In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl by Rachel Trezise

Author:Rachel Trezise
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-912109-03-6
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2018-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

11

I had had a premonition at a much younger age that my life would make a miraculous change for the better at the age of fifteen and forever stay the same.

Papered in flyposters and lopsided, a building called Tonypandy Naval Club stood shamelessly on Pandy Square with the words ‘All Hippies Smell’ engraved on its wooden front doors. Joanne and I found it in June 1993 when Hull’s most hopeful glam rock revivers Rich Rags thought it might be a good idea to find some Welsh fans there. From that particular Saturday night on, we shared the ritual so many churchless, music-orientated, bored valley people did.

Throughout the world teenagers fall into two categories, and although a place as secluded and often immodestly rural as the Rhondda fails to share such universal habits, this one made its way, even to us. The first type is the colourful, driving on their seventeenth birthday, school-prom, sports-captain, Americanised kind and the second (which always is for their disappointed parents, second) are the others, the bookish, with milk-white skin, who are cynical and look for answers in cigarettes and alternative music, as opposed to the acclaimed perfection which the first think can be bought simply with a netball medal or an all-year-round tan. The Naval Club is where the seconds went.

The thing with the Rhondda was the constant lack of choice. Understandably, some people would choose to live as far away as possible from the bustle of nine to five, club opening licences in the city and other hassles a place like London unfortunately offers. However, the Rhondda was neither city nor country; it is a valley made up of towns, and in between you could say, if the rising crime was not so rife, and heroin abuse and calculated murder, building society armed hold-ups and all these things which the city of Cardiff regularly underwent, didn’t happen in the valley, but they did, quite often. So, truthfully I could say the place where I grew up is physically as violent and as loud as any metropolitan dwelling, yet mentally the valley could be as compact as a West Virginian out of time and date KKK town. I honestly could not understand or sometimes even want to know how we could actually stand up for the National Anthem and say we were proud to be residents.

It was not only our generation of teenagers who were afraid of the sun and afraid of hockey pitches that went to the Naval Club, but all the alive still generations of seconds with odd musical tastes. The punks whose mohicans had grown out, the mods whose scooters had broken down, the rockers who thought nothing could be as good as pure, original Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, all those who belonged to something other than the bore of ordinary eat, sleep, shit, disco existences.

Needless to mention, I took part in many rich conversations there and met what I would have described then as some of the Rhondda’s most intriguing characters, musicians and disguised treasures, of whom a couple became my best friends.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.