19/01/2008

Dylan Thomas

Under Milk Wood

A Play for Voices

First published 1954

Under Milk Wood

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE (Very softly)

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, fishingboatbobbing 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. Young girls lie bedded soft  or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,  bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the  organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the  bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And  the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,  and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed  yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,  streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

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. 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 Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,  the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in  bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and  bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes,  fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a  domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves;  in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night  in Donkey Street, trotting silent, With seaweed on its  hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot,  text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours  done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night  neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

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.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the  slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you  can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the corns. 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

SECOND VOICE

never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S.S. 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.

FIRST DROWNED

Remember me, Captain?

CAPTAIN CAT

You’re Dancing Williams!

FIRST DROWNED

I lost my step in Nantucket.

SECOND DROWNED

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…

WOMAN’S VOICE

Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys,

I’m dead.

THIRD DROWNED

Hold me, Captain, I’m Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very  enjoyable.

FOURTH DROWNED

Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea-lawyer, born in Mumbles, sung  like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattooed with  mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.

FIRST DROWNED

This skull at your earhole is

FIFTH DROWNED

Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned he ormolu  clock.

CAPTAIN CAT

Aye, aye, Curly.

SECOND DROWNED

Tell my missus no I never

THIRD DROWNED

I never done what she said I never.

FOURTH DROWNED

Yes they did.

FIFTH DROWNED

And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to my Gwen now?

FIRST DROWNED

How’s it above?

SECOND DROWNED

Is there rum and laverbread?

THIRD DROWNED

Bosoms and robins?

FOURTH DROWNED

Concertinas?

FIFTH DROWNED

Ebenezer’s bell?

FIRST DROWNED

Fighting and onions?

SECOND DROWNED

And sparrows and daisies?

THIRD DROWNED

Tiddlers in a jamjar?

FOURTH DROWNED

Buttermilk and whippets?

FIFTH DROWNED

Rock-a-bye baby?

FIRST DROWNED

Washing on the line?

SECOND DROWNED

And old girls in the snug?

THIRD DROWNED

How’s the tenors in Dowlais?

FOURTH DROWNED

Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?

FIFTH DROWNED

When she smiles, is there dimples?

FIRST DROWNED

What’s the smell of parsley?

CAPTAIN CAT

Oh, my dead dears!

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring,  moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,  dream of

SECOND VOICE

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.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy Price!

MISS PRICE

Mr Mog Edwards!

MR 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.

MISS PRICE

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

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer will you say

MISS PRICE

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

MR EDWARDS

And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding.

[Noise of money-tills and chapel bells

FIRST VOICE

Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark  street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea, to the  bible-black airless attic over Jack Black the cobbler’s  shop where alone and savagely Jack Black sleeps in a  nightshirt tied to his ankles with elastic and dreams of

SECOND VOICE

chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried  double bed of the wood, flogging the tosspots in the  spit-and-sawdust, driving out the bare bold girls from the  sixpenny hops of his nightmares.

JACK BLACK (Loudly)

Ach y fi!

Ach y fi!

FIRST VOICE

Evans the Death, the undertaker,

SECOND VOICE

laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes as  he sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the  goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into  the field where his mother is making welsh-cakes 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.

FIRST VOICE

And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker’s,  lie, alone, the seventeen snoring gentle stone of Mister  Waldo, rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist, catdoctor, quack,  his fat pink hands, palms 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

MOTHER

This little piggy went to market

This little piggy stayed at home

This little piggy had roast beef

This little piggy had none

And this little piggy went

LITTLE BOY

wee wee wee wee wee

MOTHER

all the way home to

WIFE (Screaming)

Waldo! Wal-do!

MR WALDO

Yes, Blodwen love?

WIFE

Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Poor Mrs Waldo

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

What she puts up with

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Never should of married

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

If she didn’t had to

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Same as her mother

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

There’s a husband for you

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Bad as his father

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

And you know where he ended

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Up in the asylum

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Crying for his ma

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Every Saturday

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

He hasn’t got a log

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

And carrying on

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

With that Mrs Beattie Morris

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Up in the quarry

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

And seen her baby

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

It’s got his nose

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Oh it makes my heart bleed

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

What he’ll do for drink

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

He sold the pianola to

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

And her sewing machine

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Falling in the gutter

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Talking to the lamp-post

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Using language

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Singing in the w

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Poor Mrs Waldo

WIFE (Tearfully)

…Oh, Waldo, Waldo!

MR WALDO

Hush, love, hush. I’m widower Waldo now.

MOTHER (Screaming)

Waldo, Wal-do!

LITTLE BOY

Yes, our mum?

MOTHER

Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Black as a chimbley

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Ringing doorbells

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Breaking windows

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Making mudpies

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Stealing currants

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Chalking words

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Saw him in the bushes

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Playing mwchins

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Send him to bed without any supper

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Give him sennapods and lock him in the dark

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Off to the reformatory

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Off to the reformatory

TOGETHER

Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.

ANOTHER MOTHER (Screaming)

Waldo, Wal-do! what you doing with our Matti?

LITTLE BOY

Give us a kiss, Matti Richards.

LITTLE GIRL

Give us a penny then.

MR WALDO

I only got a halfpenny.

FIRST WOMAN

Lips is a penny.

PREACHER

Will you take this woman Matti Richards

SECOND WOMAN

Dulcie Prothero

THIRD WOMAN

Effie Bevan

FOURTH WOMAN

Lil the Gluepot

FIFTH WOMAN

Mrs Flusher

WIFE

Blodwen Bowen

PREACHER

To be your awful wedded wife

LITTLE BOY (Screaming)

No, no, no!

FIRST VOICE

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.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Mr Ogmore!

Mr Pritchard!

It is time to inhale your balsam.

MR OGMORE

Oh, Mrs Ogmore!

MR PRITCHARD

Oh, Mrs Pritchard!

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Soon it will be time to get up.

Tell me your tasks, in order.

MR OGMORE

I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

MR PRITCHARD

I must take my cold bath which is good for me.

MR OGMORE

I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.

MR PRITCHARD

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

MR OGMORE

I must blow my nose.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

In the garden, if you please.

MR OGMORE

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

MR PRITCHARD

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

MR OGMORE

I must boil the drinking water because of germs.

MR PRITCHARD

I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin.

MR OGMORE

And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

MR PRITCHARD

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

In the woodshed, if you please.

MR PRITCHARD

And dust the parlour and spray the canary.

MR OGMORE

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

MR PRITCHARD

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

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

FIRST VOICE

In Butcher Beynon’s, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher,  dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock  of chicken’s feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz  curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise,  a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper  carrier.

GOSSAMER BEYNON

At last, my love,

FIRST VOICE

sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

ORGAN MORGAN

Help,

SECOND VOICE

cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,

ORGAN MORGAN

There is perturbation and music in Coronation Street! All  the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing  opera. P.C. Attila Rees has got his truncheon out and is  playing cadenzas by the pump, the cows from Sunday Meadow  ring like reindeer, and on the roof of Handel Villa see the  Women’s Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon.

FIRST VOICE

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are  sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless,  salt and brown, like two old kippers In a box.

And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts,  all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the knees on  the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs  Utah Watkins.

UTAH WATKINS (Yawning)

Thirty — four, thirty — five, thirty — six, forty — eight, eighty-nine…

MRS UTAH WATKINS (Bleating)

Knit one slip one

Knit two together

Pass the slipstitch over…

FIRST VOICE

Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying his churns into the Dewi River,

OCKY MILKMAN (Whispering)

regardless of expense,

FIRST VOICE

and weeping like a funeral.

SECOND VOICE

Cherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his but nothing  flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a  fish. He drinks the fish.

FIRST VOICE

P.C. Attila Rees lumps out of bed, dead to the dar and still  foghorning, and drags out his helmet from under the bed;  but deep in the backyard lock-up of his slee a mean voice  murmurs

A VOICE (Murmuring)

You’ll be sorry for this in the morning,

FIRST VOICE

and he heave-ho’s back to bed. His helmet swashes in the dark.

SECOND VOICE

Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen miles  to deliver the post as he does every day of the night, and  rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.

MRS WILLY NILLY

Don’t spank me, please, teacher,

SECOND VOICE

whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her married  life she has been late for school.

FIRST VOICE

Sinbad Sailors, over the taproom of the Sailors Arms, hugs  his damp pillow whose secret name is Gossamer Beynon.

A mogul catches Lily Smalls in the wash-house.

LILY SMALLS

Ooh, you old mogul!

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, peals 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 Mister Right to  leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a  brilliantined trout.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE (Very close and softly, drawing out the words)

Call me Dolores

Like they do in the stories.

FIRST VOICE

Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in  the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and  gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and  picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave  of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she  wasn’t looking and never kissed her again although she was  looking all the time.

And the Inspectors of Cruelty fly down into Mrs Butcher  Brynon’s dream to persecute Mr Beynon for selling

BUTCHER BEYNON

owlmeat, dogs’ eyes, manchop.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Beynon, in butcher’s bloodied apron, spring-heels down  Coronation Street, a finger, not his own, in his mouth.  Straightfaced in his cunning sleep he pulls the legs of  his dreams and

BUTCHER BEYNON

hunting on pigback shoots down the wild giblets.

ORGAN MORGAN (High and softly)

Help!

GOSSAMER BEYNON (Softly)

My foxy darling.

FIRST VOICE

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the

SECOND VOICE

titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and  bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva  and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks  and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine  and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

FIRST VOICE

The owls are hunting. Look, over Bethesda gravestones one  hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved  Wife. 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

REV. ELI JENKINS

Eisteddfodau.

SECOND VOICE

He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn,  all night long in his druid’s seedy nightie in a beer-tent  black with parchs.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep, pretends to be sleeping, spies foxy round the droop of his nightcap and pssst! whistles up

MR PUGH

Murder.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Organ Morgan, groceress, coiled grey like a dormouse,  her paws to her ears, conjures

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Silence.

SECOND VOICE

She sleeps very dulcet in a cove of wool, and trumpeting

Organ Morgan at her side snores no louder than a spider.

FIRST VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors dreams of

MARY ANN SAILORS

The Garden of Eden.

FIRST VOICE

She comes in her smock-frock and clogs

MARY ANN SAILORS

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  gippo’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.

FIRST VOICE

In Donkey Street, so furred with sleep, Dai Bread, Polly  Garter, Nogood Boyo, and Lord Cut-Glass sigh before the  dawn that is about to be and dream of

DAI BREAD

Harems.

POLLY GARTER

Babies.

NOGOOD BOYO

Nothing.

LORD CUT-GLASS

Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.

FIRST VOICE

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. An owl flies I home past  Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak. And the dawn inches up.

[One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating

FIRST VOICE

Stand on this hill. This is Llaregyb 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 woodpigeons mooning in bed. A dog  barks in his sleep, farmyards away. The town ripples like a  lake in the waking haze.

VOICE OF A GUIDE-BOOK

Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets  and the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that  constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may,  indeed, be called a ‘backwater of life’ without disrespect  to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality  of their own. The main street, Coronation Street, consists,  for the most part, of humble, two-storied houses many of which  attempt to achieve some measure of gaiety by prinking  themselves out in crude colours and by the liberal use of  pinkwash, though there are remaining a few eighteenth-century  houses of more pretension, if, on the whole, in a sad state  of disrepair. Though there is little to attract the hillclimber,  the healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist,  the contemplative may, if sufficiently attracted to spare  it some leisurely hours, find, in its cobbled streets and  its little fishing harbour, in its several curious customs,  and in the conversation of its local ‘characters,’ some of  that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in  towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the times.  The River Dewi is said to abound in trout, but is much poached.  The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of  no architectural interest.

[A cock crows

FIRST VOICE

The principality of the sky lightens now, over our green  hill, into spring morning larked and crowed and belling.

[Slow bell notes

FIRST VOICE

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.

SECOND VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, in Bethesda House, gropes out of  bed into his preacher’s black, combs back his bard’s white  hair, forgets to wash, pads barefoot downstairs, opens the  front door, stands in the doorway and, looking out at the  day and up at the eternal hill, and hearing the sea break  and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses and tells  them softly to empty Coronation Street that is rising and  raising its blinds.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Dear Gwalia! I know there are

Towns lovelier than ours,

And fairer hills and loftier far,

And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring

And bright with birds’ adorning,

And sweeter bards than I to sing

Their praise this beauteous morning.

By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,

Or Moel yr Wyddfa’s glory,

Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,

Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,

By Penmaenmawr defiant,

Llaregyb Hill a molehill seems,

A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

Taff and Towy broad and free,

Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,

Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,

Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

A baby on a rushy bed.

By Carreg Cennen, King of time,

Our Heron Head is only

A bit of stone with seaweed spread

Where gulls come to be lonely.

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

By Golden Grove ‘neath Grongar,

But let me choose and oh! I should

Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

And hear the Dewi sing all day,

And never, never leave the town.

SECOND VOICE

The Reverend Jenkins closes the front door. His morning  service is over.

[Slow bell notes

FIRST VOICE

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 ring in Mrs  Beynon’s kitchen, and looks at herself in Mr Beynon’s  shaving-glass over the sink, and sees:

LILY SMALLS

Oh there’s a face!

Where you get that hair from?

Got it from a 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.

Come on, Lily.

Cross your heart then?

Cross my heart.

FIRST VOICE

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,  she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.

MRS BEYNON (Loudly, from above)

Lily!

LILY SMALLS (Loudly)

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Where’s my tea, girl?

LILY SMALLS

(Softly) Where d’you think? In the cat-box?

(Loudly) Coming up, mum.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morning  tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs

MR. PUGH

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… [Door creaks open

…nice tea, dear.

MRS PUGH

Too much sugar.

MR PUGH

You haven’t tasted it yet, dear.

MRS PUGH

Too much milk, then. Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?

MR PUGH

Yes, dear.

MRS PUGH

Then it’s time to get up. Give me my glasses.

No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out.

I want to see

SECOND VOICE

Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the  front step.

MRS PUGH

She’s tucked her dress in her bloomers—oh, the baggage!

SECOND VOICE

P.C. Attila Rees, ox-broad, barge-booted, stamping out of  Handcuff House in a heavy beef-red huff, black browed under  his damp helmet…

MRS PUGH

He’s going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words,

MR PUGH

What for, dear?

MRS PUGH

For having babies.

SECOND VOICE

…and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the  sea is still there.

FIRST VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors, opening her bedroom window above the  taproom and calling out to the heavens

MARY ANN SAILORS

I’m eighty-five years three months and a day!

MRS PUGH

I will say this for her, she never makes a mistake.

FIRST VOICE

Organ Morgan at his bedroom window playing chords on the  sill to the morning fishwife gulls who, heckling over Donkey  Street, observe

DAI BREAD

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.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

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. There’s a lovely morning!  How’s your boils this morning? Isn’t that good news now,  it’s a change to sit down. Ta, Mrs Sarah.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

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.

LORD CUT-GLASS

Me, Lord Cut-Glass, in an old frock-coat belonged to Eli  Jenkins and a pair of postman’s trousers from Bethesda  Jumble, running out of doors to empty slops—mind there,  Rover!—and then running in again, tick tock.

NOGOOD BO YO

Me, Nogood Boyo, up to no good in the wash-house

MISS PRICE

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.

POLLY GARTER

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?

[Single long high chord on strings

FIRST VOICE

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 OgmorePritchard, 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

MARY ANN SAILORS

praises the Lord who made porridge.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh

MR PUGH

remembers ground glass as he juggles his omelet.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Pugh

MRS PUGH

nags the salt-cellar.

FIRST VOICE

Willy Nilly postman

WILLY NILLY

downs his last bucket of black brackish tea and rumbles out  bandy to the clucking back where the hens twitch and grieve  for their tea-soaked sops.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Willy Nilly

MRS WILLY NILLY

full of tea to her double-chinned brim broods and bubbles  over her coven of kettles on the hissing hot range always  ready to steam open the mail.

FIRST VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins

REV. ELI JENKINS

finds a rhyme and dips his pen in his cocoa.

FIRST VOICE

Lord Cut-Glass in his ticking kitchen

LORD CUT-GLASS

scampers from clock to clock, a bunch of clock-keys in one  hand, a fish-head in the other.

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat in his galley

CAPTAIN CAT

blind and fine-fingered savours his sea-fry.

FIRST VOICE

Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen, in their Donkey Street room that is  bedroom, parlour, kitchen, and scullery, sit down to last  night’s supper of onions boiled in their overcoats and broth  of spuds and baconrind and leeks and bones.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

See that smudge on the wall by the picture of Auntie Blossom?

That’s where you threw the sago.

[Cherry Owen laughs with delight

MRS CHERRY OWEN

You only missed me by a inch.

CHERRY OWEN

I always miss Auntie Blossom too.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Remember last night? In you reeled, my boy, as drunk as a  deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout  and you looked at me and you said, ‘God has come home!’ you  said, and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and  bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels.

CHERRY OWEN

Was I wounded?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you took off your trousers and you said, ‘Does  anybody want a fight!’ Oh, you old baboon.

CHERRY OWEN

Give me a kiss.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you sang ‘Bread of Heaven,’ tenor and bass.

CHERRY OWEN

I always sing ‘Bread of Heaven.’

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you did a little dance on the table.

CHERRY OWEN

I did?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Drop dead!

CHERRY OWEN

And then what did I do?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Then you cried like a baby and said you were a poor drunk  orphan with nowhere to go but the grave.

CHERRY OWEN

And what did I do next, my dear?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Then you danced on the table all over again and said you  were King Solomon Owen and I was your Mrs Sheba.

CHERRY OWEN (Softy)

And then?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then I got you into bed and you snored all night like  a brewery.

[Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen laugh delightedly together

FIRST VOICE

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  everymorning hullabaloo, and Mrs Beynon slips the gristly  bits under the tasselled tablecloth to her fat cat.

[Cat purrs

MRS BEYNON

She likes the liver, Ben.

MR BEYNON

She ought to do, Bess. It’s her brother’s.

MRS BEYNON (Screaming)

Oh, d’you hear that, Lily?

LILY SMALLS

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

We’re eating pusscat.

LILY SMALLS

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, you cat-butcher!

MR BEYNON

It was doctored, mind.

MRS BEYNON (Hysterical)

What’s that got to do with it?

MR BEYNON

Yesterday we had mole.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, Lily, Lily!

MR BEYNON

Monday, otter. Tuesday, shrews.

[Mrs Beynon screams

LILY SMALLS

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

MRS BEYNON

Don’t you dare say that about Mr Beynon.

LILY SMALLS

Everybody knows it, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Mr Beynon never tells a lie. Do you, Ben?

MR BEYNON

No, Bess. And now I am going out after the corgies, with my

little cleaver.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, Lily, Lily!

FIRST VOICE

Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson  of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The  ship’s clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past  eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed  still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always  opening time in the Sailors Arms.

SINBAD

Here’s to me, Sinbad.

FIRST VOICE

All over the town, babies and old men are cleaned and put into  their broken prams and wheeled on to the sunlit cockled cobbles  or out into the backyards under the dancing underclothes, and  left. A baby cries.

OLD MAN

I want my pipe and he wants his bottle.

[School bell rings

FIRST VOICE

Noses are wiped, heads picked, hair combed, paws scrubbed,  ears boxed, and the children shrilled off to school.

SECOND VOICE

Fishermen grumble to their nets. 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.

NOGOOD BOYO (Softly, lazily)

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

FIRST VOICE

He turns his head and looks up at Llaregyb 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

MR EDWARDS (Whispers)

I love Miss Price.

FIRST VOICE

Syrup is sold in the post-office. A car drives to market,  full of fowls and a farmer. Milk-churns stand at Coronation  Corner like short silver policemen. And, sitting at the  open window of Schooner House, blind Captain Cat hears all  the morning of the town.

[ School bell in background. Children’s voices. The noise of children’s feet on the cobbles

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly, to himself)

Maggie Richards, Ricky Rhys, Tommy Powell, our Sal, little  Gerwain, Billy Swansea with the dog’s voice, one of Mr  Waldo’s, nasty Humphrey, Jackie with the sniff…Where’s  Dicky’s Albie? and the boys from Ty-pant? Perhaps they got  the rash again.

[A sudden cry among the children’s voices

CAPTAIN CAT

Somebody’s hit Maggie Richards. Two to one it’s Billy Swansea.

Never trust a boy who barks.

[A burst of yelping crying

Right again! It’s Billy.

FIRST VOICE

And the children’s voices cry away.

[Postman’s rat-a-tat on door, distant

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly, to himself)

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 letter  to Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?

[Rat-a-tat, distant again

CAPTAIN CAT

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.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE -PRITCHARD

Good morning, postman.

WILLY NILLY

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.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

No.

WILLY NILLY (Persuasively)

You wouldn’t 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…

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

And come home at all hours covered with feathers. I don’t  want persons in my nice clean rooms breathing all over the  chairs…

WILLY NILLY

Cross my heart, he won’t breathe.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

…and putting their feet on my carpets and sneezing on my  china and sleeping in my sheets…

WILLY NILLY

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

[Door slams

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly)

And back she goes to the kitchen to polish the potatoes.

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat hears Willy Nilly’s feet heavy on the distant

cobbles.

CAPTAIN CAT

One, two, three, four, five…That’s Mrs Rose Cottage.  What’s to-day? To-day she gets the letter from her sister  in Gorslas. How’s the twins’ teeth?

He’s stopping at School House.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mrs Pugh. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won’t have a  gentleman in from Builth Wells because he’ll sleep in her  sheets, Mrs Rose Cottage’s sister in Gorslas’s twins have  got to have them out…

MRS PUGH

Give me the parcel.

WILLY NILLY

It’s for Mr Pugh, Mrs Pugh.

MRS PUGH

Never you mind. What’s inside it?

WILLY NILLY

A book called Lives of the Great Poisoners.

CAPTAIN CAT

That’s Manchester House.

WILLY NILLY

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.

MR EDWARDS

Have you got a letter from her?

WILLY NILLY

Miss Price loves you with all her heart. Smelling of lavender  to-day. 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 Llaregyb. Yours for ever. Then twenty-one X’s.

MR EDWARDS

Oh, Willy Nilly, she’s a ruby! Here’s my letter. Put it  into her hands now.

[Slow feet on cobbles, quicker feet approaching

CAPTAIN CAT

Mr Waldo hurrying to the Sailors Arms. Pint of stout with  a egg in it.

[Footsteps stop

(Softly) There’s a letter for him.

WILLY NILLY

It’s another paternity summons, Mr Waldo.

FIRST VOICE

The quick footsteps hurry on along the cobbles and up  three steps to the Sailors Arms.

MR WALDO (Calling out)

Quick, Sinbad. Pint of stout. And no egg in.

FIRST VOICE

People are moving now up and down the cobbled street.

CAPTAIN CAT

All the women are out this morning, in the sun. You can  tell it’s Spring. There goes Mrs Cherry, you can tell her  by her trotters, off she trots new as a daisy. Who’s that  talking by the pump? Mrs Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish.  What can you talk about flatfish? That’s Mrs Dai Bread  One, waltzing 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, miaow  and all. There goes Mrs Twenty-Three, important, the sun  gets up and goes down in her dewlap, when she shuts her  eyes, it’s night. High heels now, in the morning too, Mrs  Rose Cottage’s eldest Mae, seventeen and never been kissed  ho ho, going young and milking under my window to the  field with the nannygoats, she reminds me all the way.  Can’t hear what the women 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!

[Organ music, distant

CAPTAIN CAT

Organ Morgan’s at it early. You can tell it’s Spring.

FIRST VOICE

And he hears the noise of milk-cans.

CAPTAIN CAT

Ocky Milkman on his round. I will say this, his milk’s as  fresh as the dew. Half dew it is. Snuffle on, Ocky,  watering the town…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. ( Louder ) Hullo, Polly, who’s there?

POLLY GARTER (Off)

Me, love.

CAPTAIN CAT

That’s Polly Garter. (Softly) 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 pandering 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 feet in that wedding-ringed holy to-night though the waltzing breadwinners snatched from the cosy smoke of the Sailors Arms will grizzle and mope.

[A cock crows

CAPTAIN CAT

Too late, cock, too late

SECOND VOICE

for the town’s half over with its morning. The morning’s

busy as bees.

[Organ music fades into silence

FIRST VOICE

There’s the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles  of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, 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.

FIRST WOMAN

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard

SECOND WOMAN

la di da

FIRST WOMAN

got a man in Builth Wells

THIRD WOMAN

and he got a little telescope to look at birds

SECOND WOMAN

Willy Nilly said

THIRD WOMAN

Remember her first husband? He didn’t need a telescope

FIRST WOMAN

he looked at them undressing through the keyhole

THIRD WOMAN

and he used to shout Tallyho

SECOND WOMAN

but Mr Ogmore was a proper gentleman

FIRST WOMAN

even though he hanged his collie.

THIRD WOMAN

Seen Mrs Butcher Beynon?

SECOND WOMAN

she said Butcher Beynon put dogs in the mincer

FIRST WOMAN

go on, he’s pulling her leg

THIRD WOMAN

now don’t you dare tell her that, there’s a dear

SECOND WOMAN

or she’ll think he’s trying to pull it off and eat it,

FOURTH WOMAN

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

FIRST WOMAN

Look at that Nogood Boyo now

SECOND WOMAN

too lazy to wipe his snout

THIRD WOMAN

and going out fishing every day and all he ever brought

back was a Mrs Samuels

FIRST WOMAN

been in the water a week.

SECOND WOMAN

And look at Ocky Milkman’s wife that nobody’s ever seen

FIRST WOMAN

he keeps her in the cupboard with the empties

THIRD WOMAN

and think of Dai Bread with two wives

SECOND WOMAN

one for the daytime one for the night.

FOURTH WOMAN

Men are brutes on the quiet.

THIRD WOMAN

And how’s Organ Morgan, Mrs Morgan?

FIRST WOMAN

you look dead beat

SECOND WOMAN

it’s organ organ all the time with him

THIRD WOMAN

up every night until midnight playing the organ.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Oh, I’m a martyr to music.

FIRST VOICE

Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling  town. It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing  the birds to sing. Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and  the shells ring out. Llaregyb this snip of a morning is  wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters  springing in the young sun.

SECOND VOICE

Evans the Death presses hard with black gloves on the  coffin of his breast in case his hearts jumps out,

EVANS THE DEATH (Harshly)

Where’s your dignity. Lie down.

SECOND VOICE

Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon schoolmistress like spoon.

GOSSAMER BEYNON (Tearfully)

Oh, what can I do? I’ll never be refined if I twitch.

SECOND VOICE

Spring this strong morning foams in a flame in Jack Black  as he cobbles a high-heeled shoe for Mrs Dai Bread Two the  gypsy, but he hammers it sternly out.

JACK BLACK (To a hammer rhythm)

There is no leg belonging to the foot that belongs to this

shoe.

SECOND VOICE

The sun and the green breeze ship Captain Cat sea-memory  again.

CAPTAIN CAT

No, I’ll take the mulatto, by God, who’s captain here?

Parlez-vous jig jig, Madam?

SECOND VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors says very softly to herself as she looks  out at Llaregyb Hill from the bedroom where she was born

MARY ANN SAILORS (Loudly)

It is Spring in Llaregyb in the sun in my old age, and  this is the Chosen Land.

[A choir of children’s voices suddenly cries out on one, high, glad, long, sighing note

FIRST VOICE

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.

MRS WILLY NILLY

From Manchester House, Llaregyb. Sole Prop: Mr Mog Edwards  (late of Twll), Linendraper, Haberdasher, Master Tailor,  Costumier. For West End Negligee, Lingerie, Teagowns,  Evening Dress, Trousseaux, Layettes. Also Ready to Wear  for All Occasions. Economical Outfitting for Agricultural  Employment Our Speciality, Wardrobes Bought. Among Our  Satisfied Customers Ministers of Religion and J.P’s.  Fittings by Appointment. Advertising Weekly in the Twll Bugle. Beloved Myfanwy Price my Bride in Heaven,

MOG EDWARDS

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 to-day, 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 got a mermaid in your lap  he said and he lifted his hat. He is a proper Christian.  Not like Cherry Owen who said you should have thrown her  back he said. Business is very poorly. Polly 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 the 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.

MRS WILLY NILLY

And then a little message with a rubber stamp. Shop at Mog’s!!!

FIRST VOICE.

And Willy Nilly, rumbling, jockeys out again to the  three-seated shack called the House of Commons in the back  where the hens weep, and sees, in sudden Springshine,

SECOND VOICE

herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the

fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy  sea smooth to the sea’s end as it lulls in blue. Green and  gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers,  pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and  leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of  fishes through the cold sea-streets. But with blue lazy  eyes the fishermen gaze at that milkmaid whispering water  with no nick or ripple as though it blew great guns and  serpents and typhooned the town.

FISHERMAN

Too rough for fishing to-day.

SECOND VOICE

And they thank God, and gob at a gull for luck, and  moss-slow and silent make their way uphill, from the still  still sea, towards the Sailors Arms as the children

[School bell

FIRST VOICE

spank and scamper rough and singing out of school into the  draggletail yard. And Captain Cat at his window says soft  to himself the words of their song.

CAPTAIN CAT (To the beat of the singing)

Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail

Kept their baby in a

milking pail Flossie

Snail and Johnnie Crack

One would pull it out and one would put it back

O it’s my turn now said Flossie Snail

To take the baby from the milking pail

And it’s my turn now said Johnnie Crack

To smack it on the head and put it back

Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail

Kept their baby in a milking pail

One would put it back and one would pull it out

And all it had to drink was ale and stout

For Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail

Always used to say that stout and ale

Was good for a baby in a milking pail.

[Long pause

FIRST VOICE

The music of the spheres is heard distinctly over Milk  Wood. It is ‘The Rustle of Spring.’

SECOND VOICE

A glee-party sings in Bethesda Graveyard, gay but muffled.

FIRST VOICE

Vegetables make love above the tenors

SECOND VOICE

and dogs bark blue in the face.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases  the sunlight with a flywhisk, but even she cannot drive  out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls a primrose  grows.

SECOND VOICE

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.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

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

Aah!

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

What d’you see, lovie?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

I see a featherbed. With three pillows on it. And a text  above the bed. I can’t read what it says, there’s great  clouds blowing. Now they have blown away. God is Love, the  text says.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE (Delighted)

That’s our bed.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

And now it’s vanished. The sun’s spinning like a top.  Who’s this coming out of the sun? It’s a hairy little man  with big pink lips. He got a wall eye.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

It’s Dai, it’s Dai Bread!

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

Ssh! The featherbed’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. I le’s  climbing into bed.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Go on, go on.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

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 round one of the women.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Which one, which one?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

I can’t see any more. There’s great clouds blowing again.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Ach, the mean old clouds!

[Pause. The children’s singing fades

FIRST VOICE

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.

POLLY GARTER (Singing)

I loved a man whose name 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.

O 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.

O 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 Weazel is, the man for me.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation.

SECOND VOICE

And the Reverend Jenkins hurries on through the town to  visit the sick with jelly and poems.

FIRST VOICE

The town’s as full as a lovebird’s egg.

MR WALDO

There goes the Reverend,

FIRST VOICE

says Mr Waldo at the smoked herring brown window of the  unwashed Sailors Arms,

MR WALDO

with his brolly and his odes. Fill ‘em up, Sinbad, I’m on  the treacle to-day.

SECOND VOICE

The silent fishermen flush down their pints.

SINBAD

Oh, Mr Waldo,

FIRST VOICE

sighs Sinbad Sailors,

SINBAD

I dote on that Gossamer Beynon. She’s a lady all over.

FIRST VOICE

And Mr Waldo, who is thinking of a woman soft as Eve and  sharp as sciatica to share his bread-pudding bed, answers

MR WALDO

No lady that I know is

SINBAD

And if only grandma’d die, cross my heart I’d go down on  my knees Mr Waldo and I’d say Miss Gossamer I’d say

CHILDREN’S VOICES

When birds do sing hey ding a ding a ding

Sweet lovers love the Spring…

SECOND VOICE

Polly Garter sings, still on her knees,

POLLY GARTER

Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men

And I’ll never have such

CHILDREN

ding a ding

POLLY GARTER

again.

FIRST VOICE

And the morning school is over, and Captain Cat at his  curtained schooner’s porthole open to the Spring sun tides  hears the naughty forfeiting children tumble and rhyme on  the cobbles.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Gwennie call the boys

They make such a noise.

GIRL

Boys boys boys

Come along to me’.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys

Kiss Gwennie where she says

Or give her a penny.

Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me in Goosegog Lane

Or give me a penny.

What’s your name?

FIRST BOY

Billy.

GIRL

Kiss me in Goosegog Lane Billy

Or give me a penny silly.

FIRST BO Y

Gwennie Gwennie

I kiss you in Goosegog Lane.

Now I haven’t got to give you a penny.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys

Kiss Gwennie where she says

Or give her a penny.

Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill

Or give me a penny.

What’s your name?

SECOND BOY

Johnnie Cristo.

GIRL

Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill Johnnie Cristo

Or give me a penny mister.

SECOND BOY

Gwennie Gwennie

I kiss you on Llaregyb Hill.

Now I haven’t got to give you a penny.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys

Kiss Gwennie where she says

Or give her a penny.

Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me in Milk Wood

Or give me a penny.

What’s your name?

THIRD BOY

Dicky.

GIRL

Kiss me in Milk Wood Dicky

Or give me a penny quickly.

THIRD BOY

Gwennie Gwennie

I can’t kiss you in Milk Wood.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Gwennie ask him why.

GIRL

Why?

THIRD BOY

Because my mother says I mustn’t.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Cowardy cowardy custard

Give Gwennie a penny.

GIRL

Give me a penny.

THIRD BOY

I haven’t got any.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Put him in the river

Up to his liver

Quick quick Dirty Dick

Beat him on the bum

With a rhubarb stick.

Aiee!

Hush!

FIRST VOICE

And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and  squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away  downhill with his patched pants falling, and his  tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant  bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and  the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and  his mother’s shame and his father’s wickedness with the  loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It  all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum,  for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and welshcakes  and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her  arms, he’ll never forget as he paddles blind home through  the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle  and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies  sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is  cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round  buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that  rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, winegums, hundreds and  thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nougat to tug and  ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue  in girls’ curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood,  ice-cream comets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and  cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.

SECOND VOICE

Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school The sun hums down  through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of  her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and  kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.  Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street,  steaming ‘Gossamer,’ and strip her to the nipples and the  bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms, the only  woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on  her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing  cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.

GOSSAMER BEYNON

I don’t care if he is common,

SECOND VOICE

she whispers to her salad-day deep self,

GOSSAMER BEYNON

I want to gobble him up. I don’t care if he does drop his  aitches,

SECOND VOICE

she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world big-beamed  and Eve-hipped spring of her self,

GOSSAMER BEYNON

so long as he’s all cucumber and hooves.

SECOND VOICE

Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and  schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat,  with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher’s  unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled for ever from the  hungry hug of his eyes.

SINBAD SAILORS

Oh, Gossamer Beynon, why are you so proud?

SECOND VOICE

he grieves to his guinness,

SINBAD SAILORS

Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B, I wish I wish that you  were for me. I wish you were not so educated.

SECOND VOICE

She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the  world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror  of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration,  and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high with  chips and the kidneys of lambs.

FIRST VOICE

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, 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.

MRS PUGH

Persons with manners do not read at table,

FIRST VOICE

says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a  horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.

[Pause

MRS PUGH

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

MR PUGH

Pigs don’t read at table, dear.

FIRST VOICE

Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles  on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

MR PUGH

Pigs can’t read, my dear.

MRS PUGH

I know one who can.

FIRST VOICE

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.

MR PUGH

You know best, dear,

FIRST VOICE

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

MRS PUGH

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

MR PUGH

It’s a theological work, my dear. Lives of the Great   Saints.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the  dining-vault.

MRS PUGH

I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly  Garter. She was martyred again last night. Mrs Organ  Morgan saw her with Mr Waldo.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

And when they saw me they pretended they were looking for  nests,

SECOND VOICE

said Mrs Organ Morgan to her husband, with her mouth full  of fish as a pelican’s.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

But you don’t go nesting in long combinations, I said to  myself, like Mr Waldo was wearing, and your dress nearly  over your head like Polly Garter’s. Oh, they didn’t fool me.

SECOND VOICE

One big bird gulp, and the flounder’s gone. She licks her  lips and goes stabbing again.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

And when you think of all those babies she’s got, then all  I can say is she’d better give up bird nesting that’s all  I can say, it isn’t the right kind of hobby at all for a  woman that can’t say No even to midgets. Remember Bob  Spit? He wasn’t any bigger than a baby and he gave her  two. But they’re two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit  and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I  like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?

ORGAN MORGAN

Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Organ Morgan, you haven’t been listening to a word 1 said.  It’s organ organ all the time with you…

FIRST VOICE

And she bursts into tears, and, in the middle of her salty  howling, nimbly spears a small flatfish and pelicans it  whole.

ORGAN MORGAN

And then Palestrina,

SECOND VOICE

says Organ Morgan.

FIRST VOICE

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down  alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps  and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for  each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their  black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth  away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks,  china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like  Noah’s whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships,  clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers,  tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius  clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that  cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony  beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time  without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six  singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass  lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark  day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill,  but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different  times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime,  and tock.

SECOND VOICE

The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and  crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its  breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lordly  fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the  tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and  pillage down Armageddon Hill to his double-locked  rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the  bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

POLLY GARTER

And I’ll never have such loving again,

SECOND VOICE

pretty Polly hums and longs.

POLLY GARTER (Sings)

Now when farmers’ boys on the first fair day

Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,

Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms

For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms,

But I always think as we tumble into bed

Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead…

[A silence

FIRST VOICE

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-anddaisy dingles,  nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag  and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet  wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream  of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for  pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal  and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They  mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails  curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug,  after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey  Down.

MRS PUGH

Persons with manners,

SECOND VOICE

snaps Mrs cold Pugh,

MRS PUGH

do not nod at table.

FIRST VOICE

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.

MRS PUGH

You should wait until you retire to your sty,

SECOND VOICE

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.

MR PUGH

I beg your pardon, my dear,

SECOND VOICE

he murmurs with a wheedle.

FIRST VOICE

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 babel 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.

SECOND VOICE

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…

ROSIE PROBERT

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

SECOND VOICE

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

ROSIE PROBERT (Softly)

What seas did you see,

Tom Cat, Tom Cat,

In your sailoring days

Long long ago?

What sea beasts were

In the wavery green

When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT

I’ll tell you the truth.

Seas barking like

seals, Blue seas and green,

Seas covered with eels

And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas did you sail

Old whaler when

On the blubbery waves

Between Frisco and Wales

You were my bosun?

CAPTAIN CAT

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.

ROSIE PROBERT

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?

CAPTAIN CAT

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.

ROSIE PROBERT,

Knock twice, Jack,

At the door of my grave

And ask for Rosie.

CAPTAIN CAT

Rosie Probert.

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.

CHILD

Look,

FIRST VOICE

says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of Schooner House,

CHILD

Captain Cat is crying

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat is crying

CAPTAIN CAT

Come back, come back,

FIRST VOICE

up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night.

CHILD

He’s crying all over his nose,

FIRST VOICE

says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.

CHILD

He’s got a nose like strawberries,

FIRST VOICE

the child says; and then she forgets him too. She sees in the still middle of the bluebagged bay Nogood Boyo fishing from the Zanzibar.

CHILD

Nogood Boyo gave me three pennies yesterday but I wouldn’t,

FIRST VOICE

the child tells her mother.

SECOND VOICE

Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught

all day.

NOGOOD BOYO

Bloody funny fish!

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Dai Bread Two gypsies up his mind’s slow eye, dressed  only in a bangle.

NOGOOD BOYO

She’s wearing her nightgown. (Pleadingly) Would you like this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

No, I won’t!

NOGOOD BO YO

And a bite of my little apple?

SECOND VOICE

he offers with no hope.

FIRST VOICE

She shakes her brass nightgown, and he chases her out of  his mind; and when he comes gusting back, there in the  bloodshot centre of his eye a geisha girl grins and bows  in a kimono of ricepaper.

NOGOOD BO YO

I want to be good Boyo, but nobody’ll let me,

FIRST VOICE

he sighs as she writhes politely. The land fades, the sea  flocks silently away; and through the warm white cloud  where he lies, silky, tingling, uneasy Eastern music  undoes him in a Japanese minute.

SECOND VOICE

The afternoon buzzes like lazy bees round the flowers  round Mae Rose Cottage. Nearly asleep in the field of  nannygoats who hum and gently butt the sun, she blows love  on a puffball.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE (Lazily)

He loves me

He loves me not

He loves me

He loves me not

He loves me!—the dirty old fool.

SECOND VOICE

Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet-grass, seventeen  and never been sweet in the grass ho ho.

FIRST VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or  poem-room tells only the truth in his Lifework—the  Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography,  Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in—the White Book  of Llaregyb. Portraits of famous bards and preachers, all  fur and wool from the squint to the kneecaps, hang over  him heavy as sheep, next to faint lady watercolours of  pale green Milk Wood like a lettuce salad dying. His  mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her  wedding-ring waist and bust like a black-clothed  dining-table suffers in her stays.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Oh angels be careful there with your knives and forks,

FIRST VOICE

he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau,  who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was  scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping  with his weakness in the corn. He lost all ambition and  died, with one leg.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Poor Dad,

SECOND VOICE

grieves the Reverend Eli,

REV. ELI JENKINS

to die of drink and agriculture.

SECOND VOICE

Farmer Watkins in Salt Lake Farm hates his cattle on the  hill as he ho’s them in to milking.

UTAH WATKINS (In a fury)

Damn you, you damned dairies!

SECOND VOICE

A cow kisses him.

UTAH WATKINS

Bite her to death!

SECOND VOICE

he shouts to his deaf dog who smiles and licks his hands.

UTAH WATKINS

Gore him, sit on him, Daisy!

SECOND VOICE

he bawls to the cow who barbed him with her tongue, and  she moos gentle words as he raves and dances among his  summerbreathed slaves walking delicately to the farm. The  coming of the end of the Spring day is already reflected  in the lakes of their great eyes. Bessie Bighead greets  them by the names she gave them when they were maidens.

BESSIE BIGHEAD

Peg, Meg, Buttercup, Moll,

Fan from the Castle,

Theodosia and Daisy.

SECOND VOICE

They bow their heads.

FIRST VOICE

Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Llaregyb and  you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor  glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there  with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first  lost love. Conceived in Milk Wood, born in a barn, wrapped  in paper, left on a doorstep, bigheaded and bass-voiced  she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen kissed her  when she wasn’t looking because he was dared. Now in the  light she’ll work, sing, milk, say the cows’ sweet names  and sleep until the night sucks out her soul and spits it  into the sky. In her life-long low light, holily Bessie  milks the fond lake-eyed cows as dusk showers slowly down  over byre, sea and town.

Utah Watkins curses through the farmyard on a carthorse.

UTAH WATKINS

Gallop, you bleeding cripple!

FIRST VOICE

and the huge horse neighs softly as though he had given it a lump of sugar.

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. Llaregyb 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.

MR PRITCHARD

You first, Mr Ogmore.

MR OGMORE

After you, Mr Pritchard.

MR PRITCHARD

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

FIRST VOICE

And in through the keyhole, with tears where their eyes  once were, they ooze and grumble.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Husbands,

FIRST VOICE

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.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

I love you both.

MR OGMORE (With terror)

Oh, Mrs Ogmore.

MR PRITCHARD (With horror)

Oh, Mrs Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your tasks in  order.

MR OGMORE AND MR PRITCHARD

We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD (Coldly)

And then you must take them off.

SECOND VOICE

Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose Cottage, still lying in  clover, listens to the nannygoats chew, draws circles of  lipstick round her nipples.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE

I’m fast. I’m a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I’m seventeen. I’ll go to hell,

SECOND VOICE

she tells the goats.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE

You just wait. I’ll sin till I blow up!

SECOND VOICE

She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen; the goats  champ and sneer.

FIRST VOICE

And at the doorway of Bethesda House, the Reverend Jenkins  recites to Llaregyb Hill his sunset poem.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Every morning when I wake,

Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,

O please to keep Thy lovely eye

On all poor creatures born to die

And every evening at sun-down

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 all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say, good-bye—but just for now!

FIRST VOICE

Jack Black prepares once more to meet his Satan in the  Wood. He grinds his night-teeth, closes his eyes, climbs  into his religious trousers, their flies sewn up with  cobbler’s thread, and pads out, torched and bibled,  grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk.

JACK BLACK

Off to Gomorrah!

SECOND VOICE

And Lily Smalls is up to Nogood Boyo in the wash-house.

FIRST VOICE

And Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the  week, goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon  as he does every night.

CHERRY OWEN

I always say she’s got two husbands,

FIRST VOICE

says Cherry Owen,

CHERRY OWEN

one drunk and one sober.

FIRST VOICE

And Mrs Cherry simply says

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And aren’t I a lucky woman? Because I love them both.

SINBAD

Evening, Cherry.

CHERRY OWEN

Evening, Sinbad.

SINBAD

What’ll you have?

CHERRY OWEN

Too much.

SINBAD

The Sailors Arms is always open…

FIRST VOICE

Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,

SINBAD

…oh, Gossamer, open yours!

FIRST VOICE

Dusk is drowned for ever until to-morrow, It is all at  once night now, The windy town is a hill of windows, and  from the larrupped waves the lights of the lamps in the  windows call back the day and the dead that have run away  to sea. All over the calling dark, babies and old men are  bribed and lullabied to sleep.

FIRST WOMAN’S VOICE

Hushabye, baby, the sandman is coming…

SECOND WOMAN’S VOICE (Singing)

Rockabye, grandpa, in the tree top,

When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

Down will come grandpa, whiskers and all.

FIRST VOICE

Or their daughters cover up the old unwinking men like  parrots, and in their little dark in the lit and bustling  young kitchen corners, all night long they watch,  beady-eyed, the long night through in case death catches  them asleep.

SECOND VOICE

Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms,  powder and curl for the Dance of the World.

[Accordion music: dim

They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or  come-hithering faces for the young men in the street  outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the  all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.

[Accordion music louder, then fading under

FIRST VOICE

The drinkers in the Sailors Arms drink to the failure of  the dance.

A DRINKER

Down with the waltzing and the skipping.

CHERRY OWEN

Dancing isn’t natural,

FIRST VOICE

righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed seventeen  pints of flat, warm, thin, Welsh, bitter beer.

SECOND VOICE

A farmer’s lantern glimmers, a spark on Llaregyb hillside.

[Accordion music fades into silence

FIRST VOICE

Llaregyb Hill, writes the Reverend Jenkins in his poem-room,

REV. ELI JENKINS

Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of  peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the  Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards  made themselves a wife out of flowers.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:

MR WALDO

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.

I did not need a knife and fork

Or a bib up to my chin

To dine on a dish of watercress

And a jug of parsnip gin.

Did you ever hear a growing boy

To live so cruel cheap

On grub that has no flesh and bones

And liquor that makes you weep?

Sweep sweep chimbley sweep,

I wept through Pembroke City

Poor and barefoot in the snow

Till a kind young woman took pity.

Poor little chimbley sweep she said

Black as the ace of spades

O nobody’s swept my chimbley

Since my husband went his ways

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

She sighed to me with a blush

Come and sweep my chimbley

Come and sweep my chimbley

Bring along your chimbley brush!

FIRST VOICE

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.

CAPTAIN CAT

Dancing Williams!

FIRST DROWNED

Still dancing.

CAPTAIN CAT

Jonah Jarvis

THIRD DROWNED

Still.

FIRST DROWNED

Curly Bevan’s skull.

ROSIE PROBERT

Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.

FIRST VOICE

The dead come out in their Sunday best.

SECOND VOICE

Listen to the night breaking.

FIRST VOICE

Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees  Bach lying on a tombstone.

ORGAN MORGAN

Johann Sebastian!

CHERRY OWEN (Drunkenly)

Who?

ORGAN MORGAN

Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach fach

CHERRY OWEN

To hell with you,

FIRST VOICE

says Cherry Owen who is resting on the tombstone on his  way home.

Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from  one another at the top and the sea end of the town write  their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm  White Book of Llaregyb you will find the little maps of  the islands of their contentment.

MYFANWY PRICE

Oh, my Mog, I am yours for ever.

FIRST VOICE

And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat  neverdull room which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.

MOG EDWARDS

Come to my arms, Myfanwy.

FIRST VOICE

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. Six feet deep that  name sings in the cold earth.

POLLY GARTER (Sings)

But I always think as we tumble into bed

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

FIRST VOICE

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 Heaven on earth and the  chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb’s land, that is  the fairday farmhands’ 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.

The End

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19/01/2008

Date:

19/01/2008