by Dylan Thomas
NARRATOR
Only two living creatures stood on the promenade, near the cenotaph, facing the tossed crystal sea: a man in a chewed muffler and a ratting cap, and an angry dog of a mixed make. The man dithered in the cold, beat his bare blue hands together, waited for some sign from sea or snow; the dog shouted at the weather, and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Mumbles Head. But when the man and I talked together, the dog piped down and fixed his eyes on me, blaming me for the snow. The man spoke towards the sea. Year in, year out, whatever the weather, once in the daytime, once in the dark, he always came to look at the sea. He knew all the dogs and boys and old men who came to see the sea, who ran or gambolled on the sand or stooped at the edge of the waves as though over a wild, wide, rolling ash-can. He knew the lovers who went to lie in the sandhills, the striding masculine women who roared at their terriers like tiger tamers, the loafing men whose work it was in the world to observe the great employment of the sea. He said:
PROMENADE-MAN
Oh yes, yes, I remember him well, but I didn’t know what was his name. I don’t know the names of none of the sandboys. They don’t know mine. About fourteen or fifteen years old, you said, with a little red cap. And he used to play by Vivian’s Stream. He used to dawdle in the arches, you said, and lark about on the railway-lines and holler at the old sea. He’d mooch about the dunes and watch the tankers and the tugs and the banana boats come out of the docks. He was going to run away to sea, he said. I know. On Saturday afternoon he’d go down to the sea when it was a long way out, and hear the foghorns though he couldn’t see the ships. And on Sunday nights, after chapel, he’d be swaggering with his pals along the prom, whistling after the girls. (Titter)
GIRL
Does your mother know you’re out? Go away now. Stop following us. (Another girl titters)
GIRL
Don’t you say nothing, Hetty, you’re only encouraging. No thank you, Mr Cheeky, with your cut-glass accent and your father’s trilby! I don’t want no walk on no sands. What d’you say? Ooh listen to him, Het, he’s swallowed a dictionary. No, I don’t want to go with nobody up no lane in the moonlight, see, and I’m not a baby-snatcher neither. I seen you going to school along Terrace Road, Mr Glad-Eye, with your little satchel and wearing your red cap and all. You seen me wearing my …no you never. Hetty, mind your glasses! Hetty Harris, you’re as bad as them. Oh go away and do your homework, see. Cheek! Hetty Harris, don’t you let him! Oooh, there’s brazen! Well, just to the end of the prom, if you like. No further, mind …
PROMENADE-MAN
Oh yes, I knew him well. I’ve known him by the thousands …
NARRATOR
Even now, on the frozen foreshore, a high, far cry of boys, all like the boy I sought, slid on the glass of the streams and snowballed each other and the sky. Then I went on my way from the sea, up Brynmill Terrace and into Glanbrydan Avenue where Bert Trick had kept a grocer’s shop and, in the kitchen, threatened the annihilation of the ruling classes over sandwiches and jelly and blancmange. And I came to the shops and houses of the Uplands. Here and around here it was that the journey had begun of the one I was pursuing through his past.
(Old piano cinema-music in background)
FIRST VOICE
Here was once the flea-pit picture-house where he whooped for the scalping Indians with Jack Basset and banged for the rustlers’ guns.
NARRATOR
Jackie Basset, killed.
THIRD VOICE
Here once was Mrs Ferguson’s, who sold the best gob-stoppers and penny packets full of surprises and a sweet kind of glue.
FIRST VOICE
In the fields behind Cwmdonkin Drive, the Murrays chased him and all cats.
SECOND VOICE
No fires now where the outlaws’ fires burned and the paradisiacal potatoes roasted in the embers.
THIRD VOICE
In the Graig beneath Town Hill he was a lonely killer hunting the wolves (or rabbits) and the red Sioux tribe (or Mitchell brothers).
(Fade cinema-music into background of children’s voices reciting, in unison, the names of the counties of Wales)
FIRST VOICE
In Mirador School he learned to read and count. Who made the worst raffia doilies? Who put water in Joyce’s galoshes, every morning prompt as prompt? In the afternoons, when the children were good, they read aloud from Struwelpeter. And when they were bad, they sat alone in the empty classroom, hearing, from above them, the distant, terrible, sad music of the late piano lesson.
(The children’s voices fade. The piano lesson continues in background)
NARRATOR
And I went up, through the white Grove, into Cwmdonkin Park, the snow still sailing and the childish, lonely, remembered music fingering on in the suddenly gentle wind. Dusk was folding the Park around, like another, darker snow. Soon the bell would ring for the closing of the gates, though the Park was empty. The park-keeper walked by the reservoir, where swans had glided, on his white rounds. I walked by his side and asked him my questions, up the swathed drives past buried beds and loaded utterly still furred and birdless trees towards the last gate. He said:
PARK-KEEPER
Oh yes, yes, I knew him well. He used to climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of. Cut branches off the trees. Carve words on the benches. Pull up moss in the rockery, go snip through the dahlias. Fight in the bandstand. Climb the elms and moon up the top like a owl. Light fires in the bushes. Play on the green bank. Oh yes, I knew him well. I think he was happy all the time. I’ve known him by the thousands.
NARRATOR
We had reached the last gate. Dusk drew around us and the town. I said: What has become of him now?
PARK-KEEPER
Dead.
NARRATOR
The Park-keeper said:
(The park bell rings)
PARK-KEEPER
Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead.
The Followers
It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking goloshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind—
‘Night, Mr Macey.’
‘Going my way, Charlie?’
‘Ooh, there’s a pig of a night!’
‘Good night, Mr Swan.’—
and older men, clinging on to the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fond, fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.
Young women from the offices, who smelt of scent and powder and wet pixie hoods and hair, scuttled, giggling, arm-in-arm, after the hissing trams, and screeched as they splashed their stockings in the puddles rainbowed with oil between the slippery lines.
In a shop window, two girls undressed the dummies:
‘Where you going to-night?’
‘Depends on Arthur. Up she comes.’
‘Mind her cami-knicks, Edna …’
The blinds came down over another window.
A newsboy stood in a doorway, calling the news to nobody, very softly:
‘Earthquake. Earthquake in Japan.’
Water from a chute dripped on to his sacking. He waited in his own pool of rain.
A flat, long girl drifted, snivelling into her hanky, out of a jeweller’s shop, and slowly pulled the steel shutters down with a hooked pole. She looked, in the grey rain, as though she were crying from top to toe.
A silent man and woman, dressed in black, carried the wreaths away from the front of their flower shop into the scented deadly darkness behind the window lights. Then the lights went out.
A man with a balloon tied to his cap pushed a shrouded barrow up a dead end.
A baby with an ancient face sat in its pram outside the wine vaults, quiet, ve
ry wet, peering cautiously all round it.
It was the saddest evening I had ever known.
A young man, with his arm round his girl, passed by me, laughing; and she laughed back, right into his handsome, nasty face. That made the evening sadder still.
I met Leslie at the corner of Crimea Street. We were both about the same age: too young and too old. Leslie carried a rolled umbrella, which he never used, though sometimes he pressed doorbells with it. He was trying to grow a moustache. I wore a check, ratting cap at a Saturday angle. We greeted each other formally:
‘Good evening, old man.’
‘Evening, Leslie.’
‘Right on the dot, boy.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Right on the dot.’
A plump, blonde girl, smelling of wet rabbits, self-conscious even in that dirty night, minced past on high-heeled shoes. The heels clicked, the soles squelched.
Leslie whistled after her, low and admiring.
‘Business first,’ I said.
‘Oh, boy!’ Leslie said.
‘And she’s too fat as well.’
‘I like them corpulent,’ Leslie said. ‘Remember Penelope Bogan? a Mrs too.’
‘Oh, come on. That old bird of Paradise Alley! How’s the exchequer, Les?’
‘One and a penny. How you fixed?’
‘Tanner.’
‘What’ll it be, then? The Compasses?’
‘Free cheese at the Marlborough.’
We walked towards the Marlborough, dodging umbrella spokes, smacked by our windy macs, stained by steaming lamplight, seeing the sodden, blown scourings and street-wash of the town, papers, rags, dregs, rinds, fag-ends, balls of fur, flap, float, and cringe along the gutters, hearing the sneeze and rattle of the bony trams and a ship hoot like a fog-ditched owl in the bay, and Leslie said:
‘What’ll we do after?’
‘We’ll follow someone,’ I said.
‘Remember following that old girl up Kitchener Street? The one who dropped her handbag?’
‘You should have given it back.’
‘There wasn’t anything in it, only a piece of bread-and-jam.’
‘Here we are,’ I said.
The Marlborough saloon was cold and empty. There were notices on the damp walls: No Singing. No Dancing. No Gambling. No Peddlers.
‘You sing,’ I said to Leslie, ‘and I’ll dance, then we’ll have a game of nap and I’ll peddle my braces.’
The barmaid, with gold hair and two gold teeth in front, like a well-off rabbit’s, was blowing on her nails and polishing them on her black marocain. She looked up as we came in, then blew on her nails again and polished them without hope.
‘You can tell it isn’t Saturday night,’ I said. ‘Evening, Miss. Two pints.’
‘And a pound from the till,’ Leslie said.
‘Give us your one-and-a-penny, Les,’ I whispered and then said aloud: ‘Anybody can tell it isn’t Saturday night. Nobody sick.’
‘Nobody here to be sick,’ Leslie said.
The peeling, liver-coloured room might never have been drunk in at all. Here, commercials told jokes and had Scotches and sodas with happy, dyed, port-and-lemon women; dejected regulars grew grand and muzzy in the corners, inventing their pasts, being rich, important, and loved; reprobate grannies in dustbin black cackled and nipped; influential nobodies revised the earth; a party, with earrings, called ‘Frilly Willy’ played the crippled piano, which sounded like a hurdy-gurdy playing under water, until the publican’s nosy wife said, ‘No.’ Strangers came and went, but mostly went. Men from the valleys dropped in for nine or ten; sometimes there were fights; and always there was something doing, some argie-bargie, giggle and bluster, horror or folly, affection, explosion, nonsense, peace, some wild goose flying in the boozy air of that comfortless, humdrum nowhere in the dizzy, ditchwater town at the end of the railway lines. But that evening it was the saddest room I had ever known.
Leslie said, in a low voice: ‘Think she’ll let us have one on tick?’
‘Wait a bit, boy,’ I murmured. ‘Wait for her to thaw.’
But the barmaid heard me, and looked up. She looked clean through me, back through my small history to the bed I was born in, then shook her gold head.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Leslie as we walked up Crimea Street in the rain, ‘but I feel kind of depressed to-night.’
‘It’s the saddest night in the world,’ I said.
We stopped, soaked and alone, to look at the stills outside the cinema we called the Itch-pit. Week after week, for years and years, we had sat on the edges of the springless seats there, in the dank but snug, flickering dark, first with toffees and monkey-nuts that crackled for the dumb guns, and then with cigarettes: a cheap special kind that would make a fire-swallower cough up the cinders of his heart. ‘Let’s go in and see Lon Chaney,’ I said, ‘and Richard Talmadge and Milton Sills and… and Noah Beery,’ I said, ‘and Richard Dix… and Slim Summerville and Hoot Gibson.’
We both sighed.
‘Oh, for our vanished youth,’ I said.
We walked on heavily, with wilful feet, splashing the passers-by.
‘Why don’t you open your brolly?’ I said.
‘It won’t open. You try.’
We both tried, and the umbrella suddenly bellied out, the spokes tore through the soaking cover; the wind danced its tatters; it wrangled above us in the wind like a ruined, mathematical bird. We tried to tug it down: an unseen, new spoke sprang through its ragged ribs. Leslie dragged it behind him, along the pavement, as though he had shot it.
A girl called Dulcie, scurrying to the Itch-pit, sniggered ‘Hallo,’ and we stopped her.
‘A rather terrible thing has happened,’ I said to her. She was so silly that, even when she was fifteen, we had told her to eat soap to make her straw hair crinkle, and Les took a piece from the bathroom, and she did.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘you broke your gamp.’
‘No, you’re wrong there,’ Leslie said. ‘It isn’t our umbrella at all. It fell off the roof. You feel,’ he said. ‘You can feel it fell off the roof.’ She took the umbrella gingerly by its handle.
‘There’s someone up there throwing umbrellas down,’ I said. ‘It may be serious.’
She began to titter, and then grew silent and anxious as Leslie said: ‘You never know. It might be walking-sticks next.’
‘Or sewing-machines,’ I said.
‘You wait here, Dulce, and we’ll investigate,’ Leslie said.
We hurried on down the street, turned a blowing corner and then ran.
Outside Rabiotti’s café, Leslie said: ‘It isn’t fair on Dulcie.’ We never mentioned it again.
A wet girl brushed by. Without a word, we followed her. She cantered, long-legged, down Inkerman Street and through Paradise Passage, and we were at her heels.
‘I wonder what’s the point in following people,’ Leslie said, ‘it’s kind of daft. It never gets you anywhere. All you do is follow them home and then try to look through the window and see what they’re doing and mostly there’s curtains anyway. I bet nobody else does things like that.’
‘You never know,’ I said. The girl turned into St Augustus Crescent, which was a wide lamplit mist. ‘People are always following people. What shall we call her?’
‘Hermione Weatherby,’ Leslie said. He was never wrong about names. Hermione was fey and stringy, and walked like a long gym-mistress, full of love, through the stinging rain.
‘You never know. You never know what you’ll find out. Perhaps she lives in a huge house with all her sisters—’
‘How many?’
‘Seven. All full of love. And when she gets home they all change into kimonos and lie on divans with music and whisper to each other and all they’re doing is waiting for somebody like us to walk in, lost, and then they’ll all chatter round us like starlings and put us in kimonos too, and we’ll never leave the house until we die. Perhaps it’s so beautiful and soft and noisy—like
a warm bath full of birds…’
‘I don’t want birds in my bath,’ said Leslie. ‘Perhaps she’ll slit her throat if they don’t draw the blinds. I don’t care what happens so long as it’s interesting.’
She slip-slopped round a corner into an avenue where the neat trees were sighing and the cosy windows shone.
‘I don’t want old feathers in the tub,’ Leslie said.
Hermione turned in at number thirteen, Beach-view.
‘You can see the beach all right,’ Leslie said, ‘if you got a periscope.’
We waited on the pavement opposite, under a bubbling lamp, as Hermione opened her door, and then we tiptoed across and down the gravel path and were at the back of the house, outside an uncurtained window.
Hermione’s mother, a round, friendly, owlish woman in a pinafore, was shaking a chip-pan on the kitchen stove.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘Ssh!’
We edged to the side of the window as Hermione came into the kitchen. She was old, nearly thirty, with a mouse-brown shingle and big earnest eyes. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles and a sensible, tweed costume, and a white shirt with a trim bow-tie. She looked as though she tried to look like a secretary in domestic films, who had only to remove her spectacles and have her hair cherished, and be dressed like a silk dog’s dinner, to turn into a dazzler and make her employer Warner Baxter, gasp, woo, and marry her; but if Hermione took off her glasses, she wouldn’t be able to tell if he was Warner Baxter or the man who read the meters.
We stood so near the window, we could hear the chips spitting.
‘Have a nice day in the office, dear? There’s weather,’ Hermione’s mother said, worrying the chip-pan.
‘What’s her name, Les?’
‘Hetty.’
Everything there in the warm kitchen, from the tea-caddy and the grandmother clock, to the tabby that purred like a kettle, was good, dull, and sufficient.
‘Mr Truscott was something awful,’ Hermione said as she put on her slippers.