by Dylan Thomas
‘Where’s her kimono?’ Leslie said.
‘Here’s a nice cup of tea,’ said Hetty.
‘Everything’s nice in that old hole,’ said Leslie, grumbling. ‘Where’s the seven sisters like starlings?’
It began to rain much more heavily. It bucketed down on the black back yard, and the little comfy kennel of a house, and us, and the hidden, hushed town, where, even now, in the haven of the Marlborough, the submarine piano would be tinning ‘Daisy,’ and the happy henna’d women squealing into their port.
Hetty and Hermione had their supper. Two drowned boys watched them enviously.
‘Put a drop of Worcester on the chips,’ Leslie whispered; and by God she did.
‘Doesn’t anything happen anywhere?’ I said, ‘in the whole wide world? I think the News of the World is all made up. Nobody murders no one. There isn’t any sin any more, or love, or death, or pearls and divorces and mink-coats or anything, or putting arsenic in the cocoa…’
‘Why don’t they put on some music for us,’ Leslie said, ‘and do a dance? It isn’t every night they got two fellows watching them in the rain. Not every night, anyway!’
All over the dripping town, small lost people with nowhere to go and nothing to spend were gooseberrying in the rain outside wet windows, but nothing happened.
‘I’m getting pneumonia,’ Leslie said.
The cat and the fire were purring, grandmother time tick-tocked our lives away. The supper was cleared, and Hetty and Hermione, who had not spoken for many minutes, they were so confident and close in their little lighted box, looked at one another and slowly smiled.
They stood still in the decent, purring kitchen, facing one another.
‘There’s something funny going to happen,’ I whispered very softly.
‘It’s going to begin,’ Leslie said.
We did not notice the sour, racing rain any more.
The smiles stayed on the faces of the two still, silent women.
‘It’s going to begin.’
And we heard Hetty say in a small secret voice: ‘Bring out the album, dear.’
Hermione opened a cupboard and brought out a big, stiff-coloured photograph album, and put it in the middle of the table. Then she and Hetty sat down at the table, side by side, and Hermione opened the album.
‘That’s Uncle Eliot who died in Porthcawl, the one who had the cramp,’ said Hetty.
They looked with affection at Uncle Eliot, but we could not see him.
‘That’s Martha-the-woolshop, you wouldn’t remember her, dear, it was wool, wool, wool, with her all the time; she wanted to be buried in her jumper, the mauve one, but her husband put his foot down. He’d been in India. That’s your Uncle Morgan,’ Hetty said, ‘one of the Kidwelly Morgans, remember him in the snow?’
Hermione turned a page. ‘And that’s Myfanwy, she got queer all of a sudden, remember. It was when she was milking. That’s your cousin Jim, the Minister, until they found out. And that’s our Beryl,’ Hetty said.
But she spoke all the time like somebody repeating a lesson: a well-loved lesson she knew by heart.
We knew that she and Hermione were only waiting.
Then Hermione turned another page. And we knew, by their secret smiles, that this was what they had been waiting for.
‘My sister Katinka,’ Hetty said.
‘Auntie Katinka,’ Hermione said. They bent over the photograph.
‘Remember that day in Aberystwyth, Katinka?’ Hetty said softly. ‘The day we went on the choir outing.’
‘I wore my new white dress,’ a new voice said.
Leslie clutched at my hand.
‘And a straw hat with birds,’ said the clear, new voice.
Hermione and Hetty were not moving their lips.
‘I was always a one for birds on my hat. Just the plumes of course. It was August the third, and I was twenty-three.’
‘Twenty-three come October, Katinka,’ Hetty said.
‘That’s right, love,’ the voice said. ‘Scorpio I was. And we met Douglas Pugh on the Prom and he said: “You look like a queen to-day, Katinka,” he said, “You look like a queen, Katinka,” he said. Why are those two boys looking in at the window?’
We ran up the gravel drive, and around the corner of the house, and into the avenue and out on to St Augustus Crescent. The rain roared down to drown the town. There we stopped for breath. We did not speak or look at each other. Then we walked on through the rain. At Victoria corner, we stopped again.
‘Good night, old man,’ Leslie said.
‘Good night,’ I said.
And we went our different ways.
A Story
If you can call it a story. There’s no real beginning or end and there’s very little in the middle. It is all about a day’s outing, by charabanc, to Porthcawl, which, of course, the charabanc never reached, and it happened when I was so high and much nicer.
I was staying at the time with my uncle and his wife. Although she was my aunt, I never thought of her as anything but the wife of my uncle, partly because he was so big and trumpeting and red-hairy and used to fill every inch of the hot little house like an old buffalo squeezed into an airing cupboard, and partly because she was so small and silk and quick and made no noise at all as she whisked about on padded paws, dusting the china dogs, feeding the buffalo, setting the mousetraps that never caught her; and once she sleaked out of the room, to squeak in a nook or nibble in the hayloft, you forgot she had ever been there.
But there he was, always, a steaming hulk of an uncle, his braces straining like hawsers, crammed behind the counter of the tiny shop at the front of the house, and breathing like a brass band; or guzzling and blustery in the kitchen over his gutsy supper, too big for everything except the great black boats of his boots. As he ate, the house grew smaller; he billowed out over the furniture, the loud check meadow of his waistcoat littered, as though after a picnic, with cigarette ends, peelings, cabbage stalks, birds’ bones, gravy; and the forest fire of his hair crackled among the hooked hams from the ceiling. She was so small she could hit him only if she stood on a chair, and every Saturday night at half past ten he would lift her up, under his arm, on to a chair in the kitchen so that she could hit him on the head with whatever was handy, which was always a china dog. On Sundays, and when pickled, he sang high tenor, and had won many cups.
The first I heard of the annual outing was when I was sitting one evening on a bag of rice behind the counter, under one of my uncle’s stomachs, reading an advertisement for sheep-dip, which was all there was to read. The shcp was full of my uncle, and when Mr Benjamin Franklyn, Mr Weazley, Noah Bowen, and Will Sentry came in, I thought it would burst. It was like all being together in a drawer that smelt of cheese and turps, and twist tobacco and sweet biscuits and snuff and waistcoat. Mr Benjamin Franklyn said that he had collected enough money for the charabanc and twenty cases of pale ale and a pound apiece over that he would distribute among the members of the outing when they first stopped for refreshment, and he was about sick and tired, he said, of being followed by Will Sentry.
‘All day long, wherever I go,’ he said, ‘he’s after me like a collie with one eye. I got a shadow of my own and a dog. I don’t need no Tom, Dick, or Harry pursuing me with his dirty muffler on.’
Will Sentry blushed, and said: ‘It’s only oily. I got a bicycle.’
‘A man has no privacy at all,’ Mr Franklyn went on. ‘I tell you he sticks so close I’m afraid to go out the back in case I sit in his lap. It’s a wonder to me,’ he said, ‘he don’t follow me into bed at night.’
‘Wife won’t let,’ Will Sentry said.
And that started Mr Franklyn off again, and they tried to soothe him down by saying: ‘Don’t you mind Will Sentry’… ‘No harm in old Will’… ‘He’s only keeping an eye on the money, Benjie.’
‘Aren’t I honest?’ asked Mr Franklyn in surprise. There was no answer for some time, then Noah Bowen said: ‘You know what the committee is. Ever since
Bob the Fiddle they don’t feel safe with a new treasurer.’
‘Do you think I’ going to drink the outing funds, like Bob the Fiddle did?’ said Mr Franklyn.
‘You might,’ said my uncle slowly.
‘I resign,’ said Mr Franklyn.
‘Not with our money you won’t,’ Will Sentry said.
‘Who put dynamite in the salmon pool?’ said Mr Weazley, but nobody took any notice of him. And, after a time, they all began to play cards in the thickening dusk of the hot, cheesy shop, and my uncle blew and bugled whenever he won, and Mr Weazley grumbled like a dredger, and I fell to sleep on the gravy-scented mountain meadow of uncle’s waistcoat.
On Sunday evening, after Bethesda, Mr Franklyn walked into the kitchen where my uncle and I were eating sardines with spoons from the tin because it was Sunday and his wife would not let us play draughts. She was somewhere in the kitchen, too. Perhaps she was inside the grandmother clock, hanging from the weights and breathing. Then, a second later, the door opened again and Will Sentry edged into the room, twiddling his hard, round hat. He and Mr Franklyn sat down on the settee, stiff and moth-balled and black in their chapel and funeral suits.
‘I brought the list,’ said Mr Franklyn. ‘Every member fully paid. You ask Will Sentry.’
My uncle put on his spectacles, wiped his whiskery mouth with a handkerchief big as a Union Jack, laid down his spoon of sardines, took Mr Franklyn’s list of names, removed the spectacles so that he could read, and then ticked the names off one by one.
‘Enoch Davies. Aye. He’s good with his fists. You never know. Little Gerwain. Very melodious bass. Mr Cadwalladwr. That’s right. He can tell opening time better than my watch. Mr Weazley. Of course. He’s been to Paris. Pity he suffers so much in the charabanc. Stopped us nine times last year between the Beehive and the Red Dragon. Noah Bowen, ah, very peaceable. He’s got a tongue like a turtle-dove. Never a argument with Noah Bowen. Jenkins Loughor. Keep him off economics. It cost us a plate-glass window. And ten pints for the Sergeant. Mr Jervis. Very tidy.’
‘He tried to put a pig in the charra,’ Will Sentry said.
‘Live and let live,’ said my uncle.
Will Sentry blushed.
‘Sinbad the Sailor’s Arms. Got to keep in with him. Old O. Jones.’
‘Why old O. Jones?’ said Will Sentry.
‘Old O. Jones always goes,’ said my uncle.
I looked down at the kitchen table. The tin of sardines was gone. By Gee, I said to myself, Uncle’s wife is quick as a flash.
‘Cuthbert Johnny Fortnight. Now there’s a card,’ said my uncle.
‘He whistles after women,’ Will Sentry said.
‘So do you,’ said Mr Benjamin Franklyn, ‘in your mind.’
My uncle at last approved the whole list, pausing only to say, when he came across one name: ‘If we weren’t a Christian community, we’d chuck that Bob the Fiddle in the sea.’
‘We can do that in Porthcawl,’ said Mr Franklyn, and soon after that he went, Will Sentry no more than an inch behind him, their Sunday-bright boots squeaking on the kitchen cobbles.
And then, suddenly, there was my uncle’s wife standing in front of the dresser, with a china dog in one hand. By Gee, I said to myself again, did you ever see such a woman, if that’s what she is. The lamps were not lit yet in the kitchen and she stood in a wood of shadows, with the plates on the dresser behind her shining—like pink-and-white eyes.
‘If you go on that outing on Saturday, Mr Thomas,’ she said to my uncle in her small, silk voice, ‘I’m going home to my mother’s.’
Holy Mo, I thought, she’s got a mother. Now that’s one old bald mouse of a hundred and five I won’t be wanting to meet in a dark lane.
‘It’s me or the outing, Mr Thomas.’
I would have made my choice at once, but it was almost half a minute before my uncle said: ‘Well, then, Sarah, it’s the outing, my love.’ He lifted her up, under his arm, on to a chair in the kitchen, and she hit him on the head with the china dog. Then he lifted her down again, and then I said good night.
For the rest of the week my uncle’s wife whisked quiet and quick round the house with her darting duster, my uncle blew and bugled and swole, and I kept myself busy all the time being up to no good. And then at breakfast time on Saturday morning, the morning of the outing, I found a note on the kitchen table. It said: ‘There’s some eggs in the pantry. Take your boots off before you go to bed.’ My uncle’s wife had gone, as quick as a flash.
When my uncle saw the note, he tugged out the flag of his handkerchief and blew such a hubbub of trumpets that the plates on the dresser shook. ‘It’s the same every year,’ he said. And then he looked at me. ‘But this year it’s different. You’ll have to come on the outing, too, and what the members will say I dare not think.’
The charabanc drew up outside, and when the members of the outing saw my uncle and me squeeze out of the shop together, both of us cat-licked and brushed in our Sunday best, they snarled like a zoo.
‘Are you bringing a boy? asked Mr Benjamin Franklyn as we climbed into the charabanc. He looked at me with horror.
‘Boys is nasty,’ said Mr Weazley.
‘He hasn’t paid his contributions,’ Will Sentry said.
‘No room for boys. Boys get sick in charabancs.’
‘So do you, Enoch Davies,’ said my uncle.
‘Might as well bring women’.
The way they said it, women were worse than boys.
‘Better than bringing grandfathers.’
‘Grandfathers is nasty too,’ said Mr Weazley.
‘What can we do with him when we stop for refreshments?’
‘I’m a grandfather,’ said Mr Weazley.
‘Twenty-six minutes to opening time,’ shouted an old man in a panama hat, not looking at a watch. They forgot me at once.
‘Good old Mr Cadwalladwr,’ they cried, and the charabanc started off down the village street.
A few cold women stood at their doorways, grimly watching us go. A very small boy waved good-bye, and his mother boxed his ears. It was a beautiful August morning.
We were out of the village, and over the bridge, and up the hill towards Steeplehat Wood when Mr Franklyn, with his list of names in his hand, called out loud: ‘Where’s old O. Jones?’
‘Where’s old O?’
‘We’ve left old O behind.’
‘Can’t go without old O.’
And though Mr Weazley hissed all the way, we turned and drove back to the village, where, outside the Prince of Wales, old O. Jones was waiting patiently and alone with a canvas bag.
‘I didn’t want to come at all,’ old O. Jones said as they hoisted him into the charabanc and clapped him on the back and pushed him on a seat and stuck a bottle in his hand, ‘but I always go.’ And over the bridge and up the hill and under the deep green wood and along the dusty road we wove, slow cows and ducks flying by, until ‘Stop the bus!’ Mr Weazley cried. ‘I left my teeth on the mantelpiece.’
‘Never you mind,’ they said, ‘you’re not going to bite nobody,’ and they gave him a bottle with a straw.
‘I might want to smile,’ he said.
‘Not you,’ they said.
‘What’s the time, Mr Cadwalladwr?’
‘Twelve minutes to go,’ shouted back the old man in the panama, and they all began to curse him.
The charabanc pulled up outside the Mountain Sheep, a small, unhappy public-house with a thatched roof like a wig with ringworm. From a flagpole by the Gents fluttered the flag of Siam. I knew it was the flag of Siam because of cigarette cards. The landlord stood at the door to welcome us, simpering like a wolf. He was a long, lean, blackfanged man with a greased love-curl and pouncing eyes. ‘What a beautiful August day!’ he said, and touched his love-curl with a claw. That was the way he must have welcomed the Mountain Sheep before he ate it, I said to myself. The members rushed out, bleating, and into the bar.
‘You keep an eye on the charra,’ my un
cle said; ‘see nobody steals it now.’
‘There’s nobody to steal it,’ I said, ‘except some cows,’ but my uncle was gustily blowing his bugle in the bar. I looked at the cows opposite, and they looked at me. There was nothing else for us to do. Forty-five minutes passed, like a very slow cloud. The sun shone down on the lonely road, the lost, unwanted boy, and the lake-eyed cows. In the dark bar they were so happy they were breaking glasses. A Shoni-Onion Breton man, with a beret and a necklace of onions, bicycled down the road and stopped at the door.
‘Quelle un grand matin, monsieur,’ I said.
‘There’s French, boy bach!’ he said.
I followed him down the passage, and peered into the bar. I could hardly recognize the members of the outing. They had all changed colour. Beetroot, rhubarb, and puce, they hollered and rollicked in that dark, damp hole like enormous ancient bad boys, and my uncle surged in the middle, all red whiskers and bellies. On the floor was broken glass and Mr Weazley.
‘Drinks all round,’ cried Bob the Fiddle, a small, absconding man with bright blue eyes and a plump smile.
‘Who’s been robbing the orphans?’
‘Who sold his little babby to the gyppoes?’
‘Trust old Bob, he’ll let you down.’
‘You will have your little joke,’ said Bob the Fiddle, smiling like a razor, ‘but I forgive you, boys.’
Out of the fug and babel I heard: ‘Come out and fight.’
‘No, not now, later.’
‘No, now when I’m in a temper.’
‘Look at Will Sentry, he’s proper snobbled.’
‘Look at his wilful feet.’
‘Look at Mr Weazley lording it on the floor.’
Mr Weazley got up, hissing like a gander. ‘That boy pushed me down deliberate,’ he said, pointing to me at the door, and I slunk away down the passage and out to the mild, good cows. Time clouded over, the cows wondered, I threw a stone at them and they wandered, wondering, away. Then out blew my uncle, ballooning, and one by one the members lumbered after him in a grizzle. They had drunk the Mountain Sheep dry. Mr Weazley had won a string of onions that the Shoni-Onion man raffled in the bar. ‘What’s the good of onions if you left your teeth on the mantelpiece?’ he said. And when I looked through the back window of the thundering charabanc, I saw the pub grow smaller in the distance. And the flag of Siam, from the flagpole by the Gents, fluttered now at half mast.