In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas

mother did not come back with the usual riposte that we did not have enough money. Yes, I would have them. Just like that! Yes, my father was coming home from sea and he would buy me a pair of dungarees on his return. He was due in dock on the following day. And – on Friday night we would be going to the Empire and on Saturday to Barry Island.
    The Empire! Barry Island! My cup was full. Even now I can see us, all four holding hands, at the bus stop waiting to go on the first part of that magic journey. I stand there, hugging myself with happiness, for I loved the stage lights, the funny men and even the singers and dancers at the Empire. And tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . .
    We sat in the gods, gazing down at the iridescent stage. The number of the act used to go up formed by light bulbs at the wings, in the interval a curtain, thick as a wall, would descend, hung with advertisements for the attractions and businesses of Newport. It is hard to describe that delight. I cannot now recall what variety of acts were on stage that night, although this may have been the occasion when, to my guilt, surprise and pleasure, a lady standing at the back of a finale tableaux suddenly allowed the gauze covering her front to fall and reveal two marble-white and marble-hard objects which I thought for a moment might be spinning tops. It was only when the curtain had dropped, and the vision vanished, that I realised that I had glimpsed something that was to hold a lasting interest for me.
    It must have been at this same period of their armistice when my parents went dancing together and took us with them. We went to a place which had the sniff of romance, the Newport Labour Hall. Roy and I sat on hoop-backed chairs, our eyes becoming clotted with chalk dust, as the dancers swooped and skidded around the floor in a swirling anti-clockwise haze. The fact that my mother was being flung backwards (it was the era of the Argentinian tango) by an utter stranger disturbed me a little. My father, meanwhile, swooped pan-faced across the boards with the dash of a marauder.
    'Why is our dad doing it by himself?' enquired my brother. Like me, he must have thought dancing was an odd way to spend an evening, especially since the entrance fee was ninepence.
    We had a good back view of our distant parent. Apparently alone, he was flicking his feet this way and that, sending up puffs of chalk, bending almost to the floor. Eventually he spun, kicked sideways, and zoomed towards us, clutching to him one of the smallest women I had ever seen, or have seen to this day. Whether he sought to impress his sons, I do not know, but as the appropriate beat of the tango occurred he arrived in our proximity, threw her backwards across his knee and her head tipped, like someone slaughtered. Then with a devilish grin he whirled her away.
    'I could see right down inside her,' sniffed my brother.
    The news that war had been declared was given to me by a boy with a stutter. 'W . . . w . . . w . . . ar,' he said as I was going up the street. We had moved in the spring of 1939 to a district called Maesglas, at the Welsh end of Newport, bordering on the ebony River Ebbw and rising meadows. Maesglas means 'green fields', but to its inhabitants and those in other council estates, it was known as Moscow.
    On that first Sunday morning in September I had been sent, in the crucial few minutes before the fateful eleven o'clock speech of Neville Chamberlain, to the greengrocer's shop at the bottom of the street. My mother, as convinced as Edward Lyndoe that there would be no war, had decided that life should go on as usual, so I was sent for the vegetables. While the man was putting the muddy potatoes and carrots in a bag, so the announcement of hostilities was coming over the wireless in the back room of his shop. I could not hear what was being said but the greengrocer was clearly disturbed. 'We're for it now,' he confided in me. He turned to weigh the potatoes. Believing firmly in Lyndoe,