Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  He watched the old man’s face, and the half-smiling absorption he saw there made him decide to stay. But how could he get into conversation with him; and – more difficult still – how could he bring the talk round to his own purpose? The old man glanced his way suddenly and nodded – but not with recognition, but as he would have to any stranger who was interested in his task.

  And it was unlikely that he would have recognised him: Peregrine was only a boy then, barely sixteen, when it happened; and it was unlikely that there was on the old man’s side any impress of the event to make him remember. It had probably melted back into his sixty-odd years as easily as a flake of snow disappearing into the tightened surface of a pond. As he recalled the afternoon it happened he glanced up towards the hill. The field hung over the narrow valley a couple of hundred feet above them, a narrow strip of fairly level turf, lit up now to a light yellowish-green by the fitful sunlight. Powderhouse Field they called it; and it was here that sports had been held and football matches played for as far back as he could remember.

  But that afternoon had passed in another world. The sun had been a raging furnace, blistering across the sky, driving all the damp and mist out of the valley, making the length of field a bright, torrid strip of scant shade, with the air rising to the bare hilltops in quick, agitated ripples. The feel of that day was still in his limbs: he remembered the vague glow of promise, the sense of being released as he sped over the turf of the roughly prepared track – effortless, as though his body had lightened, brought to a pitch of harmony by the simple miracle of the up-drawing sun. His limbs still held that feeling of power, and he relived the experience so vividly that he paced restlessly about the pavement; until the old man glanced his way and looked at him curiously.

  He did not know in what part of him the other feeling lay – the quirk, the twist in the fibre that the afternoon had also left. But this, too, had persisted with the years and had brought him here; powerfully causing him, in spite of himself, to wait on an old man who was now leading little children across a busy road.

  They came now in a continuous stream that showed no sign of stopping; and he could do nothing while the old man was so occupied. He would have to wait until the whole school of children had crossed before approaching him.

  The long-past afternoon held his mind again, shutting out the grey morning and the watery, ineffectual sun. He was in the first heat, and was pacing about waiting for the starter to order the runners to their marks when he saw a woman at the side of the track nudge her neighbour and heard her loud whisper:

  ‘Look, there’s Mr Brown the Black. He’s going to run in the race!’

  The coloured man was standing near the start, his jacket under one arm, and his boots, stuffed with tattered socks, held in his other hand. He was trying to catch the starter’s attention. Tommy John, handicapper as well as starter, shouted across to him: ‘All right, Lewis; we’ll have you in the last heat.’

  He must have been well over sixty years old then; and the crowd laughed with good humour at the thought of Mr Brown the Black running with all those young men: Of course he was a champion runner in his own day; but now! What can you expect at his age?

  Peregrine had a very good mark and won his heat easily. Tommy John had whispered to him just before: ‘You got the best lane on the track, young ’un. Keep going!’ He rose like a bird from the tremendous crash of the starting gun, became conscious of his light limbs, and felt the dark forms and the white faces of the crowd slip harmoniously past him. Then he felt the tight, momentary pull of the tape across his down-thrusting chest. As he paced luxuriously back to the start to get his sweater Tommy John gave him a nod and a smile he could not read.

  Afterwards he stayed on the side of the track to watch the other runners. When it came to Brown’s heat a man who stood on the track shouted down:

  ‘Where shall I put the black fellow, Tommy?’ The starter waved his programme casually.

  ‘Take him for a walk up the course will you, Seth?’ Brown grinned as he was led to a mark ten yards in front of the others. He tucked up his sleeves, and then his trousers carefully above his knees, showing his lean, sinewy legs and big feet shining with sweat. The women screamed with laughter. Look! Mr Brown the Black. He’s black all over. Deer-foot they used to call him when he was a runner. But look at his feet now!

  Lewis Brown the Black paid little regard to this: he stood solidly on his mark in the standing start of the old timer. When the gun went off he sprang forward, running with long, ungainly strides which nevertheless ate up the ground in front of him. He finished yards ahead of the nearest runner. As he came back the crowd shouted with delight; but he paid little attention to them as he paced down the track with a slow dignity.

  There were no cross-ties and the final came an hour later – an hour that was filled with the tinny uproar of the jazz bands. Peregrine was strung up and anxious to get it over; and he was one of the first of the finalists to take up his mark. Brown the Black was the next to come out on to the course: he halted yards in front of Peregrine and stayed there immovable while the other runners paced around him like a bunch of restless colts prancing about an old warhorse. Come on, Deer-foot! Show ’em your heels! came a quick challenge from the crowd, and Brown grinned in answer. But the starter was nodding towards him; and the starter’s man came purposefully up the track and gently caught Brown by the arm:

  ‘Back you come, Lewis. By here your mark is,’ and nodded towards a spot two or three yards to the rear.

  ‘No, no!’ Brown protested, ‘here my mark is, for sure. Here I was standing in the heat.’

  ‘But here you got to stand now, boyo.’ The starter’s man was firm. ‘There was some mistake, no doubt, the first time.’ And Brown shrugged his shoulders and took up his old, dated stance on the fresh mark. It all happened so quickly that few of the crowd noticed it.

  But Peregrine, standing a few yards behind Brown, took in every move of the incident; and the look of resignation on the coloured man’s face hit him. It was wrong to pull him back! That was his mark in the heat: he was entitled to hold the same mark in the final. Peregrine was about to speak to the starter’s man; but the man spoke to him first, whispering urgently without turning his head as he passed: ‘Keep going, young ’un. You can win it.’ Then came the compelling shout of the starter, ‘Get on your MARKS!’ driving out all thought except the many-times rehearsed response to the signal and the low obeisance towards the tape stretched out across the field a hundred yards or so in front of them.

  After the gun’s report Peregrine gained immediately on Brown’s slower impetus; but it was a struggle, even so, to pass him. Then in the whole-bodied thrust forward he saw no other runner, but hearing behind him a desperate tck, tck, tck, a disembodied sound chasing him – the urgent and chilling challenge of another runner’s feet gaining rapidly upon him. But he breasted the tape before the sound caught up with him; and then he became aware for the first time of the crowd and their loud shouting. Brown the Black – he learned afterwards – was third.

  Back again out of the clear, blueprinted past to the urgent and disturbing present where right action is hidden in a mist of numberless possibilities: his hand closed round the medal they had given him on that day. He had often recalled how he had gone up for it before a crowd quiet in a precarious hush, and had heard a voice say in pure denunciation: ‘Brown the Black should have won that. It’s his by right. If he had his proper mark you never would have caught him!’ And that voice had long echoes because it was his own voice, reminding him that he was not whole, that a part of him had been left on the field that afternoon, not to be recovered until he had tried to put things right with this old coloured man.

  Then on his return after many years he had found the medal thrust away in the drawer, hidden from the light as he had often willed his memory of it to be; and hearing that Brown was still alive and living in the village the urge to seek him out had brought him to the edge of the kerb where he was now stand
ing like a diver estimating the steel-smooth water which he sensed rather than saw beneath him. Brown the Black! Well, he had better tackle him and get it over: pluck out the small snag that had been irritating his self-respect for so many years. Besides, it would be rather pleasant to put this matter right; to give the coloured man his proper due, although the day was rather late for doing so. He watched the old man escort two more children across to the kerb. Would he remember? Or would he have to lead him laboriously back to the event on Powderhouse Field?

  At that moment the stream of children suddenly ceased. He walked across to the old man and got into conversation with him. Yes, he remembered the afternoon well; even remembered his name and that he had won the sprint. And when Peregrine told him that he was not very happy about winning it, Brown shrugged his shoulders with the same gesture and said in the same high-pitched voice he so well recalled:

  ‘You had to win it, mun. It was rigged.’

  ‘Rigged?’

  ‘Ay, didn’t you know? But perhaps you were too young: you were carrying a pile of money, most of it Tommy John’s, the starter’s. You had to win! All that money was betted on you.’

  Peregrine felt a jolt: he had gone to pick up an empty vessel and it had turned out to be full. He was going to put things right, and now it seemed the old coloured man was putting things right for him. But rigged! That explained a number of things. Peregrine shifted his stance: the old man was not as he had pictured him. He had been too eager for good works and had made a blunder. Yet as he watched the old man’s lined face and friendly eyes he knew that was not his thought:

  ‘It was a very hot afternoon,’ Brown said with a smile.

  ‘I remember it well.’ Then nodding towards the cemetery on the other side of the valley: ‘Tommy John won’t handicap no more: he’s up there now, back right behind scratch himself.’ But he spoke without bitterness.

  Peregrine’s hand closed again on the medal in his pocket; and with a stubborn resolve to see his purpose through he took it out and showed it to the old man. He looked at it with interest:

  ‘I knew there was a medal, but I never saw it.’

  ‘It’s yours by right,’ Peregrine said with relief, and with the satisfaction of saying a long-rehearsed line. ‘Wouldn’t you like to take it?’

  The old man glanced up quickly and Peregrine immediately saw the look as a refusal. Another false move. He saw his impulse to return the medal for what it was: his wish to right a wrong had been mixed with something less pleasant, and the old man had instantly spotted it; and he was now brushing aside the brash gesture with all the grace of a natural good breeding. He wanted to snatch the medal from the old man’s hand and return it to his pocket where it should have stayed. For a moment they both stood awkwardly on the pavement. Then a sudden clear note interrupted them: the sound of a boy’s voice from the opposite kerb calling insistently:

  ‘Mr Brown. Mr Brown the Black.’

  The old man looked up and held up his hand to signal the small boy to stay where he was. Then after looking up and down the road he shuffled across, taking the boy’s hand and bringing him over the road. They were both smiling as they reached the pavement where Peregrine stood: the old man out of a natural pleasure, the boy with the satisfaction of a lesson rightly carried out.

  When they stood near Peregrine, Brown – who was still holding the medal – asked the boy:

  ‘So you are the last today?’

  The boy nodded, his hand still in the old man’s.

  ‘Well, the last shall be first, so they say. And the first ought to have a prize, for sure.’

  And bending over, the old man pinned the medal on the boy’s coat. The boy flushed as he realised that he was meant to keep it, and without another word he ran up the pavement as hard as he could go – eager to bring his good fortune home to his family.

  For a moment Peregrine stood amazed at the old man’s action. But as he saw the small boy scuttling exultantly up the street a deep laughter took hold of him; and it was not long before the old man was laughing with him. Then the hard light of the too enduring past broke up instantly into a spatter of bright and quickly vanishing colours. And their laughter continued, long after the sound of the boy’s footsteps had gone right out of the narrow, echoing street.

  A STORY

  Dylan Thomas

  If you can call it a story. There’s no real beginning or end and there’s very little in the middle. It is all about a day’s outing, by charabanc, to Porthcawl, which, of course, the charabanc never reached, and it happened when I was so high and much nicer.

  I was staying at the time with my uncle and his wife. Although she was my aunt, I never thought of her as anything but the wife of my uncle, partly because he was so big and trumpeting and red-hairy and used to fill every inch of the hot little house like an old buffalo squeezed into an airing cupboard, and partly because she was so small and silk and quick and made no noise at all as she whisked about on padded paws, dusting the china dogs, feeding the buffalo, setting the mousetraps that never caught her; and once she sleaked out of the room, to squeak in a nook or nibble in the hayloft, you forgot she had ever been there.

  But there he was, always, a steaming hulk of an uncle, his braces straining like hawsers, crammed behind the counter of the tiny shop at the front of the house, and breathing like a brass band; or guzzling and blustery in the kitchen over his gutsy supper, too big for everything except the great black boats of his boots. As he ate, the house grew smaller; he billowed out over the furniture, the loud check meadow of his waistcoat littered, as though after a picnic, with cigarette ends, peelings, cabbage stalks, birds’ bones, gravy; and the forest fire of his hair crackled among the hooked hams from the ceiling. She was so small she could hit him only if she stood on a chair, and every Saturday night at half past ten he would lift her up, under his arm, on to a chair in the kitchen so that she could hit him on the head with whatever was handy, which was always a china dog. On Sundays, and when pickled, he sang high tenor, and had won many cups.

  The first I heard of the annual outing was when I was sitting one evening on a bag of rice behind the counter, under one of my uncle’s stomachs, reading an advertisement for sheep dip, which was all there was to read. The shop was full of my uncle, and when Mr Benjamin Franklyn, Mr Weazley, Noah Bowen, and Will Sentry came in, I thought it would burst. It was like all being together in a drawer that smelt of cheese and turps, and twist tobacco and sweet biscuits and snuff and waistcoat. Mr Benjamin Franklyn said that he had collected enough money for the charabanc and twenty cases of pale ale and a pound apiece over that he would distribute among the members of the outing when they first stopped for refreshment, and he was about sick and tired, he said, of being followed by Will Sentry.

  ‘All day long, wherever I go,’ he said, ‘he’s after me like a collie with one eye. I got a shadow of my own and a dog. I don’t need no Tom, Dick, or Harry pursuing me with his dirty muffler on.’

  Will Sentry blushed, and said: ‘It’s only oily. I got a bicycle.’

  ‘A man has no privacy at all,’ Mr Franklyn went on. ‘I tell you he sticks so close I’m afraid to go out the back in case I sit in his lap. It’s a wonder to me,’ he said, ‘he don’t follow me into bed at night.’

  ‘Wife won’t let,’ Will Sentry said.

  And that started Mr Franklyn off again, and they tried to soothe him down by saying: ‘Don’t you mind Will Sentry’… ‘No harm in old Will’… ‘He’s only keeping an eye on the money, Benjie.’

  ‘Aren’t I honest?’ asked Mr Franklyn in surprise. There was no answer for some time, then Noah Bowen said: ‘You know what the committee is. Ever since Bob the Fiddle they don’t feel safe with a new treasurer.’

  ‘Do you think I’m going to drink the outing funds, like Bob the Fiddle did?’ said Mr Franklyn.

  ‘You might,’ said my uncle slowly.

  ‘I resign,’ said Mr Franklyn.

  ‘Not with our money you won’t,’ Will Sentry said
.

  ‘Who put dynamite in the salmon pool?’ said Mr Weazley, but nobody took any notice of him. And, after a time, they all began to play cards in the thickening dusk of the hot, cheesy shop, and my uncle blew and bugled whenever he won, and Mr Weazley grumbled like a dredger, and I fell to sleep on the gravy-scented mountain meadow of Uncle’s waistcoat.

  On Sunday evening, after Bethesda, Mr Franklyn walked into the kitchen where my uncle and I were eating sardines with spoons from the tin because it was Sunday and his wife would not let us play draughts. She was somewhere in the kitchen, too. Perhaps she was inside the grandmother clock, hanging from the weights and breathing. Then, a second later, the door opened again and Will Sentry edged into the room, twiddling his hard, round hat. He and Mr Franklyn sat down on the settee, stiff and mothballed and black in their chapel and funeral suits.

  ‘I brought the list,’ said Mr Franklyn. ‘Every member fully paid. You ask Will Sentry.’

  My uncle put on his spectacles, wiped his whiskery mouth with a handkerchief big as a Union Jack, laid down his spoon of sardines, took Mr Franklyn’s list of names, removed the spectacles so that he could read, and then ticked the names off one by one.

  ‘Enoch Davies. Aye. He’s good with his fists. You never know. Little Gerwain. Very melodious bass. Mr Cadwalladwr. That’s right. He can tell opening time better than my watch. Mr Weazley. Of course. He’s been to Paris. Pity he suffers so much in the charabanc. Stopped us nine times last year between The Beehive and The Red Dragon. Noah Bowen, ah, very peaceable. He’s got a tongue like a turtle-dove. Never a argument with Noah Bowen. Jenkins Loughor. Keep him off economics. It cost us a plate glass window. And ten pints for the Sergeant. Mr Jervis. Very tidy.’