A Child's Christmas in Wales Quotes

“And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house, and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruing like a town crier in Pompeii.”

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep.”

“In goes my hand into that whool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rin of the carol singing sea, and our come Mrs Prothero and the firemen.

“Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees.

“Dylan Thomas at his best. He has captured the adult looking back over his early years at Christmas. Although set in Wales, it be anywhere in the United Kingdom.”

“The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffing silence of the eternal snows_eternal, ever since Wednesday_that we never heard Mrs. Prothero’s first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden.”

“But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on.”

“She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: “Would you like anything to read?”

“It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers.”