The Collected Stories
Page 38
The estuary pool under the collapsed castle, where the July children rolled together in original mud, shrieking and yawping, and low life, long before newts, twitched on their hands.
The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.
The single-line run along the spring-green river-bank where water-voles went Indian file to work, and where the young impatient voles, in their sleek vests, always in a hurry, jumped over the threadbare backs of the old ones.
The razor-scarred back-street café bar where a man with cut cheeks and chewed ears, huskily and furiously complained, over tarry tea, that the new baby panda in the zoo was not floodlit.
The gully sands in March, under the flayed and flailing cliff-top trees, when the wind played old Harry, or old Thomas, with me, and cormorants, far off, sped like motor-boats across the bay, as I weaved towards the toppling town and the black, loud Lion where the cat, who purred like a fire, looked out of two cinders at the gently swilling retired sea-captains in the snug-as-a-bug back bar.
And the basement kitchen in nipping February, with napkins on the line slung across from door to chockablock corner, and a bicycle by the larder very much down at wheels, and hats and toy-engines and bottles and spanners on the broken rocking-chair, and billowing papers and half-finished crosswords stacked on the radio always turned full tilt, and the fire smoking, and onions peeling, and chips always spitting on the stove, and small men in their overcoats talking of self-discipline and the ascetic life until the air grew woodbine-blue and the clock choked and the traffic died.
And then the moment of a night in that cavorting spring, rare and unforgettable as a bicycle-clip found in the middle of the desert. The lane was long and soused and dark that led to the house I helped to fill and bedraggle.
‘Who’s left this in this corner?’
‘What, where?’
‘Here, this.’
A doll’s arm, the chitterlings of a clock, a saucepan full of hatbands.
The lane was rutted as though by bosky watercarts, and so dark you couldn’t see your front in spite of you. Rain barrelled down. On one side you couldn’t hear the deer that lived there, and on the other side—voices began to whisper, muffled in the midnight sack. A man’s voice and a woman’s voice. ‘Lovers,’ I said to myself. For at night the heart comes out, like a cat on the tiles. Discourteously I shone my torch. There, in the thick rain, a young man and a young woman stood, very close together, near the hedge that whirred in the wind. And a yard from them, another young man sat staidly, on the grass verge, holding an open book from which he appeared to read. And in the very rutted and puddly middle of the lane, two dogs were fighting, with brutish concentration and in absolute silence.
Return Journey
NARRATOR
It was a cold white day in High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences. Dogs, delicate as cats on water, as though they had gloves on their paws, padded over the vanished buildings. Boys romped, calling high and clear, on top of a levelled chemist’s and a shoe-shop, and a little girl, wearing a man’s cap, threw a snowball in a chill deserted garden that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales. The wind cut up the street with a soft sea-noise hanging on its arm, like a hooter in a muffler. I could see the swathed hill stepping up out of the town, which you never could see properly before, and the powdered fields of the roofs of Milton Terrace and Watkin Street and Fullers Row. Fish-frailed, netbagged, umbrella’d, pixie-capped, fur-shoed, blue-nosed, puce-lipped, blinkered like drayhorses, scarved, mittened, galoshed, wearing everything but the cat’s blanket, crushes of shopping-women crunched in the little Lapland of the once grey drab street, blew and queued and yearned for hot tea, as I began my search through Swansea town cold and early on that wicked February morning. I went into the hotel. ‘Good morning.’
The hall-porter did not answer. I was just another snowman to him. He did not know that I was looking for someone after fourteen years, and he did not care. He stood and shuddered, staring through the glass of the hotel door at the snowflakes sailing down the sky, like Siberian confetti. The bar was just opening, but already one customer puffed and shook at the counter with a full pint of half-frozen Tawe water in his wrapped-up hand. I said Good morning, and the barmaid, polishing the counter vigorously as though it were a rare and valuable piece of Swansea china, said to her first customer:
BARMAID
Seen the film at the Elysium Mr Griffiths there’s snow isn’t it did you come up on your bicycle our pipes burst Monday …
NARRATOR
A pint of bitter, please.
BARMAID
Proper little lake in the kitchen got to wear your Wellingtons when you boil a egg one and four please …
CUSTOMER
The cold gets me just here …
BARMAID
… and eightpence change that’s your liver Mr Griffiths you been on the cocoa again …
NARRATOR
I wonder whether you remember a friend of mine? He always used to come to this bar, some years ago. Every morning, about this time.
CUSTOMER
Just by here it gets me. I don’t know what’d happen if I didn’t wear a band…
BARMAID
What’s his name?
NARRATOR
Young Thomas.
BARMAID
Lots of Thomases come here it’s a kind of home from home for Thomases isn’t it Mr Griffiths what’s he look like?
NARRATOR
He’d be about seventeen or eighteen …
(Slowly)
BARMAID
… I was seventeen once …
NARRATOR
… and above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean, he’s five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken after playing a game called Cats and Dogs, in the Mermaid, Mumbles; speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know; used to have poems printed in the Herald of Wales; there was one about an open-air performance of Electra in Mrs. Bertie Perkins’s garden in Sketty; lived up the Uplands; a bombastic adolescent provincial Bohemian with a thick-knotted artist’s tie made out of his sister’s scarf, she never knew where it had gone, and a cricket-shirt dyed bottle-green; a gabbing, ambitious, mock-tough, pretentious young man; and mole-y, too.
BARMAID
There’s words what d’you want to find him for I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole … would you, Mr Griffiths? Mind, you can never tell. I remember a man came here with a monkey. Called for ‘alf for himself and a pint for the monkey. And he wasn’t Italian at all. Spoke Welsh like a preacher.
NARRATOR
The bar was filling up. Snowy business bellies pressed their watch-chains against the counter; black business bowlers, damp and white now as Christmas puddings in their cloths, bobbed in front of the misty mirrors. The voice of commerce rang sternly through the lounge.
FIRST VOICE
Cold enough for you?
SECOND VOICE
How’s your pipes, Mr Lewis?
THIRD VOICE
Another winter like this’ll put paid to me, Mr Evans. I got the ‘flu…
FIRST VOICE
Make it a double …
SECOND VOICE
Similar…
BARMAID
Okay, baby…
CUSTOMER
I seem to remember a chap like you described. There couldn’t be two like him let’s hope. He used to work as a reporter. Down the Three Lamps I used to see him. Lifting his ikkle elbow.
(Confidentially)
NARRATOR
What’s the Three Lamps like now?
CUSTOMER
It isn’t like anything. It isn’t there. It’s nothing mun. You r
emember Ben Evans’s stores? It’s right next door to that. Ben Evans isn’t there either …
(Fade)
NARRATOR
I went out of the hotel into the snow and walked down High Street, past the flat white wastes where all the shops had been. Eddershaw Furnishers, Curry’s Bicycles, Donegal Clothing Company, Doctor Scholl’s, Burton Tailors, W. H. Smith, Boots Cash Chemists, Leslie’s Stores, Upson’s Shoes, Prince of Wales, Tucker’s Fish, Stead & Simpson—all the shops bombed and vanished. Past the hole in space where Hodges & Clothiers had been, down Castle Street, past the remembered, invisible shops, Price’s Fifty Shilling, and Crouch the Jeweller, Potter Gilmore Gowns, Evans Jeweller, Master’s Outfitters, Style and Mantle, Lennard’s Boots, True Form, Kardomah, R. E. Jones, Dean’s Tailor, David Evans, Gregory Confectioners, Bovega, Burton’s, Lloyd’s Bank, and nothing. And into Temple Street. There the Three Lamps had stood, old Mac magisterial in his corner. And there the Young Thomas whom I was searching for used to stand at the counter on Friday paynights with Freddie Farr Half Hook, Bill Latham, Cliff Williams, Gareth Hughes, Eric Hughes, Glyn Lowry, a man among men, his hat at a rakish angle, in that snug, smug, select Edwardian holy of best-bitter holies …
(Bar noises in background)
OLD REPORTER
Remember when I took you down the mortuary for the first time, Young Thomas? He’d never seen a corpse before, boys, except old Ron on a Saturday night. ‘If you want to be a proper newspaperman,’ I said, ‘you got to be well known in the right circles. You got to be persona grata in the mortuary, see.’ He went pale green, mun.
FIRST YOUNG REPORTER
Look, he’s blushing now …
OLD REPORTER
And when we got there what d’you think? The decorators were in at the mortuary, giving the old home a bit of a re-do like. Up on ladders having a slap at the roof. Young Thomas didn’t see ’em, he had his pop eyes glued on the slab, and when one of the painters up the ladder said ‘Good morning, gents’ in a deep voice he upped in the air and out of the place like a ferret. Laugh!
BARMAID
(Off) You’ve had enough, Mr Roberts.
You heard what I said.
(Noise of a gentle scuffle)
SECOND YOUNG REPORTER
(Casually) There goes Mr Roberts.
OLD REPORTER
Well fair do’s they throw you out very genteel in this pub …
FIRST YOUNG REPORTER
Ever seen Young Thomas covering a soccer match down the Vetch and working it out in tries?
SECOND YOUNG REPORTER
And up the Mannesman Hall shouting ‘Good footwork, sir,’ and a couple of punch-drunk colliers galumphing about like jumbos.
FIRST YOUNG REPORTER
What you been reporting to-day, Young Thomas?
SECOND YOUNG REPORTER
Two typewriter Thomas the ace news-dick …
OLD REPORTER
Let’s have a dekko at your note-book. ‘Called at British Legion: Nothing. Called at Hospital: One broken leg. Auction at the Metropole. Ring Mr Beynon re Gymanfa Ganu. Lunch: Pint and pasty at the Singleton with Mrs Giles. Bazaar at Bethesda Chapel. Chimney on fire at Tontine Street. Walters Road Sunday School Outing. Rehearsal of the Mikado at Skewen’—all front page stuff…
(Fade)
NARRATOR
The voices of fourteen years ago hung silent in the snow and ruin, and in the falling winter morning I walked on through the white havoc’d centre where once a very young man I knew had mucked about as chirpy as a sparrow after the sips and titbits and small change of the town. Near the Evening Post building and the fragment of the Castle I stopped a man whose face I thought I recognized from a long time ago. I said: I wonder if you can tell me…
PASSER BY
Yes?
NARRATOR
He peered out of his blanketing scarves and from under his snowballed Balaclava like an Eskimo with a bad conscience. I said: If you can tell me whether you used to know a chap called Young Thomas. He worked on the Post and used to wear an overcoat sometimes with the check lining inside out so that you could play giant draughts on him. He wore a conscious woodbine, too …
PASSER-BY
What d’you mean, conscious woodbine?
NARRATOR
… and a perched pork pie with a peacock feather and he tried to slouch like a newshawk even when he was attending a meeting of the Gorseinon Buffalos …
PASSER-BY
Oh, him! He owes me half a crown. I haven’t seen him since the old Kardomah days. He wasn’t a reporter then, he’d just left the grammar school. Him and Charlie Fisher—Charlie’s got whiskers now—and Tom Warner and Fred Janes, drinking coffee-dashes and arguing the toss.
NARRATOR
What about?
PASSER-BY
Music and poetry and painting and politics. Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo, death and religion, Picasso and girls…
NARRATOR
And then?
PASSER-BY
Communism, symbolism, Bradman, Braque, the Watch Committee, free love, free beer, murder, Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls …
NARRATOR
Is that all?
PASSER-BY
How Dan Jones was going to compose the most prodigious symphony, Fred Janes paint the most miraculously meticulous picture, Charlie Fisher catch the poshest trout, Vernon Watkins and Young Thomas write the most boiling poems, how they would ring the bells of London and paint it like a tart…
NARRATOR
And after that?
PASSER-BY
Oh the hissing of the butt-ends in the drains of the coffee-dashes and the tinkle and the gibble-gabble of the morning young lounge lizards as they talked about Augustus John, Emil Jannings, camer, Dracula, Amy Johnson, trial marriage, pocket-money, the Welsh sea, the London stars, King Kong, anarchy, darts, T. S. Eliot, and girls.… Duw, it’s cold!
NARRATOR
And he hurried on, into the dervish snow, without a good morning or good-bye, swaddled in his winter woollens like a man in the island of his deafness, and I felt that perhaps he had never stopped at all to tell me of one more departed stage in the progress of the boy I was pursuing. The Kardomah Café was razed to the snow, the voices of the coffee-drinkers—poets, painters, and musicians in their beginnings—lost in the willynilly flying of the years and the flakes.
Down College Street I walked then, past the remembered invisible shops, Langley’s, Castle Cigar Co., T. B. Brown, Pullar’s, Aubrey Jeremiah, Goddard Jones, Richards, Homes, Maries, Pleasance & Harper, Star Supply, Sidney Heath, Wesley Chapel, and nothing … My search was leading me back, through pub and job and café, to the School.
(Fade) (School belt)
SCHOOLMASTER
Oh yes, yes, I remember him well,
though I do not know if I would recognize him now:
nobody grows any younger, or better,
and boys grow into much the sort of men one would suppose
though sometimes the moustaches bewilder
and one finds it hard to reconcile one’s memory of a small
none-too-clean urchin lying his way unsuccessfully out of his homework
with a fierce and many-medalled sergeant-major with three children or a divorced chartered accountant;
and it is hard to realize
that some little tousled rebellious youth whose only claim
to fame among his contemporaries was his undisputed right
to the championship of the spitting contest
is now perhaps one’s own bank manager.
Oh yes, I remember him well, the boy you are searching for:
he looked like most boys, no better, brighter, or more respectful;
he cribbed, mitched, spilt ink, rattled his desk and
garbled his lessons with the worst of them;
he could smudge, hedge, smirk, wriggle, wince,
whimper, blarney, badger, blush, deceive, be
offended dignity or righteous indignation as though to the manner born;
sullenly and reluctantly he drilled, for some small
crime, under Sergeant Bird, so wittily nicknamed
Oiseau, on Wednesday half-holidays,
appeared regularly in detention classes,
his in the cloakroom during algebra,
was, when a newcomer, thrown into the bushes of the
Lower Playground by bigger boys,
and threw newcomers into the bushes of the Lower
Playground when he was a bigger boy;
he scuffled at prayers,
he interpolated, smugly, the time-honoured wrong
irreverent words into the morning hymns,
he elped to damage the headmaster’s rhubarb,
was thirty-third in trigonometry,
and, as might be expected, edited the School Magazine
(Fade)
NARRATOR
The Hall is shattered, the echoing corridors charred where he scribbled and smudged and yawned in the long green days, waiting for the bell and the scamper into the Yard: the School on Mount Pleasant Hill has changed its face and its ways. Soon, they say, it may be no longer the School at all he knew and loved when he was a boy up to no good but the beat of his blood: the names are havoc’d from the Hall and the carved initials burned from the broken wood. But the names remain. What names did he know of the dead? Who of the honoured dead did he know such a long time ago? The names of the dead in the living heart and head remain for ever. Of all the dead whom did he know?
(Funeral bell)
VOICE
Evans, K. J.
Haines, G. C.
Roberts, I. L.
Moxham, J.
Thomas, H.
Baines, W.
Bazzard, F. H.
Beer, L. J.
Bucknell, R.
Tywford, G.
Vagg, E. A.
Wright, G. (Fade)
NARRATOR
Then I tacked down the snowblind hill, a cat-o’-nine-gales whipping from the sea, and, white and eiderdowned in the smothering flurry, people padded past me up and down like prowling featherbeds. And I plodded through the ankle-high one cloud that foamed the town, into flat Gower Street, its buildings melted, and along long Helen’s Road. Now my search was leading me back to the seashore. (Noise of sea, softly)