[nfbmi-talk] Child's Christmas in Wales

[joe harcz Comcast]

When I lived in New Hampshire a crusty old talk show host, Jerry Williams, 
on WRKO, read this annually.

Now, while a good read in print it is savorrred, being so poetic when read 
aloud.

Jows does a rather good reading as it captures the cadences and rythms.


Regardless, Lydia you found a real treasure in that basement when you were 
twelve.

Besides, though not so old as this story I can personally identify with many 
of the events.

For example, my brothers and I were often sock gloved hunters of cats and 
all sorts of critters and objects armed with snowballs.

Each and everyone of we boys, there were seven got a licking or at least 
caught pelting passing cars and trucks from the drainage ditch along Mt. 
Morris Road. The milke truck (we still had them when I was young) was a 
particular target. It was a Nazi Armorred car to me. And the driver was a 
slow old fellow who couldn't catch us even though we were laden in wet, 
sodden wool coats that made your arms stand outsstraight to the sides 
sometimes; and even though we had to run through the snow in to the feilds 
with those darned rubber boots.

Gotta scoot.

Glad you and Christine enjoyed it.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lydia Anne Schuck" <lydia.a.schuck at wmich.edu>
To: "NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2013 5:34 PM
Subject: [nfbmi-talk] Child's Christmas in Wales


> So when I was about 12, I spent a lot of time on Wednesdays doing laundry 
> in the basement.  Had to babysit the machine because the water was used 
> for 3 loads, and the spinner was outside the main barrel of the washer. 
> It was there on some Wednesday, that I found a dusty copy of Child's 
> Christmas in Wales on a shelf down there.  This was a basement full of old 
> old stuff, jumping bugs...and no heat, ugh.  But it held quite a treasure 
> in that little book.
>
> Lydia
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Christine Boone <christineboone2 at gmail.com>
> To: NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sat, 14 Dec 2013 17:28:17 -0500 (EST)
> Subject: Re: [nfbmi-talk] just an early holiday present in accessable form
>
> I love this Joe.  You sent it to me several years ago and I never let this 
> merry season pass without reading Dylan Thomas'  delicious story!
>
> Thanks.  And a Merry Christmas, and Happy belated Hanukkah to one and all!
>
> Christine
>
> On Dec 6, 2013, at 10:10 PM, joe harcz Comcast <joeharcz at comcast.net> 
> wrote:
>
>> I do not wish to forget those whom don't celebrate the holiday season or 
>> those whom do. I offer this story not for religious reasons or anything 
>> else except for its pure poetic-like genius in capturing an image along 
>> with the fact that this is accessible and should be read to all of all 
>> faights or lack thereof as a simple and accessible gift.
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> Child's Christmas in Wales
>>
>>
>>
>> by Dylan Thomas
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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