by Dai Smith
‘And you say this Matlock is a judge.’
‘He is a judge because he is the donor of the silver cup for the best character band. Mathews the Moloch is donating the cash part of the prize.’
‘Why not make it plain that we have given up all hard thoughts about Matlock and politics. Why not have a kind of placard carried in front of the band just saying “The Matadors. Above Party. Above Class”.’
‘Any kind of placard or slogan in front of the band would clash with Moira in that fine romantic costume of hers. But the slogan you’ve just mentioned would put the judges out for the count. We’ll have to rely on the goodwill of Matlock and the others. We’ll have to convince them that through these carni vals we are now making our way towards the New Jerusalem by a blither route, thinking no thought that cannot be played on a gazooka. Now, that’s enough defeatist talk for one morn ing. I’m going to get a new rose for Moira. She makes a won derful picture with that flower hanging from her lips.’
Gomer looked around. The only dwelling on that part of the road was an old cottage in which lived an ancient couple, se cluded and somewhat petulant, still closer in spirit to the peasantry of the distant country of their origin than to the loud beetle-browed valleys where they had come tetchily to settle. If they had seen any of the carnivals’ bands pass their cottage they had probably taken them as being quite seriously a part of the crudescent lunacy they had always spotted at the heart of the life around them.
In the front garden of the cottage were hundreds of roses in full bloom and of as deep a red as that which had been given to Moira by Jenks the Pinks. If Gomer had had a less sonorous approach to living he could have put his hand over the fence and helped himself to a handful. Instead, he went up the garden path and knocked on the door. The woman appeared and peeped out. She looked as if Old Moore had been keeping her prepared for the coming of Gomer for years. Gomer held out to her the unpetalled stem of Moira’s first rose.
‘Since the beauty has slipped from this,’ he said and gave a light laugh which did not help, ‘could I prevail upon you to furnish the lips of Meadow Prospect’s Carmen, Moira Hallam, with a rose on a par with that grown by Naboth Jenks the Pinks?’
Every reservation she had ever felt about her days on this earth crowded on to the woman’s face. She slammed the door shut and started crying out for her husband, who was some where in the back of the cottage. Then the woman’s face ap peared at one of the front windows, her eyes two pools of shock. A few of Cynlais’ matadors, hearing the bang of the door and wondering what Gomer was up to, strolled over the brow of the grass bank and came into view of the cottage. The woman behind the window saw them and the door was instantly locked and barred. Gomer left the garden and picked up a rose on the way.
The band fell once more into line. At the sight of the fresh rose and after a round of servile attendance from Cynlais, Moira had picked up her spirits and the first notes of ‘I’m One of the Nuts of Barcelona’ had a swirl of optimistic gaiety as the matadors set forth on the last lap of their journey.
‘Now let’s hurry ahead and see about these Sheiks,’ said Gomer.
We reached the centre of Trecelyn at the double. We had passed a group of bands all dressed in chintz, unstitched from looted curtains in the main, and all playing sad tunes like ‘Moonlight and Roses’, ‘Souvenirs’ and even a hymn, but those latter boys were wearing a very dark kind of chintz and from their general appearance were out on some subtle branch line of piety. Then we saw the Aberclydach Sheiks and they stopped us in our tracks. What Onllwyn Meeker had said was quite right. The grey veils worn high and seen against the dark, rather fierce type of male face common in Aberclydach, high cheekbones, eyebrows like coconut matting, was disquieting, but in a tonic sort of way. But it was their style of marching that hit the eye. They played the ‘Sheik of Araby’ very slowly and their swaying was deep and thorough. Their leader, in splendid white robes and a jet black turban about two feet deep and of a total length of cloth that must have put mourn ing in Aberclydach back a year, was a huge and notable rugby forward, Ritchie Reeves, who in his day had worn out nine referees and the contents of two fracture wards. The drummers also wore turbans but these were squat articles, and it was clear that Ritchie Reeves was making sure that it was only he who would present the public with a real Mahometan flourish. Gomer Gough went very close to the boys from Aberclydach and then turned to us.
‘The boys between Ritchie Reeves and the drummers are not sheiks at all. They are houris, birds of paradise, a type of ethereal harlot, promised to the Arabs by Allah to compensate them for a life spent among sand and a run-down economy, but I can see three Aberclydach rodneys in that third row alone who wouldn’t compensate me for anything.’
Teilo Dew was staring fascinated at the swaying of our rivals.
‘If these boys are right,’ he said, ‘then the Middle East must be a damned sight less stable than we thought.’
‘They are practically leaving their earmarks on either side,’ said Uncle Edwin. ‘They are wanting to suggest some high note of orgasm and pandering to the bodily wants of Ritchie, who has made it quite plain by the height of his hat that he is the chief sheik.’
We looked at Ritchie. His great face was melancholy but passionate, and we could see that between his rugby-clouted brain and carrying about a stone of cloth on his head his reactions were even more muffled than usual.
‘Where are the judges?’ asked Gomer, pulling a small book from his pocket.
‘Over there in the open bay window of the Constitutional Club.’
We looked up and saw the judges. Right in front was Merfyn Matlock, very broad and bronzed, and smiling down at the Aberclydach band. At his side was the veteran coalowner Mathews the Moloch, and he did not seem to be in focus at all. He was leaning on Matlock and we could believe what we had often heard about him, that he was the one coal owner who had worked seams younger than himself. Behind these two we could see Ephraim Humphries in a grey suit and looking down with a kind of hooded caution at Ritchie Reeves and the houris.
Gomer stood squarely beneath the judges’ window, slapped the little book he was holding and shouted up in a great roar, ‘Mr Judges, an appeal, please. I’ve just seen the Aberclydach Sheiks. They are swaying like pendulums and I’m too well up in carnival law to let these antics go unchallenged. The rules we drew up at the Meadow Prospect conference, which are printed here in this little handbook, clearly state that bandsmen should keep a military uprightness on the march. It was with a faithful eye on this regulation that we told our own artistic adviser, Festus Phelps the Fancy, to avoid all imagina tive frills that make the movement of the Meadow Prospect Matadors too staccato. And now here we have these Aber clydach Sheiks weaving in and out like shuttlecocks in their soft robes. This is the work of perverts and not legal.’
Merfyn Matlock pointed his arm down at Gomer and we could see that this for him was a moment of fathomless delight. ‘Stewards,’ he said, ‘remove that man. He’s out to disrupt the carnival. Meadow Prospect has always been a pit of dissent. Here come the Sheiks now. Oh, a fine turnout!’
We turned to take another look at the Sheiks as they moved into the square and as we saw them we gave up what was left of the ghost. The Sheiks had played their supreme trump. They had slowed their rate of march down to a crawl to confuse the bands behind them. And out of a side street, goaded on by a cloud of shouting voters, came the Sheiks’ deputy leader, Mostyn Frost, dressed in Arab style and mounted on an old camel which he had borrowed from a menagerie that had gone bankrupt and bogged down in Aberclydach a week before. It was this animal that Olga Rowe caught a glimpse of as she was led back into position on the square. It finished her off for good.
At the carnival’s end Gomer and Cynlais said we would go back over the mountain path, for the macadamed roads would be too hard after the disappointments of the day. Up the mountain we went. Everything was plain because the moon was full.
The path was narrow and we walked singl
e file, women, child ren, Matadors, Sons of Dixie and Britannias. We reached the mountaintop. We reached the straight green path that leads past Llangysgod on down to Meadow Prospect. And across the lovely deep-ferned plateau we walked slowly, like a little army, most of the men with children hanging on to their arms, the women walking as best they could in the rear. Then they all fell quiet. We stood still, I and two or three others, and watched them pass, listening to the curious quietness that had fallen upon them. Far away we heard a high crazy laugh from Cynlais Coleman, who was trying to comfort Moira Hallam in their defeat. Some kind of sadness seemed to have come down on us. It was not a miserable sadness, for we could all feel some kind of contentment enriching its dark root. It may have been the moon making the mountain seem so secure and serene. We were like an army that had nothing left to cheer about or cry about, not sure if it was advancing or retreating and not caring. We had lost. As we watched the weird disguises, the strange, yet utterly familiar faces, of Britannias, Matadors and Africans, shuffle past, we knew that the bubble of frivolity, blown with such pathetic care, had burst for ever and that new and colder winds of danger would come from all the world’s corners to find us on the morrow. But for that moment we were touched by the moon and the magic of longing. We sensed some friend liness and forgiveness in the loved and loving earth we walked on. For minutes the silence must have gone on. Just the sound of many feet swishing through the summer grass. Then some body started playing a gazooka. The tune he played was one of those sweet, deep things that form as simply as dew upon a mood like ours. It must have been ‘All Through the Night’ scored for a million talking tears and a disbelief in the dawn. It had all the golden softness of an age-long hunger to be at rest. The player, distant from us now, at the head of the long and formless procession, played it very quietly, as if he were thinking rather than playing. Thinking about the night, conflict, beauty, the intricate labour of living and the dark little dish of thinking self in which they were all compounded. Then the others joined in and the children began to sing.
A CHRISTMAS STORY
Richard Burton
There were not many white Christmases in our part of Wales in my childhood – perhaps only one or two – but Christmas cards and Dickens and Dylan Thomas and wishful memory have turned them all into white. I don’t know why there should have been so few in such a cold, wet land – the nearness of the sea, perhaps. The Atlantic, by way of the Bristol Channel, endlessly harried us with gale and tempest. Perhaps our winds were too wild and salty for the snow to get a grip. Perhaps they blew the snow over us to the Black Mountains and Snowdonia and England.
Most of the Christmases of my childhood seem the same, but one of them I remember particularly, because it departed from the seemingly inexorable ritual. On this Eve of Christmas, Mad Dan, my uncle, the local agnostic, feared for his belief but revered for his brilliantly active vocabulary in the half-alien English tongue, sat in our kitchen with a group of men and with biting scourge and pithy whip drove the great cries of history, the epoch-making, world-changing ones, out of the temple of time. They were all half-truths, he said, and therefore half-lies.
I sat and stoned raisins for the pudding and listened bewitched to this exotic foreign language, this rough and r-riddled, rolling multisyllabic English.
‘“There is only one Christian and he died upon the Cross,” said Nietzsche,’ said Dan.
Nietzsche, I thought – a Japanese. Perhaps he can speak Japanese, I thought. It was said that he, Dan, knew Latin and Greek, and could write both of them backwards.
‘Can you speak Japanese, Mad Dan?’ I asked.
‘Shut up, Solomon,’ he said to me.
‘“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,”’ he said. ‘Irresponsible rubbish. Cries written by crabbed fists on empty tables from mean hearts.’
‘“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”’
‘What’s that?’ I asked
‘Latin, Copperfield,’ he said, ‘meaning it is sweetly bloody marvellous to die for your country.
‘“Man is born free and is everywhere in chains” – golden-tongued, light-brained, heedlessness of consequences.’
‘“I think, therefore I am” – Descartes.’
‘French,’ I guessed.
‘Right, Seth,’ he said. ‘Thou shalt have a Rolls-Royce and go to Oxford and never read a book again.’
‘“I think, therefore I am,”’ with scorn. ‘Wallace the fruiterer – he who sells perishable goods after they have perished to Saturday night idiots – might well say of them, “They do not think, therefore they are not, they buy perishable goods after they have perished.”’
Out of the welter of names and quotations (Mad Dan’s ‘My personal leaden treasury of the human tragedy’) the cries, the references rolled out endlessly. He said that Martin Luther should have had a diet of worms. Why, I thought, why should the man eat worms?
‘Can you eat worms?’ I asked.
‘Not as readily as the worms will eat you,’ he said.
He roared with delight at this incomprehensible joke. He had become more and more burning and bright. He said he had a cold, and took some more medicine from a little bottle in his pocket.
This was as it should be. Uncle Dan had been talking ever since I could remember. Until this moment Christmas was Christmas as it always had been. But then my sister’s husband, cheekboned, hollowed, sculpted, came into the room.
‘All right, boys,’ he said, ‘off you go – take the boy with you.’
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘Just go with Dan and behave yourself,’ he said.
‘Where’s my sister?’ I said.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Go you.’
I went out into the night with Dan and the other men.
Why were they sending me out at this time of night on Christmas Eve?
My mother had died when I was two years old, and I had lived with my sister and her husband ever since. I had had lots of Christmases since my mother’s death, and they could already be relied on, they had always been the same. There was the growing excitement of Uncle Ben’s Christmas Club (you paid a sixpence or a shilling a week throughout the year), and the choosing from the catalogue – Littlewood’s Catalogue. There was the breathless guessing at what Santa Claus would bring. What was in those anonymous brown paper parcels on top of the wardrobe? Would it be a farm with pigs in a sty, and ducks on a metal pond, and five-barred gates, and metal trees, and Kentucky fences, and a horse or two, and several cows, and a tiny bucket and a milk-maid, and a farmhouse complete with red-faced farmer and wife in the window? And a chimney on top? Pray God it wasn’t Tommy Elliot’s farm, which I’d played with for two years and which I feared – from glances and whispers that I’d caught between my sister and Mrs Elliot – was going to be cleaned up and bought for me for Christmas. It would be shameful to have a second-hand present. Everybody would know. It must be, if a farm at all, a spanking-new one, gleaming with fresh paint, with not a sign of the leaden base showing through.
And I would spend an hour singing Christmas carol duets from door to door with my friend Trevor, picking up a penny here and a ha’penny there. And then home at nine o’clock, perhaps to gossip with my sister and eat more nuts, and be sent to bed sleepless and agog. And now, at the time of getting to bed, I was being sent out into the night with Mad Dan and his audience – all of them with Christmas colds, and all of them drinking medicine out of little bottles kept in their inside pockets.
We went to the meeting ground of our part of the village. It was called ‘The End’. It was a vacant stretch of stony ground between two rows of cottages – Inkerman and Balaclava. Both the Inkerman people and the Balaclava people called it ‘The End’. Insularity, I realise now, streetophobia – to each street it was ‘The End’. It should have been called ‘The Middle’.
The miners had built a bonfire and stood around it, burning on one side and frozen on the other. Chestnuts and –
because there had been plenty of work that year – potatoes were roasted to blackness, and eaten sprinkled with salt, smoky and steaming straight from the fire. And Mad Dan, making great gestures against the flames, told the half-listening, silent, munching miners of the lies we had been told for thousands of years, the mellifluous advice we had been told to take.
‘Turn the other cheek. Turn the other cheek, boys, and get your bloody brain broken. Suffer all my children. This side of the river is torment and torture and starvation, and don’t forget the sycophancy to the carriaged and horsed, the Daimlered, the bare-shouldered, remote beauties in many mansions, gleaming with the gold we made for them. Suffer all my baby-men, beat out, with great coal-hands, the black melancholy of the hymns. When you die and cross that stormy river, that roaring Jordan, there will be unimaginable delights, and God shall wipe away all tears, and there will be no more pain. Lies Lies! Lies!’
The night was getting on. Christmas was nearly here. Dan was boring now, and sometimes he didn’t make sense, and he was repeating himself. What was in those parcels on top of the wardrobe, and why had I been sent out so late on Christmas Eve? I wanted to go home.
‘Can I go home now, Mad Dan?’
‘Shut your bloody trap and listen,’ he said, ‘or I’ll have you apprenticed to a haberdasher.’
This was a fate worse than death for a miner’s son. There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and the rats from running up inside your trousers and biting your belly (or worse), and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy, muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface. There was the ambition to be one of those blue-scarred boys at the street corner on Saturday night with a half a crown in the pocket and, secure in numbers, whistle at the girls who lived in the residential area. The doctor’s, the lawyer’s, the headmaster’s daughter.
