Homage to Dillon Thomas and Richard Llewellyn

THE MUMBLES

The Heave of the Mumbles

The dank wind was howling across the sea and butting the heave of the Mumbles like a pugilist. It gave no quarter to the town of Llareggub and asked for none. Angharad’s mood was toggled with it.
Her husband-under-the-law had not drifted home to the nest of his family. This was his pay day pageant to penury. He took himself to the Panther Arms to spend half of the hard earned coins on Ale and to spend half of the remaining half in the trollops arms along the street, his wife and children left to survive on the trickle-down of the last quarter.
Giving quarter was not in Angharad’s soul this day. This was simple survival, her children needed a father and the bread he brought in. The dream of his death skewed her atavistic brain but the cerebral top told her it would not help. She had saved his life before by dragging his limp carcase up from his face down crash into vomit. It was their cycle of life.
Visceral twisting remaindered him back to the booming wet-black trenches with bodies and mud and lice and lack of hope. He wanted to run away then and still now like a coward. He knew of other men, fathers some, who went to London for the Rugby and never returned. He had a deep entwined urge to do the same but he knew well that for him it would be a stumble closer to pocketing stones and walking into foam.
Angharad traced him in the Panther Arms, she entreated the knowledge from the husbands who were on their way home fully sated after one or two. She waited in the shadows at the back for him to relieve and then to drag him on egress out to the coal black ally with whispered threats and at the same time the promise of a sumptuous meal. She would never let go, she would drag him away from the object of his oblivion.
There was a commotion somewhere, voices shouting; wailing. She left her hide and joined with the throng, The crowd was quite quiet now and she saw policemen running. Pushing her way through the now silent crush she saw a man prostrate on the ground with a ruby halo around his head. Straining closer she saw her husband. He was stood by the feet of the victim soothing his right fist with his left hand and looking down at the body with an expression of bewilderment on his face. The police grabbed her husband, and a man on his knee by the body shook his head.
Angharad’s senses collapsed to nothing, an enveloping containment as strong as the sailor’s cawl shrouded her drowning and carried her away to the rough Mumbles and the insane wind. The spark in her mind was assailed by the predictable moral hillocks of others lives lived and they scraped, clawed and pricked at her soul; all had the same destination; Her family.