A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
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    â€œBut that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken
from whitewash 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 white-ivied the
walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm
of white, torn Christmas cards.”
    â€œWere there postmen then, too?”
    Â 
    â€œWith 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.”

    â€œYou mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?”
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    â€œI mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside
them.”
    â€œI only hear thunder sometimes, never bells.”
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    â€œThere were church bells, too.”
    â€œInside them?”
    Â 
    â€œNo, 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.”
    â€œGet back to the postmen.”
    â€œThey were just ordinary postmen, fond of walking and dogs and Christmas
and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles. . . .”
    â€œOurs has got a black knocker. . . . ”
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    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œAnd then the presents?”
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œGet back to the Presents.”

    â€œThere 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.”
    â€œGo on to the Useless Presents.”

    â€œBags 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