by Dylan Thomas
We made a Dr. Percy, who was the greatest composer for four hands in the world, and I was Paul America, the pianist, and Dan was Winter Vaux.
I read him an exercise-book full of poems. He listened wisely, like a boy aged a hundred, his head on one side and his spectacles shaking on his swollen nose. ‘This is called Warp,’ I said:
‘Like suns red from running tears,
Five suns in the glass,
Together, separate yet, yet separately round,
Red perhaps, but the glass is as pale as grass,
Glide, without sound.
In unity, five tears lid-awake, suns yet, but salt,
Five inscrutable spears in the head,
Each sun but an agony,
Twist perhaps, pain bled of hate,
Five into one, the one made of five into one, early
Suns distorted to late.
All of them now, madly and desolate,
Spun with the cloth of the five, run
Widely and foaming, wildly and desolate,
Shoot through and dive. One of the five is the sun.’
The noise of the trams past the house clattered away as far as the sea or farther, into the dredgered bay. Nobody had ever listened like that before. The school had vanished, leaving on Mount Pleasant hill a deep hole that smelt of cloakrooms and locker mice, and ‘Warmley’ shone in the dark of a town I did not know. In the still room, that had never been strange to me, sitting in heaps of coloured wool, swollen-nosed and one-eyed, we acknowledged our gifts. The future spread out beyond the window, over Singleton Park crowded with lovers messing about, and into smoky London paved with poems.
Mrs. Jenkyn peered round the door and switched the light on. ‘There, that’s more homely,’ she said. ‘You aren’t cats.’
The future went out with the light, and we played a thumping piece by Dr. Percy—‘Have you ever heard anything so beautiful? Louder, louder, America!’ said Dan. ‘Leave a bit of bass for me,’ I said—until the next-door wall was rapped.
‘That’s the Careys. Mr. Carey’s a Cape Horner,’ Dan said.
We played him one harsh, whaling piece before Mrs. Jenkyn, with wool and needles, ran upstairs.
When she had gone, Dan said: ‘Why is a man always ashamed of his mother?’
‘Perhaps he isn’t when he is older,’ I said, but I doubted it. The week before I was walking down High Street with three boys after school, and I saw my mother with a Mrs. Partridge outside the Kardomah. I knew she would stop me in front of the others and say, ‘Now you be home early for tea,’ and I wanted High Street to open and suck me down. I loved her and disowned her. ‘Let’s cross over,’ I said, ‘there’s some sailor’s boots in Griffith’s window.’ But there was only a dummy with a golf suit on, and a roll of tweed.
‘Supper isn’t for half an hour yet. What shall we do?’
‘Let’s see who can hold up that chair the longest,’ I said.
‘No, let’s edit a paper: you do the literature, I’ll do the music.’
‘What shall we call it, then?’
He wrote, ‘The——, edited by D. Jenkyn and D. Thomas,’ on the back of a hat-box from under the sofa. The rhythm was better with D. Thomas and D. Jenkyn, but it was his house.
‘What about The Maestersingers?’
‘No, that’s too musical,’ I said.
‘The Warmley Magazine?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I live in “Glanrhyd.”’
After the hat-box was covered, we wrote.
‘The Thunderer, edited by D. in chalk on a piece of cardboard and pinned it on the wall.
‘Would you like to see our maid’s bedroom?’ asked Dan. We whispered up to the attic.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Hilda.’
‘Is she young?’
‘No, she’s twenty or thirty.’
Her bed was untidy. ‘My mother says you can always smell a maid.’ We smelled the sheets. ‘I can’t smell anything.’
In her brass-bound box was a framed photograph of a young man wearing plus-fours.
‘That’s her boy.’
‘Let’s give him a moustache.’
Somebody moved downstairs, a voice called, ‘Supper now!’ and we hurried out, leaving the box open. ‘One night we’ll hide under her bed,’ Dan said as we opened the dining-room door.
Mr. Jenkyn, Mrs. Jenkyn, Dan’s aunt, and a Reverend Bevan and Mrs. Bevan were seated at the table.
Mr. Bevan said grace. When he stood-up, it was just as though he were still sitting down, he was so short. ‘Bless our repast this evening,’ he said, as though he didn’t like the food at all. But once ‘Amen’ was over, he went at the cold meat like a dog.
Mrs. Bevan didn’t look all there. She stared at the table-cloth and made hesitant movements with her knife and fork. She appeared to be wondering which to cut up first, the meat or the cloth.
Dan and I stared at her with delight; he kicked me under the table and I spilt the salt. In the commotion I managed to put some vinegar on his bread.
Mrs. Jenkyn said, while everyone except Mr. Bevan was watching Mrs. Bevan moving her knife slowly along the edge of her plate: ‘I do hope you like cold lamb.’
Mrs. Bevan smiled at her, assured, and began to eat. She was grey-haired and grey-faced. Perhaps she was grey all over. I tried to undress her, but my mind grew frightened when it came to her short flannel petticoat and navy bloomers to the knees. I couldn’t even dare unbutton her tall boots to see how grey her legs were. She looked up from her plate and gave me a wicked smile.
Blushing, I turned to answer Mr. Jenkyn, who was asking me how old I was. I told him, but added one year. Why did I lie then? I wondered. If I lost my cap and found it in my bedroom, and my mother asked me where I had found it, I would say, ‘In the attic,’ or ‘Under the hall stand.’ It was exciting to have to keep wary all the time in case I contradicted myself, to make up the story of a film I pretended to have seen and put Jack Holt in Richard Dix’s place.
‘Fifteen and three-quarters,’ said Mr. Jenkyn, ‘that’s a very exact age. I see we have a mathematician with us. Now see if he can do this little sum.’
He finished his supper and laid out matches on the plate.
‘That’s an old one, Dad,’ Dan said.
‘Oh, I’d like to see it very much,’ I said in my best voice. I wanted to come to the house again. This was better than home, and there was a woman off her head, too.
When I failed to place the matches rightly, Mr. Jenkyn showed me how it was done, and, still not understanding, I thanked him and asked him for another one. It was almost as good being a hypocrite as being a liar; it made you warm and shameful.
‘What were you talking to Mr. Morris about in the street, Dad?’ asked Dan. ‘We saw you from upstairs.’
‘I was telling him how the Swansea and District Male Voice did the Messiah, that’s all. Why do you ask?’
Mr. Bevan couldn’t eat any more, he was full. For the first time since supper began, he looked round the table. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. ‘How are studies progressing, Daniel?’
‘Listen to Mr. Bevan, Dan, he’s asking you a question.’
‘Oh, so so.’
‘So so?’
‘I mean they’re going very well, thank you, Mr. Bevan.’
‘Young people should attempt to say what they mean.’
Mrs. Bevan giggled, and asked for more meat. ‘More meat,’ she said.
‘And you, young man, have you a mathematical bent?’
‘No, sir,’ I said, ‘I like English.’
‘He’s a poet,’ said Dan, and looked uncomfortable.
‘A brother poet,’ Mr. Bevan corrected, showing his teeth.
‘Mr. Bevan has published books,’ said Mr. Jenkyn. ‘Proserpine, Psyche——’
‘Orpheus,’ said Mr. Bevan sharply.
‘And Orpheus. You must show Mr. Bevan some of your verses.’
‘I haven’t got anything with me, Mr. Jenkyn.’
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‘A poet,’ said Mr. Bevan, ‘should carry his verses in his head.’
‘I remember them all right,’ I said.
‘Recite me your latest one; I’m always very interested.’
‘What a gathering,’ Mrs. Jenkyn said, ‘poets, musicians, preachers. We only want a painter now, don’t we?’
‘I don’t think you’ll like the very latest one,’ I said.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mr. Bevan, smiling, ‘I am the best judge of that.’
‘Frivolous is my hate,’ I said, wanting to die, watching Mr. Bevan’s teeth.
‘Singed with bestial remorse
Of unfulfilment of desired force,
And lust of tearing late;
‘Now could I raise
Her dead, dark body to my own
And hear the joyous rustle of her bone
And in her eyes see deathly blaze;
‘Now could I wake
To passion after death, and taste
The rapture of her hating, tear the waste
Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break.’
Dan kicked my shins in the silence before Mr. Bevan said ‘The influence is obvious, of course. “Break, break, break, on thy cold, grey stones, O sea.”’
‘Hubert knows Tennyson backwards,’ said Mrs. Bevan, ‘backwards.’
‘Can we go upstairs now?’ Dan asked.
‘No annoying Mr. Carey then.’
And we shut the door softly behind us and ran upstairs with our hands over our mouths.
‘Damn! damn! damn!’ said Dan. ‘Did you see the reverend’s face?’
We imitated him up and down the room, and had a short fight on the carpet. Dan’s nose began to bleed again. ‘That’s nothing, it’ll stop in a minute. I can bleed when I like.’
‘Tell me about Mrs. Bevan. Is she mad?’
‘She’s terribly mad, she doesn’t know who she is. She tried to throw herself out of the window but he didn’t take any notice, so she came up to our house and told mother all about it.’
Mrs. Bevan knocked and walked in. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting you.’
‘No, of course not, Mrs. Bevan.’
‘I wanted a little change of air,’ she said. She sat down in the wool on the sofa by the window.
‘Isn’t it a close night?’ said Dan. ‘Would you like the window open?’
She looked at the window.
‘I can easily open it for you,’ Dan said, and winked at me.
‘Let me open it for you, Mrs. Bevan,’ I said.
‘It’s good to have the window open.’
‘And this is a nice high window too.’
‘Plenty of air from the sea.’
‘Let it be, dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll just sit here and wait for my husband.’
She played with the balls of wool, picked up a needle and tapped it gently on the palm of her hand.
‘Is Mr. Bevan going to be long?’
‘I’ll just sit and wait for my husband,’ she said.
We talked to her some more about windows, but she only smiled and undid the wool, and once she put the blunt end of the long needle in her ear. Soon we grew tired of watching her, and Dan played the piano—‘My twentieth sonata,’ he said, ‘this one is Homage to Beethoven’—and at half-past nine I had to go home.
I said good night to Mrs. Bevan, who waved the needle and bowed sitting down, and Mr. Bevan downstairs gave me his cold hand to shake, and Mr. and Mrs. Jenkyn told me to come again, and the quiet aunt gave me a Mars bar.
‘I’ll send you a bit of the way,’ said Dan.
Outside, on the pavement, in the warm night, we looked up at the lighted drawing-room window. It was the only light in the road.
‘Look! there she is!’
Mrs. Bevan’s face was pressed against the glass, her hook nose flattened, her lips pressed tight, and we ran all the way down Eversley Road in case she jumped.
At the corner, Dan said: ‘I must leave you now, I’ve got to finish a string trio to-night.’
‘I’m working on a long poem,’ I said, ‘about the princes of Wales and the wizards and everybody.’
We both went home to bed.
Extraordinary Little Cough
One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August, some years before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom we called Little Cough, Sidney Evans, Dan Davies, and I sat on the roof of a lorry travelling to the end of the Peninsula. It was a tall, six-wheeled lorry, from which we could spit on the roofs of the passing cars and throw our apple stumps at women on the pavement. One stump caught a man on a bicycle in the middle of the back, he swerved across the road, for a moment we sat quiet and George Hooping’s face grew pale. And if the lorry runs him over, I thought calmly as the man on the bicycle swayed towards the hedge, he’ll get killed and I’ll be sick on my trousers and perhaps on Sidney’s too, and we’ll be arrested and hanged, except George Hooping who didn’t have an apple.
But the lorry swept past; behind us, the bicycle drove into the hedge, the man stood up and waved his fist, and I waved my cap back at him.
‘You shouldn’t have waved your cap,’ said Sidney Evans, ‘he’ll know what school we’re in.’ He was clever, dark, and careful, and had a purse and a wallet.
‘We’re not in school now.’
‘Nobody can expel me,’ said Dan Davies. He was leaving next term to serve in his father’s fruit shop for a salary.
We all wore haversacks, except George Hooping whose mother had given him a brown-paper parcel that kept coming undone, and carried a suitcase each. I had placed a coat over my suitcase because the initials on it were ‘N. T.’ and everybody would know that it belonged to my sister. Inside the lorry were two tents, a box of food, a packing-case of kettles and saucepans and knives and forks, an oil lamp, a primus stove, ground sheets and blankets, a gramophone with three records, and a table-cloth from George Hooping’s mother.
We were going to camp for a fortnight in Rhossilli, in a field above the sweeping five-mile beach. Sidney and Dan had stayed there last year, coming back brown and swearing, full of stories of campers’ dances round the fires at midnight, and elderly girls from the training college who sun-bathed naked on ledges of rocks surrounded by laughing boys, and singing in bed that lasted until dawn. But George had never left home for more than a night; and then, he told me, one half-holiday when it was raining and there was nothing to do but stay in the wash-house racing his guineapigs giddily along the benches, it was only to stay in St. Thomas, three miles from his house, with an aunt who could see through the walls and who knew what a Mrs. Hoskin was doing in the kitchen.
‘How much further?’ asked George Hooping, clinging to his split parcel, trying in secret to push back socks and suspenders, enviously watching the solid green fields skim by as though the roof were a raft on an ocean with a motor in it. Anything upset his stomach, even liquorice and sherbet, but I alone knew that he wore long combinations in the summer with his name stitched in red on them.
‘Miles and miles,’ Dan said.
‘Thousands of miles,’ I said. ‘It’s Rhossilli, U.S.A. We’re going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the wind.’
‘And we have to tie the rock on to a tree.’
‘Cough can use his suspenders,’ Sidney said.
The lorry roared round a corner—‘Upsy-daisy! Did you feel it then, Cough? It was on one wheel’—and below us, beyond fields, and farms, the sea, with a steamer puffing on its far edge, shimmered.
‘Do you see the sea down there, it’s shimmering, Dan,’ I said.
George Hooping pretended to forget the lurch of the slippery roof and, from that height, the frightening smallness of the sea. Gripping the rail of the roof, he said: ‘My father saw a killer whale.’ The conviction in his voice died quickly as he began. He beat against the wind with his cracked, treble voice, trying to make us believe. I knew he wanted to find a boast so big it would make our hair stand up and stop the wild lorry.
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��Your father’s a herbalist.’ But the smoke on the horizon was the white, curling fountain the whale blew through his nose, and its black nose was the bow of the poking ship.
‘Where did he keep it, Cough, in the wash-house?’
‘He saw it in Madagascar. It had tusks as long as from here to, from here to…’
‘From here to Madagascar.’
All at once the threat of a steep hill disturbed him. No longer bothered about the adventures of his father, a small, dusty, skullcapped and alpaca-coated man standing and mumbling all day in a shop full of herbs and curtained holes in the wall, where old men with backache and young girls in trouble waited for consultations in the half-dark, he stared at the hill swooping up and clung to Dan and me.
‘She’s doing fifty!’
‘The brakes have gone, Cough!’
He twisted away from us, caught hard with both hands on the rail, pulled and trembled, pressed on a case behind him with his foot, and steered the lorry to safety round a stone-walled corner and up a gentler hill to a gate of a battered farm-house.
Leading down from the gate, there was a lane to the first beach. It was high tide, and we heard the sea dashing. Four boys on a roof—one tall, dark, regular-featured, precise of speech, in a good suit, a boy of the world; one squat, ungainly, red-haired, his red wrists fighting out of short, frayed sleeves; one heavily spectacled, small-paunched, with indoor shoulders and feet in always unlaced boots wanting to go different ways; one small, thin, indecisively active, quick to get dirty, curly—saw their field in front of them, a fortnight’s new home that had thick, pricking hedges for walls, the sea for a front garden, a green gutter for a lavatory, and a wind-struck tree in the very middle.
I helped Dan unload the lorry while Sidney tipped the driver and George struggled with the farm-yard gate and looked at the ducks inside. The lorry drove away.
‘Let’s build our tents by the tree in the middle,’ said George.
‘Pitch!’ Sidney said, unlatching the gate for him.
We pitched our tents in a corner, out of the wind.
‘One of us must light the primus,’ Sidney said, and, after George had burned his hand, we sat in a circle outside the sleeping-tent talking about motor-cars, content to be in the country, lazily easy in each other’s company, thinking to ourselves as we talked, knowing always that the sea dashed on the rocks not far below us and rolled out into the world, and that to-morrow we would bathe and throw a ball on the sands and stone a bottle on a rock and perhaps meet three girls. The oldest would be for Sidney, the plainest for Dan, and the youngest for me. George broke his spectacles when he spoke to girls; he had to walk off, blind as a bat, and the next morning he would say: ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you, but I remembered a message.’