Welsh Journals

ring the bells-the Cantref-Gwaelod in a new form-while Heaven, Hell, if Hell is the limbo of lost illusions, Charon in the form of an old butler piloting his slow journey across a symbolic Styx-are all here. One can see behind this prentice but significant effort not the academic training of the young dramatist who thinks in titles till the titles come, not even the "kitchen stuff" of some of our own well-meaning but unimaginative playwrights, but a young man who can still see visions and THE various philosophers who, from Socrates to Herbert Spencer, have sought to explain the mysterious phenomenon of Humour, while differing in certain particulars, agree in the main that the tears of laughter and the tears of woe are closely akin. And for all the sad circumstances associated with it, I cannot repress a smile in thinking of an incident of my boyhood days, when a certain mourner at a funeral, a close relative of the departed, in follow- ing the hearse with bowed head, forgot to halt when that vehicle stopped in order for the clog- brakes to be applied before descending the hill that led to the churchyard, with the result that the impact of his top hat against the hearse caused his head to be so firmly lodged within it that it needed the help of two friends before it could be extricated. Though the occasion was solemn, I can well recall the tittering that went round when the incident happened. Anyway the most con- firmed joker I have ever known was a grave- digger. He could out-alas any poor Yorick! I. Scene: The cottage of an unemployed miner. Time Monday morning, with three more days to go before the "dole" falls due. The father, in stockinged feet, is in the parlour busily cobbling his only pair of boots. The mother is about her housework. The elder children are in school. The two younger ones are playing with cinders on the hearthstone, because for the sake of peace they must be conceded anything and everything. The mother will probable wash again to-morrow the very clothes which she washed in the earlier part of this day in the hope of bluffing her more prosperous neighbours that she is not quite so badly off as they think. Pride, like a drowning man, will hang on even to a straw. All is quiet save for the sound of bathbrick Being rubbed on dream dreams. It was this young man who was eight before he learnt to speak English, who as a boy in Flint sat under the desk of the late J. M. Edwards, who first dramatised "Rhys Lewis" and who would now surely be the first to con- gratulate him. Many of the half articulate utter- ances of some of the young Welsh poets whose strains come straight from the hills like the winds themselves, and who-shades of Hedd Wynn-¾are destined never to move among the mighty, find here a new voice. HUMOUR OF HARD TIMES by Huw Menai. a steel fender, and the occasional prattling of the two children. Suddenly mother begins to sing, in a voice pitched much too high in her hurry, an old music hall ditty heard in happier times. There is little cheer in her effort. It is too forced and mechanical. Indeed, she seems more bent on making a noise than anything else. Her pale face has taken on a little colour with the strain. She changes the tune, and redoubles her effort. Soon she becomes frantic, mixing up in hopeless confusion sections of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" with the concluding portion of "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau," at the same time accompanying the medley with unrhythmic taps of the bathbrick on the fender. The pandemonium brings father out of the parlour with a scared look on his face. He speaks: "What is the matter with you, woman-have you gone mad?" "No!" she replies, "but I shall go soon unless you find a job. Can't you understand what I'm doing? Can't you hear that icecream man shouting in the street? I am only trying to drown his voice so that the children shall not hear him. I have not the means to buy any icecream for them, and if they hear his voice you know what a life I'll have with their crying!" Exit father, back to his boots. II. Scene The same cottage. Time When there was not a penny in the house. The two younger children come in howling from the street. "Johnny next door's mother has bought him a banana from the cart. We want bananas, mam- my, give us bananas." Mammy puts her fingers in her ears, and perhaps there is a suspicion of a tear in her eye. But she has a brain wave. She goes out to the greengrocer's cart, and making sure first of all that the hawker does not happen to have that particular vegetable with him, asks,