[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, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight 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 web foot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. "Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms 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-before-dawn 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 Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, 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 loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight 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 coms 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 seacaptain, 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 the ormolu clock...
CAPTAIN CAT
Aye, aye. Curly.
SECOND DROWNED
Tell my missus no my 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? 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, Samson-syrup-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 Welshcakes in the snow, and steals a fistfull 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 leg
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
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
Erne 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-defyi 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.
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-piece 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, sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

ORGAN MORGAN
Help, cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,
there is perturbation and music in Coronation Street! All the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing opera. P.C. Atilla 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 fences 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 slipstich 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 lips 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 dark, and still fog-horning, and drags out his helmet from under the bed; but deep in the backyard lock-up of his sleep 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, peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for 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 Beynon's dream to persecute Mr Beynon for selling
BUTCHER BEYNON
owl meat, dogs' eyes, manchop.

SECOND VOICE
Mr Beynon, in butcher's bloodied apron, springheels down Coronation Street, a finger, not bis 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, whalejuice 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.ELIJENKINS
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.
Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fast 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 clothes-pegs, 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
DAIBREAD
Harems.  [NB. Some versions have “Turkish girls. Horizontal.”]
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 home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak.
And the dawn inches up.
[One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating on.]

FIRST VOICE
Stand on this hill. This is Llareggub Hill, old as the hills, high, cool, and green, and from this small circle of stones, made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon's Billy, you can see all the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.
You can hear the love-sick 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 bylanes and scattered farmsteads that constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may, indeed, be called a 'back-water 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 hillclim-ber, 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 today 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 y Wyddfa's glory,

Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,

Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,

By Penmaen Mawr defiant,

Llareggub Hill a molehill seems,

A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senni, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

Taff and Towy broad and free,

Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulas, 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, stomping 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, my 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 on 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 BOYO
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 homemade 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 note held by Welsh male voices.]

FIRST VOICE
Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchens. The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down from Bay View, where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, in smock and turban, big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread and sips lemonrind 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 omelette.

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 i rumbles out bandy to the clucking back where the j 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 us a kiss.
MRS CHERRY OWEN
And then you sang 'Aberystwyth', tenor and bass.
CHERRY OWEN
I always sing 'Aberystwyth'.
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 [Softly]
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 corgis, with my little cleaver,
MRS BEYNON
Oh, Lily, Lily!

FIRST VOICE
Up the street, in the Sailors' Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann the Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The ship's clock in the bar says half past 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.
[Children's voices, up and out.]

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 Llareggub Hill, and sees, among green lathered trees, the white houses of the strewn away farms, where farmboys whistle, dogs shout, cows low, but all too far away for him, or you, to hear. And in the town, the shops squeak open. Mr Edwards, in butterfly-collar and straw-hat at the doorway of Manchester House, measures, with his eye, the dawdlers by, for striped flannel shirts and shrouds and flowery blouses, and bellows to himself, in the darkness behind his eye:
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. He hears the voices of children and the noise of children's feet on the cobbles. 

[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.]

CAPTAIN CAT

Right again! That'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...
One, two, three, four, five ... That's Mrs Rose-Cottage. What's today? Today 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 today. She's down to the last of the elderflower wine but the quince jam's bearing up and she's knitting roses on the doilies. Last week she sold three jars of boiled sweets, pound of humbugs, half a box of jellybabies and six coloured photos of Llareggub. Yours for ever. Then twenty-one X's.
MR EDWARDS
Oh, Willy Nilly, she's a ruby! Here's my letter. Put it into her hands now.
Down the street comes Willy Nilly. And Captain Cat hears other steps approaching. [Slow feet on cobbles, quicker feet approaching.]
CAPTAIN CAT
Mr Waldo hurrying to the Sailors' Arms. Pint of stout with an 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 gandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood for your naughty mothering arms and body like a wardrobe, love? Scrub the floors of the Welfare Hall for the Mothers' Union Social Dance, you're one mother won't wriggle her roly poly bum or pat her fat little buttery foot in that wedding-ringed holy tonight though the waltzing breadwinners snatched from the cosy smoke of the Sailors' Arms will grizzle and mope.
[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 horseshoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-bounced 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. Llareggub this snip of a morning is wild fruit 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 heart jumps out.
EVANS THE DEATH [Harsh]
Where's your dignity. Lie down.

SECOND VOICE

Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon schoolmistress like a spoon.
GOSSAMER BEYNON [Tearful]

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?
Mary Ann the Sailors says very softly to herself as she looks out at Llareggub Hill from the bedroom where she was born,
MARY ANN SAILORS [Loudly]
It is Spring in Llareggub 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, Llareggub. Sole Prop: Mr Mog Edwards (late of Twil), 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 andJ.P.'s. Fittings by Appointment. Advertising Weekly in the Twil 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 today all the colours in the rainbow. I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair a white one but it cannot be. I dreamed last night you were all dripping wet and you sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins went down the street. I see you 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 milk-mild whispering water with no ruck or ripple as though it blew great guns and serpents and typhooned the town.
FISHERMAN
Too rough for fishing today.

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 [Keeping 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

0 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 her fingerbowls, 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 scarlet 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 DAIBREAD 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 DAIBREAD ONE
It's Dai, it's Dai Bread!
MRS DAIBREAD 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. He's climbing into bed.
MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Go on, go on.
MRS DAIBREAD 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 tonight.
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