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He was born in monoglot Carmarthen- shire, an only child, ‘amongst people who heard a different drum’. When he was five the family moved four miles up the road to Carmarthen town, in the shadows of the English castle and unusually hideous chapels. His father was a master carpenter, and so far as he knows the only things his mother ever read were his articles in the newspapers, in case of what her neighbours might think: ‘How am I? What do you care? I haven’t been out for a week because of what you said about the town clerk!’
‘I come from the working class,’ he writes, ‘and received a middle-class education, so life, like a career in the Soviet Communist Party of the 1930s, was a series of dis- appearances.’ Soviet Communism enjoyed a great vogue in Wales — at ‘Little Moscow’, a remote village in the Valleys, boys were given such names as Stalin Watkins and Trotsky Evans — and is a ready source of analogy: he recalls the Methodists as ‘the Stalinists of Nonconformity’.
Of the purges attending Byron’s progress — he has always disliked the name (‘You there, the poet,’ gym-masters would sneer) — through 11-plus, O- and A-levels and university, the most traumatic was the primal one, the ‘disappearance’ of his parents. Their tragedy, and that of many like them, was that the education they so wanted for their children made strangers of them. ‘You mustn’t look down on people,’ his mother once told him, ‘just because they’ve never heard of Joan of Arc.’
‘In these circumstances,’ he writes, ‘you have two choices: you can do a complete makeover on yourself, and erase the past as Mrs Thatcher and Roy Jenkins did. Or you become obsessed by what you have lost.’ Rogers has made the latter choice, and though he has spent most of his life in England, his only real interest is Wales, where all was lost long ago. On the cover of Me he poses in the attitude of a bowman at Agincourt. As Chandler Bing might say, could he be more Welsh?
He explains that he was ‘startled into writing’ these memoirs by a line from the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, Ego autem coacervavi omne quod inveni (I have now made a heap of all I have found), and his narrative is resolute in its avoidance of the linear. It is possible, if perverse, to discern in this heap a chronology: Oxford, which is described at the end, in the context of an ancient love affair; a traineeship on the Sheffield Star, where he learnt that news is ‘little more than the fortunes of the famous and the misfortunes of the rest’; then Fleet Street — the Sunday Mirror (where an early article was bylined ‘by Ron Rogers’), The Times (‘a very strange newspaper’) and the Telegraph (stranger still) — and the wider world; marriage, fatherhood and authorship.
But chronology is not the point. Memories — of people and incidents — ‘bob to the surface like the floating debris watched by Jack Hawkins and John Gregson in 1950s British war films after yet another successful depth charging of a German U-boat’, propelled by submarine explosions and associating with hilarious freedom. From a brothel in Greenland (en route for Tokyo), and the company of two drunken Scotsmen, Rogers moves effortlessly to a ball at Buckingham Palace, and that of the King of Nepal, two Goons and Nancy Reagan. There is a moving chapter about the life and death of an old school friend, and another about the life and death of the ‘perfect pub’, the Old Red Lion at Litchborough, which did ‘what the University of Oxford had failed to do: it educated me.’
There is a great deal of colour, as one would expect from an inveterate writer of ‘colour features’, and any amount of Welshness. Reviewing his first book, published when he was in his late fifties, The Spectator found the emphasis on Wales ‘a little heavy going’. Rogers finds that racist, but as a semi-Welshman myself, who loves to read about the land of his fathers (Jan Morris, Niall Griffiths), I’m sorry to say I agree.
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