by Dylan Thomas
‘But you loved the walk, you enjoyed yourself on the common. It’s a wonderful day, Ray. I’m sorry about your brother. Let’s explore. Let’s climb down to the sea. Perhaps there’s a cave with prehistoric drawings, and we can write an article and make a fortune. Let’s climb down.’
‘My brother used to ring a bell for me; he could only whisper. He used to say: “Ray, look at my legs. Are they thinner to-day?”
‘The sun’s going down. Let’s climb.’
‘Father thought I was trying to murder him when I held him on the bed. I was holding him down when he died, and he rattled. Mother was in the kitchen in her chair, but she knew he was dead and she started screaming for my sister. Brenda was in a sanatorium in Craigynos. Harry rang the bell in his bedroom when mother started, but I couldn’t go to him, and father was dead in the bed.’
‘I’m going to climb to the sea,’ I said. ‘Are you coming?’
He got up out of the hollow into the open world again and followed me slowly over the point and down the steep side; the gulls rose in a storm. I clung to dry, spiked bushes but the roots came out; a foothold crumbled, a crevice for the fingers broke as I groped in it; I scrambled on to a black, flat-backed rock whose head, like a little Worm’s, curved out of the sea a few perilous steps away from me, and, drenched by flying water, I gazed up to see Ray and a shower of stones falling. He landed at my side.
‘I thought I was done for,’ he said, when he had stopped shaking. ‘I could see all my past life in a flash.’
‘All of it?’
‘Well, nearly. I saw my brother’s face clear as yours.’
We watched the sun set.
‘Like an orange.’
‘Like a tomato.’
‘Like a goldfish bowl.’
We went one better than the other, describing the sun. The sea beat on our rock, soaked our trouser-legs, stung our cheeks. I took off my shoes and held Ray’s hand and slid down the rock on my belly to trail my feet in the sea. Then Ray slid down, and I held him fast while he kicked up water.
‘Come back now,’ I said, pulling his hand.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘this is delicious. Let me keep my feet in a bit more. It’s warm as the baths.’ He kicked and grunted and slapped the rock in a frenzy with his other hand, pretending to drown. ‘Don’t save me!’ he cried. ‘I’m drowning! I’m drowning!’
I pulled him back, and in his struggles he brushed a shoe off the rock. We fished it out. It was full of water.
‘Never mind, it was worth it. I haven’t paddled since I was six. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it.’
He had forgotten about his father and his brother, but I knew that once his joy in the wild, warm water was over he would return to the painful house and see his brother growing thinner. I had heard Harry die so many times, and the mad father was as familiar to me as Ray himself. I knew every cough and cry, every clawing at the air.
‘I’m going to paddle once a day from now on,’ Ray said. ‘I’m going to go down to the sands every evening and have a good paddle. I’m going to splash about and get wet up to my knees. I don’t care who laughs.’
He sat still for a minute, thinking gravely of this. ‘When I wake up in the mornings there’s nothing to look forward to, except on Saturdays,’ he said then, ‘or when I come up to your house for Lexicon. I may as well be dead. But now I’ll be able to wake up and think: “This evening I’m going to splash about in the sea.” I’m going to do it again now.’ He rolled up his wet trousers and slid down the rock. ‘Don’t let go.’
As he kicked his legs in the sea, I said: ‘This is a rock at the world’s end. We’re all alone. It all belongs to us, Ray. We can have anybody we like here and keep everybody else away. Who do you wish was with us?’
He was too busy to answer, splashing and snorting, blowing as though his head were under, making circular commotions in the water or lazily skimming the surface with his toes.
‘Who would you like to be here on the rock with us?’
He was stretched out like a dead man, his feet motionless in the sea, his mouth on the rim of a rock pool, his hand clutched round my foot.
‘I wish George Gray was with us,’ I said. ‘He’s the man from London who’s come to live in Norfolk Street. You don’t know him. He’s the most curious man I ever met, queerer than Oscar Thomas, and I thought nobody could ever be queerer than that. George Gray wears glasses, but there’s no glass in them, only the frames. You wouldn’t know until you came near him. He does all sorts of things. He’s a cat’s doctor and he goes to somewhere in Sketty every morning to help a woman put her clothes on. She’s an old widow, he said, and she can’t dress by herself. I don’t know how he came to know her. He’s only been in town for a month. He’s a B.A., too. The things he’s got in his pockets! Pincers, and scissors for cats, and lots of diaries. He read me some of the diaries, about the jobs he did in London. He used to go to bed with a policewoman and she used to pay him. She used to go to bed in her uniform. I’ve never met such a queer man. I wish he was here now. Who do you wish was with us, Ray?’
Ray began to move his feet again, kicking them out straight behind him and bringing them down hard on the water, and then stirring the water about.
‘I wish Gwilym was here, too,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you about him. He could give a sermon to the sea. This is the very place, there isn’t anywhere as lonely as this.’ Oh, the beloved sunset! Oh, the terrible sea! Pity the sailors, pity the sinners, pity Raymond Price and me! Oh, the evening is coming like a cloud! Amen. Amen. ‘Who do you wish, Ray?’
‘I wish my brother was with us,’ Ray said. He climbed on to the flat of the rock and dried his feet. ‘I wish Harry was here. I wish he was here now, at this moment, on this rock.’
The sun was nearly right down, halved by the shadowed sea. Cold came up, spraying out of the sea, and I could make a body for it, icy antlers, a dripping tail, a rippling face with fishes passing across it. A wind, cornering the Head, chilled through our summer shirts, and the sea began to cover our rock quickly, our rock already covered with friends, with living and dead, racing against the darkness. We did not speak as we climbed. I thought: ‘If we open our mouths we’ll both say: “Too late, it’s too late.”’ We ran over the spring-board grass and the scraping rock needles, down the hollow in which Ray had talked about blood, up rustling humps, and along the ragged flat. We stood on the beginning of the Head and looked down, though both of us could have said, without looking: ‘The sea is in.’
The sea was in. The slipping stepping-stones were gone. On the mainland, in the dusk, some little figures beckoned to us. Seven clear figures, jumping and calling. I thought they were the cyclists.
Old Garbo
Mr. Farr trod delicately and disgustedly down the dark, narrow stairs like a man on ice. He knew, without looking or slipping, that vicious boys had littered the darkest corners with banana peel; and when he reached the lavatory, the basins would be choked and the chains snapped on purpose. He remembered ‘Mr. Farr, no father’ scrawled in brown, and the day the sink was full of blood that nobody admitted having lost. A girl rushed past him up the stairs, knocked the papers out of his hand, did not apologize, and the loose meg of his cigarette burned his lower lip as he failed to open the lavatory door. I heard from inside his protest and rattlings, the sing-song whine of his voice, the stamping of his small patent-leather shoes, his favourite swear-words—he swore, violently and privately, like a collier used to thinking in the dark—and I let him in.
‘Do you always lock the door?’ he asked, scurrying to the tiled wall.
‘It stuck,’ I said.
He shivered, and buttoned.
He was the senior reporter, a great shorthand writer, a chain-smoker, a bitter drinker, very humorous, round-faced and round-bellied, with dart holes in his nose. Once, I thought as I stared at him then in the lavatory of the offices of the Tawe News, he might have been a mincing-mannered man, with a strut and a cane to balance it, a watch-cha
in across the waistcoat, a gold tooth, even, perhaps a flower from his own garden in his buttonhole. But now each attempt at a precise gesture was caked and soaked before it began; when he placed the tips of his thumb and forefinger together, you saw only the cracked nails in mourning and the Woodbine stains. He gave me a cigarette and shook his coat to hear matches.
‘Here’s a light, Mr. Farr,’ I said.
It was good to keep in with him; he covered all the big stories, the occasional murder, such as when Thomas O’Connor used a bottle on his wife—but that was before my time—the strikes, the best fires. I wore my cigarette as he did, a hanging badge of bad habits.
‘Look at that word on the wall,’ he said. ‘Now that’s ugly. There’s a time and a place.’
Winking at me, scratching his bald patch as though the thought came from there, he said: ‘Mr. Solomon wrote that.’
Mr. Solomon was the news editor and a Wesleyan.
‘Old Solomon,’ said Mr. Farr, ‘he’d cut every baby in half just for pleasure.’
I smiled and said: ‘I bet he would!’ But I wished that I could have answered in such a way as to show for Mr. Solomon the disrespect I did not feel. This was a great male moment, and the most enjoyable since I had begun work three weeks before: leaning against the cracked tiled wall, smoking and smiling, looking down at my shoe scraping circles on the wet floor, sharing a small wickedness with an old, important man. I should have been writing up last night’s performance of The Crucifixion or loitering, with my new hat on one side, through the Christmas-Saturday-crowded town in the hopes of an accident.
‘You must come along with me one night,’ Mr. Farr said slowly. ‘We’ll go down the “Fishguard” on the docks; you can see the sailors knitting there in the public bar. Why not tonight? And there’s shilling women in the “Lord Jersey.” You stick to Woodbines, like me.’
He washed his hands as a young boy does, wiping the dirt on the roll-towel, stared in the mirror over the basin, twirled the ends of his moustache, and saw them droop again immediately after.
‘Get to work,’ he said.
I walked into the lobby, leaving him with his face pressed to the glass and one finger exploring his bushy nostrils.
It was nearly eleven o’clock, and time for a cocoa or a Russian tea in the Café Royal, above the tobacconist’s in High Street, where junior clerks and shop assistants and young men working in their fathers’ offices or articled to stock brokers and solicitors meet every morning for gossip and stories. I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up for the football; the country shoppers, the window gazers; the silent, shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black, brooched dresses carrying frails, smart girls with shining mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little, dandy lascars, bewildered by the weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never write. I’ll put you all in a story by and by.
Mrs. Constable, laden and red with shopping, recognized me as she charged out of Woolworth’s like a bull. ‘I haven’t seen your mother for ages! Oh! this Christmas rush! Remember me to Florrie. I’m going to have a cup of tea at the “Modern.“ There,’ she said, ‘I’ve lost a pan!’
I saw Percy Lewis, who put chewing gum in my hair at school.
A tall man stared at the doorway of a hat shop, resisting the crowds, standing hard and still. All the moving irrelevancies of good news grew and acted around me as I reached the café entrance and climbed the stairs.
‘What’s for you, Mr. Swaffer?’
‘The usual, please.’ Cocoa and free biscuit.
Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were pin-stripe trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler.
‘Sit by here,’ said Leslie Bird. He was in the boots at Dan Lewis’s.
‘Been to the flicks this week, Thomas?’
‘Yes. The Regal. White Lies. Damned good show, too! Connie Bennett was great! Remember her in the foam-bath, Leslie?’
‘Too much foam for me, old man.’
The broad vowels of the town were narrowed in, the rise and fall of the family accent was caught and pressed.
At the top window of the International Stores across the street a group of uniformed girls were standing with tea-cups in their hands. One of them waved a handkerchief. I wondered if she waved it to me. ‘There’s that dark piece again,’ I said. ‘She’s got her eye on you.’
‘They look all right in their working clothes,’ he said. ‘You catch them when they’re all dolled up, they’re awful. I knew a little nurse once, she looked a peach in her uniform, really refined; no, really, I mean. I picked her up on the prom one night. She was in her Sunday best. There’s a difference; she looked like a bit of Marks and Spencer’s.’ As he talked he was looking through the window with the corners of his eyes.
The girl waved again, and turned away to giggle.
‘Pretty cheap!’ he said.
I said: ‘And little Audrey laughed and laughed.’
He took out a plated cigarette case. ‘Present,’ he said. ‘I bet my uncle with three balls has it in a week. Have a best Turkish.’
His matches were marked Allsopps. ‘Got them from the “Carlton”’ he said. ‘Pretty girl behind the bar: knows her onions. You’ve never been there, have you? Why don’t you drop in for one to-night? Gil Morris’ll be there, too. We usually sink a couple Saturdays. There’s a hop at the “Melba.”’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going out with our senior reporter. Some other time, Leslie. So long!’
I paid my threepence.
‘Good morning, Cassie.’
‘Good morning, Hannen.’
The rain had stopped and High Street shone. Walking on the tram-lines, a neat man held his banner high and prominently feared the Lord. I knew him as a Mr. Matthews, who had been saved some years ago from British port and who now walked every night, in rubber shoes with a prayer book and a flashlight, through the lanes. There went Mr. Evans the Produce through the side-door of the ‘Bugle.’ Three typists rushed by for lunch, poached egg and milk-shake, leaving a lavender scent. Should I take the long way through the Arcade, and stop to look at the old man with the broken, empty pram who always stood there, by the music store, and who would take off his cap and set his hair alight for a penny? It was only a trick to amuse boys, and I took the short cut down Chapel Street, on the edge of the slum called the Strand, past the enticing Italian chip shop where young men who had noticing parents bought twopennyworth on late nights to hide their breath before the last tram home. Then up the narrow office stairs and into the reporters’ room.
Mr. Solomon was shouting down the telephone. I heard the last words: ‘You’re just a dreamer, Williams.’ He put the receiver down. ‘That boy’s a buddy dreamer,’ he said to no one. He never swore.
I finished my report of The Crucifixion and handed it to Mr. Farr.
‘Too much platitudinous verbosity.’
Half an hour later, Ted Williams, dressed to golf, sidled in, smiling, thumbed his nose at Mr. Solomon’s back, and sat quietly in a corner with a nail-file.
I whispered: ‘What was he slanging you for?’
‘I went out on a suicide, a tram conductor called Hopkins, and the widow made me stay and have a cup of tea. That’s all.’ He was very winning in his ways, more like a girl than a man who dreamed of Fleet Street and spent his summer fortnight walking up and down past the Daily Express and looking for celebrities in the pubs.
Saturday was my free afternoon. It was one o’clock and time to leave, but I stayed on; Mr. Farr said nothing. I pretended to be busy scribbling words and caricaturing with no likeness Mr. Solomon’s toucan profile and the snub copy-boy who whistled out of tune behind the windows of the telephone box. I wrote my name, ‘
Reporters’ Room, Tawe News, Tawe, South Wales, England, Europe, The Earth.’ And a list of books I had not written: ‘Land of My Fathers, a Study of the Welsh Character in all its aspects’; ‘Eighteen, a Provincial Autobiography.’;‘The Merciless Ladies, a Novel.’ Still Mr. Farr did not look up. I wrote ‘Hamlet.’ Surely Mr. Farr, stubbornly transcribing his council notes had not forgotten. I heard Mr. Solomon mutter, leaning over his shoulder: ‘To aitch with Alderman Daniels.’ Half-past one. Ted was in a dream. I spent a long time putting on my overcoat, tied my Old Grammarian’s scarf one way and then another.
‘Some people are too lazy to take their half-days off,’ said Mr. Farr suddenly. ‘Six o’clock in the “Lamps” back bar.’ He did not turn round or stop writing.
‘Going for a nice walk?’ asked my mother.
‘Yes, on the common. Don’t keep tea waiting.’
I went to the Plaza. ‘Press,’ I said to the girl with the Tyrolean hat and skirt.
‘There’s been two reporters this week.’
‘Special notice.’
She showed me to a seat. During the educational film, with the rude seeds hugging and sprouting in front of my eyes and plants like arms and legs, I thought of the bob women and the pansy sailors in the dives. There might be a quarrel with razors, and once Ted Williams found a lip outside the Mission to Seamen. It had a small moustache. The sinuous plants danced on the screen. If only Tawe were a larger sea-town, there would be curtained rooms underground with blue films. The potato’s life came to an end. Then I entered an American college and danced with the president’s daughter. The hero, called Lincoln, tall and dark with good teeth, I displaced quickly, and the girl spoke my name as she held his shadow, the singing college chorus in sailors’ hats and bathing dresses called me big boy and king, Jack Oakie and I sped up the field, and on the shoulders of the crowd the president’s daughter and I brought across the shifting-coloured curtain with a kiss that left me giddy and bright-eyed as I walked out of the cinema into the strong lamplight and the new rain.