by Dylan Thomas
‘No, no, Mrs. Jones, thanks the same,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind pears or chunks, but I can’t bear peaches.’
Jack and I had stopped talking. Annie stared down at her gym-shoes. One of the clocks on the mantelpiece coughed, and struck. Mrs. Williams struggled from her chair.
‘There, time flies!’ she said.
She pushed her way past the furniture, jostled against the sideboard, rattled the trinkets and brooches, and kissed Jack on the forehead.
‘You’ve got scent on,’ he said.
She patted my head.
‘Now behave yourselves.’
To Annie, she said in a whisper: ‘And remember, Mrs. Jones, just good plain food. No spoiling his appetite.’
Annie followed her out of the room. She moved slowly now. ‘I’ll do my very best, Mrs. Williams.’
We heard her say, ‘Good-bye then, Mrs. Williams,’ and go down the steps of the kitchen and close the door. The motor car roared in the yard, then the noise grew softer and died.
Down the thick dingle Jack and I ran shouting, scalping the brambles with our thin stick-hatchets, dancing, hallooing. We skidded to a stop and prowled on the bushy banks of the stream. Up above, sat one-eyed, dead-eyed, sinister, slim, ten-notched Gwilym, loading his guns in Gallows Farm. We crawled and rat-tatted through the bushes, hid, at a whistled signal, in the deep grass, and crouched there, waiting for the crack of a twig or the secret breaking of boughs.
On my haunches, eager and alone, casting an ebony shadow, with the Gorsehill jungle swarming, the violent, impossible birds and fishes leaping, hidden under four-stemmed flowers the height of horses, in the early evening in a dingle near Carmarthen, my friend Jack Williams invisibly near me, I felt all my young body like an excited animal surrounding me, the torn knees bent, the bumping heart, the long heat and depth between the legs, the sweat prickling in the hands, the tunnels down to the eardrums, the little ball’s of dirt between the toes, the eyes in the sockets, the tucked-up voice, the blood racing, the memory around and within flying, jumping, swimming, and waiting to pounce. There, playing Indians in the evening, I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name. I sprang with excitement and scrambled up through the scratching brambles again.
Jack cried: ‘I see you! I see you!’ He scampered after me. ‘Bang! bang! you’re dead!’
But I was young and loud and alive, though I lay down obediently.
‘Now you try and kill me,’ said Jack. ‘Count a hundred.’
I closed one eye, saw him rush and stamp towards the upper field, then tiptoe back and begin to climb a tree, and I counted fifty and ran to the foot of the tree and killed him as he climbed. ‘You fall down,’ I said.
He refused to fall, so I climbed too, and we clung to the top branches and stared down at the lavatory in the corner of the field. Gwilym was sitting on the seat with his trousers down. He looked small and black. He was reading a book and moving his hands.
‘We can see you!’ we shouted.
He snatched his trousers up and put the book in his pocket.
‘We can see you, Gwilym!’
He came out into the field. ‘Where are you, then?’
We waved our caps at him.
‘In the sky!’ Jack shouted.
‘Flying!’ I shouted.
We stretched our arms out like wings.
‘Fly down here.’
We swung and laughed on the branches.
‘There’s birds!’ cried Gwilym.
Our jackets were torn and our stockings were wet and our shoes were sticky; we had green moss and brown bark on our hands and faces when we went in for supper and a scolding. Annie was quiet that night, though she called me a ragamuffin and said she didn’t know what Mrs. Williams would think and told Gwilym he should know better. We made faces at Gwilym and put salt in his tea, but after supper he said: ‘You can come to the chapel if you like. Just before bed.’
He lit a candle on the top of the pulpit cart. It was a small light in the big barn. The bats were gone. Shadows still clung upside down along the roof. Gwilym was no longer my cousin in a Sunday suit, but a tall stranger shaped like a spade in a cloak, and his voice grew too deep. The straw heaps were lively. I thought of the sermon on the cart: we were watched, Jack’s heart was watched, Gwilym’s tongue was marked down, my whisper, ‘Look at the little eyes,’ was remembered always.
‘Now I take confessions,’ said Gwilym from the cart.
Jack and I stood bareheaded in the circle of the candle, and I could feel the trembling of Jack’s body.
‘You first.’ Gwilym’s finger, as bright as though he had held it in the candle flame until it burned, pointed me out, and I took a step towards the pulpit cart, raising my head.
‘Now you confess,’ said Gwilym.
‘What have I got to confess?’
‘The worst thing you’ve done.’
I let Edgar Reynolds be whipped because I had taken his homework; I stole from my mother’s bag; I stole from Gwyneth’s bag; I stole twelve books in three visits from the library, and threw them away in the park; I drank a cup of my water to see what it tasted like; I beat a dog with a stick so that it would roll over and lick my hand afterwards; I looked with Dan Jones through the keyhole while his maid had a bath; I cut my knee with a penknife, and put the blood on my handkerchief and said it had come out of my ears so that I could pretend I was ill and frighten my mother; I pulled my trousers down and showed Jack Williams; I saw Billy Jones beat a pigeon to death with a fire-shovel, and laughed and got sick; Cedric Williams and I broke into Mrs. Samuels’ house and poured ink over the bedclothes.
I said: ‘I haven’t done anything bad.’
‘Go on, confess,’ said Gwilym. He was frowning down at me.
‘I can’t! I can’t!’ I said. ‘I haven’t done anything bad.’
‘Go on, confess!’
‘I won’t! I won’t!’
Jack began to cry. ‘I want to go home,’ he said.
Gwilym opened the chapel door and we followed him into the yard, down past the black, humped sheds, towards the house, and Jack sobbed all the way.
In bed together, Jack and I confessed our sins,
‘I steal from my mother’s bag, too; there are pounds and pounds.’
‘How much do you steal?’
‘Threepence.’
‘I killed a man once.’
‘No you didn’t then.’
‘Honest to Christ, I shot him through the heart.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Williams.’
‘Did he bleed?’
I thought the stream was lapping against the house.
‘Like a bloody pig,’ I said.
Jack’s tears had dried. ‘I don’t like Gwilym, he’s barmy.’
‘No he isn’t. I found a lot of poems in his bedroom once. They were all written to girls. And he showed them to me afterwards, and he’d changed all the girls’ names to God.’
‘He’s religious.’
‘No he isn’t, he goes with actresses. He knows Corinne Griffith.’
Our door was open. I liked the door locked at night, because I would rather have a ghost in the bedroom than think of one coming in; but Jack liked it open, and we tossed and he won. We heard the front door rattle and footsteps in the kitchen passage.
‘That’s Uncle Jim.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s like a fox, he eats pigs and chickens.’
The ceiling was thin and we heard every sound, the creaking of the bard’s chair, the clatter of plates, Annie’s voice saying: ‘Midnight!’
‘He’s drunk,’ I said. We lay quite still, hoping to hear a quarrel.
‘Perhaps he’ll throw plates,’ I said.
But Annie scolded him softly. ‘There’s a fine state, Jim.’
He murmured to her.
‘There’s one pig gone,’ she said. ‘Oh, why do you have to do it, Jim? There’s noth
ing left now. We’ll never be able to carry on.’
‘Money! money! money!’ he said. I knew he would be lighting his pipe.
Then Annie’s voice grew so soft we could not hear the words, and uncle said: ‘Did she pay you the thirty shillings?’
‘They’re talking about your mother,’ I told Jack.
For a long time Annie spoke in a low voice, and we waited for words. ‘Mrs. Williams,’ she said, and ‘motor car,’ and ‘Jack,’ and ‘peaches.’ I thought she was crying for her voice broke on the last word.
Uncle Jim’s chair creaked again, he might have struck his fist on the table, and we heard him shout: ‘I’ll give her peaches! Peaches, peaches! Who does she think she is? Aren’t peaches good enough for her? To hell with her bloody motor car and her bloody son! Making us small.’
‘Don’t, don’t Jim!’ Annie said, ‘you’ll wake the boys.’
‘I’ll wake them and whip the hell out of them, too!’
‘Please, please, Jim!’
‘You send the boy away,’ he said, ‘or I’ll do it myself. Back to his three bloody houses.’
Jack pulled the bedclothes over his head and sobbed into the pillow: ‘I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear. I’ll write to my mother. She’ll take me away.’
I climbed out to close the door. Jack would not talk to me again, and I fell asleep to the noise of the voices below, which soon grew gentle.
Uncle Jim was not at breakfast. When we came down, Jack’s shoes were cleaned for him and his jacket was darned and pressed. Annie gave two boiled eggs to Jack and one to me. She forgave me when I drank tea from the saucer.
After breakfast, Jack walked to the post office. I took the one-eyed collie to chase rabbits in the upper fields, but it barked at ducks and brought me a tramp’s shoe from a hedge, and lay down with its tail wagging in a rabbit hole. I threw stones at the deserted duck pond, and the collie ambled back with sticks.
Jack went skulking into the damp dingle, his hands in his pockets, his cap over one eye. I left the collie sniffing at a molehill, and climbed to the tree-top in the corner of the lavatory field. Below me, Jack was playing Indians all alone, scalping through the bushes, surprising himself round a tree, hiding from himself in the grass. I called to him once, but he pretended not to hear. He played alone, silently and savagely. I saw him standing with his hands in his pockets, swaying like a Kelly, on the mudbank by the stream at the foot of the dingle. My bough lurched, the heads of the dingle bushes spun up towards me like green tops, ‘I’m falling!’ I cried, my trousers saved me, I swung and grasped, this was one minute of wild adventure, but Jack did not look up and the minute was lost. I climbed, without dignity, to the ground.
Early in the afternoon, after a silent meal, when Gwilym was reading the scriptures or writing hymns to girls or sleeping in his chapel, Annie was baking bread, and I was cutting a wooden whistle in the loft over the stable, the motor car drove up in the yard again.
Out of the house Jack, in his best suit, ran to meet his mother, and I heard him say as she stepped, raising her short skirts, on to the cobbles: ‘And he called you a bloody cow, and he said he’d whip the hell out of me, and Gwilym took me to the barn in the dark and let the mice run over me, and Dylan’s a thief, and that old woman’s spoilt my jacket.’
Mrs. Williams sent the chauffeur for Jack’s luggage. Annie came to the door, trying to smile and curtsy, tidying her hair, wiping her hands on her pinafore.
Mrs. Williams said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and sat with Jack in the back of the car and stared at the ruin of Gorsehill.
The chauffeur came back. The car drove off, scattering the hens. I ran out of the stable to wave to Jack. He sat still and stiff by his mother’s side. I waved my handkerchief.
A Visit to Grandpa’s
In the middle of the night I woke from a dream full of whips and lariats as long as serpents, and runaway coaches on mountain passes, and wide, windy gallops over cactus fields, and I heard the man in the next room crying, ‘Gee-up!’ and ‘Whoa!’ and trotting his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
It was the first time I had stayed in grandpa’s house. The floorboards had squeaked like mice as I climbed into bed, and the mice between the walls had creaked like wood as though another visitor was walking on them. It was a mild summer night, but curtains had flapped and branches beaten against the window. I had pulled the sheets over my head, and soon was roaring and riding in a book.
‘Whoa there, my beauties!’ cried grandpa. His voice sounded very young and loud, and his tongue had powerful hooves, and he made his bedroom into a great meadow. I thought I would see if he was ill, or had set his bedclothes on fire, for my mother had said that he lit his pipe under the blankets, and had warned me to run to his help if I smelt smoke in the night. I went on tiptoe through the darkness to his bedroom door, brushing against the furniture and upsetting a candlestick with a thump. When I saw there was a light in the room I felt frightened, and as I opened the door I heard grandpa shout, ‘Gee-up!’ as loudly as a bull with a megaphone.
He was sitting straight up in bed and rocking from side to side as though the bed were on a rough road; the knotted edges of the counterpane were his reins; his invisible horse stood in a shadow beyond the bedside candle: Over a white flannel nightshirt he was wearing a red waistcoat with walnut-sized brass buttons. The over-filled bowl of his pipe smouldered among his whiskers like a little, burning hayrick on a stick. At the sight of me, his hands dropped from the reins and lay blue and quiet, the bed stopped still on a level road, he muffled his tongue into silence, and the horses drew softly up.
‘Is there anything the matter, grandpa?’ I asked, though the clothes were not on fire. His face in the candlelight looked like a ragged quilt pinned upright on the black air and patched all over with goat-beards.
He stared at me mildly. Then he blew down his pipe, scattering the sparks and making a high, wet dog-whistle of the stem, and shouted: ‘Ask no questions.’
After a pause, he said slyly: ‘Do you ever have nightmares, boy?’
I said: ‘No.’
‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he said.
I said I was woken by a voice that was shouting to horses.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘You eat too much. Who ever heard of horses in a bedroom?’
He fumbled under his pillow, brought out a small tinkling bag, and carefully untied its strings. He put a sovereign in my hand, and said: ‘Buy a cake.’ I thanked him and wished him good night.
As I closed my bedroom door, I heard his voice crying loudly and gaily, ‘Gee-up! gee-up!’ and the rocking of the travelling bed.
In the morning I woke from a dream of fiery horses on a plain that was littered with furniture, and of large, cloudy men who rode six horses at a time and whipped them with burning bed-clothes. Grandpa was at breakfast, dressed in deep black. After breakfast he said, ‘There was a terrible loud wind last night,’ and sat in his arm-chair by the hearth to make clay balls for the fire. Later in the morning he took me for a walk, through Johnstown village and into the fields on the Llanstephan road.
A man with a whippet said, ‘There’s a nice morning, Mr. Thomas,’ and when he had gone, leanly as his dog, into the short-treed green wood he should not have entered because of the notices, grandpa said: ‘There, do you hear what he called you? Mister!’
We passed by small cottages, and all the men who leant on the gates congratulated grandpa on the fine morning. We passed through the wood full of pigeons, and their wings broke the branches as they rushed to the tops of the trees. Among the soft, contented voices and the loud, timid flying, grandpa said, like a man calling across a field: ‘If you heard those old birds in the night, you’d wake me up and say there were horses in the trees.’
We walked back slowly, for he was tired, and the lean man stalked out of the forbidden wood with a rabbit held as gently over his arm as a girl’s arm in a warm sleeve.
On the last day but one of my visit I was taken to Llanst
ephan in a governess cart pulled by a short, weak pony. Grandpa might have been driving a bison, so tightly he held the reins, so ferociously cracked the long whip, so blasphemously shouted warning to boys who played in the road, so stoutly stood with his gaitered legs apart and cursed the demon strength and wilfulness of his tottering pony.
‘Look out, boy!’ he cried when we came to each corner, and pulled and tugged and jerked and sweated and waved his whip like a rubber sword. And when the pony had crept miserably round each corner, grandpa turned to me with a sighing smile: ‘We weathered that one, boy.’
When we came to Llanstephan village at the top of the hill, he left the cart by the ‘Edwinsford Arms’ and patted the pony’s muzzle and gave it sugar, saying: ‘You’re a weak little pony, Jim, to pull big men like us.’
He had strong beer and I had lemonade, and he paid Mrs. Edwinsford with a sovereign out of the tinkling bag; she inquired after his health, and he said that Llangadock was better for the tubes. We went to look at the churchyard and the sea, and sat in the wood called the Sticks, and stood on the concert platform in the middle of the wood where visitors sang on midsummer nights and, year by year, the innocent of the village was elected mayor. Grandpa paused at the churchyard and pointed over the iron gate at the angelic headstones and the poor wooden crosses. ‘There’s no sense in lying there,’ he said.
We journeyed back furiously: Jim was a bison again.
I woke late on my last morning, out of dreams where the Llanstephan sea carried bright sailing-boats as long as liners; and heavenly choirs in the Sticks, dressed in bards’ robes and brass-buttoned waistcoats, sang in a strange Welsh to the departing sailors. Grandpa was not at breakfast; he rose early. I walked in the fields with a new sling, and shot at the Towy gulls and the rooks in the parsonage trees. A warm wind blew from the summer points of the weather; a morning mist climbed from the ground and floated among the trees and hid the noisy birds; in the mist and the wind my pebbles flew lightly up like hailstones in a world on its head. The morning passed without a bird falling.
I broke my sling and returned for the midday meal through the parson’s orchard. Once, grandpa told me, the parson had bought three ducks at Carmarthen Fair and made a pond for them in the centre of the garden, but they waddled to the gutter under the crumbling doorsteps of the house, and swam and quacked there. When I reached the end of the orchard path, I looked through a hole in the hedge and saw that the parson had made a tunnel through the rockery that was between the gutter and the pond and had set up a notice in plain writing: ‘This way to the pond.’