Make Room for the Jester by Stead Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

she followed it with ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ – only the first three lines, though, because she got it mixed up with the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
    Then Mair tried ‘Calon Lân’, but had to give upbecause her emotions got the better of her. So we had Walter again, whistling the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, on one note all the way through, but his rhythm was very good.
    ‘Your turn now Gladstone,’ the children cried. ‘Another poem like on the beach.’
    He gave us an old one – a favourite – about Buck Jones riding off the screen at the Palace, and sending the dust flying down Porthmawr Market Street, and all the children cheering, and all the deacons scowling, and how he finished up picking a fight with the man on the war memorial in the Square, and how they had to get a posse out to get him back to the Palace in time for the second house.
    As he finished it, Dewi and Maxie came in fresh and whooping from the pictures. They’d been thrown out, as usual.
    ‘Wasn’t much of a picture, anyway,’ Dewi said. He wanted to swear, I knew, but didn’t dare do so in front of the children, not with Gladstone there.
    We persuaded Maxie to tell us about the picture. ‘In China it was,’ he began.
    ‘Arabia,’ Dewi said wearily.
    ‘About this man who loved this girl only she was a gypsy, or something.’
    ‘A narab,’ Dewi said.
    ‘Anyway, it was slow.’ Maxie scratched his square nose for a moment, thinking deeply. ‘All licking and stuff.’
    ‘A love story,’ Gladstone explained to the children.
    ‘Would have been better if they’d had the man tunnel through the sand like a mole,’ Maxie went on.
    ‘Oh, dear God,’ Dewi said.
    ‘Get down in the sand and tunnel through like a mole,and come up the other side, and catch them when they weren’t looking…’
    ‘That never happened, you old fool,’ Dewi said.
    ‘I know,’ Maxie replied. ‘I was wishing it would, though. Wishing that all through the picture.’
    Maxie always wanted the hero to become a human mole. There had been a serial in the Saturday matinee about that once, and he’d never forgotten.
    ‘Just tunnel through,’ he said. ‘Not choke or anything with the sand. Then come up in the dark and get his knife out and catch them…’
    ‘Lovely,’ Gladstone said to stop him. He felt the mattress carefully. ‘Now – it won’t be long. Who’s going to be next?’
    ‘You again,’ the children chorused, so Gladstone settled back with little Walter on his knee to tell us the story of Wuthering Heights of Wales by Emily Brontë. He had books everywhere, Gladstone – used to comb the jumble sales for them. Only rarely did he come to the pictures with the rest of us.
    ‘ Wuthering Heights of Wales , by Emily Brontë,’ he began – and it all happened in the hills at the back of Porthmawr. Heathcliff was Lloyd the gypsy, Catherine was Rhian, Edgar Linton was Lord Caradog Snell (Snell was a favourite villain’s name for Gladstone), and Hindley Earnshaw was Trefor Baring (another villainous name). Gladstone altered the story too. Heathcliff was a great violinist that night – ‘potentially the world’s greatest, perhaps’ – and Rhian was an operatic soprano who could hit the highest note in the world. At the end he had Heathcliff playing a violin obbligato while Rhian sang ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’ (Gladstone sang it for us, all theway through) in a concert hall before five thousand people who rose, at the end, in a frenzy of applause. The concert hall was in Bond Street, London, not in heaven or anywhere final like that. In most of Gladstone’s versions the good ones never died.
    When it was over they all wanted an encore. Mair wanted the story of Montagu Hughes and Capulet Williams, by William Shakespeare. I liked this one, too – especially towards the end when Romeo captured all of Juliet’s family and took them to the dungeons under Caernarfon Castle, and injected them one by one with a serum called common