Welsh Journals

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DAVID WILLIAMS (1900-78) THERE is a particular stillness, an almost physical quietness, like the presence of something that is not there, that I shall always associate with an Aberystwyth Sunday morning, early enough for the cars from the midlands not yet to have reached the coast. On this October Sunday the sea was a flat, even green, with straggling streaks of a bluish black, like dark veins, that moved sinuously, as in a slow oriental dance; the coloured sails, completely immobile, seemed to have been painted on, as if to emphasise the stillness by the perfection of their white, yellow, red and blue triangles. I had just rounded the 'Prince of Wales', green with salt and spray, looking blankly, perhaps boredly, to the motionless sea, when an apparently elderly gentleman -he can in fact have only been about fifty-five-very formally and soberly dressed: grey suit, grey burberry, hat, and umbrella, came alongside, and walking, rather solemnly and with a sort of deliber- ation, in my own slow, lazy Sunday step, introduced himself, with very distinctly enunciated deliberation, saying: 'Shall we kick the bar ?' whatever that meant, but I did not want to display my ignorance. David, as deliberate in speech as in his steady walk, then having spoken of Mathiez, of his time in Dijon, of his first wife, a pupil of Mathiez, proceeded to go, in great detail, through my curriculum vitae, backwards, starting from my appointment to U.C.W., and working through, at an unhurried, even pace, to my birth in Frinton- on-Sea. Nothing much was left out, including quotes, naturally of great interest to me, from my referees; even addresses, in Tunbridge Wells and Paris, were duly noted, or at least a score of them, for even David could not have kept up with the hundreds of my parents' moves, my sister was identified, her husband's profession named. It was I who supplied their address. I think David was even a little disappointed that my family had not been more extensive. As we walked along the great curve of the bay, he spoke of mutual friends, adding little details unknown to me; of Christopher Hill, he commented that, on coming to Cardiff, he had taken lodgings, in Gabalfa, opposite the cinema, and not in the Roath Park district, which would have been more suitable. Of another shared friend, he informed me that his great-uncle had been before the magistrates for drunken language. By the time we reached the Bar, he had completed, in the same inexorably steady tone, the Welsh place names lovingly modulated, the skeleton (often in both senses) biographies of twenty or so historians.