by Dylan Thomas
‘I played for Aberavon in 1898,’ said a stranger to Enoch Davies.
‘Liar,’ said Enoch Davies.
‘I can show you photos,’ said the stranger.
‘Forged,’ said Enoch Davies.
‘And I’ll show you my cap at home.’
‘Stolen.’
‘I got friends to prove it,’ the stranger said in a fury.
‘Bribed,’ said Enoch Davies.
I have myself taken part in such a duel. Some years ago, John Ormond, distinguished film-maker, friend of Dylan Thomas and himself a poet, was shooting a film in west Wales. I was involved in this programme and was to go down to the Teifi river, very photogenic in spate, and cast a line into the water. This was strictly illegal, the fishing season having closed, but we cleared this by getting permission from the agent of the estate through which the stretch of water ran. It would be fine, he said, as long as I didn’t put a lure on my line. Dressed in my fishing garb, I stood on the rocks above a foam of water and cast my harmless line. The cameras rolled. For about five minutes. Then the river bailiff appeared, large and implacable.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘I’m pretending to fish,’ I said, ‘so that these men can make a film.’
‘Not allowed,’ he said, ‘the river’s closed.’
‘We’ve seen the agent,’ I said.
‘You may have,’ he said, ‘but I’m the river bailiff and I say you stop now.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I’m only pretending.’
‘So you say,’ he said.
‘Look,’ I said, reeling in my line, ‘I don’t have a hook on. What do you think I’m going to do, lasso the fish?’
‘You might,’ he said darkly. The ghost of Dylan Thomas, I felt, was not far away.
The ghost of Dylan Thomas. He is certainly present in ‘Return Journey’, the long narrative in which Dylan goes back to Swansea to find his former selves, the first of whom he described unflinchingly as ‘above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean, he’s five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken after playing a game called Cats and Dogs, in the Mermaid, Mumbles; speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know’—before passing down the years through ‘the departed stages’ of the boy he was pursuing. At the end of the journey, the park-keeper who ‘knew him well’, had ‘known him by the thousands’, says he is ‘Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead.’
I still find that death unnecessary, all these years later, particularly after reading these stories, so full of the man, his warmth, his voices. Toward the end of his life he wrote to his friend Dr Daniel Jones (whom we met as a boy in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog): ‘Isn’t life awful? Last week I hit Caitlin with a plate of beetroot, and I’m still bleeding. I can’t finish a poem or begin a story’.
He was to the end ‘a writer of poems and stories’. One of my friends told me that his mother would not read Dylan Thomas ‘because he was such a horrible man’. Persuaded to read these stories, she has changed her mind and is convinced he’s a wonderful man. I agree with her.
Leslie Norris
After The Fair
The fair was over, the lights in the coconut stalls were put out, and the wooden horses stood still in the darkness, waiting for the music and the hum of the machines that would set them trotting forward. One by one, in every booth, the naphtha jets were turned down and the canvases pulled over the little gaming tables. The crowd went home, and there were lights in the windows of the caravans.
Nobody had noticed the girl. In her black clothes she stood against the side of the roundabouts, hearing the last feet tread upon the sawdust and the last voices die in the distance. Then, all alone on the deserted ground, surrounded by the shapes of wooden horses and cheap fairy boats, she looked for a place to sleep. Now here and now there, she raised the canvas that shrouded the coconut stalls and peered into the warm darkness. She was frightened to step inside, and as a mouse scampered across the littered shavings on the floor, or as the canvas creaked and a rush of wind set it dancing, she ran away and hid again near the roundabouts. Once she stepped on the boards; the bells round a horse’s throat jingled and were still; she did not dare breathe again until all was quiet and the darkness had forgotten the noise of the bells. Then here and there she went peeping for a bed, into each gondola, under each tent. But there was nowhere, nowhere in all the fair for her to sleep. One place was too silent, and in another was the noise of mice. There was straw in the corner of the Astrologer’s tent, but it moved as she touched it; she knelt by its side and put out her hand; she felt a baby’s hand upon her own.
Now there was nowhere, so slowly she turned towards the caravans on the outskirts of the field, and found all but two to be unlit. She waited, clutching her empty bag, and wondering which caravan she should disturb. At last she decided to knock upon the window of the little, shabby one near her, and, standing on tiptoes, she looked in. The fattest man she had ever seen was sitting in front of the stove, toasting a piece of bread. She tapped three times on the glass, then hid in the shadows. She heard him come to the top of the steps and call out ‘Who? Who?’ but she dare not answer. ‘Who? Who?’ he called again.
She laughed at his voice which was as thin as he was fat.
He heard her laughter and turned to where the darkness concealed her. ‘First you tap,’ he said, ‘then you hide, then you laugh.’
She stepped into the circle of light, knowing she need no longer hide herself.
‘A girl,’ he said. ‘Come in, and wipe your feet.’ He did not wait but retreated into his caravan, and she could do nothing but follow him up the steps and into the crowded room. He was seated again, and toasting the same piece of bread. ‘Have you come in?’ he said, for his back was towards her.
‘Shall I close the door?’ she asked, and closed it before he replied.
She sat on the bed and watched him toast the bread until it burnt.
‘I can toast better than you,’ she said.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said the Fat Man.
She watched him put the charred toast upon a plate by his side, take another round of bread and hold that, too, in front of the stove. It burnt very quickly.
‘Let me toast it for you,’ she said. Ungraciously he handed her the fork and the loaf.
‘Cut it,’ he said, ‘toast it, and eat it.’
She sat on the chair.
‘See the dent you’ve made on my bed,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Who are you to come in and dent my bed?’
‘My name is Annie,’ she told him.
Soon all the bread was toasted and buttered, so she put it in the centre of the table and arranged two chairs.
‘I’ll have mine on the bed,’ said the Fat Man. ‘You’ll have it here.’
When they had finished their supper, he pushed back his chair and stared at her across the table.
‘I am the Fat Man,’ he said. ‘My home is Treorchy; the Fortune-Teller next door is Aberdare.’
‘I am nothing to do with the fair,’ she said, ‘I am Cardiff.’
‘There’s a town,’ agreed the Fat Man. He asked her why she had come away.
‘Money,’ said Annie.
Then he told her about the fair and the places he had been to and the people he had met. He told her his age and his weight and the names of his brothers and what he would call his son. He showed her a picture of Boston Harbour and the photograph of his mother who lifted weights. He told her how summer looked in Ireland.
‘I’ve always been a fat man,’ he said, ‘and now I’m the Fat Man; there’s nobody to touch me for fatness.’ He told her of a heat-wave in Sicily and of the Mediterranean Sea. She told him of the baby in the Astrologer’s tent.
‘That’s the stars again,’ he said.
‘The baby’ll die,’ said Annie.
He opened the door and walked out into the d
arkness. She looked about her but did not move, wondering if he had gone to fetch a policeman. It would never do to be caught by the policeman again. She stared through the open door into the inhospitable night and drew her chair closer to the stove.
‘Better to be caught in the warmth,’ she said. But she trembled at the sound of the Fat Man approaching, and pressed her hands upon her thin breast as he climbed up the steps like a walking mountain. She could see him smile through the darkness.
‘See what the stars have done,’ he said, and brought in the Astrologer’s baby in his arms.
After she had nursed it against her and it had cried on the bosom of her dress, she told him how she had feared his going.
‘What should I be doing with a policeman?’
She told him that the policeman wanted her. ‘What have you done for a policeman to be wanting you?’
She did not answer but took the child nearer to her wasted breast. He saw her thinness.
‘You must eat, Cardiff,’ he said.
Then the child began to cry. From a little wail its voice rose into a tempest of despair. The girl rocked it to and fro on her lap, but nothing soothed it.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ said the Fat Man, and the tears increased. Annie smothered it in kisses, but it howled again.
‘We must do something,’ she said.
‘Sing it a lullaby.’
She sang, but the child did not like her singing.
‘There’s only one thing,’ said Annie, ‘we must take it on the roundabouts.’ With the child’s arm around her neck she stumbled down the steps and ran towards the deserted fair, the Fat Man panting behind her.
She found her way through the tents and stalls into the centre of the ground where the wooden horses stood waiting, and clambered up on to a saddle. ‘Start the engine,’ she called out. In the distance the Fat Man could be heard cranking up the antique machine that drove the horses all the day into a wooden gallop. She heard the spasmodic humming of the engines; the boards rattled under the horse’s feet. She saw the Fat Man get up by her side, pull the central lever, and climb on to the saddle of the smallest horse of all. As the roundabout started, slowly at first and slowly gaining speed, the child at the girl’s breast stopped crying and clapped its hands. The night wind tore through its hair, the music jangled in its ears. Round and round the wooden horses sped, drowning the cries of the wind with the beating of their hooves.
And so the men from the caravans found them, the Fat Man and the girl in black with a baby in her arms, racing round and round on their mechanical steeds to the ever-increasing music of the organ.
The Tree
Rising from the house that faced the Jarvis hills in the long distance, there was a tower for the day-birds to build in and for the owls to fly around at night. From the village the light in the tower window shone like a glow-worm through the panes; but the room under the sparrows’ nests was rarely lit; webs were spun over its unwashed ceilings; it stared over twenty miles of the up-and-down county, and the corners kept their secrets where there were claw marks in the dust.
The child knew the house from roof to cellar; he knew the irregular lawns and the gardener’s shed where flowers burst out of their jars; but he could not find the key that opened the door of the tower.
The house changed to his moods, and a lawn was the sea or the shore or the sky or whatever he wished it. When a lawn was a sad mile of water, and he was sailing on a broken flower down the waves, the gardener would come out of his shed near the island of bushes. He too would take a stalk, and sail. Straddling a garden broom, he would fly wherever the child wished. He knew every story from the beginning of the world.
‘In the beginning,’ he would say, ‘there was a tree.’
‘What kind of a tree?’
‘The tree where that blackbird’s whistling.’
‘A hawk, a hawk,’ cried the child.
The gardener would look up at the tree, seeing a monstrous hawk perched on a bough or an eagle swinging in the wind.
The gardener loved the Bible. When the sun sank and the garden was full of people, he would sit with a candle in his shed, reading of the first love and the legend of apples and serpents. But the death of Christ on a tree he loved most. Trees made a fence around him, and he knew of the changing of the seasons by the hues on the bark and the rushing of sap through the covered roots. His world moved and changed as spring moved along the branches, changing their nakedness; his God grew up like a tree from the apple-shaped earth, giving bud to His children and letting His children be blown from their places by the breezes of winter; winter and death moved in one wind. He would sit in his shed and read of the crucifixion, looking over the jars on his window-shelf into the winter nights. He would think that love fails on such nights, and that many of its children are cut down.
The child transfigured the blowsy lawns with his playing. The gardener called him by his mother’s name, and seated him on his knee, and talked to him of the wonders of Jerusalem and the birth in the manger.
‘In the beginning was the village of Bethlehem,’ he whispered to the child before the bell rang for tea out of the growing darkness.
‘Where is Bethlehem?’
‘Far away,’ said the gardener, ‘in the East.’
To the east stood the Jarvis hills, hiding the sun, their trees drawing up the moon out of the grass.
The child lay in bed. He watched the rocking-horse and wished that it would grow wings so that he could mount it and ride into the Arabian sky. But the winds of Wales blew at the curtains, and crickets made a noise in the untidy plot under the window. His toys were dead. He started to cry and then stopped, knowing no reason for tears. The night was windy and cold, he was warm under the sheets; the night was as big as a hill, he was a boy in bed.
Closing his eyes, he stared into a spinning cavern deeper than the darkness of the garden where the first tree on which the unreal birds had fastened stood alone and bright as fire. The tears ran back under his lids as he thought of the first tree that was planted so near him, like a friend in the garden. He crept out of bed and tiptoed to the door. The rocking-horse bounded forward on its springs, startling the child into a noiseless scamper back to bed. The child looked at the horse and the horse was quiet; he tiptoed again along the carpet, and reached the door, and turned the knob around, and ran on to the landing. Feeling blindly in front of him, he made his way to the top of the stairs; he looked down the dark stairs into the hall, seeing a host of shadows curve in and out of the corners, hearing their sinuous voices, imagining the pits of their eyes and their lean arms. But they would be little and secret and bloodless, not cased in invisible armour but wound around with cloths as thin as a web; they would whisper as he walked, touch him on the shoulder, and say S in his ear. He went down the stairs; not a shadow moved in the hall, the corners were empty. He put out his hand and patted the darkness, thinking to feel some dry and velvet head creep under the fingers and edge, like a mist, into the nails. But there was nothing. He opened the front door, and the shadows swept into the garden.
Once on the path, his fears left him. The moon had lain down on the unweeded beds, and her frosts were spread on the grass. At last he came to the illuminated tree at the long gravel end, older even than the marvel of light, with the woodlice asleep under the bark, with the boughs standing out from the body like the frozen arms of a woman. The child touched the tree; it bent as to his touch. He saw a star, brighter than any in the sky, burn steadily above the first birds’ tower, and shine on nowhere but on the leafless boughs and the trunk and the travelling roots.
The child had not doubted the tree. He said his prayers to it, with knees bent on the blackened twigs the night wind fetched to the ground. Then, trembling with love and cold, he ran back over the lawns towards the house.
There was an idiot to the east of the county who walked the land like a beggar. Now at a farmhouse and now at a widow’s cottage he begged for his bread. A parson gave him a suit, and it lopped rou
nd his hungry ribs and shoulders and waved in the wind as he shambled over the fields. But his eyes were so wide and his neck so clear of the country dirt that no one refused him what he asked. And asking for water, he was given milk.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From the east,’ he said.
So they knew he was an idiot, and gave him a meal to clean the yards.
As he bent with a rake over the dung and the trodden grain, he heard a voice rise in his heart. He put his hand into the cattle’s hay, caught a mouse, rubbed his hand over its muzzle, and let it go away.
All day the thought of the tree was with the child; all night it stood up in his dreams as the star stood above its plot. One morning towards the middle of December, when the wind from the farthest hills was rushing around the house, and the snow of the dark hours had not dissolved from lawns and roofs, he ran to the gardener’s shed. The gardener was repairing a rake he had found broken. Without a word, the child sat on a seedbox at his feet, and watched him tie the teeth, and knew that the wire would not keep them together. He looked at the gardener’s boots, wet with snow, at the patched knees of his trousers, at the undone buttons of his coat, and the folds of his belly under the patched flannel shirt. He looked at his hands as they busied themselves over the golden knots of wire; they were hard, brown hands, with the stains of the soil under the broken nails and the stains of tobacco on the tips of the fingers. Now the lines of the gardener’s face were set in determination as time upon time he knotted the iron teeth only to feel them shake insecurely from the handle. The child was frightened of the strength and uncleanliness of the old man; but, looking at the long, thick beard, unstained and white as fleece, he soon became reassured. The beard was the beard of an apostle.