by Dylan Thomas
‘No, this is the first time here,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I stand in the Brynmill arch.’
‘Ever tried the old pier?’
‘It’s no good in the rain, is it?’
‘Underneath the pier, I mean, in the girders.’
‘No, I haven’t been there.’
‘Tom spends every Sunday under the pier,’ the pug-faced young man said bitterly. ‘I got to take him his dinner in a piece of paper.’
‘There’s another train coming,’ I said. It tore over us, the arch bellowed, the wheels screamed through our heads, we were deafened and spark-blinded and crushed under the fiery weight and we rose again, like battered black men, in the grave of the arch. No noise at all from the swallowed town. The trams had rattled themselves dumb. A pressure of the hidden sea rubbed away the smudge of the docks. Only three young men were alive.
One said: ‘It’s a sad life, without a home.’
‘Haven’t you got a home then?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, I’ve got a home all right.’
‘I got one, too.’
‘And I live near Cwmdonkin Park,’ I said.
‘That’s another place Tom sits in in the dark. He says he listens to the owls.’
‘I knew a chap once who lived in the country, near Bridgend,’ said Tom, ‘and they had a munition works there in the War and it spoiled all the birds. The chap I know says you can always tell a cuckoo from Bridgend, it goes:”Cuckbloodyoo! cuckbloodyoo!”’
‘Cuckbloodyoo!’ echoed the arch.
‘Why are you standing under the arch, then?’ asked Tom. ‘It’s warm at home. You can draw the curtains and sit by the fire, snug as a bug. Gracie’s on the wireless to-night. No shananacking in the old moonlight.’
‘I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to sit by the fire. I’ve got nothing to do when I’m in and I don’t want to go to bed. I like standing about like this with nothing to do, in the dark all by myself,’ I said.
And I did, too. I was a lonely nightwalker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tramlines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on and for the unfeeling systems in the upper air, Mars and Venus and Brazell and Skully, men in China and St. Thomas, scorning girls and ready girls, soldiers and bullies and policemen and sharp, suspicious buyers of second-hand books, bad, ragged women who’d pretend against the museum wall for a cup of tea, and perfect, unapproachable women out of the fashion magazines, seven feet high, sailing slowly in their flat, glazed creations through steel and glass and velvet. I leant against the wall of a derelict house in the residential areas or wandered in the empty rooms, stood terrified on the stairs or gazing through the smashed windows at the sea or at nothing, and the lights going out one by one in the avenues. Or I mooched in a half-built house, with the sky stuck in the roof and cats on the ladders and a wind shaking through the bare bones of the bedrooms.
‘And you can talk,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you at home?’
‘I don’t want to be home,’ said Tom.
‘I’m not particular,’ said his friend.
When a match flared, their heads rocked and spread on the wall, and shapes of winged bulls and buckets grew bigger and smaller. Tom began to tell a story. I thought of a new stranger walking on the sands past the arch and hearing all of a sudden that high voice out of a hole.
I missed the beginning of the story as I thought of the man on the sands listening in a panic or dodging, like a footballer, in and out among the jumping dark towards the lights behind the railway line, and remembered Tom’s voice in the middle of a sentence.
‘… went up to them and said it was a lovely night. It wasn’t a lovely night at all. The sands were empty. We asked them what their names were and they asked us what ours were. We were walking along by this time. Walter here was telling them about the glee party in the “Melba” and what went on in the ladies’ cloakroom. You had to drag the tenors away like ferrets.’
‘What were their names?’ I asked.
‘Doris and Norma,’ Walter said.
‘So we walked along the sands towards the dunes,’ Tom said, ‘and Walter was with Doris and I was with Norma. Norma worked in the steam laundry. We hadn’t been walking and talking for more than a few minutes when, by God, I knew I was head over heels in love with the girl, and she wasn’t the pretty one, either.’
He described her. I saw her clearly. Her plump, kind face, jolly brown eyes, warm wide mouth, thick bobbed hair, rough body, bottle legs, broad bum, grew from a few words right out of Tom’s story, and I saw her ambling solidly along the sands in a spotted frock in a showering autumn evening with fancy gloves on her hard hands, a gold bangle, with a voile handkerchief tucked in it, round her wrist, and a navy-blue handbag with” letters and outing snaps, a compact, a bus ticket, and a shilling.
‘Doris was the pretty one,’ said Tom, ‘smart and touched up and sharp as a knife. I was twenty-six years old and I’d never been in love, and there I was, gawking at Norma in the middle of Tawe sands, too frightened to put my finger on her gloves. Walter had his arm round Doris then.’
They sheltered behind a dune. The night dropped down on them quickly. Walter was a caution with Doris, hugging and larking, and Tom sat close to Norma, brave enough to hold her hand in its cold glove and tell her all his secrets. He told her his age and his job. He liked staying in in the evenings with a good book. Norma liked dances. He liked dances, too. Norma and Doris were sisters. ‘I’d never have thought that,’ Tom said, ‘you’re beautiful, I love you.’
Now the story-telling thing in the arch gave place to the loving night in the dunes. The arch was as high as the sky. The faint town noises died. I lay like a pimp in a bush by Tom’s side and squinted through to see him round his hands on Norma’s breast. ‘Don’t you dare!’ Walter and Doris lay quietly near them. You could have heard a safety-pin fall.
‘And the curious thing was,’ said Tom, ‘that after a time we all sat up on the sand and smiled at each other. And then we all moved softly about on the sand in the dark, without saying a word. And Doris was lying with me, and Norma was with Walter.’
‘But why did you change over, if you loved her?’ I asked.
‘I never understood why,’ said Tom. ‘I think about it every night.’
‘That was in October,’ Walter said.
And Tom continued: ‘We didn’t see much of the girls until July. I couldn’t face Norma. Then they brought two paternity orders against us, and Mr. Lewis, the magistrate, was eighty years old, and stone deaf, too. He put a little trumpet by his ear and Norma and Doris gave evidence. Then we gave evidence, and he couldn’t decide whose was which. And at the end he shook his head back and fore and pointed his trumpet and said: “Just like little dogs!”’
All at once I remembered how cold it was. I rubbed my numb hands together. Fancy standing all night in the cold. Fancy listening, I thought, to a long, unsatisfactory story in the frost-bite night in a polar arch. ‘What happened then?’ I asked.
Walter answered. ‘I married Norma,’ he said ‘and Tom married Doris. We had to do the right thing by them, didn’t we? That’s why Tom won’t go home. He never goes home till the early morning. I’ve got to keep him company. He’s my brother.’
It would take me ten minutes to run home. I put up my coat collar and pulled my cap down.
‘And the curious thing is,’ said Tom, ‘that I love Norma and Walter doesn’t love Norma or Doris. We’ve two nice little boys. I call mine Norman.’
We all shook hands.
‘See you again,’ said Walter.
‘I’m always hanging about,’ said Tom.
‘Abyssinia!’
> I walked out of the arch, crossed Trafalgar Terrace, and pelted up the steep streets.
Where Tawe Flows
Mr. Humphries, Mr. Roberts, and young Mr. Thomas knocked on the front door of Mrs. Emlyn Evans’s small villa, ‘Lavengro,’ punctually at nine o’clock in the evening. They waited, hidden behind a veronica bush, while Mr. Evans shuffled in carpet slippers up the passage from the back room and had trouble with the bolts.
Mr. Humphries was a school teacher, a tall, fair man with a stammer, who had written an unsuccessful novel.
Mr. Roberts, a cheerful, disreputable man of middle age, was a collector for an insurance company; they called him in the trade a body-snatcher, and he was known among his friends as Burke and Hare, the Welsh Nationalist. He had once held a high position in a brewery office.
Young Mr. Thomas was at the moment without employment, but it was understood that he would soon be leaving for London to make a career in Chelsea as a free-lance journalist; he was penniless, and hoped, in a vague way, to live on women.
When Mr. Evans opened the door and shone his torch down the narrow drive, lighting up the garage and hen-run but missing altogether the whispering bush, the three friends bounded out and cried in threatening voices: ‘We’re Ogpu men, let us in!’
‘We’re looking for seditious literature,’ said Mr. Humphries with difficulty, raising his hand in a salute.
‘Heil, Saunders Lewis! and we know where to find it,’ said Mr. Roberts.
Mr. Evans turned off his torch. ‘Come in out of the night air, boys, and have a drop of something. It’s only parsnip wine,’ he added.
They removed their hats and coats, piled them on the end of the bannister, spoke softly for fear of waking up the twins, George and Celia, and followed Mr. Evans into his den.
‘Where’s the trouble and strife, Mr. Evans?’ said Mr. Roberts in a cockney accent. He warmed his hands in front of the fire and regarded with a smile of surprise, though he visited the house every Friday, the neat rows of books, the ornate roll-top desk that made the parlour into a study, the shining grandfather clock, the photographs of children staring stiffly at a dickybird, the still, delicious home-made wine, that had such an effect, in an old beer bottle, the sleeping tom on the frayed rug. ‘At home with the bourgeoisie.’
He was himself a homeless bachelor with a past, much in debt, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to envy his friends their wives and comforts and to speak of them intimately and disparagingly.
‘In the kitchen,’ said Mr. Evans, handing out glasses.
‘A woman’s only place,’ said Mr. Roberts heartily, ‘with one exception.’
Mr. Humphries and Mr. Thomas arranged the chairs around the fire, and all four sat down, close and confidential and with full glasses in their hands. None of them spoke for a time. They gave one another sly looks, sipped and sighed, lit the cigarettes that Mr. Evans produced from a draughts box, and once Mr. Humphries glanced at the grandfather clock and winked and put his finger to his lips. Then, as the visitors grew warm and the wine worked and they forgot the bitter night outside, Mr. Evans said, with a little shudder of forbidden delight: ‘The wife will be going to bed in half an hour. Then we can start the good work. Have you all got yours with you?’
‘And the tools,’ said Mr. Roberts, smacking his side pocket.
‘What’s the word until then?’ said young Mr. Thomas.
Mr. Humphries winked again. ‘Mum!’
‘I’ve been waiting for to-night to come round like I used to wait for Saturdays when I was a boy,’ said Mr. Evans, ‘I got a penny then. And it all went on gob-stoppers and jelly-babies, too.’
He was a traveller in rubber, rubber toys and syringes and bath mats. Sometimes Mr. Roberts called him the poor man’s friend to make him blush. ‘No! no! no!’ he would say, ‘you can look at my samples, there’s nothing like that there.’ He was a Socialist.
‘I used to buy a packet of Cinderellas with my penny,’ said Mr. Roberts, ‘and smoke them in the slaughter-house. The sweetest little smoke in the world. You don’t see them now.’
‘Do you remember old Jim, the caretaker, in the slaughter-house?’ asked Mr. Evans.
‘He was after my time; I’m no chicken, like you boys.’
‘You’re not old, Mr. Roberts, think of G.B.S.’
‘No clean Shavianism for me, I’m an unrepentant eater of birds and beasts,’ said Mr. Roberts.
‘Do you eat flowers, too?’
‘Oh! oh! you literary men, don’t you talk above my head now. I’m only a poor resurrectionist on the knocker.’
‘He’d put his hand down in the guts-box and bring you out a rat with it’s neck broken clean as a match for the price of a glass of beer.’
‘And it was beer then.’
‘Shop! shop!’ Mr. Humphries beat on the table with his glass. ‘You mustn’t waste stories, we’ll need them all,’ he said. ‘Have you got the abattoir anecdote down in your memory book, Mr. Thomas?’
‘I’ll remember it.’
‘Don’t forget, you can only talk at random now,’ said Mr. Humphries.
‘Okay, Roderick!’ Mr. Thomas said quickly.
Mr. Roberts put his hands over his ears. ‘The conversation is getting esoteric,’ he said. ‘Excuse my French! Mr. Evans, have you such a thing as a rook rifle? I want to scare the highbrows off. Did I ever tell you the time I lectured to the John O’ London’s Society on “The Utility of Uselesssness”? That was a poser. I talked about Jack London all the time, and when they said at the end that it wasn’t a lecture about what I said it was going to be, I said “Well, it was useless lecturing about that, wasn’t it?”and they hadn’t a word to say. Mrs. Dr. Davies was in the front row, you remember her? She gave that first lecture on W. J. Locke and got spoonered in the middle. Remember her talking about the “Bevagged Loveabond,” Mr. Humphries?’
‘Shop! shop!’ said Mr. Humphries, groaning, ‘keep it until after.’
‘More parsnip?’
‘It goes down the throat like silk, Mr. Evans.’
‘Like baby’s milk.’
‘Say when, Mr. Roberts.’
‘A word of four syllables denoting a period of time. Thank you! I read that on a matchbox.’
‘Why don’t they have serials on matchboxes? You’d buy the shop up to see what Daphne did next,’ Mr. Humphries said.
He stopped and looked round in embarrassment at the faces of his friends. Daphne was the name of the grass widow in Manselton for whom Mr. Roberts had lost both his reputation and his position in the brewery. He had been in the habit of delivering bottles to her house, free of charge, and he had bought her a cocktail cabinet and given her a hundred pounds and his mother’s rings. In return she held large parties and never invited him. Only Mr. Thomas had noticed the name, and he was saying: ‘No, Mr. Humphries, on toilet rolls would be best.’
‘When I was in London,’ Mr. Roberts said, ‘I stayed with a couple called Armitage in Palmer’s Green. He made curtains and blinds. They used to leave each other messages on the toilet paper every single day.’
‘If you want to make a Venetian blind,’ said Mr. Evans, ‘stick him in the eye with a hatpin.’ He felt, always, a little left out of his evenings at home, and he was waiting for Mrs. Evans to come in, disapprovingly, from the kitchen.
‘I’ve often had to use, “Dear Tom, don’t forget the Watkinses are coming to tea,” or, “To Peggy, from Tom, in remembrance.” Mr. Armitage was a Mosleyite.’
‘Thugs’ said Mr. Humphries.
‘Seriously, what are we going to do about this uniformication of the individual?’ Mr. Evans asked. Maud was in the kitchen still; he heard her beating the plates.
‘Answering your question with another,’ said Mr. Roberts, putting one hand on Mr. Evans’s knee, ‘what individuality is there left? The mass-age produces the mass-man. The machine produces the robot.’
‘As its slave,’ Mr. Humphries articulated clearly, ‘not, mark you, as its master.’
&
nbsp; ‘There you have it. There it is. Tyrannic dominance by a sparking plug, Mr. Humphries, and it’s flesh and blood that always pays.’
‘Any empty glasses?’
Mr. Roberts turned his glass upside down. ‘That used to mean, “I’ll take on the best man in the room in a bout of fisticuffs,” in Llanelly. But seriously, as Mr. Evans says, the old-fashioned individualist is a square peg now in a round hole.’
‘What a hole!’ said Mr. Thomas.
‘Take our national—what did Onlooker say last week?—our national misleaders.’
‘You take them, Mr. Roberts, we’ve got rats already,’ Mr. Evans said with a nervous laugh. The kitchen was silent. Maud was ready.
‘Onlooker is a nom deplume for Basil Gorse Williams,’ said Mr. Humphries. ‘Did any one know that?’
‘Nom de guerre. Did you see his article on Ramsay Mac? “A sheep in wolfs clothing.”’
‘Know him!’ Mr. Roberts said scornfully, ‘I’ve been sick on him.’
Mrs. Evans heard the last remark as she came into the room. She was a thin woman with bitter lines, tired hands, the ruins of fine brown eyes, and a superior nose. An unshockable woman, she had once listened to Mr. Roberts’s description of his haemorrhoids for over an hour on a New Year’s Eve and had allowed him, without protest, to call them the grapes of wrath. When sober, Mr. Roberts addressed her as ‘ma’am’ and kept the talk to weather and colds. He sprang to his feet and offered her his chair.
‘No, thank you, Mr. Roberts,’ she said in a clear, hard voice, ‘I’m going to bed at once. The cold disagrees with me.’
Go to bed plain Maud, thought young Mr. Thomas. ‘Will you have a little warm, Mrs. Evans, before you retire?’ he said.
She shook her head, gave the friends a thin smile, and said to Mr. Evans: ‘Put the world right before you come to bed.’
‘Good night, Mrs Evans.’
‘It won’t be after midnight this time, Maud, I promise. I’ll put Sambo out in the back.’
‘Good night, ma’am.’
Sleep tight, hoity.
‘I won’t disturb you gentlemen any more,’ she said. ‘What’s left of the parsnip wine for Christmas is in the boot cupboard, Emlyn. Don’t let it waste. Good night.’