typing up lists of mourners and floral tributes for funeral reports; taking down sports reports over the telephone; filing the previous weeks’ photographs; and, joy of joys, occasionally going out with a real reporter on a story.

My biggest scoop was getting quotes from Hughie Greene (Double Your Money) and his miniscule assistant Monica Rose to go with a picture of Monica on the back of a baby elephant with Hughie patting its trunk.

Not the biggest scoop in the world but it made me feel good.

I also wrote a serial story for the Gazette Childrens Club and set puzzles for the youngsters under the guise of Uncle Bill.

This continued through to the summer of 1966 and was my first real taste of the world of newspapers.

Sunset Poem (Eli Jenkin’s Prayer)

by Dylan Thomas

from Under Milk Wood

Every morning when I wake,

Dear Lord a little prayer I make,

O please to keep a loving eye,

On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sundown

I ask a blessing on the town,

For whether we last the night or no

I’m sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side not our worst.

O let us see another day!

Bless us all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say, goodbye – but just for now.

For Gwyneth and Christine

Those who were left behind

Eighty years ago today my father was celebrating his 25th birthday – somewhere in France. It was a week before the mass evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French port of Dunkirk.

Unfortunately Sgt. David Pierce, RAMC, did not get to Dunkirk with his ambulance convoy.

My father was studying at the Liverpool College of Pharmacy when war was declared on 3 September 1939. He immediately went and volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps.

The second thing he did was to visit his fiancee, Ivy Lloyd, who he had met in Rhyl two years earlier when she was on holiday with her family.

He told her what he had done and asked her to have their wedding earlier than planned – in fact in just six weeks’ time.

He spent those six weeks at an army training centre in the south and returned to Liverpool on Sunday, 15th October, having gained the rank of corporal.

They got married on Monday, 16th October and had a two-day honeymoon in London. Then she returned to Liverpool and he joined the troops heading for Belgium.

Seven months later she did not know if her new husband was dead or a prisoner of the Germans. She did know that he was not one of those evacuated from Dunkirk on the “armada of little ships”.

In fact his ambulance convoy was eventually evacuated from a port on the West coast of France (Brittany).

Following a recently-released film most people are aware the Dunkirk evacuation was called Operation Dynamo.

The last ships left Dunkirk on 4th June and then they had to organise Operation Aerial which took two weeks to get the rest out. Unfortunately the families of those who did not get out at Dunkirk were not informed there was a second chance.

Dad could have reached Dunkirk if he had been willing to leave the ambulances of wounded men to be captured by the Germans. Every single medic and driver refused to leave their charges and struck out for the West.

They managed to stay roughly 24 hours ahead of the German army. Unfortunately the Luftwaffe constantly pursued them and time after time they had to seek cover as the Germans didn’t seem to notice the red crosses when they strafed the road.

Dad made light of this when he told us of his wartime adventures but to this day we knew we were lucky to be here because he was lucky to get home.

It was mid-June before he finally got back to Britain. He was given a short leave and was then posted to the Middle East and my mother didn’t see him again for five years.

But that’s another story.

Happy Birthday Dad.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

by Dylan Thomas

David George Pierce
19 May 1915 – 18 October 1995

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Back to school – staying home

Home schooling is not easy, as many parents are discovering during this crisis. That does not mean it can not be done and done well.

In the 80s I spent two years working in Oman as night editor of the state-owned daily newspaper.

Th Oman Obsrver as it looks today. When I did the layouts over 30 years ago we did not use all caps headings

After a few months my wife and children joined me but it was not long before we realised it was not the best place for a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old girl to be.

My daughters went back to Prestatyn to stay with my brother and his family and attend the local secondary while my son, aged seven, stayed with us in Oman and began home schooling.

Simple maths problems were easy to supply and for English a teacher back home had given us material to get us through a couple of years.

That left geography and history. The latter wasn’t too hard as Marion and I had a good working knowledge of both and for the former we started with a large scale world map pinned up on the apartment wall.

It began with giving him a place to find on the map. After two weeks he was finding towns or countries within 60 seconds.

By the time we returned to North Wales he was ahead of his peers in almost every subject. I was not that hot with Welsh but his maths and command of the English language was great.

My own home schooling was not quite so free and easy.

In September 1965 my first major problem surfaced. I missed my friends.

I know Roger and I, along with a couple of others, Dennis Randall and Peter Horton, had knocked about together all summer.

The difference on the first day of the autumn term was that I was sitting down at home with a stack of books and lesson booklets and they were together in a classroom.

Ater a while I began to take a break and meet Roger and others after school at a local coffee bar in town Le Nautique.

Le Nautique – a great place to meet for a coffee and to play favourite hits on the juke box and even catch a live gig.

The difference to learning in school as to learning at home was that without the school discipline I had to discipline myself.

Later in life I found that this was a bonus especially as a journalist when setting a deadline and sticking to it was vital. If deadlines weren’t met and presses didn’t roll on time the story didn’t get to the people.

A few years later when I was on a journalism block release course a lecturer (teacher not journalist) said: “Robin needs deadlines and if they are not set then he sets his own, which is not always a good thing.”

She was right and she was wrong.

At work my personal deadlines meant I always completed my work to fit in with the overall deadline.

In life itself I often set unnecessary deadlines as to when to set off to get somewhere, allowing for problems en route. This has meant that at times I arrived for appointments half an hour beforehand. At least I wasn’t late.

Back to home school.

My first delivery of schooling material arrived about a fortnight before the September start which meant I did have time to go through it and work out my own timetable.

For history and geography it was fairly easy to plan because pieces of work had to be returned at set dates and, especially with history, there was a chronological order of study.

Englsh was a different matter. Did I read Lord of the Flies in one straight run and then refer back to it as necessary or should I read it alongside the course insructions?

That was easy – I read it on the day I got it, for pleasure, then read it twice more before home school began. Once because I enjoyed it and the second time just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

Occasionally I slipped and instead of working I would let my mind wander.

In school this would have meant a sharp reprimand or even a well-flung piece of chalk.

In my lounge/classroom I had to snap out of it and get back on track because I wanted to, not because someone was making me do it.

It soon dawned on me that my problem was grammar school rigid authority. The school’s problem was that the more they clamped down on me the more I rebelled.

It doesn’t make either setup right or wrong but it was a lesson that helped me over the next 55 years and continues to help me to this day.

That’s the school bell ending the lesson. Or is it just the old black telephone ringing away?

Sonnet I

by William Shakespeare

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou contracted to thy own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self be cruel:

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by thy grave and thee.

The Whitsun Weddings

by Philip Larkin

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
 Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   
    For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   
Until the next town, new and nondescript,   
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   
I took for porters larking with the mails,   
And went on reading. Once we started, though,   
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   
More promptly out next time, more curiously,   
And saw it all again in different terms:   
The fathers with broad belts under their suits   
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   
Just what it saw departing: children frowned   
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—and none   
Thought of the others they would never meet   
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   
I thought of London spread out in the sun,   
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   
Travelling coincidence; and what it held   
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Summertime and the lovin’ is …. not that easy

In 1965 in the UK Harold Wilson was Prime Minister; wartime PM Winston Churchill was given a state funeral; Liverpool won the FA Cup for the first time; Ian Smith was preparing to declare UDI in Rhodesia; the Beatles first film ‘Help” was released; capital punishment was ended; Kenneth Tynan was the first person to use the “f” word on British television.

Meanwhile in Rhyl my friends and I were making the most of a mediocre summer.

I truly intended to make the most of what might be my last summer of freedom. After all if you don’t go to school you don’t get school holidays.

The amusement arcades and the theatre were not my only source of enjoyment.

In later years, when we had our own motorised transport, we could travel far afield but that summer we relied on our bikes or just walked.

It wasn’t far from the town centre to the harbour or the Marine Lake and at that end of town Rhyl had not one but two funfairs.

Although they were technically two separate fairs the Marine Lake Fun Fair and the Ocean Beach were one great homogenous, flashy, brightly-lit and loud source of fun.

Sometimes we would go down in the daytime but the real fun was to be had at night when all the stalls and rides were garishly lit with multi-coloured bulbs; the stallholders and barkers shouted out the delights of their offerings; and holidaymakers screamed and shouted on rides such as the Caterpillar, or the Mad Mouse rollercoaster; or the carousel.

The Big Wheel, from the top of which you got a view of the Clwydian Range in one direction or out to sea the other, and the Mad Mouse, a rollercoaster ride which left your stomach behind as it dropped from the heights, or had you scared it would come off the tracks on corners.

At ground level the fair seemed to go on and on with hoop-la stalls, coconut shies, roll-a-penny pitches, even a rifle range with real rifles, Winchesters, and real bullets, just as the cowboys used at the Saturday morning pictures.

At 15 (going on 16) we were aware of the opposite sex. Not that sex was really on the cards with local girls where you were more likely to get a slap wthout even the slightest tickle.

Holidaymakers were a different matter.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that these girls were ‘easy’. Far from it. Yet wandering hands might get a bit further when the girl knew she was unlikely to see you ever again once the holiday was over.

When the cover went over the carriages on the Caterpillar the shrieks weren’t all from girls scared of the dark.

Not that local boys had the pick of the girls at the fair. That ‘honour’ was more likely to benefit the lads on the dodgem cars who would jump from car to car as they collected the money.

Dodgem cars at Rhyl were holidaymakers were an easy target for the lads who collected the fares.

If you did find a girl at the fair you were best advised to take her round some of the sideshows first to win her a cuddly toy by hitting the Ace of Spades with three darts; or flicking a wooden ring over a post with a prize on top. Trying to impress her with the ‘Test Your Strength’ machine was not a good idea.

A couple of prizes, a candy floss or hot dog followed by a ride on the carousel was the perfect prelude to a trip on the Ghost Train where you had a good chance of your partner clinging to you in fright at the luminous skeletons and giant spiders.

An offer to walk her back to her digs was a further chance of intimacy as you slipped an arm around her waist and, if you were really lucky, you might get a five-minute midnight smooch on the doorstep.

There are probably numerous boys who went back to school after that summer and told their pals of the fun they had under the pier with a different girl every night.

In reality the closest they would have got to the birds and the bees was in a biology lesson.

Philip Larkin claimed in his poem Annus Mirabilis that sex was invented in 1963 – he may have been right but it didn’t reach North Wales for quite a few years after that.

Sea Virus

by Gwyneth Lewis

I knew I should never have gone below

but I did, and the fug of bilges and wood

caught me aback. The sheets of my heart

snapped taut to breaking, as a gale

stronger than longing filled the sail

inside me. To be shot of land

and its woodsmoke! To feel the keel

cold in a current! To see the mast

inscribing the water like a restless pen

writing a fading wake! It’s true

I’m ruined. Not even peace will do

to keep me ashore now. Not even you.