Mario remembers the Real Merthyr

Mario Basini recalls some of the stories and characters of his home town of Merthyr Tydfil in a new book. Here's his account of cross-dressing dustman Teacher Bessie.

If it was the comfort of the familiar you were looking for, as you groped your way into each morning, then Teacher Bessie was not the most reassuring sight to greet you.

Above his blue boiler suit and black T-shirt the transvestite dustman's plump, round face wore full make-up. The large eyes beneath the false eyelashes floated on seas of blue or black mascara. His lips beneath the rouged cheeks were soft cusions of vermilion to match his painted fingernails which never seemed to chip, as he emptied dustbin after heavy dustbin into the back of his lorry.

We lived above and beneath my parents' cafe, and as I tottered from my upstairs bedroom through the shop towards the living room on the floor below, he was already sitting down with his mates to a breakfast of tea and toast or perhaps a steamed steak and kidney pie.

He was a large, heavy man with dyed black hair and surprisingly small and delicate feet and hands. His voice had the querulous vibrato of Dame Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Ernest.

His gestures, the way he fluttered his eyelashes, puckered his mouth or sculpted his hands, had the exaggerated femininity of the drag artist he was away from his dustman's day job.

He performed in various Merthyr workingmen's clubs, reserving the stage name, Teacher Bessie - which suggested the dominatrix who demanded complete obedience from her 'pupils' - for his more prosaic venues. In the posher clubs and private parties he became 'Madame Sonia'. But if, while he performed, he tolerated the raucous humour of his audiences and even the odd bawdy caress from an admirer, offstage no-one dared to take such liberties.

He had a deserved reputation as a strong man with a quick temper, more than capable of looking after himself even in Merthyr's emphatically masculine culture. Born, prosaically, Willie Pugh, he had worked as a blacksmith and in what remained of the Dowlais Ironworks before becoming a dustman to keep body and soul together.

As I staggered through the cafe, bleary-eyed with sleep, I did my best to avoid staring at him, as much out of fear as politeness. But he was impossible to ignore and when my gaze was inevitably drawn towards him he would turn his slow, lazy eyes away, contemptuous of my curiosity.

It is a measure of the humanity of 'Macho Merthyr' that his presence in the town was accepted with amused tolerance and understanding. He never, as far as I know, provoked persecution or even mild condemnation.

Mario Basini © 2008

Real Merthyr is published by Seren Books

---

Bernard "Bun" Walters in Plouye, Brittany, France, read this article and remembers the young Mario:

Although I went to the same school as Mario, I think I entered the year he left; how I remember him is standing behind the counter, when with my brother Maldwyn, as youngsters, we used to go down to the café around 5.30 on a Saturday or Sunday evening, before we had our own TV, to watch "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans", whilst eating two steamed steak and kidney pies. This would have been about 1958/9.