Under Milk Wood
Page 11
BESSIE BIGHEAD
Peg, Meg, Buttercup, Moll,
Fan from the Castle,
Theodosia and Daisy.
They bow their heads.
Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Liareggub and you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first lost love. Conceived in Milk Wood, born in a barn, wrapped in paper, left on a doorstep, big-headed and bass-voiced she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen kissed her when she wasn’t looking because he was dared. Now in the light she’ll work, sing, milk, say the cows’ sweet names and sleep until the night sucks out her soul and spits it into the sky. In her life-long love light, holily Bessie milks the fond lake-eyed cows as dusk showers slowly down over byre, sea and town.
Utah Watkins curses through the farmyard on a carthorse.
UTAH WATKINS
Gallop, you bleeding cripple!
and the huge horse neighs softly as though he had given it a lump of sugar.
Now the town is dusk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk; and dusk and ceremonial dust, and night’s first darkening snow, and the sleep of birds, drift under and through the live dusk of this place of love. Llareggub is the capital of dusk.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, at the first drop of the dusk-shower, seals all her sea-view doors, draws the germ-free blinds, sits, erect as a dry dream on a high-backed hygienic chair and wills herself to cold, quick sleep. At once, at twice, Mr Ogmore and Mr Pritchard, who all dead day long have been gossiping like ghosts in the woodshed, planning the loveless destruction of their glass widow, reluctantly sigh and sidle into her clean house.
MR PRITCHARD
You first, Mr Ogmore.
MR OGMORE
After you, Mr Pritchard.
MR PRITCHARD
No, no, Mr. Ogmore. You widowed her first.
And in through the keyhole, with tears where their eyes once were, they ooze and grumble.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Husbands,
she says in her sleep. There is acid love in her voice for one of the two shambling phantoms. Mr Ogmore hopes that it is not for him. So does Mr Pritchard.
I love you both.
MR OGMORE [With terror]
Oh, Mrs Ogmore.
MR PRITCHARD [With horror]
Oh, Mrs Pritchard.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD
Soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your tasks in order.
MR OGMORE AND MR PRITCHARD
We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas.
MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD [Coldly]
And then you must take them off.
Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose Cottage, still lying in clover, listens to the nannygoats chew, draws circles of lipstick round her nipples.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE
I’m fast. I’m a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I’m seventeen. I’ll go to hell,
she tells the goats.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE
You just wait. I’ll sin till I blow up!
She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen; the goats champ and sneer.
And at the doorway of Bethesda House, the Reverend Jenkins recites to Llareggub Hill his sunset poem.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.
And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I’m sure is always touch-and-go.
We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.
O let us see another day!
Bless us this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye—but just for now!
Jack Black prepares once more to meet his Satan in the Wood. He grinds his night-teeth, closes his eyes, climbs into his religious trousers, their flies sewn up with cobbler’s thread, and pads out, torched and bibled, grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk.
JACK BLACK
Off to Gomorrah!
And Lily Smalls is up to Nogood Boyo in the wash-house.
Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the week, goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon as he does every night.
CHERRY OWEN
I always say she’s got two husbands,
says Cherry Owen,
one drunk
and one sober.
And Mrs Cherry simply says
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And aren’t I a lucky woman? Because I love them both.
SINBAD
Evening, Cherry.
CHERRY OWEN
Evening, Sinbad.
SINBAD
What’ll you have?
CHERRY OWEN
Too much.
SINBAD
The Sailors Arms is always open,
Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,
…oh, Gossamer,
open yours!
Dusk is drowned for ever until tomorrow. It is all at once night now. The windy town is a hill of windows, and from the larrupped waves the lights of the lamps in the windows call back the day and the dead that have run away to sea. All over the calling dark, babies and old men are bribed and lullabied to sleep.
FIRST WOMAN’S VOICE
Hushabye, baby, the sandman is coming …
SECOND WOMAN’S VOICE [Singing]
Rockabye, grandpa, in the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come grandpa, whiskers and all.
Or their daughters cover up the old unwinking men like parrots, and in their little dark in the lit and bustling young kitchen corners, all night long they watch, beady-eyed, the long night through in case death catches them asleep.
Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms, powder and curl for the Dance of the ‘World.
[Accordion music — dim]
They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or come-hithering faces for the young men in the street outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.
[Accordion music louder, then fading under]
The drinkers in the Sailors Arms drink to the failure of the dance.
FIRST DRINKER
Down with the waltzing and skipping.
SECOND DRINKER
Dancing isn’t natural,
righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed seventeen pints of flat, warm, thin, ‘Welsh, bitter beer.
A farmer’s lantern glimmers, a spark on Llareggub hillside.
Llareggub Hill, writes the Reverend Jenkins in his poem-room, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in the region of Llareggub before the Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards made themselves a wife out of flowers.
[Accordion music out]
Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:
MR WALDO
In Pembroke City when I was young
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley sweep.
Six cold pennies he gave me
Not a farthing more or less
And all the fare I could afford
Was parsnip gin and watercress.
I did not need a knife and fork
Or a bib up to my chin
To dine on a dish of watercress
And a jug of parsnip gin.
Did you ever hear a growing boy
To live so cruel cheap
> On grub that has no flesh and bones
And liquor that makes you weep?
Sweep sweep chimbley sweep, I wept through Pembroke City
Poor and barefoot in the snow
Till a kind young woman took pity.
Poor little chimbley sweep she said
Black as the ace of spades
O nobody’s swept my chimbley
Since my husband went his ways.
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
She sighed to me with a blush
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
Bring along your chimbley brush!
Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk. Like a cat, he sees in the dark. Through the voyages of his tears, he sails to see the dead.
CAPTAIN CAT
Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
Still dancing.
CAPTAIN CAT
Johah Jarvis
THIRD DROWNED
Still.
Curly Bevan’s skull
ROSIE PROBERT
Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.
The dead come out in their Sunday best.
Listen to the night breaking.
Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees Bach lying on a tombstone.
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian!
CHERRY OWEN [Drunkenly]
Who?
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach, fach.
CHERRY OWEN
To hell with you,
says Cherry Owen who is resting on the tombstone on his way home.
Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from one another at the top and the sea end of the town write their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm White Book of Llareggub you will find the little maps of the islands of their contentment.
MYFANWY PRICE
Oh, my Mog, I am yours for ever.
And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat neverdull room which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.
MOG EDWARDS
Come to my arms, Myfanwy.
And he hugs his lovely money to his own heart.
And Mr. Waldo drunk in the dusky wood hugs his lovely Polly Garter under the eyes and rattling tongues of the neighbours and the birds, and he does not care. He smacks his live red lips.
But it is not his name that Polly Garter whispers as she lies under the oak and loves him back. Six feet deep that name sings in the cold earth.
POLLY GARTER [Sings]
But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.
The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood, whose every tree-foot’s cloven in the black glad sight of the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary Ann Sailors, who knows there is Heaven on earth and the chosen people of His kind fire in Llareggub’s land, that is the fairday farmhands’ wantoning ignorant chapel of bridesbeds, and, to the Reveren Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken wood springs awake for the second dark time this one Spring day.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
Under Milk Wood (title): After a period in which Thomas referred to the work under various forms of the title 'The Town That Was Made' (see Introduction), the working title became 'Llareggub Hill' (abbreviated to 'Llareggub' when the first half was published in Botteghe Oscure in April 1952). John Malcolm Brinnin records a conversation with Thomas in Laugharne in September 1952: 'When I suggested that perhaps he might find a better title than Llareggub Hill for his "play for voices", he agreed at once. The joke in the present title was a small and childish one, he felt; beyond that, the word "Llareggub" would be too thick and forbidding to attract American audiences. "What about Under Milk Wood?" he said, and I said, "Fine," and the new work was christened on the spot' (Dylan Thomas in American, Dent 1956, p. 152). See note on 'Llareggub Hill', p. 66 below.
With the title Under Milk Wood, Thomas probably had in mind the way in which Laugharne (especially the lower part of the village) lies 'under' Sir John's Hill, a wooded headland on which cows graze (cf. 'at a wood's dancing hoof' in the Laugharne-based poem, 'Prologue', and 'Sir John's elmed/Hill' in the poem 'Over Sir John's hill'). If so, Sir John's Hill is what, in his own working sketch of Llareggub (opposite), Thomas named 'Llareggub Hill', with 'Salt Lake Farm' on its summit, just as the real Sir John's Hill is topped by Salt House Farm. At the same time, of course, Under Milk Wood wittily echoes the archetypal pastoral connotations of a phrase in Amiens' song in Shakespeare's As You Like It that Thomas Hardy also took as a title: Under the Greenwood Tree.
A Play for Voices (subtitle): Though there is no manuscript authority for using the phrase 'Play for Voices' as an actual subtitle, it does seem to have been Thomas's own phrase, certainly as recorded by John Malcolm Brinnin in this memory of summer 1951 at Laugharne: 'What he most wanted me to hear were fragments of a "kind of play for voices" he was thinking about' (Dylan Thomas in America, p. 103). In a letter to Marguerite Caetani in October 1951, Thomas called it 'an impression for voices' (Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris, Dent 1985, p. 813).
p. 3 To begin at the beginning: Cf. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Bk. 2, ch. 15: 'Commence … at the commencement' and 'All the village … withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the village sleeps; all the village dreams …' The very first words of Under Milk Wood show what is often, throughout the play, a mock-heroic humor that quotes texts more obviously serious than itself. But cf. also the opening of 'Margate—Past and Present' (1946): '1ST VOICE: Well, where do we being? Got to begin somewhere' — a consideration repeated in another 1946 broadcast in the form of its very title: 'How to Begin a Story' (The Broadcasts, ed. Ralph Maud, Dent 1991, pp. 104, 122).
p. 3 the sloeblack, slow, black: The 'sloe' image, a favorite with Gerard Manley Hopkins, reminds us also of Hopkins's more general influence on the play's stylistic delight in accumulating adjectives and nouns. In this particular phrase, Thomas echoes Hopkins's fondness for paragrams (consecutive words changing only one sound or letter), e.g. Hopkins's 'How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe'.
p. 3 Captain Cat: The name raises the old idea that cats are able to see in the dark. Captain Cat, though blind, is, along with the narrator, the means whereby we 'see' a world that the voices of the characters cannot entirely reveal.
p. 3 the shops in mourning: Apart from the darkness of the night itself, the phrase evokes the 'mourning' effect of the blinds drawn overnight in shop windows. Shop blinds were also traditionally drawn during funerals.
p. 3 the Welfare Hall: Welfare Halls — a feature mainly of coal mining South Wales, established from the 1920s onwards to house 'welfare' services such as libraries, recreation rooms and clinics that had previously been left to charities to provide — were in the 1950s still an important focus of community life. The fact that they were often also Memorial Halls, dedicated to the dead of two World Wars, is part of Thomas's reference to 'widows' weeds'.
p. 3 jolly, rodgered: The Jolly Roger, the ensign of pirates was a black flag with white skull-and-cross-bones. Thomas's punctuation also gives 'rodger' ('roger') its slang sexual meaning.
p. 4 Llareggub Hill: 'Llareggub' is famous as a word that can be read backwards. Such reversible concoctions figured prominently in the compulsive word-games the young Thomas played with his Swansea friend Daniel Jones, who coined the word 'paling ram' for the form. An example, in a spoof broadcast, was 'Zoilreb Pogoho will read his poem Ffeifokorp' (Daniel Jones, My Friend Dylan Thomas, Dent 1977, p. 24). 'Llareggub' first appeared in the early short stories of the 1930s, 'The Orchards' and 'The Holy Six'. The latter also used anagrams as the names of the characters: 'Stul' (Lust), 'Edger' (Greed), 'Rafe' (Fear) etc. As it happens, among the worksheets for Under Milk Wood now at Texas is a note in whi
ch Thomas asks himself 'what have I missed out?' and then lists the following: 'Incest/Greed/Hate/Envy/Spite/Malice'. Nothing makes clearer the emotional distance he travelled between the raw treatment of such themes in early surrealistic short stories and their comic treatment (or omission) in the pastoral mod of Under Milk Wood.
p. 4 the four-ale: A public house selling four types of ale. In the May 1954 premiere in New York, Thomas as First Voice says 'four-ale bar', obviously to help clarify the reference for an American audience (Caedmon Records TC2005).
p.4 with seaweed on its hooves: Possibly a reference to the old tradition of paddling the hooves of mules or horses drawing a funeral cart. It is the same sense of muted reverence that makes night, a few lines later, go 'gloved and folded' through the graveyard of Bethesda chapel. Cf. the 'muffle-toed tap tap', involving both funeral and mule, at the opening of the poem 'After the funeral.'