MORNING SERIAL
SO confident had we become in the Sons of Dixie before they set out for Elmhill that all the people in Windy Way, the long, hillside street that pushed its grey, apologetic track right up to the summit of Merlin’s Brow, got candles and lighted them as soon as darkness fell on the day of the carnival. The candles were placed on the front windowsill of most of the two hundred houses in Windy Way and as the street, seen from the bottom of Meadow Prospect, seemed to go right off into the sky the small flames made a beautiful and moving sight, and we all thought that this would be a fine way of greeting the Sons of Dixie when they drummed and gazookered their return in glory to Meadow Prospect. But they lost all the same. ‘Unimaginative.’ ‘Prussian and aesthetically Luddite.’ ‘Naïve and depressing.’ These were just some of the judges’ verdicts, and Georgie Young was carried back on some sort of litter a full hour before the band itself returned.
The Sons of Dixie came back in the darkness. Some sympathisers had staked them to a gill or two. They marched through the town and halted at the foot of Windy Way when their leader, Big Mog Malley, so erect even in the florescent melancholy of the moment he looked as if he had done a spell of training with Frederick the Great before moving under the baton of Georgie Young, raised his gigantic staff and told them to break ranks. Their mood as they stared up at the long legion of triumphant candles was for some bit of self-defensive clowning. They found they were quite near the work-yard of our undertaker, Goronwy Mayer the Layer. The lads pushed open Mayer’s gate. The locks and bolt were brittle because Mayer believed that everything connected with death should be friendly and easily negotiable. They commandeered a hearse. An unbelievable number of them managed to clamber aboard and they began their journey with that erratic reciter, Theo Morgan the Monologue, at the wheel and keeping his head bent in comical sorrow until the hearse hit the kerb and jerked a couple of the Dixies on to the roadway.
Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas is published by Parthian at £9. parthianbooks.com