by Dylan Thomas
The snowball had turned into a short snow man with a lop-sided, dirty head and a face full of twigs, wearing a boy’s cap and smoking a pencil.
‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ said Arnold. ‘I love you both.’
Edith screamed. The boy jumped forward and the snow man with a broken back collapsed.
‘Don’t tell your lies, how can you love two of us?’ Edith cried, shaking her handbag at Arnold. The bag snapped open, and a bundle of letters fell on the snow.
‘Don’t you dare pick up those letters,’ Patricia said.
Arnold had not moved. The boy was searching for his pencil in the snow man’s ruins.
‘You make your choice, Arnold Matthews, here and now.’
‘Her or me,’ said Edith.
Patricia turned her back to him. Edith, with her bag in her hand hanging open, stood still. The sweeping snow turned up the top page of a letter.
‘You two,’ he said, ‘you go off the handle. Sit down and talk. Don’t cry like that, Edith. Hundreds of men love more than one woman, you’re always reading about it. Give us a chance, Edith, there’s a girl.’
Patricia looked at the hearts and arrows and old names. Edith saw the letters curl.
‘It’s you, Patricia,’ said Arnold.
Still Patricia stood turned away from him. Edith opened her mouth to cry, and he put a finger to his lips. He made the shape of a whisper, too soft for Patricia to hear. The boy watched him soothing and promising Edith, but she screamed again and ran out of the shelter and down the path, her handbag beating against her side.
‘Patricia,’ he said, ‘turn round to me. I had to say it. It’s you, Patricia.’
The boy bent down over the snow man and found his pencil driven through its head. When he stood up he saw Patricia and Arnold arm in arm.
Snow dripped through his pockets, snow melted in his shoes, snow trickled down his collar into his vest. ‘Look at you now,’ said Patricia, rushing to him and holding him by the hands, ‘you’re wringing wet.’
‘Only a bit of snow,’ said Arnold, suddenly alone in the shelter.
‘A bit of snow indeed, he’s as cold as ice and his feet are like sponges. Come on home at once!’
The three of them climbed the path to the upper walk, and Patricia’s footprints were large as a horse’s in the thickening snow.
‘Look, you can see our house, it’s got a white roof!’
‘We’ll be there, ducky, soon.’
‘I’d rather stay out and make a snow man like Arnold Matthews.’
‘Hush! hush! your mother’ll be waiting. You must come home.’
‘No she won’t. She gone on a randy with Mr. Robert. Randy, sandy, bandy!’
‘You know very well she’s shopping with Mrs. Partridge, you mustn’t tell wicked lies.’
‘Well Arnold Matthews told lies. He said he loved you better than Edith, and he whispered behind your back to her.’
‘I swear I didn’t, Patricia, I don’t love Edith at all!’
Patricia stopped walking. ‘You don’t love Edith?’
‘No, I’ve told you, it’s you. I don’t love her at all,’ he said. ‘Oh! my God, what a day! Don’t you believe me? It’s you Patricia. Edith isn’t anything. I just used to meet her; I’m always in the park.’
‘But you told her you loved her.’
The boy stood bewildered between them. Why was Patricia so angry and serious? Her face was flushed and her eyes shone. Her chest moved up and down. He saw the long black hairs on her leg through a tear in her stockings. Her leg is as big as my middle, he thought. I’m cold; I want tea; I’ve got snow in my fly.
Arnold backed slowly down the path. ‘I had to tell her that or she wouldn’t have gone away. I had to, Patricia. You saw what she was like. I hate her. Cross my heart!’
‘Bang! bang!’ cried the boy.
Patricia was smacking Arnold, tugging at his muffler, knocking him with her elbows. She pummelled him down the path, and shouted at the top of her voice: ‘I’ll teach you to lie to Edith! You pig! you black! I’ll teach you to break her heart!’
He shielded his face from her blows as he staggered back. ‘Patricia, Patricia, don’t hit me! There’s people!’
As Arnold fell, two women with umbrellas up peered through the whirling snow from behind a bush.
Patricia stood over him. ‘You lied to her and you’d lie to me,’ she said. ‘Get up, Arnold Matthews!’
He rose and set his muffler straight and wiped his eyes with the red handkerchief, and raised his cap and walked toward the shelter.
‘And as for you,’ Patricia said, turning to the watching women, ‘you should be ashamed of yourselves! Two old women playing about in the snow.’
They dodged behind the bush.
Patricia and the boy climbed, hand in hand, back to the upper walk.
‘I’ve left my cap by the snow man,’ he remembered. ‘It’s my cap with the Tottenham colours.’
‘Run back quickly,’ she said, ‘you can’t get any wetter than you are.’
He found his cap half hidden under snow. In a corner of the shelter, Arnold sat reading the letters that Edith had dropped, turning the wet pages slowly. He did not see the boy, and the boy, behind a pillar, did not interrupt him. Arnold read every letter carefully.
‘You’ve been a long time finding your cap,’ Patricia said. ‘Did you see the young man?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘he was gone.’
At home, in the warm living-room, Patricia made him change his clothes again. He held his hands in front of the fire, and soon they began to hurt.
‘My hands are on fire,’ he told her, ‘and my toes, and my face.’
After she had comforted him, she said: ‘There, that’s better. The hurting’s gone. You won’t call the king your uncle in a minute.’ She was bustling about the room. ‘Now we’ve all had a good cry to-day.’
The Fight
I was standing at the end of the lower playground and annoying Mr. Samuels, who lived in the house just below the high railings. Mr. Samuels complained once a week that boys from the school threw apples and stones and balls through his bedroom window. He sat in a deck chair in a small square of trim garden and tried to read the newspaper. I was only a few yards from him. I was staring him out. He pretended not to notice me, but I knew he knew I was standing there rudely and quietly. Every now and then he peeped at me from behind his newspaper, saw me still and serious and alone, with my eyes on his. As soon as he lost his temper I was going to go home. Already I was late for dinner. I had almost beaten him, the newspaper was trembling, he was breathing heavily, when a strange boy, whom I had not heard approach, pushed me down the bank.
I threw a stone at his face. He took off his spectacles, put them in his coat pocket, took off his coat, hung it neatly on the railings, and attacked. Turning round as we wrestled on the top of the bank, I saw that Mr. Samuels had folded his newspaper on the deck chair and was standing up to watch us. It was a mistake to turn round. The strange boy rabbit-punched me twice. Mr. Samuels hopped with excitement as I fell against the railings. I was down in the dust, hot and scratched and biting, then up and dancing, and I butted the boy in the belly and we tumbled in a heap. I saw through a closing eye that his nose was bleeding. I hit his nose. He tore at my collar and spun me round by the hair.
‘Come on! come on!’ I heard Mr. Samuels cry.
We both turned towards him. He was shaking his fists and dodging about in the garden. He stopped then, and coughed, and set his panama straight, and avoided our eyes, and turned his back and walked slowly to the deck chair.
We both threw gravel at him.
‘I’ll give him “Come on!” ‘, the boy said, as we ran along the playground away from the shouts of Mr. Samuels and down the steps on to the hill.
We walked home together. I admired his bloody nose. He said that my eye was like a poached egg, only black.
‘I’ve never seen such a lot of blood,’ I said.
He said I h
ad the best black eye in Wales, perhaps it was the best black eye in Europe; he bet Tunney never had a black eye like that.
‘And there’s blood all over your shirt.’
‘Sometimes I bleed in dollops,’ he said.
On Walter’s Road we passed a group of high school girls, and I cocked my cap and hoped my eye was as big as a bluebag, and he walked with his coat flung open to show the bloodstains.
I was a hooligan all during dinner, and a bully, and as bad as a boy from the Sandbanks, and I should have more respect, and I sat silently, like Tunney, over the sago pudding. That afternoon I went to school with an eye-shade on. If I had had a black silk sling I would have been as gay and desperate as the wounded captain in the book that my sister used to read, and that I read under the bedclothes at night, secretly with a flash-lamp.
On the road, a boy from an inferior school, where the parents did not have to pay anything, called me ‘One eye!’ in a harsh, adult voice. I took no notice, but walked along whistling, my good eye on the summer clouds sailing, beyond insult, above Terrace Road.
The mathematics master said: ‘I see that Mr. Thomas at the back of the class has been straining his eyesight. But it isn’t over his homework, is it, gentlemen?’
Gilbert Rees, next to me, laughed loudest.
‘I’ll break your leg after school!’ I said.
He’d hobble, howling, up to the head master’s study. A deep hush in the school. A message on a plate brought by the porter. ‘The head master’s compliments, sir, and will you come at once?’ ‘How did you happen to break this boy’s leg?’ ‘Oh! damn and bottom, the agony!’ cried Gilbert Rees. ‘Just a little twist,’ I would say. ‘I don’t know my own strength. I apologize. But there’s nothing to worry about. Let me set the leg, sir.’ A rapid manipulation, the click of a bone. ‘Doctor Thomas, sir, at your service.’ Mrs. Rees was on her knees. ‘How can I thank you?’ ‘It’s nothing at all, dear lady. Wash his ears every morning. Throw away his rulers. Pour his red and green inks down the sink.’
In Mr. Trotter’s drawing class we drew naked girls inaccurately on sheets of paper under our drawings of a vase and passed them along under the desks. Some of the drawings were detailed strangely, others were tailed off like mermaids. Gilbert Rees drew the vase only.
‘Sleep with your wife, sir?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Lend me a knife, sir?’
‘What would you do if you had a million pounds?’
‘I’d buy a Bugatti and a Rolls and a Bentley and I’d go two hundred miles an hour on Pendine sands.’
‘I’d buy a harem and keep the girls in the gym.’
‘I’d buy a house like Mrs. Cotmore-Richard’s, twice as big as hers, and a cricket field and a football field and a proper garage with mechanics and a lift.’
‘And a lavatory as big as, as big as the Melba pavilion, with plush seats and a golden chains and …’
‘And I’d smoke cigarettes with real gold tips, better than Morris’s Blue Book.’
‘I’d buy all the railway trains, and only 4A could travel in them.’
‘And not Gilbert Rees either.’
‘What’s the longest you’ve been?’
‘I went to Edinburgh.’
‘My father went to Salonika in the War.’
‘Where’s that, Cyril?’
‘Cyril, tell us about Mrs. Pussie Edwards in Hanover Street.’
‘Well, my brother says he can do anything.’
I drew a wild guess below the waist, and wrote Pussie Edwards in small letters at the foot of the page.
‘Cave!’
‘Hide your drawings.’
‘I bet you a greyhound can go faster than a horse.’
Everybody liked the drawing class, except Mr. Trotter.
In the evening, before calling on my new friend, I sat in my bedroom by the boiler and read through my exercise-books full of poems. There were Danger Don’ts on the backs. On my bedroom walls were pictures of Shakespeare, Walter de la Mare torn from my father’s Christmas Bookman, Robert Browning, Stacy Aumonier, Rupert Brooke, a bearded man who I had discovered was Whittier, Watts’s ‘Hope,’ and a Sunday school certificate I was ashamed to want to pull down. A poem I had had printed in the ‘Wales Day by Day’ column of the Western Mail was pasted on the mirror to make me blush, but the shame of the poem had died. Across the poem I had written, with a stolen quill and in flourishes: ‘Homer Nods.’ I was always waiting for the opportunity to bring someone into my bedroom—‘Come into my den; excuse the untidiness; take a chair. No! not that one, it’s broken!’—and force him to see the poem accidentally. ‘I put it there to make me blush.’ But nobody ever came in except my mother.
Walking to his house in the early dusk through solid, deserted professional avenues lined with trees, I recited pieces of my poems and heard my voice, like a stranger’s voice in Park Drive accompanied by the tap-tapping of nailed boots, rise very thinly up through the respectable autumn evening.
‘My mind is fashioned
In the ways of intertissue;
Veiled and passioned
Are the thoughts that issue
From its well of furtive lust
Raptured by the devil’s dust.’
If I looked through a window on to the road, I would see a scarlet-capped boy with big boots striding down the middle, and would wonder who it could be. If I were a young girl watching, my face like Mona Lisa’s, my coal-black hair coiled in earphones, I’d see beneath the ‘Boys’ Department’ suit a manly body with hair and sun tan, and call him and ask, ‘Will you have tea or cocktails?’ and hear his voice reciting the Grass Blade’s Psalm in the half-dark of the heavily curtained and coloured drawing-room hung about with famous reproductions and glowing with books and wine bottles:
‘The frost has lain,
Frost that is dark with flowered slain,
Fragilely strewn
With patches of illuminated moon,
About my lonely head in flagged unlovely red,
‘The frost has spake,
Frost secretive and thrilled in silent flake,
With unseen lips of blue
Glass in the glaze stars threw,
Only to my ears, has spake in visionary tears.
‘The frost has known,
From scattered conclave by the few winds blown,
That the lone genius in my roots,
Bare down there in a jungle of fruits,
Has planted a green year, for praise in the heart
of my upgrowing days.
‘The frost has filled
My heart with longing that the night’s sleeve
spilled,
Frost of celestial vapour fraught,
Frost that the columns of unfallen snow have
sought,
With desire for the fields of space hovering about
my single place.’
‘Look! there’s a strange boy, walking alone like a prince.’
‘No, no, like a wolf! Look at his long stride!’ Sketty church was shaking its bells for me.
‘When I am strewn low
And all my ashes are
Dust in a dumb provoking show
Of minatory star…’
I recited. A young man and woman, arm in arm, suddenly appeared from a black lane between houses. I changed my recitation into a tune and hummed past them. They would be tittering together now, with their horrid bodies close. Cissy, moony, long hair. I whistled hard and loud, kicked a tradesmen’s entrance, and glanced back over my shoulder. The couple were gone. Here’s a kick at ‘The Elms.’ ‘Where are the bleedy elms, mister?’ Here’s a handful of gravel, Mrs. ‘The Croft’, right at your window. One night I would paint ‘Bum’ all over the front gate of ‘Kia-ora.’
A woman stood on ‘Lyndhurst’ steps with a hissing pom, and, stuffing my cap in my pocket, I was off down the road; and there was Dan’s house, ‘Warmley,’ with music coming loudly out of it.
He was a
composer and a poet too; he had written seven historical novels before he was twelve, and he played the piano and the violin; his mother made wool pictures, his brother was a clerk at the docks and syncopated, his aunt kept a preparatory school on the first floor, and his father wrote music for the organ. All this he had told me as we walked home bleeding, strutting by the gym-frocks waving to boys in the trams.
My new friend’s mother answered the door with a ball of wool in her hand. Dan, in the upstairs drawing-room, heard my arrival and played the piano faster.
‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said when I found him. He finished on a grand chord, stretching all his fingers.
The room was splendidly untidy, full of wool and paper and open cupboards stacked with things you could never find; all the expensive furniture had been kicked; a waistcoat hung on the chandelier. I thought I could live for ever in that room, writing and fighting and spilling ink, having my friends for picnics there after midnight with Walker’s rum-and-butter and charlottes russes from Eynon’s, and Cydrax and Vino.
He showed me his books and his seven novels. All the novels were about battles, sieges, and kings. ‘Just early stuff,’ he said.
He let me take out his violin and make a cat noise.
We sat on a sofa in the window and talked as though we had always known each other. Would the ‘Swans’ beat the ‘Spurs’? When could girls have babies? Was Arnott’s average last year better than Clay’s?
‘That’s my father outside there on the road,’ he said, ‘the tall one waving his arms.’
Two men were talking on the tram lines. Mr. Jenkyn looked as if he were trying to swim down Eversley Road, he breast-stroked the air and beat on the ground with his feet, and then he limped and raised one shoulder higher than the other.
‘Perhaps he’s describing a fight,’ I said.
‘Or telling Mr. Morris a story about cripples,’ said Dan. ‘Can you play the piano?’
‘I can do chords, but not tunes,’ I said.
We played a duet with crossed hands.
‘Now who’s that sonata by?’