Book review: Whose Song to Sing? A Memoir by Ben Wildsmith

Desmond Clifford

Either the memoir is having a moment or else there’s a trend developing.  The memoir form has long been popular in the Welsh language, a by-product, I guess, of a relatively homogenous and compact community where people often know “who’s who?” and share a degree of common cultural curiosity.

This culture isn’t replicable in English in the same way. People need to be properly famous – actors, sportspeople, politicians usually – before they register.

The trend for memoirs, therefore, must be based on life stories of actual interest, as opposed to the authors being merely well-known.

That’s the starting point for Ben Wildsmith, and his story is interesting.  The centrally important fact of his life, his adoption, was decided by others.

He grew up in one of suburban Birmingham’s smarter districts, Solihull, and with natural intelligence allied to home tuition, won a place at the competitive and academically privileged King Edward’s School.

His adoptive parents were unhappy together – like many another, they thought a child might do the trick – and home life imploded in his teens.

His grandfather, who lived in a less fashionable Birmingham suburb, Acocks Green, was originally from Tylerstown in Rhondda fach and this connection planted a seed of identity in his mind.

Born in 1973, he grew up a world of petty suburban snobberies cultivated by his mother, the MGBGT, the Ford Capri, the Beefeater Steakhouse, beige jumpers, Mrs Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, the Militant Tendency, the Miners’ Strike, collapsing industry, The Pogues, the Merry Hill Shopping Centre (which is anything but merry).

It is in many ways the world portrayed by Jonathan Coe’s “The Rotters’ Club” (Coe also attended King Edward’s School, a generation ahead of Wildsmith).

King Edward’s virtually guarantees entry to the demi-monde for anyone half-way industrious – its A level results are better than Eton – but Wildsmith flunked out early and took his chances in search of musical bohemia.

Which he found, after a fashion, in Stourbridge of all places (and not to be sniffed at; the birthplace of Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham, among other distinctions).

He compares this period of his life with John Major’s government: “I was largely well-meaning, lazy, given to pastel-hued imaginings of the past and prone to sudden lurches into absurdity.”

Changes in his family circumstances melted life’s inhibitors and from his mid-teens onwards his adopted parents played smaller and smaller parts in his life.

The disintegration of his home life made me think of “What Maisie Knew”, by Henry James.  The soullessness of Solihull is reflected in his emotional universe. In his mind he associates the emotional world of his grandfather – Tylerstown, Rhondda – with warmth, community, caring.

Wildsmith is anything but stupid; he knows this is a stereotype, but projection is an element of identity and longing. He learned guitar the hard way (is there an easy one?).

After a succession of jobs, he became a bookseller and sustained a life through music, the job seekers allowance and supportive girlfriends. He was a full-time bohemian and duly visited by alcoholism, the bohemian’s Faustian elixir.

I’m a decade older than the author (he’s early 50s) but relate well enough to his conundrums.  I recognise very well that sense of life punctuated by crossroads – this way or that?

A life of artistry or clerking at the building society? Be a James Joyce or TS Eliot?  Other points in common? I have been to the Merry Hill shopping centre, or was it Merry Hell?

We have both shaken hands with Gareth Edwards who, having survived the toughest of sports, must, surely, have contracted Repetitive Strain Injury, for his must be the most shaken hand in Wales.

Rugby (or footy) traditionally provides a language through which men, often emotionally stunted, can share and talk about something in common. It offers emotion without embarrassment.

We wear scarves, shout, laugh, curse, we drink beer as the soggy currency of feelings and a smidgen of empathy with our fellow men.

There’s quite a lot going on, and rugby is not the half of it.  I imagine Doctors Freud, Adler and Jung would counsel more mature approaches but for many of us, it’s better than nothing.

I must challenge Wildsmith on some points.  As a literature student, he swerved reading “Moby Dick”, which can only be noted as a significant failing. Ben, you’re a literate man – do yourself a favour!  You can skip the chapters on the whale’s anatomy, or get an abridged version, but until then, something’s missing from your life.

Furthermore, after he has transplanted to Wales, he describes chatting to a Welsh author at the Hay Festival and Wildsmith suggests, in passing, that “eisteddfodau could be a successful cultural export”, along Irish lines.

I think it’s fair to judge that Wildsmith is a natural hater of authority but, unusually cowed, he notes; “She narrowed her eyes and told me my ‘colonial roots’ were showing. I died inside, a little, but took the lesson.”

Fuck that, Ben! Take no lesson. Resist Welsh ethno-identity-authoritarianism! Fight the Power, my friend!

Wildsmith was understandably curious to discover more about his birth parents. As things unfolded, a kind of inverse curve developed in his experience of his adoptive and his birth parents.

Despite early years of relative stability his adopted family life crumbled, his parents separated from each other and, increasingly, from Wildsmith – emotionally and materially. While relations seem never wholly to have broken down, they cooled and ended up in the freezer box.

Eventually he met, separately, his birth mother and his birth father and other family members.  These connections proved fruitful and positive and help provide a measure of resolution and optimism to the book.

The other element of resolution was settling in Wales.  An instinct for Wales initiated by his Rhondda-born grandfather eventually led to him settling in Cardiff and then Rhondda, where he resides today.

Family is part of anyone’s identity, positive or negative – we get no choice – but so is culture and community, and that, we can choose. Ben chose Wales, or Wales chose Ben – who cares which way round.

This book is open and entertaining.  He recalls his life episodically rather than strict linear form; he deals with big emotions and incidents, some shocking and painful.

Vivid and well-written, his story is sometimes vertiginous and – saving grace – you’re never far from a laugh. He’s a genuinely funny writer.

He writes intelligently about places: Birmingham, Stourbridge, Australia, Wales.

A sense of Wales propels the book, though it features directly only fitfully.  Perhaps he’s saving more for a volume two and, if so, I’ll look forward to that.

For transparency, readers may recognise that Ben is a columnist for nation.cymru, and so am I, but we don’t know each other and, at the time of writing, we’ve never met.  

Whose Song to Sing? A Memoir by Ben Wildsmith is published by Calon, the University of Wales non-fiction imprint, and is available to purchase from their site.