Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  Mog was saying to him, ‘You ought to come and join our choir, Gomer. Rehearsals for The Messiah now. Something to do. A grand piece, by Handel.

  ‘I got a solo to sing,’ he added with a grin of pride.

  ‘No voice in me now,’ Gomer answered, a little impatiently, weary of his continued failure among the rubble. Then, ashamed of his brusqueness to the cheerful and chatty Mog, who used to work near him in the pit, he said reminiscently, ‘Aye, Handel’s Messiah. Grand indeed. Many’s the time I’ve heard it. I heard Madame Lily Jenkins in it, singing “He shall feed His flock” – there’s a voice for you, an angel’s! Dead now, poor Lily Jenkins. She went into dropsy.’

  ‘We’re having Sara Watkins to sing “He shall feed His flock”,’ said Mog, who was too young to have known the glory of Lily Jenkins. ‘Contralto and eisteddfod winner.’

  ‘A wonderful solo it is,’ sighed Gomer. And he turned again to the tip, while Mog, also resuming search, began to sing in a hearty voice:

  ‘He shall feed His flock

  Like a shepherd—’

  ‘Hey, what’s that moke neighing for on this tip?’ Walt, not far below, demanded.

  An exchange of ironical insults began between Walt and Mog, the latter reminding the amateur boxer of various disgraceful losses he had sustained in the local ring. It was not long before they were throwing pieces of the rubble at each other. Searchers, pausing in their difficult crablike movements over the tip, urged on the combatants. But Gomer, aware of the darkening afternoon, delved deeper into the tip: he found two or three meagre pieces. So absorbed was he that he peered no more down the vale.

  A small figure was approaching the tip, climbing the dirty pasturage that lay between it and the first row of houses, a figure Gomer had been half expecting all day. It was that of a young girl of about twelve, wearing a shabby coat tightly belted round her stark, angular body. She walked stiffly over the dust-sodden field and contemptuously ignored a few grumpy geese who lunged out at her with menacing cries. Soon she was climbing the tip, sticking her feet into the loose rubble and balancing herself confidently. She was thin, but hardened; the ice-pallor of her oval face and the purity of grey in her eyes gave her a remote look. She knew that she bore an important announcement, but she carried it as a sealed letter; she did not allow it to be distributed in wonder and contemplation through her own mind. Her father sometimes called her his young snowdrop. And she looked a snowdrop now, an early snowdrop, closed and very pale and pure. There had been no school for her that auspicious day.

  Some of the tip-searchers looked at her curiously. Having discovered her father she went on climbing steadily and with assurance towards his bent figure. Gomer still hadn’t noticed and it was Mog who called to him.

  ‘This your girl, isn’t she, Gomer?’

  Gomer started up as quickly as his aching back would allow him. For a minute he couldn’t move, the pain in his back gripped him so tight. His daughter and he met near Mog, who waited inquisitively.

  ‘Well now, well now?’ Gomer said hurriedly, his breath blown excitedly over the words. ‘What is it, Olwen, now?’

  For she had not seemed in a hurry to speak. Her grey eyes, wide and remote, had looked at him without expression. Perhaps, deep in her, there was a secret excitement too. Then her lips moved and her voice, fragile and slow with a strange kind of warmth as if early spring sunlight played on it, said:

  ‘A little boy has come.’

  Gomer stood still and after a moment wiped his brow with the back of his hand, leaving a big smudge. There was rejoicing and desolation in his heart. He had two daughters, Olwen, who was twelve, and Megan, who was eight. He used to say, when work was regular and pay decent, that he wanted two girls and two boys. Now he had a boy: a boy had come into his world: the day was a festival. But he stood still and was aware of dark lamentations. What had he to give out of his world to this new child? He moved his gaze almost furtively away from the grey eyes of his daughter. A few drops of rain fell on his lifted face: he looked silently into the prowling clouds. Olwen waited, shut and quiet. Mog, having heard the announcement and gaped at it, turned aside and plunged again into the tip. He was shocked. Other searchers were near and looked up, wondering if anything were happening.

  Gomer quickly returned to normal behaviour. ‘I’ll come now, Olwen,’ he said.

  Olwen’s wide gaze moved to the empty-looking sack flung at her father’s feet. She had been busy at household tasks that day, while the district nurse bustled about. She felt responsible, and she asked with cool expectancy, since he had been on the tip since the morning:

  ‘A load of coal you’re bringing?’

  Gomer swung up the sack. It was disgustingly light, enough for an hour’s fire perhaps.

  ‘Not a load, Olwen,’ he said briefly.

  At which Mog lifted himself and said, ‘Open that sack now, more luck’s than my share I’ve had. I got just a full bag here.’

  ‘No, no, Mog,’ Gomer protested.

  But Mog had already snatched the bag out of Gomer’s hand, and he began filling it. All the same, he was going to make the others on the tip contribute. He bawled out to them:

  ‘Oi there! Gomer’s got to go home. His missus has took to her bed. Come on now and fill his sack.’

  Those within hearing scrambled up and down to the little group. Mog repeated his demand, Gomer protesting. They contributed willingly. One or two men made a joke of the news, others shook their heads and deplored. Gomer’s bag was soon full. He stood deprecating, but helpless. And relieved; he had to submit to the feeling of relief, miserable as it was to be helped in this way by those who could ill afford to give.

  Olwen stood apart, an aloof acceptance of the scene on her face. Coal was wanted; the house was cold. The district nurse had exclaimed loudly. Olwen had scraped and scraped over the floor of the coalhouse for dust and sifted half a shovelful over an old stool she had chopped up and lit in the grate. So a gleam of approval entered her watching eyes as the searchers crammed the precious stuff into her father’s sack.

  ‘There now,’ said Mog, with a determined gaiety, ‘the young chap’ll see a real fire on his first winter’s night, as is proper.’

  Gomer quietly thanked the searchers. They tied the opening of the sack and heaved it up to his shoulders. Carefully and slowly he began to descend the tip, the sedate Olwen preceding him. Joy and foreboding still struggled in his heart. A boy seemed to him now a more serious business than a girl. A girl was usually protected by some man. A man’s life depended on the goodwill and prosperity and peaceful disposition of the world. And the world had become like a skeleton. Gomer stumbled from the tip to the frozen field below. Olwen waited for him. As he came to her, she suddenly smiled, with a kind of cool glee.

  ‘I’ve seen him. He’s a pretty little boy, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘Is he indeed, Olwen, is he now?’ he said, rousing himself.

  Then she added, a hint of grave elderly knowledge in her voice:

  ‘Like you he seemed to me.’

  ‘Like me, is he?’ said Gomer, laughing at her desire to please him. The rain was swinging down now, but neither of them took any notice of it. Gomer strode along quite easily, with the lumpy bag stretched across his shoulders. And Olwen, alert and stark in her tight-belted coat, looked forward to domestic tasks, aided by a proper fire…

  Up on the tip, Mog had followed father and daughter’s progress with a troubled mien. His jauntiness had been wiped away for a while; still he was shocked. It seemed to him the most dangerous folly to bring forth young into the world, with times as they were. Yet… yet… He tightened his belt. Why, after all, should the nasty behaviour of the times be allowed to affect a man’s true life! Life must proceed. Gomer had a courage which he, Mog, did not possess.

  The rain began to slash across the tip, the sodden clouds plunging nearer the dead hills. Mog looked at his diminished sack. He could hear Gwen’s exasperated cry when she caught sight of it. But might as well give up now.
Cold and wet: the rain spat large icy drops into his face. Mog suddenly lifted his arm and shook his fist menacingly at the heaving sky. He would like to have a fight with someone just then. The world was dirty, untidy, slovenly…

  Then he uttered a bark of laughter. What was he doing, shaking his fist at the heavens? Threatening God with a black eye? Snatching up his sack of coal he ran carelessly and easily down the tip, ducking through the whipping rain and flinging a last good-humoured insult to Walt, whose flattened smudge of a nose was pale blue with cold. Three or four searchers, half hidden in the rain, still combed the tip.

  EXTRAORDINARY LITTLE COUGH

  Dylan Thomas

  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 tablecloth 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 sunbathed 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 wash house 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 farther?’ 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 said.

  ‘Thousands of miles,’ I said. ‘It’s Rhossilli, USA. 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 wash house?’

  ‘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, skullcapped 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 farmyard 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, lazing 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 tomorrow 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 it trickled 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.