The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) is known for three things: an evocative style, immoderate drinking, and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a classic account of Christmas in the 1920s from a kid’s perspective, which was beautifully recorded by Thomas himself. Until now, however, the reverse perspective, that of a whale among Welsh children, has been lacking; The Hub’s in-house poet Jack Mitchell fills the gap.
Along the currents down St. George’s narrows, where the warm flux of the siesta-tinged eastbound salt surge and the northern Presbyterian swell cross over, we would travel each December, and the pod with Great-grandfather at the head would scoop up the yuletide plankton in our fastidious sifting baleen plates down the Bristol Channel, hearing from the nearby shore the faint interwoven song of the earthbound mammals.
The line of the sky was hazy and sun-birthing when I surfaced, blowing a cheerful damp bass note that caught the carollers’ frost-pricked ears and briefly paused mid-bar the mellow-fleshed fruity strains of “Ar Fore Dydd Nadolig.” There were always earthbound mammals singing at Christmas down the Bristol Channel, and I would imagine my own young sea-scraping mammalian tones meshing with the onshore melody, mine rich with knowledge of the deep and theirs with that of the tall inland snow-tipped crags that peeked over the flat surface from afar.
And from far out my sonic intuitions perceived a rising in the deep distance, and the voice of my pod readying to dive, and my Aunt Grace calling the wayward calves, and the notes that meant me. And I knew I was too close on my shoreward carolling progress and would have to push hard against the inset tide and the rising that was coming closer already, the great wave, and I turned from the dappled beach for the company of my own cetacean folk.
But the tide, insistent with delay, kept me close in. And soon the heave of the sudden wave, mighty as ten huge squid all co-operating to heave, rolled me over and over along my axis til I was sick and spluttering and felt the scrape of the sand on my belly and I knew I was beached. As the surf seethed and growled around me I trained one eye on the freshly inaccessible cooling depths and the other on the crowd of tiny upright chattering mammals now running down from the smoke-belching huts, muffled in mittens and trailing well-knit scarves and with snowballs in their hands. And they pelted me with the cooling tickle of snowballs and ran around me and asked each other what to do, noting over and over that I was a whale and not a fish and I was still alive.
And then Mr Baughan-Bethel arrived with the fires of uncertain responsibility in his eyes and with him his niece Nelly wearing a shawl and Nelly took over the operation. She divided the boys into two groups, a group to push the side of my head and then my chin and a group to push my nether regions and Mr Baughan-Bethel was to push on my side.
“One, two, three, push!” came the enchanting soprano tuneful voice of Nelly, and the pushing began, and the assembled choir began the noble and completely vain effort of rolling 2000 pounds of whale vaguely toward the sea, and I began to get worried, and I remembered the still notorious effort to handle the beached whale in Oregon, that perennial viral favourite, that ended in the less than foresightful use of dynamite and the showering of whale meat in both large chunks and infinitely small particles over a large area.
But then the fisherman, with his tall boots and pipe and perhaps a certain bachelor fondness for Nelly whom he’d known since she came to teach the younger classroom when Mr Baughan-Bethel with his degree in Geography came to teach the older, but he’d never quite had the occasion for discussion and here at last was an appropriate venture in which a fisherman’s acuity might assist, came down and tapped out his pipe on his boot and gave his idea. And then it was a matter of winches and nets and the propeller spluttering in the shallows and Mr Baughan-Bethel in the stern ordering Dylan and Jim sternly not to stand on top of me and the boys not listening but Nelly striking up a new carol to distract the calf-like frolickers while the delicate operation proceeded. And the hymn rose in their bard-descended throats as the first inch was achieved and they sang louder and still louder as I picked up speed, scraping along the barnacle-textured sand and blowing my deep note alongside them every eight bars. And the boys were happy, and the fisherman was happy in his tall boots and Nelly was happy and Mr Baughan-Bethel was so happy he fell in the drink and had to be fished out with a pole.
Then I turned toward my seagull-bobbing caerulean home as the scene-closing fog rolled in off the Bristol Channel, keeping to the creamy air-abundant surface so I could hear the last verse and chorus of the gleeful shouting children before they turned back with a wave toward the snow-besprinkled dim village, Nelly at their head.
And I heard the note of my pod still calling for me and met them by Lundy where they were going vertical for the night and Aunt Grace nodded to me to take station by Great-grandfather, and I too went vertical, and then I slept.
Jack Mitchell (www.jackmitchell.ca) is a poet and scholar based in Halifax, where he is an associate professor of Classics at Dalhousie. His latest book, "The Odyssey of Star Wars: an Epic Poem", a retelling of the original Star Wars film trilogy, was published in September 2021 by Abrams Books.
