The Peculiar People

The Peculiar People...

I come From.

My father was born in a cottage hospital in 1942 Ruabon (Rhiwabon) not two miles from the farm I ended up growing up on. This Father was a mechanic in the R.A.F, who fixed Spitfires and saw action all over the world. Thomas O'Malley was also of Irish Catholic stock (though he "reformed") to marry Dylis Lewis (of feverish Methodist stock). He was not allowed to see his family, though there was an Aunt Lucy my father saw, and a cousin Patrica he saw on occasion.

He lived in a nice semi-detached house, next door to his also devoutly Methodist in-laws. The Lewis's were "well to do", strict and rather poe-faced people. My Great-Grandfather Lewis was a fireman, a hero, all brass buttons and saving men's life from terrible mining tragedies, notably Gresford Colliery fire (Gresford Disaster). Several Lewis's were killed and I wonder if we were related.

Dylis was for my father a figure of intense dislike. She was snobby, smothering, self-centered, petulant and weak. She was too close to her family and I know my father blamed her for his father's early death. Thomas had the vicious Irish temper, but he was also very funny, with a quick witted and course tongue when the mood struck him. After the war he worked his way up from shop keep to area manager of Co-op, at least according to my father.

My father grew very anti-religious (especially when he found jazz) but he also was very fond playing practical jokes and stunts, especially against teachers at his grammar school. Sometimes he got caught but mostly he didn't and he would tell me stories with relish.

On Smithy Lane I can remember Uncle Jason that when we were small we visited. I never heard his surname. Yet looking it he was likely a Lewis. He was a whistley old man with a couple of very annoying yappy (and nippy) tiny black poodles.

My father was an actor and he left school and joined a rep theatre company. He was amazing at voices and impersonations. That was his bread and butter when I knew him. It is odd but true to say where most people could not have told the impressions apart, I could recognise his voice, even as someone else when it came on the television, as sometimes it did.

I wonder sometimes at the characters he sometimes did, his booming baritone thumping out a sermon, or bursting into feverish song, being a reflection of the Lewis side of his life.

He was very "anti-welsh", in so much as he refused to allow me to gain a Welsh accent, and adopted the clip up the ear first, explain why later approach. Yet he met my "Mother" at the Welsh club in London where she was working as a bar-maid as a student. 

I remember nothing of being spoken to about my great-grand-mother, and I don't know her name.

I do know that I have many of the traits, good and bad from this muddled side of the family. My father, much to his own horror I imagine, is a terrible snob, and rather petulant and self-centered too. I could never figure out how you could love jazz and be so mind-meltingly racist. I certainly saw myself more Irish than Welsh as a child (which is silly as the O'Malley's had been Wales a couple of generation marrying other Welsh born, Irish Catholics long before my Granddad).

I always felt like an outsider, but maybe that was not about who I came from. It was only when I left that I felt my Welshness more keenly. With a sense of wonder and pride.

My "mother" is a Beynon. Her mother was a Jones (though her own mother was some sort of blue-blood who was disowned for marrying Albert Jones, a foundling found nearly naked wandering the mountain.)

Their own stories make my father's appear a series of Just William stories. In truth I have coal-dust, liquid copper, milk, blue blood, and magick in my veins.