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Title: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
Author: Thomas, Dylan [Dylan Marlais] (1914-1953)
Date of first publication: 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1954
Date first posted: 27 December 2018
Date last updated: 27 December 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1587

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Mark Akrigg, Howard Ross
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG

by Dylan Thomas

 



TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Peaches
  A Visit to Grandpa's
  Patricia, Edith, and Arnold
  The Fight
  Extraordinary Little Cough
  Just like Little Dogs
  Where Tawe Flows
  Who do you wish was with us?
  Old Garbo
  One Warm Saturday




THE PEACHES


The grass-green cart, with 'J. Jones, Gorsehill' painted shakily on it,
stopped in the cobblestone passage between 'The Hare's Foot' and 'The
Pure Drop.' It was late on an April evening. Uncle Jim, in his black
market suit with a stiff white shirt and no collar, loud new boots, and
a plaid cap, creaked and climbed down. He dragged out a thick wicker
basket from a heap of straw in the corner of the cart and swung it over
his shoulder. I heard a squeal from the basket and saw the tip of a pink
tail curling out as Uncle Jim opened the public door of 'The Pure Drop.'

'I won't be two minutes,' he said to me. The bar was full; two fat women
in bright dresses sat near the door, one with a small, dark child on her
knee; they saw Uncle Jim and nudged up on the bench.

'I'll be out straight away,' he said fiercely, as though I had
contradicted him, 'you stay there quiet.'

The woman without the child raised up her hands. 'Oh, Mr Jones,' she
said in a high laughing voice. She shook like a jelly.

Then the door closed and the voices were muffled.

I sat alone on the shaft of the cart in the narrow passage, staring
through a side window of 'The Hare's Foot.' A stained blind was drawn
half over it. I could see into half of a smoky, secret room, where four
men were playing cards. One man was huge and swarthy, with a handlebar
moustache and a love-curl on his forehead; seated by his side was a
thin, bald, pale old man with his cheeks in his mouth; the faces of the
other two were in shadow. They all drank out of brown pint tankards and
never spoke, laying the cards down with a smack, scraping at their
match-boxes, puffing at their pipes, swallowing unhappily, ringing the
brass bell, ordering more, by a sign of the fingers, from a sour woman
with a flowered blouse and a man's cap.

The passage grew dark too suddenly, the walls crowded in, and the roofs
crouched down. To me, staring timidly there in a dark passage in a
strange town, the swarthy man appeared like a giant in a cage surrounded
by clouds, and the bald old man withered into a black hump with a white
top; two white hands darted out of the corner with invisible cards. A
man with spring-heeled boots and a two-edged knife might be bouncing
towards me from Union Street.

I called, 'Uncle Jim, Uncle Jim,' softly so that he should not hear.

I began to whistle between my teeth, but when I stopped I thought the
sound went hissing on behind me. I climbed down from the shaft and
stepped close to the half-blind window; a hand clawed up the pane to the
tassel of the blind; in the little, packed space between me on the
cobbles and the card-players at the table, I could not tell which side
of the glass was the hand that dragged the blind down slowly. I was cut
from the night by a stained square. A story I had made in the warm, safe
island of my bed, with sleepy midnight Swansea flowing and rolling round
outside the house, came blowing down to me then with a noise on the
cobbles. I remembered the demon in the story, with his wings and hooks,
who clung like a bat to my hair as I battled up and down Wales after a
tall, wise, golden, royal girl from Swansea Convent. I tried to remember
her true name, her proper, long, black-stockinged legs, her giggle and
paper curls, but the hooked wings tore at me and the colour of her hair
and eyes faded and vanished like the grass-green of the cart that was a
dark, grey mountain now standing between the passage walls.

And all this time the old, broad, patient, nameless mare stood without
stirring, not stamping once on the cobbles or shaking her reins. I
called her a good girl and stood on tiptoe to try to stroke her ears as
the door of 'The Pure Drop' swung open and the warm lamplight from the
bar dazzled me and burned my story up. I felt frightened no longer, only
angry and hungry. The two fat women near the door giggled 'Good night,
Mr Jones' out of the rich noise and the comfortable smells. The child
lay curled asleep under the bench. Uncle Jim kissed the two women on the
lips.

'Good night.'

'Good night.'

'Good night.'

Then the passage was dark again.

He backed the mare into Union Street, lurching against her side, cursing
her patience and patting her nose, and we both climbed into the cart.

'There are too many drunken gipsies,' he said as we rolled and rattled
through the flickering, lamp-lit town.

He sang hymns all the way to Gorsehill in an affectionate bass voice,
and conducted the wind with his whip. He did not need to touch the
reins. Once on the rough road, between hedges twisting out to twig the
mare by the bridle and poke our caps, we stopped, at a whispered 'Whoa,'
for uncle to light his pipe and set the darkness on fire and show his
long, red, drunken, fox's face to me, with its bristling side-bushes and
wet, sensitive nose. A white house with a light in one bedroom window
shone in a field on a short hill beyond the road.

Uncle whispered, 'Easy, easy, girl,' to the mare, though she was
standing calmly, and said to me over his shoulder in a suddenly loud
voice: 'A hangman lived there.'

He stamped on the shaft, and we rattled on through a cutting wind. Uncle
shivered, pulling down his cap to hide his ears; but the mare was like a
clumsy statue trotting, and all the demons of my stories, if they
trotted by her side or crowded together and grinned into her eyes, would
not make her shake her head or hurry.

'I wish he'd have hung Mrs Jesus,' uncle said.

Between hymns he cursed the mare in Welsh. The white house was left
behind, the light and the hill were swallowed up.

'Nobody lives there now,' he said.

We drove into the farm-yard of Gorsehill, where the cobbles rang and the
black, empty stables took up the ringing and hollowed it so that we drew
up in a hollow circle of darkness and the mare was a hollow animal and
nothing lived in the hollow house at the end of the yard but two sticks
with faces scooped out of turnips.

'You run and see Annie,' said uncle. 'There'll be hot broth and
potatoes.'

He led the hollow, shaggy statue towards the stable; clop, clop to the
mice-house. I heard locks rattle as I ran to the farm-house door.

The front of the house was the single side of a black shell, and the
arched door was the listening ear. I pushed the door open and walked
into the passage out of the wind. I might have been walking into the
hollow night and the wind, passing through a tall vertical shell on an
inland sea-shore. Then a door at the end of the passage opened; I saw
the plates on the shelves, the lighted lamp on the long, oil-clothed
table, 'Prepare to Meet Thy God' knitted over the fire-place, the
smiling china dogs, the brown-stained settle, the grandmother clock, and
I ran into the kitchen and into Annie's arms.

There was a welcome, then. The clock struck twelve as she kissed me, and
I stood among the shining and striking like a prince taking off his
disguise. One minute I was small and cold, skulking dead-scared down a
black passage in my stiff, best suit, with my hollow belly thumping and
my heart like a time bomb, clutching my grammar school cap, unfamiliar
to myself, a snub-nosed story-teller lost in his own adventures and
longing to be home; the next I was a royal nephew in smart town clothes,
embraced and welcomed, standing in the snug centre of my stories and
listening to the clock announcing me. She hurried me to the seat in the
side of the cavernous fire-place and took off my shoes. The bright lamps
and the ceremonial gongs blazed and rang for me.

She made a mustard bath and strong tea, told me to put on a pair of my
cousin Gwilym's socks and an old coat of uncle's that smelt of rabbit
and tobacco. She fussed and clucked and nodded and told me, as she cut
bread and butter, how Gwilym was still studying to be a minister, and
how Aunt Rach Morgan, who was ninety years old, had fallen on her belly
on a scythe.

Then Uncle Jim came in like the devil with a red face and a wet nose and
trembling, hairy hands. His walk was thick. He stumbled against the
dresser and shook the coronation plates, and a lean cat shot booted out
from the settle corner. Uncle looked nearly twice as tall as Annie. He
could have carried her about under his coat and brought her out
suddenly, a little, brown-skinned, toothless, hunchbacked woman with a
cracked, sing-song voice.

'You shouldn't have kept him out so long,' she said, angry and timid.

He sat down in his special chair, which was the broken throne of a
bankrupt bard, and lit his pipe and stretched his legs and puffed clouds
at the ceiling.

'He might catch his death of cold,' she said.

She talked at the back of his head while he wrapped himself in clouds.
The cat slunk back. I sat at the table with my supper finished, and
found a little empty bottle and a white balloon in the pockets of my
coat.

'Run off to bed, there's a dear,' Annie whispered.

'Can I go and look at the pigs?'

'In the morning, dear,' she said.

So I said good night to Uncle Jim, who turned and smiled at me and
winked through the smoke, and I kissed Annie and lit my candle.

'Good night.'

'Good night.'

'Good night.'

I climbed the stairs; each had a different voice. The house smelt of
rotten wood and damp and animals. I thought that I had been walking
long, damp passages all my life, and climbing stairs in the dark, alone.
I stopped outside Gwilym's door on the draughty landing.

'Good night.'

The candle flame jumped in my bedroom where a lamp was burning very low,
and the curtains waved; the water in a glass on a round table by the bed
stirred, I thought, as the door closed, and lapped against the sides.
There was a stream below the window; I thought it lapped against the
house all night until I slept.

'Can I go and see the pigs?' I asked Gwilym next morning. The hollow
fear of the house was gone, and, running downstairs to my breakfast, I
smelt the sweetness of wood and the fresh spring grass and the quiet
untidy farm-yard, with its tumbledown dirty-white cow-house and empty
stables open.

Gwilym was a tall young man aged nearly twenty, with a thin stick of a
body and spade-shaped face. You could dig the garden with him. He had a
deep voice that cracked in half when he was excited, and he sang songs
to himself, treble and bass, with the same sad hymn tune, and wrote
hymns in the barn. He told me stories about girls who died for love.
'And she put a rope round a tree but it was too short,' he said; 'she
stuck a penknife in her bosoms but it was too blunt.' We were sitting
together on the straw heaps that day in the half-dark of the shuttered
stable. He twisted and leaned near to me, raising his big finger, and
the straw creaked.

'She jumped in the cold river, she jumped,' he said, his mouth against
my ear, 'arse over tip and, Diu, she was dead.' He squeaked like a bat.

The pigsties were at the far end of the yard. We walked towards them,
Gwilym dressed in minister's black, though it was a weekday morning, and
me in a serge suit with a darned bottom, past three hens scrabbling the
muddy cobbles and a collie with one eye, sleeping with it open. The
ramshackle outhouses had tumbling, rotten roofs, jagged holes in their
sides, broken shutters, and peeling whitewash; rusty screws ripped out
from the dangling, crooked boards; the lean cat of the night before sat
snugly between the splintered jaws of bottles, cleaning its face, on the
tip of the rubbish pile that rose triangular and smelling sweet and
strong to the level of the riddled cart-house roof. There was nowhere
like that farm-yard in all the slapdash county, nowhere so poor and
grand and dirty as that square of mud and rubbish and bad wood and
falling stone, where a bucketful of old and bedraggled hens scratched
and laid small eggs. A duck quacked out of the trough in one deserted
sty. Now a young man and a curly boy stood staring and sniffing over a
wall at a sow, with its tits on the mud, giving suck.

'How many pigs are there?'

'Five. The bitch ate one,' said Gwilym.

We counted them as they squirmed and wriggled, rolled on their backs and
bellies, edged and pinched and pushed and squealed about their mother.
There were four. We counted again. Four pigs, four naked pink tails
curling up as their mouths guzzled down and the sow grunted with pain
and joy.

'She must have ate another,' I said, and picked up a scratching stick
and prodded the grunting sow and rubbed her crusted bristles backwards.
'Or a fox jumped over the wall,' I said.

'It wasn't the sow or the fox,' said Gwilym. 'It was father.'

I could see uncle, tall and sly and red, holding the writhing pig in his
two hairy hands, sinking his teeth in its thigh, crunching its trotters
up; I could see him leaning over the wall of the sty with the pig's legs
sticking out of his mouth. 'Did Uncle Jim eat the pig?'

Now, at this minute, behind the rotting sheds, he was standing,
knee-deep in feathers, chewing off the live heads of the poultry.

'He sold it to go on the drink,' said Gwilym in his deepest rebuking
whisper, his eyes fixed on the sky. 'Last Christmas he took a sheep over
his shoulder, and he was pissed for ten days.'

The sow rolled nearer the scratching stick, and the small pigs sucking
at her, lost and squealing in the sudden darkness, struggled under her
folds and pouches.

'Come and see my chapel,' said Gwilym. He forgot the lost pig at once
and began to talk about the towns he had visited on a religious tour,
Neath and Bridgend and Bristol and Newport, with their lakes and luxury
gardens, their bright, coloured streets roaring with temptation. We
walked away from the sty and the disappointed sow.

'I met actress after actress,' he said.

Gwilym's chapel was the last old barn before the field that led down to
the river; it stood well above the farm-yard, on a mucky hill. There was
one whole door with a heavy padlock, but you could get in easily through
the holes on either side of it. He took out a ring of keys and shook
them gently and tried each one in the lock. 'Very posh,' he said; 'I
bought them from the junk-shop in Carmarthen.' We climbed into the
chapel through a hole.

A dusty wagon with the name painted out and a whitewash cross on its
side stood in the middle. 'My pulpit cart,' he said, and walked solemnly
into it up the broken shaft. 'You sit on the hay; mind the mice,' he
said. Then he brought out his deepest voice again, and cried to the
heavens and the bat-lined rafters and the hanging webs: 'Bless us this
holy day, O Lord, bless me and Dylan and this Thy little chapel for ever
and ever, Amen. I've done a lot of improvements to this place.'

I sat on the hay and stared at Gwilym preaching, and heard his voice
rise and crack and sink to a whisper and break into singing and Welsh
and ring triumphantly and be wild and meek. The sun, through a hole,
shone on his praying shoulders, and he said: 'O God, Thou art everywhere
all the time, in the dew of the morning, in the frost of the evening, in
the field and the town, in the preacher and the sinner, in the sparrow
and the big buzzard. Thou canst see everything, right down deep in our
hearts; Thou canst see us when the sun is gone; Thou canst see us when
there aren't any stars, in the gravy blackness, in the deep, deep, deep,
deep pit; Thou canst see and spy and watch us all the time, in the
little black corners, in the big cowboys' prairies, under the blankets
when we're snoring fast, in the terrible shadows, pitch black, pitch
black; Thou canst see everything we do, in the night and the day, in the
day and the night, everything, everything; Thou canst see all the time.
O God, mun, you're like a bloody cat.'

He let his clasped hands fall. The chapel in the barn was still, and
shafted with sunlight. There was nobody to cry Hallelujah or God-bless;
I was too small and enamoured in the silence. The one duck quacked
outside.

'Now I take a collection,' Gwilym said.

He stepped down from the cart and groped about in the hay beneath it and
held out a battered tin to me.

'I haven't got a proper box,' he said.

I put two pennies in the tin.

'It's time for dinner,' he said, and we went back to the house without a
word.

Annie said, when we had finished dinner: 'Put on your nice suit for this
afternoon. The one with stripes.'

It was to be a special afternoon, for my best friend, Jack Williams,
from Swansea, was coming down with his rich mother in a motor car, and
Jack was to spend a fortnight's holiday with me.

'Where's Uncle Jim?'

'He's gone to market,' said Annie.

Gwilym made a small pig's noise. We knew where uncle was; he was sitting
in a public house with a heifer over his shoulder and two pigs nosing
out of his pockets, and his lips were wet with bull's blood.

'Is Mrs Williams very rich?' asked Gwilym.

I told him she had three motor cars and two houses, which was a lie.
'She's the richest woman in Wales, and once she was a mayoress,' I said.
'Are we going to have tea in the best room?'

Annie nodded. 'And a large tin of peaches,' she said.

'That old tin's been in the cupboard since Christmas,' said Gwilym,
'mother's been keeping it for a day like this.'

'They're lovely peaches,' Annie said. She went upstairs to dress like
Sunday.

The best room smelt of mothballs and fur and damp and dead plants and
stale, sour air. Two glass cases on wooden coffin-boxes lined the window
wall. You looked at the weed-grown vegetable garden through a stuffed
fox's legs, over a partridge's head, along the red-paint-stained breast
of a stiff wild duck. A case of china and pewter, trinkets, teeth,
family brooches, stood beyond the bandy table; there was a large oil
lamp on the patchwork table-cloth, a Bible with a clasp, a tall vase
with a draped woman about to bathe on it, and a framed photograph of
Annie, Uncle Jim, and Gwilym smiling in front of a fern-pot. On the
mantelpiece were two clocks, some dogs, brass candlesticks, a
shepherdess, a man in a kilt, and a tinted photograph of Annie, with
high hair and her breasts coming out. There were chairs around the table
and in each corner, straight, curved, stained, padded, all with lace
cloths hanging over their backs. A patched white sheet shrouded the
harmonium. The fire-place was full of brass tongs, shovels, and pokers.
The best room was rarely used. Annie dusted and brushed and polished
there once a week, but the carpet still sent up a grey cloud when you
trod on it, and dust lay evenly on the seats of the chairs, and balls of
cotton and dirt and black stuffing and long black horse hairs were
wedged in the cracks of the sofa. I blew on the glass to see the
pictures. Gwilym and castles and cattle.

'Change your suit now,' said Gwilym.

I wanted to wear my old suit, to look like a proper farm boy and have
manure in my shoes and hear it squelch as I walked, to see a cow have
calves and a bull on top of a cow, to run down in the dingle and wet my
stockings, to go out and shout, 'Come on, you b----,' and pelt the hens
and talk in a proper voice. But I went upstairs to put my striped suit
on.

From my bedroom I heard the noise of a motor car drawing up in the yard.
It was Jack Williams and his mother.

Gwilym shouted, 'They're here, in a Daimler!' from the foot of the
stairs, and I ran down to meet them with my tie undone and my hair
uncombed.

Annie was saying at the door: 'Good afternoon, Mrs Williams, good
afternoon. Come right in, it's a lovely day, Mrs Williams. Did you have
a nice journey then? This way, Mrs Williams, mind the step.'

Annie wore a black, shining dress that smelt of mothballs, like the
chair covers in the best room; she had forgotten to change her
gym-shoes, which were caked with mud and all holes. She fussed on before
Mrs Williams down the stone passage, darting her head round, clucking,
fidgeting, excusing the small house, anxiously tidying her hair with one
rough, stubby hand.

Mrs Williams was tall and stout, with a jutting bosom and thick legs,
her ankles swollen over her pointed shoes; she was fitted out like a
mayoress or a ship, and she swayed after Annie into the best room.

She said: 'Please don't put yourself out for me, Mrs Jones, there's a
dear.' She dusted the seat of a chair with a lace handkerchief from her
bag before sitting down.

'I can't stop, you know,' she said.

'Oh, you must stay for a cup of tea,' said Annie, shifting and scraping
the chairs away from the table so that nobody could move and Mrs
Williams was hemmed in fast with her bosom and her rings and her bag,
opening the china cupboard, upsetting the Bible on the floor, picking it
up, dusting it hurriedly with her sleeve.

'And peaches,' Gwilym said. He was standing in the passage with his hat
on.

Annie said, 'Take your hat off, Gwilym, make Mrs Williams comfortable,'
and she put the lamp on the shrouded harmonium and spread out a white
table-cloth that had a tea stain in the centre, and brought out the
china and laid knives and cups for five.

'Don't bother about me, there's a dear,' said Mrs Williams. 'There's a
lovely fox!' She flashed a finger of rings at the glass case.

'It's real blood,' I told Jack, and we climbed over the sofa to the
table.

'No it isn't,' he said, 'it's red ink.'

'Oh, your shoes!' said Annie.

'Don't tread on the sofa, Jack, there's a dear.'

'If it isn't ink it's paint then.'

Gwilym said: 'Shall I get you a bit of cake, Mrs Williams?'

Annie rattled the tea-cups. 'There isn't a single bit of cake in the
house,' she said; 'we forgot to order it from the shop; not a single
bit. Oh, Mrs Williams!'

Mrs Williams said: 'Just a cup of tea, thanks.' She was still sweating
because she had walked all the way from the car. It spoiled her powder.
She sparkled her rings and dabbed at her face.

'Three lumps,' she said. 'And I'm sure Jack will be very happy here.'

'Happy as sandboys.' Gwilym sat down.

'Now, you must have some peaches, Mrs Williams, they're lovely.'

'They should be, they've been here long enough,' said Gwilym.

Annie rattled the tea-cups at him again.

'No peaches, thanks,' Mrs Williams said.

'Oh, you must, Mrs Williams, just one. With cream.'

'No, no, Mrs Jones, thanks the same,' she said. 'I don't mind pears or
chunks, but I can't bear peaches.'

Jack and I had stopped talking. Annie stared down at her gym-shoes. One
of the two clocks on the mantelpiece coughed, and struck. Mrs Williams
struggled from her chair.

'There, time flies!' she said.

She pushed her way past the furniture, jostled against the cupboard,
rattled the trinkets and brooches, and kissed Jack on the forehead.

'You've got scent on,' he said.

She patted my head.

'Now, behave yourselves.'

To Annie, she said in a whisper: 'And remember, Mrs Jones, just good
plain food. No spoiling his appetite.'

Annie followed her out of the room. She moved slowly now. 'I'll do my
very best, Mrs Williams.'

We heard her say, 'Good-bye then, Mrs Williams,' and go down the steps
of the kitchen and close the door. The motor car roared in the yard,
then the noise grew softer and died.

Down the thick dingle Jack and I ran shouting, scalping the brambles
with our thin stick-hatchets, dancing, hallooing. We skidded to a stop
and prowled on the bushy banks of the stream. Up above, sat one-eyed,
dead-eyed, sinister, slim, ten-notched Gwilym, loading his guns in
Gallows Farm. We crawled and rat-tatted through the bushes, hid, at a
whistled signal, in the deep grass, and crouched there, waiting for the
crack of a twig or the secret breaking of boughs.

On my haunches, eager and alone, casting an ebony shadow, with the
Gorsehill jungle swarming, the violent, impossible birds and fishes
leaping, hidden under four-stemmed flowers the height of horses, in the
early evening in a dingle near Carmarthen, my friend Jack Williams
invisibly near me, I felt all my young body like an excited animal
surrounding me, the torn knees bent, the bumping heart, the long heat
and depth between the legs, the sweat prickling in the hands, the
tunnels down to the eardrums, the little balls of dirt between the toes,
the eyes in the sockets, the tucked-up voice, the blood racing, the
memory around and within flying, jumping, swimming, and waiting to
pounce. There, playing Indians in the evening, I was aware of me myself
in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and
my name. I sprang with excitement and scrambled up through the
scratching brambles again.

Jack cried: 'I see you! I see you!' He scampered after me. 'Bang! bang!
you're dead!'

But I was young and loud and alive, though I lay down obediently.

'Now you try and kill me,' said Jack. 'Count a hundred.'

I closed one eye, saw him rush and stamp towards the upper field, then
tiptoe back and begin to climb a tree, and I counted fifty and ran to
the foot of the tree and killed him as he climbed. 'You fall down,' I
said.

He refused to fall, so I climbed too, and we clung to the top branches
and stared down at the lavatory in the corner of the field. Gwilym was
sitting on the seat with his trousers down. He looked small and black.
He was reading a book and moving his hands.

'We can see you!' we shouted.

He snatched his trousers up and put the book in his pocket.

'We can see you, Gwilym!'

He came out into the field. 'Where are you, then?'

We waved our caps at him.

'In the sky!' Jack shouted.

'Flying!' I shouted.

We stretched our arms out like wings.

'Fly down here.'

We swung and laughed on the branches.

'There's birds!' cried Gwilym.

Our jackets were torn and our stockings were wet and our shoes were
sticky; we had green moss and brown bark on our hands and faces when we
went in for supper and a scolding. Annie was quiet that night, though
she called me a ragamuffin and said she didn't know what Mrs Williams
would think and told Gwilym he should know better. We made faces at
Gwilym and put salt in his tea, but after supper he said: 'You can come
to chapel if you like. Just before bed.'

He lit a candle on the top of the pulpit cart. It was a small light in
the big barn. The bats were gone. Shadows still clung upside down along
the roof. Gwilym was no longer my cousin in a Sunday suit, but a tall
stranger shaped like a spade in a cloak, and his voice grew too deep.
The straw heaps were lively. I thought of the sermon on the cart: we
were watched, Jack's heart was watched, Gwilym's tongue was marked down,
my whisper, 'Look at the little eyes,' was remembered always.

'Now I take confessions,' said Gwilym from the cart.

Jack and I stood bareheaded in the circle of the candle, and I could
feel the trembling of Jack's body.

'You first.' Gwilym's finger, as bright as though he had held it in the
candle flame until it burned, pointed me out, and I took a step towards
the pulpit cart, raising my head.

'Now you confess,' said Gwilym.

'What have I got to confess?'

'The worst thing you've done.'

I let Edgar Reynolds be whipped because I had taken his homework; I
stole from my mother's bag; I stole from Gwyneth's bag; I stole twelve
books in three visits from the library, and threw them away in the park;
I drank a cup of my water to see what it tasted like; I beat a dog with
a stick so that it would roll over and lick my hand afterwards; I looked
with Dan Jones through the keyhole while his maid had a bath; I cut my
knee with a penknife, and put the blood on my handkerchief and said it
had come out of my ears so that I could pretend I was ill and frighten
my mother; I pulled my trousers down and showed Jack Williams; I saw
Billy Jones beat a pigeon to death with a fire-shovel, and laughed and
got sick; Cedric Williams and I broke into Mrs Samuels's house and
poured ink over the bed-clothes.

I said: 'I haven't done anything bad.'

'Go on, confess!' said Gwilym. He was frowning down at me.

'I can't! I can't!' I said. 'I haven't done anything bad.'

'Go on, confess!'

'I won't! I won't!'

Jack began to cry. 'I want to go home,' he said.

Gwilym opened the chapel door and we followed him into the yard, down
past the black, humped sheds, towards the house, and Jack sobbed all the
way.

In bed together, Jack and I confessed our sins.

'I steal from my mother's bag, too; there are pounds and pounds.'

'How much do you steal?'

'Threepence.'

'I killed a man once.'

'No you didn't then.'

'Honest to Christ, I shot him through the heart.'

'What was his name?'

'Williams.'

'Did he bleed?'

I thought the stream was lapping against the house.

'Like a bloody pig,' I said.

Jack's tears had dried. 'I don't like Gwilym, he's barmy.'

'No, he isn't. I found a lot of poems in his bedroom once. They were all
written to girls. And he showed them to me afterwards, and he'd changed
all the girls' names to God.'

'He's religious.'

'No he isn't, he goes with actresses. He knows Corinne Griffith.'

Our door was open. I liked the door locked at night, because I would
rather have a ghost in the bedroom than think of one coming in; but Jack
liked it open, and we tossed and he won. We heard the front door rattle
and footsteps in the kitchen passage.

'That's Uncle Jim.'

'What's he like?'

'He's like a fox, he eats pigs and chickens.'

The ceiling was thin and we heard every sound, the creaking of the
bard's chair, the clatter of plates, Annie's voice saying: 'Midnight!'

'He's drunk,' I said. We lay quite still, hoping to hear a quarrel.

'Perhaps he'll throw plates,' I said.

But Annie scolded him softly: 'There's a fine state, Jim.'

He murmured to her.

'There's one pig gone,' she said. 'Oh, why do you have to do it, Jim?
There's nothing left now. We'll never be able to carry on.'

'Money! money! money!' he said. I knew he would be lighting his pipe.

Then Annie's voice grew so soft we could not hear the words, and uncle
said: 'Did she pay you the thirty shillings?'

'They're talking about your mother,' I told Jack.

For a long time Annie spoke in a low voice, and we waited for words.
'Mrs Williams,' she said, and 'motor car,' and 'Jack,' and 'peaches.' I
thought she was crying, for her voice broke on the last word.

Uncle Jim's chair creaked again, he might have struck his fist on the
table, and we heard him shout: 'I'll give her peaches! Peaches, peaches!
Who does she think she is? Aren't peaches good enough for her? To hell
with her bloody motor car and her bloody son! Making us small.'

'Don't, don't, Jim!' Annie said, 'you'll wake the boys.'

'I'll wake them and whip the hell out of them, too!'

'Please, please, Jim!'

'You send the boy away,' he said, 'or I'll do it myself. Back to his
three bloody houses.'

Jack pulled the bed-clothes over his head and sobbed into the pillow: 'I
don't want to hear, I don't want to hear. I'll write to my mother.
She'll take me away.'

I climbed out to close the door. Jack would not talk to me again, and I
fell asleep to the noise of the voices below, which soon grew gentle.

Uncle Jim was not at breakfast. When we came down, Jack's shoes were
cleaned for him and his jacket was darned and pressed. Annie gave two
boiled eggs to Jack and one to me. She forgave me when I drank tea from
the saucer.

After breakfast, Jack walked to the post office. I took the one-eyed
collie to chase rabbits in the upper fields, but it barked at ducks and
brought me a tramp's shoe from a hedge, and lay down with its tail
wagging in a rabbit hole. I threw stones at the deserted duck pond, and
the collie ambled back with sticks.

Jack went skulking into the damp dingle, his hands in his pockets, his
cap over one eye. I left the collie sniffing at a molehill, and climbed
to the tree-top in the corner of the lavatory field. Below me, Jack was
playing Indians all alone, scalping through the bushes, surprising
himself round a tree, hiding from himself in the grass. I called to him
once, but he pretended not to hear. He played alone, silently and
savagely. I saw him standing with his hands in his pockets, swaying like
a Kelly, on the mud-bank by the stream at the foot of the dingle. My
bough lurched, the heads of the dingle bushes spun up towards me like
green tops, 'I'm falling!' I cried, my trousers saved me, I swung and
grasped, this was one minute of wild adventure, but Jack did not look up
and the minute was lost. I climbed, without dignity, to the ground.

Early in the afternoon, after a silent meal, when Gwilym was reading the
scriptures or writing hymns to girls or sleeping in his chapel, Annie
was baking bread, and I was cutting a wooden whistle in the loft over
the stable, the motor car drove up in the yard again.

Out of the house Jack, in his best suit, ran to meet his mother, and I
heard him say as she stepped, raising her short skirts, on to the
cobbles: 'And he called you a bloody cow, and he said he'd whip the hell
out of me, and Gwilym took me to the barn in the dark and let the mice
run over me, and Dylan's a thief, and that old woman's spoilt my
jacket.'

Mrs Williams sent the chauffeur for Jack's luggage. Annie came to the
door, trying to smile and curtsy, tidying her hair, wiping her hands on
her pinafore.

Mrs Williams said, 'Good afternoon,' and sat with Jack in the back of
the car and stared at the ruin of Gorsehill.

The chauffeur came back. The car drove off, scattering the hens. I ran
out of the stable to wave to Jack. He sat still and stiff by his
mother's side. I waved my handkerchief.




A VISIT TO GRANDPA'S


In the middle of the night I woke from a dream full of whips and lariats
as long as serpents, and runaway coaches on mountain passes, and wide,
windy gallops over cactus fields, and I heard the old man in the next
room crying, 'Gee-up!' and 'Whoa!' and trotting his tongue on the roof
of his mouth.

It was the first time I had stayed in grandpa's house. The floorboards
had squeaked like mice as I climbed into bed, and the mice between the
walls had creaked like wood as though another visitor was walking on
them. It was a mild summer night, but curtains had flapped and branches
beaten against the window. I had pulled the sheets over my head, and
soon was roaring and riding in a book.

'Whoa there, my beauties!' cried grandpa. His voice sounded very young
and loud, and his tongue had powerful hooves, and he made his bedroom
into a great meadow. I thought I would see if he was ill, or had set his
bed-clothes on fire, for my mother had said that he lit his pipe under
the blankets, and had warned me to run to his help if I smelt smoke in
the night. I went on tiptoe through the darkness to his bedroom door,
brushing against the furniture and upsetting a candlestick with a thump.
When I saw there was a light in the room I felt frightened, and as I
opened the door I heard grandpa shout, 'Gee-up!' as loudly as a bull
with a megaphone.

He was sitting straight up in bed and rocking from side to side as
though the bed were on a rough road; the knotted edges of the
counterpane were his reins; his invisible horses stood in a shadow
beyond the bed-side candle. Over a white flannel nightshirt he was
wearing a red waistcoat with walnut-sized brass buttons. The over-filled
bowl of his pipe smouldered among his whiskers like a little, burning
hayrick on a stick. At the sight of me, his hands dropped from the reins
and lay blue and quiet, the bed stopped still on a level road, he
muffled his tongue into silence, and the horses drew softly up.

'Is there anything the matter, grandpa?' I asked, though the clothes
were not on fire. His face in the candlelight looked like a ragged quilt
pinned upright on the black air and patched all over with goat-beards.

He stared at me mildly. Then he blew down his pipe, scattering the
sparks and making a high, wet dog-whistle of the stem, and shouted: 'Ask
no questions.'

After a pause, he said slyly: 'Do you ever have nightmares, boy?'

I said: 'No.'

'Oh, yes, you do,' he said.

I said I was woken by a voice that was shouting to horses.

'What did I tell you?' he said. 'You eat too much. Who ever heard of
horses in a bedroom?'

He fumbled under his pillow, brought out a small, tinkling bag, and
carefully untied its strings. He put a sovereign in my hand, and said:
'Buy a cake.' I thanked him and wished him good night.

As I closed my bedroom door, I heard his voice crying loudly and gaily,
'Gee-up! gee-up!' and the rocking of the travelling bed.

In the morning I woke from a dream of fiery horses on a plain that was
littered with furniture, and of large, cloudy men who rode six horses at
a time and whipped them with burning bed-clothes. Grandpa was at
breakfast, dressed in deep black. After breakfast he said, 'There was a
terrible loud wind last night,' and sat in his arm-chair by the hearth
to make clay balls for the fire. Later in the morning he took me for a
walk, through Johnstown village and into the fields on the Llanstephan
road.

A man with a whippet said, 'There's a nice morning, Mr Thomas,' and when
he had gone, leanly as his dog, into the short-treed green wood he
should not have entered because of the notices, grandpa said: 'There, do
you hear what he called you? Mister!'

We passed by small cottages, and all the men who leant on the gates
congratulated grandpa on the fine morning. We passed through the wood
full of pigeons, and their wings broke the branches as they rushed to
the tops of the trees. Among the soft, contented voices and the loud,
timid flying, grandpa said, like a man calling across a field: 'If you
heard those old birds in the night, you'd wake me up and say there were
horses in the trees.'

We walked back slowly, for he was tired, and the lean man stalked out of
the forbidden wood with a rabbit held as gently over his arm as a girl's
arm in a warm sleeve.

On the last day but one of my visit I was taken to Llanstephan in a
governess cart pulled by a short, weak pony. Grandpa might have been
driving a bison, so tightly he held the reins, so ferociously cracked
the long whip, so blasphemously shouted warning to boys who played in
the road, so stoutly stood with his gaitered legs apart and cursed the
demon strength and wilfulness of his tottering pony.

'Look out, boy!' he cried when we came to each corner, and pulled and
tugged and jerked and sweated and waved his whip like a rubber sword.
And when the pony had crept miserably round each corner, grandpa turned
to me with a sighing smile: 'We weathered that one, boy.'

When we came to Llanstephan village at the top of the hill, he left the
cart by the 'Edwinsford Arms' and patted the pony's muzzle and gave it
sugar, saying: 'You're a weak little pony, Jim, to pull big men like
us.'

He had strong beer and I had lemonade, and he paid Mrs Edwinsford with a
sovereign out of the tinkling bag; she inquired after his health, and he
said that Llangadock was better for the tubes. We went to look at the
churchyard and the sea, and sat in the wood called the Sticks, and stood
on the concert platform in the middle of the wood where visitors sang on
midsummer nights and, year by year, the innocent of the village was
elected mayor. Grandpa paused at the churchyard and pointed over the
iron gate at the angelic headstones and the poor wooden crosses.
'There's no sense in lying there,' he said.

We journeyed back furiously: Jim was a bison again.

I woke late on my last morning, out of dreams where the Llanstephan sea
carried bright sailing-boats as long as liners; and heavenly choirs in
the Sticks, dressed in bards' robes and brass-buttoned waistcoats, sang
in a strange Welsh to the departing sailors. Grandpa was not at
breakfast; he rose early. I walked in the fields with a new sling, and
shot at the Towy gulls and the rooks in the parsonage trees. A warm wind
blew from the summer points of the weather; a morning mist climbed from
the ground and floated among the trees and hid the noisy birds; in the
mist and the wind my pebbles flew lightly up like hailstones in a world
on its head. The morning passed without a bird falling.

I broke my sling and returned for the midday meal through the parson's
orchard. Once, grandpa told me, the parson had bought three ducks at
Carmarthen Fair and made a pond for them in the centre of the garden;
but they waddled to the gutter under the crumbling doorsteps of the
house, and swam and quacked there. When I reached the end of the orchard
path, I looked through a hole in the hedge and saw that the parson had
made a tunnel through the rockery that was between the gutter and the
pond and had set up a notice in plain writing: 'This way to the pond.'

The ducks were still swimming under the steps.

Grandpa was not in the cottage. I went into the garden, but grandpa was
not staring at the fruit-trees. I called across to a man who leant on a
spade in the field beyond the garden hedge: 'Have you seen my grandpa
this morning?'

He did not stop digging, and answered over his shoulder: 'I seen him in
his fancy waistcoat.'

Griff, the barber, lived in the next cottage. I called to him through
the open door: 'Mr Griff, have you seen my grandpa?'

The barber came out in his shirtsleeves.

I said: 'He's wearing his best waistcoat.' I did not know if it was
important, but grandpa wore his waistcoat only in the night.

'Has grandpa been to Llanstephan?' asked Mr Griff anxiously.

'We went there yesterday in a little trap,' I said.

He hurried indoors and I heard him talking in Welsh, and he came out
again with his white coat on, and he carried a striped and coloured
walking-stick. He strode down the village street and I ran by his side.

When we stopped at the tailor's shop, he cried out, 'Dan!' and Dan
Tailor stepped from his window where he sat like an Indian priest but
wearing a derby hat. 'Dai Thomas has got his waistcoat on,' said Mr
Griff, 'and he's been to Llanstephan.'

As Dan Tailor searched for his overcoat, Mr Griff was striding on. 'Will
Evans,' he called outside the carpenter's shop, 'Dai Thomas has been to
Llanstephan, and he's got his waistcoat on.'

'I'll tell Morgan now,' said the carpenter's wife out of the hammering,
sawing darkness of the shop.

We called at the butcher's shop and Mr Price's house, and Mr Griff
repeated his message like a town crier.

We gathered together in Johnstown square. Dan Tailor had his bicycle, Mr
Price his pony trap. Mr Griff, the butcher, Morgan Carpenter, and I
climbed into the shaking trap, and we trotted off towards Carmarthen
town. The tailor led the way, ringing his bell as though there were a
fire or a robbery, and an old woman by the gate of a cottage at the end
of the street ran inside like a pelted hen. Another woman waved a bright
handkerchief.

'Where are we going?' I asked.

Grandpa's neighbours were as solemn as old men with black hats and
jackets on the outskirts of a fair. Mr Griff shook his head and mourned:
'I didn't expect this again from Dai Thomas.'

'Not after last time,' said Mr Price sadly.

We trotted on, we crept up Constitution Hill, we rattled down into
Lammas Street, and the tailor still rang his bell and a dog ran,
squealing, in front of his wheels. As we clip-clopped over the cobbles
that led down to the Towy bridge, I remembered grandpa's nightly noisy
journeys that rocked the bed and shook the walls, and I saw his gay
waistcoat in a vision and his patchwork head tufted and smiling in the
candlelight. The tailor before us turned round on his saddle, his
bicycle wobbled and skidded. 'I see Dai Thomas!' he cried.

The trap rattled on to the bridge, and I saw grandpa there; the buttons
of his waistcoat shone in the sun, he wore his tight, black Sunday
trousers and a tall, dusty hat I had seen in a cupboard in the attic,
and he carried an ancient bag. He bowed to us. 'Good morning, Mr Price,'
he said, 'and Mr Griff and Mr Morgan and Mr Evans.' To me, he said:
'Good morning, boy.'

Mr Griff pointed his coloured stick at him.

'And what do you think you are doing on Carmarthen bridge in the middle
of the afternoon,' he said sternly, 'with your best waistcoat and your
old hat?'

Grandpa did not answer, but inclined his face to the river wind, so that
his beard was set dancing and wagging as though he talked, and watched
the coracle men move, like turtles, on the shore.

Mr Griff raised his stunted barber's pole. 'And where do you think you
are going,' he said, 'with your old black bag?'

Grandpa said: 'I am going to Llangadock to be buried.' And he watched
the coracle shells slip into the water lightly, and the gulls complain
over the fish-filled water as bitterly as Mr Price complained:

'But you aren't dead yet, Dai Thomas.'

For a moment grandpa reflected, then: 'There's no sense in lying dead in
Llanstephan,' he said. 'The ground is comfy in Llangadock; you can
twitch your legs without putting them in the sea.'

His neighbours moved close to him. They said: 'You aren't dead, Mr
Thomas.'

'How can you be buried, then?'

'Nobody's going to bury you in Llanstephan.'

'Come on home, Mr Thomas.'

'There's strong beer for tea.'

'And cake.'

But grandpa stood firmly on the bridge, and clutched his bag to his
side, and stared at the flowing river and the sky, like a prophet who
has no doubt.




PATRICIA, EDITH, AND ARNOLD


The small boy in his invisible engine, the Cwmdonkin Special, its
wheels, polished to dazzle, crunching on the small back garden scattered
with breadcrumbs for the birds and white with yesterday's snow, its
smoke rising thin and pale as breath in the cold afternoon, hooted under
the wash-line, kicked the dog's plate at the washhouse stop, and puffed
and pistoned slower and slower while the servant girl lowered the pole,
unpegged the swinging vests, showed the brown stains under her arms, and
called over the wall: 'Edith, Edith, come here, I want you.'

Edith climbed on two tubs on the other side of the wall and called back:
'I'm here, Patricia.' Her head bobbed up above the broken glass.

He backed the Flying Welshman from the washhouse to the open door of the
coal-hole and pulled hard on the brake that was a hammer in his pocket;
assistants in uniform ran out with fuel; he spoke to a saluting fireman,
and the engine shuffled off, round the barbed walls of China that kept
the cats away, by the frozen rivers in the sink, in and out of the
coal-hole tunnel. But he was listening carefully all the time, through
the squeals and whistles, to Patricia and the next-door servant, who
belonged to Mrs Lewis, talking when they should have been working,
calling his mother Mrs T., being rude about Mrs L.

He heard Patricia say: 'Mrs T. won't be back till six.'

And Edith next door replied: 'Old Mrs L. has gone to Neath to look for
Mr Robert.'

'He's on the randy again,' Patricia whispered.

'Randy, sandy, bandy!' cried the boy out of the coal-hole.

'You get your face dirty, I'll kill you,' Patricia said absent-mindedly.

She did not try to stop him when he climbed up the coal-heap. He stood
quietly on the top, King of the Coal Castle, his head touching the roof,
and listened to the worried voices of the girls. Patricia was almost in
tears, Edith was sobbing and rocking on the unsteady tubs. 'I'm standing
on the top of the coal,' he said, and waited for Patricia's anger.

She said: 'I don't want to see him, you go alone.'

'We must, we must go together,' said Edith. 'I've got to know.'

'I don't want to know.'

'I can't stand it, Patricia, you must go with me.'

'You go alone, he's waiting for you.'

'Please, Patricia!'

'I'm lying on my face in the coal,' said the boy.

'No, it's your day with him. I don't want to know. I just want to think
he loves me.'

'Oh, talk sense, Patricia, please! Will you come or no? I've got to hear
what he says.'

'All right then, in half an hour. I'll shout over the wall.'

'You'd better come soon,' the boy said, 'I'm dirty as Christ knows
what.'

Patricia ran to the coal-hole. 'The language! Come out of there at
once!' she said.

The tubs began to slide and Edith vanished.

'Don't you dare use language like that again. Oh! your suit!' Patricia
took him indoors.

She made him change his suit in front of her. 'Otherwise there's no
telling.' He took off his trousers and danced around her, crying: 'Look
at me, Patricia!'

'You be decent,' she said, 'or I won't take you to the park.'

'Am I going to the park, then?'

'Yes, we're all going to the park; you and me and Edith next door.'

He dressed himself neatly, not to annoy her, and spat on his hands
before parting his hair. She appeared not to notice his silence and
neatness. Her large hands were clasped together; she stared down at the
white brooch on her chest. She was a tall, thick girl with awkward
hands, her fingers were like toes, her shoulders were wide as a man's.

'Am I satisfactory?' he asked.

'There's a long word,' she said, and looked at him lovingly. She lifted
him up and seated him on the top of the chest of drawers. 'Now you're as
tall as I am.'

'But I'm not so old,' he said.

He knew that this was an afternoon on which anything might happen; it
might snow enough for sliding on a tray; uncles from America, where he
had no uncles, might arrive with revolvers and St Bernards; Ferguson's
shop might catch on fire and all the piece-packets fall on the
pavements; and he was not surprised when she put her black,
straight-haired, heavy head on his shoulder and whispered into his
collar: 'Arnold, Arnold Matthews.'

'There, there,' he said, and rubbed her parting with his finger and
winked at himself in the mirror behind her and looked down her dress at
the back.

'Are you crying?'

'No.'

'Yes you are, I can feel the wet.'

She dried her eyes on her sleeve. 'Don't you let on that I was crying.'

'I'll tell everybody, I'll tell Mrs T. and Mrs L., I'll tell the
policeman and Edith and my dad and Mr Chapman, Patricia was crying on my
shoulder like a nanny goat, she cried for two hours, she cried enough to
fill a kettle. I won't really,' he said.

As soon as he and Patricia and Edith set off for the park, it began to
snow. Big flakes unexpectedly fell on the rocky hill, and the sky grew
dark as dusk though it was only three in the afternoon. Another boy,
somewhere in the allotments behind the houses, shouted as the first
flakes fell. Mrs Ocky Evans opened the top bay-window of Springmead and
thrust her head and hands out, as though to catch the snow. He waited,
without revolt, for Patricia to say, 'Quick! hurry back, it's snowing!'
and to pack him in out of the day before his feet were wet. Patricia
can't have seen the snow, he thought at the top of the hill, though it
was falling heavily, sweeping against her face, covering her black hat.
He dared not speak, for fear of waking her, as they turned the corner
into the road that led down to the park. He lagged behind to take his
cap off and catch the snow in his mouth.

'Put on your cap,' said Patricia, turning. 'Do you want to catch your
death of cold?'

She tucked his muffler inside his coat, and said to Edith: 'Will he be
there in the snow, do you think? He's bound to be there, isn't he? He
was always there on my Wednesdays, wet or fine.' The tip of her nose was
red, her cheeks glowed like coals, she looked handsomer in the snow than
in the summer, when her hair would lie limp on her wet forehead and a
warm patch spread on her back.

'He'll be there,' Edith said. 'One Friday it was pelting down and he was
there. He hasn't got anywhere else to go, he's always there. Poor
Arnold!' She looked white and tidy in a coat with a fur piece, and twice
as small as Patricia; she stepped through the thick snow as though she
were going shopping.

'Wonders will never cease,' he said aloud to himself. This was Patricia
letting him walk in the snow, this was striding along in a storm with
two big girls. He sat down in the road. 'I'm on a sledge,' he said,
'pull me, Patricia, pull me like an Eskimo.'

'Up you get, you moochin, or I'll take you home.'

He saw that she did not mean it. 'Lovely Patricia, beautiful Patricia,'
he said, 'pull me along on my bottom.'

'Any more dirty words, and you know who I'll tell.'

'Arnold Matthews,' he said.

Patricia and Edith drew closer together.

'He notices everything,' Patricia whispered.

Edith said: 'I'm glad I haven't got your job.'

'Oh,' said Patricia, catching him by the hand and pressing it on her
arm, 'I wouldn't change him for the world!'

He ran down the gravel path on to the upper walk of the park. 'I'm
spoilt!' he shouted, 'I'm spoilt! Patricia spoils me!'

Soon the park would be white all over; already the trees were blurred
round the reservoir and fountain, and the training college on the gorse
hill was hidden in a cloud. Patricia and Edith took the steep path down
to the shelter. Following on the forbidden grass, he slid past them
straight into a bare bush, but the bump and the pricks left him shouting
and unhurt. The girls gossiped sadly now. They shook their coats in the
deserted shelter, scattering snow on the seats, and sat down, close
together still, outside the bowling-club window.

'We're only just on time,' said Edith. 'It's hard to be punctual in the
snow.'

'Can I play by here?'

Patricia nodded. 'Play quietly then; don't be rough with the snow.'

'Snow! snow! snow!' he said, and scooped it out of the gutter and made a
small ball.

'Perhaps he's found a job,' Patricia said.

'Not Arnold.'

'What if he doesn't come at all?'

'He's bound to come, Patricia; don't say things like that.'

'Have you brought your letters?'

'They're in my bag. How many have you got?'

'No, how many have you got, Edith?'

'I haven't counted.'

'Show me one of yours,' Patricia said.

He was used to their talk by this time; they were old and cuckoo,
sitting in the empty shelter sobbing over nothing. Patricia was reading
a letter and moving her lips.

'He told me that, too,' she said, 'that I was his star.'

'Did he begin: "Dear Heart?"'

'Always: "Dear Heart."'

Edith broke into real, loud tears. With a snowball in his hand, he
watched her sway on the seat and hide her face in Patricia's snowy coat.

Patricia said, patting and calming Edith, rocking her head: 'I'll give
him a piece of my mind when he comes!'

When who comes? He threw the snowball high into the silently driving
fall. Edith's crying in the deadened park was clear and thin as a
whistle, and, disowning the soft girls and standing away from them in
case a stranger passed, a man with boots to his thighs, or a sneering,
bigger boy from the Uplands, he piled the snow against the wire of the
tennis court and thrust his hands into the snow like a baker making
bread. As he delved and moulded the snow into loaves, saying under his
breath, 'This is the way it is done, ladies and gentlemen,' Edith raised
her head and said: 'Patricia, promise me, don't be cross with him. Let's
all be quiet and friendly.'

'Writing, "Dear Heart" to us both,' said Patricia angrily. 'Did he ever
take off your shoes and pull your toes and----'

'No, no, you mustn't, don't go on, you mustn't speak like that!' Edith
put her fingers to her cheeks. 'Yes, he did,' she said.

'Somebody has been pulling Edith's toes,' he said to himself, and ran
round the other side of the shelter, chuckling. 'Edith went to market,'
he laughed aloud, and stopped at the sight of a young man without an
overcoat sitting in a corner seat and cupping his hands and blowing into
them. The young man wore a white muffler and a check cap. When he saw
the boy, he pulled his cap down over his eyes. His hands were pale blue
and the ends of his fingers yellow.

The boy ran back to Patricia. 'Patricia, there's a man!' he cried.

'Where's a man?'

'On the other side of the shelter; he hasn't got an overcoat and he's
blowing in his hands like this.'

Edith jumped up. 'It's Arnold!'

'Arnold Matthews, Arnold Matthews, we know you're there!' Patricia
called round the shelter, and, after a long minute, the young man,
raising his cap and smiling, appeared at the corner and leant against a
wooden pillar.

The trousers of his sleek blue suit were wide at the bottoms; the
shoulders were high and hard, and sharp at the ends; his pointed patent
shoes were shining; a red handkerchief stuck from his breast pocket; he
had not been out in the snow.

'Fancy you two knowing each other,' he said loudly, facing the red-eyed
girls and the motionless, open-mouthed boy who stood at Patricia's side
with his pockets full of snowballs.

Patricia tossed her head and her hat fell over one eye. As she
straightened her hat, 'You come and sit down here, Arnold Matthews,
you've got some questions to answer!' she said in her washing-day voice.

Edith clutched at her arm: 'Oh! Patricia you promised.' She picked at
the edge of her handkerchief. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Arnold said softly then: 'Tell the little boy to run away and play.'

The boy ran round the shelter once and returned to hear Edith saying,
'There's a hole in your elbow, Arnold,' and to see the young man kicking
the snow at his feet and staring at the names and hearts cut on the wall
behind the girls' heads.

'Who did you walk out with on Wednesdays?' Patricia asked. Her clumsy
hands held Edith's letter close to the sprinkled folds of her chest.

'You, Patricia.'

'Who did you walk out with on Fridays?'

'With Edith, Patricia.'

He said to the boy: 'Here, son, can you roll a snowball as big as a
football?'

'Yes, as big as two footballs.'

Arnold turned back to Edith, and said: 'How did you come to know
Patricia Davies? You work in Brynmill.'

'I just started working in Cwmdonkin,' she said. 'I haven't seen you
since, to tell you. I was going to tell you to-day, but I found out. How
could you, Arnold? Me on my afternoon off, and Patricia on Wednesdays.'

The snowball had turned into a short snow man with a lop-sided, dirty
head and a face full of twigs, wearing a boy's cap and smoking a pencil.

'I didn't mean any harm,' said Arnold. 'I love you both.'

Edith screamed. The boy jumped forward, and the snow man with a broken
back collapsed.

'Don't tell your lies, how can you love two of us?' Edith cried, shaking
her handbag at Arnold. The bag snapped open, and a bundle of letters
fell on the snow.

'Don't you dare pick up those letters,' Patricia said.

Arnold had not moved. The boy was searching for his pencil in the snow
man's ruins.

'You make your choice, Arnold Matthews, here and now.'

'Her or me,' said Edith.

Patricia turned her back to him. Edith, with her bag in her hand hanging
open, stood still. The sweeping snow turned up the top page of a letter.

'You two,' he said, 'you go off the handle. Sit down and talk. Don't cry
like that, Edith. Hundreds of men love more than one woman, you're
always reading about it. Give us a chance, Edith, there's a girl.'

Patricia looked at the hearts and arrows and old names. Edith saw the
letters curl.

'It's you, Patricia,' said Arnold.

Still Patricia stood turned away from him. Edith opened her mouth to
cry, and he put a finger to his lips. He made the shape of a whisper,
too soft for Patricia to hear. The boy watched him soothing and
promising Edith, but she screamed again and ran out of the shelter and
down the path, her handbag beating against her side.

'Patricia,' he said, 'turn round to me. I had to say it. It's you,
Patricia.'

The boy bent down over the snow man and found his pencil driven through
its head. When he stood up he saw Patricia and Arnold arm in arm.

Snow dripped through his pockets, snow melted in his shoes, snow
trickled down his collar into his vest. 'Look at you now,' said
Patricia, rushing to him and holding him by the hands, 'you're wringing
wet.'

'Only a bit of snow,' said Arnold, suddenly alone in the shelter.

'A bit of snow indeed, he's cold as ice and his feet are like sponges.
Come on home at once!'

The three of them climbed the path to the upper walk, and Patricia's
footprints were large as a horse's in the thickening snow.

'Look, you can see our house, it's got a white roof!'

'We'll be there, ducky, soon.'

'I'd rather stay out and make a snow man like Arnold Matthews.'

'Hush! hush! your mother'll be waiting. You must come home.'

'No she won't. She's gone on a randy with Mr Robert. Randy, sandy,
bandy!'

'You know very well she's shopping with Mrs Partridge, you mustn't tell
wicked lies.'

'Well Arnold Matthews told lies. He said he loved you better than Edith,
and he whispered behind your back to her.'

'I swear I didn't, Patricia, I don't love Edith at all!'

Patricia stopped walking. 'You don't love Edith?'

'No, I've told you, it's you. I don't love her at all,' he said. 'Oh! my
God, what a day! Don't you believe me? It's you, Patricia. Edith isn't
anything. I just used to meet her; I'm always in the park.'

'But you told her you loved her.'

The boy stood bewildered between them. Why was Patricia so angry and
serious? Her face was flushed and her eyes shone. Her chest moved up and
down. He saw the long black hairs on her leg through a tear in her
stocking. Her leg is as big as my middle, he thought. I'm cold; I want
tea; I've got snow in my fly.

Arnold backed slowly down the path. 'I had to tell her that or she
wouldn't have gone away. I had to, Patricia. You saw what she was like.
I hate her. Cross my heart!'

'Bang! bang!' cried the boy.

Patricia was smacking Arnold, tugging at his muffler, knocking him with
her elbows. She pummelled him down the path, and shouted at the top of
her voice: 'I'll teach you to lie to Edith! You pig! you black! I'll
teach you to break her heart!'

He shielded his face from her blows as he staggered back. 'Patricia,
Patricia, don't hit me! There's people!'

As Arnold fell, two women with umbrellas up peered through the whirling
snow from behind a bush.

Patricia stood over him. 'You lied to her and you'd lie to me,' she
said. 'Get up, Arnold Matthews!'

He rose and set his muffler straight and wiped his eyes with the red
handkerchief, and raised his cap and walked towards the shelter.

'And as for you,' Patricia said, turning to the watching women, 'you
should be ashamed of yourselves! Two old women playing about in the
snow.'

They dodged behind the bush.

Patricia and the boy climbed, hand in hand, back to the upper walk.

'I've left my cap by the snow man,' he remembered. 'It's my cap with the
Tottenham colours.'

'Run back quickly,' she said, 'you can't get any wetter than you are.'

He found his cap half hidden under snow. In a corner of the shelter,
Arnold sat reading the letters that Edith had dropped, turning the wet
pages slowly. He did not see the boy, and the boy, behind a pillar, did
not interrupt him. Arnold read every letter carefully.

'You've been a long time finding your cap,' Patricia said. 'Did you see
the young man?'

'No,' he said, 'he was gone.'

At home, in the warm living-room, Patricia made him change his clothes
again. He held his hands in front of the fire, and soon they began to
hurt.

'My hands are on fire,' he told her, 'and my toes, and my face.'

After she had comforted him, she said: 'There, that's better. The
hurting's gone. You won't call the king your uncle in a minute.' She was
bustling about the room. 'Now we've all had a good cry to-day.'




THE FIGHT


I was standing at the end of the lower playground and annoying Mr
Samuels, who lived in the house just below the high railings. Mr Samuels
complained once a week that boys from the school threw apples and stones
and balls through his bedroom window. He sat in a deck chair in a small
square of trim garden and tried to read the newspaper. I was only a few
yards from him. I was staring him out. He pretended not to notice me,
but I knew he knew I was standing there rudely and quietly. Every now
and then he peeped at me from behind his newspaper, saw me still and
serious and alone, with my eyes on his. As soon as he lost his temper I
was going to go home. Already I was late for dinner. I had almost beaten
him, the newspaper was trembling, he was breathing heavily, when a
strange boy, whom I had not heard approach, pushed me down the bank.

I threw a stone at his face. He took off his spectacles, put them in his
coat pocket, took off his coat, hung it neatly on the railings, and
attacked. Turning round as we wrestled on the top of the bank, I saw
that Mr Samuels had folded his newspaper on the deck chair and was
standing up to watch us. It was a mistake to turn round. The strange boy
rabbit-punched me twice. Mr Samuels hopped with excitement as I fell
against the railings. I was down in the dust, hot and scratched and
biting, then up and dancing, and I butted the boy in the belly and we
tumbled in a heap. I saw through a closing eye that his nose was
bleeding. I hit his nose. He tore at my collar and spun me round by the
hair.

'Come on! come on!' I heard Mr Samuels cry.

We both turned towards him. He was shaking his fists and dodging about
in the garden. He stopped then, and coughed, and set his panama
straight, and avoided our eyes, and turned his back and walked slowly to
the deck chair.

We both threw gravel at him.

'I'll give him "Come on!"' the boy said, as we ran along the playground
away from the shouts of Mr Samuels and down the steps on to the hill.

We walked home together. I admired his bloody nose. He said that my eye
was like a poached egg, only black.

'I've never seen such a lot of blood,' I said.

He said I had the best black eye in Wales, perhaps it was the best black
eye in Europe; he bet Tunney never had a black eye like that.

'And there's blood all over your shirt.'

'Sometimes I bleed in dollops,' he said.

On Walter's Road we passed a group of high school girls, and I cocked my
cap and hoped my eye was as big as a bluebag, and he walked with his
coat flung open to show the bloodstains.

I was a hooligan all during dinner, and a bully, and as bad as a boy
from the Sandbanks, and I should have more respect, and I sat silently,
like Tunney, over the sago pudding. That afternoon I went to school with
an eyeshade on. If I had had a black silk sling I would have been as gay
and desperate as the wounded captain in the book that my sister used to
read, and that I read under the bed-clothes at night, secretly with a
flash-lamp.

On the road, a boy from an inferior school, where the parents did not
have to pay anything, called me 'One eye!' in a harsh, adult voice. I
took no notice, but walked along whistling, my good eye on the summer
clouds sailing, beyond insult, above Terrace Road.

The mathematics master said: 'I see that Mr Thomas at the back of the
class has been straining his eyesight. But it isn't over his homework,
is it, gentlemen?'

Gilbert Rees, next to me, laughed loudest.

'I'll break your leg after school!' I said.

He'd hobble, howling, up to the head master's study. A deep hush in the
school. A message on a plate brought by the porter. 'The head master's
compliments, sir, and will you come at once?' 'How did you happen to
break this boy's leg?' 'Oh! damn and bottom, the agony!' cried Gilbert
Rees. 'Just a little twist,' I would say. 'I don't know my own strength.
I apologize. But there's nothing to worry about. Let me set the leg,
sir.' A rapid manipulation, the click of a bone. 'Doctor Thomas, sir, at
your service.' Mrs Rees was on her knees. 'How can I thank you?' 'It's
nothing at all, dear lady. Wash his ears every morning. Throw away his
rulers. Pour his red and green inks down the sink.'

In Mr Trotter's drawing class we drew naked girls inaccurately on sheets
of paper under our drawings of a vase and passed them along under the
desks. Some of the drawings were detailed strangely, others were tailed
off like mermaids. Gilbert Rees drew the vase only.

'Sleep with your wife, sir?'

'What did you say?'

'Lend me a knife, sir?'

'What would you do if you had a million pounds?'

'I'd buy a Bugatti and a Rolls and a Bentley and I'd go two hundred
miles an hour on Pendine sands.'

'I'd buy a harem and keep the girls in the gym.'

'I'd buy a house like Mrs Cotmore-Richard's, twice as big as hers, and a
cricket field and a football field and a proper garage with mechanics
and a lift.'

'And a lavatory as big as, as big as the Melba pavilion, with plush
seats and golden chains and...'

'And I'd smoke cigarettes with real gold tips, better than Morris's Blue
Book.'

'I'd buy all the railway trains, and only 4A could travel in them.'

'And not Gilbert Rees either.'

'What's the longest you've been?'

'I went to Edinburgh.'

'My father went to Salonika in the War.'

'Where's that, Cyril?'

'Cyril, tell us about Mrs Pussie Edwards in Hanover Street.'

'Well, my brother says he can do anything.'

I drew a wild guess below the waist, and wrote Pussie Edwards in small
letters at the foot of the page.

'Cave!'

'Hide your drawings.'

'I bet you a greyhound can go faster than a horse.'

Everybody liked the drawing class, except Mr Trotter.

In the evening, before calling on my new friend, I sat in my bedroom by
the boiler and read through my exercise-books full of poems. There were
Danger Don'ts on the backs. On my bedroom walls were pictures of
Shakespeare, Walter de la Mare torn from my father's Christmas
_Bookman_, Robert Browning, Stacy Aumonier, Rupert Brooke, a bearded man
who I had discovered was Whittier, Watts's 'Hope,' and a Sunday school
certificate I was ashamed to want to pull down. A poem I had had printed
in the 'Wales Day by Day' column of the _Western Mail_ was pasted on the
mirror to make me blush, but the shame of the poem had died. Across the
poem I had written, with a stolen quill and in flourishes: 'Homer Nods.'
I was always waiting for the opportunity to bring someone into my
bedroom--'Come into my den; excuse the untidiness; take a chair. No! not
that one, it's broken!'--and force him to see the poem accidentally. 'I
put it there to make me blush.' But nobody ever came in except my
mother.

Walking to his house in the early dusk through solid, deserted
professional avenues lined with trees, I recited pieces of my poems and
heard my voice, like a stranger's voice in Park Drive accompanied by the
tap-tapping of nailed boots, rise very thinly up through the respectable
autumn evening.

     'My mind is fashioned
   In the ways of intertissue;
     Veiled and passioned
   Are the thoughts that issue
   From its well of furtive lust
   Raptured by the devil's dust.'

If I looked through a window on to the road, I would see a
scarlet-capped boy with big boots striding down the middle, and would
wonder who it could be. If I were a young girl watching, my face like
Mona Lisa's, my coal-black hair coiled in earphones, I'd see beneath the
'Boys' Department' suit a manly body with hair and sun tan, and call him
and ask, 'Will you have tea or cocktails?' and hear his voice reciting
the _Grass Blade's Psalm_ in the half-dark of the heavily curtained and
coloured drawing-room hung about with famous reproductions and glowing
with books and wine bottles:

        'The frost has lain,
      Frost that is dark with flowered slain,
        Fragilely strewn
      With patches of illuminated moon,
    About my lonely head in flagged unlovely red.

        'The frost has spake,
      Frost secretive and thrilled in silent flake,
        With unseen lips of blue
      Glass in the glaze stars threw,
    Only to my ears, has spake in visionary tears.

        'The frost has known,
      From scattered conclave by the few winds blown,
        That the lone genius in my roots,
      Bare down there in a jungle of fruits,
    Has planted a green year, for praise, in the heart of my upgrowing
            [days.

        'The frost has filled
      My heart with longing that the night's sleeve spilled,
        Frost of celestial vapour fraught,
      Frost that the columns of unfallen snow have sought,
    With desire for the fields of space hovering about my single place.'

'Look! there's a strange boy, walking alone like a prince.'

'No, no, like a wolf! Look at his long stride!' Sketty church was
shaking its bells for me.

    'When I am strewn low
      And all my ashes are
    Dust in a dumb provoking show
      Of minatory star...'

I recited. A young man and woman, arm in arm, suddenly appeared from a
back lane between houses. I changed my recitation into a tune and hummed
past them. They would be tittering together now, with their horrid
bodies close. Cissy, moony, long hair. I whistled hard and loud, kicked
a tradesmen's entrance, and glanced back over my shoulder. The couple
were gone. Here's a kick at 'The Elms.' 'Where are the bleedy elms,
mister?' Here's a handful of gravel, Mrs 'The Croft,' right at your
window. One night I would paint 'Bum' all over the front gate of
'Kia-Ora.'

A woman stood on 'Lyndhurst' steps with a hissing pom, and, stuffing my
cap in my pocket, I was off down the road; and there was Dan's house,
'Warmley,' with music coming loudly out of it.

He was a composer and a poet too; he had written seven historical novels
before he was twelve, and he played the piano and the violin; his mother
made wool pictures, his brother was a clerk at the docks and syncopated,
his aunt kept a preparatory school on the first floor, and his father
wrote music for the organ. All this he had told me as we walked home
bleeding, strutting by the gym-frocks, waving to boys in the trams.

My new friend's mother answered the door with a ball of wool in her
hand. Dan, in the upstairs drawing-room, heard my arrival and played the
piano faster.

'I didn't hear you come in,' he said when I found him. He finished on a
grand chord, stretching all his fingers.

The room was splendidly untidy, full of wool and paper and open
cupboards stacked with things you could never find; all the expensive
furniture had been kicked; a waistcoat hung on the chandelier. I thought
I could live for ever in that room, writing and fighting and spilling
ink, having my friends for picnics there after midnight with Waller's
rum-and-butter and charlottes russes from Eynon's, and Cydrax and Vino.

He showed me his books and his seven novels. All the novels were about
battles, sieges, and kings. 'Just early stuff,' he said.

He let me take out his violin and make a cat noise.

We sat on a sofa in the window and talked as though we had always known
each other. Would the 'Swans' beat the 'Spurs'? When could girls have
babies? Was Arnott's average last year better than Clay's?

'That's my father outside there on the road,' he said, 'the tall one
waving his arms.'

Two men were talking on the tram-lines. Mr Jenkyn looked as if he were
trying to swim down Eversley Road, he breast-stroked the air and beat on
the ground with his feet, and then he limped and raised one shoulder
higher than the other.

'Perhaps he's describing a fight,' I said.

'Or telling Mr Morris a story about cripples,' said Dan. 'Can you play
the piano?'

'I can do chords, but not tunes,' I said.

We played a duet with crossed hands.

'Now who's that sonata by?'

We made a Dr Percy, who was the greatest composer for four hands in the
world, and I was Paul America, the pianist, and Dan was Winter Vaux.

I read him an exercise-book full of poems. He listened wisely, like a
boy aged a hundred, his head on one side and his spectacles shaking on
his swollen nose. 'This is called _Warp_,' I said:

    'Like suns red from running tears,
    Five suns in the glass,
    Together, separate yet, yet separately round,
    Red perhaps, but the glass is as pale as grass,
    Glide, without sound.
    In unity, five tears lid-awake, suns yet, but salt,
    Five inscrutable spears in the head,
    Each sun but an agony,
    Twist perhaps, pain bled of hate,
    Five into one, the one made of five into one, early
    Suns distorted to late.
    All of them now, madly and desolate,
    Spun with the cloth of the five, run
    Widely and foaming, wildly and desolate,
    Shoot through and dive. One of the five is the sun.'

The noise of the trains past the house clattered away as far as the sea
or farther, into the dredgered bay. Nobody had ever listened like that
before. The school had vanished, leaving on Mount Pleasant hill a deep
hole that smelt of cloakrooms and locker mice, and 'Warmley' shone in
the dark of a town I did not know. In the still room, that had never
been strange to me, sitting in heaps of coloured wool, swollen-nosed and
one-eyed, we acknowledged our gifts. The future spread out beyond the
window, over Singleton Park crowded with lovers messing about, and into
smoky London paved with poems.

Mrs Jenkyn peered round the door and switched the light on. 'There,
that's more homely,' she said. 'You aren't cats.'

The future went out with the light, and we played a thumping piece by Dr
Percy--'Have you ever heard anything so beautiful? Louder, louder,
America!' said Dan. 'Leave a bit of bass for me,' I said--until the
next-door wall was rapped.

'That's the Careys. Mr Carey's a Cape Horner,' Dan said.

We played him one harsh, whaling piece before Mrs Jenkyn, with wool and
needles, ran upstairs.

When she had gone, Dan said: 'Why is a man always ashamed of his
mother?'

'Perhaps he isn't when he's older,' I said, but I doubted it. The week
before I was walking down High Street with three boys after school, and
I saw my mother with a Mrs Partridge outside the Kardomah. I knew she
would stop me in front of the others and say, 'Now you be home early for
tea,' and I wanted High Street to open and suck me down. I loved her and
disowned her. 'Let's cross over,' I said, 'there's some sailors' boots
in Griffith's window.' But there was only a dummy with a golf suit on,
and a roll of tweed.

'Supper isn't for half an hour yet. What shall we do?'

'Let's see who can hold that chair up the longest,' I said.

'No, let's edit a paper; you do the literature, I'll do the music.'

'What shall we call it, then?'

He wrote, '_The_ ----, edited by D. Jenkyn and D. Thomas,' on the back
of a hat-box from under the sofa. The rhythm was better with D. Thomas
and D. Jenkyn, but it was his house.

'What about _The Maestersingers_?'

'No, that's too musical,' I said.

'_The Warmley Magazine?_'

'No,' I said, 'I live in "Glanrhyd."'

After the hat-box was covered, we wrote,

    '_The Thunderer_, edited by D. Jenkyn'
                                   Thomas'

in chalk on a piece of cardboard and pinned it on the wall.

'Would you like to see our maid's bedroom?' asked Dan. We whispered up
to the attic.

'What's her name?'

'Hilda.'

'Is she young?'

'No, she's twenty or thirty.'

Her bed was untidy. 'My mother says you can always smell a maid.' We
smelled the sheets. 'I can't smell anything.'

In her brass-bound box was a framed photograph of a young man wearing
plus-fours.

'That's her boy.'

'Let's give him a moustache.'

Somebody moved downstairs, a voice called, 'Supper now!' and we hurried
out, leaving the box open. 'One night we'll hide under her bed,' Dan
said as we opened the dining-room door.

Mr Jenkyn, Mrs Jenkyn, Dan's aunt, and a Reverend Bevan and Mrs Bevan
were seated at the table.

Mr Bevan said grace. When he stood up, it was just as though he were
still sitting down, he was so short. 'Bless our repast this evening,' he
said, as though he didn't like the food at all. But once 'Amen' was
over, he went at the cold meat like a dog.

Mrs Bevan didn't look all there. She stared at the table-cloth and made
hesitant movements with her knife and fork. She appeared to be wondering
which to cut up first, the meat or the cloth.

Dan I stared at her with delight; he kicked me under the table and I
spilt the salt. In the commotion I managed to put some vinegar on his
bread.

Mrs Jenkyn said, while every one except Mr Bevan was watching Mrs Bevan
moving her knife slowly along the edge of her plate: 'I do hope you like
cold lamb.'

Mrs Bevan smiled at her, assured, and began to eat. She was grey-haired
and grey-faced. Perhaps she was grey all over. I tried to undress her,
but my mind grew frightened when it came to her short flannel petticoat
and navy bloomers to the knees. I couldn't even dare unbutton her tall
boots to see how grey her legs were. She looked up from her plate and
gave me a wicked smile.

Blushing, I turned to answer Mr Jenkyn, who was asking me how old I was.
I told him, but added one year. Why did I lie then? I wondered. If I
lost my cap and found it in my bedroom, and my mother asked me where I
had found it, I would say, 'In the attic,' or, 'Under the hall stand.'
It was exciting to have to keep wary all the time in case I contradicted
myself, to make up the story of a film I pretended to have seen and put
Jack Holt in Richard Dix's place.

'Fifteen and three-quarters,' said Mr Jenkyns, 'that's a very exact age.
I see we have a mathematician with us. Now see if he can do this little
sum.'

He finished his supper and laid out matches on the plate.

'That's an old one, dad,' Dan said.

'Oh, I'd like to see it very much,' I said in my best voice. I wanted to
come to the house again. This was better than home, and there was a
woman off her head, too.

When I failed to place the matches rightly, Mr Jenkyn showed me how it
was done, and, still not understanding, I thanked him and asked him for
another one. It was almost as good being a hypocrite as being a liar; it
made you warm and shameful.

'What were you talking to Mr Morris about in the street, dad?' asked
Dan. 'We saw you from upstairs.'

'I was telling him how the Swansea and District Male Voice did the
_Messiah_, that's all. Why do you ask?'

Mr Bevan couldn't eat any more, he was full. For the first time since
supper began, he looked round the table. He didn't seem to like what he
saw. 'How are studies progressing, Daniel?'

'Listen to Mr Bevan, Dan, he's asking you a question.'

'Oh, so so.'

'So so?'

'I mean they're going very well, thank you, Mr Bevan.'

'Young people should attempt to say what they mean.'

Mrs Bevan giggled, and asked for more meat. 'More meat,' she said.

'And you, young man, have you a mathematical bent?'

'No, sir,' I said, 'I like English.'

'He's a poet,' said Dan, and looked uncomfortable.

'A brother poet,' Mr Bevan corrected, showing his teeth.

'Mr Bevan has published books,' said Mr Jenkyn. '_Proserpine_,
_Psyche_----'

'_Orpheus_,' said Mr Bevan sharply.

'And _Orpheus_. You must show Mr Bevan some of your verses.'

'I haven't got anything with me, Mr Jenkyn.'

'A poet,' said Mr Bevan, 'should carry his verses in his head.'

'I remember them all right,' I said.

'Recite me your latest one; I'm always very interested.'

'What a gathering,' Mrs Jenkyn said, 'poets, musicians, preachers. We
only want a painter now, don't we?'

'I don't think you'll like the very latest one,' I said.

'Perhaps,' said Mr Bevan, smiling, 'I am the best judge of that.'

'Frivolous is my hate,' I said, wanting to die, watching Mr Bevan's
teeth,

    'Singed with bestial remorse
    Of unfulfilment of desired force,
    And lust of tearing late;

    'Now could I raise
    Her dead, dark body to my own
    And hear the joyous rustle of her bone
    And in her eyes see deathly blaze;

    'Now could I wake
    To passion after death, and taste
    The rapture of her hating, tear the waste
    Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break.'

Dan kicked my shins in the silence before Mr Bevan said: 'The influence
is obvious, of course. "Break, break, break, on thy cold, grey stones, O
sea."'

'Hubert knows Tennyson backwards,' said Mrs Bevan, 'backwards.'

'Can we go upstairs now?' Dan asked.

'No annoying Mr Carey then.'

And we shut the door softly behind us and ran upstairs with our hands
over our mouths.

'Damn! damn! damn!' said Dan. 'Did you see the reverend's face?'

We imitated him up and down the room, and had a short fight on the
carpet. Dan's nose began to bleed again. 'That's nothing, it'll stop in
a minute. I can bleed when I like.'

'Tell me about Mrs Bevan. Is she mad?'

'She's terribly mad, she doesn't know who she is. She tried to throw
herself out of the window but he didn't take any notice, so she came up
to our house and told mother all about it.'

Mrs Bevan knocked and walked in. 'I hope I'm not interrupting you.'

'No, of course not, Mrs Bevan.'

'I wanted a little change of air,' she said. She sat down in the wool on
the sofa by the window.

'Isn't it a close night?' said Dan. 'Would you like the window open?'

She looked at the window.

'I can easily open it for you,' Dan said, and winked at me.

'Let me open it for you, Mrs Bevan,' I said.

'It's good to have the window open.'

'And this is a nice high window too.'

'Plenty of air from the sea.'

'Let it be, dear,' she said, 'I'll just sit here and wait for my
husband.'

She played with the balls of wool, picked up a needle and tapped it
gently on the palm of her hand.

'Is Mr Bevan going to be long?'

'I'll just sit and wait for my husband,' she said.

We talked to her some more about windows, but she only smiled and undid
the wool, and once she put the blunt end of the long needle in her ear.
Soon we grew tired of watching her, and Dan played the piano--'My
twentieth sonata,' he said, 'this one is _Homage to Beethoven_'--and at
half-past nine I had to go home.

I said good night to Mrs Bevan, who waved the needle and bowed sitting
down, and Mr Bevan downstairs gave me his cold hand to shake, and Mr and
Mrs Jenkyn told me to come again, and the quiet aunt gave me a Mars bar.

'I'll send you a bit of the way,' said Dan.

Outside, on the pavement, in the warm night, we looked up at the lighted
drawing-room window. It was the only light in the road.

'Look! there she is!'

Mrs Bevan's face was pressed against the glass, her hook nose flattened,
her lips pressed tight, and we ran all the way down Eversley Road in
case she jumped.

At the corner, Dan said: 'I must leave you now, I've got to finish a
string trio to-night.'

'I'm working on a long poem,' I said, 'about the princes of Wales and
the wizards and everybody.'

We both went home to bed.




EXTRAORDINARY LITTLE COUGH


One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August, some years
before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom we called Little Cough,
Sidney Evans, Dan Davies, and I sat on the roof of a lorry travelling to
the end of the Peninsula. It was a tall, six-wheeled lorry, from which
we could spit on the roofs of the passing cars and throw our apple
stumps at women on the pavement. One stump caught a man on a bicycle in
the middle of the back, he swerved across the road, for a moment we sat
quiet and George Hooping's face grew pale. And if the lorry runs over
him, I thought calmly as the man on the bicycle swayed towards the
hedge, he'll get killed and I'll be sick on my trousers and perhaps on
Sidney's too, and we'll all be arrested and hanged, except George
Hooping who didn't have an apple.

But the lorry swept past; behind us, the bicycle drove into the hedge,
the man stood up and waved his fist, and I waved my cap back at him.

'You shouldn't have waved your cap,' said Sidney Evans, 'he'll know what
school we're in.' He was clever, dark, and careful, and had a purse and
a wallet.

'We're not in school now.'

'Nobody can expel me,' said Dan Davies. He was leaving next term to
serve in his father's fruit shop for a salary.

We all wore haversacks, except George Hooping whose mother had given him
a brown-paper parcel that kept coming undone, and carried a suitcase
each. I had placed a coat over my suitcase because the initials on it
were 'N. T.' and everybody would know that it belonged to my sister.
Inside the lorry were two tents, a box of food, a packing-case of
kettles and saucepans and knives and forks, an oil lamp, a primus stove,
ground sheets and blankets, a gramophone with three records, and a
table-cloth from George Hooping's mother.

We were going to camp for a fortnight in Rhossilli, in a field above the
sweeping five-mile beach. Sidney and Dan had stayed there last year,
coming back brown and swearing, full of stories of campers' dances round
the fires at midnight, and elderly girls from the training college who
sun-bathed naked on ledges of rocks surrounded by laughing boys, and
singing in bed that lasted until dawn. But George had never left home
for more than a night; and then, he told me one half-holiday when it was
raining and there was nothing to do but to stay in the washhouse racing
his guinea-pigs giddily along the benches, it was only to stay in St
Thomas, three miles from his house, with an aunt who could see through
the walls and who knew what a Mrs Hoskin was doing in the kitchen.

'How much further?' asked George Hooping, clinging to his split parcel,
trying in secret to push back socks and suspenders, enviously watching
the solid green fields skim by as though the roof were a raft on an
ocean with a motor in it. Anything upset his stomach, even liquorice and
sherbet, but I alone knew that he wore long combinations in the summer
with his name stitched in red on them.

'Miles and miles,' Dan sad.

'Thousands of miles,' I said. 'It's Rhossilli, U.S.A. We're going to
camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the wind.'

'And we have to tie the rock on to a tree.'

'Cough can use his suspenders,' Sidney said.

The lorry roared round a corner--'Upsy-daisy! Did you feel it then,
Cough? It was on one wheel'--and below us, beyond fields and farms, the
sea, with a steamer puffing on its far edge, shimmered.

'Do you see the sea down there, it's shimmering, Dan,' I said.

George Hooping pretended to forget the lurch of the slippery roof and,
from that height, the frightening smallness of the sea. Gripping the
rail of the roof, he said: 'My father saw a killer whale.' The
conviction in his voice died quickly as he began. He beat against the
wind with his cracked, treble voice, trying to make us believe. I knew
he wanted to find a boast so big it would make our hair stand up and
stop the wild lorry.

'Your father's a herbalist.' But the smoke on the horizon was the white,
curling fountain the whale blew through his nose, and its black nose was
the bow of the poking ship.

'Where did he keep it, Cough, in the washhouse?'

'He saw it in Madagascar. It had tusks as long as from here to, from
here to...'

'From here to Madagascar.'

All at once the threat of a steep hill disturbed him. No longer bothered
about the adventures of his father, a small, dusty, skull-capped and
alpaca-coated man standing and mumbling all day in a shop full of herbs
and curtained holes in the wall, where old men with backache and young
girls in trouble waited for consultations in the half-dark, he stared at
the hill swooping up and clung to Dan and me.

'She's doing fifty!'

'The brakes have gone, Cough!'

He twisted away from us, caught hard with both hands on the rail, pulled
and trembled, pressed on a case behind him with his foot, and steered
the lorry to safety round a stone-walled corner and up a gentler hill to
the gate of a battered farm-house.

Leading down from the gate, there was a lane to the first beach. It was
high tide, and we heard the sea dashing. Four boys on a roof--one tall,
dark, regular-featured, precise of speech, in a good suit, a boy of the
world; one squat, ungainly, red-haired, his red wrists fighting out of
short, frayed sleeves; one heavily spectacled, small-paunched, with
indoor shoulders and feet in always unlaced boots wanting to go
different ways; one small, thin, indecisively active, quick to get
dirty, curly--saw their field in front of them, a fortnight's new home
that had thick, pricking hedges for walls, the sea for a front garden, a
green gutter for a lavatory, and a wind-struck tree in the very middle.

I helped Dan unload the lorry while Sidney tipped the driver and George
struggled with the farm-yard gate and looked at the ducks inside. The
lorry drove away.

'Let's build our tents by the tree in the middle,' said George.

'Pitch!' Sidney said, unlatching the gate for him.

We pitched our tents in a corner, out of the wind.

'One of us must light the primus,' Sidney said, and, after George had
burned his hand, we sat in a circle outside the sleeping-tent talking
about motor cars, content to be in the country, lazily easy in each
other's company, thinking to ourselves as we talked, knowing always that
the sea dashed on the rocks not far below us and rolled out into the
world, and that to-morrow we would bathe and throw a ball on the sands
and stone a bottle on a rock and perhaps meet three girls. The oldest
would be for Sidney, the plainest for Dan, and the youngest for me.
George broke his spectacles when he spoke to girls; he had to walk off,
blind as a bat, and the next morning he would say: 'I'm sorry I had to
leave you, but I remembered a message.'

It was past five o'clock. My father and mother would have finished tea;
the plates with famous castles on them were cleared from the table;
father with a newspaper, mother with socks, were far away in the blue
haze to the left, up a hill, in a villa, hearing from the park the faint
cries of children drift over the public tennis court, and wondering
where I was and what I was doing. I was alone with my friends in a
field, with a blade of grass in my mouth, saying, 'Dempsey would hit him
cold,' and thinking of the great whale that George's father never saw
thrashing on the top of the sea, or plunging underneath, like a
mountain.

'Bet you I can beat you to the end of the field.'

Dan and I raced among the cowpads, George thumping at our heels.

'Let's go down to the beach.'

Sidney led the way, running straight as a soldier in his khaki shorts,
over a stile, down fields to another, into a wooded valley, up through
heather on to a clearing near the edge of the cliff, where two broad
boys were wrestling outside a tent. I saw one bite the other in the leg,
they both struck expertly and savagely at the face, one struggled clear,
and, with a leap, the other had him face to the ground. They were
Brazell and Skully.

'Hallo, Brazell and Skully!' said Dan.

Skully had Brazell's arm in a policeman's grip; he gave it two quick
twists and stood up, smiling.

'Hallo, boys! Hallo, Little Cough! How's your father?'

'He's very well, thank you.'

Brazell, on the grass, felt for broken bones. 'Hallo, boys! How are your
fathers?'

They were the worst and biggest boys in school. Every day for a term
they caught me before class began and wedged me in the waste-paper
basket and then put the basket on the master's desk. Sometimes I could
get out and sometimes not. Brazell was lean, Skully was fat.

'We're camping in Button's field,' said Sidney.

'We're taking a rest cure here,' said Brazell. 'And how is Little Cough
these days? Father given him a pill?'

We wanted to run down to the beach, Dan and Sidney and George and I, to
be alone together, to walk and shout by the sea in the country, throw
stones at the waves, remember adventures and make more to remember.

'We'll come down to the beach with you,' said Skully.

He linked arms with Brazell, and they strolled behind us, imitating
George's wayward walk and slashing the grass with switches.

Dan said hopefully: 'Are you camping here for long, Brazell and Skully?'

'For a whole nice fortnight, Davies and Thomas and Evans and Hooping.'

When we reached Mewslade beach and flung ourselves down, as I scooped up
sand and let it trickle grain by grain through my fingers, as George
peered at the sea through his double lenses and Sidney and Dan heaped
sand over his legs, Brazell and Skully sat behind us like two warders.

'We thought of going to Nice for a fortnight,' said Brazell--he rhymed
it with ice, dug Skully in the ribs--'but the air's nicer here for the
complexion.'

'It's as good as a herb,' said Skully.

They shared an enormous joke, cuffing and biting and wrestling again,
scattering sand in the eyes, until they fell back with laughter, and
Brazell wiped the blood from his nose with a piece of picnic paper.
George lay covered to the waist in sand. I watched the sea slipping out,
with birds quarrelling over it, and the sun beginning to go down
patiently.

'Look at Little Cough,' said Brazell. 'Isn't he extraordinary? He's
growing out of the sand. Little Cough hasn't got any legs.'

'Poor Little Cough,' said Skully, 'he's the most extraordinary boy in
the world.'

'Extraordinary Little Cough,' they said together, 'extraordinary,
extraordinary, extraordinary.' They made a song out of it, and both
conducted with their switches.

'He can't swim.'

'He can't run.'

'He can't learn.'

'He can't bowl.'

'He can't bat.'

'And I bet he can't make water.'

George kicked the sand from his legs. 'Yes, I can!'

'Can you swim?'

'Can you run?'

'Can you bowl?'

'Leave him alone,' Dan said.

They shuffled nearer to us. The sea was racing out now. Brazell said in
a serious voice, wagging his finger: 'Now, quite truthfully, Cough,
aren't you extraordinary? Very extraordinary? Say "Yes" or "No."'

'Categorically, "Yes" or "No,"' said Skully.

'No,' George said. 'I can swim and I can run and I can play cricket. I'm
not frightened of anybody.'

I said: 'He was second in the form last term.'

'Now isn't that extraordinary? If he can be second he can be first. But
no, that's too ordinary. Little Cough must be second.'

'The question is answered,' said Skully. 'Little Cough is
extraordinary.' They began to sing again.

'He's a very good runner,' Dan said.

'Well, let him prove it. Skully and I ran the whole length of Rhossilli
sands this morning, didn't we, Skull?'

'Every inch.'

'Can Little Cough do it?'

'Yes,' said George.

'Do it, then.'

'I don't want to.'

'Extraordinary Little Cough can't run,' they sang, 'can't run, can't
run.'

Three girls, all fair, came down the cliffside arm in arm, dressed in
short, white trousers. Their arms and legs and throats were brown as
berries; I could see when they laughed that their teeth were very white;
they stepped on to the beach, and Brazell and Skully stopped singing.
Sidney smoothed his hair back, rose casually, put his hands in his
pockets, and walked towards the girls, who now stood close together,
gold and brown, admiring the sunset with little attention, patting their
scarves, turning smiles on each other. He stood in front of them,
grinned, and saluted: 'Hallo, Gwyneth! do you remember me?'

'La-di-da!' whispered Dan at my side, and made a mock salute to George
still peering at the retreating sea.

'Well, if this isn't a surprise!' said the tallest girl. With little
studied movements of her hands, as though she were distributing flowers,
she introduced Peggy and Jean.

Fat Peggy, I thought, too jolly for me, with hockey legs and tomboy
crop, was the girl for Dan; Sidney's Gwyneth was a distinguished piece
and quite sixteen, as immaculate and unapproachable as a girl in Ben
Evans' stores; but Jean, shy and curly, with butter-coloured hair, was
mine. Dan and I walked slowly to the girls.

I made up two remarks: 'Fair's fair, Sidney, no bigamy abroad,' and
'Sorry we couldn't arrange to have the sea in when you came.'

Jean smiled, wriggling her heel in the sand, and I raised my cap.

'Hallo!'

The cap dropped at her feet.

As I bent down, three lumps of sugar fell from my blazer pocket. 'I've
been feeding a horse,' I said, and began to blush guiltily when all the
girls laughed.

I could have swept the ground with my cap, kissed my hand gaily, called
them seoritas, and made them smile without tolerance. Or I could have
stayed at a distance, and this would have been better still, my hair
blown in the wind, though there was no wind at all that evening, wrapped
in mystery and staring at the sun, too aloof to speak to girls; but I
knew that all the time my ears would have been burning, my stomach would
have been as hollow and as full of voices as a shell. 'Speak to them
quickly, before they go away!' a voice would have said insistently over
the dramatic silence, as I stood like Valentino on the edge of the
bright, invisible bull-ring of the sands. 'Isn't it lovely here!' I
said.

I spoke to Jean alone; and this is love, I thought, as she nodded her
head and swung her curls and said: 'It's nicer than Porthcawl.'

Brazell and Skully were two big bullies in a nightmare; I forgot them
when Jean and I walked up the cliff, and, looking back to see if they
were baiting George again or wrestling together, I saw that George had
disappeared around the corner of the rocks and that they were talking at
the foot of the   with Sidney and the two girls.

'What's your name?'

I told her.

'That's Welsh,' she said.

'You've got a beautiful name.'

'Oh! it's just ordinary.'

'Shall I see you again?'

'If you want to.'

'I want to all right! We can go and bathe in the morning. And we can try
to get an eagle's egg. Did you know that there were eagles here?'

'No,' she said. 'Who was that handsome boy on the beach, the tall one
with dirty trousers?'

'He's not handsome, that's Brazell. He never washes or combs his hair or
anything. And he's a bully and he cheats.'

'I think he's handsome.'

We walked into Button's field, and I showed her inside the tents and
gave her one of George's apples. 'I'd like a cigarette,' she said.

It was nearly dark when the others came. Brazell and Skully were with
Gwyneth, one each side of her holding her arms, Sidney was with Peggy,
and Dan walked, whistling, behind with his hands in his pockets.

'There's a pair,' said Brazell, 'they've been here all alone and they
aren't even holding hands. You want a pill,' he said to me.

'Build Britain's babies,' said Skully.

'Go on!' Gwyneth said. She pushed him away from her, but she was
laughing, and she said nothing when he put his arm around her waist.

'What about a bit of fire?' said Brazell.

Jean clapped her hands like an actress. Although I knew I loved her, I
didn't like anything she said or did.

'Who's going to make it?'

'He's the best, I'm sure,' she said, pointing to me.

Dan and I collected sticks, and by the time it was quite dark there was
a fire crackling. Inside the sleeping-tent, Brazell and Jean sat close
together; her golden head was on his shoulder; Skully, near them,
whispered to Gwyneth; Sidney unhappily held Peggy's hand.

'Did you ever see such a sloppy lot?' I said, watching Jean smile in the
fiery dark.

'Kiss me, Charley!' said Dan.

We sat by the fire in the corner of the field. The sea, far out, was
still making a noise. We heard a few nightbirds. '"Tu-whit! tu-whoo!"
Listen! I don't like owls,' Dan said, 'they scratch your eyes out!'--and
tried not to listen to the soft voices in the tent. Gwyneth's laughter
floated out over the suddenly moonlit field, but Jean, with the beast,
was smiling and silent in the covered warmth; I knew her little hand was
in Brazell's hand.

'Women!' I said.

Dan spat in the fire.

We were old and alone, sitting beyond desire in the middle of the night,
when George appeared, like a ghost, in the firelight and stood there
trembling until I said: 'Where've you been? You've been gone hours. Why
are you trembling like that?'

Brazell and Skully poked their heads out.

'Hallo, Cough my boy! How's your father? What have you been up to
to-night?'

George Hooping could hardly stand. I put my hand on his shoulder to
steady him, but he pushed it away.

'I've been running on Rhossilli sands! I ran every bit of it! You said I
couldn't, and I did! I've been running and running!'

Someone inside the tent put a record on the gramophone. It was a
selection from _No, No, Nanette_.

'You've been running all the time in the dark, Little Cough?'

'And I bet I ran it quicker than you did, too!' George said.

'I bet you did,' said Brazell.

'Do you think we'd run five miles?' said Skully.

Now the tune was 'Tea for Two.'

'Did you ever hear anything so extraordinary? I told you Cough was
extraordinary. Little Cough's been running all night.'

'Extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary Little Cough,' they said.

Laughing from the shelter of the tent into the darkness, they looked
like a boy with two heads. And when I stared round at George again he
was lying on his back fast asleep in the deep grass and his hair was
touching the flames.




JUST LIKE LITTLE DOGS


Standing alone under a railway arch out of the wind, I was looking at
the miles of sands, long and dirty in the early dark, with only a few
boys on the edge of the sea and one or two hurrying couples with their
mackintoshes blown around them like balloons, when two young men joined
me, it seemed out of nowhere, and struck matches for their cigarettes
and illuminated their faces under bright-checked caps.

One had a pleasant face; his eyebrows slanted comically towards his
temples, his eyes were warm, brown, deep, and guileless, and his mouth
was full and weak. The other man had a boxer's nose and a weighted chin
ginger with bristles.

We watched the boys returning from the oily sea; they shouted under the
echoing arch, then their voices faded. Soon there was not a couple in
sight; the lovers had disappeared among the sandhills and were lying
down there with the broken tins and bottles of the summer passed, old
paper blowing by them, and nobody with any sense was about. The
strangers, huddled against the wall, their hands deep in their pockets,
their cigarettes sparkling, stared, I thought, at the thickening of the
dark over the empty sands, but their eyes may have been closed. A train
raced over us, and the arch shook. Over the shore, behind the vanishing
train, smoke clouds flew together, rags of wings and hollow bodies of
great birds black as tunnels, and broke up lazily; cinders fell through
a sieve in the air, and the sparks were put out by the wet dark before
they reached the sand. The night before, little quick scarecrows had
bent and picked at the track-line and a solitary dignified scavenger
wandered three miles by the edge with a crumpled coal sack and a
park-keeper's steel-tipped stick. Now they were tucked up in sacks,
asleep in a siding, their heads in bins, their beards in straw, in
coal-trucks thinking of fires, or lying beyond pickings on Jack Stiff's
slab near the pub in the Fishguard Alley, where the methylated-spirit
drinkers danced into the policemen's arms and women like lumps of
clothes in a pool waited, in doorways and holes in the soaking wall, for
vampires or firemen. Night was properly down on us now. The wind
changed. Thin rain began. The sands themselves went out. We stood in the
scooped, windy room of the arch, listening to the noises from the
muffled town, a goods train shunting, a siren in the docks, the hoarse
trams in the streets far behind, one bark of a dog, unplaceable sounds,
iron being beaten, the distant creaking of wood, doors slamming where
there were no houses, an engine coughing like a sheep on a hill.

The two young men were statues smoking, tough-capped and collarless
watchers and witnesses carved out of the stone of the blowing room where
they stood at my side with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and all the
raining, almost winter, night before them. I cupped a match to let them
see my face in a dramatic shadow, my eyes mysteriously sunk, perhaps, in
a startling white face, my young looks savage in the sudden flicker of
light, to make them wonder who I was as I puffed my last butt and
puzzled about them. Why was the soft-faced young man, with his tame
devil's eyebrows, standing like a stone figure with a glow-worm in it?
He should have a nice girl to bully him gently and take him to cry in
the pictures, or kids to bounce in a kitchen in Rodney Street. There was
no sense in standing silent for hours under a railway arch on a hell of
a night at the end of a bad summer when girls were waiting, ready to be
hot and friendly, in chip shops and shop doorways and Rabbiotti's
all-night caf, when the public bar of the 'Bay View' at the corner had
a fire and skittles and a swarthy, sensuous girl with different coloured
eyes, when the billiard saloons were open, except the one in High Street
you couldn't go into without a collar and tie, when the closed parks had
empty, covered bandstands and the railings were easy to climb.

A church clock somewhere struck a lot, faintly from the night on the
right, but I didn't count.

The other young man, less than two feet from me, should be shouting with
the boys, boasting in lanes, propping counters, prancing and clouting in
the Mannesmann Hall, or whispering around a bucket in a ring corner. Why
was he humped here with a moody man and myself, listening to our
breathing, to the sea, the wind scattering sand through the archway, a
chained dog and a foghorn and the rumble of trams a dozen streets away,
watching a match strike, a boy's fresh face spying in a shadow, the
lighthouse beams, the movement of a hand to a fag, when the sprawling
town in a drizzle, the pubs and the clubs and the coffee-shops, the
prowlers' streets, the arches near the promenade, were full of friends
and enemies? He could be playing nap by a candle in a shed in a
wood-yard.

Families sat down to supper in rows of short houses, the wireless sets
were on, the daughters' young men sat in the front rooms. In
neighbouring houses they read the news off the table-cloth, and the
potatoes from dinner were fried up. Cards were played in the front rooms
of houses on the hills. In the houses on tops of the hills families were
entertaining friends, and the blinds of the front rooms were not quite
drawn. I heard the sea in a cold bit of the cheery night.

One of the strangers said suddenly, in a high, clear voice: 'What are we
all doing then?'

'Standing under a bloody arch,' said the other one.

'And it's cold,' I said.

'It isn't very cosy,' said the high voice of the young man with the
pleasant face, now invisible. 'I've been in better hotels than this.'

'What about that night in the Majestic?' said the other voice.

There was a long silence.

'Do you often stand here?' said the pleasant man. His voice might never
have broken.

'No, this is the first time here,' I said. 'Sometimes I stand in the
Brynmill arch.'

'Ever tried the old pier?'

'It's no good in the rain, is it?'

'Underneath the pier, I mean, in the girders.'

'No, I haven't been there.'

'Tom spends every Sunday under the pier,' the pug-faced young man said
bitterly. 'I got to take him his dinner in a piece of paper.'

'There's another train coming,' I said. It tore over us, the arch
bellowed, the wheels screamed through our heads, we were deafened and
spark-blinded and crushed under the fiery weight and we rose again, like
battered black men, in the grave of the arch. No noise at all from the
swallowed town. The trams had rattled themselves dumb. A pressure of the
hidden sea rubbed away the smudge of the docks. Only three young men
were alive.

One said: 'It's a sad life, without a home.'

'Haven't you got a home then?' I said.

'Oh, yes, I've got a home all right.'

'I got one, too.'

'And I live near Cwmdonkin Park,' I said.

'That's another place Tom sits in in the dark. He says he listens to the
owls.'

'I knew a chap once who lived in the country, near Bridgend,' said Tom,
'and they had a munition works there in the War and it spoiled all the
birds. The chap I know says you can always tell a cuckoo from Bridgend,
it goes: "Cuckbloodyoo! cuckbloodyoo!"'

'Cuckbloodyoo!' echoed the arch.

'Why are you standing under the arch then?' asked Tom. 'It's warm at
home. You can draw the curtains and sit by the fire, snug as a bug.
Gracie's on the wireless to-night. No shananacking in the old
moonlight.'

'I don't want to be home, I don't want to sit by the fire. I've got
nothing to do when I'm in and I don't want to go to bed. I like standing
about like this with nothing to do, in the dark all by myself,' I said.

And I did, too. I was a lonely night-walker and a steady
stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight,
when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and
alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under
the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer
Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing
world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for
myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on and for the
unfeeling systems in the upper air, Mars and Venus and Brazell and
Skully, men in China and St Thomas, scorning girls and ready girls,
soldiers and bullies and policemen and sharp, suspicious buyers of
second-hand books, bad, ragged women who'd pretend against the museum
wall for a cup of tea, and perfect, unapproachable women out of the
fashion magazines, seven feet high, sailing slowly in their flat, glazed
creations through steel and glass and velvet. I leant against the wall
of a derelict house in the residential areas or wandered in the empty
rooms, stood terrified on the stairs or gazing through the smashed
windows at the sea or at nothing, and the lights going out one by one in
the avenues. Or I mooched in a half-built house, with the sky stuck in
the roof and cats on the ladders and a wind shaking through the bare
bones of the bedrooms.

'And you can talk,' I said. 'Why aren't you at home?'

'I don't want to be home,' said Tom.

'I'm not particular,' said his friend.

When a match flared, their heads rocked and spread on the wall, and
shapes of winged bulls and buckets grew bigger and smaller. Tom began to
tell a story. I thought of a new stranger walking on the sands past the
arch and hearing all of a sudden that high voice out of a hole.

I missed the beginning of the story as I thought of the man on the sands
listening in a panic or dodging, like a footballer, in and out among the
jumping dark towards the lights behind the railway line, and remembered
Tom's voice in the middle of a sentence.

'...went up to them and said it was a lovely night. It wasn't a
lovely night at all. The sands were empty. We asked them what their
names were and they asked us what ours were. We were walking along by
this time. Walter here was telling them about the glee party in the
"Melba" and what went on in the ladies' cloakroom. You had to drag the
tenors away like ferrets.'

'What were their names?' I asked.

'Doris and Norma,' Walter said.

'So we walked along the sands towards the dunes,' Tom said, 'and Walter
was with Doris and I was with Norma. Norma worked in the steam laundry.
We hadn't been walking and talking for more than a few minutes when, by
God, I knew I was head over heels in love with the girl, and she wasn't
the pretty one, either.'

He described her. I saw her clearly. Her plump, kind face, jolly brown
eyes, warm wide mouth, thick bobbed hair, rough body, bottle legs, broad
bum, grew from a few words right out of Tom's story, and I saw her
ambling solidly along the sands in a spotted frock in a showering autumn
evening with fancy gloves on her hard hands, a gold bangle, with a voile
handkerchief tucked in it, round her wrist, and a navy-blue handbag with
letters and outing snaps, a compact, a bus ticket, and a shilling.

'Doris was the pretty one,' said Tom, 'smart and touched up and sharp as
a knife. I was twenty-six years old and I'd never been in love, and
there I was, gawking at Norma in the middle of Tawe sands, too
frightened to put my finger on her gloves. Walter had his arm round
Doris then.'

They sheltered behind a dune. The night dropped down on them quickly.
Walter was a caution with Doris, hugging and larking, and Tom sat close
to Norma, brave enough to hold her hand in its cold glove and tell her
all his secrets. He told her his age and his job. He liked staying in in
the evenings with a good book. Norma liked dances. He liked dances, too.
Norma and Doris were sisters. 'I'd never have thought that,' Tom said,
'you're beautiful, I love you.'

Now the story-telling night in the arch gave place to the loving night
in the dunes. The arch was as high as the sky. The faint town noises
died. I lay like a pimp in a bush by Tom's side and squinted through to
see him round his hands on Norma's breast. 'Don't you dare!' Walter and
Doris lay quietly near them. You could have heard a safety-pin fall.

'And the curious thing was,' said Tom, 'that after a time we all sat up
on the sand and smiled at each other. And then we all moved softly about
on the sand in the dark, without saying a word. And Doris was lying with
me, and Norma was with Walter.'

'But why did you change over, if you loved her?' I asked.

'I never understood why,' said Tom. 'I think about it every night.'

'That was in October,' Walter said.

And Tom continued: 'We didn't see much of the girls until July. I
couldn't face Norma. Then they brought two paternity orders against us,
and Mr Lewis, the magistrate, was eighty years old, and stone deaf, too.
He put a little trumpet by his ear and Norma and Doris gave evidence.
Then we gave evidence, and he couldn't decide whose was which. And at
the end he shook his head back and fore and pointed his trumpet and
said: "Just like little dogs!"'

All at once I remembered how cold it was. I rubbed my numb hands
together. Fancy standing all night in the cold. Fancy listening, I
thought, to a long, unsatisfactory story in the frost-bite night in a
polar arch. 'What happened then?' I asked.

Walter answered. 'I married Norma,' he said 'and Tom married Doris. We
had to do the right thing by them, didn't we? That's why Tom won't go
home. He never goes home till the early morning. I've got to keep him
company. He's my brother.'

It would take me ten minutes to run home. I put up my coat collar and
pulled my cap down.

'And the curious thing is,' said Tom, 'that I love Norma and Walter
doesn't love Norma or Doris. We've two nice little boys. I call mine
Norman.'

We all shook hands.

'See you again,' said Walter.

'I'm always hanging about,' said Tom.

'Abyssinia!'

I walked out of the arch, crossed Trafalgar Terrace, and pelted up the
steep streets.




WHERE TAWE FLOWS


Mr Humphries, Mr Roberts, and young Mr Thomas knocked on the front door
of Mr Emlyn Evans's small villa, 'Lavengro,' punctually at nine o'clock
in the evening. They waited, hidden behind a veronica bush, while Mr
Evans shuffled in carpet slippers up the passage from the back room and
had trouble with the bolts.

Mr Humphries was a school teacher, a tall, fair man with a stammer, who
had written an unsuccessful novel.

Mr Roberts, a cheerful, disreputable man of middle age, was a collector
for an insurance company; they called him in the trade a body-snatcher,
and he was known among his friends as Burke and Hare, the Welsh
Nationalist. He had once held a high position in a brewery office.

Young Mr Thomas was at the moment without employment, but it was
understood that he would soon be leaving for London to make a career in
Chelsea as a free-lance journalist; he was penniless, and hoped, in a
vague way, to live on women.

When Mr Evans opened the door and shone his torch down the narrow drive,
lighting up the garage and hen-run but missing altogether the whispering
bush, the three friends bounded out and cried in threatening voices:
'We're Ogpu men, let us in!'

'We're looking for seditious literature,' said Mr Humphries with
difficulty, raising his hand in a salute.

'Heil, Saunders Lewis! and we know where to find it,' said Mr Roberts.

Mr Evans turned off his torch. 'Come in out of the night air, boys, and
have a drop of something. It's only parsnip wine,' he added.

They removed their hats and coats, piled them on the end of the
banister, spoke softly for fear of waking up the twins, George and
Celia, and followed Mr Evans into his den.

'Where's the trouble and strife, Mr Evans?' said Mr Roberts in a cockney
accent. He warmed his hands in front of the fire and regarded with a
smile of surprise, though he visited the house every Friday, the neat
rows of books, the ornate roll-top desk that made the parlour into a
study, the shining grandfather clock, the photographs of children
staring stiffly at a dickybird, the still, delicious home-made wine,
that had such an effect, in an old beer bottle, the sleeping tom on the
frayed rug. 'At home with the _bourgeoisie_.'

He was himself a homeless bachelor with a past, much in debt, and
nothing gave him more pleasure than to envy his friends their wives and
comforts and to speak of them intimately and disparagingly.

'In the kitchen,' said Mr Evans, handing out glasses.

'A woman's only place,' said Mr Roberts heartily, 'with one exception.'

Mr Humphries and Mr Thomas arranged the chairs around the fire, and all
four sat down, close and confidential and with full glasses in their
hands. None of them spoke for a time. They gave one another sly looks,
sipped and sighed, lit the cigarettes that Mr Evans produced from a
draughts box, and once Mr Humphries glanced at the grandfather clock and
winked and put his finger to his lips. Then, as the visitors grew warm
and the wine worked and they forgot the bitter night outside, Mr Evans
said, with a little shudder of forbidden delight: 'The wife will be
going to bed in half an hour. Then we can start the good work. Have you
all got yours with you?'

'And the tools,' said Mr Roberts, smacking his side pocket.

'What's the word until then?' said young Mr Thomas.

Mr Humphries 'winked again. 'Mum!'

'I've been waiting for to-night to come round like I used to wait for
Saturdays when I was a boy,' said Mr Evans, 'I got a penny then. And it
all went on gob-stoppers and jelly-babies, too.'

He was a traveller in rubber, rubber toys and syringes and bath mats.
Sometimes Mr Roberts called him the poor man's friend to make him blush.
'No! no! no!' he would say, 'you can look at my samples, there's nothing
like that there.' He was a Socialist.

'I used to buy a packet of Cinderellas with my penny,' said Mr Roberts,
'and smoke them in the slaughter-house. The sweetest little smoke in the
world. You don't see them now.'

'Do you remember old Jim, the caretaker, in the slaughter-house?' asked
Mr Evans.

'He was after my time; I'm no chicken, like you boys.'

'You're not old, Mr Roberts, think of G.B.S.'

'No clean Shavianism for me, I'm an unrepentant eater of birds and
beasts,' said Mr Roberts.

'Do you eat flowers, too?'

'Oh! oh! you literary men, don't you talk above my head now. I'm only a
poor old resurrectionist on the knocker.'

'He'd put his hand down in the guts-box and bring you out a rat with its
neck broken clean as a match for the price of a glass of beer.'

'And it was beer then.'

'Shop! shop!' Mr Humphries beat on the table with his glass. 'You
mustn't waste stories, we'll need them all,' he said. 'Have you got the
abattoir anecdote down in your memory book, Mr Thomas?'

'I'll remember it.'

'Don't forget, you can only talk at random now,' said Mr Humphries.

'Okay, Roderick!' Mr Thomas said quickly.

Mr Roberts put his hands over his ears. 'The conversation is getting
esoteric,' he said. 'Excuse my French! Mr Evans, have you such a thing
as a rook rifle? I want to scare the highbrows off. Did I ever tell you
the time I lectured to the John O' London's Society on 'The Utility of
Uselessness'? That was a poser. I talked about Jack London all the time,
and when they said at the end that it wasn't a lecture about what I said
it was going to be, I said, "Well, it was useless lecturing about that,
wasn't it?" and they hadn't a word to say. Mrs Dr Davies was in the
front row, you remember her? She gave that first lecture on W. J. Locke
and got spoonered in the middle. Remember her talking about the
'Bevagged Loveabond,' Mr Humphries?'

'Shop! shop!' said Mr Humphries, groaning, 'keep it until after.'

'More parsnip?'

'It goes down the throat like silk, Mr Evans.'

'Like baby's milk.'

'Say when, Mr Roberts.'

'A word of four syllables denoting a period of time. Thank you! I read
that on a matchbox.'

'Why don't they have serials on matchboxes? You'd buy the shop up to see
what Daphne did next,' Mr Humphries said.

He stopped and looked round in embarrassment at the faces of his
friends. Daphne was the name of the grass widow in Manselton for whom Mr
Roberts had lost both his reputation and his position in the brewery. He
had been in the habit of delivering bottles to her house, free of
charge, and he had bought her a cocktail cabinet and given her a hundred
pounds and his mother's rings. In return, she held large parties and
never invited him. Only Mr Thomas had noticed the name, and he was
saying: 'No, Mr Humphries, on toilet rolls would be best.'

'When I was in London,' Mr Roberts said, 'I stayed with a couple called
Armitage in Palmer's Green. He made curtains and blinds. They used to
leave each other messages on the toilet paper every single day.'

'If you want to make a Venetian blind,' said Mr Evans, 'stick him in the
eye with a hatpin.' He felt, always, a little left out of his evenings
at home, and he was waiting for Mrs Evans to come in, disapprovingly,
from the kitchen.

'I've often had to use, "Dear Tom, don't forget the Watkinses are coming
to tea," or, "To Peggy, from Tom, in remembrance." Mr Armitage was a
Mosleyite.'

'Thugs!' said Mr Humphries.

'Seriously, what are we going to do about this uniformication of the
individual?' Mr Evans asked. Maud was in the kitchen still; he heard her
beating the plates.

'Answering your question with another,' said Mr Roberts, putting one
hand on Mr Evans's knee, 'what individuality is there left? The mass-age
produces the mass-man. The machine produces the robot.'

'As its slave,' Mr Humphries articulated clearly, 'not, mark you, as its
master.'

'There you have it. There it is. Tyrannic dominance by a sparking plug,
Mr Humphries, and it's flesh and blood that always pays.'

'Any empty glasses?'

Mr Roberts turned his glass upside down. 'That used to mean, "I'll take
on the best man in the room in a bout of fisticuffs," in Llanelly. But
seriously, as Mr Evans says, the old-fashioned individualist is a square
peg now in a round hole.'

'What a hole!' said Mr Thomas.

'Take our national--what did Onlooker say last week?--our national
misleaders.'

'You take them, Mr Roberts, we've got rats already,' Mr Evans said with
a nervous laugh. The kitchen was silent. Maud was ready.

'Onlooker is a _nom de plume_ for Basil Gorse-Williams,' said Mr
Humphries. 'Did any one know that?'

'_Nom de guerre._ Did you see his article on Ramsay Mac? "A sheep in
wolf's clothing."'

'Know him!' Mr Roberts said scornfully, 'I've been sick on him.'

Mrs Evans heard the last remark as she came into the room. She was a
thin woman with bitter lines, tired hands, the ruins of fine brown eyes,
and a superior nose. An unshockable woman, she had once listened to Mr
Roberts's description of his haemorrhoids for over an hour on a New
Year's Eve and had allowed him, without protest, to call them the grapes
of wrath. When sober, Mr Roberts addressed her as 'ma'am' and kept the
talk to weather and colds. He sprang to his feet and offered her his
chair.

'No, thank you, Mr Roberts,' she said in a clear, hard voice, 'I'm going
to bed at once. The cold disagrees with me.'

Go to bed, plain Maud, thought young Mr Thomas. 'Will you have a little
warm, Mrs Evans, before you retire?' he said.

She shook her head, gave the friends a thin smile, and said to Mr Evans:
'Put the world right before you come to bed.'

'Good night, Mrs Evans.'

'It won't be after midnight this time, Maud, I promise. I'll put Sambo
out in the back.'

'Good night, ma'am.'

Sleep tight, hoity.

'I won't disturb you gentlemen any more,' she said. 'What's left of the
parsnip wine for Christmas is in the boot cupboard, Emlyn. Don't let it
waste. Good night.'

Mr Evans raised his eyebrows and whistled. 'Whew! boys.' He pretended to
fan his face with his tie. Then his hand stopped still in the air. 'She
was used to a big house,' he said, 'with servants.'

Mr Roberts brought out pencils and fountain pens from his side pocket.
'Where's the priceless MS.? Tempus is fugiting.'

Mr Humphries and Mr Thomas put notebooks on their knees, took a pencil
each, and watched Mr Evans open the door of the grandfather clock.
Beneath the swinging weights was a heap of papers tied up in a blue bow.
These Mr Evans placed on the desk.

'I call order,' said Mr Roberts. 'Let's see where we were. Have you got
the minutes, Mr Thomas?'

'"_Where Tawe flows_,"' said Mr Thomas, '"a Novel of Provincial Life.
Chapter One: a cross-section description of the town, Dockland, Slums,
Suburbia, etc." We finished that. The title decided upon was: Chapter
One, "The Public Town." Chapter Two is to be called "The Private Lives,"
and Mr Humphries has proposed the following: "Each of the collaborators
take one character from each social sphere or stratum of the town and
introduce him to the readers with a brief history of his life up to the
point at which we commence the story, i.e. the winter of this very year.
These introductions of the characters, hereafter to be regarded as the
principal protagonists, and their biographical chronicles, shall
constitute the second chapter." Any questions, gentlemen?'

Mr Humphries agreed with all he had said. His character was a sensitive
schoolmaster of advanced opinions, who was misjudged and badly treated.

'No questions,' said Mr Evan's. He was in charge of Suburbia. He rustled
his notes and waited to begin.

'I haven't written anything yet,' Mr Roberts said, 'it's all in my
head.' He had chosen the Slums.

'Personally,' said Mr Thomas, 'I haven't made up my mind whether to have
a barmaid or a harlot.'

'What about a barmaid who's a harlot too?' Mr Roberts suggested. 'Or
perhaps we could have a couple of characters each? I'd like to do an
alderman. And a gold-digger.'

'Who had a word for them, Mr Humphries?' said Mr Thomas.

'The Greeks.'

Mr Roberts nudged Mr Evans and whispered: 'I just thought of an opening
sentence for my bit. Listen, Emlyn. "On the rickety table in the corner
of the crowded, dilapidated room, a stranger might have seen, by the
light of the flickering candle in the gin-bottle, a broken cup, full of
sick or custard."'

'Be serious, Ted,' said Mr Evans, laughing. 'You wrote that sentence
down.'

'No, I swear, it came to me just like that!' He flicked his fingers.
'And who's been reading my notes?'

'Have you put anything on paper yourself, Mr Thomas?'

'Not yet, Mr Evans.' He had been writing, that week, the story of a cat
who jumped over a woman the moment she died and turned her into a
vampire. He had reached the part of the story where the woman was an
undead children's governess, but he could not think how to fit it into
the novel.

'There's no need, is there,' he asked, 'for us to avoid the fantastic
altogether?'

'Wait a bit! wait a bit!' said Mr Humphries, 'let's get our realism
straight. Mr Thomas will be making all the characters Blue Birds before
we know where we are. One thing at a time. Has any one got the history
of his character ready?' He had his biography in his hand, written in
red ink. The writing was scholarly and neat and small.

'I think my character is ready to take the stage,' said Mr Evans. 'But I
haven't written it out. I'll have to refer to the notes and make the
rest up out of my head. It's a very silly story.'

'Well, you must begin, of course,' said Mr Humphries with
disappointment.

'Everybody's biography is silly,' Mr Roberts said. 'My own would make a
cat laugh.'

Mr Humphries said: 'I must disagree there. The life of that mythical
common denominator, the man in the street, is dull as ditch-water, Mr
Roberts. Capitalist society has made him a mere bundle of repressions
and useless habits under that symbol of middle-class divinity, the
bowler.' He looked quickly away from the notes in the palm of his hand.
'The ceaseless toil for bread and butter, the ogres of unemployment, the
pettifogging gods of gentility, the hollow lies of the marriage bed.
Marriage,' he said, dropping his ash on the carpet, 'legal monogamous
prostitution.'

'Whoa! whoa! there he goes!'

'Mr Humphries is on his hobby-horse again.'

'I'm afraid,' said Mr Evans, 'that I lack our friend's extensive
vocabulary. Have pity on a poor amateur. You're shaming my little story
before I begin.'

'I still think the life of the ordinary man is most extraordinary,' Mr
Roberts said, 'take my own...'

'As the secretary,' said Mr Thomas, 'I vote we take Mr Evans's story. We
must try to get _Tawe_ finished for the spring list.'

'My _To-morrow and To-morrow_ was published in the summer in a heat
wave,' Mr Humphries said.

Mr Evans coughed, looked into the fire, and began.

'Her name is Mary,' he said, 'but that's not her name really. I'm
calling her that because she is a real woman and we don't want any
libel. She lives in a house called "Bellevue," but that's not the proper
name, of course. A villa by any other name, Mr Humphries. I chose her
for my character because her life story is a little tragedy, but it's
not without its touches of humour either. It's almost Russian.
Mary--Mary Morgan now but she was Mary Phillips before she married and
that comes later, that's the anti-climax--wasn't a suburbanite from
birth, she didn't live under the shadow of the bowler, like you and me.
Or like me, anyway. I was born in "The Poplars" and now I'm in
"Lavengro." From bowler to bowler, though I must say, apropos of Mr
Humphries's diatribe, and I'm the first to admire his point of view,
that the everyday man's just as interesting a character study as the
neurotic poets of Bloomsbury.'

'Remind me to shake your hand,' said Mr Roberts.

'You've been reading the Sunday papers,' said Mr Humphries accusingly.

'You two argue the toss later on,' Mr Thomas said. "Is the Ordinary Man
a Mouse?" Now, what about Mary?'

'Mary Phillips,' continued Mr Evans, '--and any more interruptions from
the intelligentsia and I'll get Mr Roberts to tell you the story of his
operations, no pardons granted--lived on a big farm in Carmarthenshire,
I'm not going to tell you exactly where, and her father was a widower.
He had any amount of what counts and he drank like a fish, but he was
always a gentleman with it. Now, now! forget the class war, I could see
it smouldering. He came of a very good, solid family, but he raised his
elbow, that's all there is to it.'

Mr Roberts said: 'Huntin', fishin', and boozin'.'

'No, he wasn't quite county and he wasn't a _nouveau riche_ either. No
Philippstein about him, though I'm not an anti-Semite. You've only got
to think of Einstein and Freud. There are bad Christians, too. He was
just what I'm telling you, if you'd only let me, a man of good old
farming stock who'd made his pile and now he was spending it.'

'Liquidating it.'

'He'd only got one child, and that was Mary, and she was so prim and
proper she couldn't bear to see him the worse for drink. Every night he
came home, and he was always the worse, she'd shut herself in her
bedroom and hear him rolling about the house and calling for her and
breaking the china sometimes. But only sometimes, and he wouldn't have
hurt a hair of her head. She was about eighteen and a fine-looking girl,
not a film star, mind, not Mr Roberts's type at all, and perhaps she had
an Oedipus complex, but she hated her father and she was ashamed of
him.'

'What's my type, Mr Evans?'

'Don't pretend not to know, Mr Roberts. Mr Evans means the sort you can
take home and show her your stamp collection.'

'I will have hush,' said Mr Thomas.

''Ave 'ush, is the phrase,' Mr Roberts said. 'Mr Thomas, you're afraid
we'll think you're patronizing the lower classes if you drop your
aspirates.'

'No nasturtiums, Mr Roberts,' said Mr Humphries.

'Mary Phillips fell in love with a young man whom I shall call Marcus
David,' Mr Evans went on, still staring at the fire, avoiding his
friends' eyes, and speaking to the burning pictures, 'and she told her
father: "Father, Marcus and I want to be engaged. I'm bringing him home
one night for supper, and you must promise me that you'll be sober."

'He said, "I'm always sober!" but he wasn't sober when he said it, and
after a time he promised.

'"If you break your word, I'll never forgive you," Mary said to him.

'Marcus was a wealthy farmer's son from another district, a bit of a
Valentino in a bucolic way, if you can imagine that. She invited him to
supper, and he came, very handsome, with larded hair. The servants were
out. Mr Phillips had gone to a mart that morning and hadn't returned.
She answered the door herself. It was a winter's evening.

'Picture the scene. A prim, well-bred country girl, full of fixations
and phobias, proud as a duchess, and blushing like a dairymaid, opening
the door to her beloved and seeing him standing there on the pitch-black
threshold, shy and handsome. This is from my notes.

'Her future hung on that evening as on a thread. "Come in," she
insisted. They didn't kiss, but she wanted him to bow and print his lips
on her hand. She took him over the house, which had been specially
cleaned and polished, and showed him the case with Swansea china in it.
There wasn't a portrait gallery, so she showed him the snaps of her
mother in the hall and the photograph of her father, tall and young and
sober, in the suit he hunted otters in. And all the time she was proudly
parading their possessions, attempting to prove to Marcus, whose father
was a J.P., that her background was prosperous enough for her to be his
bride, she was waiting fearfully the entrance of her father.

'"O God," she was praying, when they sat down to a cold supper, "that my
father will arrive presentable." Call her a snob, if you will, but
remember that the life of country gentry, or near gentry, was bound and
dictated by the antiquated totems and fetishes of possession. Over
supper she told him her family tree and hoped the supper was to his
taste. It should have been a hot supper, but she didn't want him to see
the servants who were old and dirty. Her father wouldn't change them
because they'd always been with him, and there you see the Toryism of
this particular society rampant. To cut a long story (this is only the
gist, Mr Thomas), they were half-way through supper, and their
conversation was becoming more intimate, and she had almost forgotten
her father, when the front door burst open and Mr Phillips staggered
into the passage, drunk as a judge. The dining-room door was ajar and
they could see him plainly. I will not try to describe Mary's
kaleidoscopic emotions as her father rocked and mumbled in a thick voice
in the passage. He was a big man--I forgot to tell you--six foot and
eighteen stone.

'"Quick! quick! under the table!" she whispered urgently, and she pulled
Marcus by the hand and they crouched under the table. What bewilderment
Marcus experienced we shall never know.

'Mr Phillips came in and saw nobody and sat down at the table and
finished all the supper. He licked both plates clean, and under the
table they heard him swearing and guzzling. Every time Marcus fidgeted,
Mary said: "Shhh!"

'When there was nothing left to eat, Mr Phillips wandered out of the
room. They saw his legs. Then, somehow, he climbed upstairs, saying
words that made Mary shudder under the table, words of four syllables.'

'Give us three guesses,' said Mr Roberts.

'And she heard him go into his bedroom. She and Marcus crept out of
hiding and sat down in front of their empty plates.

'"I don't know how to apologize, Mr David," she said, and she was nearly
crying.

'"There's nothing the matter," he said, he was an amenable young man by
all accounts, "he's only been to the mart at Carmarthen. I don't like
t.t.s myself."

'"Drink makes men sodden beasts," she said.

'He said she had nothing to worry about and that he didn't mind, and she
offered him fruit.

'"What will you think of us, Mr David? I've never seen him like that
before."

'The little adventure brought them closer together, and soon they were
smiling at one another and her wounded pride was almost healed again,
but suddenly Mr Phillips opened his bedroom door and charged downstairs,
eighteen stone of him, shaking the house.

'"Go away!" she cried softly to Marcus, "please go away before he comes
in!"

'There wasn't time. Mr Phillips stood in the passage in the nude.

'She dragged Marcus under the table again, and she covered her eyes not
to see her father. She could hear him fumbling in the hall-stand for an
umbrella, and she knew what he was going to do. He was going outside to
obey a call of nature. "O God," she prayed, "let him find an umbrella
and go out. Not in the passage! Not in the passage!" They heard him
shout for his umbrella. She uncovered her eyes and saw him pulling the
front door down. He tore it off its hinges and held it flat above him
and tottered out into the dark.

'"Hurry! please hurry!" she said. "Leave me now, Mr David." She drove
him out from under the table.

'"Please, please go now," she said, "we'll never meet again. Leave me to
my shame." She began to cry, and he ran out of the house. And she stayed
under the table all night.'

'Is that all?' said Mr Roberts. 'A very moving incident, Emlyn. How did
you come by it?'

'How can it be all?' said Mr Humphries. 'It doesn't explain how Mary
Phillips reached "Bellevue." We've left her under a table in
Carmarthenshire.'

'I think Marcus is a fellow to be despised,' Mr Thomas said. 'I'd never
leave a girl like that, would you, Mr Humphries?'

'Under a table, too. That's the bit I like. That's a position.
Perspectives were different,' said Mr Roberts, 'in those days. That
narrow puritanism is a spent force. Imagine Mrs Evans under the table.
And what happened afterwards? Did the girl die of cramp?'

Mr Evans turned from the fire to reprove him. 'Be as flippant as you
will, but the fact remains that an incident like that has a lasting
effect on a proud, sensitive girl like Mary. I'm not defending her
sensitivity, the whole basis of her pride is outmoded. The social
system, Mr Roberts, is not in the box. I'm telling you an incident that
occurred. Its social implications are outside our concern.'

'I'm put in my place, Mr Evans.'

'What happened to Mary then?'

'Don't vex him, Mr Thomas, he'll bite your head off.'

Mr Evans went out for more parsnip wine, and, returning, said:

'What happened next? Oh! Mary left her father, of course. She said she'd
never forgive him, and she didn't, so she went to live with her uncle in
Cardiganshire, a Dr Emyr Lloyd. He was a J.P. too, and rolling in it,
about seventy-five--now, remember the age--with a big practice and
influential friends. One of his oldest friends was John William
Hughes--that's not his name--the London draper, who had a country house
near his. Remember what the great Caradoc Evans says? The Cardies always
go back to Wales to die when they've rooked the cockneys and made a
packet.

'And the only son, Henry William Hughes, who was a nicely educated young
man, fell in love with Mary as soon as he saw her and she forgot Marcus
and her shame under the table and she fell in love with him. Now don't
look disappointed before I begin, this isn't a love story. But they
decided to get married, and John William Hughes gave his consent because
Mary's uncle was one of the most respected men in the country and her
father had money and it would come to her when he died and he was doing
his best.

'They were to be married quietly in London. Everything was arranged. Mr
Phillips wasn't invited. Mary had her trousseau. Dr Lloyd was to give
her away. Beatrice and Betti William Hughes were bridesmaids. Mary went
up to London with Beatrice and Betti and stayed with a cousin, and Henry
William Hughes stayed in the flat above his father's shop, and the day
before the wedding Dr Lloyd arrived from the country, saw Mary for tea,
and had dinner with John William Hughes. I wonder who paid for it, too.
Then Dr Lloyd retired to his hotel. I'm giving you these trivial details
so that you can see how orderly and ordinary everything was. There the
actors were, safe and sure.

'Next day, just before the ceremony was to begin, Mary and her cousin,
whose name and character are extraneous, and the two sisters, they were
both plain and thirty, waited impatiently for Dr Lloyd to call on them.
The minutes passed by, Mary was crying, the sisters were sulking, the
cousin was getting in everybody's way, but the doctor didn't come. The
cousin telephoned the doctor's hotel, but she was told he hadn't spent
the night there. Yes, the clerk in the hotel said, he knew the doctor
was going to a wedding. No, his bed hadn't been slept in. The clerk
suggested that perhaps he was waiting at the church.

'The taxi was ticking away, and that worried Beatrice and Betti, and at
last the sisters and the cousin and Mary drove together to the church. A
crowd had gathered outside. The cousin poked her head out of the taxi
window and asked a policeman to call a churchwarden, and the warden said
that Dr Lloyd wasn't there and the groom and the best man were waiting.
You can imagine Mary Phillips's feelings when she saw a commotion at the
church door and a policeman leading her father out. Mr Phillips had his
pockets full of bottles, and how he ever got into the church in the
first place no one knew.'

'That's the last straw,' said Mr Roberts.

'Beatrice and Betti said to her: "Don't cry, Mary, the policeman's
taking him away. Look! he's fallen in the gutter! There's a splash!
Don't take on, it'll be all over soon. You'll be Mrs Henry William
Hughes." They were doing their best.

'"You can marry without Dr Lloyd," the cousin told her, and she
brightened through her tears--anybody would be crying--and at that
moment another policeman----'

'Another!' said Mr Roberts.

'--made his way through the crowd and walked up to the door of the
church and sent a message inside. John William Hughes and Henry William
Hughes and the best man came out, and they all talked to the policeman,
waving their arms and pointing to the taxi with Mary and the bridesmaids
and the cousin in it.

'John William Hughes ran down the path to the taxi and shouted through
the window: "Dr Lloyd is dead! We'll have to cancel the wedding."

'Henry William Hughes followed him and opened the taxi door and said:
"You must drive home, Mary. We've got to go to the police station."

'"And the mortuary," his father said.

'So the taxi drove the bride-to-be home, and the sisters cried worse
than she did all the way.'

'That's a sad end,' said Mr Roberts with appreciation. He poured himself
another drink.

'It isn't really the end,' Mr Evans said, 'because the wedding wasn't
just cancelled. It never came off.'

'But why?' asked Mr Humphries, who had followed the story with a grave
expression, even when Mr Phillips fell in the gutter. 'Why should the
doctor's death stop everything? She could get someone else to give her
away. I'd have done it myself.'

'It wasn't the doctor's death, but where and how he died,' said Mr
Evans. 'He died in bed in a bed-sitting-room in the arms of a certain
lady. A woman of the town.'

'Kiss me!' Mr Roberts said. 'Seventy-five years old. I'm glad you asked
us to remember his age, Mr Evans.'

'But how did Mary Phillips come to live in "Bellevue"? You haven't told
us that,' Mr Thomas said.

'The William Hugheses wouldn't have the niece of a man who died in those
circumstances----'

'However complimentary to his manhood,' Mr Humphries said, stammering.

'--marry into their family, so she went back to live with her father and
he reformed at once--oh! she had a temper, those days--and one day she
met a traveller in grain and pigs' food and she married him out of
spite. They came to live in "Bellevue," and when Mr Phillips died he
left his money to the chapel, so Mary got nothing after all.'

'Nor her husband either. What did you say he travelled in?' asked Mr
Roberts.

'Grain and pigs' food.'

After that, Mr Humphries read his biography, which was long and sad and
detailed and in good prose; and Mr Roberts told a story about the slums,
which could not be included in the book.

Then Mr Evans looked at his watch. 'It's midnight. I promised Maud not
after midnight. Where's the cat? I've got to put him out; he tears the
cushions. Not that I mind. Sambo! Sambo!'

'There he is, Mr Evans, under the table.'

'Like poor Mary,' said Mr Roberts.

Mr Humphries, Mr Roberts, and young Mr Thomas collected their hats and
coats from the banister.

'Do you know what time it is, Emlyn?' Mrs Evans called from upstairs.

Mr Roberts opened the door and hurried out.

'I'm coming now, Maud, I'm just saying good night. Good night,' Mr Evans
said in a loud voice. 'Next Friday, nine sharp,' he whispered. 'I'll
polish my story up. We'll finish the second chapter and get going on the
third. Good night, comrades.'

'Emlyn! Emlyn!' called Mrs Evans.

'Good night, Mary,' said Mr Roberts to the closed door.

The three friends walked down the drive.




WHO DO YOU WISH WAS WITH US?


Birds in the Crescent trees were singing; boys on bicycles were ringing
their bells and pedalling down the slight slope to make the whirrers in
their wheels startle the women gabbing on the sunny doorsteps; small
girls on the pavement, wheeling young brothers and sisters in prams,
were dressed in their summer best and with coloured ribbons; on the
circular swing in the public playground, children from the snot school
spun themselves happy and sick, crying 'Swing us!' and 'Swing us!' and,
'Ooh! I'm falling!'; the morning was as varied and bright as though it
were an international or a jubilee when Raymond Price and I, flannelled
and hatless, with sticks and haversacks, set out together to walk to the
Worm's Head. Striding along, in step, through the square of the
residential Uplands, we brushed by young men in knife-creased whites and
showing-off blazers, and hockey-legged girls with towels round their
necks and celluloid sun-glasses, and struck a letterbox with our sticks,
and bullied our way through a crowd of day-trippers who waited at the
stop of the Gower-bound buses, and stepped over luncheon baskets, not
caring if we trod in them.

'Why can't those bus lizards walk?' Ray said.

'They were born too tired,' I said.

We went on up Sketty Road at a great speed, our haversacks jumping on
our backs. We rapped on every gate to give a terrific walkers'
benediction to the people in the choking houses. Like a breath of fresh
air we passed a man in office pin-stripes standing, with a dog-lead in
his hand, whistling at a corner. Tossing the sounds and smells of the
town from us with the swing of our shoulders and loose-limbed strides,
half-way up the road we heard women on an outing call 'Mutt and Jeff!'
for Ray was tall and thin and I was short. Streamers flew out of the
charabanc. Ray, sucking hard at his bulldog pipe, walked too fast to
wave and did not even smile. I wondered whom I had missed among the
waving women bowling over the rise. My love to come, with a paper cap
on, might have sat at the back of the outing, next to the barrel; but,
once away from the familiar roads and swinging towards the coast, I
forgot her face and voice, that had been made at night, and breathed the
country air in.

'There's a different air here. You breathe. It's like the country,' Ray
said, 'and a bit of the sea mixed. Draw it down; it'll blow off the
nicotine.'

He spat in his hand. 'Still town grey,' he said.

He put back the spit in his mouth and we walked on with our heads high.

By this time we were three miles from the town. The semi-detached
houses, with a tin-roofed garage each and a kennel in the back plot and
a mowed lawn, with sometimes a hanging coco-nut on a pole, or a
bird-bath, or a bush like a peacock, grew fewer when we reached the
outskirts of the common.

Ray stopped and sighed and said: 'Wait half a sec, I want to fill the
old pipe.' He held a match to it as though we were in a storm.

Hot-faced and wet-browed, we grinned at each other. Already the day had
brought us close as truants; we were running away, or walking with pride
and mischief, arrogantly from the streets that owned us into the
unpredictable country. I thought it was against our fate to stride in
the sun without the shop-windows dazzling or the music of mowers rising
above the birds. A bird's dropping fell on a fence. It was one in the
eye for the town. A sheep cried 'Baa!' out of sight, and that would show
the Uplands. I did not know what it would show. 'A couple of wanderers
in wild Wales,' Ray said, winking, and a lorry carrying cement drove
past us towards the golf links. He slapped my haversack and straightened
his shoulders. 'Come on, let's be going.' We walked uphill faster than
before.

A party of cyclists had pulled up on the roadside and were drinking
dandelion and burdock from paper cups. I saw the empty bottles in a
bush. All the boys wore singlets and shorts, and the girls wore open
cricket shirts and boys' long grey trousers, with safety-pins for clips
at the bottoms.

'There's room for one behind, sonny boy,' a girl on a tandem said to me.

'It won't be a stylish marriage,' Ray said.

'That was quick,' I told Ray as we walked away from them and the boys
began to sing.

'God, I like this!' said Ray. On the first rise of the dusty road
through the spreading heathered common, he shaded his eyes and looked
all round him, smoking like a chimney and pointing with his Irish stick
at the distant clumps of trees and sights of the sea between them. 'Down
there is Oxwich, but you can't see it. That's a farm. See the roof? No,
there, follow my finger. This is the life,' he said.

Side by side, thrashing the low banks, we marched down the very middle
of the road, and Ray saw a rabbit running. 'You wouldn't think this was
near town. It's wild.'

We pointed out the birds whose names we knew, and the rest of the names
we made up. I saw gulls and crows, though the crows may have been rooks,
and Ray said that thrushes and swallows and skylarks flew above us as we
hurried and hummed.

He stopped to pull some blades of grass. 'They should be straws,' he
said, and put them in his mouth next to his pipe. 'God, the sky's blue!
Think of me, in the G.W.R. when all this is about. Rabbits and fields
and farms. You wouldn't think I'd suffered to look at me now. I could do
anything, I could drive cows, I could plough a field.'

His father and sister and brother were dead, and his mother sat all day
in a wheel-chair, crippled with arthritis. He was ten years older than I
was. He had a lined and bony face and a tight, crooked mouth. His upper
lip had vanished.

Alone on the long road, the common in the heat mist wasting for miles on
either side, we walked on under the afternoon sun, growing thirsty and
drowsy but never slowing our pace. Soon the cycling party rode by, three
boys and three girls and the one girl on the tandem, all laughing and
ringing.

'How's Shanks's pony?'

'We'll see you on the way back.'

'You'll be walking still.'

'Like a crutch?' they shouted.

Then they were gone. The dust settled again. Their bells rang faintly
through the wood around the road before us. The wild common, six miles
and a bit from the town, lay back without a figure on it, and, under the
trees, smoking hard to keep the gnats away, we leant against a trunk and
talked like men, on the edge of an untrodden place, who have not seen
another man for years.

'Do you remember Curly Parry?'

I had seen him only two days ago in the snooker-room, but his dimpled
face was fading, even as I thought of him, into the colours of our walk,
the ash-white of the road, the common heathers, the green and blue of
fields and fragmentary sea, and the memory of his silly voice was lost
in the sounds of birds and unreasonably moving leaves in the lack of
wind.

'I wonder what he's doing now? He should get out more in the open air,
he's a proper town boy. Look at us here.' Ray waved his pipe at the
trees and leafy sky. 'I wouldn't change this for High Street.'

I looked at us there: a boy and a young man, with faces, under the
strange sunburn, pale from the cramped town, out of breath and
hot-footed, pausing in the early afternoon on a road through a popular
wood, and I could see the unaccustomed happiness in Ray's eyes and the
impossible friendliness in mine, and Ray protested against his history
each time he wondered or pointed in the country scene and I had more
love in me than I could ever want or use.

'Yes, look at us here,' I said, 'dawdling about. Worm's Head is twelve
miles off. Don't you want to hear a tram-car, Ray? That's a wood pigeon.
See! The boys are out on the streets with the sports special now. Paper!
paper! I bet you Curl's potting the red. Come on! come on!'

'Eyes right!' said Ray, 'I's b----d! Remember that story?'

Up the road and out of the wood, and a double-decker roared behind us.

'The Rhossilli bus is coming,' I said.

We both held up our sticks to stop it.

'Why did you stop the bus?' Ray said, when we were sitting upstairs.
'This was a walking holiday.'

'You stopped it as well.'

We sat in front like two more drivers.

'Can't you mind the ruts?' I said.

'You're wobbling,' said Ray.

We opened our haversacks and shared the sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs
and meat paste and drank from the thermos in turns.

'When we get home don't say we took a bus,' I said. 'Pretend we walked
all day. There goes Oxwich! It doesn't seem far, does it? We'd have had
beards by now.'

The bus passed the cyclists crawling up a hill. 'Like a tow along?' I
shouted, but they couldn't hear. The girl on the tandem was a long way
behind the others.

We sat with our lunch on our laps, forgetting to steer, letting the
driver in his box beneath drive where and how he liked on the
switch-back road, and saw grey chapels and weather-worn angels; at the
feet of the hills farthest from the sea, pretty, pink
cottages--horrible, I thought, to live in, for grass and trees would
imprison me more securely than any jungle of packed and swarming streets
and chimney-roosting roofs--and petrol pumps and hayricks and a man on a
cart-horse standing stock still in a ditch, surrounded by flies.

'This is the way to see the country.'

The bus, on a narrow hill, sent two haversacked walkers bounding to the
shelter of the hedge, where they stretched out their arms and drew their
bellies in.

'That might have been you and me.'

We looked back happily at the men against the hedge. They climbed on to
the road, slow as snails continued walking, and grew smaller.

At the entrance to Rhossilli we pushed the conductor's bell and stopped
the bus, and walked, with springing steps, the few hundred yards to the
village.

'We've done it in pretty good time,' said Ray.

'I think it's a record,' I said.

Laughing on the cliff above the very long golden beach, we pointed out
to each other, as though the other were blind, the great rock of the
Worm's Head. The sea was out. We crossed over on slipping stones and
stood, at last, triumphantly on the windy top. There was monstrous,
thick grass there that made us spring-heeled, and we laughed and bounced
on it, scaring the sheep who ran up and down the battered sides like
goats. Even on this calmest day a wind blew along the Worm. At the end
of the humped and serpentine body, more gulls than I had ever seen
before cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages. On the
point, the sound of my quiet voice was scooped and magnified into a
hollow shout, as though the wind around me had made a shell or cave,
with blue, intangible roof and sides, as tall and wide as all the arched
sky, and the flapping gulls were made thunderous. Standing there, legs
apart, one hand on my hip, shading my eyes like Raleigh in some picture,
I thought myself alone in the epileptic moment near bad sleep, when the
legs grow long and sprout into the night and the heart hammers to wake
the neighbours and breath is a hurricane through the elastic room.
Instead of becoming small on the great rock, poised between sky and sea,
I felt myself the size of a breathing building, and only Ray in the
world could match my lovely bellow as I said: 'Why don't we live here
always? Always and always. Build a bloody house and live like bloody
kings!' The word bellowed among the squawking birds, they carried it off
to the headland in the drums of their wings; like a tower, Ray pranced
on the unsteady edge of a separate rock and beat about with his stick,
which could turn into snakes or flames; and we sank to the ground, the
rubbery, gull-limed grass, the sheep-pilled stones, the pieces of bones
and feathers, and crouched at the extreme point of the Peninsula. We
were still for so long that the dirty-grey gulls calmed down, and some
settled near us.

Then we finished our food.

'This isn't like any other place,' I said. I was almost my own size
again, five feet five and eight stone, and my voice didn't sweep any
longer up to the amplifying sky. 'It could be in the middle of the sea.
You could think the Worm was moving, couldn't you? Guide it to Ireland,
Ray. We'll see W. B. Yeats and you can kiss the Blarney. We'll have a
fight in Belfast.'

Ray looked out of place on the end of the rock. He would not make
himself easy and loll in the sun and roll on to his side to stare down a
precipice into the sea, but tried to sit upright as though he were in a
hard chair and had nothing to do with his hands. He fiddled with his
tame stick and waited for the day to be orderly, for the Head to grow
paths, and for railings to shoot up on the scarred edges.

'It's too wild for a townee,' I said.

'Townee yourself! Who stopped the bus?'

'Aren't you glad we stopped it? We'd still be walking, like Felix.
You're just pretending you don't like it here. You were dancing on the
edge.'

'Only a couple of hops.'

'I know what it is, you don't like the furniture. There's not enough
sofas and chairs,' I said.

'You think you're a country boy; you don't know a cow from a horse.'

We began to quarrel, and soon Ray felt at home again and forgot the
monotonous out-of-doors. If snow had fallen suddenly he would not have
noticed. He drew down into himself, and the rock, to him, became dark as
a house with the blinds drawn. The sky-high shapes that had danced and
bellowed at birds crept down to hide, two small town mutterers in a
hollow.

I knew what was going to happen by the way Ray lowered his head and
brought his shoulders up so that he looked like a man with no neck, and
by the way he sucked his breath in between his teeth. He stared at his
dusty white shoes and I knew what shapes his imagination made of them:
they were the feet of a man dead in bed, and he was going to talk about
his brother. Sometimes, leaning against a fence when we watched
football, I caught him staring at his own thin hand: he was thinning it
more and more, removing the flesh, seeing Harry's hand in front of him,
with the bones appearing through the sensitive skin. If he lost the
world around him for a moment, if I left him alone, if he cast his eyes
down, if his hand lost its grip on the hard, real fence or the hot bowl
of his pipe, he would be back in ghastly bedrooms, carrying cloths and
basins and listening for handbells.

'I've never seen such a lot of gulls,' I said. 'Have you ever seen such
a lot? Such a lot of gulls. You try and count them. Two of them are
fighting up there; look, pecking each other like hens in the air.
What'll you bet the big one wins? Old dirty beak! I wouldn't like to
have had his dinner, a bit of sheep and dead gull.' I swore at myself
for saying the word 'dead.' 'Wasn't it gay in town this morning?' I
said.

Ray stared at his hand. Nothing could stop him now. 'Wasn't it gay in
town this morning? Everybody laughing and smiling in their summer
outfits. The kids were playing and everybody was happy; they almost had
the band out. I used to hold my father down on the bed when he had fits.
I had to change the sheets twice a day for my brother, there was blood
on everything. I watched him getting thinner and thinner; in the end you
could lift him up with one hand. And his wife wouldn't go to see him
because he coughed in her face. Mother couldn't move, and I had to cook
as well, cook and nurse and change the sheets and hold father down when
he got mad. It's embittered my outlook,' he said.

'But you loved the walk, you enjoyed yourself on the common. It's a
wonderful day, Ray. I'm sorry about your brother. Let's explore. Let's
climb down to the sea. Perhaps there's a cave with prehistoric drawings,
and we can write an article and make a fortune. Let's climb down.'

'My brother used to ring a bell for me; he could only whisper. He used
to say: "Ray, look at my legs. Are they thinner to-day?"'

'The sun's going down. Let's climb.'

'Father thought I was trying to murder him when I held him on the bed. I
was holding him down when he died, and he rattled. Mother was in the
kitchen in her chair, but she knew he was dead and she started screaming
for my sister. Brenda was in a sanatorium in Craigynos. Harry rang the
bell in his bedroom when mother started, but I couldn't go to him, and
father was dead in the bed.'

'I'm going to climb to the sea,' I said. 'Are you coming?'

He got up out of the hollow into the open world again and followed me
slowly over the point and down the steep side; the gulls rose in a
storm. I clung to dry, spiked bushes but the roots came out; a foothold
crumbled, a crevice for the fingers broke as I groped in it; I scrambled
on to a black, flat-backed rock whose head, like a little Worm's, curved
out of the sea a few perilous steps away from me, and, drenched by
flying water, I gazed up to see Ray and a shower of stones falling. He
landed at my side.

'I thought I was done for,' he said, when he had stopped shaking. 'I
could see all my past life in a flash.'

'All of it?'

'Well, nearly. I saw my brother's face clear as yours.'

We watched the sun set.

'Like an orange.'

'Like a tomato.'

'Like a goldfish bowl.'

We went one better than the other, describing the sun. The sea beat on
our rock, soaked our trouser-legs, stung our cheeks. I took off my shoes
and held Ray's hand and slid down the rock on my belly to trail my feet
in the sea. Then Ray slid down, and I held him fast while he kicked up
water.

'Come back now,' I said, pulling his hand.

'No, no,' he said, 'this is delicious. Let me keep my feet in a bit
more. It's warm as the baths.' He kicked and grunted and slapped the
rock in a frenzy with his other hand, pretending to drown. 'Don't save
me!' he cried. 'I'm drowning! I'm drowning!'

I pulled him back, and in his struggles he brushed a shoe off the rock.
We fished it out. It was full of water.

'Never mind, it was worth it. I haven't paddled since I was six. I can't
tell you how much I enjoyed it.'

He had forgotten about his father and his brother, but I knew that once
his joy in the wild, warm water was over he would return to the painful
house and see his brother growing thinner. I had heard Harry die so many
times, and the mad father was as familiar to me as Ray himself. I knew
every cough and cry, every clawing at the air.

'I'm going to paddle once a day from now on,' Ray said. 'I'm going to go
down to the sands every evening and have a good paddle. I'm going to
splash about and get wet up to my knees. I don't care who laughs.'

He sat still for a minute, thinking gravely of this. 'When I wake up in
the mornings there's nothing to look forward to, except on Saturdays,'
he said then, 'or when I come up to your house for Lexicon. I may as
well be dead. But now I'll be able to wake up and think: "This evening
I'm going to splash about in the sea." I'm going to do it again now.' He
rolled up his wet trousers and slid down the rock. 'Don't let go.'

As he kicked his legs in the sea, I said: 'This is a rock at the world's
end. We're all alone. It all belongs to us, Ray. We can have anybody we
like here and keep everybody else away. Who do you wish was with us?'

He was too busy to answer, splashing and snorting, blowing as though his
head were under, making circular commotions in the water or lazily
skimming the surface with his toes.

'Who would you like to be here on the rock with us?'

He was stretched out like a dead man, his feet motionless in the sea,
his mouth on the rim of a rock pool, his hand clutched round my foot.

'I wish George Gray was with us,' I said. 'He's the man from London
who's come to live in Norfolk Street. You don't know him. He's the most
curious man I ever met, queerer than Oscar Thomas, and I thought nobody
could ever be queerer than that. George Gray wears glasses, but there's
no glass in them, only the frames. You wouldn't know until you came near
him. He does all sorts of things. He's a cat's doctor and he goes to
somewhere in Sketty every morning to help a woman put her clothes on.
She's an old widow, he said, and she can't dress by herself. I don't
know how he came to know her. He's only been in town for a month. He's a
B.A., too. The things he's got in his pockets! Pincers, and scissors for
cats, and lots of diaries. He read me some of the diaries, about the
jobs he did in London. He used to go to bed with a policewoman and she
used to pay him. She used to go to bed in her uniform. I've never met
such a queer man. I wish he was here now. Who do you wish was with us,
Ray?'

Ray began to move his feet again, kicking them out straight behind him
and bringing them down hard on the water, and then stirring the water
about.

'I wish Gwilym was here, too,' I said. 'I've told you about him. He
could give a sermon to the sea. This is the very place, there isn't
anywhere as lonely as this.' Oh, the beloved sunset! Oh, the terrible
sea! Pity the sailors, pity the sinners, pity Raymond Price and me! Oh,
the evening is coming like a cloud! Amen. Amen. 'Who do you wish, Ray?'

'I wish my brother was with us,' Ray said. He climbed on to the flat of
the rock and dried his feet. 'I wish Harry was here. I wish he was here
now, at this moment, on this rock.'

The sun was nearly right down, halved by the shadowed sea. Cold came up,
spraying out of the sea, and I could make a body for it, icy antlers, a
dripping tail, a rippling face with fishes passing across it. A wind,
cornering the Head, chilled through our summer shirts, and the sea began
to cover our rock quickly, our rock already covered with friends, with
living and dead, racing against the darkness. We did not speak as we
climbed. I thought: 'If we open our mouths we'll both say: "Too late,
it's too late."' We ran over the springboard grass and the scraping rock
needles, down the hollow in which Ray had talked about blood, up
rustling humps, and along the ragged flat. We stood on the beginning of
the Head and looked down, though both of us could have said, without
looking: 'The sea is in.'

The sea was in. The slipping stepping-stones were gone. On the mainland,
in the dusk, some little figures beckoned to us. Seven clear figures,
jumping and calling. I thought they were the cyclists.




OLD GARBO


Mr Farr trod delicately and disgustedly down the dark, narrow stairs
like a man on mice. He knew, without looking or slipping, that vicious
boys had littered the darkest corners with banana peel; and when he
reached the lavatory, the basins would be choked and the chains snapped
on purpose. He remembered 'Mr Farr, no father' scrawled in brown, and
the day the sink was full of blood that nobody admitted having lost. A
girl rushed past him up the stairs, knocked the papers out of his hand,
did not apologize, and the loose meg of his cigarette burned his lower
lip as he failed to open the lavatory door. I heard from inside his
protest and rattlings, the sing-song whine of his voice, the stamping of
his small, patent-leather shoes, his favourite swear-words--he swore,
violently and privately, like a collier used to thinking in the
dark--and I let him in.

'Do you always lock the door?' he asked, scurrying to the tiled wall.

'It stuck,' I said.

He shivered, and buttoned.

He was the senior reporter, a great shorthand writer, a chain-smoker, a
bitter drinker, very humorous, round-faced and round-bellied, with dart
holes in his nose. Once, I thought as I stared at him then in the
lavatory of the offices of the _Tawe News_, he might have been a
mincing-mannered man, with a strut and a cane to balance it, a
watch-chain across the waistcoat, a gold tooth, even, perhaps a flower
from his own garden in his buttonhole. But now each attempt at a precise
gesture was caked and soaked before it began; when he placed the tips of
his thumb and forefinger together, you saw only the cracked nails in
mourning and the Woodbine stains. He gave me a cigarette and shook his
coat to hear matches.

'Here's a light, Mr Farr,' I said.

It was good to keep in with him; he covered all the big stories, the
occasional murder, such as when Thomas O'Connor used a bottle on his
wife--but that was before my time--the strikes, the best fires. I wore
my cigarette as he did, a hanging badge of bad habits.

'Look at that word on the wall,' he said. 'Now that's ugly. There's a
time and a place.'

Winking at me, scratching his bald patch as though the thought came from
there, he said: 'Mr Solomon wrote that.'

Mr Solomon was the news editor and a Wesleyan.

'Old Solomon,' said Mr Farr, 'he'd cut every baby in half just for
pleasure.'

I smiled and said: 'I bet he would!' But I wished that I could have
answered in such a way as to show for Mr Solomon the disrespect I did
not feel. This was a great male moment, and the most enjoyable since I
had begun work three weeks before: leaning against the cracked tiled
wall, smoking and smiling, looking down at my shoe scraping circles on
the wet floor, sharing a small wickedness with an old, important man. I
should have been writing up last night's performance of _The
Crucifixion_ or loitering, with my new hat on one side, through the
Christmas-Saturday-crowded town in the hopes of an accident.

'You must come along with me one night,' Mr Farr said slowly. 'We'll go
down the "Fishguard" on the docks; you can see the sailors knitting
there in the public bar. Why not to-night? And there's shilling women in
the "Lord Jersey." You stick to Woodbines, like me.'

He washed his hands as a young boy does, wiping the dirt on the
roll-towel, stared in the mirror over the basin, twirled the ends of his
moustache, and saw them droop again immediately after.

'Get to work,' he said.

I walked into the lobby, leaving him with his face pressed to the glass
and one finger exploring his bushy nostrils.

It was nearly eleven o'clock, and time for a cocoa or a Russian tea in
the Caf Royal, above a tobacconist's in High Street, where junior
clerks and shop assistants and young men working in their fathers'
offices or articled to stockbrokers and solicitors met every morning for
gossip and stories. I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up
for the football; the country shoppers; the window gazers; the silent,
shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation
in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black,
brooched dresses carrying frails; smart girls with shining mackintoshes
and splashed stockings; little, dandy lascars, bewildered by the
weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of
umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never
write. I'll put you all in a story by and by.

Mrs Constable, laden and red with shopping, recognized me as she charged
out of Woolworth's like a bull. 'I haven't seen your mother for ages!
Oh! this Christmas rush! Remember me to Florrie. I'm going to have a cup
of tea at the "Modern." There,' she said, 'I've lost a pan!'

I saw Percy Lewis, who put chewing gum in my hair at school.

A tall man stared at the doorway of a hat shop, resisting the crowds,
standing hard and still. All the moving irrelevancies of good news grew
and acted around me as I reached the caf entrance and climbed the
stairs.

'What's for you, Mr Swaffer?'

'The usual, please.' Cocoa and free biscuit.

Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of
moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved
pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were
pin-stripe trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler.

'Sit by here,' said Leslie Bird. He was in the boots at Dan Lewis's.

'Been to the flicks this week, Thomas?'

'Yes. The Regal. _White Lies._ Damned good show, too! Connie Bennett was
great! Remember her in the foam-bath, Leslie?'

'Too much foam for me, old man.'

The broad vowels of the town were narrowed in, the rise and fall of the
family accent was caught and pressed.

At the top window of the International Stores across the street a group
of uniformed girls were standing with tea-cups in their hands. One of
them waved a handkerchief. I wondered if she waved it to me. 'There's
that dark piece again,' I said. 'She's got her eye on you.'

'They look all right in their working clothes,' he said. 'You catch them
when they're all dolled up, they're awful. I knew a little nurse once,
she looked a peach in her uniform, really refined; no, really, I mean. I
picked her up on the prom one night. She was in her Sunday best. There's
a difference; she looked like a bit of Marks and Spencer's.' As he
talked he was looking through the window with the corners of his eyes.

The girl waved again, and turned away to giggle.

'Pretty cheap!' he said.

I said: 'And little Audrey laughed and laughed.'

He took out a plated cigarette case. 'Present,' he said. 'I bet my uncle
with three balls has it in a week. Have a best Turkish.'

His matches were marked Allsopps. 'Got them from the "Carlton," he said.
'Pretty girl behind the bar; knows her onions. You've never been there,
have you? Why don't you drop in for one to-night? Gil Morris'll be
there, too. We usually sink a couple Saturdays. There's a hop at the
"Melba."'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'm going out with our senior reporter. Some other
time, Leslie. So long!'

I paid my threepence.

'Good morning, Cassie.'

'Good morning, Hannen.'

The rain had stopped and High Street shone. Walking on the tram-lines, a
neat man held his banner high and prominently feared the Lord. I knew
him as a Mr Matthews, who had been saved some years ago from British
port and who now walked every night, in rubber shoes with a prayer book
and a flashlight, through the lanes. There went Mr Evans the Produce
through the side-door of the 'Bugle.' Three typists rushed by for lunch,
poached egg and milkshake, leaving a lavender scent. Should I take the
long way through the Arcade, and stop to look at the old man with the
broken, empty pram, who always stood there, by the music store, and who
would take off his cap and set his hair alight for a penny? It was only
a trick to amuse boys, and I took the short cut down Chapel Street, on
the edge of the slum called the Strand, past the enticing Italian chip
shop where young men who had noticing parents bought twopenny-worth on
late nights to hide their breath before the last tram home. Then up the
narrow office stairs and into the reporters' room.

Mr Solomon was shouting down the telephone. I heard the last words:
'You're just a dreamer, Williams.' He put the receiver down. 'That boy's
a buddy dreamer,' he said to no one. He never swore.

I finished my report of _The Crucifixion_ and handed it to Mr Farr.

'Too much platitudinous verbosity.'

Half an hour later, Ted Williams, dressed to golf, sidled in, smiling,
thumbed his nose at Mr Solomon's back, and sat quietly in a corner with
a nail-file.

I whispered: 'What was he slanging you for?'

'I went out on a suicide, a tram conductor called Hopkins, and the widow
made me stay and have a cup of tea. That's all.' He was very winning in
his ways, more like a girl than a man who dreamed of Fleet Street and
spent his summer fortnight walking up and down past the _Daily Express_
office and looking for celebrities in the pubs.

Saturday was my free afternoon. It was one o'clock and time to leave,
but I stayed on; Mr Farr said nothing. I pretended to be busy,
scribbling words and caricaturing with no likeness Mr Solomon's toucan
profile and the snub copy-boy who whistled out of tune behind the
windows of the telephone box. I wrote my name, 'Reporters' Room, _Tawe
News_, Tawe, South Wales, England, Europe, The Earth.' And a list of
books I had not written: 'Land of My Fathers, a Study of the Welsh
Character in all its aspects'; 'Eighteen, a Provincial Autobiography';
'The Merciless Ladies, a Novel.' Still Mr Farr did not look up. I wrote
'Hamlet'. Surely Mr Farr, stubbornly transcribing his council notes had
not forgotten. I heard Mr Solomon mutter, leaning over his shoulder: 'To
aitch with Alderman Daniels.' Half past one. Ted was in a dream. I spent
a long time putting on my overcoat, tied my Old Grammarian's scarf one
way and then another.

'Some people are too lazy to take their half-days off,' said Mr Farr
suddenly. 'Six o'clock in the "Lamps'" back bar.' He did not turn round
nor stop writing.

'Going for a nice walk?' asked my mother.

'Yes, on the common. Don't keep tea waiting.'

I went to the Plaza. 'Press,' I said to the girl with the Tyrolean hat
and skirt.

'There's been two reporters this week.'

'Special notice.'

She showed me to a seat. During the educational film, with the rude
seeds hugging and sprouting in front of my eyes and plants like arms and
legs, I thought of the bob women and the pansy sailors in the dives.
There might be a quarrel with razors, and once Ted Williams found a lip
outside the Mission to Seamen. It had a small moustache. The sinuous
plants danced on the screen. If only Tawe were a larger sea-town, there
would be curtained rooms underground with blue films. The potato's life
came to an end. Then I entered an American college and danced with the
president's daughter. The hero, called Lincoln, tall and dark with good
teeth, I displaced quickly, and the girl spoke my name as she held his
shadow, the singing college chorus in sailors' hats and bathing dresses
called me big boy and king, Jack Oakie and I sped up the field, and on
the shoulders of the crowd the president's daughter and I brought across
the shifting-coloured curtain with a kiss that left me giddy and
bright-eyed as I walked out of the cinema into the strong lamplight and
the new rain.

A whole wet hour to waste in the crowds. I watched the queue outside the
Empire and studied the posters of _Nuit de Paris_, and thought of the
long legs and startling faces of the chorus girls I had seen walking arm
in arm, earlier that week, up and down the streets in the winter
sunshine, their mouths, I remembered remarking and treasuring for the
first page of 'The Merciless Ladies' that was never begun, like crimson
scars, their hair raven-black or silver; their scent and paint reminded
me of the hot and chocolate-coloured East, their eyes were pools. Lola
de Kenway, Babs Courcey, Ramona Day would be with me all my life. Until
I died, of a wasting, painless disease, and spoke my prepared last
words, they would always walk with me, recalling me to my dead youth in
the vanished High Street nights when the shop windows were blazing, and
singing came out of the pubs, and sirens from the Hafod sat in the
steaming chip shops with their handbags on their knees and their
ear-rings rattling. I stopped to look at the window of Dirty Black's,
the Fancy Man, but it was innocent; there were only itching and sneezing
powders, stink bombs, rubber pens, and Charlie masks; all the novelties
were inside, but I dared not go in for fear a woman should serve me, Mrs
Dirty Black with a moustache and knowing eyes, or a thin, dog-faced girl
I saw there once, who winked and smelt of seaweed. In the market I
bought pink cachous. You never knew.

The back room of 'The Three Lamps' was full of elderly men. Mr Farr had
not arrived. I leant against the bar, between an alderman and a
solicitor, drinking bitter, wishing that my father could see me now and
glad, at the same time, that he was visiting Uncle A. in Aberavon. He
could not fail to see that I was a boy no longer, nor fail to be angry
at the angle of my fag and my hat and the threat of the clutched
tankard. I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its
brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the
glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the
lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

'Same again, miss.' She was middle-aged. 'One for you, miss?'

'Not during hours, ta all the same.'

'You're welcome.'

Was that an invitation to drink with her afterwards, to wait at the back
door until she glided out, and then to walk through the night, along the
promenade and sands, on to a soft dune where couples lay loving under
their coats and looking at the Mumbles lighthouse? She was plump and
plain, her netted hair was auburn and wisped with grey. She gave me my
change like a mother giving her boy pennies for the pictures, and I
would not go out with her if she put cream on it.

Mr Farr hurried down High Street, savagely refusing laces and matches,
averting his eyes from the shabby crowds. He knew that the poor and the
sick and the ugly, unwanted people were so close around him that, with
one look of recognition, one gesture of sympathy, he would be lost among
them and the evening would be spoiled for ever.

'You're a pint man then,' he said at my elbow.

'Good evening, Mr Farr. Only now and then for a change. What's yours?
Dirty night,' I said.

Safe in a prosperous house, out of the way of the rain and the
unsettling streets, where the poor and the past could not touch him, he
took his glass lazily in the company of business and professional men
and raised it to the light. 'It's going to get dirtier,' he said. 'You
wait till the "Fishguard." Here's health! You can see the sailors
knitting there. And the old fish-girls in the "Jersey." Got to go to the
w. for a breath of fresh air.'

Mr Evans the Produce came in quickly through a side door hidden by
curtains, whispered his drink, shielded it with his overcoat, swallowed
it in secrecy.

'Similar,' said Mr Farr, 'and half for his nibs.'

The bar was too high class to look like Christmas. A notice said 'No
Ladies.'

We left Mr Evans gulping in his tent.

Children screamed in Goat Street, and one boy, out of season, pulled my
sleeve, crying: 'Penny for the guy!' Big women in men's caps barricaded
their doorways, and a posh girl gave us the wink at the corner of the
green iron convenience opposite the Carlton Hotel. We entered to music,
the bar was hung with ribbons and balloons, a tubercular tenor clung to
the piano, behind the counter Leslie Bird's pretty barmaid was twitting
a group of young men who leant far over and asked to see her garters and
invited her to gins and limes and lonely midnight walks and moist
adventures in the cinema. Mr Farr sneered down his glass as I watched
the young men enviously and saw how much she liked their ways, how she
slapped their hands lightly and wriggled back, in pride of her
prettiness and gaiety, to pull the beer-handles.

'Toop little Twms from the Valleys. There'll be some puking to-night,'
he said with pleasure.

Other young men, sleek-haired, pale, and stocky, with high cheekbones
and deep eyes, bright ties, double-breasted waistcoats and wide
trousers, some pocked from the pits, their broad hands scarred and
damaged, all exultantly half-drunk, stood singing round the piano, and
the tenor with the fallen chest led in a clear voice. Oh! to be able to
join in the suggestive play or the rocking choir, to shout _Bread of
Heaven_, with my shoulders back and my arms linked with Little Moscow,
or to be called 'saucy' and 'a one' as I joked and ogled at the counter,
making innocent, dirty love that could come to nothing among the spilt
beer and piling glasses.

'Let's get away from the bloody nightingales,' said Mr Farr.

'Too much bloody row,' I said.

'Now we're coming to somewhere.' We crawled down Strand alleys by the
side of the mortuary, through a gas-lit lane where hidden babies cried
together, and reached the 'Fishguard' door as a man, muffled like Mr
Evans, slid out in front of us with a bottle or a black-jack in one
gloved hand. The bar was empty. An old man whose hands trembled sat
behind the counter, staring at his turnip watch.

'Merry Christmas, Pa.'

'Good evening, Mr F.'

'Drop of rum, Pa.'

A red bottle shook over two glasses.

'Very special poison, son.'

'This'll make your eyes bulge,' said Mr Farr.

My iron head stood high and firm, no sailors' rum could rot the rock of
my belly. Poor Leslie Bird the port-sipper, and little Gil Morris who
marked dissipation under his eyes with a blacklead every Saturday night,
I wished they could have seen me now, in the dark, stunted room with
photographs of boxers peeling on the wall.

'More poison, Pa,' I said.

'Where's the company to-night? gone to the Riviera?'

'They're in the snuggery, Mr F., there's a party for Mrs Prothero's
daughter.'

In the back room, under a damp royal family, a row of black-dressed
women on a hard bench sat laughing and crying, short glasses lined by
their Guinnesses. On an opposite bench two men in jerseys drank
appreciatively, nodding at the emotions of the women. And on the one
chair, in the middle of the room, an old woman, with a bonnet tied under
her chins, a feather boa, and white gym-shoes, tittered and wept above
the rest. We sat on the men's bench. One of the two touched his cap with
a sore hand.

'What's the party, Jack?' asked Mr Farr. 'Meet my colleague, Mr Thomas;
this is Jack Stiff, the mortuary keeper.'

Jack Stiff spoke from the side of his mouth. 'It's Mrs Prothero there.
We call her Old Garbo because she isn't like her, see. She had a message
from the hospital about an hour ago, Mrs Harris's Winifred brought it
here, to say her second daughter's died in pod.'

'Baby girl dead, too,' said the man at his side.

'So all the old girls came round to sympathize, and they made a big
collection for her, and now she's beginning to drink it up and treating
round. We've had a couple of pints from her already.'

'Shameful!'

The rum burned and kicked in the hot room, but my head felt tough as a
hill and I could write twelve books before morning and roll the
'Carlton' barmaid, like a barrel, the length of Tawe sands.

'Drinks for the troops!'

Before a new audience, the women cried louder, patting Mrs Prothero's
knees and hands, adjusting her bonnet, praising her dead daughter.

'What'll you have, Mrs Prothero, dear?'

'No, have it with me, dear, best in the house.'

'Well, a Guinness tickles my fancy.'

'And a little something in it, dear.'

'Just for Margie's sake, then.'

'Think if she was here now, dear, singing _One of the Ruins_ or _Cockles
and Mussels_; she had a proper madam's voice.'

'Oh, don't, Mrs Harris!'

'There, we're only bucking you up. Grief killed the cat, Mrs Prothero.
Let's have a song together, dear.'

    'The pale moon was rising above the grey mountain,
    The sun was declining beneath the blue sea,
    When I strolled with my love to the pure crystal fountain,'

Mrs Prothero sang.

'It was her daughter's favourite song,' said Jack Stiff's friend.

Mr Farr tapped me on the shoulder; his hand fell slowly from a great
height and his thin, bird's voice spoke from a whirring circle on the
ceiling. 'A drop of out-of-doors for you and me.' The gamps and bonnets,
the white gym-shoes, the bottles and the mildew king, the singing
mortuary man, the _Rose of Tralee_, swam together in the snuggery; two
small men, Mr Farr and his twin brother, led me on an ice-rink to the
door, and the night air slapped me down. The evening happened suddenly.
A wall slumped over and knocked off my trilby; Mr Farr's brother
disappeared under the cobbles. Here came a wall like a buffalo; dodge
him, son. Have a drop of angostura, have a drop of brandy, Fernet
Branca, Polly, Ooo! the mother's darling! have a hair of the dog.

'Feeling better now?'

I sat in a plush chair I had never seen before, sipping a mothball drink
and appreciating an argument between Ted Williams and Mr Farr. Mr Farr
was saying sternly: 'You came in here to look for sailors.'

'No, I didn't then,' said Ted. 'I came for local colour.'

The notices on the walls were: '"The Lord Jersey." Prop.: Titch Thomas.'
'No Betting.' 'No Swearing, B---- you.' 'The Lord helps Himself, but you
mustn't.' 'No Ladies allowed, except Ladies.'

'This is a funny pub,' I said. 'See the notices?'

'Okay now?'

'I'm feeling upsydaisy.'

'There's a pretty girl for you. Look, she's giving you the glad.'

'But she's got no nose.'

My drink, like winking, had turned itself into beer. A hammer tapped.
'Order! order!' At a sound in a new saloon a collarless chairman with a
cigar called on Mr Jenkins to provide _The Lily of Laguna_.

'By request,' said Mr Jenkins.

'Order! order! for Katie Sebastopol Street. What is it, Katie?'

She sang the National Anthem.

'Mr Fred Jones will supply his usual dirty one.'

A broken baritone voice spoiled the chorus; I recognized it as my own,
and drowned it.

A girl of the Salvation Army avoided the arms of two firemen and sold
them a _War Cry_.

A young man with a dazzling handkerchief round his head, black and white
holiday shoes with holes for the toes, and no socks, danced until the
bar cried: 'Mabel!'

Ted clapped at my side. 'That's style! "Nijinsky of the Night-world,"
there's a story! Wonder if I can get an interview?'

'Half a crack,' said Mr Farr.

'Don't make me cross.'

A wind from the docks tore up the street, I heard the rowdy dredger in
the bay and a boat blowing to come in, the gas-lamps bowed and bent,
then again smoke closed about the stained walls with George and Mary
dripping above the women's bench, and Jack Stiff whispered, holding his
hand in front of him like the paw of an animal: 'Old Garbo's gone.'

The sad and jolly women huddled together.

'Mrs Harris's little girl got the message wrong. Old Garbo's daughter's
right as rain, the baby was born dead. Now the old girls want their
money back, but they can't find Garbo anywhere.' He licked his hand. 'I
know where she's gone.'

His friend said: 'To a boozer over the bridge.'

In low voices the women reviled Mrs Prothero, liar, adulteress, mother
of bastards, thief.

'She got you know what.'

'Never cured it.'

'Got Charlie tattooed on her.'

'Three and eight she owes me.'

'Two and ten.'

'Money for my teeth.'

'One and a tanner out of my Old Age.'

Who kept filling my glass? Beer ran down my cheek and my collar. My
mouth was full of saliva. The bench spun. The cabin of the 'Fishguard'
tilted. Mr Farr retreated slowly; the telescope twisted, and his face,
with wide and hairy nostrils, breathed against mine.

'Mr Thomas is going to get sick.'

'Mind your brolly, Mrs Arthur.'

'Take his head.'

The last tram clanked home. I did not have the penny for the fare. 'You
get off here. Careful!' The revolving hill to my father's house reached
to the sky. Nobody was up. I crept to a wild bed, and the wallpaper
lakes converged and sucked me down.

Sunday was a quiet day, though St Mary's bells, a mile away, rang on,
long after church time, in the holes of my head. Knowing that I would
never drink again, I lay in bed until midday dinner and remembered the
unsteady shapes and far-off voices of the ten o'clock town. I read the
newspapers. All news was bad that morning, but an article called 'Our
Lord was a Flower-lover' moved me to tears of bewilderment and
contrition. I excused myself from the Sunday joint and three vegetables.

In the park in the afternoon I sat alone near the deserted bandstand. I
caught a ball of waste paper that the wind blew down the gravel path
towards the rockery, and, straightening it out and holding it on my
knee, wrote the first three lines of a poem without hope. A dog nosed me
out where I crouched, behind a bare tree in the cold, and rubbed its
nose against my hand. 'My only friend,' I said. It stayed with me up to
the early dusk, sniffing and scratching.

On Monday morning, with shame and hate, afraid to look at them again, I
destroyed the article and the poem, throwing the pieces on to the top of
the wardrobe, and I told Leslie Bird in the tram to the office: 'You
should have been with us, Saturday. Christ!'

Early on Tuesday night, which was Christmas Eve, I walked, with a
borrowed half-crown, into the back room of the 'Fishguard.' Jack Stiff
was alone. The women's bench was covered with sheets of newspaper. A
bunch of balloons hung from the lamp.

'Here's health!'

'Merry Christmas!'

'Where's Mrs Prothero?'

His hand was bandaged now. 'Oh! You haven't heard? She spent all the
collection money. She took it over the bridge to the "Heart's Delight."
She didn't let one of the old girls see her. It was over a pound. She'd
spent a lot of it before they found her daughter wasn't dead. She
couldn't face them then. Have this one with me. So she finished it up by
stop-tap Monday. Then a couple of men from the banana boats saw her
walking across the bridge, and she stopped half-way. But they weren't in
time.'

'Merry Christmas!'

'We got a pair of gym-shoes on our slab.'

None of Old Garbo's friends came in that night.

When I showed this story a long time later to Mr Farr, he said: 'You got
it all wrong. You got the people mixed. The boy with the handkerchief
danced in the "Jersey." Fred Jones was singing in the "Fishguard." Never
mind. Come and have one to-night in the "Nelson." There's a girl down
there who'll show you where the sailor bit her. And there's a policeman
who knew Jack Johnson.'

'I'll put them all in a story by and by,' I said.




ONE WARM SATURDAY


The young man in a sailor's jersey, sitting near the summer huts to see
the brown and white women coming out and the groups of pretty-faced
girls with pale vees and scorched backs who picked their way delicately
on ugly, red-toed feet over the sharp stones to the sea, drew on the
sand a large, indented woman's figure; and a naked child, just out of
the sea, ran over it and shook water, marking on the figure two wide wet
eyes and a hole in the footprinted middle. He rubbed the woman away and
drew a paunched man; the child ran over it, tossing her hair, and shook
a row of buttons down its belly and a line of drops, like piddle in a
child's drawing, between the long legs stuck with shells.

In a huddle of picnicking women and their children, stretched out limp
and damp in the sweltering sun or fussing over paper carriers or
building castles that were at once destroyed by the tattered march of
other picnickers to different pieces of the beach, among the ice-cream
cries, the angrily happy shouts of boys playing ball, and the screams of
girls as the sea rose to their waists, the young man sat alone with the
shadows of his failure at his side. Some silent husbands, with rolled up
trousers and suspenders dangling, paddled slowly on the border of the
sea, paddling women, in thick, black picnic dresses, laughed at their
own legs, dogs chased stones, and one proud boy rode the water on a
rubber seal. The young man, in his wilderness, saw the holiday Saturday
set down before him, false and pretty, as a flat picture under the
vulgar sun; the disporting families with paper bags, buckets and spades,
parasols and bottles, the happy, hot, and aching girls with sunburn
liniments in their bags, the bronzed young men with chests, and the
envious, white young men in waistcoats, the thin, pale, hairy, pathetic
legs of the husbands silently walking through the water, the plump and
curly, shaven-headed and bowed-backed children up to no sense with
unrepeatable delight in the dirty sand, moved him, he thought
dramatically in his isolation, to an old shame and pity; outside all
holiday, like a young man doomed for ever to the company of his maggots,
beyond the high and ordinary, sweating, sun-awakened power and stupidity
of the summer flesh on a day and a world out, he caught the ball that a
small boy had whacked into the air with a tin tray, and rose to throw it
back.

The boy invited him to play. A friendly family stood waiting some way
off, the tousled women with their dresses tucked in their knickers, the
bare-footed men in shirtsleeves, a number of children in slips and
cut-down underwear. He bowled bitterly to a father standing with a tray
before a wicket of hats. 'The lone wolf playing ball,' he said to
himself as the tray whirled. Chasing the ball towards the sea, passing
undressing women with a rush and a wink, tripping over a castle into a
coil of wet girls lying like snakes, soaking his shoes as he grabbed the
ball off a wave, he felt his happiness return in a boast of the body,
and, 'Look out, Duckworth, here's a fast one coming,' he cried to the
mother behind the hats. The ball bounced on a boy's head. In and out of
the scattered families, among the sandwiches and clothes, uncles and
mothers fielded the bouncing ball. A bald man, with his shirt hanging
out, returned it in the wrong direction, and a collie carried it into
the sea. Now it was mother's turn with the tray. Tray and ball together
flew over her head. An uncle in a panama smacked the ball to the dog,
who swam with it out of reach. They offered the young man egg-and-cress
sandwiches and warm stout, and he and an uncle and a father sat down on
the _Evening Post_ until the sea touched their feet.

Alone again, hot and unhappy, for the boasting minute when he ran among
the unknown people lying and running loudly at peace was struck away,
like a ball, he said, into the sea, he walked to a space on the beach
where a hell-fire preacher on a box marked 'Mr Matthews' was talking to
a congregation of expressionless women. Boys with pea-shooters sat
quietly near him. A ragged man collected nothing in a cap. Mr Matthews
shook his cold hands, stormed at the holiday, and cursed the summer from
his shivering box. He cried for a new warmth. The strong sun shone into
his bones, and he buttoned his coat collar. Valley children, with
sunken, impudent eyes, quick tongues and singing voices, chests thin as
shells, gathered round the Punch and Judy and the Stop Me tricycles, and
he denied them all. He contradicted the girls in their underclothes
combing and powdering, and the modest girls cleverly dressing under
tents of towels.

As Mr Matthews cast down the scarlet town, drove out the bare-bellied
boys who danced around the ice-cream man, and wound the girls' sunburnt
thighs about with his black overcoat--'Down! down!' he cried, 'the night
is upon us'--the young man in dejection stood, with a shadow at his
shoulder, and thought of Porthcawl's Coney Beach, where his friends were
rocking with girls on the Giant Racer or tearing in the Ghost Train down
the skeletons' tunnel. Leslie Bird would have his arms full of
coco-nuts. Brenda was with Herbert at the rifle-range. Gil Morris was
buying Molly a cocktail with a cherry at the 'Esplanade.' Here he stood,
listening to Mr Matthews, the retired drinker, crying darkness on the
evening sands, with money hot in his pocket and Saturday burning away.

In his loneliness he had refused their invitations. Herbert, in his low,
red sports car, G. B. at the back, a sea-blown nymph on the radiator,
called at his father's house, but he said: 'I'm not in the mood, old
man. I'm going to spend a quiet day. Enjoy yourselves. Don't take too
much pop.' Only waiting for the sun to set, he stood in the sad circle
with the pleasureless women who were staring at a point in the sky
behind their prophet, and wished the morning back. Oh, boy! to be
wasting his money now on the rings and ranges of the fair, to be sitting
in the chromium lounge with a short worth one and six and a Turkish
cigarette, telling the latest one to the girls, seeing the sun, through
the palms in the lounge window, sink over the promenade, over the Bath
chairs, the cripples and widows, the beach-trousered, kerchiefed,
week-end wives, the smart, kiss-curled girls with plain and spectacled
girl friends, the innocent, swaggering, loud bad boys, and the poms at
the ankles, and the cycling sweet-men. Ronald had sailed to Ilfracombe
on the _Lady Moira_, and, in the thick saloon, with a party from
Brynhyfryd, he'd be knocking back nips without a thought that on the
sands at home his friend was alone and pussyfoot at six o'clock, and the
evening dull as a chapel. All his friends had vanished into their
pleasures.

He thought: Poets live and walk with their poems; a man with visions
needs no other company; Saturday is a crude day; I must go home and sit
in my bedroom by the boiler. But he was not a poet living and walking,
he was a young man in a sea town on a warm bank holiday, with two pounds
to spend; he had no visions, only two pounds and a small body with its
feet on the littered sand; serenity was for old men; and he moved away,
over the railway points, on to the tram-lined road.

He snarled at the flower clock in Victoria Gardens.

'And what shall a prig do now?' he said aloud, causing a young woman on
a bench opposite the white-tiled urinal to smile and put her novel down.

She had chestnut hair arranged high on her head in an old-fashioned way,
in loose coils and a bun, and a Woolworth's white rose grew out of it
and drooped to touch her ear. She wore a white frock with a red paper
flower pinned on the breast, and rings and bracelets that came from a
fun-fair stall. Her eyes were small and quite green.

He marked, carefully and coldly in one glance, all the unusual details
of her appearance; it was the calm, unstartled certainty of her bearing
before his glance from head to foot, the innocent knowledge, in her
smile and the set of her head, that she was defended by her gentleness
and accessible strangeness against all rude encounters and picking
looks, that made his fingers tremble. Though her frock was long and the
collar high, she could as well be naked there on the blistered bench.
Her smile confessed her body bare and spotless and willing and warm
under the cotton, and she waited without guilt.

How beautiful she is, he thought, with his mind on words and his eyes on
her hair and red and white skin, how beautifully she waits for me,
though she does not know she is waiting and I can never tell her.

He had stopped and was staring. Like a confident girl before a camera,
she sat smiling, her hands folded, her head slightly to one side so that
the rose brushed her neck. She accepted his admiration. The girl in a
million took his long look to herself, and cherished his stupid love.

Midges flew into his mouth. He hurried on shamefully. At the gates of
the Gardens he turned to see her for the last time on earth. She had
lost her calm with his abrupt and awkward going, and stared in confusion
after him. One hand was raised as though to beckon him back. If he
waited, she would call him. He walked round the corner and heard her
voice, a hundred voices, and all hers, calling his name, and a hundred
names that were all his, over the bushy walls.

And what shall the terrified prig of a love-mad young man do next? he
asked his reflection silently in the distorting mirror of the empty
'Victoria' saloon. His ape-like, hanging face, with 'Bass' across the
forehead, gave back a cracked sneer.

If Venus came in on a plate, said the two red, melon-slice lips, I would
ask for vinegar to put on her.

She could drive my guilt out; she could smooth away my shame; why didn't
I stop to talk to her? he asked.

You saw a queer tart in a park, his reflection answered, she was a child
of nature, oh my! oh my! Did you see the dewdrops in her hair? Stop
talking to the mirror like a man in a magazine, I know you too well.

A new head, swollen and lop-jawed, wagged behind his shoulder. He spun
round, to hear the barman say:

'Has the one and only let you down? You look like death warmed up. Have
this one on the house. Free beer to-day. Free X's.' He pulled the beer
handle. 'Only the best served here. Straight from the rust. You do look
queer,' he said, 'the only one saved from the wreck and the only wreck
saved. Here's looking at you!' He drank the beer he had drawn.

'May I have a glass of beer, please?'

'What do you think this is, a public house?'

On the polished table in the middle of the saloon the young man drew,
with a finger dipped in strong, the round head of a girl and piled a
yellow froth of hair upon it.

'Ah! dirty, dirty!' said the barman, running round from behind the
counter and rubbing the head away with a dry cloth.

Shielding the dirtiness with his hat, the young man wrote his name on
the edge of the table and watched the letters dry and fade.

Through the open bay-window, across the useless railway covered with
sand, he saw the black dots of bathers, the stunted huts, the jumping
dwarfs round the Punch and Judy, and the tiny religious circle. Since he
had walked and played down there in the crowded wilderness, excusing his
despair, searching for company though he refused it, he had found his
own true happiness and lost her all in one bewildering and clumsy half a
minute by the 'Gentlemen' and the flower clock. Older and wiser and no
better, he would have looked in the mirror to see if his discovery and
loss had marked themselves upon his face in shadows under the eyes or
lines about the mouth, were it not for the answer he knew he would
receive from the distorted reflection.

The barman came to sit near him, and said in a false voice: 'Now you
tell me all about it, I'm a regular storehouse of secrets.'

'There isn't anything to tell. I saw a girl in Victoria Gardens and I
was too shy to speak to her. She was a piece of God help us all right.'

Ashamed of his wish to be companionable, even in the depth of love and
distress, with her calm face before his eyes and her smile reproving and
forgiving him as he spoke, the young man defiled his girl on the bench,
dragged her down into the spit and sawdust and dolled her up to make the
barman say:

'I like them big myself. Once round Bessy, once round the gasworks. I
missed the chance of a lifetime, too. Fifty lovelies in the rude and I'd
left my Bunsen burner home.'

'Give me the same, please.'

'You mean similar.'

The barman drew a glass of beer, drank it, and drew another.

'I always have one with the customers,' he said, 'it puts us on even
terms. Now we're just two heart-broken bachelors together.' He sat down
again.

'You can't tell me anything I don't know,' he said. 'I've seen over
twenty chorines from the Empire in this bar, drunk as printers. Oh, les
girls! les limbs!'

'Will they be in to-night?'

'There's only a fellow sawing a woman in half this week.'

'Keep a half for me.'

A drunk man walked in on an invisible white line, and the barman,
reeling in sympathy across the room, served him with a pint. 'Free beer
to-day,' he said. 'Free X's. You've been out in the sun.'

'I've been out in the sun all day,' said the man.

'I thought you looked sunburnt.'

'That's drink,' said the man. 'I've been drinking.'

'The holiday is drawing to an end,' the young man whispered into his
glass. Bye-bye blackbird, the moment is lost, he thought, examining,
with an interest he could not forgive, the comic coloured postcards of
mountain-buttocked women on the beach and hen-pecked, pin-legged men
with telescopes, pasted on the wall beneath the picture of a terrier
drinking stout; and now, with a jolly barman and a drunk in a crushed
cap, he was mopping the failing day down. He tipped his hat over his
forehead, and a lock of hair that fell below the hat tickled his eyelid.
He saw, with a stranger's darting eye that missed no single subtlety of
the wry grin or the faintest gesture drawing the shape of his death on
the air, an unruly-haired young man who coughed into his hand in the
corner of a rotting room and puffed the smoke of his doped Weight.

But as the drunk man weaved towards him on wilful feet, carrying his
dignity as a man might carry a full glass around a quaking ship, as the
barman behind the counter clattered and whistled and dipped to drink, he
shook off the truthless, secret tragedy with a sneer and a blush,
straightened his melancholy hat into a hard-brimmed trilby, dismissed
the affected stranger. In the safe centre of his own identity, the
familiar world about him like another flesh, he sat sad and content in
the plain room of the undistinguished hotel at the sea-end of the
shabby, spreading town where everything was happening. He had no need of
the dark interior world when Tawe pressed in upon him and the eccentric
ordinary people came bursting and crawling, with noise and colours, out
of their houses, out of the graceless buildings, the factories and
avenues, the shining shops and blaspheming chapels, the terminuses and
the meeting-halls, the falling alleys and brick lanes, from the arches
and shelters and holes behind the hoardings, out of the common, wild
intelligence of the town.

At last the drunk man had reached him. 'Put your hand here,' he said,
and turned about and tapped himself on the bottom.

The barman whistled and rose from his drink to see the young man touch
the drunk man on the seat of the trousers.

'What can you feel there?'

'Nothing.'

'That's right. Nothing. Nothing. There's nothing there to feel.'

'How can you sit down then?' asked the barman.

'I just sit down on what the doctor left,' the man said angrily. 'I had
as good a bottom as you've got once. I was working underground in
Dowlais, and the end of the world came down on me. Do you know what I
got for losing my bottom? Four and three! Two and three ha'pence a
cheek. That's cheaper than a pig.'

The girl from Victoria Gardens came into the bar with two friends: a
blonde young girl almost as beautiful as she was, and a middle-aged
woman dressed and made up to look young. The three of them sat at the
table. The girl he loved ordered three ports and gins.

'Isn't it delicious weather?' said the middle-aged woman.

The barman said: 'Plenty of sky about.' With many bows and smiles he
placed their drinks in front of them. 'I thought the princesses had gone
to a better pub,' he said.

'What's a better pub without you, handsome?' said the blonde girl.

'This is the "Ritz" and the "Savoy," isn't it, _garon_ darling?' the
girl from the Gardens said, and kissed her hand to him.

The young man in the window seat, still bewildered by the first sudden
sight of her entering the darkening room, caught the kiss to himself and
blushed. He thought to run out of the room and through the
miracle-making Gardens, to rush into his house and hide his head in the
bed-clothes and lie all night there, dressed and trembling, her voice in
his ears, her green eyes wide awake under his closed eyelids. But only a
sick boy with tossed blood would run from his proper love into a dream,
lie down in a bedroom that was full of his shames, and sob against the
feathery, fat breast and face of the damp pillow. He remembered his age
and poems, and would not move.

'Tanks a million, Lou,' said the barman.

Her name was Lou, Louise, Louisa. She must be Spanish or French or a
gipsy, but he could tell the street that her voice came from; he knew
where her friends lived by the rise and fall of their sharp voices, and
the name of the middle-aged woman was Mrs Emerald Franklin. She was to
be seen every night in the 'Jew's Harp,' sipping and spying and watching
the clock.

'We've been listening to Matthews Hell-fire on the sands. Down with this
and down with that, and he used to drink a pint of biddy before his
breakfast,' Mrs Franklin said. 'Oh, there's a nerve!'

'And his eye on the fluff all the time,' said the blonde girl. 'I
wouldn't trust him any further than Ramon Navarro behind the counter.'

'Whoops! I've gone up in the world. Last week I was Charley Chase,' said
the barman.

Mrs Franklin raised her empty glass in a gloved hand and shook it like a
bell. 'Men are deceivers ever,' she said. 'And a drop of mother's ruin
right around.'

'Especially Mr Franklin,' said the barman.

'But there's a lot in what the preacher says, mind,' Mrs Franklin said,
'about the carrying on. If you go for a constitutional after stop-tap
along the sands you might as well be in Sodom and Gomorrah.'

The blonde girl laughed. 'Hark to Mrs Grundy! I see her with a black man
last Wednesday, round by the museum.'

'He was an Indian,' said Mrs Franklin, 'from the university college, and
I'd thank you to remember it. Every one's brothers under the skin, but
there's no tarbrush in my family.'

'Oh, dear! oh, dear!' said Lou. 'Lay off it, there's loves. This is my
birthday. It's a holiday. Put a bit of fun in it. Miaow! miaow!
Marjorie, kiss Emerald and be friends.' She smiled and laughed at them
both. She winked at the barman, who was filling their glasses to the
top. 'Here's to your blue eyes, _garon_!' She had not noticed the young
man in the corner. 'And one for grand-dad there,' she said, smiling at
the swaying, drunk man. 'He's twenty-one to-day. There! I've made him
smile.'

The drunk man made a deep, dangerous bow, lifted his hat, stumbled
against the mantelpiece, and his full pint in his free hand was steady
as a rock. 'The prettiest girl in Carmarthenshire,' he said.

'This is Glamorganshire, dad,' she said, 'where's your geography? Look
at him waltzing! mind your glasses! He's got that Kruschen feeling. Come
on, faster! give us the Charleston.'

The drunk man, with his pint held high, danced until he fell, and all
the time he never spilt a drop. He lay at Lou's feet on the dusty floor
and grinned up at her in confidence and affection. 'I fell,' he said. 'I
could dance like a trooper when I had a beatyem.'

'He lost his bottom at the last trump,' the barman explained.

'When did he lose his bottom?' said Mrs Franklin.

'When Gabriel blew his whistle down in Dowlais.'

'You're pulling my leg.'

'It's a pleasure, Mrs Em. Hoi, you! get up from the vomitorium.'

The man wagged his end like a tail, and growled at Lou's feet.

'Put your head on my foot. Be comfy. Let him lie there,' she said.

He went to sleep at once.

'I can't have drunks on the premises.'

'You know where to go then.'

'Cru-el Mrs Franklin!'

'Go on, attend to your business. Serve the young man in the corner, his
tongue's hanging out.'

'Cru-el lady!'

As Mrs Franklin called attention to the young man, Lou peered
shortsightedly across the saloon and saw him sitting with his back to
the window.

'I'll have to get glasses,' she said.

'You'll have plenty of glasses before the night's out.'

'No, honest, Marjorie, I didn't know any one was there. I do beg your
pardon, you in the corner,' she said.

The barman switched on the light. 'A bit of _lux in tenebris_.'

'Oh!' said Lou.

The young man dared not move for fear that he might break the long light
of her scrutiny, the enchantment shining like a single line of light
between them, or startle her into speaking; and he did not conceal the
love in his eyes, for she could pierce through to it as easily as she
could turn his heart in his chest and make it beat above the noises of
the two friends' hurried conversation, the rattle of glasses behind the
counter where the barman spat and polished and missed nothing, and the
snores of the comfortable sleeper. Nothing can hurt me. Let the barman
jeer. Giggle in your glass, our Em. I'm telling the world, I'm walking
in clover, I'm staring at Lou like a fool, she's my girl, she's my lily.
O love! O love! She's no lady, with her sing-song Tontine voice, she
drinks like a deep-sea diver; but Lou, I'm yours, and Lou, you're mine.
He refused to meditate on her calmness now and twist her beauty into
words. She was nothing under the sun or moon but his. Unashamed and
certain, he smiled at her; and, though he was prepared for all, her
answering smile made his fingers tremble again, as they had trembled in
the Gardens, and reddened his cheeks and drove his heart to a gallop.

'Harold, fill the young man's glass up,' Mrs Franklin said.

The barman stood still, a duster in one hand and a dripping glass in the
other.

'Have you got water in your ears? Fill the young man's glass!'

The barman put the duster to his eyes. He sobbed. He wiped away the mock
tears.

'I thought I was attending a _premire_ and this was the royal box,' he
said.

'He's got water on the brain, not in his earhole,' said Marjorie.

'I dreamt it was a beautiful tragi-comedy entitled "Love at First Sight,
or, Another Good Man gone wrong." Act one in a boozer by the sea.'

The two women tapped their foreheads.

Lou said, still smiling: 'Where was the second act?'

Her voice was as gentle as he had imagined it to be before her gay and
nervous playing with the over-familiar barman and the inferior women. He
saw her as a wise, soft girl whom no hard company could spoil, for her
soft self, bare to the heart, broke through every defence of her sensual
falsifiers. As he thought this, phrasing her gentleness, faithlessly
running to words away from the real room and his love in the middle, he
woke with a start and saw her lively body six steps from him, no calm
heart dressed in a sentence, but a pretty girl, to be got and kept. He
must catch hold of her fast. He got up to cross to her.

'I woke before the second act came on,' said the barman. 'I'd sell my
dear old mother to see that. Dim lights. Purple couches. Ecstatic bliss.
L, la chrie!'

The young man sat down at the table, next to her.

Harold, the barman, leaned over the counter and cupped his hand to his
ear.

The man on the floor rolled in his sleep, and his head lay in the
spittoon.

'You should have come and sat here a long time ago,' Lou whispered. 'You
should have stopped to talk to me in the Gardens. Were you shy?'

'I was too shy,' the young man whispered.

'Whispering isn't manners. I can't hear a word,' said the barman.

At a sign from the young man, a flick of the fingers that sent the
waiters in evening dress bustling with oysters about the immense room,
the barman filled the glasses with port, gin, and Nutbrown.

'We never drink with strangers,' Mrs Franklin said, laughing.

'He isn't a stranger,' said Lou, 'are you, Jack?'

He threw a pound note on the table: 'Take the damage.'

The evening that had been over before it began raced along among the
laughter of the charming women sharp as knives, and the stories of the
barman, who should be on the stage, and Lou's delighted smiles and
silences at his side. Now she is safe and sure, he thought, after her
walking, like my doubtful walking, around the lonely distances of the
holiday. In the warm, spinning middle they were close and alike. The
town and the sea and the last pleasure-makers drifted into the dark that
had nothing to do with them, and left this one room burning.

One by one, some lost men from the dark shuffled into the bar, drank
sadly, and went out. Mrs Franklin, flushed and dribbling, waved her
glass at their departures. Harold winked behind their backs. Marjorie
showed them her long, white legs.

'Nobody loves us except ourselves,' said Harold. 'Shall I shut the bar
and keep the riff-raff out?'

'Lou is expecting Mr O'Brien, but don't let that stop you,' Marjorie
said. 'He's her sugar daddy from old Ireland.'

'Do you love Mr O'Brien?' the young man whispered.

'How could I, Jack?'

He could see Mr O'Brien as a witty, tall fellow of middle age, with
waved greying hair and a clipped bit of dirt on his upper lip, a flash
ring on his marriage finger, a pouched, knowing eye, dummy dressed with
a whale-boned waist, a broth of a man about Cardiff, Lou's horrible
lover tearing towards her now down the airless streets in the firm's
car. The young man clenched his hand on the table covered with dead, and
sheltered her in the warm strength of his fist. 'My round, my round,' he
said, 'up again, plenty! Doubles, trebles, Mrs Franklin is a jibber.'

'My mother never had a jibber.'

'Oh, Lou!' he said, 'I am more than happy with you.'

'Coo! coo! hear the turtle doves.'

'Let them coo,' said Marjorie. 'I could coo, too.'

The barman looked around him in surprise. He raised his hands, palms up,
and cocked his head.

'The bar is full of birds,' he said.

'Emerald's laying an egg,' he said, as Mrs Franklin rocked in her chair.

Soon the bar was full of customers. The drunk man woke up and ran out,
leaving his cap in a brown pool. Sawdust dropped from his hair. A small,
old, round, red-faced, cheery man sat facing the young man and Lou, who
held hands under the table and rubbed their legs against each other.

'What a night for love!' said the old man. 'On such a night as this did
Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew. Do you know where that comes from?'

'_The Merchant of Venice_,' Lou said. 'But you're an Irishman, Mr
O'Brien.'

'I could have sworn you were a tall man with a little tish,' said the
young man gravely.

'What's the weapons, Mr O'Brien?'

'Brandies at dawn, I should think, Mrs Franklin.'

'I never described Mr O'Brien to you at all. You're dreaming!' Lou
whispered. 'I wish this night could go on for ever.'

'But not here. Not in the bar. In a room with a big bed.'

'A bed in a bar,' said the old man, 'if you'll pardon me hearing you,
that's what I've always wanted. Think of it, Mrs Franklin.'

The barman bobbed up from behind the counter.

'Time, gentlemen and others!'

The sober strangers departed to Mrs Franklin's laughter.

The lights went out.

'Lou, don't you lose me.'

'I've got your hand.'

'Press it hard, hurt it.'

'Break his bloody neck,' Mrs Franklin said in the dark. 'No offence
meant.'

'Marjorie smack hand,' said Marjorie. 'Let's get out of the dark.
Harold's a rover in the dark.'

'And the girl guides.'

'Let's take a bottle each and go down to Lou's,' she said.

'I'll buy the bottles,' said Mr O'Brien.

'It's you don't lose me now,' Lou whispered. 'Hold on to me, Jack. The
others won't stay long. Oh, Mr Christ, I wish it was just you and me!'

'Will it be just you and me?'

'You and me and Mr Moon.'

Mr O'Brien opened the saloon door. 'Pile into the Rolls, you ladies. The
gentlemen are going to see to the medicine.'

The young man felt Lou's quick kiss on his mouth before she followed
Marjorie and Mrs Franklin out.

'What do you say we split the drinks?' said Mr O'Brien.

'Look what I found in the lavatory,' said the barman, 'he was singing on
the seat.' He appeared behind the counter with the drunk man leaning on
his arm.

They all climbed into the car.

'First stop, Lou's.'

The young man, on Lou's knee, saw the town in a daze spin by them, the
funnelled and masted smoke-blue outline of the still, droning docks, the
lightning lines of the poor streets growing longer, and the winking
shops that were snapped out one by one. The car smelt of scent and
powder and flesh. He struck with his elbow, by accident, Mrs Franklin's
upholstered breast. Her thighs, like cushions, bore the drunk man's
rolling weight. He was bumped and tossed on a lump of women. Breasts,
legs, bellies, hands, touched, warmed, and smothered him. On through the
night, towards Lou's bed, towards the unbelievable end of the dying
holiday, they tore past black houses and bridges, a station in a smoke
cloud, and drove up a steep side street with one weak lamp in a circle
of railings at the top, and swerved into a space where a tall tenement
house stood surrounded by cranes, standing ladders, poles and girders,
barrows, brick-heaps.

They climbed to Lou's room up many flights of dark, perilous stairs.
Washing hung on the rails outside closed doors. Mrs Franklin, fumbling
alone with the drunk man behind the others, trod in a bucket, and a
lucky black cat ran over her foot. Lou led the young man by the hand
through a passage marked with names and doors, lit a match, and
whispered: 'It won't be very long. Be good and patient with Mr O'Brien.
Here it is. Come in first. Welcome to you, Jack!' She kissed him again
at the door of her home. 'That kiss is my promise.'

She turned on the light, and he walked with her proudly into her own
room, into the room that he would come to know, and saw a wide bed, a
gramophone on a chair, a wash-basin half-hidden in a corner, a gas fire
and a cooking ring, a closed cupboard, and her photograph in a cardboard
frame on the chest of drawers with no handles. Here she slept and ate.
In the double bed she lay all night, pale and curled, sleeping on her
left side. When he lived with her always, he would not allow her to
dream. No other men must lie and love in her head. He spread his fingers
on her pillow.

'Why do you live at the top of the Eiffel Tower?' said the barman,
coming in.

'What a climb!' said Mr O'Brien. 'But it's very nice and private when
you get here.'

'If you get here!' said Mrs Franklin. 'I'm dead beat. This old nuisance
weighs a ton. Lie down, lie down on the floor and go to sleep. The old
nuisance!' she said fondly. 'What's your name?'

'Ernie,' the drunk man said, raising his arm to shield his face.

'Nobody's going to bite you, Ernie. Here, give him a nip of whisky.
Careful! Don't pour it on your waistcoat; you'll be squeezing your
waistcoat in the morning. Pull the curtains, Lou, I can see the wicked
old moon,' she said.

'Does it put ideas in your head?'

'I love the moon,' said Lou.

'There never was a young lover who didn't love the moon.' Mr O'Brien
gave the young man a cheery smile, and patted his hand. His own hand was
red and hairy. 'I could see at the flash of a glance that Lou and this
nice young fellow were made for each other. I could see it in their
eyes. Dear me, no! I'm not so old and blind I can't see love in front of
my nose. Couldn't you see it, Mrs Franklin? Couldn't you see it,
Marjorie?'

In the long silence, Lou collected glasses from the cupboard as though
she had not heard Mr O'Brien speak. She drew the curtains, shut out the
moon, sat on the edge of her bed with her feet tucked under her, looked
at her photograph as at a stranger, folded her hands as she had folded
them, on the first meeting, before the young man's worship in the
Gardens.

'A host of angels must be passing by,' said Mr O'Brien. 'What a silence
there is! Have I said anything out of place? Drink and be merry,
to-morrow we die. What do you think I bought these lovely shining
bottles for?'

The bottles were opened. The dead were lined on the mantelpiece. The
whisky went down. Harold the barman and Marjorie, her dress lifted, sat
in the one arm-chair together. Mrs Franklin, with Ernie's head on her
lap, sang in a sweet, trained contralto voice _The Shepherd's Lass_. Mr
O'Brien kept rhythm with his foot.

I want Lou in my arms, the young man said to himself, watching Mr
O'Brien tap and smile and the barman draw Marjorie down deep. Mrs
Franklin's voice sang sweetly in the small bedroom where he and Lou
should be lying in the white bed without any smiling company to see them
drown. He and Lou could go down together, one cool body weighted with a
boiling stone, on to the falling, blank white, entirely empty sea, and
never rise. Sitting on their bridal bed, near enough to hear his breath,
she was farther from him than before they met. Then he had everything
but her body; now she had given him two kisses, and everything had
vanished but that beginning. He must be good and patient with Mr
O'Brien. He could wipe away the embracing, old smile with the iron back
of his hand. Sink lower, lower, Harold and Marjorie, tumble like whales
at Mr O'Brien's feet.

He wished that the light would fail. In the darkness he and Lou could
creep beneath the clothes and imitate the dead. Who would look for them
there, if they were dead still and soundless? The others would shout to
them down the dizzy stairs or rummage in the silence about the narrow,
obstacled corridors or stumble out into the night to search for them
among the cranes and ladders in the desolation of the destroyed houses.
He could hear, in the made-up dark, Mr O'Brien's voice cry, 'Lou, where
are you? Answer! answer!' the hollow answer of the echo, 'answer!' and
hear her lips in the cool pit of the bed secretly move around another
name, and feel them move,

'A fine piece of singing, Emerald, and very naughty words. That was a
shepherd, that was,' Mr O'Brien said.

Ernie, on the floor, began to sing in a thick, sulking voice, but Mrs
Franklin placed her hand over his mouth and he sucked and nuzzled it.

'What about this young shepherd?' said Mr O'Brien, pointing his glass at
the young man. 'Can he sing as well as make love? You ask him kindly,
girlie,' he said to Lou, 'and he'll give us a song like a nightingale.'

'Can you sing, Jack?'

'Like a crow, Lou.'

'Can't he even talk poetry? What a young man to have who can't spout the
poets to his lady!' Mr O'Brien said.

From the cupboard Lou brought out a red-bound book and gave it to the
young man, saying: 'Can you read us a piece out of here? The second
volume's in the hat-box. Read us a dreamy piece, Jack. It's nearly
midnight.'

'Only a love poem, no other kind,' said Mr O'Brien. 'I won't hear
anything but a love poem.'

'Soft and sweet,' Mrs Franklin said. She took her hand away from Ernie's
mouth and looked at the ceiling.

The young man read, but not aloud, lingering on her name, the
inscription on the fly-leaf of the first volume of the collected poems
of Tennyson: 'To Louisa, from her Sunday School teacher, Miss Gwyneth
Forbes. God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world.'

'Make it a love poem, don't forget.'

The young man read aloud, closing one eye to steady the dancing print,
_Come into the Garden, Maud_. And when he reached the beginning of the
fourth verse his voice grew louder:

    'I said to the lily, "There is but one
      With whom she has heart to be gay.
    When will the dancers leave her alone?
      She is weary of dance and play."
    Now half to the setting moon are gone,
      And half to the rising day;
    Low on the sand and loud on the stone
      The last wheel echoes away.

    'I said to the rose, "The brief night goes
      In babble and revel and wine.
    O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,
      For one that will never be thine?
    But mine, but mine," so I sware to the rose,
      "For ever and ever, mine."'

At the end of the poem, Harold said, suddenly, his head hanging over the
arm of the chair, his hair made wild, and his mouth red with lipstick:
'My grandfather remembers seeing Lord Tennyson, he was a little man with
a hump.'

'No,' said the young man, 'he was tall and he had long hair and a
beard.'

'Did you ever see him?'

'I wasn't born then.'

'My grandfather saw him. He had a hump.'

'Not Alfred Tennyson.'

'Lord Alfred Tennyson was a little man with a hump.'

'It couldn't have been the same Tennyson.'

'You've got the wrong Tennyson, this was the famous poet with a hump.'

Lou, on the wonderful bed, waiting for him alone of all the men, ugly or
handsome, old or young, in the wide town and the small world that would
be bound to fall, lowered her head and kissed her hand to him and held
her hand in the river of light on the counterpane. The hand, to him,
became transparent, and the light on the counterpane glowed up steadily
through it in the thin shape of her palm and fingers.

'Ask Mr O'Brien what Lord Tennyson was like,' said Mrs Franklin. 'We
appeal to you, Mr O'Brien, did he have a hump or not?'

Nobody but the young man, for whom she lived and waited now, noticed
Lou's little loving movements. She put her glowing hand to her left
breast. She made a sign of secrecy on her lips.

'It depends,' Mr O'Brien said.

The young man closed one eye again, for the bed was pitching like a
ship; a sickening, hot storm out of a cigarette cloud unsettled cupboard
and chest. The motions of the sea-going bedroom were calmed with the
cunning closing of his eye, but he longed for night air. On sailor's
legs he walked to the door.

'You'll find the House of Commons on the second floor at the end of the
passage,' said Mr O'Brien.

At the door, he turned to Lou and smiled with all his love, declaring it
to the faces of the company and making her, before Mr O'Brien's envious
regard, smile back and say: 'Don't be long, Jack. Please! You mustn't be
long.'

Now every one knew. Love had grown up in an evening.

'One minute, my darling,' he said. 'I'll be here.'

The door closed behind him. He walked into the wall of the passage. He
lit a match. He had three left. Down the stairs, clinging to the sticky,
shaking rails, rocking on see-saw floorboards, bruising his shin on a
bucket, past the noises of secret lives behind doors he slid and
stumbled and swore and heard Lou's voice in a fresh fever drive him on,
call him to return, speak to him with such passion and abandonment that
even in the darkness and the pain of his haste he was dazzled and struck
still. She spoke, there on the rotting stairs in the middle of the poor
house, a frightening rush of love words; from her mouth, at his ear,
endearments were burned out. Hurry! hurry! Every moment is being killed.
Love, adored, dear, run back and whistle to me, open the door, shout my
name, lay me down. Mr O'Brien has his hands on my side.

He ran into a cavern. A draught blew out his matches. He lurched into a
room where two figures on a black heap on the floor lay whispering, and
ran from there in a panic. He made water at the dead end of the passage
and hurried back towards Lou's room, finding himself at last on a silent
patch of stairway at the top of the house; he put out his hand, but the
rail was broken and nothing there prevented a long drop to the ground
down a twisted shaft that would echo and double his cry, bring out from
their holes in the wall the sleeping or stirring families, the
whispering figures, the blind startled turners of night into day. Lost
in a tunnel near the roof, he fingered the damp walls for a door; he
found a handle and gripped it hard, but it came off in his hand. Lou had
led him down a longer passage than this. He remembered the number of
doors: there were three on each side. He ran down the broken-railed
flight into another passage and dragged his hand along the wall. Three
doors, he counted. He opened the third door, walked into darkness, and
groped for the switch on the left. He saw, in the sudden light, a bed
and a cupboard and a chest of drawers with no handles, a gas fire, a
wash-basin in the corner. No bottles. No glasses. No photograph of Lou.
The red counterpane on the bed was smooth. He could not remember the
colour of Lou's counterpane.

He left the light burning and opened the second door, but a strange
woman's voice cried, half-asleep: 'Who is there? Is it you, Tom? Tom,
put the light on.' He looked for a line of light at the foot of the next
door, and stopped to listen for voices. The woman was still calling in
the second room.

'Lou, where are you?' he cried. 'Answer! answer!'

'Lou, what Lou? There's no Lou here,' said a man's voice through the
open door of the first dark room at the entrance to the passage.

He scampered down another flight and counted four doors with his
scratched hand. One door opened and a woman in a nightdress put out her
head. A child's head appeared below her.

'Where does Lou live? Do you know where Lou lives?'

The woman and the child stared without speaking.

'Lou! Lou! her name is Lou!' he heard himself shout. 'She lives here, in
this house! Do you know where she lives?'

The woman caught the child by the hair and pulled her into the room. He
clung to the edge of her door. The woman thrust her arm round the edge
and brought down a bunch of keys sharply on his hands. The door slammed.

A young woman with a baby in a shawl stood at an open door on the
opposite side of the passage, and caught his sleeve as he ran by. 'Lou
who? You woke my baby.'

'I don't know her other name. She's with Mrs Franklin and Mr O'Brien.'

'You woke my baby.'

'Come in and find her in the bed,' a voice said from the darkness behind
the young woman.

'He's woken up the baby.'

He ran down the passage, holding his wet hand to his mouth. He fell
against the rails of the last flight of stairs. He heard Lou's voice in
his head once more whisper to him to return as the ground floor rose,
like a lift full of dead, towards the rails. Hurry! hurry! I can't, I
won't wait, the bridal night is being killed.

Up the rotten, bruising, mountainous stairs he climbed, in his sickness,
to the passage where he had left the one light burning in an end room.
The light was out. He tapped all the doors and whispered her name. He
beat on the doors and shouted, and a woman, dressed in a vest and a hat,
drove him out of the passage with a walking-stick.

For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no love now to
wait for and no bed but his own too many miles away to lie in, and only
the approaching day to remember his discovery. All around him the
disturbed inhabitants of the house were falling back into sleep. Then he
walked out of the house on to the waste space and under the leaning
cranes and ladders. The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle
fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust that had
been houses once, where the small and hardly known and
never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and
died and, always, lost.






[End of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, by Dylan Thomas]
