|
Dylan Thomas: Memories of
Christmas
(page one)
Dylan Thomas was born
in 1914: I felt this extract from his Reminiscences of Childhood formed a
useful introduction to the longer piece:
Dylan
Thomas reading one of his essays for BBC radio
|
I was born in
a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an
ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling,
slummed,unplanned, jerry-villa’d, and smug-suburbed by the side of
a long and splendid-curving shore where truant boys and sandfield
boys and old anonymous men, in the tatters and hangovers of a hundred
charity suits, beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock-bound
boats, threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs, and,
on Saturday summer afternoons, listened to the militant music of salvation
and hell-fire preached from a soap-box.
This sea town was my world; outside,
a strange Wales, coal-pitted, mountained, river run, full, so far as I knew,
of choirs and sheep and story-book tall hats, moved about its business which
was none of mine; beyond that unknown Wales lay England, which was London,
and a country called ‘The Front’ from which many of our neighbours never
came back. At the beginning, the only ‘front’ I knew was the little
lobby before our front door; I could not understand how so many people never
returned from there; but later I grew to know more, though still without
understanding, and carried a wooden rifle in Cwmdonkin Park and shot down
the invisible, unknown enemy like a flock of wild birds...
Memories
of Christmas
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 some-. times 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; or whether the ice broke and the skating
grocer vanished like a snowman through a white trap-door on that same
Christmas Day that the mince-pies
finished Uncle Arnold and we tobogganed down the seaward hill, all the
afternoon, on the best tea-tray, and Mrs Griffiths complained, and we threw
a snowball at her niece, and my hands burned so, with the heat and the cold,
when I held them in front of the fire, that I cried for twenty minutes and
then had some jelly.
All the Christmases roll down the
hill towards the Welsh-speaking sea, like a snowball growing whiter and
bigger and rounder, 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;
holly or robins or pudding, squabbles and carols and oranges and tin
whistles, and the fire in the front room, and bang go the crackers, and
holy, holy, holy, ring the bells, and the glass bells shaking on the tree,
and Mother Goose, and Struwelpeter—oh! the baby-burning flames and the
clacking scissorman !—Billy Bunter and Black Beauty, Little Women and boys
who have three helpings, Alice and Mrs Potter’s badgers, penknives,
teddy-bears—----named after a Mr Theodore Bear, their inventor, or father,
who died recently in the United States—mouth-organs, tin-soldiers, and
blancmange, and Auntie Bessie playing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and ‘Nuts
in May ‘and ‘Oranges and Lemons’ on the untuned piano in the parlour
all through the thimble-hiding musical-chairing blind-man’s-buffing party
at the end of the-never-to-be-forgotten day at the end of the unremembered
year.
In goes my hand into
that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the margin of the
carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the
afternoon of the day of 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 terrible-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’s Bay off Eversley 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 neighbour’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, towards 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.
‘They 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 and 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 something to read?’
|
Recent Additions
