Story, Volume I Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  THE STORIES

  ENCHANTMENT

  The Gift of Tongues – Arthur Machen

  The Coffin – Caradoc Evans

  The Dark – World Rhys Davies

  THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD

  A Father in Sion – Caradoc Evans

  The Black Rat – Frank Richards

  The Grouser – Fred Ambrose

  Be This Her Memorial – Caradoc Evans

  A Bed of Feathers – Rhys Davies

  The Conquered – Dorothy Edwards

  The Last Voyage – James Hanley

  An Afternoon at Ewa Shad’s – Glyn Jones

  Shacki Thomas – Gwyn Jones

  The Lost Land – Geraint Goodwin

  Wat Pantathro – Glyn Jones

  Revelation – Rhys Davies

  The Shearing – Geraint Goodwin

  Let Dogs Delight – George Ewart Evans

  Twenty Tons of Coal – B. L. Coombes

  Gamblers – Leslie Norris

  On the Tip – Rhys Davies

  Extraordinary – Little Cough Dylan Thomas

  And a Spoonful of Grief to Taste – Gwyn Thomas

  Just Like Little Dogs – Dylan Thomas

  Thy Need – Gwyn Thomas

  Acting Captain – Alun Lewis

  The Lost Fisherman – Margiad Evans

  The Pits are on the Top – Rhys Davies

  They Came – Alun Lewis

  Boys of Gold – George Brinley Evans

  Ward ‘O’ 3 (B) – Alun Lewis

  Mrs Armitage – Emyr Humphreys

  One Life – Alun Richards

  AFTER FOREVER

  The Return – Brenda Chamberlain

  Homecoming – Nigel Heseltine

  A White Birthday – Gwyn Jones

  The Medal – George Ewart Evans

  A Story – Dylan Thomas

  Match – Roland Mathias

  Hester and Louise – Siân James

  A View Across the Valley – Dilys Rowe

  Time Spent – Ron Berry

  Boy with a Trumpet – Rhys Davies

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  EDITOR BIOGRAPHY

  PUBLISHED LIST

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  Copyright

  STORY I

  The Library of Wales Short Story Anthology

  Edited by Dai Smith

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  In Ireland for Lily

  INTRODUCTION

  If the novel offers the reader entrance to its expansive world through the hospitality of an open door, the short story presents us with the more guarded perspective of a window into life. The short story must select and edit its revelation, glimpsed not dwelt upon, if it is to be a telling one, and worth a second glance. What it wishes to show is, to an extent, foretold by all that frames it, yet which remains unseen. This is why the chosen field of sight is crucial to the meaning of the vision vouchsafed for an understanding. The portal of the window defines not only what we will see but how we will view. The short story window, then, will come in many shapes and sizes, and some will have stained glass for panes and some will have bars across them, whilst, depending on which aspect of human behaviour they have decided to unveil, some will be open to the sky and others will cast their light into the cellar depths of existence. Once upon a time, it is true, in a world in which, literally, there was no glass in the holes or slits of the buildings, whether hovels or castles, through which the outside world was eyeballed, so there was no imaginative conduit into the lives of significant others which, first, the novel and then the short story proffered for those readers with the available leisure to look. By the mid nineteenth century increasingly glassed-off sectors of human anomie yearned for the connective compensation of an inner-eye’s resolution of life’s strange bewilderment and alien otherness, which a completed narrative alone could bring. The novel’s finite dream world made up for the infinite messiness of actual living in the new urban and industrial world. Yet, notwithstanding the structured ordering which such fiction could bring, the chance, ephemeral, disturbing, enticing diorama of street encounters and haphazard incident, the unaccountable and the unknowable, needed the explication of epiphany. The flash bulb. The thunderclap. The whisper. The rumour. Often, amidst the unstoppable flow of modernity, there was no time for anything else. Or, as John Updike put it, the importance of the short story now derived from the way it had of ‘bringing Americans news of how they lived and why’, and not only Americans. Everywhere, if you blinked you might miss something. If you stopped to do anything more than gulp it down, you might choke. Such speed of motion and instant memory would, soon, find its blurred articulation captured via the shutter of the stills camera or the sprocket whirr of the movies. From the late nineteenth century the short story especially was the literary cross-over form which pictured new vistas, distant horizons and close-up faces, in an array of montage and edited cuts.

  None of this came about because of some species of reified aesthetics, though a subsequent aesthetic crafting of subtleties of form and language was to be key to making the short story such an effective witness to the psychological and emotional upheavals engendered in individual lives by the weight of unbidden social developments, and through the devastation wrought by unheralded historical circumstances. In all this, Wales, except in the spurts and starts of particular places and industries, was a latecomer until with a landslide shudder as the twentieth century began there was no country of comparable size so overwhelmingly marked out by all that industrialisation entailed. Some Machine. Some Garden. Even rural Wales, its agricultural and artisan and mercantile economy there included, had become an offshoot, de-populated and migratory, of the new Wales of tinplate and iron and slate and copper and steel and, feeding all the roaring fires of Industry and Empire, of coal – anthracite, bituminous and steam, the fossil fuel of modernity itself. Two out of three workers in a Wales approaching three million in population by 1914 were in the coal industry. Wales was urban to its molten core, if only urbane in the marmoreal, statuary of its prosperous Edwardian heyday, and tricked out for the first time in our history with a panoply of national institutions.

  Yet, Wales had no cities or deep civic traditions, no wide gradation of rank and hierarchy beyond the bourgeois and proletarian, to compare with Scotland or Ireland, let alone England. Its university colleges were as young as its national sporting endeavours and its literary glories were embedded in Welsh, its most distinctive and, down to 1914, thriving characteristic. Whatever the decline in numbers, both absolute and in percentage terms, which would within a few decades first assail and then fatally threaten the language, there was, before the 1920s, only a sporadically expressed sense of any national cultural crisis around linguistic usage, whilst, emphatically, there was no dilemma, political or otherwise, about the being of Welshness and the embrace of a British identity.

  Before the First World War, James Joyce had written the short stories he used to skewer the evasions and illusions, their dreams as well as their acts, of his fellow countrymen. The struggle he had to publish Dubliners in 1914 was, in part, a reflection of the power of his devastating, unacceptable, ultimately undeniable stories of love and indictment. Crises and civics were the twin breeders of his consciousness, and of Ireland’s conflicted nation. It would take, in different circumstances of crisis and civic outcomes around class, at least another generation before Wales would find comparable voices. For a while after 1914, Wales was buoyed up, as nation and society, by the centrality of coal in both peace and in war, and its force-fed ambitions took it to the forefront of the Celtic queue in power and aspiration. The triumphan
t foie-gras outcome was the production of the cocky, confidently self-promoting, Welsh-speaking politico, David Lloyd George, as Prime Minister of Britain and wartime leader of its Imperial Dominions. It would take a mighty shake of the social and economic kaleidoscope after the Great War to see the mosaic of Welsh life thrown into shards in a disarray which would now overturn all previous set patterns of expectation and order. It was all this, no more and no less, which saw the Welsh short story emerge as central to our understanding of knowing how and why the people of Wales have lived as they have over the past century.

  The very first batch of stories in this volume are uneasy outriders of all that will be. Not quite tinged with the late Victorian romance of Celtic exoticism and otherness, yet suffused with strangeness, playful with morbidity, helpless in the face of encroaching death. They are enchanted tales because they are in thrall to magic and all its spells in a Wales gasping through religion and respectability to breathe anew under the suffocating toxicity of a noxious capitalist system. This Wales was a-buzz with contradictions. Curtains fretfully twitched across these particular windows of intellect until, the spell abruptly broken, winds began to howl through all the shattered glass of post-1914 Wales. It was Caradoc Evans – of whom his friend and admirer, Gwyn Jones, in 1957 said that he had ‘flung a bucket of dung through the Welsh parlour window and … had flung the bucket in after, with a long-reverberating clangour’ – who put a capstone on any fantasy Wales which lingered on. That his collection, My People (1915), appeared in the midst of a World War which shape-shifted Welsh history entirely is no more a happenstance than Lloyd George’s own contemporary elevation. If England, as Keynes informed us, had Shakespeare when she could afford him, the great economist who would shortly dilate on the Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) delivered by Lloyd George at Versailles, might have added that Wales only joined the discordant chorus of twentieth century literature when its economy slid into bankruptcy.

  The stories which follow on into the disenchantment of the world, through the inter-war years and in the Second World War itself down to the 1950s, are utterly distinctive in tone even when, occasionally, they tell this wider Big Story in oblique or sidling ways. They are time-bound and socially observant as a measure of historical experience. It is this focus which makes them so Welsh. Contrariwise, the critic, Tony Brown, has pointed out that most women writers in English of this entire period, formally educated and necessarily middle-class, had ‘connections with the actual social life of Wales (which was only) socially and/or geographically tenuous (and that their) stories tell us very little about the actualities of Wales itself between 1850 and 1950 …nothing …of industrialisation, nothing about the huge shift from the boom years at the end of the nineteenth century to the disasters of the 1930s, nothing of the struggle of working-class families to survive’. The perception of such activities was one which contemporaries, as writer practitioners and reader participants, did not hesitate to emphasise in their work: What was socially marginal, for whatever valid socio-historical reasons, was not the work which brought the news of how and why the Welsh had lived and endured in a dramatic if enforced commonality of being.

  At the end of this first period, from the late 1920s to the late 1950s, one of its first generation of writers – those born before 1914 – came to edit the third major collection of stories to be published. That was George Ewart Evans (b.1909), whose Welsh Short Stories came out for the English publisher, Faber & Faber, in 1959. He was clear, as he wrote in his Introduction, dated May 1958, that over ‘thirty years or so, the short story in Wales has emerged and reached its present maturity’, and he was just as firm in his answer to his own posed question:

  What caused the Welsh short story to appear when it did? This is a question that cannot be answered if we try to restrict the inquiry to purely literary terms. For the Welsh short story, like the Irish story just before it… flowered during or immediately after a period of acute social stress… The Irish experienced their upheaval in the first quarter of the century; the renascence of Irish letters roughly coincided with it. The Welsh were entering the ‘Hungry Thirties’ when the tempo of events in Ireland was slowing down. It seems no accident that the writers who have had the greatest influence on the direction of the Welsh short story grew up during the twenties and thirties in industrial South Wales, chiefly in those valleys and coastal towns that were so devastated by social and economic crises.

  In that Wales of the late 1950s, so much was clear to that generation which had indeed seeded the ‘first flowering’ of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature. It was a drumbeat to which the prominent Welsh writers in English marched in step as much as did the whole culture and society, formed and perhaps already static, of their known world. Gwyn Jones (b.1907), his shadow as critic and contributor looming authoritatively over the literary landscape, had anticipated George Ewart Evans’ thoughtful remarks in his own typically more flamboyant editorial note to his influential collection Welsh Short Stories (1956) for Oxford:

  An editor who is part of what he edits cannot show free from prejudice. My book has been built around those authors who seem to me at once creators and most distinguished practitioners of the Welsh short story in English… if we except the patriarchal Caradoc, these writers belong to one generation, and all of them except Caradoc and Goodwin belong to industrial South Wales. Remove the Swansea-bred Dylan Thomas, and the others belong to the mining valleys, where they grew up in the hungry twenties.

  For better and worse the contemporary Welsh story is the product of a passionate, rebellious, and humorous generation, with a huge delight in life and no small relish for death.

  He who edits, as Gwyn Jones assertively admits, also selects. And in the 1950s, as in the 1930s, the selectivity was indeed all one way in its regional skew. Twenty years had separated the first collection from Faber, Welsh Short Stories assembled by a collective anonymous panel of advisory editors, in 1937 from the offerings of the 1950s, with only Gwyn Jones’ slim Welsh Short Stories from 1940 for Penguin in between. The dates are significant for, in the 1930s the fate of the Welsh industrial valleys had first impinged on a wider consciousness, whilst by the 1950s the emergence of ‘Welfare’ Britain after the Second World War was unimaginable, in shape and in aspiration, without the wider contribution of South Wales. It was, in a sense, a pinnacle from which these editors, and their acolytic readers, could accommodate all of Wales.

  In the Faber volume of 1959, out of 25 selected stories by single authors, three were in translation from Welsh, including one of the stories by three of the women there included. The 1956 OUP volume had been almost a mirror image, with 26 stories, though by 18 authors, with four stories translated. Gwyn Jones perfectly reflected the contemporary sensibilities of the 1950s in his fulsome declaration that ‘all 26 stories are by Welshmen… and about Welshmen, and… he who dips his head into this book will hear music and taste mead’. Sufficient mead, perhaps, to ignore the fact that two of the stories he selected were in translation by that honorary ‘Welshman’ Kate Roberts. At a time, perhaps, of a different tempo of crisis for Welsh-language writing, his further remark that ‘There is not one Wales, but many; and no one voice and one language can serve them all’ might sound as truthful as it is contentious. It is a double condition, even so, to which our selected stories over these two current volumes will return again and again.

  A way of avoiding it was to take the more fanciful road chosen by Aled Vaughan in Celtic Story, from 1946, where 24 stories were assembled from ‘Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the West country’. The editor, no doubt whistling against the wind of post-war British triumphalism, contended that ‘The central theme of this collection is “Celticism”, that indefinable quality that makes the work of the true Celtic writer stand out on its own in any collection’. But, by then, the concept of Celtic sensibility outside a rooted and structured society was a feeble throwback to the idylls and/or grotesqueries which the writers championed by Jones and Evans had long swept away.
Gwyn Jones, for one, was clear about what the first generation of Welsh short-story writers had sought to do, and the examples from elsewhere by which he, and they, sought to be measured. He introduced his own selected short stories in 1974 and, again, his collected stories of 1998 with the confident modesty of one who knew where his texts would find their context. It is where, too, I hope that Story may be located and assessed:

  …literature has never lacked far-questers and exotics, but for the most part, what men are, what they know, what they feel, grows from a place or region. This can be provincial (in the literal not pejorative sense), metropolitan, or in respect of some Nations national. For me, it seems unnecessary to add, this means Wales, and therein South Wales, and still more narrowly the mining valleys of Gwent and Glamorgan on the one hand, and the thirty-mile central arc of Cardigan Bay and its hinterland on the other.

  Regionalism of this high and honourable definition has a status as estimable as any other form of writing, and has been a main feature of the European and American literary tradition. For this region – it can be as small as Eire, Calabria, or Berlin, or huge as the Deep South of America – the regional writer will feel an inescapable though not necessarily an exclusive attachment. He will understand its people, as no intruder will ever understand them, and be driven to act out that understanding in words: their character, personality and traditions, patterns of behaviour and impulses to action; what they believe in, their hopes and fears, bonds and severances; their relationship to each other, to the landscape around them, and the creatures they share it with… If his gifts are modest but genuine, his following will be small but appreciative; if he is a Hardy, Joyce, or Faulkner by virtue of what his region has given him he will be heard with reverence throughout the world.

  Every editor should end with a confession: implicit or explicit. Implicitly this selection over two volumes will speak for itself as to its specificities and its inter-relationships. Explicitly, I constructed a few principles, or rather made up some rules, some of which I broke. There happens to be 42 stories in each volume. That was, as it turned out, a coincidence. What was not accidental, however, was the decision to have more than one story by certain writers, and even to give a few authorial stars more than two stories by which to represent themselves. The familiar or the classic, then, rub together with the unexpected and with what is raw but powerful. By so doing, I hope, the representational intent of Story will become clear. And that is, to touch upon the lives of Wales in the past one hundred years or so without any literal attempt to suggest any kind of overall objective survey or even a foray into history. My chosen windows onto Wales do precisely what windows do: whether the weather outside changes, stones are thrown, night blots out day, rain streaks or sun shines, with figures at play or bodies at rest. These are moments. It is why they are, therefore, momentous. None more so than the two World Wars which have marked out destinies, individual and social, more than most histories of Wales until very recently have wished to consider. Those stories are most definitely flagged up here. As are the ways and means, humorous and defiant and forlorn, with which Wales suffered its equivalent of the Famine in Ireland – the locust decades between those wars.