Huw Collingbourne wrote this review for Green Man Review.
Snow, deep and crisp, memories of a mythical childhood wait just beneath the surface of memory. “I plunge my hands into the snow and bring out whatever I can find.” What Dylan finds in A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Many of Dylan Thomas's best stories are evocations of a childhood in which the summers are always sunny, the winters are always snowy, adults are invariably strange, funny, threatening and inexplicable and there is always an undertone of melancholy.
Grab yourself a collection of Dylan's short stories and read a few at random. You will repeatedly find accounts of the eccentricity of relatives such as his grandfather who, in A Visit To Grandpa's, sits up in bed in the deep darkness of the night crying "Gee-up!" and "Whoa!" as he whips invisible horses across the mountains of his bedroom. Then there are the perfect golden days of youth. In Holiday Memory the fondly remembered far-off days of summer are "always radiant, rainless, lazily rowdy and sky-blue." Finally, there is the eternal melancholy of a lost childhood whose fairground lights fade into darkness as his Grandpa plans for his death while the Christmas aunt who once gave the boy Dylan a crocheted nosebag as a present is "now, alas, no longer whinnying with us."
But in Dylan's childhood stories, it is not the passing of the aunts and uncles that is most keenly mourned but the passing of the boy who once was Dylan. "What has become of him now?" the narrator asks the old park keeper in Return Journey. "Dead (the Park-Keeper said), Dead . . . dead . . . dead . . . dead . . . dead . . . dead."
It seems to me that I have known Dylan's Child's Christmas ever since I was myself a young boy growing up in the valleys of South Wales. I too remember the uncles with their cigars, the aunts sitting "poised and brittle, afraid to break like faded cups and saucers," the next-door neighbours and their cats out prowling as I went with my friends, hustling, bustling and blowing on our hands against the cold while the grownups drank sherry, cracked walnuts and ate too much Christmas pudding.
Oh yes, I remember it all as though it was yesterday. Or do I?
Or am I, perhaps, like Dylan himself, forgetting the things that are best forgotten and inventing episodes that never really happened? That, for me, is one of the joys of Dylan's writing. His memoirs are supremely unreliable, flawed in their perfection, a ragbag jumble of scraps and bits all flung together into a snow drift of crisp, white memories frozen in one perfect, impossible, moment in time.
"I can never remember," he says, "Whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."
This is Christmas not as it was but as it might and should have been. Give yourself a Christmas treat. Snuggle up close to the fire with a glass of something warming and a plate of mince pies and read A Child’s Christmas
(New Directions, 1952)
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