by Dylan Thomas
It was past five o’clock. My father and mother would have finished tea; the plates with famous castles on them were cleared from the table; father with a newspaper, mother with socks, were far away in the blue haze to the left, up a hill, in a villa, hearing from the park the faint cries of children drift over the public tennis court, and wondering where I was and what I was doing. I was alone with my friends in a field, with a blade of grass in my mouth saying, ‘Dempsey would hit him cold,’ and thinking of the great whale that George’s father never saw thrashing on the top of the sea, or plunging underneath, like a mountain.
‘Bet you I can beat you to the end of the field.’
Dan and I raced among the cowpads, George thumping at our heels.
‘Let’s go down to the beach.’
Sidney led the way, running straight as a soldier in his khaki shorts, over a stile, down fields to another, into a wooded valley, up through heather on to a clearing near the edge of the cliff, where two broad boys were wrestling outside a tent. I saw one bite the other in the leg, they both struck expertly and savagely at the face, one struggled clear, and, with a leap, the other had him face to the ground. They were Brazell and Skully.
‘Hallo, Brazell and Skully!’ said Dan.
Skully had Brazell’s arm in a policeman’s grip; he gave it two quick twists and stood up, smiling.
‘Hallo, boys! Hallo, Little Cough! How’s your father?’
‘He’s very well, thank you.’
Brazell, on the grass, felt for broken bones. ‘Hallo, boys! How are your fathers?’
They were the worst and biggest boys in school. Every day for a term they caught me before class began and wedged me in the waste-paper basket and then put the basket on the master’s desk. Sometimes I could get out and sometimes not. Brazell was lean, Skully was fat.
‘We’re camping in Button’s field,’ said Sidney.
‘We’re taking a rest cure here,’ said Brazell. ‘And how is Little Cough these days? Father given him a pill?’
We wanted to run down to the beach, Dan and Sidney and George and I, to be alone together, to walk and shout by the sea in the country, throw stones at the waves, remember adventures and make more to remember.
‘We’ll come down to the beach with you,’ said Skully.
He linked arms with Brazell, and they strolled behind us, imitating George’s wayward walk and slashing the grass with switches.
Dan said hopefully: ‘Are you camping here for long, Brazell and Skully?’
‘For a whole nice fortnight, Davies and Thomas and Evans and Hooping.’
When we reached Mewslade beach and flung ourselves down, as I scooped up sand and it trickled, grain by grain through my fingers, as George peered at the sea through his double lenses and Sidney and Dan heaped sand over his legs, Brazell and Skully sat behind us like two warders.
‘We thought of going to Nice for a fortnight,’ said Brazell—he rhymed it with ice, dug Skully in the ribs—‘but the air’s nicer here for the complexion.’
‘It’s as good as a herb,’ said Skully.
They shared an enormous joke, cuffing and biting and wrestling again, scattering sand in the eyes, until they fell back with laughter, and Brazell wiped the blood from his nose with a piece of picnic paper. George lay covered to the waist in sand. I watched the sea slipping out, with birds quarrelling over it, and the sun beginning to go down patiently.
‘Look at Little Cough,’ said Brazell. ‘Isn’t he extraordinary? He’s growing out of the sand. Little Cough hasn’t got any legs.’
‘Poor Little Cough,’ said Skully, ‘he’s the most extraordinary boy in the world.’
‘Extraordinary Little Cough,’ they said together, ‘extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary.’ They made a song out of it, and both conducted with their switches.
‘He can’t swim.’
‘He can’t run.’
‘He can’t learn.’
‘He can’t bowl.’
‘He can’t bat.’
‘And I bet he can’t make water.’
George kicked the sand from his legs. ‘Yes, I can!’
‘Can you swim?’
‘Can you run?’
‘Can you bowl?’
‘Leave him alone,’ Dan said.
They shuffled nearer to us. The sea was racing out now. Brazell said in a serious voice, wagging his finger: ‘Now, quite truthfully, Cough, aren’t you extraordinary? Very extraordinary? Say “Yes” or “No.”’
‘Categorically, “Yes” or “No.”’ said Skully.
‘No,’ George said. ‘I can swim and I can run and I can play cricket. I’m not frightened of anybody.’
I said: ‘He was second in the form last term.’
‘Now isn’t that extraordinary? If he can be second he can be first. But no, that’s too ordinary. Little Cough must be second.’
‘The question is answered,’ said Skully. ‘Little Cough is extraordinary.’ They began to sing again.
‘He’s a very good runner,’ Dan said.
‘Well, let him prove it. Skully and I ran the whole length of Rhossilli sands this morning, didn’t we, Skull?’
‘Every inch.’
‘Can Little Cough do it?’
‘Yes,’ said George.
‘Do it, then.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Extraordinary Little Cough can’t run,’ they sang, ‘can’t run, can’t run.’
Three girls, all fair, came down the cliff-side arm in arm, dressed in short, white trousers. Their arms and legs and throats were brown as berries; I could see when they laughed that their teeth were very white; they stepped on to the beach, and Brazell and Skully stopped singing. Sidney smoothed his hair back, rose casually, put his hands in his pockets, and walked towards the girls, who now stood close together, gold and brown, admiring the sunset with little attention, patting their scarves, turning smiles on each other. He stood in front of them, grinned, and saluted: ‘Hallo, Gwyneth! do you remember me?’
‘La-di-da!’ whispered Dan at my side, and made a mock salute to George still peering at the retreating sea.
‘Well, if this isn’t a surprise!’ said the tallest girl. With little studied movements of her hands, as though she were distributing flowers, she introduced Peggy and Jean.
Fat Peggy, I thought, too jolly for me, with hockey legs and tomboy crop, was the girl for Dan; Sidney’s Gwyneth was a distinguished piece and quite sixteen, as immaculate and unapproachable as a girl in Ben Evans’ stores; but Jean, shy and curly, with butter-coloured hair, was mine. Dan and I walked slowly to the girls.
I made up two remarks: ‘Fair’s fair, Sidney, no bigamy abroad,’ and ‘Sorry we couldn’t arrange to have the sea in when you came.’
Jean smiled, wriggling her heel in the sand, and I raised my cap.
‘Hallo!’
The cap dropped at her feet.
As I bent down, three lumps of sugar fell from my blazer pocket. ‘I’ve been feeding a horse,’ I said, and began to blush guiltily when all the girls laughed.
I could have swept the ground with my cap, kissed my hand gaily, called them señoritas, and made them smile without tolerance. Or I could have stayed at a distance, and this would have been better still, my hair blown in the wind, though there was no wind at all that evening, wrapped in mystery and staring at the sun, too aloof to speak to girls; but I knew that all the time my ears would have been burning, my stomach would have been as hollow and as full of voices as a shell. ‘Speak to them quickly, before they go away!’ a voice would have said insistently over the dramatic silence, as I stood like Valentino on the edge of the bright, invisible bull-ring of the sands. ‘Isn’t it lovely here!’ I said.
I spoke to Jean alone; and this is love, I thought, as she nodded her head and swung her curls and said: ‘It’s nicer than Porthcawl.’
Brazell and Skully were two big bullies in a nightmare; I forgot them when Jean and I walked up the cliff, and, looking back to see if
they were baiting George again or wrestling together, I saw that George had disappeared around the corner of the rocks and that they were talking at the foot of the cliff with Sidney and the two girls.
‘What’s your name?’
I told her.
‘That’s Welsh,’ she said.
‘You’ve got a beautiful name.’
‘Oh, it’s just ordinary.’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘If you want to.’
‘I want to all right! We can go and bathe in the morning. And we can try to get an eagle’s egg. Did you know that there were eagles here?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Who was that handsome boy on the beach, the tall one with dirty trousers?’
‘He’s not handsome, that’s Brazell. He never washes or combs his hair or anything. He’s a bully and he cheats.’
‘I think he’s handsome.’
We walked into Button’s field, and I showed her inside the tents and gave her one of George’s apples. ‘I’d like a cigarette,’ she said.
It was nearly dark when the others came. Brazell and Skully were with Gwyneth, one each side of her holding her arms, Sidney was with Peggy, and Dan walked, whistling, behind with his hands in his pockets.
‘There’s a pair,’ said Brazell, ‘they’ve been here all alone and they aren’t even holding hands. You want a pill,’ he said to me.
‘Build Britain’s babies,’ said Skully.
‘Go on!’ Gwyneth said. She pushed him away from her, but she was laughing, and she said nothing when he put his arm around her waist.
‘What about a bit of fire?’ said Brazell.
Jean clapped her hands like an actress. Although I knew I loved her, I didn’t like anything she said or did.
‘Who’s going to make it?’
‘He’s the best, I’m sure,’ she said, pointing at me.
Dan and I collected sticks, and by the time it was quite dark there was a fire crackling. Inside the sleeping-tent, Brazell and Jean sat close together; her golden head was on his shoulder; Skully, near them, whispered to Gwyneth; Sidney unhappily held Peggy’s hand.
‘Did you ever see such a sloppy lot?’ I said, watching Jean smile in the fiery dark.
‘Kiss me, Charley!’ said Dan.
We sat by the fire in the corner of the field. The sea, far out, was still making a noise. We heard a few nightbirds. ‘”Tu-whit! tu-whoo!” Listen! I don’t like owls,’ Dan said, ‘they scratch your eyes out!’——and tried not to listen to the soft voices in the tent. Gwyneth’s laughter floated out over the suddenly moonlit field, but Jean, with the beast, was smiling and silent in the covered warmth; I knew her little hand was in Brazel’s hand.
‘Women!’ I said.
Dan spat in the fire.
We were old and alone, sitting beyond desire in the middle of the night, when George appeared, like a ghost, in the firelight and stood there trembling until I said: ‘Where’ve you been? You’ve been gone hours. Why are you trembling like that?’
Brazell and Skully poked their heads out.
‘Hallo, Cough my boy! How’s your father? What have you been up to to-night?’
George Hooping could hardly stand. I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him, but he pushed it away.
‘I’ve been running on Rhossilli sands! I ran every bit of it! You said I couldn’t, and I did! I’ve been running and running!’
Someone inside the tent had put a record on the gramophone. It was a selection from No, No, Nanette.
‘You’ve been running all the time in the dark, Little Cough?’
‘And I bet I ran it quicker than you did, too!’ George said.
‘I bet you did,’ said Brazell.
‘Do you think we’d run five miles?’ said Skully.
Now the tune was ‘Tea for Two.’
‘Did you ever hear anything so extraordinary? I told you Cough was extraordinary. Little Cough’s been running all night.’
‘Extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary Little Cough,’ they said.
Laughing from the shelter of the tent into the darkness, they looked like a boy with two heads. And when I stared round at George again he was lying on his back fast asleep in the deep grass and his hair was touching the flames.
Just Like Little Dogs
Standing alone under a railway arch out of the wind, I was looking at the miles of sands, long and dirty in the early dark, with only a few boys on the edge of the sea and one or two hurrying couples with their mackintoshes blown around them like balloons, when two young men joined me, it seemed out of nowhere, and struck matches for their cigarettes and illuminated their faces under bright-checked caps.
One had a pleasant face; his eyebrows slanted comically towards his temples, his eyes were warm, brown, deep, and guileless, and his mouth was full and weak. The other man had a boxer’s nose and a weighted chin ginger with bristles.
We watched the boys returning from the oily sea; they shouted under the echoing arch, then their voices faded. Soon there was not a single couple in sight; the lovers had disappeared among the sandhills and were lying down there with broken tins and bottles of the summer passed, old paper blowing by them, and nobody with any sense was about. The strangers, huddled against the wall, their hands deep in their pockets, their cigarettes sparkling, stared, I thought, at the thickening of the dark over the empty sands, but their eyes may have been closed. A train raced over us, and the arch shook. Over the shore, behind the vanishing train, smoke clouds flew together, rags of wings and hollow bodies of great birds black as tunnels, and broke up lazily; cinders fell through a sieve in the air, and the sparks were put out by the wet dark before they reached the sand. The night before, little quick scarecrows had bent and picked at the track-line and a solitary dignified scavenger wandered three miles by the edge with a crumpled coal sack and a park-keeper’s steel-tipped stick. Now they were tucked up in sacks, asleep in a siding, their heads in bins, their beards in straw, in coal-trucks thinking of fires, or lying beyond pickings on Jack Stiffs slab near the pub in the Fishguard Alley, where the methylated-spirit drinkers danced into the policemen’s arms and women like lumps of clothes in a pool waited, in doorways and holes in the soaking wall, for vampires or firemen. Night was properly down on us now. The wind changed. Thin rain began. The sands themselves went out. We stood in the scooped, windy room of the arch, listening to the noises from the muffled town, a goods train shunting, a siren in the docks, the hoarse trams in the streets far behind, one bark of a dog, unplaceable sounds, iron being beaten, the distant creaking of wood, doors slamming where there were no houses, an engine coughing like a sheep on a hill.
The two young men were statues smoking, tough-capped and collarless watchers and witnesses carved out of the stone of the blowing room where they stood at my side with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and all the raining, almost winter, night before them. I cupped a match to let them see my face in a dramatic shadow, my eyes mysteriously sunk, perhaps, in a startling white face, my young looks savage in the sudden flicker of light, to make them wonder who I was as I puffed my last butt and puzzled about them. Why was the soft-faced young man, with his tame devil’s eyebrows, standing like a stone figure with a glow-worm in it? He should have a nice girl to bully him gently and take him to cry in the pictures, or kids to bounce in a kitchen in Rodney Street. There was no sense in standing silent for hours under a railway arch on a hell of a night at the end of a bad summer when girls were waiting, ready to be hot and friendly, in chip shops and shop doorways and Rabbiotti’s all-night café, when the public bar of the ‘Bay View’ at the corner had a fire and skittles and a swarthy, sensuous girl with different coloured eyes, when the billiard saloons were open, except the one in High Street you couldn’t go into without a collar and tie, when the closed parks had empty, covered bandstands and the railings were easy to climb.
A church clock somewhere struck a lot, faintly from the night on the right, but I didn’t count.
The other you
ng man, less than two feet from me, should be shouting with the boys, boasting in lanes, propping counters, prancing and clouting in the Mannesmann Hall, or whispering around a bucket in a ring corner. Why was he humped here with a moody man and myself, listening to our breathing, to the sea, the wind scattering sand through the archway, a chained dog and a foghorn and the rumble of trams a dozen streets away, watching a match strike, a boy’s fresh face spying in a shadow, the lighthouse beams, the movement of a hand to a fag, when the sprawling town in a drizzle, the pubs and the clubs and the coffee-shops, the prowlers’ streets, the arches near the promenade, were full of friends and enemies? He could be playing nap by a candle in a shed in a wood-yard.
Families sat down to supper in rows of short houses, the wireless sets were on, the daughters’ young men sat in the front rooms. In neighbouring houses they read the news off the table-cloth, and the potatoes from dinner were fried up. Cards were played in the front rooms of houses on the hills. In the houses on tops of the hills families were entertaining friends, and the blinds of the front rooms were not quite drawn. I heard the sea in a cold bit of the cheery night.
One of the strangers said suddenly, in a high, clear voice: ‘What are we all doing then?’
‘Standing under a bloody arch,’ said the other one.
‘And it’s cold,’ I said.
‘It isn’t very cosy,’ said the high voice of the young man with the pleasant face, now invisible. ‘I’ve been in better hotels than this.’
‘What about that night in the Majestic?’ said the other voice.
There was a long silence.
‘Do you often stand here?’ said the pleasant man. His voice might never have broken.