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I Name This Child
A rose by any nickname would smell as sweet
My dad had a few names for me, ranging from ‘Biggie-bees’, when I was a toddler, to ‘Bycani’ when I was older (derived from the Welsh, ‘Bachgen i’ - ‘my boy’). He also referred to me by ‘Ei Ban’, a term used, as far as I know, only in our small village of Brynamman, that just means ‘hey you’ but can be used in a wealth of different ways depending on intonation. I can’t recall him ever calling me by my name, Simon.
My full name is Simon Arthur Goss. The Arthur is after my dad, but the Simon is entirely down to my mother’s taste in movies. In the 50s, my dear mum went to see a black-and-white film called The Yangtzee Incident (1957) starring British heartthrob Richard Todd.
It is a story about HMS Amethyst’s involvement in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and is as typically plucky as you might expect of a film of the genre and vintage. But I wasn’t named after the brave Lieutenant Commander Kerans played by Todd (although his middle name was actually Simon).
No, I was named after the ship’s cat, a redoubtable black and white stray who performed the ratting duties aboard the warship. The little adoptee from Hong Kong was badly injured during a battle but survived to resume duties, a feat of bravery that won him the Dickin medal and…