Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  When I reached the Terraces I saw great crowds of people. This was not common. Usually the people in the Terraces were asleep, working, sitting in a stupor on the doorsteps, or stroking their rabbits, pigeons or despair in the backyards. The crowd was thickest in Cadwallader’s street, and at first I thought his passion and his strength had carried his lust for exercise to a peak where he had thrust Agnes through the roof without thought for her or the tiles. The people were excited. One voter told me that the colliery company which owned the streets around, and most of the people in them, had put up the rent of twelve of the houses, and the tenants in these houses had refused to pay any more rent until the company saw sense. I found that Agnes’ house was one of the twelve. I saw Agnes standing on the pavement talking loudly, swinging her arms and flouncing her hair in great crimson waves upon her neck, and giving an outline of the sort of sense she was waiting for the company to see. I felt sorry for all these tenants who were being put on the wheel, but I could not see the company seeing anything but the company even with someone like Agnes dragging their eyes towards the target. Agnes had persuaded the tenants and their friends to resist. I could see a small group of listless and pallid men standing near her and taking in her commands. The man who was giving me the news of these developments told me that these boys were those lovers of Agnes who had blazed the trail before Cadwallader, the few who could still stand at all. People were building a barricade in the street made out of furniture that nobody wanted any more. Most of the furniture in the Terraces looks as if no one wants it any more, so there was a very poor quality about this barricade altogether. The idea of it was to keep out the band of policemen and bailiffs and so on who were shortly to come in the name of the company and drag out these people who had buried their rent books ahead of themselves, which is not legal. I thought this made my job with Cadwallader all the easier. If he was going to be evicted it would be better all round if he just came down to the bed of the valley with me and took his old lodgings with us straightaway, but I found him in a harsh and brutal frame of mind, his mind all stoked up to a high flame by the speeches and antics of Agnes, his heart full of impatient hatred for the evictors and their assistants. Agnes must have been talking to him in signs to make him understand so much. He seemed really to have grasped the issue neatly, and was now waiting for the action to start which would allow him to lay down the issue and transfer his fingers to some unfriendly neck. I began my pleading, orating hard about the condition of my father, his gloom and hunger, lacing the whole with some selections from that poem. But he would not listen. I got down on my knees, conjuring him to have done with this tomfoolery of conflict and let himself be evicted like a decent citizen. I didn’t even give up when Agnes, hearing the drift of my talk, began kicking at me from the rear and Cadwallader, to follow suit and to pander to this Agnes, who was the moontug upon the broad yearning waters of him, started to push my head off my shoulders with his thumb which was about the size of your leg. He kept the effort to this thumb to show me this was only a caution, given without malice even though it might end up with me walking about the Terraces wondering why I stopped so short at my shoulders. Then Agnes said I was probably a spy, sent up there after a lot of coaching by the bailiffs to do this pleading and get just one party to evict himself and set the ball rolling in favour of the law and the coal owners. She quickened her kicks and said she could now see through my game, and if it was that she was kicking I was not surprised. She suggested to Cadwallader that I should be reduced to eight parts and served up raw to the bums when they should start peering over the barricade. She opened her mouth so wide when she said this that she got it full of red hair, and that gave her words an old, flaming, dangerous look. Cadwallader started after me, holding up one finger as if measuring me up roughly for the rending. I gave up and began pelting down the Terrace with him after me. I could hear Agnes tally-hoing after him like a mistress of the wolfhounds. I got to the barricade. I climbed up it like a monkey. As soon as I got to the top a policeman spotted me. He did not look very bright. He had probably come fresh from a long talk by the Chief Constable on the disasters, ranging from a terrible crumbling of the nation’s brickwork to the organised ravishing of his womenfolk, if these Terraces were allowed to get away with this defiance. I could see his mouth drooping with concern, ripening into panic as he saw me. He yelled, ‘Here they come, boys,’ and reached up and gave me a hard clip with his baton that stretched me out cold on some sort of sofa number than the millpuff that came staggering out in armfuls from the torn upholstery. This did not please Cadwallader who remembered, Agnes notwithstanding, that I was his nephew. So he went over the barricade and dealt that policeman a lot harder clip than the one the policeman had given me. The policeman joined me across the sofa and we were both full of nothingness, tickled by millpuff. Then a lot of other people followed Cadwallader on his wild way and the policemen and bailiffs were driven to the bottom of the valley. But not for long.

  When I came properly to myself, I found myself being marched by an army of policemen down to the police station. With me were about eighteen other men, Cadwallader among them, looking as dazed as I was but walking significantly in the centre of the group, like a kingpin. At the station we were charged with rioting, and I was still so boss-eyed with the fetcher I had from the baton that I could not even ask them what the hell they were talking about.

  Everybody made a great fuss of me as we were waiting for the trial. I came right out from behind the front door when the bailiffs called about my father’s debts and there was no need to make a single statement about death or calling next week. They were off. Some of the wisest voters in our part of the valley, boys suckled on grief and unrest, told me that I had struck a fine blow for tenants all over the world. I started to go to those classes at the Library and Institute that my friend, Milton Nicholas, used to run on the ‘History of Our Times’, giving the light to such subjects as the workers’ struggle for lower rents, longer lives, higher ceilings, sweeter kids, and kinder days. Milton, though young and on the frail side, shone like a little sun on the gloom and wilderness of these topics. I started, with a thawed and astonished brain, to understand that it is a very bad thing, a very wrong thing, for colliery companies to go slapping extra rent on voters who don’t get enough to eat most of the time, and to send bodies of policemen and bailiffs to evict these voters whenever the landlord is in a mood to disagree. And Milton showed me how I personally fitted into all this. He likened me to that Wat the Tyler who had put a hammer to the head of some tax collector or nark who was eyeing Wat’s daughter and taking Wat’s mind off the tiles. The boys in Milton Nicholas’ class clubbed in and bought me a strong hammer, and Milton, when it was handed over, made a short speech in which he said that sooner or later the world, in its endless devising of discomfort and evil, would yield me some nark or collector who would give just the right kind of lip and have just the right kind of head to send me racing for the hammer. This gave me a proud feeling and I began to hope that when the trial came along the judge would order me to be kept in jail for ever like that poor bloke who was all beard and fish bones in that picture Monte Cristo, so that Milton could say something about me from week to week as an example of those who were giving their lives for freedom. My father was very worried when I told him about this hope, especially the part about the beard, because he hates hair on the face in any shape or form and thinks a man should be neat even in the County Jail.

  The trial came and I could see that the judge, who was dressed in a way I had never seen before except in carnivals, believed in rent and was stern towards all people who rioted and played hell with bailiffs. Every time he opened his mouth I got to feel more and more like Monte Cristo. But the man who was defending us made out that I should never have been in that street at all, and mentioned that Cadwallader had been clearly seen chasing me, with a promise of murder right across his face, towards the barricade, and that the fetcher I got from the policeman which put me across the sofa as
cold as one of the legs, was simply a practice swing let off by the policeman by way of getting his muscles loose and ready to help the landlords lose their chains. It had nothing to do with my head at all. It had come along at the wrong moment. The judge was impressed by this and peered at me and muttered something a few times about me being young, as if I was Cadwallader’s father and keeping very fresh for my age. He said, ‘Let us separate the chaff from the grain.’ The chaff was such personalities as Cadwallader, at whom the judge didn’t bother even to peer. ‘This boy,’ went on the judge, ‘has no doubt been seduced by the rash Bolshevik elements who mar this valley. He has been corrupted by idleness. The thing here is to nurse this bent sapling back to mental health. We will have him taught a trade. What trade would you like to be taught, my boy?’ At first I was too busy playing up to the judge by looking bent and corrupted and explaining this programme in mutters to my puzzled comrades to make an answer. He asked me again. I remembered that Milton Nicholas had told me that moneylending was a very secure line of business where you didn’t have to change and bath every time you came home. It sounded to me just the thing for people who were not in it. I mumbled something about having a strong fancy for moneylending if I could find something to lend. ‘Excellent,’ said the judge, laughing with pleasure. ‘An excellent choice. A bricklayer. A wise choice. I judged rightly. This boy has the right stuff. Let him be taught to lay bricks.’ I hadn’t said a word about bricks but that is how it happened. They sent me on a six-months’ course to a Government Training Centre, and the night I went away Hicks the Bricks, the contractor I’ve worked with ever since, had a piece in the paper giving his views about the problem of the young, to which Hicks seemed to give even more thought than he gave to bricks, and saying that when I returned he would provide me with a job. Cadwallader and the other boys went to jail for a few weeks, and when he came out he found two other voters going in and out of Agnes’ house. He noticed that, put together, these two were just about his weight, and Agnes pleaded that she was only keeping them about the place as mementoes of fuller times and to keep the mats in place until Cadwallader’s return. But he had read passages from the large printed Bible he had found in his cell, and he told Agnes she was the sort of woman they had set dogs on in the days when print was larger. And he came back to the house of my father trying his best not to bark, and to pour the rain of his new resolution on the hot ache of his longing body.

  That is how I came into the building trade. I was too sorrowful at having fallen so far below the golden hills of a striving martyrdom on which I had been sent briefly to walk by the words of Milton Nicholas to feel gratitude or gladness. The only thing I learned to the depths at that centre was to stay right away from all fish that looked like whale, because I had a poisoned stomach from eating fish that looked like that. Our foreman says I am so bad a hand with bricks I ought to sign articles with the Eskimos and specialise in igloos where the walls are supposed to be curved in just the way I curve them and not meant to outlast a good warm spring. So that is the way to do it. When a man of power, like that judge, asks you to choose your path out of hell, mumble your reply and let him put the pattern out of his own wisdom upon your blur of sound, for in the end it is his choice it will be and the hell of your beginning will face you at the end and the heat of hell grows no less hot; only you and your fibres, with weariness and understanding and the laughter that will ooze from the dampest blankest wall of knowing and feeling, will grow less swift to smart at the pain of its burning. That, and helping a boy like Hicks the Bricks to get his name in the paper. That sets you up and eases the cold, whatever the great distance one’s eyes must cross before they light once more upon the golden hills.

  JUST LIKE LITTLE DOGS

  Dylan Thomas

  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 single couple in sight; the lovers had disappeared among the sandhills and were lying down there with 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 darkover 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 café, 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 woodyard.

  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 tablecloth, 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.’