Freda did her best to amuse her son. Sometimes she would sing and dance around the room to cheer him up. She urged him to draw with a set of Indian inks she bought for him. When he was allowed to have visitors, she encouraged friends and family to see him.
Cousin Margaret, who was ten at the time, recalls, ‘We realised it was serious. We were up there visiting him most of the time. Auntie Freda would say, “Come up and keep him company.” We would tell him about school and what we were doing. We were never bored with Tom.
‘But we could never play cards. My mother wouldn’t have us playing cards. Auntie Freda was the same. Cards were like the devil in the house. We were chapel – only a man could play cards, not a woman.’ Tom, perhaps as a result of his mother’s disapproval, has never had any inclination to play cards and has always shown a strong dislike of any form of gambling.
From his bed, Tom could look out of the window and see all the way down the valley. He recalled, ‘As good as that view was, I’d grow restless. So my parents would routinely move the bed around the room to change the scenery for me.’ Freda was forever cutting out pictures of cowboys from magazines and sticking them to the wall, so he would have something fresh to look at. Margaret observes, ‘It was lovely, his bedroom.’
The lifesaver for Tom was when his parents rented a heavy, dark-brown radio for him. It was the sort of old-fashioned wireless you could imagine listening to when the declaration of war was announced. Tom loved it. His parents didn’t mind if he listened to it late at night, when the BBC played American music into the small hours – time didn’t matter when you were in bed for twenty-four hours a day. Pirate radio and Radio 1 had yet to change the musical taste of a nation. In 1952, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was still two years away. Instead, Tom grew to love the records of Mahalia Jackson, the ‘Queen of Gospel’, an influence he carried with him throughout his career. He also discovered the music of Big Bill Broonzy, the acclaimed master of the Chicago blues, whom Eric Clapton once called his role model and both Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones identify as a key figure in the development of their guitar-playing.
This was music to stir the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy in Treforest. These wonderful performers helped shape his destiny and Tom never forgot the effect they had on him. He included Mahalia’s uplifting recording of the traditional American hymn ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and Big Bill’s protest song ‘Black, Brown and White’ among his Desert Island Discs in a programme broadcast shortly after his seventieth birthday in 2010. Tom had heard the song ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ many times, because it was a favourite of Welsh choirs and was often sung at funerals and formal occasions. Tom had never heard it sung like this, however, and he was keen to try out the style.
After a year confined to his room, Tom had shown enough improvement to be allowed to get up for two hours a day. He still couldn’t go out, but was well enough to stand by the front door and wave to his friends as they walked up the hill to the quarry or the White Tips to play or gathered around the gas lamp-post as darkness fell to laugh and chat. Tom was frustrated and jealous. ‘I promised myself that when I could walk to that lamp-post, I’d never complain about anything again.’
Once he was stronger, Tom was allowed to resume singing. When he turned thirteen, his parents rented a black-and-white TV set in time to enjoy the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Tom was able to watch the performances of popular artists of the fifties, like the snappily dressed Frankie Vaughan. Ever since he’d first seen Al Jolson on screen, Tom was a magpie when it came to imitating other entertainers. He would absorb a hand gesture or a facial expression and file it away to use himself.
His parents also bought him a guitar, on which he could strum a few basic chords as rudimentary backing. Freda never forgot his delight when he saw the parcel wrapped up at the bottom of his bed: ‘There was happiness! To see Tom smile was all I wanted.’ Through the open window of his second-floor bedroom, he would serenade the neighbourhood. It was like a scene from the period drama Call the Midwife, as the mums in the street would pause their chores to listen to young Tommy Woodward sing.
Just imagine if The X Factor had existed back then. Tom’s would have been the ultimate sob story – young boy stricken with TB raises himself from his sickbed to ‘nail’ ‘Riders in the Sky’. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye on the judging panel.
Brian Blackler remembers visiting his friend, who was sitting up in bed singing ‘Riders in the Sky’ and other songs he had picked up from the radio, including ‘That Old Black Magic’. Artists from Marilyn Monroe to Frank Sinatra had recorded the song, but the version that had caught Tom’s ear was by Billy Daniels. Nobody sang the standard like the great black singer and Tom was struck by his unique phrasing. He decided he wanted to sing it that way too.
Eventually, after two long years, the fourteen-year-old Tom was considered well enough to venture into the outside world once more. Holidays during his childhood – as for most mining families – tended to consist of a day trip to Barry Island, but this time his parents thought he deserved a proper summer treat. Brian Blackler remembers the boys had borrowed bicycles and, as they were riding, Tom shouted over, ‘I’m going now to Porthcawl for a week. Do you fancy coming down?’ Brian, who was one of eight children and had never had a proper holiday either, jumped at the chance, and joined the Woodward family in a caravan by the seaside in the popular resort some thirty miles west of Cardiff. There wasn’t much to do other than muck about on the dunes or ‘freeze your balls off’ in the water – it was always cold in Porthcawl. Tom found a place to sing though: the back of an old lorry by the beach, where he could entertain other holidaymakers.
The holiday was a positive outcome at the end of his two-year sentence in Laura Street. The resumption of school wasn’t particularly welcome, however. A teacher had come in from time to time to help the patient with his lessons, but Tom’s heart had never been in it. For his age, Tom was well behind and hadn’t mastered the most basic elements of education. His handwriting and spelling were hopeless – not that he cared much. After all, he had met the girl who would be the love of his life.
3
Being laid up in bed with tuberculosis isn’t an ideal situation for a lad struggling through adolescence. Tommy could only gaze out of his ‘prison’ window in frustration and watch the local schoolgirls laughing and gossiping in the street below. One in particular grabbed his attention – Melinda Trenchard was the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood.
Linda was the daughter of Bill and Vi Trenchard, who lived in Cliff Terrace, just a few hundred yards away from Laura Street across Wood Road. Her parents ran the County Cinema, near the railway station in Pontypridd, and were well known in the area. Vi was friendly with Tom’s mother, Freda, and, like her, was outgoing and popular.
As youngsters, Tom and Linda’s paths seldom crossed. Boys and girls played separately, unless they went to the same school. Linda, who is six months younger than Tom, went to a Catholic primary school, so he was only vaguely aware of who she was at that age. He noticed that she wore little crucifix earrings, like many of the local Catholic girls, but that was about all.
Tom first became aware of Linda properly, before he was struck down with TB, when she was playing marbles in the street with some friends. He recalled light-heartedly, ‘I must have been eleven. I walked down her street and she was bending down and playing marbles. I saw those great legs and all of a sudden I thought of her in a new light.’
He did pursue Linda, after a fashion, but it was more for a game of kiss chase than anything else. All the boys would chase the girls and if they were lucky enough to catch up with one, they had to give her a kiss. ‘My first proper kiss was with Linda and it was her first kiss too. Afterwards I had to run my