This ‘memoir’ by Dylan Thomas has one of the most evocative openings I have ever read. It transports us truly away into the land of story and childhood when 2 and 2 did not necessarily make only 4! Perhaps writers write what they cannot let go of in some way . But imagine the wild freedom of ‘when there were wolves in Wales… and it snowed and snowed.‘ Makes me smile and tingle just to read! Dylan Thomas knew the value of a resonant anchor!
And look how imaginatively impoverished and diminished the child’s later version is. It seems linear and ‘dead’.
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour 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 parlours, 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.”
And when the small boy grows the past will have something mythic about it? (Imagine with time travel it’s the same person,)
This makes me think of an impassioned, literate, wry, knowing, version of The Four Yorkshiremen, and you’re right, it’s wonderful writing with a brilliant opening!
Jeff
The use of alliteration in ‘Wolves in Wales’ is very evocative!
I studied Under Milk Wood and enjoyed it a lot!
Peter