I turn left up Belsize Road and walk towards Swiss Cottage, thinking of fireworks and pianos. Those are two things I became aware of as early as servants. Fireworks are the ultimate form of all-round family entertainment. They really are fun for everyone except the blind – and even some blind people probably like the noise. For most people the noise is the downside. Some, especially children, find it frightening. But the noise is like the cholesterol in a bacon sandwich. There’s got to be a nasty or dangerous side to anything enjoyable or there’s something wrong, something suspicious and hidden. If everything seems perfect, it means you’re one of the Eloi and a Morlock is watching you with a napkin tucked under its chin. I always thought Disneyland might be like that but people tell me there are long queues so that’s okay.
The downside of pianos is having to practise. I learned that young. I started having piano lessons aged six and I suppose that means I could have been a concert pianist. I had the opportunity to put in the ten thousand hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell recommends. Although, like learning the details of how a magic trick is done, thinking about a musician in that way really undermines their art in my eyes. Suddenly one is more amazed by the massive faff that the attainment of their skill has involved than by the skill itself. It seems such a ridiculously obsessive, disproportionate act, like keeping all your wee in jars. You feel like saying they needn’t have bothered.
I think I wanted to learn the piano because of my maternal grandfather, who played it beautifully. He was Welsh and, until he died in 1985, probably my favourite person in the world. He couldn’t read music but he could make tunes from his head turn into tunes coming out of a piano. This was the closest to magic that I ever witnessed before I got an iPhone, and it meant he possessed a quality that the Welsh seem to value above all others: he was musical.
I am extremely proud of my Welsh heritage. My mother’s parents were kind, interesting, funny, happy people and their house in Swansea was a wonderful place to be. I adored Swansea too; it is truly an ‘ugly, lovely town’ as Dylan Thomas said. It seemed to me in every way preferable to Oxford, and not just because the people were friendlier – which, according to my parents, it had in common with everywhere outside Stasi-controlled East Berlin.
I loved the weird and wrecked old industrial buildings – the huge warehouses near the largely disused docks with the names of defunct companies written in faded paint between dozens of smashed windows; the dark appearance and malevolent smell of the Carbon Black Factory which, as we drove from Oxford, signified that we were nearly there. I loved the graceful terraces of the Uplands where my grandparents ran a filling station; the shiny writing on the brand new ‘Leisure Centre’ which struck me as so much swankier than a mere ‘public swimming pool’ could ever be; the Victorian ironwork of Mumbles pier.
And the seaside – the amazing Gower coast, more beautiful than a thousand Radcliffe Cameras. Actually a thousand Radcliffe Cameras wouldn’t be beautiful. It would be odd but also monotonous: a vast and weird expanse of limestone pimples. I think I mean a thousand times more beautiful than the Radcliffe Camera. (If you haven’t heard of the Radcliffe Camera, this may be a baffling paragraph. I should explain that it’s not a camera, it’s a building – a very pretty building which doesn’t even look like a camera. It looks more like the dome of St Paul’s.)
I learned so many things through Swansea. What the Second World War was; that the Germans had tried to bomb British cities to bits but failed; that lights had been put on Clyne Common near my grandparents’ house so the Luftwaffe would mistake it for the docks and unleash their payload harmlessly there. I thought this plan brilliant and was not yet sufficiently aware of the city’s wrecked centre to realise how seldom it had worked.
I learned the difference between rugby and football: the fact that the latter required rigorous policing while the former would only have a couple of bobbies overseeing a crowd of tens of thousands; and that the Welsh were pre-eminent in the former and, largely, disdained the latter.
Where the world’s best ice cream is made: Swansea. And by whom: Joe’s ice cream parlour.
Where coal came from and how it was used. What a slagheap was. How coal had made Britain great but how there wasn’t so much left now. How Welsh coal burned hotter.
I’ve never had a stronger sense of belonging to a place than I did about Swansea when I was sitting on my grandfather’s knee, behind the counter of his filling station in the Uplands, being introduced to all the customers.
And then there were my evil grandparents: my father’s mother and father, who lived in Scotland. ‘Evil’ is a terribly unfair way to refer to them but it was how I felt a lot of the time. I think that many children probably cast their grandparents in these contrasting roles, largely on the basis of one set of grandparents being marginally more easy-going than the other. But, as a small child, it felt to me that, while I could do no wrong in Grandpa and Grandma’s eyes, to Grandad and Grannie I was trouble. Particularly to Grannie. To her, I think I represented all that was flawed in my father’s personality for having chosen to marry my mother rather than someone stupider and more old-fashioned, plus the much greater flaws in the character of my mother, and all the consequent flaws in the disgracefully modern way they’d chosen to bring me up.
This is a familiar collection of attitudes for a disgruntled grandmother to have – I expect a lot of people will recognise it from their own families – but, looking back, it seems truly daft. By any objective reckoning, my parents were conventional. They weren’t hippies; they believed that children should be, if not ‘seen and not heard’, well-behaved and obedient, and should, in public at least, defer to adults. They weren’t as old-fashioned as they would have been if they’d been born in the 1910s instead of the 1940s but, since my grandmother didn’t trouble to give birth to my father until 1946, I think that was more her fault than his.
I don’t want to give an exaggerated impression of how difficult she was: she wasn’t horrible all the time and she could be very kind. But she was tricky and inconsistent, and kept tricky and inconsistent dogs as pets.
My grandfather on that side was a remarkable man who died in 2011, three days after his 100th birthday. He was intelligent, witty, successful, quite rich and as financially generous as he was emotionally miserly. He loved fishing and shared many of the temperamental attributes of his prey.
This was not a man you hugged. I don’t know how I knew this – maybe I’d been told or maybe I just felt it. But I only ever shook hands with him, as did my dad. He would kiss my mother on the cheek perfunctorily, like a chat show host with a difficult actress.
Icy judgement emanated from him. He abhorred being kept waiting and, if we were going out for lunch (something which happened when he was around because he was rich), we’d have to get to the restaurant early when it was deserted, cryptlike. If we didn’t, his displeasure would manifest itself in my dad’s rising stress levels. Grandad hardly needed to say anything himself; some unseen power would make my father squirm, like when Darth Vader uses the force to strangle someone.
He had a snooker table and I remember once, when very small, wandering into the snooker room where he and my dad were having a game. I was too young to know what snooker was but, seeing a red shiny ball on a table at about my eye level, I picked it up. The reaction was like an east wind as my dad quickly took the ball from me and replaced it. My grandfather showed no surprise, only quiet displeasure. My behaviour had merely been typically disappointing.
He loved comedy though and, while we were never close, I think he was proud that I became a comedian, even if Peep Show was probably never to his taste. He was more of a fan of Peter Sellers and I can’t fault him there. I remember him wheezing and crying with laughter at the various Pink Panther films and I think such abandoned enjoyment of comedy from someone who was so controlled and controlling made me respect comedy even more. I concluded that everyone loved and admired comedy,