Blackler remembers the boys had borrowed bicycles and, as they were riding, Tom shouted over, ‘I’m going now to Porthcawl for a week. Do you fancy coming down?’ Brian, who was one of eight children and had never had a proper holiday either, jumped at the chance, and joined the Woodward family in a caravan by the seaside in the popular resort some thirty miles west of Cardiff. There wasn’t much to do other than muck about on the dunes or ‘freeze your balls off’ in the water – it was always cold in Porthcawl. Tom found a place to sing though: the back of an old lorry by the beach, where he could entertain other holidaymakers.
The holiday was a positive outcome at the end of his two-year sentence in Laura Street. The resumption of school wasn’t particularly welcome, however. A teacher had come in from time to time to help the patient with his lessons, but Tom’s heart had never been in it. For his age, Tom was well behind and hadn’t mastered the most basic elements of education. His handwriting and spelling were hopeless – not that he cared much. After all, he had met the girl who would be the love of his life.
3
Being laid up in bed with tuberculosis isn’t an ideal situation for a lad struggling through adolescence. Tommy could only gaze out of his ‘prison’ window in frustration and watch the local schoolgirls laughing and gossiping in the street below. One in particular grabbed his attention – Melinda Trenchard was the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood.
Linda was the daughter of Bill and Vi Trenchard, who lived in Cliff Terrace, just a few hundred yards away from Laura Street across Wood Road. Her parents ran the County Cinema, near the railway station in Pontypridd, and were well known in the area. Vi was friendly with Tom’s mother, Freda, and, like her, was outgoing and popular.
As youngsters, Tom and Linda’s paths seldom crossed. Boys and girls played separately, unless they went to the same school. Linda, who is six months younger than Tom, went to a Catholic primary school, so he was only vaguely aware of who she was at that age. He noticed that she wore little crucifix earrings, like many of the local Catholic girls, but that was about all.
Tom first became aware of Linda properly, before he was struck down with TB, when she was playing marbles in the street with some friends. He recalled light-heartedly, ‘I must have been eleven. I walked down her street and she was bending down and playing marbles. I saw those great legs and all of a sudden I thought of her in a new light.’
He did pursue Linda, after a fashion, but it was more for a game of kiss chase than anything else. All the boys would chase the girls and if they were lucky enough to catch up with one, they had to give her a kiss. ‘My first proper kiss was with Linda and it was her first kiss too. Afterwards I had to run my wrists under cold water. I was an early starter.’ It was nothing more than a playground romance at this stage, although Tom has always been disarmingly frank and earthy about growing up: ‘I can remember the first time I got to know myself better – I thought I had broken it!’
When he was confined to his room, Linda was the girl he would watch out for most. He would quietly seethe when he saw her talking to the other boys, but he could do nothing about it. She never came to visit him, because, in those prim and proper days, girls who weren’t family didn’t visit boys in their homes. Linda, as Tom could see from his window, was maturing into a lovely teenager. Her old school friend Vimy Pitman observes, ‘She was very, very attractive. She was everybody’s cup of tea. She had a lovely figure and was the sweetest girl. She would never say anything nasty about anybody or get involved in arguments or anything. She really was a nice girl.’
When Tom emerged from Laura Street, he had changed. He was taller and broader and his hair had turned the colour of coal. Linda hadn’t seen him for two years. She recalled, ‘When we met up after he went back to school, I didn’t recognise him at first, but I was immediately attracted to him again.’
Tom was equally smitten. ‘I don’t know what the feeling was. All I knew was I had a feeling for this girl. She looked fantastic.’
It was a classic case of opposites attracting – good girl in the A stream meets a boy who couldn’t care less and was languishing in the Ds. Tom’s lack of interest in all things academic had become even more pronounced. He had fallen so far behind during his two years away from school that he saw little point in trying to catch up. Linda, on the other hand, was particularly accomplished at drawing and illustrating – an interest she might have had in common with Tom if he had stuck with it. Perhaps art was too closely associated with the boredom of TB, because music took over as soon as he was allowed to sing again.
The girls at school weren’t too bothered about Tom’s classroom credentials. Vimy acknowledges, ‘Lots of the girls, well, most of the girls, I suppose, found him very attractive. He seemed a bit rough to me, but he definitely had the charisma. He had a way with him – a swagger.’
Linda had no idea at first that he was a gifted singer. She hadn’t been present at any family sing-songs, nor had she heard him entertain classmates. Instead, she had to wait until his sister Sheila’s engagement party to hear him. She described it in a rare interview in the 1960s: ‘Tom’s mother and mine knew each other well, so it was quite natural that when his sister got engaged he should invite me to the party. It was there I first really heard him sing. He sang “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and accompanied himself by tapping his fingers on the table. I wish it had been recorded.’
The opportunities for teenage courtship in Treforest were few. Linda and Tom got together first of all at the local youth club. She recalled, ‘We were too young to say we were going together, but we always seemed to end up with each other.’ They would synchronise running errands for their mothers, just so they could walk to the local shops hand in hand.
Tom and Linda became an item almost without anybody noticing. It wasn’t a case of them going into class one day and announcing that they were going out. His cousin Margaret can’t remember a time when they weren’t together: ‘I used to think they were like Darby and Joan – like an old pair of slippers. They were always together, with their arms around each other. They were very loving.’
Many of her contemporaries have likened Linda to Doris Day, the epitome of movie-star niceness. Tom, on the other hand, had a touch of Marlon Brando about him, being more brooding than clean cut. But something clicked between them. Looking back on those days in 2006, Tom said, ‘Teenage love is great. It never really happens like that again. We were so wrapped up with one another then and we’ve never really lost that. We like one another’s company. We are friends, we laugh and we are natural with one another. That’s something you can’t learn. It’s either there or it’s not.’
Things soon became more serious. If it was dry, they would walk for hours in the hills above the village. If it was raining – and it rained a lot in the Valleys – they would shelter in the old red phone box at the end of Laura Street. Fortunately, it was a fine day when they decided to make love for the first time. Tom was fifteen and Linda was fourteen when they found a secluded spot in a field overlooking the village. Tom said simply, ‘It was very special.’
Tom’s devotion to his girlfriend was clear from his reluctance to brag about her to his mates. He didn’t provide them with a blow-by-blow account, and flatly denied they had done the deed. It was all right to indulge in some swaggering talk with the lads about sex, but he wouldn’t talk about his sweetheart. As Vimy Pitman perceptively observes, ‘Linda was sacred.’
Tom had only a year of school left after recovering from TB. As well as Linda and singing, his other interest when he resumed his education was smoking Woodbines. He would join the boys and pop into the shop opposite the school gates, where they would
