by Dai Smith
‘The Meadow Prospect Toreadors, Willie. What do you think of that?’
‘Very nice, very exotic. It will help to show what little is left of our traditional earnestness to the gate but good luck to you all the same. We are headed for an age of clownish callousness and we might as well have a local boy as stage hand in that pro cess as anyone else. These bullfighters will bring the voters an illusion of the sun and a strong smell of marmalade, both much needed.’
Gomer turned to Mathew Sewell the Sotto who was putting Tasso’s teeth on edge by beating his tuning fork on the counter and bringing its pointed end sharply into play on the metal edge of the counter.
‘What about the theme tune for these boys when Cynlais gets his new band started, Mathew? What do you suggest?’
Sewell thought for a whole minute in silence, then brought his tuning fork across his teeth as if to bring his reflections to the boil.
‘Something Spanish, of course,’ said Sewell, and Gomer told him to try his tuning fork on his teeth again to see if he could come out with something more cogent.
‘Try to. make it something operatic, Mr Sewell,’ said Cyn lais Coleman, who had come in five minutes before wearing a long raincoat and the visor of his cap hiding the most signifi cant parts of his face. It had taken some major wheedling to get him to shed this disguise. He sat now by the stove looking overt and edgy.
‘What did you say?’ asked Gomer.
‘Something operatic,’ said, Cynlais. ‘I want to show that Moira Hallam that I’m as cultured as Moelwyn Cox. What about that Toreador Song? That’s a treat. That was what Moelwyn made such a hit with. Let’s have that.’
Mathew Sewell ignored Cynlais except for a short glance that told him to pick up his cap and get back out of sight.
‘It will have to be something Spanish of course. There are strong affinities between Iberian music and our own and I don’t see why we shouldn’t exploit this. I can make it marks for you if ever I’m one of the judges. Did you know, Tasso, that we were once known as Iberian Celts?’
Tasso said no very politely, but we could see from his mouth that he was tired of having Sewell pitching on him with questions that were so well outside the catering trade.
There was a long silence from Sewell and Tasso worked the urn to cover his embarrassment.
‘What about the Toreador Song?’ asked Cynlais again.
‘Just sing it over,’ said Sewell very casually, as if to say that we might as well have something going on while he picked down the one he wanted from a hallful of Iberian alternatives.
Cynlais started in a tenor so thin he had us all bending over him to follow the melody. Cynlais had never been a vigorous singer, and his collapse had caused his cords to dangle worse than ever. We all gathered around him and tried as briskly as we could to give him support in the bullfighter’s song.
Tasso tapped with his toffee hammer on the counter and smiled broadly at Sewell as if to tell him that this was just the thing, especially if played or sung without Gomer Gough, who was lunging at the melody as recklessly as he would have done at the bull.
‘No,’ said Sewell. ‘I don’t think so. It’s a little bit too com plicated to play on the march. We want something a bit wit less, something everybody’ll know.’
‘What about “I’m One of the Nuts of Barcelona”?’ asked Gomer Gough, and the title of this piece sounded strangely from the mouth of Gomer, which had been worn down to the gums by the reading of a thousand unsmiling agendas.
‘What’s nutting to do with bullfighting?’ asked Uncle Edwin. ‘Let’s lift the tone of these carnivals. I’m for the operatic tune. Let’s go through it again. It’s got a very warming beat, although I still think a nation that has to make the fighting of bulls a national cult is just passing the time on and trying to keep its mind off something else.’ Uncle Edwin gave Cynlais a nod and raised his hand to lead the group back into Bizet.
‘Don’t make difficulties, Edwin,’ said Gomer, and he was clearly torn between two conversational lines; one to censure Edwin for hanging a little close to the boneyard spiritually, second, to explain to us how he had come to spare enough time from the dialectic to find the title of such a tune as ‘I’m One of Nuts of Barcelona’, one of the least pensive lyrics of the period. But Willie Silcox nipped in before Gomer could make his point.
‘There’s another thing, too,’ said Willie. ‘Do you still want Cynlais to win the esteem of Moira Hallam?’
‘Oh definitely. It’ll give Cynlais that little extra bit of winning vim. What are you hinting at now, Silcox?’
‘This girl has got some sort of Spanish complex.’
‘No question about it,’ said Mathew Sewell. He turned to Tasso. ‘I expect you’ve heard, Tasso, that the adjective Spanish is often used in connection with various sexual restora tives and stimulants.’ But he got no answer. Tasso was not looking. ‘She’s even got me feeling like a bit of a picador, and I haven’t felt that sort of urge very often since I conducted the united choirs of Meadow Prospect in the Messiah three years ago.’ Sewell paused and his thoughts dived into waters that were not instantly visible to us. ‘Do you remember those sop ranos in their snow-white blouses? Do you remember the big dispute about my treatment of the last six hallelujahs?’
We remembered the sopranos, the steep, tumescent tiers of gleaming satin, the last great outlay on sheet music and cloth in the pre-bath-chair phase of the coal trade in the third de cade. But we could recall no dispute about Sewell’s interpreta tion of that particular score. His hallelujahs had seemed to us orthodox, even flatly so.
Gomer became annoyed at this backwash of recollection in which we had politely allowed ourselves to become involved. He accused Sewell of egomania, of putting his own and Handel’s past before Meadow Prospect’s future, of creating confusion and making our thinking bitty. Cynlais Coleman, at best a staccato thinker, and always prone to be hypnotised by Sewell, queried this.
‘Anyway,’ said Gomer, ‘carry on, Willie, with your remarks about Moira Hallam.’
‘What better than to have her walking right in front of Coleman’s new band, dressed up as Carmen?’ asked Willie.
He addressed his question to Sewell, but there was no reply from him. He was in the cold mental vaults of his memories of the Messiah, that white acreage of banked sopranos, and his treatment of those shouts of praise.
‘That’s a first-class notion, Willie,’ said Gomer, ‘Paolo,’ he said to Tasso, ‘give Willie Silcox another raspberry cordial. He’s the Livingstone of our mental Congo.’
During the next week the bullfighting uniforms for Cynlais and his band were stitched from cheap cloth and rough recollections of Blood and Sand, a film which had been screened at one of our cinemas, The Cosy, a year before. On a reasonably flat part of the waun the band practised its marching and playing. The wind came down to us scalloped by the sharp, quick step beat of ‘The Nuts of Barcelona’.
We were full of hope for Cynlais and his boys. We needed that hope. A week before the great Trecelyn carnival at which Cynlais was to make his first appearance with his matadors, the Sons of Dixie had registered their tenth total defeat in a row at a town called Elmhill. They had gone to Elmhill with an arro gant faith in themselves and sure of triumph. Georgie Young the Further Flung had drilled them more ruthlessly than ever, and at their last rehearsal he had wept with pride at the sight of their speed and precision. Under heavy pressure he had de cided to abandon his phobic faith in an all-black turn out and the wives of the Dixie’s had laundered their trousers and shirts into an incredible snowiness and that gentle, theatrically minded voter Festus Phelps the Fancy, who was in general control of décor in our stretch of the valley, had blackened their faces with an especially yielding type of cork down to the very soul of sable.
So confident had we become in the Sons of Dixie before they set out for Elmhill that all the people in Windy Way, the long, hillside street that pushed its grey, apologetic track right up to the summit of Merlin’s Brow,
got candles and lighted them as soon as darkness fell on the day of the carnival. The candles were placed on the front windowsill of most of the two hundred houses in Windy Way and as the street, seen from the bottom of Meadow Prospect, seemed to go right off into the sky the small flames made a beautiful and moving sight, and we all thought that this would be a fine way of greeting the Sons of Dixie when they drummed and gazookered their return in glory to Meadow Prospect. But they lost all the same. ‘Unimaginative.’ ‘Prussian and aesthetically Luddite.’ ‘Naïve and depressing.’ These were just some of the judges’ verdicts, and Georgie Young was carried back on some sort of litter a full hour before the band itself returned.
The Sons of Dixie came back in the darkness. Some sympathisers had staked them to a gill or two. They marched through the town and halted at the foot of Windy Way when their leader, Big Mog Malley, so erect even in the florescent melancholy of the moment he looked as if he had done a spell of training with Frederick the Great before moving under the baton of Georgie Young, raised his gigantic staff and told them to break ranks. Their mood as they stared up at the long legion of triumphant candles was for some bit of self-defensive clowning. They found they were quite near the work-yard of our undertaker, Goronwy Mayer the Layer. The lads pushed open Mayer’s gate. The locks and bolt were brittle because Mayer believed that everything connected with death should be friendly and easily negotiable. They commandeered a hearse. An unbelievable number of them managed to clamber aboard and they began their journey with that erratic reciter, Theo Morgan the Monologue, at the wheel and keeping his head bent in comical sorrow until the hearse hit the kerb and jerked a couple of the Dixies on to the roadway. Some gazooka players fell in behind and struck up with a funeral hymn so magical in its scope for sensuous harmony it had caused many a mourner to forget the body. Mayer the Layer came out of his house full of fury at the sight of his burglared yard but he had to follow behind saying not a word because he had taken a vow never to interfere in any way with the singing of that particular hymn because it had sent up the figures for funeral attendance a hun dred per cent. Mayer even joined in loudly in the lower register. He had always said that had it not been for the excluding nature of his trade he could have done something as a baritone.
And with every yard advanced by that strange cortège a candle on its windowsill was extinguished by a housewife eager not to waste the tallow on an empty midnight and wishful not to seem to mock the Sons of Dixie in their hour of hollowness.
That memory made us all the more anxious as we watched Cynlais and his followers practise up on the flat moorland. It seemed that Cynlais’ hour had come. The toreador role lifted him on to a plane of joyful release, and once the slower bands men had been persuaded that with this move into Spain ‘Colonel Bogey’ would be definitely out of place the musical side of it went well. Festus Phelps the Fancy created a bit of confusion during the early stages of preparation. Festus’ attitude to the bands had been becoming steadily more antic as his power and influence as artistic adviser had increased. He had been delighted when Cynlais and his band had decided to become bullfighters because he had read many books about the bulls and rather fancied that he himself had the shape and style to have done well at this exercise. He felt this all the more keenly because a few years before Silcox and a group of fanciers at the Institute had told Phelps that he had the shape and look of Carpentier. He had one fight. He went into the ring, superbly handsome but totally inept in the use of his hands and attended by two of the least aware voters in Meadow Prospect who were to be his seconds. They believed that Festus would win by grace of footwork and they were still massaging Festus’ feet when the first bell went. The opponent’s opening view of Festus was a figure falling on his face for no reason that he could see. He helped Festus to his feet and set to work. Festus was in the ring twenty seconds, but that was only because the referee was a slow counter even when not doing it over the form of a man as prone and still as Festus was at that moment. Since then Festus had felt that in a sport like bullfighting he would find the right field for the passion and solitariness he knew to be his, without having the clumsy folly of his fellow men clogging the pipes of his talent every whipstitch. So he tackled his advisory job with the Meadow Prospect Matadors like a crusader.
At a full meeting of the bandsmen at the Institute he explained to them the main movements of the bullfight, compar ing them with the phases of a symphony to which he applied the proper Italian terms. Then he told them about the moment of truth, the moment at which the bullfighter faces the bull with a tension of courage that makes life imperishably resonant, when he slaps death’s both cheeks and dares it to try on him any of the infamous betrayals whereby it had made shoddy and shuffling fools of the whole race of men. Festus, on the plat form, looked right into death’s eyes, taking a little time off now and then to throw looks of freezing contempt at the bandsmen whom he saw as the sweating, treacherous, contumelious ticket holders in the sun and the shadow. He rose on tiptoe to deliver the stroke of death to the grave-ripe beast which only he could see. The bandsmen, few of whom had heard Festus’ talk from the beginning, were confused as never before and they thought that Festus’ mind, without question one of the most sensitive in the division, had now been submitted to one aggravation too many and had broken loose from its last hinge. Some pointed end of revelation had jabbed Festus on to a high apocalyptic peak. All around him on the stage walked every privation and mishap that had ever driven him into his tight and terrifying corner of self-awareness, one last rubbed nerve between himself and the relief of a frank lunacy. ‘What can be the flavour on the tongue of death, daft death?’ he had shouted. ‘What was that again?’ asked a few of the bandsmen in the front row, and they started to fidget a bit as they got a glimpse of death as an articulate but loutish imbecile met casually in a lightless lane. Three committee men of the Institute, who were sitting in the back row, reminded Festus that questions of the raking, rattling sort he had just put to the matadors had to be reserved for the smaller, quieter rooms.
Then Festus, overcome by the beauty and mental nakedness of the moment, had broken down and was led weeping off the platform. Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin were sent for from the Reading Room and were told of what had been going on. They got hold of four bandsmen, lined them up on the stage and told them to run through ‘I’m One of the Nuts of Barce lona’ twice. It took that and a short statement from Gomer Gough on the dangers of emotionalism to get the matadors back into mental motion.
Festus even then had not quite shot his bolt. Up on the prac tice ground he made a last effort to give an authentic Sevillian edge to what he thought the rather clomping approach of Cynlais’ boys.
‘The day of straightforward marching is done,’ he said. ‘In these carnivals we have the seed of a great popular ballet. You see into what ruin you run if you stick to the stolid conventions that have governed the carnivals so far. The Sons of Dixie marched with the dour determination of iron collared serfs and what did it get them. Half an acre of bunions and a threat of police court prosecution from Goronwy Mayer for dragging the paraphernalia of death into a context of gross buffoonery. No, what we want is a leap of imagination.’
He got his leap. It was built around the moment of truth.
At the end of the theme tune the band would stop dead and every gazooka would blow a long, loud, low note. That was supposed to be the final defiance of the bull. Then the mata dors all stood on tiptoe and held their gazookas as if for the thrust of extinction. This manoeuvre was looked on with astonishment by all the supporters who watched the band re hearse up on the moorland. Either the matadors were a natur ally flat-footed lot, or they held their gazookas too low, or they did not realise how tall a bull can be, but their posture was ambiguous and created a lot of unfavourable talk among those supporters who were anxious to keep the goodwill of the chapels.
Two days before the Trecelyn carnival we were walking down the hillside with Cynlais. About twenty yards behind us Festus Phel
ps was talking fast and passionately to half a dozen matadors who still did not know what he was supposed to be getting at. Of these voters there were four who had never been able to stand on tiptoe without a feeling of crucial absurdity, and they were telling Festus that after two efforts to rise like that and deal with the bull they would never again have the nervous calm to find the right note when the band struck up again with ‘Barcelona’.
‘That notion of stopping and lunging with the gazookas is going to play hell with the marching,’ said Cynlais Coleman. ‘I think that that Festus Phelps the Fancy has just been sent here to hinder us. Why didn’t you tell him to leave us alone, Gomer?’
‘Patience, Cyn. We can’t afford to offend Festus yet. He’s doing splendid work with the costumes. He’s got the touch and the women who are doing the stitching say that he’s got a peer less hand with the needle. But we mustn’t allow him to overdo this mania for the ballet or we’ll be badgering Ephraim Humphries for another grant, this time to have Festus re moved. If he’s going to develop fresh art forms for the people he should have a better team to play with than the matadors. There are some very bandy-legged boys among them and they seem to be even more so when they get up on their toes and get poised for the thrust. The bull would run right through.’
‘What about Moira, Gomer? When is she going to start walking in front of the band like you said?’
‘We’re keeping her as a surprise. Don’t worry, she’ll be ready for the day. We’ve given her the beat of “I’m One of the Nuts” and she’s been practising around the table in her front room. Sewell has been coaching her. The first time he walked in front of her round the front room table to give her an idea of the type of slink and wriggle he mentally associates with this element Carmen. The second time Sewell went around the front room table behind her, and he felt his reserve ravelling and he had to sit down at Mrs Hallam’s harmonium and play that version of “Abide with Me” that leaves no room for laughs. And don’t forget, Cynlais. In the carnival you’ll be walking behind her, too, and your gonads are still fresh-faced com pared with Sewell’s. So if your mother has any cooling herb in the house fill up on it before the big day.’