GCSE English Tuition Bolton : Best Christmas Writing Ever?

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

A Nostalgia for lost times haunts so many memories of childhood. We often luxuriate in what we would like to think happened, even if this was only secretly because our ‘real’  childhood betrayed our hopes and fulfilled our fears. 

Dylan Thomas wrote a remarkable prose poem called A Child’s Christmas in Wales. It evokes a lost time that knows it is made up as all the best stories are, but in that made up world, are truths and wonders that never cease to move me and make me smile. 

I love the tentativeness of the  ‘small dry voice through the keyhole’ who sings back to the carol singing boys. It feels as if the voice has been neglected and lonely. Ironically the carols wake up the voice but terrify the young singers too. Fragility is not always treated delicately! Thomas brilliantly recreates a theatrical, memorable scene from childhood, and suffuses the scene with a poet’s respect for the extraordinary. The ‘dry voice’ is the ‘eggshell voice’ which evokes the rebirth and fragility all in one image. 

After running to escape the voice, the boys debate the identity of the speaker, a debate that abandons mention of  ‘trolls’ and a  ‘ ghost’ in favour of ‘jelly’! Bathos is perfectly deployed and brilliantly preserves the sense of youthful joie de vivre and changeability. ‘And we did that.’ Listen to the perfection of the bathetic  ‘that’ in relation to the elated ‘we’. 

In the final paragraph, the poet recalls the rhythm of his retirement after so many fun-filled exertions. The last line takes the reader with the poet as he bids farewell in stages, to his perfect Christmas. Who can resist the beguiling awe of  ‘I said some words to the close and holy darkness’ – it captures the trance-like state of the tired but deeply grateful! 

Leaves me with a sense of grace….