Leslie Thomas Great Welsh Writers

Leslie Thomas is one of Britain's most popular novelists.

Loved by readers, critics and fellow writers alike,

his life has been as colourful as one of his novels.

Terrific anecdotist at a dinner or lunch table.

He's more than keeping his end up with his stories,

some of them wild and weird, some of them probably true.

You're not quite certain which is which.

He was the comic chronicler of the late 20th century.

Whilst other writers obsessed about the chattering classes,

Leslie wrote about what he knew -

sailors, squaddies and suburban sex lives.

If you want to know about mid-Victorian England,

then you read Dickens.

If you want to know about the latter half of the 20th century in Britain,

you could do worse than read Leslie's novels.

I think the personality does come through in his writing, because he's

a very funny man, and he's also very observant, as all writers should be.

He's the sort of picker-up of little bits and pieces.

If we were out somewhere, something happened. If it was funny,

if it was sad, it would be stored away,

and would appear in the next book or the book after that.

His first novel was an instant best-seller.

By the early 1970s, he was the highest-paid writer in Britain

and a television celebrity.

His output has been prolific - a book a year for 40 years -

and always they are firmly rooted in first-hand experience.

I can't imagine anyone writing a book

that wasn't partially autobiographical.

I like writing non-fiction, but I can't separate it.

The roots of Leslie Thomas's talent go back to his turbulent childhood

in the South Wales town of Newport.

Although he left Wales when he was just a child,

Wales has never left him.

I feel Welsh.

I cross that bridge and I begin to talk - these are ears -

and I find my accent changes in a moment.

I can only be in Wales three or four hours

and I'm talking like a South Wales man.

Leslie was born into a seafaring family.

His father was in the merchant navy, and often away from home.

Living with a family of sailors, you did tend to tell stories

and they were always full of stories.

Mind you, they'd never know where they'd been.

The old man, he had some excuse cos he was a stoker.

He went onto the ship,

went down into the stokehold or his quarters down below,

and he never came up until the ship had come back.

I remember when I was little asking him, "Where have you been, Dad?"

and he said, "Oh, in the east," pointing to the west.

During World War Two, tragedy struck.

News came that his father had been lost at sea.

His ship was torpedoed by a German U-Boat.

Leslie didn't know at the time

but his mother was already dying of cancer.

My mother and father didn't get on very well, which happens when...

I suppose they were ill-matched.

They were always wishing each other dead,

and they died within six months of each other.

Now, that's the... That's the home. My gosh!

There are the kids at the Barnardo home at Kingsbridge,

when I first went in.

There's me, I'm 12. Where's my brother? There he is.

Leslie and his younger brother Roy were sent to live

in a Barnardo's orphanage in Devon.

Leslie was just 12 years old.

He would never live in Wales again.

It sounds insensitive, but I thought,

"Well, I've got to get on with this, now."

But I've quite often felt I should have felt more tearful than that.

But everything was happening at once.

I remember saying to one of the staff at the home in Kingsbridge,

"I treat life as one long joke." I mean, at 12, saying that.

I must have been crazy.

It was at the Barnardo's orphanage that Leslie first discovered

the spellbinding power of words.

There were 30 in the dormitory, so you had spinning-up time.

You were allowed to tell stories.

So I did this one night, and the kids loved it.

I made it up as I went along.

There were war stories and all sorts of things.

At that age, he knew he wanted to be a writer.

He was a good storyteller then, because if he was being bullied,

he'd say, "Well, I'm not spinning up tonight."

So he looked after himself, really, in that way.

Kids used to come in from other dormitories to listen to the stories.

I thought, "There's a living in this!"

During the war, Leslie was evacuated to a Barnardo's home in rural Norfolk.

That summer was beautiful because we were away from the bombs and everything

and I learned to swim in a lake

and we had a boat on the lake.

It was a real Boy's Own summer.

I discovered reading there.

We lived in a house that was abandoned, more or less,

and there were loads of books left there,

and I spent these summer days...

It was idyllic.

I found a new world.

Leslie stored up his memories of Barnardo's

and years later, they all came out when he wrote his first book

This Time Next Week, subtitled The Autobiography Of A Happy Orphan.

"It was here that I came to know the things I loved.

"Afternoons in winter when the light goes early,

"water in its wild state, and shadows on water,

"lanes and roads in summer, empty and dusty,

"voices calling across fields at night.

"And strong, sweet tea, and warm jerseys,

"Wild animals who do not see you first,

"old books and maps and letters, brown and full of secret things.

"Seagulls, big blackbirds and homecomings."

He already knew he wanted to be a writer. And now he made a plan.

I was very ambitious. Very ambitious.

I worked out a timetable.

I'd write a short story by the time I was 15,

I'd write something else by the time I was 20.

Be on a newspaper... And that's how it proved.

He got his first writing job

as a junior reporter on a local newspaper.

It gave him an introduction to a world of remarkable experiences.

Well, this is where it all started.

It doesn't look much like a newspaper office now

but, in fact, it never did...

'The first morning I worked on that newspaper I went to Walthamstow,

'and I had an address where somebody had died.'

And I thought, "Well, I've got to do this,"

so I went to the house,

and a little kid in a dirty night dress came to the door and she said,

"Do you want to see my brother?" So a boy came and he was a bit older.

She said, "Do you want to see our mum?"

So I went in and there was this body lying out with these two children,

in the house alone,

and the body lying out there.

You cease to be surprised at anything.

It was very depressing, I must say.

At 17 or 16, to be confronted with all that.

But, anyway, it was an introduction to life and death.

Eventually Leslie worked his way to Fleet Street,

where he became a top feature writer on the world's largest

evening newspaper, the Evening News.

If you're a journalist,

something extraordinary happens to you each day.

And when you stop - you're not a journalist, you become

a novelist or whatever - if you're not careful, that can go by you.

You have to go and travel and do things and see people

and talk to people so that you have that raw material.

He covered Churchill's funeral, he covered the Eichmann trial,

and I think that opens your eyes to all sorts of varied

experiences which almost certainly would never happen to you.

Though you may be of no particular importance yourself,

you meet a lot of important people, you rub shoulders with them.

That gives you a font of anecdotes.

His journalistic career was interrupted by national service.

At 18, he was called up, like many young men of his generation,

to serve in the army.

He was posted to Malaya.

Years later, this experience provided the inspiration

for his first novel, The Virgin Soldiers.

It started with this extraordinary story of these incredibly naive,

almost babyish infantrymen

on a train from Singapore up to Kuala Lumpur,

through jungles then infested with Communist guerrillas,

and the utter helplessness and incompetence of everybody concerned.

And, of course, one roared with laughter whilst saying,

"Yes, it really was like that."

That I believe. That was national service.

The Virgin Soldiers book had a big core readership of people

a little bit older than me who had gone through all that

and had gone through it in strange places like Singapore,

so it obviously struck a chord.

We all think of the '60s as the swinging '60s and, indeed, they were

but it reminded people like me that, you know,

five or ten years earlier and we'd have been in there.

The trouble was I wanted to be a soldier, and, you know,

I ended up in a clerk's job.

It was a dreary job.

I could do my work in ten minutes in the morning,

and I played football and cricket and that sort of thing.

That was the only thing about it.

Leslie described his experience of national service

with a journalist's eye for detail.

"The conscripts, apart from being idle, homesick, afraid,

"uninterested, hot, sweating, old, oversexed and under-satisfied,

"were not in the same state of decay as many of the regular soldiers.

"Fighting soldiers from upcountry arrived at Panglin.

"Sometimes in transit, sometimes for rest.

"The garrison soldiers would examine them

"with curiosity at a distance, as though looking for bullet holes,

"and grin and say amongst themselves that it took brains to do desk work.

"Anyone could be a dumb infantryman.

"There was a dullness about the infantrymen's eyes,

"a redness about their faces,

"so that they look like labourers or country boys."

We thought we might be killed - you know, we were in Malaya.

We might be killed before we'd had it away.

Not during, but before.

I remember going to Penang

to a place called The City Lights - a blessed memory.

and I met a Chinese girl there and I went off home with her,

and it was 30 bob.

She gave me ten bob back in the morning because I was a bit inept.

Leslie lost his virginity and his heart

to the prostitute he'd met in Singapore.

He immortalized her in The Virgin Soldiers

as the character Juicy Lucy.

When you think he was an 18-year-old boy, and 18 in those days was

nothing like it is today, to go out to somewhere like Singapore...

I mean, all you ever did at home was

if you got a kiss on the doorstep, you were lucky.

To go out into someone as exotic as Singapore,

and to meet exotic ladies, I mean, what 18-year-old wouldn't enjoy it?

There was this lovely Chinese girl and I really didn't know what to do.

I mean, I fell off the bed twice.

And I sort of rushed at it, and climbed on...

But, do you know, honestly, there was one point where I did a wild rush.

I couldn't find anything!

So it's true what they say about Chinese women?

Yes!

But I did, I did a sort of horrendous...

To the modern reader, Leslie's depiction of Juicy Lucy

may seem a little outdated.

But for better or worse,

Leslie was simply reflecting the prevailing attitudes of the time.

'Do you know, she was my first real girlfriend.

'We used to go swimming, we used to go to the pictures together.'

The funny thing is, I never knew her name.

I called her Juicy Lucy in the book but I never knew her name,

because she changed it every week from Doris, the actor,

or Rita, the actress at the cinema.

The Virgin Soldiers was an international best-seller

and set the template for Leslie's future novels,

with its blend of keen-eyed observation and lyrical writing,

which could be bawdy one minute and poignant the next.

And always a healthy dose of humour

and the assured hand of a master storyteller.

Incredibly, I did once liken him to Dickens.

And he said, "Christ," he said, when I met him later.

"That's going over the top a bit, isn't it?"

And I said, "Well, I suppose it is."

"I mean, you know, Dickens and George Eliot,

"they're in the Premiership, but I put you top of the Championship."

"Oh, very nice," he said.

Anyway, they both had this great addiction for eccentric characters -

both got an eye for human eccentricity.

The funny thing is, I was going to call it The Little Soldiers

and I met a man who was on the Evening News,

he was a fiction editor.

I met him on the train and he said, "Call it The Virgin Soldiers."

So I did.

And it was the best three words I'd ever written.

The Virgin Soldiers quickly gained a reputation as a racy novel and

it sold half a million copies within the first six months of publication.

It's a beginner's novel.

It's got obvious pitfalls to me

and I wrote much better, indeed, later on.

I mean, when it was sold in America, I could not believe the money.

I could not believe... I rang up my agent and said, "Is this right?"

And he said, "Yeah, we've checked on it!"

I was amazed that all sorts of people would nod to me in the street

and one thing and another.

But it set me up as a novelist

and I've always been thankful for it, believe me.

Beginner's novel or not,

the success of The Virgin Soldiers meant that Leslie could give up

his job as a journalist and become a full-time novelist.

The lifestyle of a best-selling author suited him perfectly.

He loved the peace and solitude of writing,

but also the public profile which came with success.

He loves the celebrity side of it.

I mean, they tend to be older people, these days,

who come up to him and say,

"You've given me so much pleasure with your books,"

and he loves that - that's a marvellous thing to hear.

When I come home to my house, I open my office door and I smile.

I smile. I think, "This is where I'm me."

I'd write a thousand words a day,

and I'd close the door again and go out, and be my normal person again.

He is a man, I think, a bit like me,

who doesn't see his writing as the be all and end all of his life.

And sometimes I'm sure he goes through what I go through.

You think, "Oh, maybe I should.

"Maybe I'd be better or, erm, rated more highly," if that matters,

"if I did make it my be all," and you do come across writers

and artists who think about nothing else,

and quite often they're pains in the neck.

D'you know, the whole thing with writing is just...it grows.

It's exciting, it grows. It's almost out of your control.

Some of the books I've written have had really surprising endings.

It's all amazing that I think, "Where's this going?"

And it comes out in the end, it's astonishing,

it's like a mystery prize.

Can't help feeling with Leslie that he's such a spontaneous writer

that, although of course he works hard at it, it comes out

more or less ready composed as opposed to, erm, a deep process

of cogitation, making a cup of coffee and staring at a blank page.

I don't think Leslie spends too much time staring at a blank page.

I don't do angst. I've met several writers who are

so up themselves, and I'm never like that.

I just think it's a job.

Not a job, but a God-given job, honestly.

And people...they say, "You don't talk about your writing."

Well, I can't think of anything to say about it.

Leslie's unpretentious attitude to his work may be one reason

why he was consistently overlooked for major literary prizes.

But he has received several honorary awards, including an OBE in 2004.

I don't think of Leslie Thomas as a best seller.

He's a writer. He's a man who is in love with words.

He's a man who's enraptured by the whole human spectacle

and wants to enrapture us.

He's a damn good writer. He's got a lot to say.

He's a veteran, he's been around,

he's seen things, been places and he can write about them

with authority and in damn good English, which also helps.

The inspiration for Leslie's most controversial novel

came from close to home.

Tropic Of Ruislip is set on the suburban housing estate where

Leslie lived with his first wife Maureen and their children.

All the houses were the same. Every house had a flat roof.

It was just at the time when the austerity of the war was finished.

But my God, we were the new rich.

We had wall-to-wall carpet and all sorts of things and two cars

and that sort of thing. So it was the beginning of a modern age.

Tropic Of Ruislip, published in 1974,

is an unflinching portrayal of the aspirational middle classes.

It's a moral tale of snobbery, frustration

and lust amongst the flat roofs.

It's told with Leslie's trademark good humour.

But for some, it was a little too close for comfort.

Lots of people live on estates, especially at that time.

And people recognised themselves. They recognised the characters,

so that was the success of that story.

And I went to Ruislip to a meeting at the village hall, and it was packed.

My publisher came with me and I thought,

"My God, I'm in the lion's den here."

And there was one woman who said,

"This book has blackened Ruislip in the eyes of the world."

My favourite man in the book, I must admit -

it's a very funny book as well, it made me laugh a lot -

is the Phantom Flasher.

LAUGHTER

It actually... It really was inspired, if that's the word...

I was playing golf one morning,

on a Monday morning at Northwood at 8.30 on an October morning,

and it was cold and everything, and I was playing with some people,

and two men came from the woods and produced police cards,

and said, "We're policemen. Have you seen a naked man running about?"

And I thought, "A naked man at half past eight

"on a Monday morning at Northwood!" And it's bizarre, but it does happen.

You'd think he'd have something better to do.

Well, they never caught me, though.

"The Flasher stood trembling behind a holly bush as the four ladies

"approached the green. Four was a good number at one exposure.

"He judged their ages to be about right, too.

"Eventually there were four balls on the green.

"In a moment, the Flasher thought with a quiver,

"there'd be a couple more.

"Only one of the quartet observed him walk casually from behind the tree

"and reveal all his private hangings.

"With true golf grit and tradition, she did not utter a sound

"until her opponent's putt was safely made.

"He bowed politely to the ladies, gave them another quick glimpse

"and then, in an almost leisurely fashion, trotted away.

"Behind him, he heard the cry, "Was it a member?" '

It is true that if you're a comic or a comic writer or a comic actor

that you do get an instant review.

People laugh or they don't,

and if they don't laugh that's a bad review.

But it's a difficult one to pull off in novels, but Leslie clearly has

cos the vast majority of his work is very funny, but it's

not just funny, it's not just going for belly laughs on every page.

Although best known as a humorist,

Leslie has never shied away from difficult subject matter.

He was researching ideas for a new book

when he found an unreported story from World War Two.

Allied troops on the south coast of England

were preparing for the D-Day landings

when a training exercise went tragically wrong.

Drawing on his experience as a journalist, Leslie dug deeper.

What he discovered inspired his novel The Magic Army.

They were practising for D-Day and one night exercise,

there were some LSTs,

which were the big landing ships out in Lyme Bay,

and eight E-Boats, German E-Boats, very fast torpedo craft,

got out of Cherbourg and torpedoed two of these landing ships.

Now, the Americans on board, they'd never seen a German

and they thought it was part of the practice.

And there were 750 men died in half an hour.

It's such an amazing story,

I'm surprised it doesn't seem to have been widely heard of.

Well, I... There was a cover-up at the time because the effect

on morale just before D-Day would have been disastrous.

The Magic Army was Leslie's most commercially successful book

after The Virgin Soldiers.

Against a backdrop of real-life wartime drama,

he set a tale of romance and comedy

as British and American forces descended

on the unsuspecting Devon villagers.

He mixes humour with pathos, very much like Charlie Chaplin.

I don't know whether it was me that said it's a Chaplin-esque quality,

but that most certainly is - one moment you're laughing,

the next moment you're reaching for the Kleenex

because something rather terrible or uncomfortable has happened.

I think it's my best book, you know,

and it's certainly been most popular.

I was doing a television programme from Birmingham

and some chap rang up and said,

"You're telling lies! You're telling lies, nothing of this sort happened!

"I was in intelligence at..." wherever it was,

"..and it didn't happen!"

I said, "It did happen.

"800 lives were lost and you didn't even know about it

"and you were in intelligence.

"What are you doing in intelligence?"

In a long and prolific career as a novelist,

Leslie travelled the world looking for new stories and adventures.

But he always returned to the South Wales of his childhood memory

for inspiration.

Nearly all his novels feature

at least one Welsh location or character.

"They got the train from Newport to Barry Island.

"What a day that had been. What a wonderful last day.

"He'd never realised the beach was so big,

"and he'd been going there all the years he could remember.

"All the rubbish of summer had been taken away by the huge tide

"and the corporation workmen.

"The sand was flat and damp, the sea grey and tired.

"He was going to tell her again how good it would be in Australia,

"but he stopped himself. He'd already said it.

"The funfair was all closed up and covered with sheets of tarpaulin

"and canvas, like an exhibition waiting to be unveiled.

"The cafes and the hotels across from the beach looked out to the slate sea

"and the cold ships moving on it

"speechlessly and with blind shuttered eyes.

"No-one, it seemed, had anything to say.

" 'It'll be all right, you know,' he'd said.

" 'It will, truly, Kate. 'Yes,' she'd answered.

"It had been a wonderful last day."

In 2010, Leslie suffered a serious illness

which stopped him in his tracks.

These days he lives a quiet life in Salisbury with his wife Diana.

They were taking me home to die not very long ago,

and thank God that cleared off.

But I'm enjoying the leisure of doing nothing.

He's said to me the other day... I mean, he's 81 now and he said,

"I feel guilty about not working,"

and I said, "Well, for heaven's sake, why?

"Just enjoy the time, you know.

"Watch cricket on the television all day if you want to or,

"you know, it's... You've done it now, you can't keep on."

Have you got any more novels in you?

No. No, I did about 20 pages of something,

er, well, it was called A Boy's War,

and I realised it's too much for me now.

I live a very pleasant life.

I get up at 10.30 in the morning, I read the papers, I have lunch,

I have a sleep in the afternoon,

I watch television or sport at night and that sort of thing.

It's a good way to go out.

I've had a very happy life outside writing.

It doesn't consume me, it was just a part of me.

I look at the books on the shelf now

and I think, "Where did that come from?"

But d'you know, God gives you this gift and thank God it happens.

Thank God it happens, that's the one thing I want to say.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd