No. 36 - What Every Boy Wants (Part One)

Sixty-eight. Blimey. Now that I am of an age that my father never reached, I find myself thinking about him a lot and regretting that, as an adult, I never got to know him. When you are a child you don’t consider your parents to be people…they’re just parents aren't they. They’re all right, but you do sometimes wish they were richer, more accomplished or perhaps just a little bit cooler. Could my father not have had a Zodiac convertible rather than a poky little Anglia? In Pwllheli he was well thought of, but I failed to see him through anybody’s eyes but my own. To me he was an authority figure committed to thwarting any chance I had of having fun. Now, because I am older and hopefully wiser, and because I have heard so many people talk about him with great affection, I have re-evaluated him.

Philip Llewelyn Simon, kite designer.

I can have no complaints about my upbringing in the little Welsh seaside town of Pwllheli. The family was never rolling in money, it seemed to me that we always had just enough, and I can appreciate that I was privileged in many other ways. I was brought up beside the sea, beautiful in all its moods, and surrounded by lush green countryside, so magnificent that it could be intoxicating. For a child, the town was a giant adventure playground and from a very early age I could wander around it safely, with impunity. The occasional rows delivered to me for getting home late for supper merely demonstrated that I was cared for. 

The Brown Paper Kite

No-one can embarrass you quite like your parents can, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. With Mum it was often a matter of language. I think that it amused her that her archaic terminology could exasperate me so. She would call the school holidays 'hols', my football kit ‘togs’ and my pumps ‘daps’ as though she had consulted a 1953 Billy Bunter annual to find out how to speak to kids. Later, during my adolescence, she would frequently exclaim ‘Ooh! You’ve got another pimple coming look!’ What a horrible word ‘pimple’ is, and why did she feel it necessary to raise the matter anyway? It isn’t like I didn’t know already.

When it came to Dad, it was a rare thing indeed for us to do normal father-son things, which is understandable given that at one time, he was my headmaster, my class teacher, my Sunday School teacher and he was the church organist, leaving him as sick of the sight of me as I was of him. I cannot recall ever expressing any great desire to fly a kite, which seemed to me a futile and largely unrewarding pursuit. But Dad was subject to notions about what every little boy must want and, out of the blue, he decided I would have one. He wasn’t going to fork out for a shop bought one - oh no – not when he was resourceful enough to build one himself. With a great deal of cutting and mild cussing, this he proceeded to do.

When it was finished, I have to admit that it was recognisably a kite, certainly of the classic  shape. But I can be no kinder than that, for there the resemblance to anything airworthy ended. It was made out of brown paper and, perhaps crucially, its frame had been constructed using old bits of dowelling rod. It had a vaguely military look about it. It featured a long string tail with paper strips and the blue mottled tube around which the string had been wound was meant to serve as the only thing to stop it from blowing away – as if it ever could. My older brother Jos has since revealed that Dad had made one for him years earlier, but out of newspaper, so mine was in fact a comparatively deluxe model. Pleased with his handiwork, Dad insisted on taking me down to the beach for its maiden flight.

‘Would any of your mates like to come?’ he asked.

‘No thanks Dad’

My reply was emphatic. If I could have got away with wearing an impenetrable disguise I would have, false beard and all, so there was no way I wanted anyone I knew to witness what was almost certain to be a debacle. He drove us down to Abererch beach and as we crossed the dunes I stared mournfully at his new transparent plastic sandals. They were of a type I had only ever seen women wear and they did not go with the rest of his ensemble – baggy trousers, nylon work shirt and a short-sleeved jumper. I could view his sartorial choices only as a clinical exercise in humiliating me.

Me in kite-dragging days.

He marched boldly onto the flat sands much as Malcolm Campbell must have done at Daytona Beach when attempting a land speed record. I slunk along behind him, furtively looking from side to side, desperate for there to be no witnesses. Once we’d arrived at a clear, flat area of beach, Dad scampered this way and that, dragging the inert contraption in his wake without success. Once he was out of breath, and it didn’t take long, he forced me to do the same. I don’t think he’d have been too pleased had I succeeded where he had failed, but there was little to no danger of that. Of course, this was because I was doing it all wrong as, it seemed to me, he believed I did everything all wrong.

‘Oh give the confounded thing here,’ he growled impatiently, snatching back the mottled tube from my incompetent hands. In his minds eye he probably pictured the two of us gazing delightedly skywards as the kite soared through a blue sky, like the jolly cover of a Ladybird book. Instead, he found himself stumbling across wet sand, dragging his contraption of wood and soggy paper, beside an ungrateful son who was willing the earth to swallow him up. 

He dragged the thing up and down the shore a few more times before concluding that it mustn’t be ‘quite windy enough’. Seeing an end to my ordeal I agreed eagerly – but to this day I think that had Abererch Beach been overtaken by an unexpected hurricane, I could have done worse than cling to that kite for safety – because believe me, it was going nowhere. There was more chance of the nearby refreshment hut becoming airborne.

Despite his remark that we would return on a windier day, I never saw the brown paper kite again and for that I will always be grateful. I asked Jos whether his newspaper kite had flown. “Er…no!” was the reply.

Wheels of Independence

Another memory. One Christmas morning I woke up to find a string attached to a note which read ‘Follow me’. Agog with anticipation I did as instructed. The string took me all the way down the stairs to the hall, where, attached to the other end, was a brand new bike. I realised that this was a major purchase - a big present - and I was mindful enough of my parents’ feelings to feign delight. In fact, I had never expressed any desire to own one, but Dad must have decided that every boy wants a bike. 

Had I wanted a bike, I most probably wouldn’t have chosen this one. It was a red Moulton Mini, which was a model with very small wheels. It was probably less daunting to someone who had never ridden a bike before than the more traditional model, but that is the only advantage I can think of.

To make matters worse, Dad insisted that I take it out under his supervision after dinner on Christmas Day. Due to my complete lack of experience on anything more challenging than a Triang scooter, he didn’t trust me to figure it out for myself. He insisted on hanging on to the back of it as I rode it unsteadily up and down a mercifully deserted Lleyn Street. I am greatly averse to pain, but I would have cheerfully sustained multiple fractures rather than suffer this humiliation. Without his meddling I may have wobbled a bit, but I’d have picked it up quicker . 

It was the late 1960’s and this was a very smart bicycle of modern design. With hindsight I think that Dad wanted me to free me to explore the area and hoped I'd come to love it as much as he did. He bought the bike to give me an extra level of independence and to allow me to cycle out into the wonderful Lleyn countryside with my friends, free of the sickness that plagued me whenever I rode in his car. [See 'It Won't be Long Now']

But sadly, with small wheels and no gears this was very much a town bike, and hardly ideal for hilly Welsh country lanes. There were outings, but I found it difficult to keep up with friends on more traditional bikes. I don’t think I ever made it further than Llanor, which is not a destination for the young. Had I persevered, I reckon I would have ended up with legs like Popeye the Sailor Man's arms after a dose of spinach. For the Moulton Mini, our garden shed became less of a garage and more of a tomb. One day I noticed that it had gone - maybe Dad brushed off the cobwebs and sold it, or more than likely he gave it away. When I enquired, Mum said, “Well it was just gathering dust. You never went out on the blooming thing anyway.” I did not cry myself to sleep.

Popeye the Sailor Man, on a shutter on Lea Bridge Road E17.

With the benefit of hindsight I find these incidents rather touching, because in both cases my father was just trying to do something nice for me. It is a pity that I was unable or unwilling to appreciate that at the time.

He was a very busy man. I should have enjoyed spending that precious time alone with him, on the rare occasions when he was focusing on me and really only trying to be a good father. I took him for granted as though he would be there forever - and no-one is there forever.

Part Two will follow shortly.