[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 s*****r 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
b***** 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 BOYO
And a b*** 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 BOYO
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 b*** 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)
d*** you, you d***ed 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, b***ercup, 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.
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 s*****r 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
b***** 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 BOYO
And a b*** 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 BOYO
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 b*** 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)
d*** you, you d***ed 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, b***ercup, 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.