by Dai Smith
That will be a better place to be in than any throwback to any false dichotomy between ‘individual’ and ‘society’. Such a dictum was the solipsistic nursery chant of the socially corrupt and intellectually bankrupt 1980s, a decade that eventually sharpened the Welsh mind by being so out of kilter with any concept, historically derived or culturally aspirational, of what Wales was and could yet be. The vigour and conviction with which the latest generation of Welsh story writers are now addressing their Welsh subject matter is a compound of local sensibility and global awareness which holds their Wales in an embrace as warm as it is guarded. Our story had been stalled for a while, but now it is again kick-started into fresh meaning in language that is fashioned, as speech and description, to bear the mark of our originality, and of our sameness with others. We can detect the voices in chorus in the various collections made from the early 1990s on, and especially in the three made up of the winning stories in the Rhys Davies Short Story Competitions sponsored by the eponymous Trust which has as its aim the fostering of Welsh writing in English. We can taste through their prose the overwhelming engagement this particular Wales has made, for good or ill, with its post-industrial destiny in Urban Welsh: New Welsh Fiction edited by Lewis Davies, and in the teasingly entitled selection Wales Half Welsh chosen by John Williams, both the editors tellingly being themselves novelists whose own work is as much at ease beyond the borders of Wales as within its boundaries. New horizons can arise, too, from the rescue of neglected traditions as in Jane Aaron’s edition from 1999, A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales, and in the celebratory All Shall be Well: A quarter of a century’s great writing from the women of Wales which Stephanie Tillotson and Penny Anne Thomas brought together in 2012. Great writing, from many pens and minds, and laptops, too, of course, has been a real feature of an emerging Wales in the first two decades of devolved policy, of cultural drive and the proper grounding of an institutional life for Welsh-based publishers and national arts organisations. So it would be insidious to single out any particular writer to make an emblematic point; and yet it would be purblind not to do so if the concatenation of the given and desired, the twin poles of the Story I have assembled in this volume, appears so obvious in two instances. For me, then, there is no coincidence that the winner in 2006 of the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize for writing from anywhere on the globe by a writer under the age of thirty, should be the phenomenally talented Rachel Trezise, born in 1978 in the Rhondda, nor that this volume ends with a masterly story by Wales’ pre-eminent living novelist, Emyr Humphreys, born in 1919 in Prestatyn and a bridge, in both of his chosen languages, for all writers fated to write of their native country with a semblance of his unmatched passion and his cold clarity.
Fortunately therefore, looking back with this Story ready to hand, we can see that the intricacies expressed and revealed in our diverse and multiple Welsh stories overrides any simplistic settlement. The range of outlook and insight upon which we can draw reaffirms the galaxy of individual identities, across region, gender, class, age and opinion, whilst, together, proving to be part of a common universe, a tradition perhaps, of the specifically Welsh short story whose motto could come, both near and far, from the American writer, Richard Ford:
Stories should point to what’s important in life…secular redemption…through the opening of affection, intimacy, closeness, complicity [so that we might feel like] our time spent on earth is not wasted.
Our story is certainly not ended for we always get to choose how it might end. That is the promissory note of all fiction whose dreams resolve our lives. Not all will have happy endings, of course, but they will invariably be just. We do not have the choice to escape judgement. We do have the human privilege of standing up before it. Story is our testimony at that bar. It is a witness from Wales to the full weighing of human endeavour in this our place over their time.
Dai Smith
THE STORIES
MEMORY
GAZOOKA
Gwyn Thomas
Somewhere outside my window a child is whistling. He is walking fast down the hill and whistling. The tune on his lips is ‘Swanee’. I go to the window and watch him. He is moving through a fan of light from a street lamp. His head is thrown back, his lips protrude strongly and his body moves briskly. ‘D-I-X-I-Even Mamee, How I love you, how I love you, my dear old Swanee…’ The Mississippi and the Taff kiss with dark humming lubricity under an ashen hood of years. Swanee, my dear old Swanee.
The sound of it promotes a roaring life inside my ears. Whenever I hear it, brave ghosts, in endless procession, march again. My eyes are full of the wonder they knew in the months of that long, idle, beautifully lit summer of 1926.
By the beginning of June the hills were bulging with a clearer loveliness than they had ever known before. No smoke rose from the great chimneys to write messages on the sky that puzzled and saddened the minds of the young. The endless journeys of coal trams on the incline, loaded on the upward run, empty and terrifyingly fast on the down, ceased to rattle through the night and mark our dreams. The parade of nailed boots on the pavements at dawn fell silent. Day after glorious day came up over the hills that had been restored by a quirk of social conflict to the calm they lost a hundred years before.
When the school holidays came we took to the mountain tops, joining the liberated pit ponies among the ferns on the broad plateaux. That was the picture for us who were young. For our fathers and mothers there was the inclosing fence of hinted fears, fear of hunger, fear of defeat.
And then, out of the quietness and the golden light, partly to ease their fret, a new excitement was born. The carnivals and the jazz bands.
Rapture can sprout in the oddest places and it certainly sprouted then and there. We formed bands by the dozen, great lumps of beauty and precision, a hundred men and more in each, blowing out their songs as they marched up and down the valleys, amazing and deafening us all. Their instruments were gazookas, with a thunderous bringing up of drums in the rear. Gazookas: small tin zeppelins through which you hummed the tune as loudly as possible. Each band was done up in the uniform of some remote character never before seen in Meadow Prospect. Foreign Legionaries, Chinamen, Carabinieri, Grenadiers, Gauchos, Sultans, Pearl Divers, or what we thought these performers looked like, and there were some very myopic voters among the designers. There was even one group of lads living up on the colder slopes of Mynydd Goch, and eager to put in a word from the world’s freezing fringes who did themselves up as Eskimos, but they were liquidated because even Mathew Sewell the Sotto, our leading maestro and musical adviser, could not think up a suitable theme song for boys dressed up as delegates from the Arctic and chronic ally out of touch with the carnival spirit.
And with the bands came the fierce disputes inseparable from any attempt to promote a little beauty on this planet, the too hasty crowding of chilled men around its small precious flame. The thinkers of Meadow Prospect, a harassed and anxious fringe, gathered in the Discussion Group at the Lib rary and Institute to consider this new marvel. Around the wall was a mural frieze showing a long series of clasped hands staring eyes, symbolising unity and enlightenment among such people as might be expected to turn up in such a room. The chairman was Gomer Gough, known for his addiction to chair manship as Gough the Gavel. He was broad, wise, enduring and tolerant as our own slashed slopes. He sat at his table underneath two pictures, one a photograph of Tolstoi, a great shaggy lump of sadness, and the other an impression done in charcoal and a brooding spirit, of the betrayal and death of Llewellyn the Last, and as Gomer Gough had often pointed out, it was clear from this drawing that Llewellyn had never had much of a chance.
It was on a Tuesday evening that Milton Nicholas took my Uncle Edwin and myself down to the emergency meeting of the Discussion Group. As we walked down the bare corridor of the Institute we could hear the rustle of bodies and the sough of voices from the Discussion Room. We were solemnly greeted by two very earnest ushers who stood by the door week
in, week out, whether they were needed there or no. They had heard so many hot, apocalyptic utterances from the Group they just felt it would be wiser to stay near the door.
‘Here, Edwin,’ said Milton; ‘and you, Iolo, here in the second row.’
‘Stop pulling at me, Milton,’ said Uncle Edwin. ‘Why so far down?’
‘This is the place to catch Gomer Gough’s eye for a quick question. Gough’s eye will have to be very alert tonight.’
‘What is this crisis, anyway? Show me the agenda, boy. I don’t want to be mixed up in anything frivolous.’
‘You know me, Edwin. Always earnest. Uriah Smayle, that neurotic anti-humanist from Cadwallader Crescent, has prepared a very bitter report on the carnivals and bands. Uriah reckons the bands are spreading a mood of pagan laxity among the people and he’s out to stop it. I’ve heard you put up some good lines of argument against Uriah in the past, so just tell your mind to gird up its loins and prepare for its sternest fight. He’s a very restrictive element, that Smayle. Any stirring on the face of life and he faints.’
‘He’s dead against delight, and no doubt at all about it.’
‘All right, boy. I’ll do what I can. Oh, this is a fine gathering, a room full of people, keen, with their minds out like swords to carve their name on the truth.’
‘If that article ever gets as far as this on its travels.’
A man of about forty, ravelled by wariness and rage, looking as sad as Tolstoi but shorter and with no beard and a blue suit, came to sit in the vacant seat just in front of us. He gave us no glance, no greeting.
‘Hullo, Uriah,’ said Uncle Edwin.
‘Good evening,’ said Uriah Smayle.
‘You’re looking very grey and tense tonight, Uriah,’ said Uncle Edwin. ‘What new terror is gnawing at you now? If life’s a rat, boy, you’re the cheese.’
‘Well put,’ said Milton. ‘I’ve always said that if anybody’s got the gift of laying on words like a poultice it’s Edwin Pugh the Pang.’
‘Mock on, Edwin,’ said Uriah, half rising in his seat, his arm up at angle of condemnation. ‘But some of my statements tonight are going to shake you rodneys.’
‘Good,’ said Uncle Edwin. ‘Set the wind among our branches, Uriah, and we’ll make you a bonus of all the acorns that fall.’ His voice was soft and affectionate and he had his hand on Uriah’s arm. He was known as Pugh the Pang be cause he operated as an exposed compassionate nerve on behalf of the whole species. We could see Uriah’s spirit sliding down from its plane of high indignation. But he shook himself free from Edwin’s arm and got back to form.
‘Who’s the chairman here?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got a meeting of the Young Men’s Guild to address at eight on prayer as an answer to lust and it’ll be a real relief to have a headful of quiet piety after the chatter of this unbelieving brood.’
‘I’m in the chair, Mr Smayle,’ said Gomer Gough, who had just walked in followed by Teilo Dew the Doom, our sec retary, who had early come under the influence of Carlyle and very tight velveteen trousers. Gomer paused gravely in front of Uriah before turning to take his seat under the face of Tolstoi. ‘I’m in the chair, Mr Smayle,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t rush things. This Discussion Group is out to examine the nature of mankind and the destination of this clinker, the earth.’
Teilo Dew raised his head and winked at Tolstoi and Llewellyn the Last, very sadly, as if suggesting that if he had been a less gentle man he would have told us the black and terrifying answer years ago.
‘These are big themes, Mr Smayle,’ went on Gomer, ‘and we favour a cautious approach. We try not to be hysterical about them, and the best thing you can do is to set a dish of hot leek soup in front of your paler fears.’
‘Stop putting yourself to sleep, Gomer,’ said Uriah, ‘and get on with it.’
Gomer raised his enormous baritone voice like a fist. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Brothers, at this extraordinary meeting of the Meadow Prospect Discussion Group we are going to hear a special statement from Brother Smayle. He thinks the epidemic of carnivals and costumed bands is a menace and likely to put morals through the mincer. And he says that we, serious thinkers, ought to do something about it.’
‘Mr Chairman,’ said Uncle Edwin, ‘I want you to ask Smayle to tighten his dialectical washers and define this mincer. Tell him, too, that there never has been any period when the morals of mankind, through fear, poverty, ignorance and the rest of the dreary old circus, have not been well minced and ready for the pastry case.’
‘Begging your pardon, Edwin,’ said Gomer, ‘just keep it simmering on the hob, if you don’t mind, until Uriah has had his canter. Carry on, Mr Smayle.’
‘Mr Chairman,’ said Uriah, but he had his body turned and he was speaking straight at Edwin and Milton Nicholas. ‘Since these bands came decency has gone to the dogs. There is something about the sound of a drum that makes the average voter as brazen as a gong. The girls go up in droves to the hill sides where the bands practise, and there is a quality about these gazookas that makes the bandsmen so daring and thoughtless you’ve got to dig if you want to find modesty any more. Acres of fernland on the plateau to the west left black ened and flat by the scorch stain of depravity.’
Uriah rocked a little and we allowed him a minute to recover from the hubbub created in his mind by that last image. ‘And as for the costumes worn by these turnouts, they make me blink. I am thinking particularly of the band led by that Powderhall runner there, Cynlais Coleman the Comet, who is sitting in the fourth row looking very blank and innocent as he always does but no doubt full of mischief.’
We turned around to greet Cynlais Coleman, whom we had not seen until that moment. He was craning forward to hear the whole of Uriah’s statement, looking lean, luminous and virgin of guile. Cynlais had aroused wrath in Uriah during his active years as a foot-runner shooting through the streets of Meadow Prospect on trial runs in very short knickers. After he had given us a wide smile of friendliness he returned to looking astounded at what Uriah had just said.
‘Who, me?’ he asked.
‘Yes, you.’
There was a rap from Gomer’s gavel and Uriah addressed the chair once more.
‘I’ve always known Cynlais to be as dull as a bat. How does he come to be playing the cuckoo in this nest of thinkers, Gomer? What sinister new alliance is this, boy?’
‘Keep personalities out of this, Mr Smayle,’ said Gomer.
‘Do you mind if I ask Cynlais a few questions about his band?’ said Uriah. ‘Mr Ephraim Humphries, the ironmonger, has been requested by some of us to serve as moral adviser at large to the carnival committees of the area and he wants me to prepare a special casebook on Cynlais Coleman.’
‘Do you mind being questioned, Cynlais?’ asked Gomer in his judge’s voice.
‘Oh no,’ said Cynlais. ‘You know me. Gomer. Very frank and always keen to help voters like Mr Smayle who are out to keep life scoured and fresh to the smell.’
A lot of voices around Cynlais applauded his willingness to undergo torment by Uriah’s torch.
‘Now tell me, Cynlais, my boy,’ began Uriah. ‘I have now watched you in three carnivals, and each time you’ve put me down for the count with worry and shock. Let me explain why, Mr Chairman. He marches at the head of a hundred young elements, all of them half naked, with little more than the legal minimum covered over with bits of old sheet, and Cynlais him self working up a colossal gleam of frenzy in his eye. He does a short sprint at Powderhall speed and then returns to the head of his retinue looking as if he’s just gone off the hinge that very morning. Cynlais is no better dressed than his followers. His bits of sheet are thicker and whiter but they hang even looser about the body. He also has a way, when on the march, of giv ing his body a violent jerk which makes him look even more demented. This is popular among the thoughtless, and I have heard terrible shrieks of approval from some who are always present at these morally loose-limbed events. But I warn Cyn lais that one day he will grossly ove
rdo those pagan leaps and find his feet a good yard to the north of his loin cloth, and a frost on his torso that will finish him for such events as the Powderhall Dash, and even for the commonplace carnality that has been his main hobby to date. His band also plays “Colonel Bogey”, an ominous tune even when played by the Meadow Prospect Silver Jubilee Band in full regalia. But Coleman’s boys play it at slow march tempo as if to squeeze the last drop of significance out of it. Now tell me, Coleman, what’s the meaning of all this? What lies behind these antics, boy? What are you supposed to be, and I ask with a real fear of being answered.’
‘Dervishes,’ said Cynlais Coleman. ‘We are dervishes, Mr Smayle.’
‘Dervishes? What are they?’
‘A kind of fanatic. We got the idea from Edwin Pugh the Pang there. When we told him that we were very short of fabric for our costumes and that we’d got no objection to going around looking shameless, out he came with this suggestion that we should put on a crazed, bare, prophetic look, as if we’d just come in from the desert with an old sunstroke and a fresh revelation.’
Uriah was now nodding his head and looking horrified as if his finger, eroded and anguished by a life’s inquiry, had now found and fondled the central clod from which all the darkness of malignity flowered.