by Dylan Thomas
‘I thought they were girls.’
‘My friend thought you were a couple of girls,’ George Ring said in a loud voice as they danced past them. Samuel looked at the floor, trying to follow the movements of George Ring’s feet. One, two, three, turn around, tap.
One of the young men squealed, ‘Come up and see my Aga Cooker.’
One, two, three, swirl and tap.
‘What sort of a girl is Polly Dacey, really? Is she mad?’
I’m like thistledown, thought Samuel. Swirl about and swirl again, on the toes now, shake those hips.
‘Not so heavy, Sam. You’re like a little Jumbo. When she went to school she used to post mice in the pillar-box and they ate up all the letters. And she used to do things to boys in the scullery. I can’t tell you. You could hear them screaming all over the house.’
But Samuel was not listening any more. He circled and stumbled to a rhythm of his own among the flying legs, dipped and retreated, hopped on one leg and spun, his hair falling over his eyes and his bottle swinging. He clung to George Ring’s shoulder and zig-zagged away from him, then bounced up close again.
‘Don’t swing the bottle. Don’t swing it. Look out. Sam. Sam.’
Samuel’s arm flew back and a small woman went down. She grabbed at his legs and he brought George Ring with him. Another man fell, catching fast to his partner’s skirt. A long rip and she tumbled among them, her legs in the air, her head in a heave of bellies and arms.
Samuel lay still. His mouth pressed on the curls at the nape of the neck of the woman who had fallen first. He put out his tongue.
‘Get off my head; you’ve got keys in your pocket.’
‘Oh, my leg!’
‘That’s right. Easy does it. Upsadaisy.’
‘Someone’s licking me,’ cried the woman at the bottom.
Then the two girls from behind the bar were standing over them, slapping and kicking, pulling them up by the hair.
‘It was that one’s fault. He crowned her with a bottle. I saw him,’ said the bank manager’s niece.
‘Where’d he get the bottle from, Lola?’
The girl with the bow tie dragged Samuel up by the collar and pointed to his left hand. He tried to slip it in his pocket but a hand like a black boxing glove closed over the bottle. A large black face bent down and stared into his. He saw only the whites of the eyes and the teeth.
I don’t want a cut on my face. Don’t cut my lips open. They only use razors in stories. Don’t let him have read any stories.
‘Now, now,’ said Mrs. Dacey’s voice. The black face jerked back as she thrust out her opened umbrella, and Samuel’s hand was free.
‘Throw him out, Monica.’
‘He was dancing like a monkey, throw him out.’
‘If you throw him out you can throw me out too,’ Mr. Allingham said from the bar. He raised his fists.
Two men walked over to him.
‘Mind my glasses.’ He did not wear any.
They opened the door and threw him up the steps.
‘Bloody nun,’ a voice shouted.
‘Now you.’
‘And the old girl. Look out for her brolly, Dodie.’
Samuel fell on the area step below Mr. Allingham, and Mrs. Dacey came flying after with her umbrella held high.
It was still raining heavily.
4
‘Just a passing call,’ said Mr. Allingham. As though he were sitting indoors at a window, he put out his hand to feel the rain. Shoes slopped past on the pavement above his head. Wet trousers and stockings almost touched the brim of his hat. ‘Just in and out,’ he said. ‘Where’s George?’
I’ve been bounced, Samuel thought.
‘It reminds me of my old man.’ Mrs. Dacey’s face was hidden under the umbrella, as though in a private, accompanying thunder cloud. ‘In and out, in and out. Just one look at him, and out he went like clockwork.’
Oh, the Gayspot? Can’t go there, old man. Samuel winked seriously in the dark. Oh, carrying a cargo. Swinging a bottle around. One look at me, out I went.
‘He used to carry a little book with all the places he couldn’t go to and he went to them every Saturday.’
Fool, fool, fool, Samuel said to himself.
The steps were suddenly lit up as the door opened for George Ring. He came out carefully and tidily, to a rush of music and voices that faded at once with the vanishing of the smoky light, and stood on Mrs. Dacey’s step, his mane of curls golden against the fanlight, a god or a half-horse emerging from the underworld into the common rain.
‘They’re awfully cross,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Cavanagh ripped her skirt and she didn’t have anything on underneath. My dear, it’s like Ancient Rome down there and now she’s wearing a man’s trousers and he’s got legs exactly like a spider’s. All black and hairy. Why are you sitting in the rain?’
‘It’s safe,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘It’s nice and safe in the rain. It’s nice and rational sitting on the steps in the rain. You can’t knock a woman down with a bottle here. See the stars? That’s Arcturus. That’s the Great Bear. That’s Sirius, see, the green one. I won’t show you where Venus is. There’s some people can’t enjoy themselves unless they’re knocking women down and licking them on the floor. They think the evening’s wasted unless they’ve done that. I wish I was home. I wish I was lying in bed by the ceiling. I wish I was lying under the chairs like Rosie.’
‘Who started to fight, anyway? Let’s go round the corner to the Cheerioh.’
‘That was ethical.’
They climbed up the street, George Ring first, then Mr. Allingham, then Samuel and Mrs. Dacey. She tucked his arm in hers.
‘Don’t you worry. You hold on to me. Cold? You’re shivering.’
‘It’ll be Cheerioh all right.’
The Cheerioh was a bad blaze, an old hole of lights. In the dark, open a cupboard full of cast-off clothes moving in a wind from nowhere, the smell of mothballs and damp furs, and find a lamp lit, candles burning, a gramophone playing.
‘No dancing for you,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘You need space. You want the Crystal Palace.’
Mrs. Dacey still held Samuel by the arm. ‘You’re safe with me. I’ve taken a fancy,’ she said. ‘Once I take a fancy I never let go.’
‘And never trust a woman who can’t get up.’ Mr. Allingham pointed to a woman sitting in a chair by the Speedboat pin-table. ‘She’s trying to get up all the time.’ The woman made a sudden movement of her shoulders. ‘No, no, legs first.’
‘This used to be the cow-shed,’ George Ring said, ‘and there was real straw on the floor.’
Mrs. Dacey never lets go. Samuel saw the fancy shining behind her glasses, and in her hard mouse-trap mouth. Her cold hand hooked him. If he struggled and ran she would catch him in a corner and open her umbrella inside his nose.
‘And real cows,’ Mr. Allingham said.
The men and women drinking and dancing looked like the older brothers and sisters of the drinkers and dancers in the club round the corner, but no one was black. There were deep green faces, dipped in a sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-grey, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily whitewashed, with violet-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axle-greased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, saltcellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrot-heads, yolk-heads, black-heads, heads bald as sweetbreads.
‘All white people here,’ Samuel said.
‘The salt of the earth,’ Mr. Allingham said.
‘The foul salt of the earth. Drunk as a pig. Ever seen a pig drunk? Ever seen a monkey dancing like a man? Look at that king of the animals. See him? The one who’s eaten his lips. That one smiling. That one having his honeymoon on her feet.’
Quite Early One Morning
Quite early one morning in the win
ter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold unseasonable holiday, to see if it was raining still, if the outhouse had been blown away, potatoes, shears, rat-killer, shrimp-nets, and tins of rusty nails aloft on the wind, and if all the cliffs were left. It had been such a ferocious night that someone in the smoky shipped-pictured bar had said he could feel his tombstone shaking even though he was not dead, or at least was moving; but the morning shone as clear and calm as one always imagines to-morrow will shine.
The sun lit the sea town, not as a whole—from topmost down—reproving zinc-roofed chapel to empty but for rats and whispers grey warehouse on the harbour, but in separate bright pieces. There, the quay shouldering out, nobody on it now but the gulls and the capstans like small men in tubular trousers. Here, the roof of the police-station, black as a helmet, dry as a summons, sober as Sunday. There, the splashed church, with a cloud in the shape of a bell poised above it, ready to drift and ring. Here the chimneys of the pink-washed pub, the pub that was waiting for Saturday night as an over-jolly girl waits for sailors.
The town was not yet awake. The milkman lay still lost in the clangour and music of his Welsh-spoken dreams, the wish-fulfilled tenor voices more powerful than Caruso’s, sweeter than Ben Davies’s, thrilling past Cloth Hall and Manchester House up to the frosty hills. The town was not yet awake. Babies in upper bedrooms of salt-white houses dangling over water, or of bow-windowed villas squatting prim in neatly treed but unsteady hill streets, worried the light with their half in sleep cries. Miscellaneous retired sea captains emerged for a second from deeper waves than ever tossed their boats, then drowned again, going down down into a perhaps Mediterranean-blue cabin of sleep, rocked to the sea-beat of their ears. Landladies, shawled and bloused and aproned with sleep in the curtained, bombasined black of their once spare rooms, remember their loves, their bills, their visitors—dead, decamped, or buried in English deserts till the trumpet of next expensive August roused them again to the world of holiday rain, dismal cliff and sand seen through the weeping windows of front parlours, tasselled table-cloths, stuffed pheasants, ferns in pots, fading photographs of the bearded and censorious dead, autograph albums with a lock of limp and colourless beribboned hair lolling out between the thick black boards.
The town was not yet awake. Birds sang in eaves, bushes, trees, on telegraph wires, rails, fences, spars, and wet masts, not for love or joy, but to keep other birds away. The landlords in feathers disputed the right of even the flying light to descend and perch.
The town was not yet awake, and I walked through the streets like a stranger come out of the sea, shrugging off weed and wave and darkness with each step, or like an inquisitive shadow, determined to miss nothing—not the preliminary tremor in the throat of the dawn-saying cock or the first whirring nudge of arranged time in the belly of the alarm clock on the trinketed chest of drawers under the knitted text and the done-by-hand water-colours of Porthcawl or Trinidad.
I walked past the small sea-spying windows, behind whose trim curtains lay mild-mannered men and women not yet awake and, for all I could know, terrible and violent in their dreams. In the head of Miss Hughes, ‘The Cosy,’ clashed the cymbals of an eastern court. Eunuchs struck gongs the size of Bethesda Chapel. Sultans with voices fiercer than visiting preachers demanded a most un-Welsh dance. Everywhere there glowed and rayed the colours of the small, slate-grey woman’s dreams, purple, magenta, ruby, sapphire, emerald, vermilion, honey. But I could not believe it. She knitted in her tidy sleep-world a beige woollen shroud with ‘thou shalt not’ on the bosom.
I could not imagine Cadwallader Davies the grocer in his near-to-waking dream, riding on horse-back, two-gunned and Cody-bold, through the cactus prairies. He added, he subtracted, he receipted, he filed a prodigious account with a candle dipped in dried egg.
What big seas of dreams ran in the Captain’s sleep? Over what blue-whaled waves did he sail through a rainbow hail of flying-fishes to the music of Circe’s swinish island? Do not let him be dreaming of dividends and bottled beer and onions.
Someone was snoring in one house. I counted ten savage and indignant grunts and groans like those of a pig in a model and mudless farm which ended with a window rattler, a wash-basin shaker, a trembler of tooth glasses, a waker of dormice. It thundered with me to the chapel railings, then brassily vanished.
The chapel stood grim and grey, telling the day there was to be no nonsense. The chapel was not asleep, it never cat-napped nor nodded nor closed its long cold eye. I left it telling the morning off and the sea-gull hung rebuked above it.
And climbing down again and up out of the town I heard the cocks crow from hidden farmyards, from old roosts above waves where fabulous sea-birds might sit and cry; ‘Neptune!’ And a far-away clock struck from another church in another village in another universe, though the wind blew the time away. And I walked in the timeless morning past a row of white cottages almost expecting that an ancient man with a great beard and an hour-glass and a scythe under his night-dressed arm might lean from the window and ask me the time. I would have told him: ‘Arise old counter of the heartbeats of albatrosses, and wake the cavernous sleepers of the town to a dazzling new morning.’ I would have told him: ‘You unbelievable Father of Eva and Dai Adam, come out, old chicken, and stir up the winter morning with your spoon of a scythe.’ I would have told him—I would have scampered like a scalded ghost over the cliffs and down to the bilingual sea.
Who lived in these cottages? I was a stranger to the sea town, fresh or stale from the city where I worked for my bread and butter wishing it were laver-bread and country salty butter yolk-yellow. Fishermen certainly; no painters but of boats; no man-dressed women with shooting-sticks and sketch-books and voices like macaws to paint the reluctant heads of critical and sturdy natives who posed by the pint against the chapel-dark sea which would be made more blue than the bay of Naples—though shallower.
I walked on to the cliff path again, the town behind and below waking up now so very slowly; I stopped and turned and looked. Smoke from one chimney—the cobbler’s I thought, but from that distance it may have been the chimney of the retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years successful wrestling with the mad rich of southern England. He was not liked. He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorbo ball. No behaviour surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humour at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal.
Smoke from another chimney now. They were burning their last night’s dreams. Up from a chimney came a long-haired wraith like an old politician. Someone had been dreaming of the Liberal Party. But no, the smoky figure wove, attenuated into a refined and precise grey comma. Someone had been dreaming of reading Charles Morgan. Oh! the town was waking now and I heard distinctly insistent over the slow-speaking sea the voices of the town blown up to me. And some of the voices said:
I am Miss May Hughes ‘The Cosy,’ a lonely lady,
Waiting in her house by the nasty sea,
Waiting for her husband and pretty baby
To come home at last from wherever they may be.
I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the Kidwelly,
And Mrs Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
‘Poor Captain Tiny all alone,’ the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone and I hated her.
Clara Tawe Jenkins, ‘Madam’ they call me,
An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.
Parchedig Thomas Evans making morning tea,
Very weak tea, too, you mustn’t waste a leaf.
Every morn
ing making tea in my house by the sea,
I am troubled by one thing only, and that, belief.
Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room floor;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.
I am only Mr Griffiths, very short-sighted, B.A., Aber.
As soon as I finish my egg I must shuffle off to school.
O patron saint of teachers, teach me to keep order,
And forget those words on the blackboard—‘Griffiths Bat is a fool.’
Do you hear that whistling?—It’s me, I am Phoebe,
The maid at the King’s Head, and I am whistling like a bird.
Someone spilt a tin of pepper in the tea.
There’s twenty for breakfast and I’m not going to say a word.
Thus some of the voices of a cliff-perched town at the far end of Wales moved out of sleep and darkness into the new-born, ancient, and ageless morning, moved and were lost.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.