Perhaps the very best piece of secular writing on Christmas? This is something I have been reading aloud for forty years - first to my younger brother, then with him, now with my children.
There are a few variants of this work - here is one:
**
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. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared
not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the
stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing
carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying
streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large
house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one
of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of
us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of
old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We
reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the
Herald?" "No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three."
One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly
distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by
nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King
Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry
voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time,
joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of
the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped
running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons
floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good
again and shone over the town. "Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said. "Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading. "Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.
Always
on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a
cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was
very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the
parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then
another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then
everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my
bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored
snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on
our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling
night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the
close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
**
Note: Dylan Thomas himself had the merest trace of Welsh accent, mostly in the intonation; so it is not necessary to an authentic performance.
"A Child's Christmas in Wales - by Dylan Thomas"
No comments yet. -