The Day I Buried My Shoes and Dug a Hole of Lies
Photo by James Xander on Unsplash
Growing up in Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, nobody tracked where we were. We had the sun, our wits (questionable), and Mam's voice carrying up the street when it was time to come home.
We often didn't come home. Not when we were meant to.
It got to the point where Mam called the police more than once to report us missing. In reality we were off having adventures, scruffy-kneed and intensely local, around Wern Fawr Road and beyond, and we'd simply lost track of the time.
Sometimes it was Swansea Bay, sometimes the Bank behind our street, and once the Carbon Black factory, which coated the neighbourhood in black grime whenever the wind turned the wrong way. One of us, David or Peter, memory blurs here, came home looking like he'd crawled out of a coal sack. Mam didn't find it funny.
One day, when I was about seven, a group of us wandered all the way to the Slip, a beach three miles from home. I fancied a paddle, but there was a problem: new shoes. No way were they getting wet.
So I did the only sensible thing. I buried them in the sand.
By the time I came back for them, the beach had turned into one uniform stretch of nothing-in-particular. I couldn't find them. They were just gone.
That left me with a three-mile barefoot walk home and a father to explain it to. I panicked, and told Dad the Fermandals, a family of outlaws down our street, had stolen them.
Big mistake.
Dad, in full Welsh fury mode, marched me straight to their door to demand justice. Mercifully nobody answered. Either they were out, or they'd seen his face through the curtains and made themselves scarce.
With the Fermandal story dead, I tried again: big boys had stolen the shoes and thrown them down a hole over the Bank. So off we went a second time, Dad stomping beside me, and yes, he climbed into the hole himself and had a look round.
Still no shoes.
Out of ideas, I panicked once more and invented bottomless mud pits that opened up at random and swallowed shoes whole. I watched Dad's face reach the outer limit of what a man can be expected to believe.
I don't remember what happened after that, but it likely involved a clipped ear, or worse. What I understand now is that his fury was never really about the lies.
It was the fear of a man who couldn't afford to buy his son another pair of shoes.