My older brother Jos was writing books before I even started, having published several travel guides and articles. The real writer came out in the first volume of a memoirs - On Bonfires, Butlin’s and Being Welsh which has found favour not only with the inhabitants of Pwllheli and similar seaside towns, but with those who enjoyed a childhood in the 1950s and 1960s wherever they may have spent it.
I was gratified, and a little frightened, to find that one section of the book covers my arrival in his world - how although I had my uses, he’d have preferred a puppy. A logical choice for a twelve-year-old I think. This is what he wrote to immortalise me:
"My little brother Chris
Having posted at length about my older brother Jeff, it occurred to me that I really should offer my younger brother Chris the same courtesy. In some ways this is more difficult – Jeff, four years older, was really only a shade ahead of me: Elvis and Buddy Holly, though of his generation, were also part of my early world. Whereas, half a generation younger, Chris’s Noddy Holder, whilst cheerful enough, didn’t quite seem to me the stuff of which rock stars are made.
Anyway.
When mum, at 42, got pregnant with Chris (I was 12), I found the way adults treated her pregnancy, and me, slightly uncomfortable. Or not. I can’t even remember if I realised what was going on. I just knew that mum, being well under five foot tall, resembled a cannonball. But then anything your parents do seems, at that age, to be excruciatingly embarrassing.
My next memory was mum coming back from Bangor with a baby. I took a mild interest in it, as I would have a budgie or a kitten. Not a puppy – a puppy would have been much more fun.
Some time later, mum took the baby off to Ferndale, presumably to be admired by our family in the south. Chris was pleasant enough before they left, and reasonably easy to look after – you could plant him somewhere and he’d stay there, not having learned to move, and he took a really intelligent interest in his surroundings. Wherever he found himself, he could keep himself amused.
When they came back six weeks later, it was a horse of a completely different colour. He could crawl, and not in a sluggish, lackadaisical way, but at a hundred miles an hour. And in the confines of Llys Pedr’s narrow corridors and diminutive rooms this was terrifying. I kept trying to coral him, but he charged about like a cupid on speed, his golden curls flowing. Soon, I was sure, he would collide with the sharp edge of a piece of furniture and die in a torrent of his own blood. AND I WOULD BE BLAMED!
As he got older, Chris became what I can only describe as a cutie. He was extremely pretty, with a phenomenal command of the English language, and an oddly old-fashioned air. At six he could identify and name virtually every car on the road. I stumped him only once. I pointed at a Triumph Mayflower, a curiously angular car that looked a bit like Kryten in Red Dwarf. He thought hard, and eventually came up, tentatively, with, ‘A Triumph Daisy?’ Not a bad try. His other slight mishearing of things are part of our family’s lexicon to this day: ‘I want a piece of quiet!’ and, ‘It’s' the blom on the back!’ (it was a ‘blond’ on the pillion of a tin scooter).
By the time I was sixteen I was keen to take my little brother with me to Brexo every Saturday morning. Not because I was keen to earn parental brownie points, or because I was a particularly good brother, but because this very pretty, insanely articulate moptop was a cast-iron babe magnet. I was immediately surrounded by girls billing and cooing and chucking him under the chin. Not a puppy, to be sure, but not at all a bad substitute.
I was a terrible brother. I teased him mercilessly. I provoked him into paroxysms of fury to record it on a hidden tape-recorder. I berated him on Tre’r Ceiri when he denied having eaten any of the bilberries we were collecting despite his virulently purple mouth.
But he was a huge favourite with my girlfriend-then-wife, and became, and still is a half century later, a huge favourite with my children and grandchildren.
An anecdote to finish. After we’d been home to Pwllheli, I got a phone call from my children’s school. The Head was perturbed – my kids had told her that, whilst we’d been in Wales, their Uncle Chris had taken them to an ancient site and made them join the National Front! I was able to reassure her.
He’d taken them to Penrhyn Castle, and they’d joined the National Trust. "
On Bonfires, Butlin’s and Being Welsh by Jos Simon (Y Lolfa 2022) is available through the usual outlets.
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