One Moonlit Night Read online

  To Mati and Mari

  for

  their endless

  patience and tolerance

  FOREWORD

  by

  Jan Morris

  Long ago in a Fleet Street wine bar Caradog Prichard was pointed out to me as a curiosity. He was a well-respected Welsh journalist on the Daily Telegraph, I was told, but also an eminent poet in the Welsh language. He had left his traditional village in the mountains when he was no more than a boy, he had lived in London for many years, and his widowed mother, they said, had long been immured in a Welsh lunatic asylum. They certainly sounded curious circumstances, but Prichard looked ordinary enough to me, middle-aged, amiable and gregarious, and so far as I can remember I never thought of him again until years later when I read Un Nos Ola Leuad, One Moonlit Night, his esoteric masterpiece.

  I happen to agree with those French theorists who used to maintain that authorship was irrelevant to a book, that a work of art stood existentially on its own, liberated from its creator and unneedful of audience. I believe One Moonlit Night should ideally be read without commentary or critical apparatus. However, more than most novels it is so impregnated with its author’s profoundest experiences of real life—the curious circumstances I had first learnt about in that wine bar—that for once, I think, explanations are necessary.

  Prichard’s ‘traditional village in the mountains’, where he was born in 1904, was the substantial slate-quarrying town of Bethesda in Caernarfonshire. His quarryman father was accidentally killed there when Caradog was five months old, leaving his mother to raise him and two elder brothers in conditions of harsh poverty. Physically Bethesda is much the same today, and it is easy enough to follow the novel’s winding trails through the grey streets and up the mountain flanks. Metaphysically it is very different, for the quarries are dead, the church and chapel life of the people is mostly moribund, many more English settlers have arrived and the sense of homogenous community which gives ironic power to One Moonlit Night is fast becoming nostalgic memory.

  Prichard did indeed leave Bethesda when he was an adolescent, first to work as a journalist on local papers, later to go to London, where he became a pillar of the London Welsh community and remained a faithful (and highly successful) competitor in national eisteddfods in Wales. And since the early 1920s his mother really had been a patient in a mental hospital at Denbigh, dying there in 1954.

  Throw in two years of army and government service during and after the Second World War, and there you have a lifetime of embittering sadness, enough to make a neurotic misanthrope of a saint. Despite his kindly and gregarious character, despite a happy marriage and success both as a journalist and as a poet, Prichard was tragically scarred within. He became obsessed by the notion of suicide, and once tried to kill himself; he was tormented by the thought of his poor mad mother struggling to keep her family clothed and fed; and he was undoubtedly afflicted, like so many Welsh people who have chosen to live in exile, by pangs of homesickness and perhaps of guilt.

  Yet the miracle is that One Moonlit Night is, to my mind, essentially a sweet-natured book, seldom bitter, often funny, and in the end ambiguously serene. It was first published in 1961. That was a time when established literary sensibilities in Wales had been knocked askew by the debunking of old assumptions—Prichard’s near-contemporary Caradog Evans was said to be the most hated man in Wales because of the rural hypocrisies and corruptions he exposed in his stories. It is notable that although One Moonlit Night records suicides, sexual perversions, insanity, adulteries and murder in that village in the mountains, the book was an instant success among Welsh readers of all kinds. It was essentially a kind book, and perhaps that was why.

  * * *

  In my view One Moonlit Night is beyond rational analysis. It is a sort of dream. Prichard himself described it as ‘an unreal picture, seen in the twilight and in the light of the moon’, and it is illuminated throughout by a light which, like moonlight itself, seems disorienting, casting too many shadows, throwing too many structures into sudden relief. De Chirico might have illustrated it, with figures by the elder Bruegel.

  On the face of it the one logical thread of the book is provided by its narrative structure, outlined in the opening chapter. It tells the story of one day and a night, and it is told by a single, unnamed voice. But it turns out to be far from simple, because although the voice is that of a boy, sometimes it evidently speaks with the experience of a grown man, and three times in the course of the book it is superseded by mysteriously vatic pronouncements of no explicable origin, as though some deus ex machina has intervened.

  These eerie interruptions, couched in loftily poetical language, are all the more unsettling because at all other times the narrative voice is touchingly naive. It expresses itself throughout not merely in a broad north Walian vernacular, the lingua franca of the Bethesda quarry country, but also in the vocabulary and intonation of a small boy. He is a particularly engaging boy, too, innocently ready for fun and harmless mischief but precociously tender in his sympathies. He is grateful for small kindnesses. He is devoted—perhaps over-devoted—to his widowed mother. There is something wistful about him, one feels, which sets him apart from his fellows, and gives to those Olympian interjections a fateful suggestion of premonition.

  And it presently becomes clear that the premonition is of madness. The very first paragraph of the book suggests it, indeed, with its incongruous touch of the liturgical, its lack of punctuation and something strange about its tone of voice:

  I’ll go and ask Huw’s Mam if he can come out to play. Can Huw come out to play, Ο Queen of the Black Lake? No, he can’t, he’s in bed and that’s where you should be, you little monkey, instead of going round causing a riot at this time of night. Where were you two yesterday making mischief and driving village folk out of their minds?

  Where the two were yesterday is to be the ostensible plot of the book, but the Black Lake and the village folk out of their minds will remain with us to its last pages. In the first thirty-five pages of One Moonlit Night we come across a sadistic schoolmaster, a half-wit flasher in a street, an epileptic having a fit, a man with a knife at his wife’s throat, a corpse brought home from a lunatic asylum, a woman committed to a lunatic asylum, an eviction, rumours of sexual deviation, a woman locked in a coal shed, violent fisticuffs outside The Blue Bell, a couple fornicating in a wood, a horse dropping dead in its stable and somebody hanging himself in the lavatory. All this we witness through the sensibility of a small boy, more puzzled than aghast at what he sees, and when on page thirty-five he goes to bed on a bright moonlit night, tucked up with his Mam for comfort, God knows what we can expect in the morning.

  There’s a full moon tonight. Why won’t you let Huw come out to play, Ο Queen of the Black Lake?

  * * *

  As the boy wanders the town that day he remembers events of his life; but as he wanders he grows older too, and although he still speaks as a child he seems to see as an adult. Sometimes he is one age, sometimes another, and it is both as boy and as man that he recalls the tragic circumstances of his childhood—the loss of his two best friends, the loss of his mother when she is taken away to mental hospital, the grotesqueries of village life, the poverty and the presence somewhere of that ominous Black Lake. Death and madness are themes of the book, and as we peer through the moonlight we gradually realise that we are witnessing a slow descent into insanity. How much is real in the narrative, and how much is hallucinatory, we never discover. When we set foot on the banks of the Black Lake at last, we know we are in the company of a murderer, but how old he is, whether he is free or incarcerated, whether is mad or sane, just about to enter an abyss or recently escaped from one—all these questions are left so mistily
unresolved that we wonder whether the author himself, in his unnamed persona as the Bethesda boy, or as that ordinary-looking Fleet Street character of the wine bar, ever knew the answers.

  And yet … I speak only for myself, of course, but I have come back to One Moonlit Night time and again not for the tragedy of it, or even the haunting strangeness, but for the sweet pity of it all.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  In translating Un Nos Ola Leuad into English, I have relied heavily upon two principles: faithfulness in that I have tried to keep as close as possible to the meaning of the original text, while also tuning in to the sounds of the words, their relationships to each other and the hints and allusions which each word carries with it, and function in that I have striven to produce a narrative which will evoke in the English-language reader the same strong feelings that the original work evokes in the Welsh reader.

  The following paragraphs may be of help to readers unfamiliar with the history of Wales, its language and its culture.

  The expletive ‘Dew!’ In Welsh, as in English, expletives tend to be rooted in religion. The difference is that, in Welsh society, religious expletives are regarded as significantly more shocking than are the corresponding expressions in England. The mild expletive ‘Dew!’ occurs throughout the narrative of Un Nos Ola Leuad and has been retained in the translation. The word has no intrinsic meaning but is used throughout Wales as a means of approaching, yet ultimately avoiding, the very much stronger exclamation ‘Duw!’ (God).

  Placenames. Most of the novel’s placenames are reproduced in their original Welsh form. However, those names rich in symbolism or which carry essential meaning have been rendered into English. A glossary of these names can be found at the end of the book.

  Personal names. The use of hereditary or family surnames is a relatively recent phenomenon in Wales. The first surnames appeared about 1600 but, even then, the practice spread both slowly and cautiously. The result is that, today, just a handful of names dominates all others. However, the problems of identification inherent in the situation are overcome, at a local level, by the ingenious application of nicknames which are used in addition to, or instead of, the original surname—in One Moonlit Night, we meet characters such as Bob Milk Cart (a milkman), Owen the Coal (a fuel merchant), Johnny Beer Barrel (his father runs the pub), Price the School (a teacher), Little Bob School (Price’s son), Will Ellis Porter (a baggage carrier), Johnny Edwards Butcher (in the meat trade) and many, many more, including one of the best-known characters in Welsh literature—and probably the most lengthily named—Emyr, Little Owen the Coal’s Big Brother.

  Other names. ‘Settling-up Saturday’ (referred to on page 56) is the nickname given to the first Saturday of each month following the tâl mawr (big payout) in the mines and quarries the previous Friday night.

  I would like to thank Glenys Roberts for her help, advice, support and encouragement without which this translation would not have been possible. Diolch ο galon, Glenys.

  Philip Mitchell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Translator’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Afterword

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  I’LL GO AND ASK Huw’s Mam if he can come out to play. Can Huw come out to play, Ο Queen of the Black Lake? No, he can’t, he’s in bed and that’s where you should be, you little monkey, instead of going round causing a riot at this time of night. Where were you two yesterday making mischief and driving village folk out of their minds?

  What village folk out of their minds? It’s not us that’s driving them out of their minds, it’s them that are going out of their minds themselves. We weren’t anywhere yesterday except walking about. I got Go on there! and Whoa there! first thing in the morning, fetching the Tal Cafn cattle from Pen y Foel and picking a capful of mushrooms on Ffridd Wen after pulling up a few of Owen Gorlan’s potatoes for Mam on the way home.

  This is why Huw and me went to the back door of Margaret Lewis’s shop for a pennorth of apples, cos I hadn’t had any breakfast before I went to School cos Mam had gone to do the washing at the Vicarage. We were just finishing eating them as we got to School and the clock was striking nine. And I know who threw the clump of turf through the window while we were saying prayers, and hit Price the School on the side of the head while he was kneeling down. It was Owen, Mary Plums’s boy, and Little Dai from the Black Shop. They only left Standard Four at the beginning of the year. I saw them both legging it through the Graveyard just like two evil spirits among the gravestones.

  And we hadn’t done anything when Price the School caned us. He was in a terrible temper all morning. But when he came back from The Blue Bell after playtime with his face as red as a beetroot, he went berserk and started thrashing everybody. Huw and me just happened to get in the way of his cane. But after he went to Standard Four to fetch Little Jini Pen Cae and took her off with him through the far door, we didn’t see anything of him till the bell went for dinnertime.

  It was Huw wanting to go to the Quarry to tell Jini’s dad, that’s why we went along Post Lane. There was no school at our School in the afternoon because it was Ascension Day but there was school in the Chapel schools. We would have gone to the Quarry too except that there were a lot of people standing by Stallions Gate in front of Catrin Jane’s house in Lower Lane, and Little Will Policeman’s Dad was standing by the door watching two men carrying the furniture out and putting it in a pile in the middle of the lane and Catrin Jane had locked herself in the coal shed and was screaming and shouting: Go away, you devils, you’ve no right to go into my house. Dew, it was a fine afternoon as well. Never mind the old Quarry, said Huw, we’ll go for a picnic to the top of Rallt Ddu.

  That’s why we went to Ann Jones’s shop, because we only had enough money to buy one bottle of pop and we wanted four, and two currant cakes because Nell Fair View and Kate White Houses were coming after us. You go and buy one bottle, said Huw, I’ll get the others. He was a sly one, Huw. I’m sure Ann Jones had seen him but she was frightened of saying anything because she was afraid of you, O Queen of the Black Lake.

  Before the two girls caught up to us, who should come up Stables Lane and meet us by the Pen Lôn Gate but Little Harry the Clogs with his basket on his arm and laughing hee! hee! hee! through his beard. Give us a quick look, Harry, said Huw, and Harry put his basket down, and then he opened his flies and pulled his willy out. Hee! hee! hee! he said through his beard and pulled it back in again quick as wiand nk just like a jack-in-the-box. Hee! hee! hee! he said again then picked up his basket and off he went on his way. Hee! hee! hee! said the two girls behind us. Watch yourself, Nell Fair View, said Huw as we were going through the gate. And you as well, Kate White Houses, I said. But they still came after us through the gate.

  It was Huw who went first to hide behind the wall and then I did the same, and they only pretended to run across the field when we ran after them. It was Huw that caught Nell first and threw her onto the ground and lifted her skirt up. That’s why I did the same thing with Kate, because Huw had the pop bottles. I was only carrying the two currant cakes. And there they both were, lying on their backs with their skirts up with us two staring down at them.

  It was Huw that had the poacher’s pocket, that’s why he was carrying the bottles. But it was the two currant cakes I pulled out of my pocket that made Nell pull her skirt down and sit up and tell Kate to do the same. They k
new full well we were going to have a picnic.

  Dew! It was a fine afternoon. The sun was making the hay smell so good and the air was so clear I could see Mam putting clothes on the line at the bottom of Vicarage Field. That’s why it’s so fine, said Nell, because it’s Ascension Day. But Kate got up and started crying. I’ll tell my Mam, she said, crying like I don’t know what, and ran off home. And Nell went after her when she’d drunk her bottle of pop and scoffed a big piece of currant cake.

  Then Huw wanted to know why Church people went to church on Ascension Day and I said to him: Don’t you know, Huw? No, I don’t, Huw said. Well, because Jesus Christ went up to Heaven like a balloon on Thursday after He rose from the dead, of course. All the good people are going to rise from the dead, everyone in the Graveyard, no matter how heavy their gravestones are, and go up like balloons just like Jesus Christ. But it’s down to Hell we’ll be going, you’ll see, for stealing Ann Jones’s pop bottles.

  What are you doing, Huw?

  Making this pile of stumps into a cigarette so we can have a smoke. Moi can smoke coltsfoot leaves and he says he’s seen Little Harry the Clogs collecting dried dung on Post Lane and smoking that. Do you think Griffith Evans Braich will be allowed to go to Heaven after splitting his head open when he got killed on Bone Rhiwia in the quarry?

  He’s sure to be allowed to go, I said, cos the boys in the choir got tuppence each for going to the funeral.

  He’ll look horrible, said Huw. Try a little smoke.

  Heurch! Heurch! Dew, I feel sick. Would you like to work in the Quarry, Huw?

  Sure I would. I’m getting long trousers when I pass Standard Four, and Mam says I can go the minute I’m fourteen.

  I don’t want to go, Huw. Mam’s said I can try for a scholarship and go to County School if I pass, and then go and see the world and make a lot of money.