More of Molly Whuppie

"Go away, because if you don't you'll be sorry when my husband comes home."
 Molly looked at the ogre's wife, standing in the doorway, and said,
"We won't go away, because if we do, we'll freeze to death in the forest. And anyway, my name's Molly Whuppie and I'm a right good 'un and your husband will soon see that."
The ogre's wife opened the door a little wider,
"Alright then, come in, but remember what I said.
When he comes home, my husband will be hungry and he won't think twice before wringing your necks and adding your bones to our stock-pot."
Molly swallowed hard and grabbed her sisters' hands tightly before they could pull away from her and run back into the forest.
"Thankyou," she said. "We'd love to come in."
And she dragged her silent, trembling sisters over the threshold and into the ogre's house.
"What now?" Sally whispered.
Amy said, "Have you got a plan, Molly?"
"I don't know, and no," Molly answered.
"But we're all three together and it's warm and, look, there are children here already, so it can't be all that bad."
She pointed to a doll and a rocking-horse across the hall.
"We're very hungry, do you have anything that we could eat?" Molly said boldly to the ogre's wife.
"Hmmmm," said the ogress. "I'll find something, no doubt. You look as if you haven't much meat on your bones at all, and that's a pity."
In just a few minutes Molly, Sally and Amy were sitting near the fire, gnawing at pieces of old, hard cheese helped down with hot bitter tea.
The ogre's daughters, Sowthistle, Henbit and Marestail, appeared from somewhere deep inside the mansion, and now they stood with their mother, looking down at the three hungry girls.
"Such poor, wet things," Henbit said.
"So thin," whispered Sowthistle.
"Can we play with them?" asked Marestail.
The ogress shook her head.
"Wait until your father comes home."

Molly Whuppie 5

It was a long while before Molly's sisters said anything, and when they did it was to complain.
"Where are we going, Molly?"
"We're lost aren't we!"

All three girls were soaked to the skin now, from pushing through the deep snow, and they were hungry, too, but Molly wasn't ready to stop.
"You're right, I don't know where we're going, but we're no more lost than we were when we woke up this morning," said Molly.
"If we can keep walking while there's daylight, we might find home, or someone else's home or the edge of the forest, but if we sit down here now, and just wait, we're just going to freeze in the snow."
" I don't care," said Sally, tears running down her cheeks. "I'm tired and I want to stop."
She planted herself down in the snow and looked up at Amy and Molly, her face wet with snow and tears.
"Just a short rest, then," said Molly.
"You two sit here a while and I'll carry on. Follow my footprints when you're ready, but don't wait long!"
And so Molly pushed on alone.
She carried on for a good long way before she noticed that the ground was becoming more rocky and broken, and the trees were thinning a little, and she became aware of a steady rumble, or a roar, ahead of her. It was not an animal. It sounded more, Molly thought, like the noise the packed snow made when it fell off their shack's roof in the thaw.
She walked further, careful now.
When Amy and Sally caught up with her, Molly was standing still, looking ahead.
Twenty yards away, on both sides, a boiling rock-filled river roared behind the trees.
To their left they were looking downstream, while on their right, after making a tight, dizzy curve somewhere ahead, the river turned back on itself and so they were looking upstream.  The air was filled with spray and the trees and boulders hung with grey beards of frozen lichen. Great twisted icicles hung from the trees, some of them so big that glittering columns of ice had grown joining the branches with the ground.
Directly ahead of the three girls was a gate and beyond, fixed to the rocks and surrounded on three sides by the torrent, a wooden mansion loomed, dim and unclear in the foggy  dusk.
"Come on," Molly said. "Let's knock on the door."
Amy and Sally were not convinced.

Molly Whuppie again.

Under the tarpaulin in the forest it was dark, and Molly, waking first, couldn’t understand why it was so hard to move about. She pushed her hands upwards and felt cold dampness. It moved a little as she pushed, so she pushed harder, and the whole canvas shelter fell to one side. Suddenly there was light and she was covered in stinging, cold, powdery snow. The freezing shower fell on her sisters, too, and all three children, Amy, Sally and Molly, screamed and then jumped up, brushing the icy wetness off their clothes and faces.

Amy and Sally were not happy as they listened to Molly explaining that their father had most probably gone off and left them in the forest on purpose because there was not enough food for them all at home, and when she told them that she knew this because she’d overheard their mother and father talking about it, Amy said, or rather shouted,

“And you didn’t tell us! Why didn’t you tell us?”

Molly cupped her hands and blew between them to warm them, and then she said,

“Amy, it wouldn’t have made any difference. If I had told you, you and Sally would only have been upset, and then, perhaps, something worse might have happened.”

“But we’re lost in the forest,” Sally chipped in. “What could be worse than that?”

Molly looked at her.

“Being cooked alive, or stabbed through the heart?”

Amy and Sally looked shocked.

“What, do you really think that our mother and father would ...”

“Listen,” Molly replied, “you used to sit and listen to the stories just like I did. Don’t you remember Hansel and Gretel, or Snow White?”

That was enough for Amy and Sally. The two girls could take no more. First their lips began to quiver, then tears began to sting their eyes and run down their cheeks and very soon they were clinging to one another and sobbing.

Molly looked at them, blowing on her hands again. 

 
“I may be the youngest, and I may be small,” she thought, “but at least I’m a right good ‘un.”

She felt frightened, but she didn’t feel helpless, and she knew that, if she didn’t do something useful, all three of them would end up freezing to death where they stood, because her sisters clearly didn’t have any intention of being practical.
 
And so, even though she had no idea which was the right direction to take, Molly grasped each of her sisters by the hand and led them purposefully out of the clearing and into the trees. 

... her course was true, for he was an able seaman through and through ...

In a recent blog entry, "Singing Madrigals", my sister-in-law (Alison Hobbs) mentions the double-entendres  sometimes to be found in madrigals.  Our current usage of the expression double-entendre  tends to be a derogatory one, often applied to short, smutty sexual allusions of the: If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? kind. 

I wonder if the term does justice to what are often, in madrigals and folk songs at least, considerably well-crafted extended metaphors.

I don't have anything more than a passing acquaintance with the texts of madrigals (Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore than I, when I sang madrigals no more), but I am on friendlier terms with English folk songs,. 

A great number of folk-songs are about a man gaining sexual conquest over a woman, where the "hero" of the song is frequently a soldier (I drilled her into the sentry-box, wrapped up in a soldier's cloak) or a sailor (So Jack became master of that craft-o, and she was well-found both fore and aft-o). 

Just recently, I have been listening to a song called I will put my ship in order.  The story line runs: a sailor tries to persuade a girl to come down from her bed and let him in so that they can lie together; the girl is hesitant and, by the time she has plucked up courage to go downstairs, the sailor has lost patience and gone to find another conquest. 

At first listening, the song seems to be in the typical "sailor seduces girl" mould, a variant of a song that I know well  Jack the Jolly Tar. A little odd perhaps that, in this version, he does not get her maidenhead, but maybe it's a warning to all those girls out there that they should not delay in acquiescing to a lusty lover, or they may die old maids ...

... but wait. 

Part of the song is clearly metaphor. The sailor didn't just walk up to his girl's house, he drew his ship across the harbour, close to her bedroom window to hear what she would say. 

What, then, if we assume that there's more to the song than meets the eye, and that, perhaps, the presumed narrative text, is not what it seems to be at all:

O who is that at my bower window, 

That raps so loudly and would be in? 

It is your true love that loves you dearly, 

So rise, dear love, and let him in.

Then slowly, slowly rose she up, 

And slowly, slowly came she down, 

But before she had the door unlocked 

Her true love had both come and gone.

Come back, come back my own true love,

Come back, come back, come, ease my pain.

The fish shall fly love, the seas run dry, love

Before that I'll return again. 

 The imagery is clear; we are not 

witnessing a maiden jilted by a petulant 

seducer, but a woman disappointed 

at the hand of a prematurely spent fumbler. 

This is not double-entendre but 

poetic complaint.

Molly Whuppie 3

Father and daughters worked hard together all day. He selected saplings to fell, ash mainly, and then cut the fallen wood into logs. The girls trimmed and corded the brushwood into bundles for carrying and stacked them tightly to keep them as dry as possible. Near the end of the afternoon, to hold back the gathering cold for a while, their father made a fire and sat them around it under cover of a tarpaulin. In their damp clothes, the girls huddled close to rub their aching, white fingers back to life. They whispered together and listened to the sounds of the forest in the half-light, and laid their heads on one another’s arms in the fire’s delicious warmth as new snow began to drift out of the darkening clouds. 

And all the while their father worked on. The sound of his axe, biting wood, echoed among the trees. Thwack! Thwack! and always, it seemed, a little farther away. By the time it had faded quite out of earshot, the girls were already asleep, tricked by the stuffy warmth of their smoky den.

For a time the fire kept the night away, but outside the slowly shrinking ring of brightness and heat, the darkness edged closer and eased the sisters deeper into sleep . As they will, searching for the last scraps of wood, the flames eventually lost their strength and, long before the morning, the fire had died. But the snow continued to fall, covering the sleeping bundles that were Molly and her sisters and softly wiping away all trace of paths and tracks and signs.   

Not all of the children asleep under the clouds that night shared such a cold bed as Molly and her sisters. An ogre lived in the forest, with his wife and his own three daughters, in a wooden mansion on a great rock in a loop of the river, where the forest was deepest. Now, although they are monsters, ogres are not creatures that are born stupid, like trolls or giants. Just like people, some ogres are cunning and clever, some rough and dangerous and others are good and helpful. This ogre was both cunning and dangerous and not good or helpful at all, but his daughters were all his treasure and his delight, and they knew it well. Because of this, and because of his own weakness, they ruled their father, asking him for all sorts of treats and gifts, and this night it was gold that they asked for.

“ Pa, will you bring a gold necklace for each of us?” the youngest asked.

“Yes, do, Pa” said the middle daughter, and clapped her hands like shovels.

“You know how we love gold, and how happy it will make us,” finished the eldest, and winked at her sisters.

The ogre smiled a broad smile and kissed each of his daughters wetly on her greasy cheek.

“ Go up to bed now Sowthistle, Henbit and Marestail, my darlings, and tomorrow I’ll bring back treasure enough for you all,” he said.

The ogre's wife, busy in the kitchen, snarled as she listened to him, and hacked a chop from the spine of a long-dead lost traveller.

“Treasure indeed!  Your time's better spent hunting, mooncalf. The meat-safe’s near empty and even this one smells like it’s past its best.”

Molly Whuppie 2

Morning crept up on the cabin from the forest that spread around it like the sea. The land was so flat, and the forest so wide, that the light seemed to leak from the trees to fill the world. At first it coloured the sky a cold grey, pinching out the stars, and then it lapped at the edge of the dark clearing that Molly’s father had hacked out of the woods in those first days of building the cabin. Slowly it poured on in, filling up the space between the living tree-trunks and the dead wood of the cabin’s walls, and, as it came, it revealed the hiding places of the shadows in their deep corners and their little ditches, and it brought the shadows with it, even through the window into the cabin itself.

Inside, Molly’s mother moved about busily. She stacked five used bowls at the end of the table; she laid out thread and a long needle; she fussed over the tiny glow in the embers of last night’s fire. She pulled back the curtain that hung between her and her daughters’ empty bed and paused to take in what little of their warmth and sleepy scent remained. It would soon fade, and later, much later, she would be able to begin to forget them. 

But for now, she would clean the five bowls that were stacked at the end of the table, and then pick up the needle and thread, and see which clothes needed mending, and all the while she would coax and care for the small flames struggling in the hearth, feeding them with continual gifts of tear-damp wood.

In the slowly brightening forest, the three girls followed their father’s tall, spare figure as he trod a path for them. The night had laid a crust on top of the snow and so, as he walked, he would raise one foot high, balancing for a second before the crust cracked under his weight and sent him plunging up to his knees in the freezing powder underneath. Lift, crack, plunge, lift, crack, plunge, he ploughed forward. Behind him, the girls had to stretch out their legs to follow in his footsteps. 

Their route was not a familiar one, but they had worked in the forest often with their father, and this morning they had eaten an unusually good breakfast – there had been hot porridge as well as a little coffee - and so the two older girls laughed, and pushed at one another when they fell occasionally in the deep snow. But Molly was quiet, and thought, “I wonder how it’s going to happen?” 

Molly Whuppie: Part 1.

At first she hadn’t been able to hear 

words, for it was only the swish and sigh of their talk that crept into her sleep like a breeze and, slowly, teased her awake. The speakers were clearly sitting together, close to the still-warm hearth on the other side of the one room that the whole family shared but, even though only a curtain screened off her bed, it was not easy for Molly to make out anything of what her father and mother were saying to one another. Lying with her eyes open to the darkness, she held her breath and listened hard.

There were mumbles and pauses, sounds and silences, but she couldn’t make sense of them. She strained her ears and thought she’d caught some words but then, quite suddenly, those words turned into weeping. It was her mother, but her father’s voice was there, too, making quiet sounds, trying to give comfort, to stop the crying.  Molly couldn’t bear that sound, but it happened more and more often these days. The unusually long, cold winter had made it hard to stretch out food and firewood, the snow blocked paths, ice walled off the streams and birds and animals had fled, or buried themselves deep inside the drifts. Molly knew herself that there hadn’t been enough to eat for weeks, and they were never warm, inside the cabin or outside. But what was this latest calamity? She would have to find out, and so she sat up and folded back the blanket quietly. She was about to swing her feet out into the cold when she clearly heard her father say,

“Tomorrow, then; I’ll take all three out to the forest. I’ll come back alone. It will be for the best.” Molly stopped dead and bit her lip hard to stop herself from calling out. She sat very still, and gripped the rough edge of the blanket hard. Her clenched fingers ached and her heart pounded, but she forced herself to carry on listening.

The talking had stopped, though, and now only the familiar sounds of night in the small house were left. She heard her mother and father undressing, and then climbing into their creaking bed. Silence fell, punctuated by quiet sobs that died away into deep uneasy breathing. Later still, Molly heard the twitching of their small cabin as it cooled in the frosty night, and the small, urgent  sounds of mice in the shingles. And all the time, and all around her, she was wrapped in the long, slow, regular breathing of her two sleeping sisters in the bed beside her. She lay back between them and she wondered what to do, but sleep found her before she had managed to find an answer.

Run away from the inside of a book.

There's not a lot of call for books among our 15 year-olds in Wales, it seems. Almost half of them will tell you that they only read if they have to, and nearly two thirds never borrow library books to read for pleasure.

The source of these figures is the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, which has just informed us that Wales is below all of the other countries in the UK as far as our teenagers' performance in reading is concerned.

 The response from the Welsh Assembly government has been predictable and hands, and necks, are being wrung.

The previous PISA report took place in 2006 and, although Wales did slightly better then, it certainly did not shine. So what has changed in four years that might lead us to expect that we ought to have improved? The answer, at least for the educational experience that our current sixteen year-olds will have received, is, "Not much yet."

Since 2006, the lion's share of Welsh government support and training has gone to the exciting, but still developing, Foundation Phase (the education of 3 - 7 year-olds), while in Key Stages 2 and 3 (8 to 14 year-olds) a fundamental re-structuring of the curriculum and its assessment is taking place with far fewer resources. The simple truth, anyway, is that it's too early yet for any of these developments to have had a positive impact on the education of pupils who may have been included in the 2009 PISA assessments.

And so, what about PISA 2012? The pupils who will take part are already 13 years old, still too old to have experienced substantially the changes that are being wrought around them in the education system in Wales, and so perhaps it isn't likely that we will see results that are tremendously different from those we've seen already. I suppose this is what is called an inconvenient truth.

 There is a more fundamental issue than mere curriculum-design to be addressed here, however. The love of reading, and its corresponding facility to understand and to engage with the written word, is not something that is simply the responsibility of schools to ignite. A learner's whole community, and especially parents and grandparents, must play their part.  

Through others, we become ourselves

said Lev Vygotsky .

We must look to ways in which we should support, and expect, every child's parents or carers to acknowledge that they are its first teachers, not the school. This is not an easy responsibility to bear, nor would it be popular with some.
And so it is more likely that what will take place is more adjustment to the curriculum, with an attendant "searchlight on literacy" .

But we have tried that before and, as Michael Rosen, erstwhile Children's Laureate, observed,

The government has allowed a situation to develop where the word "reading" has come to mean something narrow and functional, no more than evidence that a child can read. This is an abdication of what education is about.

Is there are an alternative?

Well, he also says

I have always thought that teachers can think. In the particular segment of education where I mostly work, with literature and language for primary age children, I’ve come to the conclusion that literature and reading have become so reduced, dissected, cross-examined, abridged, chopped-up and tested that the most subversive, exciting and political thing to do now is to rush about creating moments in schools where the children will know for certain that all that they’ll have to do with a book, a poem, a story or a play is enjoy it.  No questions, no tests, no learning outcomes. 

Mind it!

I'm just going outside ...

When the snow begins to fall in this part of the world otherwise normal and well-balanced individuals trip their switches and begin to operate in unusual and outlandish ways. Ours is a landscape where, not so very long ago, many of the hills were topped with the black drifts of coal waste-tips and on washing days, when clean white sheets were hung out to dry, they would, if the wind blew from those tips, turn into weird, dark canvases. The more artistically inclined voters among the populace would stand, then, and stare at them because the sooty bed-linen would become uncomfortably reminiscent of the works of Dore or Goya. Eventually the starers would move off, pensive and talking quietly amongst themselves, to add a kind of morose rive gauche quality to the general gloom of the valley. Perhaps it is this racial memory of creeping blackness that triggers brains around here to regard white flakes falling from a low grey sky as some kind of heavenly sign that an apocalypse is near.

The first flurries of snow began to fall around midday. By 2 p.m. the world is turned upside down.

In the supermarket all of the tills have lines that stretch back well into the aisles and every trolley in those lines is stocked with bread, potatoes, milk and, among the more far-sighted, a certain amount of alcohol.

There is a worrying buzz in the store, too. It is like the sound that you hear when you've opened a long-neglected garden-shed to find that a colony of assertive wasps has moved in during your absence. For the shoppers are uneasy; outside the snow is falling, and inside stocks are running low.

The white sliced-bread is already gone and some elements, strangers to the vocabulary, are being driven to make hopeful, but ultimately uninformed, choices between pain rustique, coppia ferrarese and bauernbrot. Others, only previously familiar with smooth plastic-wrapped loaves,  stare helplessly at the knobbly, naked splendour of stacked sourdoughs, or pick in a distracted way at the organic bloomers' golden crusts. Among the vegetables, too, circumstance forces hands. With the potatoes running low, shoppers scrabble for the last tubers remaining.  A small and determined group of toothless, grey-haired women forms up into a phalanx and drives forward through a wall of surprised shoppers to snatch bags of Maris Piper and King Edwards; then, hot with victory, the wiry testudo heads off to hunt out the small remaining reserves of teabags and Hobnobs.

I decide that I am not equal to the ordeal of entering the lists for the single pack of cat-food that was to be my only purchase, for trolleys are stacked six-deep, and, tempers frayed, normal people threaten to become zombies. The buzz in the aisles is a guttural growl at the tills.  A young woman deftly slips her basket on a belt, just in front of a family already unpacking their load of shopping. "Don't mind, do you, love!" she brays loudly, in the direction of the mother.

Deciding that I am not suitably armed for this battle, I guiltily put the cat-food down amongst some aubergines in a display and slink out of the store.

There are big snowflakes falling on the car park. Two drivers  threaten one another over a single parking-space, and a crawling line of cars stretches towards the petrol station where, no doubt, the pumps will soon be empty. I start my own car quietly and, with great caution, ease it away from the store and out onto the dual carriageway.

The traffic is reduced to a single line in the white gloom as we feel our way down the valley, headlights and wipers working overtime ... except for a young lady in the sporty little Fiesta, who flies by in the outside lane at 70 mph, car-horn defiantly blaring  'La Cucaracha'. Perhaps she's a zombie already.

What's in a name?

A couple of weeks ago, to escape from the early darkness that descends upon our little village at this time of year, we went for a walk through the woodland behind our house, and up onto the track that leads to the broad, flat, sunny whaleback of the Garth.
As you climb the path, both a geography and a history lesson unfold before your eyes.

The valley floors are overcrowded; roads, railways, the old canals thread and interwine south to north and they are lapped by untidy waves of houses and trading estates. This is a legacy of the century before last, when coal and iron were mined and extracted from the valleys, and settlements grew up around the works and the collieries to house and supply the immigrant workers. For the populations in those valley towns were, and are, cosmopolitan; in the valley where I grew up, family names included Hartshorn, Courtney, Greening, Walbeoff, Szymanski, and Minoli, as well as Evans, Gronw and Morgan. Before the nineteenth century, the deep-cut, damp, valleys were hardly populated at all.

The dissected plateaux rolling high above are a different story. This is farmland and moorland, and here, settlements, though fewer and smaller than down below, have a pedigree. There are farms, typically they are old farms, whose byres were old even before the acts of union. Blood-lines are older up here; there are Vaughans and Lewises, Pritchards and Prices. Coughlins, Joneses and Contis, if they have found their way up to the sunlight at all, have done so only recently, and by way of the high-altitude council estates that were the successors to the earlier TB hospitals (situated alike,  to clear the diseased lungs of the poorer working folk) or the newer dormitory villages and terracotta-roofed houses that sprang up in the affluent years of the beginning of the present century.

Up on the Garth, then, it should have been no surprise to see the local hunt, the Pentyrch, gathered on the sky-line with its horses and hounds. Behind them, beyond the farms of the Vale of Glamorgan, and across the Severn Channel, was Exmoor, and in front, to the North, the high moorland of the Brecon Beacons. Atop their impressive horses, and dressed in jackets of black or brown velvet, the riders and followers are probably a more substantial link to the long-view of the history of this landscape than the damp, patchwork citizenry in the stone streets below. Even they are not immune from infiltration, though, because, as we passed, their whipper-in, after sounding the horn, and shouting: "Get down Dancer!" at one over-eager dog, called to us, "Oi, you 'aven' seen three dogs down by there 'ave you? We carn' find 'em."

Don't step on my blue serge suit!

Gwyn Thomas was a writer, raconteur, wit and schoolmaster and, while he once had a cult-following in the United States, his work has never become popular in Britain, outside Wales. Perhaps it is because, while drawing on universal themes, his context is a parochial one; he confines his plots almost entirely to the South Welsh industrial valleys in the early and middle years of the last century. Even within Wales his audience did not extend to the Welsh-speaking heartland, or to most of the more rarified pundits of Welsh literature. This was because he was an example of that strangest of all birds, a Welsh author writing in English about the condition of living in Wales. Today, undeservedly, his work is almost forgotten, whether in Wales or the world.

It was a pleasant shock, then, when in Cardiff recently, to discover a flyer for a new drama, based on  a collection of Gwyn Thomas' short stories "The Dark Philosophers", to be staged in a theatre in Newport. I bought tickets and on Friday last we  set off for that city to see a performance.

View from Cymmer Hill

Newport is an interesting phenomenon. It juggles the awkward facts that it is, geographically, closer to Chepstow than to Cymmer, historically, nearer to Monmouth than Glamorgan and, realistically, it is a bit of a cat in a kipper-box. An interesting place to choose, then, to stage a performance of a play based upon the work of a writer who said himself , "as soon as I get to Chepstow I feel very frightened."

The Riverfront (Glan yr afon)  Arts Centre houses the theatre, and we arrived early enough to buy some supper for ourselves. The menu was international; chicken fajitas and spaghetti bolognese clamoured for our attention beside brie-filled baguettes and "mouth-watering" panini.  Adding to this heady cosmopolitan ambience were the many spruced-up and well turned-out socialites, bon-viveurs and theatre-crowd types who, like so many gazelles or show-birds, disposed themselves around the foyer in elegant knots or careless agglomerations of chatter and self-assuredness.

We decided upon spicy (is there another kind?) chick-pea curry and yellow rice and moved to a bistro-style table in the foyer to await its delivery. Gwyn Thomas described his writing as "Chekhov with chips", and so perhaps this multi-cultural start to the evening was some sort of a portent.

Hardly had we begun to eat when a young woman, a little flustered and distracted, and talking urgently into her mobile phone, asked if she might join us at our little table. There were two empty seats, and so, of course, we agreed. As happens on these social occasions, we fell to talking and we discovered that she was the partner of the playwright and was, at this very moment, talking him in from the railway station to the theatre. Our little group of three was soon joined by a fourth (still not the playwright), a theatre director. He exhibited a healthy, and self-confessed, "south-west glow" and had travelled over from Bristol to see the play, for he and the playwright were colleagues.

Soon, we were all, severally of course, tucking into a serving of spicy chick-pea curry, and listening carefully for updates on the playwright's progress through Newport. The man himself arrived at length. He was a sunny-looking young fellow, quite ruddy, with a satchel and a green combat jacket, and he was clearly anxious for the play to get started. He thanked us for welcoming his partner to our table and was interested that I knew Gwyn Thomas' own play, "The Keep". He asked if I'd ever met Gwyn Thomas. I said that I hadn't, and he looked disappointed, but his partner smiled and ventured that she was sure I'd enjoy the play immensely. With a cheery, "Break a leg" we left his little party to find our seats in the auditorium.

The set was very effective. A dark space, the stage was occupied by a towering hill of old-fashioned wooden wardrobes, desks and chests of drawers. These became, at different times in the play, terraces of valleys-houses, hillsides, coffins and portals, and, too, they symbolised quite beautifully the domestic setting of Gwyn Thomas' work and the skeletons in closets that he often hangs out to air.

The play began ....

... and we left our seats furtively at the end, trying very hard to avoid meeting again with the playwright and his party, for it would probably have been embarrassing had we done so.

Quite how an ensemble can so thoroughly misinterpret and, therefore, misrepresent the genius of a writer is breathtaking. On this stage, Simeon is no longer a complex, brooding, enigma but a straightforward incestuous ram; Oscar is still vile, but the dark corners in the lives of those he squashes have been swept clean, and their own sinister cobwebs quietly disposed of. The result is that the pathos and wry humour of life's "big, sad, beautiful joke", bitter and sweet as the darkest chocolate, are overcome by sweet and sticky bathos and slapstick, and life is no longer funny.

A Commedia dell'Arte character, masked,  stalks the set throughout. As the action progresses, he walks among the characters, sometimes listening, sometimes teasing, sometimes telling them what they must say. That this Arleccino is intended to be the writer himself is undeniable, for he wears the unmistakable signature trilby hat and suit, but his purpose, other than to provide the glue that sticks the pastiche together, is unclear. He provides the suitably monstrous puppet-Oscar with its voice and takes part in an unnecessarily supercilious re-enactment of one of Gwyn Thomas' frequent television appearances. Maybe a theatrical metaphor is being dangled here. If so, we are, alas, either too short-sighted to see it, or too dull to understand it; perhaps both.

And, finally, what of  Walter, Ben and Arthur, the Dark Philosophers themselves? Perhaps they were too busy on this cold night, arguing over strong tea in the back room of Idomeneo's cafe, to make the complicated journey from Porth to Newport. Oh, but wasn't there a fourth among them? Ah yes, I remember, so there was ... and perhaps he was at Idomeneo's too, for though we searched, we could not find him at the Riverfront.

The sun also rises.

There are very many places whose names describe the beautiful or fortunate aspects of their location. Honeycombe Leaze, Otter Ferry and Combe Florey make you want to throw everything in and set off to share the sheer joy that their inhabitants must feel in saying, quite simply, "Oh yes, I live in Honeycombe Leaze," or, "Visiting Combe Florey? No, I live here." Other places hint of drama or dismay; Battle, Bleak Hey Nook and Lower Slaughter would be worth a drink bought for a local in any of their, undoubtedly atmospheric, hostelries in return for a story or two.

We live in a place whose name is just as descriptive and evocative of its location, but whose first fathers must have been of a much more modest and practical frame of mind than the worthy founders of Chew Magna or Rickinghall Superior. Gwaelod y Garth is what its name describes, the Bottom of the Hill, and being at the bottom, and facing east, we are accustomed to the dusky shadow that creeps down upon our little houses once the sun has passed over the top of the mountain.
In the summer, this personal sun-screen can be very welcome. We're often to be seen sitting outside our doors drinking cocoa in the cool shade while the unfortunate elements on the other side of the valley are still sweating and toiling in evening sunlight. We save pounds and pounds through this, not being forced to buy parasols, for example, or any of the more exotic garden furniture such as gazebos. Barbecues, too, are an unnecessary expense that we are fortunate to be spared. In winter time, however, if truth be told, the sun's early disappearance is something of a trial. For, what with the naturally damp disposition of the climate hereabouts, and the lush and over-exuberant ambitions of some of the lower flora, we are forced to wage a continual war against creeping green. By November - January at the latest - some of the older and more sedentary inhabitants of the village begin to take on a distinctly mossy appearance, and those of us who are of a comptemplative nature and who stop often, therefore, to peruse or to cogitate as we go about our daily business, are careful to rub our heads and to pat our shoulders often, lest the invisible yet ubiquitous fern-spores that fill the darkling air should gain a foot-hold.
We are all very used to this, of course, and newer elements in the village, like ourselves, soon pick up the necessary habits to keep the cryptogams at bay, and we quickly learn to move about regularly and, from time to time, to seek out those places roundabout where the sunlight lingers a little longer and where, as a result, the visitor will find small, sociable groups of us villagers, gathered together like those sea-lions one sees sometimes on the better kind of natural history programmes.
Very occasionally, I have been told, a villager will succumb to the advancing green-ness and, seeing the attraction of becoming fully vegetised, will seek out a dark and shady spot and sit down there as autumn approaches to mossify. By all accounts it is a gentle and painless process and, apart from the irritations of woodlice and millipedes, uncomplicated. Some voters, in days gone by, so one of the local wags tells me, took it into their heads to visit the National Botanic of Wales in this state, and are now, even to this day, feted in the temperate green-house there and make a tidy income for themselves through occasional walk-on parts, as exotic alien lfe-forms, in programmes such as Doctor Who and Pobol y Cwm.

Trouble is my business

We inched into the city along a choked highway where cars moved slower than the dead-cert I'd bet on the day before.
From the passenger seat, the woman looked across at me. She was short, neat and quick, like a tap to the back of the head.
"Park down there," she snapped, pointing to a closed-off road by the riverside.
"I can't do that, it's a one way road," I replied. "We'll have to drive round."
"You better not be stalling, Mo."
Her small, wrinkled hand reached inside her bag. I sneaked a peek out of the corner of my eye as we waited at the lights. I was right, the bag was loaded. If she tickled me with that one I'd have a lump on my noggin the size of a politician's expense-account.
"Listen," I said. "I know these streets. Believe me, some of them you wouldn't want to walk down, even with your granny."
She didn't buy it, though, "Funny, wise guy. But this is one old lady who can take care of herself. Now find a parking slot before I introduce you to the sharp end of my walking-pole."
The Market is a covered district where all kinds of people buy all kinds of merchandise. It isn't a pretty place, a bit fishy if you ask me, and a lot of faggots, too, but she knew who she wanted.
"Where's the Stick-man?" she asked quietly, looking right at a guy selling hot rolls.
"For why?" he growled, and I could tell by looking at her that he'd soon wish he hadn't.
The little lady looked up at him and smiled, slowly, " I want, to buy, a stick. Do you sell, sticks?"
He'd tried to brush her off, but she had him pat.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean no harm, lady," the sap blurted out. "He's over there, on a stall behind ... the Book-man."
Her precise, "Thankyou" hit him like a glass of ice-water and left him shivering over his little pastries.
He looked at me.
"You with her?"
I nodded.
"Jeez," he said.
"What kind you want darlin'," the stick-man asked. " I got canes, poles, swaggers, wood, metal, plastic, plain, fancy ... "
"I want folding," she said.
He looked her up and down; it didn't take long.
"You sure, doll?" he said. "Folding sticks ain't cheap."
"My last one was. The guy I bought it from was glad to sell it to me ... without VAT."
I watched the words hang in the air between them, like spiders on silk.
"Try this one."
He reached across and pulled down a small package from the side-wall. He flipped it open, snapped his wrist and, with three sharp well-oiled clicks, a full-length stick was in his hand.
It was quicker than any stick-up I'd ever seen, but the she wasn't impressed.
"It looks heavy," she said.
"Lady, this is the latest, lightest, four-section fold-up on the market. Anything else is just tubing."
He caught her eye.
"Listen, rube, I can see you're no tenderfoot. OK. I'll throw in a tooled leather wrist-loop."
She looked a little interested. He leered. She pulled his lead.
"I want it sawn-off."
The Stick-man paled and eyed the passing crowds nervously. He swallowed like a big scared frog and gulped out,
"Jeez, lady, don't tell the world, you'll get my licence revoked. Sawn-off? You know what that means?"
"Yeah, you might make a sale," she shot back, quicker than a hen off a nest.
"OK, OK, sawn-off it is, but keep it down."
"Deal. I'll pay cash," she said. "Don't trust electronic card machines. They never work anyhow."
I followed her as she trotted out of the market. It was raining and the pavements were wet and we had a long walk in front of us.
"Danged if he hasn't cut it too long," she said,
I winced in anticipation, but she smiled.
"Hey, never mind, Mo. I think you've earned a cup of coffee. I'll buy."
I nodded my head. I knew it was not the time to say a word.

No country for old (wo)men

Time for an entry to the blog, after another very long pause.

It is very inconvenient when you lose a bespoke walking-stick. Even if losing things is something that you are very good at. And so, when I heard that my wife's mother (call her Dorothy) had lost hers, and being a dutiful son-in-law, I offered to take her to buy a replacement. She had, after all, gone to the trouble of finding out that her local supplier of such things no longer stocked "her brand", but that a similar establishment in a different, though nearby, part of the city, did.
I duly picked up Dorothy on the appointed morning, and drove her to Canton. Don't be alarmed, it was not a long journey, for that is merely the name of the suburb where the stick-purveyor was to be found. Thinking about it for a moment, though, and with the undoubted benefit of hind-sight, the whole coming experience was to resemble being press-ganged or Shanghaied.
I parked the car in the spacious and usefully sign-posted "Customer's car park" a little nervously. There was another car already standing in a space and, if its driver was, in fact, a customer, then, morally at least, I would be double-parked.
There was a back entrance to the shop from the car park. It was a small, battered metal door with one of those fish-eye peepholes that you encounter in a certain sort of hotel. There was a bell-push. A sign told us to "Push for assistance". I pushed. I am an aficionado of the kind of film where pushing a bell like that triggers a long period in which one hears, ever more clearly, a limping tread and a dragging foot that herald the approach of a hooded and hump-backed Igor. And so I stepped well back. Dorothy, who does not watch films, has no such prejudices, and so she held her ground close to the door. This was a little unfortunate because it opened outwards and so, for a moment, she disappeared from view and I was left to face the denizen of the shop alone. Hooded and hunch-backed only metaphorically, it was a female, and she eyed me, an apparently healthy middle-aged man, with suspicion. I hastily reached my wife's mother out from behind the door and stood behind her, beaming as conciliatory a smile as I could muster, and pushed her forward.
"She wants a stick." I said.
"Indeed." the female snorted. "This way."
And she melted into the darkness of the shop.
It smelled a little damp inside, and the carpeted floor felt unaccountably "sticky" as we walked along a short corridor into the showroom. Here, in a large, low-ceilinged chamber, all manner of "living-aids" were ranged about, displayed on walls and shelves and on the dubious floor itself.
Some I recognised: wheelchairs, powered and otherwise; walking-frames; commodes; and bathroom aids. Others were strange to me, and I kept close to Dorothy for fear of them. On one shelf, soft bundles, faintly phosphorescent, and reminiscent of fungoid growths, bore the inscription "Foam Ring Cushions". Nearby, "Luxury Stocking Aids" cunningly twisted into a chthonic tower, of unfamiliar and nauseous geometry, cast an eldritch shadow in the wan light of the shop's fluorescent fittings.
The sticks, such as they were, cowered in a corner, far from the light, and the denizen, smiling at the prospect of a conquest, waved her hand expansively,
"Many sticks. Choose."
My wife's mother, as I've said, is not party to the protocols of the horror and mystery genres and, unaffected by that which she could not, therefore, perceive, dealt the "assistant" a blow that was as effective as a crucifix in a crypt,
"Which are the cheapest ones?" she asked.
There followed an extended cosmic battle between the forces of light and reason and the armies of chaos. I merely watched, trembling, as the "Igor" fawned over the qualities of the most expensively crafted sticks on the stand.
"Look," she said, "how they fold. See, see the pretty flowers on the stock."
"Too heavy," Dorothy snapped back.
"Feel the handle, it is orthopaedic."
With a delight that was not quite healthy, the denizen stroked a horrid, weirdly carved lump atop one of the sticks.
"I want a simple handle," my wife's mother countered, "and, besides, they're all too tall."
The denizen winced, and cast a sideways glance towards the till.
"Can you cut them to size? The man who sold me my last one could."
The Igor ket out a strangled,
"N-no."
Defeat.
The denizen betrayed it in every gesture. One shoulder raised higher than the other, an eye twitching, she acknowledged the greater skill of her adversary and led us to the door regretfully.
As we approached it, I heard a malicious giggle and then,
"I know a man who sells sticks. In the market, in the CENTRE of the town. He might help."
Snatching meagre comfort from abject defeat, the female leered in my direction and, as she heard Drothy ask, rhetorically, "Will you be able to park near the market?", she smiled and closed the door upon us.