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 buy one fag for a penny. Brian Blackler recalls, ‘Then we would go up the White Tips and smoke it and die on the way home. You think you are big when you have a fag in your mouth when you are a young kid.’
Tom left school at fifteen, as did practically everyone in Treforest. You had to be at the grammar school in Pontypridd to stay on and take A levels. Tom had no qualifications, but one thing had already been established: he wouldn’t follow his father down the mines. Even before his brush with TB had ruled it out, his parents wanted a different life for their son. Margaret observed, ‘He was brought up that he wasn’t going down the mines. Uncle Tom would never have agreed to that.’
In any case, Tom belonged to the first generation of Welsh sons who weren’t expected to follow in their fathers’ dusty footsteps. Instead, he found his first job as an apprentice glove cutter at the Polyglove factory in the Broadway, the main road between Treforest and Pontypridd.
His friend Brian joined him there when he, too, left school. Brian recalled, ‘We just used to shift some gloves. That was about it and a machine would do the rest.’ It was hot, dull and repetitive, and all for thirty-eight shillings a week in old money. Tom admitted that he hated it – not least because the cutting room was men only. The female staff were in another part of the factory, dealing with sales, packaging and retail.
At least he was earning just enough money to indulge his interest in records, clothes and beer. Far more important than work was the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, with the release of the film Blackboard Jungle and the impact of the theme tune ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. The song, with its hugely catchy, danceable melody, played over both the opening and closing credits. The film transformed a minor hit into a sensation. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was everywhere.
The song was released at the start of 1955 and made some waves in the UK before the movie came out in March. It re-entered the charts in November 1955 and marched all the way up to number one. Bill Haley was no Elvis though. He was already thirty, on the chubby side and just as likely to be performing an old country and western song as anything cutting edge. His music was much more influential than the man himself.
Tom first heard the song blaring from the radio that was constantly playing at the factory to keep the workforce entertained as they faced the daily grind: ‘All of a sudden this “Rock Around the Clock” came on and I thought, “This is jumping out of the radio”.’ His workmates were less impressed and failed to understand what he found so exciting about it. An exasperated Tom told them to ‘just bloody listen to it’.
At least Tom’s enthusiasm for the new music gave him a head start when it came to the two Christmas parties he attended during his time at the factory. All the staff had the opportunity to mix together, but the men tended to stand around drinking, while the girls wanted to dance. Tom had a big advantage, ‘I was the only one who could jive. I was like a kid in a candy store.’
Tom’s ability on the dance floor had been finely tuned by Linda when they went out dancing on the weekend. She had left school a few months after her boyfriend, and she found a job in Pontypridd, working as an assistant in a draper’s shop, where one of her tasks was looking after the window display.
By this time, Tom had embraced the new Teddy boy culture that was sweeping the country and Linda was happy to wear the uniform of the girlfriend. Becoming a