Tom Jones - the Life Read Online Free

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    After the initial elation of not having to go to school, life became pretty boring. He explained, ‘Bed was a novelty at first. I didn’t have to go to school, which was great, since I wasn’t a good student. But being forbidden to sing during the first year was a real drag!’ In his boredom, he would drive his poor mother to distraction by frequently banging on the floor with a stick to attract her attention in the kitchen on the floor below. She would drop everything to rush and see what he needed.
    Freda did her best to amuse her son. Sometimes she would sing and dance around the room to cheer him up. She urged him to draw with a set of Indian inks she bought for him. When he was allowed to have visitors, she encouraged friends and family to see him.
    Cousin Margaret, who was ten at the time, recalls, ‘We realised it was serious. We were up there visiting him most of the time. Auntie Freda would say, “Come up and keep him company.” We would tell him about school and what we were doing. We were never bored with Tom.
    ‘But we could never play cards. My mother wouldn’t have us playing cards. Auntie Freda was the same. Cards were like the devil in the house. We were chapel – only a man could play cards, not a woman.’ Tom, perhaps as a result of his mother’s disapproval, has never had any inclination to play cards and has always shown a strong dislike of any form of gambling.
    From his bed, Tom could look out of the window and see all the way down the valley. He recalled, ‘As good as that view was, I’d grow restless. So my parents would routinely move the bed around the room to change the scenery for me.’ Freda was forever cutting out pictures of cowboys from magazines and sticking them to the wall, so he would have something fresh to look at. Margaret observes, ‘It was lovely, his bedroom.’
    The lifesaver for Tom was when his parents rented a heavy, dark-brown radio for him. It was the sort of old-fashioned wireless you could imagine listening to when the declaration of war was announced. Tom loved it. His parents didn’t mind if he listened to it late at night, when the BBC played American music into the small hours – time didn’t matter when you were in bed for twenty-four hours a day. Pirate radio and Radio 1 had yet to change the musical taste of a nation. In 1952, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was still two years away. Instead, Tom grew to love the records of Mahalia Jackson, the ‘Queen of Gospel’, an influence he carried with him throughout his career. He also discovered the music of Big Bill Broonzy, the acclaimed master of the Chicago blues, whom Eric Clapton once called his role model and both Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones identify as a key figure in the development of their guitar-playing.
    This was music to stir the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy in Treforest. These wonderful performers helped shape his destiny and Tom never forgot the effect they had on him. He included Mahalia’s uplifting recording of the traditional American hymn ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and Big Bill’s protest song ‘Black, Brown and White’ among his Desert Island Discs in a programme broadcast shortly after his seventieth birthday in 2010. Tom had heard the song ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ many times, because it was a favourite of Welsh choirs and was often sung at funerals and formal occasions. Tom had never heard it sung like this, however, and he was keen to try out the style.
    After a year confined to his room, Tom had shown enough improvement to be allowed to get up for two hours a day. He still couldn’t go out, but was well enough to stand by the front door and wave to his friends as they walked up the hill to the quarry or the White Tips to play or gathered around the gas lamp-post as darkness fell to laugh and chat. Tom was frustrated and jealous. ‘I promised myself that when I could walk to that lamp-post, I’d never complain about anything