The miners in addition to their pay, received a coal allowance every month and when the wagon tipped it onto the road outside the house I would help my father to store it. He broke up the huge slabs with a sledge-hammer while I loaded the wheelbarrow and piled the pieces in the shed at the back. The small coal, we swept to one side and used to keep the fire smouldering during the winter nights. After his shift, father would sit in a tin bath in front of the fire, washing the thick black coal dust from his body that carried the blue scars and patterns of skin grafts from accidents and underground explosions. Three fingers of his left hand were missing as the result of a wartime accident on an icy road with a motorcycle and an army convoy. After supper he would sit watching the fire, smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes, or reading the newspaper. In those evenings no one spoke very much. There was only the warm silence, the crackle of the fire and the sweet smell of tobacco smoke.
When I was at school in Aberdare, my French teacher, J.B. Davies MA, master of wit and cruel sarcasm and the most articulate man I can remember, gave me, in the corridor some valuable, if acerbic advice, and a book that contained De Vigny’s poem.
“Johns!” He said.
“It will require some serious and uncharacteristic effort on your part, to read and understand this poem, but doing so might convince you that French is one of the most beautiful languages in the world; a fact you would perhaps appreciate had you ever paid any attention to my classes or delivered any homework. The poem is about a horn, or at least it centres around one. And as it is that instrument that seems to absorb all your interest at the present time, you may be enabled to summon the effort necessary for the task. Provided such unfamiliar exertions do not bring about irreparable damage to your delicate artistic disposition, they may remind you that there are means of communication and areas of study in the world at large other than music! It may even help you to pass an A level examination in a subject other than music; pointless and eccentric as that may sound to you. Be careful you don’t become some sort of anchorite. The day might yet come when you will be required to join the rest of us in our mundane preoccupations”
I was too young to understand the implications of what he was saying; his concern for my welfare and education having been disfigured by his studied sarcasm, but when I began to read and to understand some of the poem, I wanted to learn more, and sensing my willingness, J.B. was glad to help me.
Garfield Griffiths was an evangelical teacher of literature and of poetry in particular and it was from him that I first learned something of Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson. The value of my lessons with him, I realised years later when I took part in a famous performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with the composer conducting and I remembered our lessons on Wilfred Owen’s, Anthem for Doomed Youth and the heartbreaking Futility, made the more poignant by the fact that Owen had been killed in France just a week before the Armistice. But Garfield’s greatest gift to me came from his knowledge and understanding of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins and the Aberdare poet Alun Lewis. From the time when I could first afford to buy books, I have studied and collected the work of the Anglo Welsh poets.
JB and Garfield were just two of the many inspirational people that helped and guided me.
Early one September morning, in the old tradition I got a telephone call from an unusually conversational Sydney Sax with the offer of a great many film and recording sessions, extending over several weeks and months which I soon realised was a serious but poorly disguised attempt to persuade me to leave the Royal Philharmonic. Sid’s well known telephone manner was defined by the seemingly casual way that he approached what were very significant musical and commercial transactions, that was as persuasive as the wads of cash that he doled out at the end of the day in the film studios. I was a “first class” player, he said (with untypical enthusiasm,) and I had “proved myself” in symphony orchestras. It was time to be good to myself, to hang up my tail suit and make some money. It was very tempting indeed. All the sessions he was offering me were in London and by that time I certainly was becoming tired of touring. Also, I relished the prospect of playing with Jim again who, having returned to full-time playing was spending most of his time working in the studios and I suspected had taken part behind the scenes in Sid’s seduction process. So I took the plunge finally, and I was in my element, in the studio almost every day under the direction of the great Hollywood composers that I felt so comfortable with. Among the many films we did were The Omen, and The Boys from Brazil, with Jerry Goldsmith. Man who would be King, with Maurice Jarre. Scrooge, and The Little Prince, with Angela Morley, and A Bridge too Far, with Richard Adinsall. But I still loved to play in small orchestras and on jazz dates too, and I played in Max Jaffa’s little orchestra for the BBC “Palm Court” series, broadcast live on Sunday nights from the beautiful “Art Nouveau” theatre at Broadcasting House and I was invited to the Royal Opera House whenever there was a performance of Richard Rodney Bennett’s “Jazz Calendar.”