To begin at the Beginning…
The voices in my head always sounded like Richard Burton delivering his polished lines as the Narrator in Under Milkwood. I say voices, it was just the sound of the hero in me, that underused, undernourished soul that waved from the shore at the edge of the ocean as I slinked terrified at the prospect of being at school, college…University, through all my important days, mediocre times, desperate hours, dark relentless minutes that stretched and spiralled seemingly out of control, through my first kiss, then my first real kiss…and no doubt would be there trying to talk calmly to me on my final day on Earth as I waved franticly to the hero on the otherwise deserted shore to save me whilst I started to finally, and regretfully drown.
I have loved Dylan Thomas all my life. I had had meaningful relationships with Roger McGough, Poe, Simon Armitage, a long lingering adoration, respect and sheer gut wrenching love for both Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, a threesome that kept giving all the time whilst on the road and of course I kept my affair with W.H. Auden close to my heart; I even had a fling with a few women such as Anne Sexton, the grace and magnificence of Amelia Lanier and Anne Askew…Anne Askew especially, the early feminist heart enticing me completely and once I fell in love with an unnamed poet whose writing I found inside a book in the University Library, the poem unsigned but their message of hope conquering my heart. I have no idea to this day if they were male or female, hell they could have been both, an intersexed beauty with the art flowing out of them through their thin wiry fingers and shy poetic brain; I didn’t care, in those days I willingly slept with anyone who threw me a good line.
I always came back sheepishly and with humility to Dylan Thomas though. He never once scolded me like an errant child dropping a book in the library and being hushed by the mean spirited, witch like, hunched over figure of the assistant librarian who, even to my young mind, was so vile that I could scarcely believe that she would ever be married, have children and introduce them, cap in hand, shoes scuffed and worn, nose full of snot, hankie unused, but with clean hands and innocent mind to any poet whose book might also fall of the shelf, opened on the first poem they ever read. He would gently just ask me how I was, how life had been treating me, writing the little notes and scrawling down, smiling to himself whilst keeping one set of ink dried fingers close to the bottle. The warmth would follow and I promised that I would never leave him again, he would nod sagely knowing full well that in a week, a month, a year…a day, someone else’s voice would turn my head briefly.
Well the voices started that day. I hurriedly picked up the book that had fallen and that caused me to be embarrassed and ashamed to cause my father to even look upon me with disapproving eyes as he struggled in vain to come across any book that would satisfy his need and lust for a good war story. I looked for some reason at the printed word that enveloped me like a shroud of mist coming of a battlefield, the souls of the dead in search of freedom. Do not go gentle into that good night…the words I remembered vaguely from somewhere else and tugging at my father’s elbow, the eight year old me asked him what the words meant.
“I don’t know”, he said with a hint of frustration in his voice. I looked down at the words and scratched my head, the thought of recent chicken pox scars still having the ability to make me stop quickly. “However, your granddad was a fan of that drunk, that poem, well your Uncle read it at his funeral, do you remember?”
I did remember, although I was six at the time and had my head buried in my Nan’s lap, her warm tears cascading down her rouge filled cheeks, past her unpainted lips, off her chin and into my red unkempt hair and all the while muttering to herself about the parade of women in the aisle just a row away that she was sure had known my Granddad better than she had. I did remember and whilst my father was once more lost looking for a war he could not fight, I remembered that somewhere in Nan’s home in the village, where the crab apples from her tree fell with a crash onto the dew laden grass early in the morning, so much better an alarm clock than her cocky cockerel crowing at the crack of dawn and which were eaten by the keen and hungry worms, there was a recording of the poem I was reading. My dad looked at me out of the corner of his eye, I saw the look of horror as he realised that his child was not going to join him from now on in watching re-runs of The Great Escape, Das Boot or Mister Roberts, his child had been seduced with a sentence from a different grave. The four books that he had spent over an hour collecting lay in his cradled right arm and with the sense of the injustice of it all, sighed deeply, looked at the beckoning titles and trudged back to where he found the last one, put it back gently in the void that had so recently become vacant and then returned to me, still holding the book out on that first page, took it from me and said, “Just once I would like to be part of a family that’s normal.”
From that day, I devoured, not just his work, but all work. Some was bad, no two ways about it, as I got older I found some to be as garbled a mess as any war that my father would have killed to have taken part in, but for the most part I was enraptured, I was a soul no longer in need of salvation, everything could be summed up in a sonnet, in the magnificence of shape and form of life’s cruellest art. The day I left senior school, my teacher, a relation to the now dead assistant librarian with the hunchback and nose for trouble and who had been struck dumb after an altercation with a man on a bicycle, she never spoke again, with hindsight and with a set of eyes in the back of her head, as well as her arse, that caught every unguarded pupil who dared wander off the straight and very narrow, told me with an air of misguided authority that there was no future for me in poetry…”It simply won’t pay the bills, you need to find another outlook young lady, you are standing on the forefront of the technology revolution, think on that.” I did, all the way home, steam coming out of my ears as I thought of the red faced, two faced and who had been disgraced by her own inadequacies in her writing career. There was no way I wanted anything other than to read, to make love, if he let me to, the voice that had been in my head since that day I heard the cast recording of Under Milkwood. Revolution indeed I thought as I finally got home and put my key in the door, if there be Revolution, I surmised, let the writers create the first spark.
Passport control, well back in those days getting into America was easy, well for me. I suppose there may have been a few who once off the plane, found themselves sweating harder than my aunt the first day she stepped into the nunnery, forsaking her rights as a woman, to hide behind a veiled wall and who upon crossing the man-made invisible line suddenly realised that she would never now be able to worry about the state of Ken and Deirdre’s marriage in Coronation Street or whether being a nun was truly her calling or just a habit she had fallen into. The man at the desk, large, built like the toilet we had finally knocked down in our yard and whose winter collection of spider webs were a terrifying beauty to behold at three in the morning; especially when being serenaded by the tones of the man next door who made a living singing folk songs in the clubs but who in reality was as tone deaf as a marble, looked me over with a look of incredulity to see a woman with a back pack so large it towered above her. “Purpose of your visit?” he asked. The smile betrayed it all. “Well, I have just finished University, graduated thank you very much and I have a month to spare before I go back and start my Masters, specifically on the life of Dylan Thomas, so I thought why not to the place where it ended.
Moments ticked by, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick….”Real purpose of your visit?” he asked once more, a bored disinterest in anything poetic easy to see. To visit the sights, to eat a bagal, say hello to the French lady, sit in Time Square, perhaps take a random picture of a homeless person on the street sitting above a steam vent and keeping his b.t.m warm whilst his hands grow cold and finally frozen. Any shred of humanity taken from him. Go home and spread the word on American culture and how wonderful it is. “O.K. Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Now what would my Granddad have done if ever he found in my shoes, a truthful man if a little wayward in his sexual appetites and a card carrying red since he first stepped off the boat from New York in 1937. I took the easy option and lied. “Welcome Miss, I hope you enjoy your visit to America.” He said straight faced, two faced, unfaced look, but I finally caught the twinkle in his official eyes. He stamped my passport, bid me good day and gestured to the blind man behind me to step forward and whose stick surely was noticeable.
The bus journey is one that always has to be taken, too far to walk with a heavy backpack, full of cassettes that I had made for my journey, guide books, a couple of biographies, some clothes, a spare skirt, couple of pairs of jeans and more bras than you could take a blind man’s stick too. The bus back home in the village ran twice a day, once at 6, taking the children to the next village where my first school was and where the workers in their suits, boiler suits, top hats, cravats, flatcaps and pressed shirts that had been cleaned, mangled and starched by Mrs Watchett in the same brutal manner in which she had disposed of her husband in 1973, even though there was never any proof of such a crime except for that look of undisguised glee as she turned the mangle handle round and round until everything was clean again.
The bus journey’s at home were nothing compared to the ones I undertook to get to University every day except Sundays when the lure of my bed and the chance to snuggle up to my latest lover between the covers of a good book were too much to bare. They were nothing like this journey either. Having been met at J.F.K by one of very few friends at University who shared a similar passion for poetry as I did, the young New Yorker, or so she told us, talked all the way to her apartment whilst I fought Jetlag with the courage of a Welsh woman finding herself in the middle of a scrum in the local bookshop. There was a rumour, possibly true, that she was really in fact from a small place called Benny’s Landing in New Jersey where the bus times were as erratic as they were erotic, the 8.10 might become the 8.42 and carry the late running transsexual pole dancer who certainly never needed a pole to make her customers happy and the vicar who saw his duties to administer the word of God but who had lost his licence to drive the day he was found drunk parked on the 17th green.
Having got to Polly’s apartment building on 77th Street, I struggled up the stairs, already dreaming, soundly, vividly, not noticing a fellow who looked and sounded English, wink and blow a kiss at me and who never would do so again. I just wanted to sleep but I did notice the book stuffed in his back pocket and thought to myself, not every boy is stupid then, can’t go wrong with a bit of Kerouac. Inside I thought of those back home. The dead, the dying, the deceased, the living and the outlived, those who rested under the bows of the mourning Willow and the one whose scattered remains fed the worms as an complimentary starter before they started on the fallen Crab apples. I found myself both In New York and in my grandmother’s front room, both spaces with the image of a young girl with red unkempt hair flowing halfway down her back, sitting entranced by the words of Under Milkwood.
“Are you happy now?”
Oh yes Granddad I am!
“Thank you for taking me with you my love.”
Oh it’s my pleasure Granddad.
“Tell your nan, I never did anything with all those women in the row behind.”
I know Granddad.
“It was her cousin Morag that she should seek out.”
Oh Granddad why would you say such a thing.
“Did you see where she scattered my remains? I buried several years worth of Dog shit under that tree I did, the least I can do in return is say that Morag was worth every penny she took from me in payment for a kiss.”
“Don’t listen to your Granddad my love, the only women he ever kissed was all in his head, too busy like you mooning over one man. I so wish you had been a boy, the battles we could have watched on television my love.”
I know Dad, but were you at least proud of me getting my degree?
“I would have been prouder if you had been a boy my girl, a soldier, a warrior in search of truth and honour, but never the less I am so very proud of you.”
The dead have a habit of making you feel worse when you are asleep that when you are awake it seems, the ghosts of that dumfounded village never sleep well.
The ghost I had come to see in New York beckoned me in the next day. He took me on a voyage of discovery that I never knew could be so exciting. He showed me the real Captain Cat, the drowned, Organ Morgan, the Thief of Time, the hero who bared his soul and the townsfolk of Llareggub Hill. He showed me the world as I sat in the bar drinking Whisky and reading, reading, reading. To see a man in his life you must surely see it from the end backwards, to see the moment of final departure and exhale of a terminal breath before you can ever hope to see how he got there. I raised my glass in salute to the man who filled my dreams and caught the voice of another Passer-By and the words where Death, so the great man said, in the end shall have no Dominion.
Ian D. Hall 2014.