Angela Macmilllan – A Little Aloud

ISBN: 97807011865633

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.

Dylan Thomas’s story evokes once more a delicious combination of elation and fear; his narrator’s memory reopens one gift after another. Sensory impressions literally teeming with other threads of recollections…bursting their way back to life. Such reanimation reads as a vivid, deeply felt gift to both the writer and the reader.For the writer is rediscovering his essence. He is reviving an elated innocence where each space in his memory tenderly salutes and reunites his present perhaps fragmneted, worldly self with a lost encounter with his past . It reads as if the narrator is stretching out his hand and warmly greeting again faces, scents and sounds of his earlier pulsing life.

Dylan Thomas embraces wonder wonderfully!

And how moving the sound of the ‘eggshell’ voice , barely used. Daring to share the boys’ singing through a small keyhole, yet Boo Radley like, remaining shy, secretive, tragically lonely on Xmas Eve. The boys hurtling back to the warmth of community and family, yet haunted by the temporary esurrrection’ they had inspired.

Angel McMillan’s superb collection of stories and poems, A Little Aloud, edited together for reading aloud to ‘someone you care for’, saves this beautiful tale almost to the end of the collection. The writing is superb and Dylan Thomas’s childhood skips around the reader and listener, dancing his way through glimpses of a world colourfully human and tender.

The simple trust of the final line is deeply affecting: Faithful to the profound intimacy of the imagination and to the spirit!

I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Reviewed By: Janet Lewison

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