It’s big enough, this city. It’s the biggest thing on the whole walk and
hangs its eastern side right at the sea’s edge.
I’ve crossed it many times and now I’m doing it again with John
Williams, just to be sure I’ve covered it all.
In the large and mostly empty car park of Tesco Pengam Green, down at
the bottom of where the runways once were when this moorland doubled as Cardiff
Airport, we’re discussing who the clientele of this south Cardiff superstore
might precisely be. Tremorfa, the Cardiff district this technically is, barely
seems large enough. The gypsy camp I tracked around the back of a couple of
hundred yards further on would hardly tip the balance. Celsa Steel Mill workers
at the end of their shifts buying four-packs to quench their thirsts. Leisure
sailors walking in from the Rhymney River Motor Boat Sailing and Fishing Club.
Maybe there’s an expansion to Cardiff that we don’t yet know about. Tesco in
place, ready to serve the new apartment blocks being built among the scrap
metal yards and the car breakers, on piles sunk into the foreshore and on piers
cantilevered out over the river. If this were still 2003, when anything was
possible, then maybe.
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| John Williams Photo: P Finch |
John Williams
John Williams, master of Cardiff Dead and biographer of Shirley Bassey, has just told me that he’s thinking of
changing his name. Ten books down the road and he’s just discovered that the
one he’s been using is hopeless.
John Williams guitarist
John Williams composer
John Williams New Zealand horse breeder
John Williams football sociologist
John Williams Welsh historian
John Williams Welsh artist
John Williams user interface designer
John Williams Blackburn Rovers chairman
John Williams BBC reporter
John Williams philosopher
John Williams Texan novelist
John Williams Brooklyn blogger
John Williams Detective Chief Superintendent
It’s this last one that rankles. Detective Chief
Superintendent John Williams, head of the 1980s investigation into the Lynette
White murder. That murder, in a flat in James Street, Butetown, Cardiff, in
1988, became the obsession of the John Williams I am with. The murder changed
his career direction from chronicler of detective fiction and novelist of the
noir to Cardiff fictioneer par excellence. He’s the man against whom all other
narratives set in the capital are now measured.
So, if you were not John Williams, then who might you be?
John reflects. “Johnny Highnote, maybe.
I got that one from a dream. On the other hand I quite like Johnny
‘Nightlife’ Williams. There was a Bertie ‘Nightlife Jarrett’ who was one of
Shirley Bassey’s early co-stars. People I tell this to think I’m insane.”
The Plan - A Walk To The Barrage
Our plan is to walk from here to the Barrage, right
through the centre of the city’s southern half. The working class suburbs, the
office units built where heavy industry once was, the playing fields, the lines
of shops. We go up through the Pengam Green private new build, along Hind
Close, De Havilland Road, Handley Road and Hawker Close, the names of the
planes that once flew from here now celebrated in orange brick. Tremorfa Park,
in full socialist fashion and untroubled by herbaceous plantings, is large,
flat and dense with football pitches. A notice at the entrance still announces
last November’s firework display. At the western end St Alban’s School sports,
sack races, penalty shoot outs, team relay and slam dunk is in full end of term
swing.
John, described by the Independent as bald and stocky and
with “the air of Donald Pleasance” (which is a little unfair, I’d say it’s more
the air of Peter Sallis or, if he were white, Willie Dixon) finds a hole in the
park fence and we emerge on Runway Road in the heart of the council house
territory that Tremorfa always was. Sunset gates, half-rendered pebbledash
semis, badly cut hedges, notices warning of dogs and against junk mail, NO
MENUS. There’s no sense anywhere of the sea that you could virtually touch if
you stood on stilts. These are post-war homes for heroes, housing for East Moors
Steelworkers when that place filled the local skyline with smog, an eastern
Splott beyond the Roath Dock rail link. Hardly any of these things are relevant
now. A train a day to the rolling mill comes down the link. The steelworks
closed in 1979. The space is now a business park.
We cross the bottom of Splott Park, going under the South
Park Road railway bridges, to emerge by the now boarded-up Grosvenor. These
south Cardiff workers’ pubs are closing as fast as the industry that once
supported them. John is talking about his latest enterprise – touring the
capital’s social clubs in the company of novelist Rob Lewis. They’ve already
tracked City Road starting at the Conservative Club, taking in the New Park
Liberal Club, the Cardiff and General Municipal Works Club and Institute, and
then ending in Charles Street’s Cardiff Ex-Serviceman’s Club. These places,
once all-male bastions of working-class exclusivity, are now pleased to hear
from anyone pressing their buzzers. Obtaining temporary membership is no longer
the problem it once was.
Splott Proper
In Splott proper, where we now are, the nineteenth
century terraces are a familiar sight. John lived here in the early eighties.
We walk along Splott Road to the refurbished Star Centre. Here at night, when I
regularly came twenty years back to learn martial arts, they’d steal the wheels
off your car if you didn’t pay the local kids a pound to guard it. In the
centre’s window are adverts for Zumba Dance Fitness and Flash-mob meditation.
It’s a changing world.
Railway Street running past both writer Susie Wild’s former
place and the now closed Cardiff Arms eventually reaches the New Fleurs,
Skittles & Darts, Function Room, Bar Food, on Walker Road. “A place of
great significance in the history of Cardiff punk,” John says. For a late-70s
guitarist who couldn’t really play like John the arrival of punk was a gift. “I
regarded it as mass conceptual art movement,” he tells me. “The music business
was promoting bands like ELP and Yes and you couldn’t just have a bash at being
them. But with punk anyone could join in. I was living in London and running a
punk fanzine called After Hours I got
it printed, appropriately after hours, by a friend who worked at Communist
Party HQ. The whole thing was very socialist. On a visit back home to Cardiff
to see my folks I put copies on sale in Spillers. Cardiff band Reptile Ranch
who’d recorded a do it yourself 7-inch single bought one
and wrote to me. They lived at 1 Walker Road and invited me down. I ended up
staying.”
Is the War Over?
Z. Block Records, Reptile Ranch’s label, operating out of
the Grass Roots Coffee Bar in Charles Street, but using Walker Road as a
business address, then put out Is The War
Over. This was Cardiff punk’s trailblazer compilation album. In addition to
Beaver, Mad Dog, The New Form, Addiction, Test to Destruction, and The Riotous
Brothers the album had two cuts by probably the only Cardiff band from this
period that the world will remember, Young Marble Giants.
Outside the Fleurs was once a red phone box. John and I
stare at the empty space it occupied.” We gave out the number of that box for
Z. Block,” says John. “Rough Trade rang us there to offer a contract for the
Young Marble Giants.” The future was bright. For a time.
John’s own band, The Puritan Guitars, then fell apart when
his inability to actually play started to become apparent. Instead he formed a
band where you sang. This was a nine-piece doo-wop with added David Bowie
outfit called the Skeleteens. The band practised over there. John is pointing
at the Maltings Warehouse, a little to the west of The Fleurs. “We went to
Paris to busk. I was there more for my ability to speak a bit of French and
pass the hat round than my ability as a singer.” Music, despite considerable
desire, wasn’t to be John’s future.
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| East Dock Early Morning Photo: P Finch |
Docks
Beyond the magic roundabout lies the now
enclosed East Dock, full of water, weed and sometimes fish. It’s a sanitised
reminder of how this area once was. Warehouses demolished to be replaced by
apartment blocks resembling warehouses. A single preserved dock crane. Metal
loading buckets cemented to the walkways. The dockside itself railed for
safety. No ships bar the preserved and rotting barge, the Eben Haezer, moored
outside the Wharf pub. Diving ducks in action. Floating bags and half-submerged
cans.
Access is officially via Schooner Way but Atlantic Wharf,
as the top end of the dock is known, can be reached by climbing a low wall on
Tyndall Street. John is telling me about how Cardiff ended up being the place
that defined him as an author. If doo wop wasn’t going to get him there then
crime would. The printed version, anyway. Beyond music his abiding interest was
the novel noir – crime made literature, crime written down. He’d completed Into the Badlands,
a book about American crime writers, and, along with the black London crime
novelist Mike Phillips, had decided to research a book on the event that, as
we’ve heard, changed his own career
direction, the killing of Cardiff prostitute Lynette White.
Lynette White
On Valentine’s Day, 1988, in a flat above the Kingsport
Betting Shop in Cardiff’s James Street, White had been brutally stabbed more
than fifty times. The police, floundering around for a suspect, selected three
locals as perpetrators, massaged the evidence, and got their conviction.
Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris, the Cardiff Three, were sent
down in 1990. Local indignation was considerable and a campaign to prove their
innocence was launched.
John, who’d parted from Phillips at this stage, found
himself in Canal Park at the annual mix of dope, Clark’s pies, curried goat,
Haile Selassie and dub that is the Butetown Carnival. Here he met Abdullahi’s
wife, Alex, working a fundraising stall. Perceived, correctly as it turned out,
to be on the side of the innocents, John was invited back to the family house
in Alice Street. In the tiny terrace he was confronted with boxes and boxes of
prosecution evidence, formally released to the defence. There were interviews
with almost every drug user, pimp, sex worker, petty criminal, street walker,
layabout, alcoholic, and low-lifer at large in greater Butetown on the night of
the 14th February, 1988. Five thousand reports. A sociological
document without equal.
As the book progressed John found himself sitting in
Butetown’s now rebranded Paddle Steamer
pub surrounded by known criminals and drug-dealers getting the news straight
from those who made it. Around him spun an outrage of incredulity and barely
repressed rage. People who would
normally never speak to a middle-class boy sitting there with a notebook were
induced to tell him how their world worked.
The cause was everything. John
was fighting for them.
John was inspired. His Bloody Valentine, the true tale of justice appallingly being
miscarried came out in 1993. The Court of Appeal had ruled that a gross
miscarriage of justice had taken place and the Three had been released. It then
took until 2000 for the Police to reopen their investigations and a further
three years for the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, to be convicted using DNA
evidence. In 2011, eight more years down the line, ten of those involved in the original Cardiff Three conviction were
finally put on trial for conspiring to pervert the cause of justice. In the way of things this trial then collapsed. The judge ruled that eight of the defendants
were not guilty of perverting the course of justice and two more as unable to
get a fair trial. The truth recedes and the mist returns.
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| Cardiff Bay Seafront Photo: P Finch |
The Sea Lock Pound
I’m getting all this as we cross Dock bottom to wend our
way through West Close, where the Taff Vale Railway once built steam engines.
We go along the side of the old Slipper Baths and enter Canal Park, the
grasslands that run south from Cardiff Central Station almost to the sea. This
was once the basin of the Glamorgan Canal – the Sea Lock Pound. The place where the barges carrying coal and
iron all the way from Merthyr met the sea. The Pound stayed full of water until
the steam dredger Catherine Ethel ripped the sea lock gates off in 1951 and the
waterway was abandoned.
We sit on a bench pretty much from where the famous 1950s
Bert Hardy Picture Post photo of the
Canal Basin that currently adorns John’s study wall would have been shot. John
is talking about the Cardiff Trilogy that
made his name, linked stories of low-life grit and humour set in the city of
his birth. He’d written a short story about a prostitute ripping off a sailor
and sent it, along with the manuscript of a spy novel he’d finished, to his
agent. “The novel is okay but it’s the short story we like,” was the reply. “Do
more.” With the Lynette White evidence to hand and the prospect of publication
up ahead the idea for what eventually became the first book of that trilogy, Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub, was
born.
Beyond the park is Dumballs Road. To the north this leads
to Curran Road and off that to Williams Way. This was once site of the Williams
steel stockholding and – later – aluminium window family business. Famous
enough now to be marked on the map. We forgo the chance to take a photo of John
standing by a road sign that bears his name to walk instead past South Wales’
Police’s new fortress-like HQ and over the bridge into Grangetown. The sea, or
at least Cardiff Bay’s fresh-water empounded replacement, is in full view. The
sun is glinting, aeration pumps are pushing up their bubbles and, officially,
there’s not a leak in anyone’s basement for miles around. Prior to the building
of the Barrage this was the district’s fear – ground water would rise, sewage
would back up and roads would be deluged. Didn’t happen.
The birds that once dined on the flats here have gone, to
be replaced with swan and duck. On the Taff’s western bank Channel View Leisure
Centre looks out at serried rows of moored yachts. If you live in Butetown then
Grangetown is another country. But Henry Bassey, Shirley’s brother lived here,
says John. So did Lynette White, once. We pass the Marl, drained playing fields
now but once tidal flats, to reach the blue and yellow bulk of Ikea.
Ikea
Ikea is a Cardiff magnet. Built on the site of the
gasworks at the top of Ferry Road it’s been a destination for the upwardly
mobile, the wannabe, the hunter for cheapskate shelving, the newly-wed and the
working class kitchen replacer for most of the past decade. It’s seen off
Maskrey's and Habitat and wrecked the profitability of BHS’s lighting section.
There’s pretty much no one under thirty who does not possess an Ikea cutlery
drainer or one of those battery coffee frothers that cost a pound.
John, it turns out, carries an Ikea Family Card. We are
here for a traditional lunch and since we’re too early for the much advertised
Ikea Swedish Crayfish Season –
be a part
of the largest crayfish party in the UK & Ireland – which is a pity, we
stick with what they’ve got. Mash, gravy and Swedish meatballs with Lingonberry
Sauce followed by jelly that looks like Swarfega but tastes like Sunny Delight.
What else.
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| Penarth Head From The Barrage Photo: P Finch |
The Trek Back
I trek back through the Grangetown streets, over the much
celebrated Clarence Road Bridge, to side-cut through the residential docks
south of James Street. If it were not for the liner-styled buildings that line
Mermaid Quay ahead this could be Cardiff’s past hanging on. Thin terraces,
gulls, sense of the sea beyond.
I pass the waterside conglomeration of restaurants on
which the Bay centres, thick with customers in slow shoes and Marks and Spencer
coats. Ahead is the white spire of the wooden Norwegian Church, moved, rebuilt,
everything cleaned and replaced so that virtually nothing of the original
remains, yet authentic to the last nail. South of it is the Barrage. The coast. Back on track again.
(This is an updated slice taken from Edging The Estuary - Peter Finch - Seren Books - not quite a Real Book but almost)
