Welsh Journals

From A LIFE OF GENERAL CHUNKLEDOM 'A Biography to ind Biographies.' CHUNKLEDOM I. CHUNKLEDOM was an unlaughing dwarf with a brow like a giant John Bull. His temples bulged like the dome of St. Paul's and Chunkledom knew everything for he had read all the books that ever gathered round him. He walked with long flat strides like a determined duck, eyes huge and with the split glint of an owl's cleaving through his glasses. When he once did laugh, a revolution broke out, and rapidly spread to every part of his face. His pupils seemed to pop out of their sockets and his head jerked forward as though he was being strangled, while his face grew purple. That was the moving into position, the strategy of his laughter. Then he half rose in his chair, propping himself up with stiff arms, and a low rumbling came from the direction of the stomach, like distant gunfire-although of course Chunkledom was a pacifist, as belligerent a pacifist as you could wish for. By devious routes the rumbling reached the throat; the isosceles triangle of his face collapsed on its apex the chin; the eyes protruded more and more on to the cheeks; the cheekbones stood out (the man seemed hungry 1) and blood- vessels filled with red made a blotch of the head. It looked like a retching fit, but no-no !-he hee-hee-hee heaved and LAUGHED, shaking his body and filling with blood that egg of a head-a sack of tilting potato delight I CHUNKLEDOM II. Night was falling all over London, all over Hampstead. The first strange night for twenty-one years without any light and with mourning draping the windows. A WAR had come of age and was blowing out the candles on Haverstock Hill The city shook in the air like a huge tethered elephant sensing expanding bullets Bloodless tints of light fading between the trees; wind in shushing leaves a random sparrow the silenced musician opposite, all whispered Air-raid Absolutely certain hissed Chunkledom from between teeth, eyes poking forward in prophetic trance. Chunkledom dealt invariably with absolutes and certainties and fundamentals' and other cabers tossed from his gut.