Welsh Journals

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conjure up simplicity for me. A mongoloid face would press its grotesqueness against the window, smiling, senselessly waving a hand over which the skin fitted tighter than a glove, and I would wave in an abandonment of emotion as the bus lurched down Habershohn Street, the noised, unintelligent dissonance of its passengers leaving me on the pavement. I thought, and the thoughts passed in the time it takes to pause and take in, for a moment, one's surroundings. They passed, not in sequence, but spread themselves out before me so that I viewed many remem- brances of my childhood and experienced them again; at once making them separate in themselves, but part of the same experience now. I could summon up recent feelings or those of years ago, simply and immediately with little introductory thought, for everything before that moment was the past and all that was past in me filled me with interest, and my memories were familiar. The heat of the afternoon made me uncomfortable in my black blazer, but I gloried a little in the heat as I looked at the street before me. The only trees were a few apologetic dusty trunks sprouted now with a greennesss that gave them a false nobility, for the rest of the year saw them as the few existing trunks that they were, the only trees in the only gardens-patches of moth-eaten grass. All but a few of the houses had no gardens, and I looked at them fronting directly and honestly on to the pavement, decayed but not respectable. My indulgent glory in the heat came from a longing to experience the sweat of working with unfruitful land. The nobility of toil. My imagination took over from the feeling of exotic langour and swept the beating sun on to my hair. (I was glad of its lank darkness, for it enhanced the sudden Spanish locale to which Constellation Street found itself suddenly transported.) Persuaded breaking sweat came on my forehead and neck, or rather, a sort of dampness as much from my suddenly fired emotions as the sun. I felt the honest wood of a sickle across my corduroyed shoulders or some other vineyard implement clasped in my peasant hand. This sudden affinity with the earth and with the sun spurred me until I was opposite the slaughterhouse by Cystem Street. The sharp- ness of the smell from the death-waiting beasts dilated my nostrils without any feeling of distaste. The smell permeating the air of summer and the sun striking the tiles on the stable roofs made me sense that this was what that part of the bullring where the bulls are housed must be