Dylan Thomas
1914-10-27 Swansea, Reino Unido
1953-11-09 Greenwich Village, Nova Iorque, EUA
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Some Poems
Biography
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Dylan Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953)
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in
English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and
radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in
America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt
became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the
"play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying
father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also
noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or
Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion"
and "Fern Hill".
Early Life
Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales,
on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought
the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the
city.
His father, David John ('DJ') Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class
honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was
dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English
master who taught English literature.[4] His mother, Florence Hannah
Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea.
Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older
than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even
though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. 'DJ' was
even known to give Welsh lessons at home.
Dylan is pronounced 'd?lan in Welsh, and in the early part of his career some
announcers introduced him using this pronunciation. However, Thomas
himself favoured the anglicised pronunciation /'d?l?n/. A review of a
biography by Andrew Lycett (2004) notes: "Florence, the boy’s mother, had
her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the
family used, is “Dullan,” and she worried that other children would tease him
by calling him “dull one.” Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of
the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the
way he himself pronounced it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him
in honour of his great-uncle, Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose
bardic name was Gwilym Marles.
His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to
visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and
the contrast with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of
his work, notably many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill.
Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and
asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He
was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war
effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education
began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few
streets away on Mirador Crescent. He described his experience there in Quite
Early One Morning:
Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and
smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons
drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the
sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime —
the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table
during English literature.
In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School,
in the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an
undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's
magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks
and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He
left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the South
Wales Daily Post, only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in
1932. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90
poems he published, half were written during these first years. He then
joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now
Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still continued to work as a freelance
journalist for a few more years.
Thomas spent his time visiting the cinema in the Uplands, walking along
Swansea Bay, visiting a theatre where he used to perform, and frequenting
Swansea's pubs. He especially patronised those in the Mumbles area such
the Antelope Hotel and the Mermaid Hotel. A short walk from the local
newspaper where he worked was the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, central
Swansea. At the café he met with various artist contemporaries, such as his
good friend the poet Vernon Watkins. These writers, musicians and artists
became known as 'The Kardomah Gang'. In 1932, Thomas embarked on
what would be one of his various visits to London.
In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in a "three
nights' blitz". Castle Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that
suffered badly; the rows of shops, including the 'Kardomah Café', were
destroyed. Thomas later wrote about this in his radio play Return Journey
Home, in which he describes the café as being "razed to the snow". Return
Journey Home was first broadcast on 15 June 1947, having been written
soon after the bombing raids. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell
of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he
concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". The Kardomah Café later reopened on
Portland Street, not far from the original location
Career and Family
It is often commented that Thomas was indulged like a child and he was, in
fact, still a teenager when he published many of the poems he would become
famous for: “And death shall have no dominion" “Before I Knocked” and “The
Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall
have no dominion", appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933 and
further work appeared in The Listener in 1934 catching the attention of two
of the most senior poets of the day T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. His
highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published on 18
December 1934, and went on to win a contest run by The Sunday Referee,
netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith
Sitwell. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, which did not pay its
writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A
similar arrangement would later be used by a number of other new authors,
including Philip Larkin.
His passionate musical lyricism caused a sensation in these years of
desiccated Modernism; the critic Desmond Hawkins said it was “the sort of
bomb that bursts no more than once in three years”. In all, he wrote half of
his poems while living at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive before he moved to London.It
was also the time that Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.
In the spring of 1936, Dylan Thomas met dancer Caitlin Macnamara in the
Wheatsheaf pub, in the Fitzrovia area of London's West End. They were
introduced by Augustus John, who was Macnamara's lover at the time (there
were rumours that she continued her relationship with John after she
married Thomas). A drunken Thomas proposed to Macnamara on the spot,
and the two began a courtship. On 11 July 1937, Thomas married
Macnamara in a register office in Penzance, Cornwall. In 1938, the couple
rented a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, West Wales.
Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939 (d. 2000).
Their daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, was born on 3 March 1943 (d. 2009).
A second son, Colm Garan Hart, was born on 24 July 1949.
Wartime and After
At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was designated C3, which
meant that although he could, in theory, be called up for service he would be
in one of the last groups to be so. He was saddened to see his friends enter
active service leaving him behind and drank whilst struggling to support his
family. He lived on tiny fees from writing and reviewing and borrowed heavily
from friends and acquaintances, writing begging letters to random literary
figures in hope of support, envisaging this as a plan of long term regular
income. He wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of
Information asking for employment but after a rebuff eventually ended up
working for Strand Films. Strand produced films for the Ministry of
Information and Thomas scripted at least five in 1942 with titles such as This
Is Colour (about dye), New Towns For Old, These Are The Men and Our
Country (a sentimental tour of Britain). He actively sought to build a
reputation as a raconteur and outrageous writer, heavy drinker and wit.
The publication of Deaths and Entrances in 1946 was a major turning point
for Thomas. Poet and critic W. J. Turner commented in The Spectator "This
book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet". Thomas was well
known for being a versatile and dynamic speaker, best known for his poetry
readings. He made over 200 broadcasts for the BBC.
Often considered his greatest single work, Under Milk Wood, a radio play
featuring the characters of Llareggub, is set in a fictional Welsh fishing village
('Llareggub' is 'Bugger All' backwards, implying that there is absolutely
nothing to do there). The BBC credited their producer Stella Hillier with
ensuring the play actually materialised. Assigned "some of the more
wayward characters who were then writing for the BBC", she dragged the
notoriously unreliable Thomas out of the pub and back to her office to finish
the work. The play took several years to write, the first half mostly in South
Leigh, Oxford, in 1948, whilst the second half was mostly written in America
in May 1953. Fewer than 300 lines were written in Laugharne, according to
one account, which also explains the influence of New Quay on the play.
New York
John Malcolm Brinnin invited Thomas to New York and in 1950 embarked on
a lucrative three month tour of arts centres and campuses in the States. He
toured there again in 1952, this time with Caitlin, who discovered that he
had been unfaithful on his 1950 trip. They both drank heavily, as if in
competition, Thomas's health beginning to suffer with gout and lung
problems. Thomas performed a 'work in progress' version of Under Milk
Wood solo for the first time on 3 May at Harvard during his early 1953 US
tour, and then with a cast at the Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May. He
worked on the play further in Wales, where in its completed form it
premiered the Lyric Theatre, Carmarthen, Wales on 8 October 1953, just 12
miles away from Laugharne. It was said Thomas gave a 'supreme virtuoso
performance'. He then travelled to London and on the 19 October he flew to
America. He died in New York on 5 November 1953 before the BBC could
record the play. Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954 and
was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film.
Thomas's last collection Collected Poems, 1934–1952, published when he
was 38, won the Foyle poetry prize. He wrote "Do not go gentle into that
good night", a villanelle, to his dying father, who passed away in 1952, one
of the poet's last poems.
Death
Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953, to take part in a
performance of Under Milk Wood at the city's prestigious Poetry Centre. He
was already ill and had a history of blackouts and heart problems, using an
inhaler in New York to help his breathing. Thomas had liked to boast of his
addiction to drinking, saying "An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who
drinks as much as you do." He "liked the taste of whisky" and had a
powerful reputation for his drinking. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled
how intoxicating a performer he was and how the tension would build before
a performance: “Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would
some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be
offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting
possibilities.” His wife Caitlin said in her embittered memoir “Nobody ever
needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it.” Thomas “exhibited
the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated
with rock stars,” however the amount he is supposed to have drunk in his
lifetime and in New York before his death, may well have been exaggerated
as Thomas became mythologised.
On the evening of 27 October 1953, Thomas's 39th birthday, the poet
attended a party in his honour but felt so unwell that he returned to his
hotel. On 28 October 1953, he took part in Poetry And The Film, a recorded
symposium at Cinema 16, which included panellists Amos Vogel, Maya
Deren, Parker Tyler, and Willard Maas. The director of the Poetry Centre,
John Brinnin, was also Thomas's tour agent. Brinnin didn't travel to New
York, remaining at home in Boston and handed responsibility to his assistant,
Liz Reitell.[ Reitell met Thomas at Idlewild Airport (now JFK airport) and he
told her that he had had a terrible week, had missed her terribly and wanted
to go to bed with her. Despite Reitell's previous misgivings about their
relationship they spent the rest of the day and night together at the Chelsea
Hotel. The next day she invited him to her apartment but he declined, saying
that he was not feeling well and retired to his bed for the rest of the
afternoon. After spending the night at the hotel with Thomas, Reitell went
back to her own apartment for a change of clothes. At breakfast Herb
Hannum noticed how sick Thomas looked and suggested a visit to a Dr.
Feltenstein before the performance of Under Milk Wood that evening. The
doctor went to work with his needle, and Thomas made it through the two
performances of Under Milk Wood, but collapsed straight afterwards. Reitell
would later describe Feltenstein as a wild doctor who believed injections
could cure anything.
A turning point came on 2 November. Air pollution in New York had risen
significantly and exacerbated chest illnesses, such as Thomas had. By the
end of the month, over two hundred New Yorkers had died from the smog.
On 3 November Thomas spent most of that day in bed drinking He went out
in the evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel,
he went out again for a drink at 2am. After drinking at the White Horse
Tavern, a pub he'd found through Scottish poet Ruthven Todd, Thomas
returned to the Hotel Chelsea, declaring, "I've had eighteen straight
whiskies. I think that's the record!" The barman and the owner of the pub
who served Thomas at the time later commented that Thomas couldn't have
imbibed more than half that amount. Thomas had an appointment to visit a
clam house in New Jersey on 4 November. When phoned at the Chelsea that
morning, he said that he was feeling awful and asked to take a rain-check.
Later, he did go drinking with Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick
again, returned to the hotel. Dr. Feltenstein came to see him three times
that day, on the third call prescribing morphine, which seriously affected
Thomas's breathing. At midnight on 5 November, his breathing became more
difficult and his face turned blue. Reitell unsuccessfully tried to get hold of
Feltenstein.
Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at nearby St Vincent's
hospital. The medical notes state that he arrived in a coma at 1.58am, and
that the "impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy
damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without
response". The duty doctors found bronchitis in all parts of his bronchial tree,
both left and right sides. An X-ray showed pneumonia, and a raised white
cell count confirmed the presence of an infection. Caitlin in Laugharne was
sent a telegram on 5 November, notifying her that Dylan was in hospital. She
flew to America the following day and was taken, with a police escort, to the
hospital. Her alleged first words were "Is the bloody man dead yet?" The
pneumonia worsened and Thomas died, whilst in coma, at noon on 9
November.
Poetry
Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the
villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night. His images were carefully
ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all
life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the
generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing
unity out of diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate
this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love,
procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Therefore, each image
engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes
self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and
Freud. Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in poems
such as Fern Hill, In Country Sleep, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait or In the
White Giant's Thigh from Under Milkwood:
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
and heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
the scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse
of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were
Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:
I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen
in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I
could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words
alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I
fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at
the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their
behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even
learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled
for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself,
and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the
most important things, to me, that could be ever.
Eserleri:
Poetry collections
1934 18 Poems
1936 Twenty-Five Poems
1939 The Map of Love
1943 New Poems
1946 Deaths and Entrances
1950 Twenty-Six Poems
1952 In Country Sleep
1952 Collected Poems, 1934–1952
Collected prose
1940 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent
1946 Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, New Directions
1953 Adventures In The Skin Trade And Other Stories (Adventures In The
Skin Trade, an unfinished novel). New Directions
1954 Quite Early One Morning (Planned by Thomas, posthumously
published). New Directions
1955 A Child's Christmas in Wales, New Directions
1955 A Prospect of the Sea and other stories and prose writings, Dent
1957 Letters to Vernon Watkins, Dent
1965 Rebecca's Daughters, Triton
1969 The year of love.
Drama
1954 Under Milk Wood (Radio play)
1953 The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts
1964 The Beach of Falesa (Screenplay)
Further reading: collections
1966 Dylan Thomas: a Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Charles B. Cox
1971 The Poems of Dylan Thomas W. W. Norton & Co
1978 A Child's Christmas in Wales illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1996:
published as Dolphin Paperback from Orion Children's Books
1982 Selected Works, Guild Publishing, London
1984 The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas, New Directions Publishing
1986 Collected Letters. Edited by Paul Ferris. MacMillan
1992 On the Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, Ed. Ralph Maud New
Directions Publishing
1994 Eight Stories, W. W. Norton & Co
1995 Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays, Ed. John Ackerman.
Applause Books
1997 Fern Hill: An Illustrated edition of the Dylan Thomas poem. Red Deer
College Press, Canada
2000 Collected Poems 1934-1953, London: Phoenix
2000 Selected Poems London: Phoenix
Critical studies
Brinnin, J M Dylan Thomas in America: an intimate journal, 1957
Gilbar & Stewart Literary Santa Barbara 1998, pp. 248–252
Lycett, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: A new life, 2003
Thomas, Caitlin Leftover Life to Kill, 1957
Thomas, David N. Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? David N.
Thomas, Seren 2008
Thomas, David N. Dylan Remembered, Volume 2: 1935-1953, Seren 2004
Thomas, David N. Dylan Remembered, Volume 1: 1913- 1934, Seren 2003
Thomas, David N. The Dylan Thomas Murders, Seren 2002
Thomas, David N. Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow,
Seren 2000
A Child's Christmas in Wales
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner
now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a
moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and
six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights
when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong
moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the
ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out
whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays
resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the
firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden,
waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.
December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But
there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to
snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and
snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the
lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay,
off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise
cats never appeared.
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal
snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry
from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like
the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the
voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and
smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating,
and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better
than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house,
laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.
Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there
after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle
of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.
"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the
middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we
missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he
likes fires."
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in
helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before
they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the
firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt,
Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly,
to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at
the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders
and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds
the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang
and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp
front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and
the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse,
when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a
small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked
it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white
wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted
out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs
of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled
on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn
Christmas cards."
"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up
to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a
ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And
they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder
and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for
joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."
"Get back to the postmen"
"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the
snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ...."
"Ours has got a black knocker...."
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and
huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like
small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"
"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on
his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He
went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. "He wagged his bag like
a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was
gone."
"Get back to the Presents."
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens
made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be
tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies
and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from
aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests
that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little
crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And
pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would
skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything
about the wasp, except why."
"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a
tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a
catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid
duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an
ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I
could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still
the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and
pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs,
glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers
who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy
Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh,
easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next
door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And
a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the
street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a
cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the
balloons."
"Were there Uncles like in our house?"
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning,
with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the
news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white
deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading
or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos,
huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung
from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled
beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires;
and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers.
Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost
certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length,
returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though
waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor
anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle,
afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."
Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered,
yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his
constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on
Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing,
no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn
sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the
waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their
inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the
dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my
nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself,
with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch,
leering all to himself.
I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips
and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his
whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling
faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the
whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing
pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put
their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers,
aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already
been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had
some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but
Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard,
singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would
blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled.
In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow
descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try
to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and
produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.
Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the
seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets,
leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.
"I bet people will think there's been hippos."
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and
then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"
Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow
toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box."
"Let's write things in the snow."
"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"
The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind
travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their
necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through
the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the
wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged
uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay.
And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the
center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because
it was only once a year.
Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver.