In last Saturday's 'Western Mail' there was a photographic supplement entitled 'Pictures from the Past - part 3'. One shows the children's paddling pool at the seafront, Aberystwyth, in 1957 and I'm convinced I'm in it.   It must be a real sign of aging that I'm featured in such nostalgia, but four years old it looks like me, on the edge of the pool and gazing down to the beach (which is probably where I want to be).
   In the foreground I can only see the back of a woman who could well be my grandmother, or' Nanny' as we would call her. That made sense : no sign of my parents!
   If their marriage was collapsing, I wasn't particularly aware of it then. In retrospect, I can deliberate about the fact they never embraced, never seemed to kiss even and , most strangely, that there were two 'uncles' who bought us presents.
   One of those 'uncles' lived just down the road and the other in Swansea and my mother would take shopping trips to that city and return with a jar of sweets, a rarity.
   It also seems astonishing now that my father never became aware of this, or perhaps he did and we didn't know the resulting tensions and frustrations.
   It's not as if there were constant arguments in the house. My mother was an expert at 'putting on a show'. Once prominent in local AmDramatics, she used all her acting skills in personal situations and showed few emotions. This was the case even when my father stripped to his underpants and leapt onto the kitchen table, spitting and fuming abuse.
   When I was very young it was my dad who cared more for me and it was he who came to my bedside when I couldn't sleep and cried out, gently smoothing my head.
   With my mother, we three children grew up believing we were 'responsibilities' rather than loved ones. It didn't surprise me when, years later, I discovered that I was a mistake, the product of a burst condom.
   Perhaps, even as a sperm, I was a determined and rebellious little sod!
   When we moved to England with my father's job as an agricultural officer, my mother soon found a way to raise money by taking in a lodger.
   She interviewed all the candidates assiduously and I think she had a set of criteria which few could possibly meet. Eventually, she chose the one who, a decade after, would become my step-father.
   After losing his post in the Civil Service for panning out his boss, my mother encouraged my father to re-train as a librarian. He went away to college, leaving my mother to dote on the lodger, who became the resident 'uncle'.
   Their separation was sudden and a shock to my father, who was suddenly stuck in a bedsit in the city at the beginning of a new career.
   To my mother, on the other hand, it was a long time coming. Both of them were totally self-obsessed, but my father's mental illness and his treatment of my sister had made him impossible to live with.
   Their separation was a great relief to me. I had no desire to see my father, who had long since stopped playing a part in my life ( though I had to visit him once a week by law). Whenever I stayed with him I was constantly wary of his explosive nature.
   My mother carried on seeing that lodger surreptiously, while my father had a few affairs which weren't serious.
    Despite my relief, I was still affected by the disturbances in my life and by the way my mother sought to use me as a spy,to collect data on my father's liaisons. He saw her as 'poisoning my mind'.
   I believe he held out some hope she would return and , amazingly, never seemed to suspect the lodger. I recall one time we walked by the River Cam and he implored me to ask her, on his behalf, to come back to him.
   At school, I changed from being a studious pupil to a very stroppy one and I'm surprised I learnt anything in my first years at Grammar. One teacher, our football trainer who had known my brother, did offer to help. I appreciated it, but couldn't talk to him.
   As I grew older I formed an unofficial club with other boys in school of those with divorced or separated parents and parents staying together 'for the children's sake'. We would debate the issues and that certainly helped at a time when divorce wasn't so common.
   Like my siblings, I soon discovered the need for an alternative family. Without my girlfriend's family in their council house in Cambridgeshire, I think I'd have turned out a complete delinquent. I was taken in as a second son.
   Of course , I thought she was utterly gorgeous : even played footie, loved the Small Faces, read Barstow and Braine ( though she was Sec. Mod to my Grammar) and , above all, could out-snog all the village girls. Her family became my surrogate one and I soon learnt to talk in their burry, rolling accents.
   Divorce was a messy business then and despite my mother being the one who'd left and was having an affair, it was my father who had to undergo the humiliation of private detectives interrupting one of his casual meetings, to capture the evidence.
   It's only with time that I have become aware how deluded and also manipulated my father was in that predicament. My mother should probably have left him before I was born, but then I wouldn't be here staring at that photo in the newspaper and wondering what was going through my little head.

   The poem below is about a very good friend whose relationship has finally ended, though they have been separated for years. She has moved to the next valley, but it might as well be another planet.  


                                      I'M  A  DEAD MAN!

She've left
she've gone
to er I'm a dead man

we lived close by,
teatimes together
an now Aberdare

might jest as well
be Australia
f'r all she cares

I paint, do collages
end up changin them black,
end up burnin them up

all them yers
f'r what?
no kids 

carn even play
my mewsic no more,
I sol the television

tha Clinic turned er
against me an I even
paid f'r er t be there

too many voices
when she shoulda slept,
it woz er father fucked er up

now I'm left t regret
I couldn be er child an usband :
I'll ave a fewnral for myself

I'll drink till my ead's a canvas
stretched an ready f'r-a brush :
but my ands shake.....nothin comes.