Dylan Thomas The Town Smells Of Seaweed And Breakfast
[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.