Under Milk Wood

To begin at the beginning...

OK.

INDISTINCT SPEECH

OK. Stand by.

Yeah, looking forward or just start looking at the camera?

-INDISTINCT RESPONSE

-OK.

We're up to speed. Nice and quiet, please.

OK, stand by, studio. Five, four,

three...

To begin at the beginning...

It is spring.

Moonless night

in the small town.

Starless and bible-black.

The cobblestreets silent

and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood

limping invisible down to the sloeblack...

..slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

The houses are blind as moles,

though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles.

Or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle

by the pump and the town clock.

The shops in mourning,

the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.

And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town

are sleeping now.

(Hush, the babies are sleeping.)

The farmers, the fishers,

the tradesmen and pensioners,

cobbler, schoolteacher,

postman and publican,

the undertaker and the fancy woman,

drunkard, dressmaker,

preacher, policeman,

the webfoot cocklewomen

and the tidy wives.

You can hear the dew falling...

..and the hushed town...breathing.

Only your eyes are unclosed

to see the black and folded town

fast, and slow, asleep.

And you alone

can hear the invisible starfall,

the darkest-beforedawn

minutely dewgrazed stir

of the black, dab-filled sea

where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark,

Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover,

the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales

tilt and ride.

Listen.

-Listen.

-Listen.

-Listen.

It is night moving in the streets,

the processional salt slow musical wind

in Coronation Street and Cockle Row...

..it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill,

dewfall,

starfall...

..the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Look.

It is night,

dumbly, royally winding

through the Coronation cherry trees,

going through the graveyard of Bethesda

with winds gloved and folded,

and dew doffed - tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes.

Listen.

Time passes.

Come closer now.

Come closer now.

In the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.

Only you can see,

in the blinded bedrooms,

the combs and petticoats over the chairs,

the jugs and basins,

the glasses of teeth,

"Thou Shalt Not" on the wall,

and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead.

Only you can hear and see,

behind the eyes of the sleepers,

the movements and countries

and mazes and colours

and dismays and rainbows

and tunes and wishes

and flight and fall

and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are,

you can hear their dreams.

Captain Cat, the retired blind sea captain,

asleep in his bunk

in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled,

shipshape best cabin of Schooner House

dreams of...

Never such seas as any that swamped the decks

of his SS Kidwelly

bellying over the bedclothes

and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep

into the Davy dark

where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone,

and the long drowned nuzzle up to him.

Remember me, Captain?

-You're Dancing Williams!

-I lost my step in Nantucket.

Do you see me, Captain?

The white bone talking?

I'm Tom-Fred the donkeyman.

We shared the same girl once...

her name was Mrs Probert.

Rosie Probert, 33 Duck Lane.

Come on up, boys, I'm dead.

Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis,

come to a bad end, very enjoyable.

This skull at your earhole is...

Curly Bevan.

Tell my auntie it was me who pawned the ormolu clock.

Aye, aye, Curly.

Tell my missus, no, I never.

I never done what she said, I never.

-Yes, they did.

-How's it above?

Is there rum and lavabread?

-Bosoms and robins?

-Concertinas?

-Ebenezer's bell?

-Fighting and onions?

And sparrows and daisies?

Tiddlers in a jamjar?

Buttermilk and whippets?

-Rock-a-bye-baby?

-Washing on the line?

And old girls in the snug?

How's the tenors in Dowlais?

Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?

When she smiles, is there dimples?

What's the smell of parsley?

Oh, my dead dears!

From where you are, you can hear,

in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night,

Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,

-dream of...

-Her lover, tall as the town clock tower,

Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot,

thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted,

flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps

and scooping low

over her lonely, loving

hotwaterbottled body.

Myfanwy Price!

Mr Mog Edwards!

I am a draper mad with love.

I love you more than all the flannelette and calico,

candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,

tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin,

poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world.

I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill,

where the change hums on wires.

Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket.

I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster.

I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue,

for the money to be comfy.

I will warm your heart by the fire

so you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is closed.

Myfanwy, Myfanwy,

before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer will you say...

Yes, Mog.

Yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

And all the bells of the tills of the town

shall ring for our wedding.

Evans the Death, the undertaker

laughs high and aloud in his sleep

and curls up his toes as he sees,

upon waking 50 years ago,

snow lie deep on the goosefield behind the sleeping house.

And he runs out into the field

where his mother is making Welshcakes in the snow

and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants

and climbs back to bed to eat them

cold and sweet under the warm, white clothes

while his mother dances in the snow kitchen

crying out for her lost currants.

And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker's,

lie, alone, the 17 snoring gentle stone of Mr Waldo,

rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist,

catdoctor, quack,

his fat, pink hands, palm up, over the edge of the patchwork quilt,

his black boots neat and tidy in the washing basin,

his bowler on a nail above the bed,

a milk stout and a slice of cold bread pudding under the pillow.

And, dripping in the dark, he dreams of...

Waldo! Waldo!

What'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours...?

Poor Mrs Waldo.

What she puts up with.

-Never should've married.

-If she didn't have to.

-Same as her mother.

-There's a husband for you.

-Bad as his father.

-You know where he ended.

-Up in the asylum.

-Crying for his ma.

-Every Sunday.

-He hadn't got a leg.

-And carrying on.

-With that Mrs Beetie Morris.

-Up in the quarry.

-You seen her baby?

-It's got his nose.

-Oh, it makes my heart bleed.

-What he'll do for drink.

-He sold the pianola.

And her sewing machine.

-Falling in the gutter.

-Talking to the lamp post.

-Using language.

-Singing in the W.

Poor Mrs Waldo.

Waldo.

-Waldo!

-Yes?

What'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours...?

-Black as a chimbley.

-Ringing doorbells.

-Breaking windows.

-Making mudpies.

-Stealing currants.

-Chalking words.

-Saw him in the bushes.

-Playing moochins.

-Send him to bed without any supper.

-Give him senapods and lock him in the dark.

-Off to the reformatory.

-Off to the reformatory!

Learn him with a slipper on his BTM.

Now, in her iceberg-white,

holily laundered crinoline nightgown,

under virtuous polar sheets,

in her spruced and scoured dust-defying bedroom

in trig and trim Bay View,

a house for paying guests,

at the top of the town,

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard,

widow, twice,

of Mr Ogmore, linoleum, retired,

and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker,

who, maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing,

the voice of the vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish,

ironically swallowed disinfectant,

fidgets in her rinsed sleep,

wakes in a dream,

and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore,

dead Mr Pritchard,

ghostly on either side.

Mr Ogmore, Mr Pritchard,

it's time to inhale your balsam.

Oh, Mrs Ogmore!

Oh, Mrs Pritchard!

Soon it will be time to get up.

Tell me your tasks, in order.

I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked "pyjamas".

I must take my cold bath

which is good for me.

I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.

I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.

I must blow my nose...

In the garden, if you please.

..in a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.

I must take my salts which are nature's friend.

I must boil the drinking water because of germs.

I must make my herb tea

which is free from tannin.

And have a charcoal biscuit

which is good for me.

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture...

In the woodshed, if you please.

And dust the parlour and spray the canary.

I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.

I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

And before you let the sun in,

mind it wipes its shoes.

Mrs Rose Cottage's eldest, Mae,

peels off her pink-and-white skin

in a furnace in a tower

in a cave in a waterfall in a wood

and waits there raw as an onion

for Mr Right to leap up

the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves

like a brilliantined trout.

Call me Dolores

like they do in the stories.

And the Inspectors of Cruelty

fly down into Mrs Butcher Beynon's dream

to persecute Mr Beynon for selling owl meat,

dogs' eyes, manchop.

Mr Beynon, in butcher's bloodied apron,

springheels down Coronation Street,

a finger, not his own, in his mouth.

Straight-faced in his cunning sleep

he pulls the legs of his dreams

and hunting on pigback shoots down the wild giblets.

HE YELLS

And in Coronation Street,

which you alone can see,

it is so dark under the chapel in the skies,

the Reverend Eli Jenkins,

poet, preacher,

turns in his deep towards-dawn sleep

-and dreams of...

-Eisteddfodau.

He intricately rhymes the music of crwth and pibgorn,

all night long

in his druid's seedy nightie

in a beer-tent black with parchs.

Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep,

pretends to be sleeping,

spies foxy round the droop of his nightcap and...

Pssst....

..whistles up.

Murder.

Mary Ann the Sailors dreams of...

..The Garden of Eden.

She comes in her smock-frock and clogs

away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen

with the Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall

and the farmers' almanac hung above the settle

and the sides of bacon on the ceiling hooks...

..and goes down the cockleshelled paths

of that applepie kitchen garden...

..ducking under the gyppo's clothespegs,

catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes,

past beanrows and onion-bed

and tomatoes ripening on the wall...

..towards the old man

playing the harmonium in the orchard,

and sits down on the grass at his side...

..and shells the green peas

that grow up through the lap of her frock

that brushes the dew.

Time passes.

Listen.

Time passes.

An owl flies home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak.

And the dawn inches up.

The principality of the sky lightens now,

over our green hill...

into spring morning

larked and crowed and belling.

Stand on this hill.

This is Llareggub Hill...

..old as the hills, high,

cool, and green.

And from this small circle of stones,

made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon's Billy,

you can see all the town below you

sleeping in the first of the dawn.

You can hear the love-sick wood pigeons mooning in bed.

A dog barks in his sleep,

farmyards away.

The town ripples

like a lake in the waking haze.

BELL RINGS

Who pulls the townhall bellrope but blind Captain Cat?

One by one, the sleepers are rung out of sleep this one morning

as every morning.

And soon you shall see the chimneys' slow upflying snow

as Captain Cat, in sailor's cap and seaboots,

announces to-day with his loud get-out-of-bed bell.

Now, woken at last by the

out-of-bed-sleepy-head-Polly-put- the-kettle-on townhall bell,

Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon's treasure,

comes downstairs from a dream of royalty

who all night long went larking with her

full of sauce in the Milk Wood dark,

and puts the kettle on the primus in Mrs Beynon's kitchen

and looks at herself in Mr Beynon's shaving-glass over the sink

and sees...

Oh, there's a face!

Where you get that hair from?

Got it from an old tom cat.

Give it back then, love.

Oh, there's a perm!

Where you get that nose from, Lily?

Got it from my father, silly.

You've got it on upside down!

Oh...

there's a conk!

Look at your complexion! Oh, no, you look.

Needs a bit of make-up. Needs a veil!

Oh, there's glamour(!)

Where you get that smile, Lil?

Never you mind, girl.

Nobody loves you. That's what you think.

Who is it loves you? Shan't tell.

Oh, come on, Lily!

Cross your heart, then?

Cross my heart.

< Lily!

-Yes, Mum?

-Where's my tea, girl?

(Where do you think? In the cat-box?)

Coming up, Mum!

Mr Pugh, in the schoolhouse opposite,

takes up the morning tea to Mrs Pugh,

and whispers on the stairs...

(Here's your arsenic, dear.

(And your weedkiller biscuit.

(I've throttled your parakeet.

(I've spat in the vases.

(I've put cheese in the mouseholes.

(Here's your...)

Nice tea, dear?

Too much sugar.

You haven't tasted it yet, dear.

Too much milk, then.

Give me my glasses.

No, not my reading glasses,

I want to look out.

I want to see.

Organ Morgan at his bedroom window

playing chords on the sill to the morning fishwife gulls

who, heckling over Donkey Street, observe.

Me, Dai Bread, hurrying to the bakery,

pushing in my shirt-tails, buttoning my waistcoat,

ping goes a button.

Why can't they sew them?

No time for breakfast,

nothing FOR breakfast.

There's wives for you.

Me, Mrs Dai Bread One,

capped and shawled and no old corset,

nice to be comfy, nice to be nice,

clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighbour.

Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf, love?

Dai Bread forgot the bread.

Me, Mrs Dai Bread Two,

gypsied to kill

in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees,

dirty pretty knees.

See my body through my petticoat

brown as a berry,

high-heel shoes with one heel missing,

tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair,

nothing else at all but a dab of scent,

lolling gaudy at the doorway,

tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,

scowling at the sunshine,

lighting up my pipe.

Me, Nogood Boyo,

up to no good in the wash-house.

Me, Miss Price, in my pretty print housecoat,

deft at the clothesline, natty as a jenny-wren,

then pit-pat back to my egg in its cosy,

my crisp toast-fingers,

my home-made plum and butterpat.

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line,

giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby.

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing.

And babies.

And where's their fathers live, my love?

Over the hills and far away.

You're looking up at me now.

I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature.

You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly,

and that's good enough for me.

Oh, isn't life a terrible thing,

thank God?

Now, frying-pans spit,

kettles and cats purr in the kitchen.

The town smells of seaweed and breakfast

all the way down from Bay View,

where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, in smock and turban,

big-besomed to engage the dust,

picks at her starchless bread

and sips lemon-rind tea...

To Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo,

in bowler and bib,

gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers

and swigs from the saucebottle.

Mary Ann Sailors

praises the Lord who made porridge.

Mr Pugh...

..remembers ground glass as he juggles his omelette.

Mrs Pugh nags the salt-cellar.

From Beynon butchers in Coronation Street,

the smell of fried liver sidles out

with onions on its breath.

And listen!

In the dark breakfast room behind the shop,

Mr and Mrs Beynon,

waited upon by their treasure,

enjoy, between bites, their every morning hullabaloo,

and Mrs Beynon slips the gristly bits under the tasselled tablecloth

to her fat cat.

She likes the liver, Ben.

She ought to do, Bess, it's her brother's.

Oh, do you hear that, Lily?

Yes, Mum.

We're eating pusscat.

Yes, Mum.

Oh, you cat-butcher!

It was doctored, mind.

What's that got to do with it?

Yesterday we had mole.

Oh, Lily! Lily!

Monday, otter. Tuesday, shrews.

Oh!

Go on, Mrs Beynon. He's the biggest liar in town.

Don't you dare say that about Mr Beynon.

Everybody knows it, Mum.

Mr Beynon never tells a lie.

-Do you, Ben?

-No, Bess.

And now I am going out after the corgis,

with my little cleaver.

Up the street, in the Sailors' Arms,

Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann the Sailors,

draws a pint in the sunlit bar.

The ship's clock in the bar says half past 11.

Half past 11 is opening time.

The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past 11

for 50 years.

It's always opening time in the Sailors' Arms.

Here's to me, Sinbad.

Nogood Boyo goes out in the dinghy Zanzibar,

ships the oars,

drifts slowly in the dab-filled bay,

and, lying on his back in the unbaled water,

among crabs' legs and tangled lines,

looks up at the spring sky.

I don't know who's up there and I don't care.

He turns his head and looks up at Llareggub Hill,

and sees, among green lathered trees,

the white houses of the strewn away farms,

where farmboys whistle,

dogs shout,

cows low,

but all too far away for him,

or you, to hear.

And in the town, the shops squeak open.

Mr Edwards,

in butterfly-collar and straw-hat at the doorway of Manchester House,

measures, with his eye, the dawdlers by,

for striped flannel shirts and shrouds

and flowery blouses,

and bellows to himself, in the darkness behind his eye.

I love Miss Price.

And, sitting at the open window of Schooner House,

blind Captain Cat hears all the morning of the town.

That's Willy Nilly knocking at Bay View.

Rat-a-Tat, very soft.

The knocker's got a kid glove on.

Who's sent a litter to Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?

KNOCKING

Careful now, she swabs the front glassy.

Every step's like a bar of soap.

Mind your size twelveses.

That old Bessie would beeswax the lawn to make the birds slip.

Morning, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

Good morning, postman.

Here's a letter for you with stamped and addressed envelope enclosed,

all the way from Builth Wells.

A gentleman wants to study birds

and can he have accommodation for two weeks and a bath, vegetarian.

-No.

-You wouldn't even know he was in the house, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

He'd be out in the mornings at the bang of dawn

with his bag of breadcrumbs and his little telescope.

And come home at all hours covered with feathers.

I don't want persons in my nice clean rooms

breathing all over the chairs.

Cross my heart, he won't breathe.

And putting their feet on my carpets

and sneezing on my china

and sleeping in my sheets.

He only wants a single bed, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

DOOR SLAMS And back she goes to the kitchen,

to polish the potatoes.

Captain Cat hears Willy Nilly's feet heavy on the distant cobbles.

One, two, three, four...

five.

KNOCKING

-He's stopping at schoolhouse.

-Morning, Mrs Pugh.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won't have a gentleman in

because he'll sleep in her sheets.

Give me the parcel.

It's for Mr Pugh, Mrs Pugh.

Never you mind.

What's inside it?

A book called Lives Of The Great Poisoners.

That's Manchester House.

Morning, Mr Edwards. Very small news.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won't have birds in the house,

and Mr Pugh's....

(bought a book now on how to do in Mrs Pugh.)

Have you got a letter from HER?

Miss Price loves you with all her heart.

Smelling of lavender today.

She's down to the last of the elderflower wine

but the quince jam's bearing up and she's knitting roses on the doilies.

Last week she sold three jars of boiled sweets,

pound of humbugs,

half a box of jellybabies and six coloured photos of Llareggub.

Yours for ever. Then 21 Xs.

HE SIGHS

Oh, Willy Nilly, she's a ruby!

Here's my letter.

Put it into her hands now.

Mr Waldo hurrying to the Sailors' Arms.

Pint of stout with an egg in it.

There's a letter for him.

It's another paternity summons, Mr Waldo.

All the women are out this morning, in the sun.

You can tell it's spring.

That's Mrs Dai Bread One, walking up the street like a jelly,

every time she shakes it's slap, slap, slap.

Who's that?

Mrs Butcher Beynon with her pet black cat,

it follows her everywhere, meow and all.

High heels now, in the morning, too, Mrs Rose-Cottage's eldest,

Mae, 17 and never been kissed, ho-ho!

Going young and milking under my window to the field

with the nanny goats, she reminds me all the way.

Can't hear what the girls are gabbing round the pump.

Same as ever.

Who's having a baby, who blacked whose eye,

seen Polly Garter giving her belly an airing, there should be a law,

seen Mrs Beynon's new mauve jumper, it's her old grey jumper, dyed,

who's dead, who's dying, there's a lovely day,

oh, the cost of soapflakes!

Somebody's coming.

Now the voices round the pump can see somebody coming.

Hush, there's a hush?

You can tell by the noise of the hush, it's Polly Garter.

Hullo, Polly, who's there?

-Me, love.

-That's Polly Garter.

Hullo, Polly, my love.

Can you hear the dumb goose-hiss of the wives as they huddle

and peck or flounce at a waddle away?

Who cuddled you when?

Which of their gandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood

for your naughty mothering arms and body like a wardrobe, love?

Scrub the floors of the Welfare Hall

for the Mothers' Union Social Dance, you're one mother won't

wriggle her roly poly bum or pat her fat little buttery foot

in that wedding-ringed holy tonight, though the waltzing breadwinners

snatched from the cosy smoke of the Sailors' Arms will grizzle and mope.

COCK CROWS

Too late, cock, too late.

For the town's half over with it's morning.

The morning's busy as bees.

There's the clip-clop of horses on the sunhoneyed

cobbles of the humming streets,

hammering of horseshoes, gobble quack and cackle,

tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down.

Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher,

milk churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing.

Oh, the spring whinny and morning moo

from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab

and rabble on the boat bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling

in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo,

clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden

school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's

general shop where everything is sold - custard, buckets,

henna, rat-traps, shrimp nets, sugar, stamps, confetti,

paraffin, hatchets, whistles.

PHONE RINGS

-Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

-La di da.

Got a man in Builth Wells.

And he got a little telescope to look at birds.

Willy Nilly said...

Remember her first husband? He didn't need a telescope.

He looked at them undressing through the keyhole.

And he used to shout "Tally-ho".

But Mr Ogmore was a proper gentleman.

Even though he hanged his collie.

Seen Mrs Butcher Beynon?

She said Butcher Beynon put dogs in the mincer.

Go on! He's puling her leg.

Now don't you dare tell her that, there's a dear.

Or she'll think he's trying to pull it off and eat it!

There's a nasty lot live here when you come to think.

Look at that Nogood Boyo now.

Too lazy to wipe his snout.

And going out fishing every day,

and all he ever brought back was a Mrs Samuels.

Been in the water a week.

And look at Ocky Milkman's wife that nobody's ever seen.

He keeps her in the cupboard with the empties!

And think of Dai Bread with two wives.

One for the daytime, one for the night.

Men are brutes on the quiet.

And in Willy Nilly the Postman's

dark and sizzling damp tea-coated misty pygmy kitchen where the

spittingcat kettles throb and hop on the range, Mrs Willy Nilly

steams open Mr Mog Edwards' letter to Miss Myfanwy Price

and reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring sun through

the one sealed window running with tears, while the drugged,

bedraggled hens at the back door whimper

and snivel for the lickerish bog-black tea.

Beloved Mafanwy Price,

my bride in heaven.

I love you until death do us part

and then we shall be together for ever and ever.

A new parcel of ribbons has come from Carmarthen today,

all the colours in the rainbow.

I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair, a white one, but it cannot be.

I dreamed last night you were all dripping wet and you

sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins went down the street.

"I see you've got a mermaid in your lap," he said and he lifted his hat.

He's a proper Christian. Not like Cherry Owen who said,

"You should have thrown her back!" he said. Business is very poorly.

Poly Garter bought two garters with roses

but she never got stockings so what is the use, I say?

Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman's nightie, outsize, he said

he found it and we know where.

I sold a packet of pins to Tom the Sailors to pick his teeth.

If this goes on I shall be in a workhouse.

My heart is in your bosom and yours is in mine.

God be with you always Myfanwy Price and keep you lovely for me

in His Heavenly Mansion.

I must stop now and remain, Your Eternal, Mog Edwards.

And then a little message with a rubber stamp, "Shop at Mog's"!

Mrs Dai Bread One

and Mrs Dai Bread Two are sitting outside their house in

Donkey Lane, one darkly one plumply blooming in the quick, dewy sun.

Mrs Dai Bread Two is looking into a crystal ball which she holds in the

lap of her dirty yellow petticoat, hard against her hard dark thighs.

Cross my palm with silver. Out of our housekeeping money.

-Aah!

-What do you see, lovey?

I see a feather bed. With three pillows on it.

And a text above the bed.

I can't read what it says, there's great clouds blowing.

Ooh, now they've blown away.

"God is Love", the text says.

That's our bed.

And now it's vanished.

The sun spinning like a top.

Who's this coming out of the sun?

It's a hairy little man with big pink lips,

he's got a wall eye.

-It's Dai, it's Dai Bread!

-Ssh! The feather bed's floating back.

The little man's taking his boots off.

He's pulling his shirt over his head.

He's beating his chest with his fists. He's climbing into bed.

Go on, go on.

There's two women in bed.

He looks at them both, with his head cocked on one side.

He's whistling through his teeth.

Now he grips his little arms around one of the women.

Which one, which one?

I can't see any more.

There's great clouds blowing again.

Ach, the mean old clouds!

The morning is all singing.

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, busy on his morning calls,

stops outside the Welfare Hall to hear Polly Garter as

she scrubs the floors for the Mothers' Union Dance to-night.

# ..was Tom

# He was strong as a bear and two yards long

# I loved a man whose name was Dick

# He was big as a barrel and three feet thick

# And I loved a man whose name was Harry

# Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry

# But the one I loved best awake or asleep

# Was little Willy Wee and he's six feet deep

# Oh, Tom, Dick and Harry were three fine men

# And I'll never have such loving again

# But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee

# Little Willy Wee was the man for me

# Now, men from every parish round

# Run after me and roll me on the ground

# But whenever I love another man back

# Johnnie from the Hill or Sailing Jack

# I always think as they do what they please

# Of Tom, Dick and Harry who were tall as trees

# And most I think when I'm by their side

# Of little Willy Wee who downed and died. #

Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation.

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of schoolhouse, dusty

and echoing as a dining-room in a vault,

Mr and Mrs Pugh are silent over cold grey cottage pie.

Mr Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in,

from Lives Of The Great Poisoners.

He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the book.

Slyly, between slow mouthfuls,

he sidespies up at Mrs Pugh,

poisons her with his eye, then goes on reading.

He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret.

Persons with manners do not read at table.

Says Mrs Pugh.

She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a horse-pill,

washing it down with clouded peasoup water.

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

Pigs don't read at table, dear.

Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet.

It settles on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

Pigs can't read, my dear.

I know one who can.

Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes,

Mr Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys

of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially

for Mrs Pugh a venomous porridge

unknown to toxicologists which will scald

and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow

big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel.

You know best, dear.

Says Mr Pugh and quick as a flash he ducks her in rat soup.

What's that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?

It's a theological work, my dear. Lives Of The Great Saints.

I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly Garter.

She was martyred again last night.

# But I always think as we tumble into bed

# Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead...#

The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns

and moons through the dozy town.

The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap.

The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls,

the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy.

The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llareggub Hill.

Persons with manners...

Snaps Mrs cold Pugh...

..do not nod at table.

Mr Pugh cringes awake.

He puts on a soft-soaping smile,

it is sad and grey under his nicotine-eggyellow weeping walrus

Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory of Doctor Crippen.

You should wait until you retire to your sty...

Says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor.

His fawning measly quarter-smile freezes.

Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist's den and there,

in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons

and phials brimful with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee

of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his

needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.

I beg your pardon, my dear.

He murmurs, with a wheedle.

Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun

and the clippered seas he sailed long ago

when his eyes were blue and bright, slumbers and voyages,

ear-ringed and rolling, "I Love You, Rosie Probert"

tattooed on his belly,

he brawls with broken bottles

in the fug and babble of the dark dock bars,

roves with a herd of short and good-time cows in every naughty port

and twines and souses with the drowned and blowzy-breasted dead.

He weeps as he sleeps and sails,

and the tears run down his grog-blossomed nose.

One voice of all he remembers most dearly as his dream buckets down.

Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch, whom he shared with Tom-Fred

the donkeyman and many another seaman, clearly and near to him,

speaks from the bedroom of her dust.

In that gulf and haven, fleets by the dozen have anchored for the

little heaven of the night, but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone.

Mrs Probert...

From Duck Lane, Jack. Quack twice and ask for Rosie.

..is the one love of his sea-life that was sardined with women.

What seas did you see

Tom Cat, Tom Cat

In your sailoring days?

What sea beasts were In the wavery green

When you were my master?

I'll tell you the truth.

Seas barking like seals

Blue seas and green

Seas covered with eels

And mermen and whales.

What seas did you sail

Old whaler when

On the blubbery waves

Between Frisco and Wales

You were my bosun?

As true as I'm here

Dear you Tom Cat's tart

You landlubber Rosie

You cosy love

My easy as easy

My true sweetheart

Seas green as a bean

Seas gliding with swans

In the seal-barking moon.

What seas were rocking

My little deck hand

My favourite husband

In your seaboots and hunger

My duck my whaler

My honey my daddy

My pretty sugar sailor

With my name on your belly

When you were a boy

Long long ago?

I'll tell you no lies.

The only sea I saw

Was the seesaw sea

With you riding on it.

Lie down, lie easy.

Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

Knock twice, Jack

At the door of my grave

And ask for Rosie.

Rosie Probert.

Remember her.

She is forgetting.

The earth which filled her mouth

Is vanishing from her.

Remember me.

I have forgotten you.

I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.

I have forgotten that I was ever born.

Now the town is dusk.

Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street

Is a thoroughfare of dusk

And dusk and ceremonial dust

And night's first darkening snow

And the sleep of birds

Drift under and through the live dusk of this place of love.

Llareggub is the capital of dusk.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, at the first drop of the dusk-shower,

seals all her Sea-View doors,

draws the germ-free blinds,

sits, erect as a dry dream on a high-backed hygienic chair

and wills herself to cold, quick sleep.

At once, at twice,

Mr Ogmore and Mr Pritchard,

who all dead day long have been

gossiping like ghosts in the woodshed,

planning the loveless destruction of their glass widow,

reluctantly sigh and sidle into her clean house.

You first, Mr Ogmore.

After you, Mr Pritchard.

No, no, Mr Ogmore. You widowed her first.

And in through the keyhole

with tears where their eyes once were,

they ooze and grumble.

Husbands...

She says in her sleep.

There is acid love in her voice

for one of the two shambling phantoms.

Mr Ogmore hopes that it is not for him.

So does Mr Pritchard.

I love you both.

Oh, Mrs Ogmore.

Oh, Mrs Pritchard.

Soon it will be time to go to bed.

Tell me your tasks in order.

BOTH: We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked "pyjamas".

And then you must take them off.

Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose-Cottage,

still lying in clover, listens to the nanny goats chew,

draws circles of lipstick round her nipples.

I'm fast.

I'm a bad lot.

God will strike me dead.

I'm 17.

I'll go to hell...

She tells the goats.

You just wait.

I'll sin till I blow up!

She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen,

as the goats champ and sneer.

Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms,

powder and curl for the Dance of the World.

Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailor's Arms, sings...

ACCORDION PLAYS

# In Pembroke City when I was young

# I lived by the Castle Keep

# Sixpence a week was my wages

# For working for the chimbley-sweep

# Six cold pennies he gave me

# Not a farthing more or less

# And all the fare I could afford

# Was parsnip gin and watercress

# Sweep, sweep, chimbley sweep

# I wept through Pembroke City

# Poor and barefoot in the snow

-ALL JOIN IN:

-# Till a kind young woman took pity

# Poor little chimbley sweep, she said

# Black as the ace of spades

# Oh, nobody's swept my chimbley

# Since my husband went his ways

# Come and sweep my chimbley, she sighed to me with a blush

# Come and sweep my chimbley

# Bring along your chimbley brush. #

CHEERING AND LAUGHTER

And at the doorway of Bethesda House,

the Reverend Jenkins recites to Llaregyb Hill his sunset poem.

# Every morning when I wake

# Dear Lord, a little prayer I make

# O please to keep Thy loving eye

# On all poor creatures born to die

# And every evening at sundown

# I ask a blessing on the town

# For whether we last the night or no

# I'm sure is always touch and go

# We are not wholly bad or good

# Who live our lives under Milk Wood

# And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

# To see our best side

# Not our worst

# O let us see another day!

# Bless us this night, I pray

# And to the sun we all will bow

# And say, goodbye

# But just for now. #

Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk.

Like a cat, he sees in the dark.

Through the voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead.

Dancing Williams!

Still dancing.

Jonah Jarvis.

Still.

Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.

The dead come out in their Sunday best.

Listen to the night breaking.

Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price,

happily apart from one another at the top and the sea-end of town,

write their everynight letters of love and desire.

In the warm White Book of Llareggub,

you will find the little maps of the islands of their contentment.

Oh, my Mog, I am yours for ever.

And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat neverdull room

which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.

Come to my arms, Myfanwy.

And he hugs his lovely money to his own heart.

And Mr Waldo, drunk in the dusky wood, hugs his lovely Polly Garter

under the eyes and rattling tongues of the neighbours and the birds,

and he does not care.

He smacks his live red lips.

But it is not his name that Polly Garter whispers as she lies

-under the oak and loves him back.

-# But I always think

-# As we tumble into bed... #

-Six feet deep,

-that name sings in the cold earth.

-# ..of little Willy Wee

# Who is dead, dead, dead. #

The thin night darkens.

A breeze from the creased water sighs the streets close

under Milk waking Wood.

The Wood, whose every tree-foot's cloven

in the black glad sight of the hunters of lovers,

that is a God-built garden to Mary Ann Sailors,

who knows there is a heaven on earth

and the chosen people of his kind fire in Llareggub's land.

That is the fairday farm hands' wantoning ignorant chapel of bridesbeds,

and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins,

a greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men,

the suddenly wind-shaken wood

springs awake for the second dark time this one spring day.

# Bless us this night, I pray

# And to the sun we all will bow

# And say goodbye

# But just for now. #

HE LAUGHS

-Perfect.

-Cut there.

-We got it.

Thank you very much.

That was great!

Spot on, man.

-I feel so self-conscious!

-SHE LAUGHS

All right, can we go again?

MUSIC: "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" performed by John Cale

# Rage at the dying of the light

# Rage at the dying of the light. #