Simeon E-Book

Gwyn Thomas

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In Simeon, the abuse of sexual and family power ends with violent death.

Das E-Book Simeon wird angeboten von Parthian Books und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

About Gwyn Thomas

Simeon

Library of Wales

Copyright

Simeon

Gwyn Thomas

LIBRARY OF WALES

Gwyn Thomas was born into a large and boisterous family in Porth,in the Rhondda Valley, in 1913. After a scholarship to Porth County School he went to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he read Spanish. Mass unemployment and widespread poverty in South Wales deepened his radicalism. After working for the Workers’ Educational Association he became a teacher, first in Cardigan and from 1942 in Barry. In 1962 he left teaching and concentrated on writing and broadcasting. His many published works of fiction includeThe Dark Philosophers(1946);The Alone to the Alone(1947);All Things Betray Thee(1949);The World Cannot Hear You(1951) andNow Lead Us Home(1952). He also wrote several collections of short stories, six stage plays and the autobiographyA Few Selected Exits(1968). He died in 1981.

Simeon

We all looked upon Simeon with respect. The house of Simeon stood nearer the mountain top than any other in the valley. It was surrounded by some two acres of cultivated land. It was rich land and bore for Simeon many flowers and vegetables. Skirting the house was a narrow plantation of oaks through which a stream ran to feed the river in the valley.

We all thought it must be nice to have trees as near to the house as Simeon had them, and a stream that had white water and not black water like the river we had to spend most of our time staring at down in the valley. Simeon also had four goats. He had trained them well. They were gentle, sociable animals. It was a pleasure to sit down and watch the way they watched you. Simeon, whose taste, every so often, ran to fine phrases, called these goats his spirits of contemplation.

On summer evenings, when the mountains were very quiet, Simeon would send down the young lad he kept for odd jobs to fetch us. There was myself and my friends, Colenso and Emrys, and perhaps a few other young comrades who liked sitting about the mountain singing to the evening as it came down.

We were about sixteen years old at the time. No more than sixteen. Simeon would tell us to sit somewhere in the plantation of oaks and sing. We would never know right away what it was he expected us to sing. Simeon said he did not like hymns because he had broken with the chapel ever since the time he tried to argue with some preacher that sun worship was the only form of truth. People, Simeon had said, had managed to act so daftly without sunstroke, perhaps they would improve with sunstroke. So he had broken with the chapel after this bit of reasoning, and told us not to sing him any hymns till he lost his hearing. They smelled of dead men, that was the reason he gave. He’d say, sing any song you know that’s got the long notes in it, notes you can harmonize on, sad notes that make a man want to cry.

As we sang, he would sit on a small knoll, five yards from the oak nearest the house. He would listen for about five minutes; then he’d send the farm boy over to us with a shilling and the farm boy would say Simeon had told him to tell us it was wonderful the way the notes we sang seemed to move about among the trees as if they were looking for something. That did not make sense to us or to the farm boy. But the shilling did. We would take it and thank him.

We all thought Simeon led a very lonely kind of life in that big house stuck so near the top of the mountain. His wife had died a long time before. He had three daughters. Two, Elsa and Bess, lived with him, and a third, whose name no one seemed to know, had been away about five years living with her grandmother on the mother’s side. This third daughter was the youngest.

The people in the valley always wondered what sort of a life it was they lived in that house on the mountain. But they never found either Simeon or the daughters in the valley, so they had to keep on guessing. They knew Elsa had a little son and Bess had one, too. They also knew that neither Elsa nor Bess was married. We used to ask our parents how it was Bess and Elsa came to have these little sons if they were not married. We knew that nobody can just start keeping little sons like you can with goats or chickens.

Our parents would say they thought it was funny, too, because they had never seen the girls knocking about with anybody on a regular basis. But most people were united in saying that the father of both children was, in all likelihood, one Walter James Mathias, a sturdy fellow who had drifted into the valley looking for work a few years before, stamped about like a stallion for a year or two on account of his being sturdy and attractive in appearance when properly washed and turned out, then vanished, and some people said he had wound up in a sanatorium, which, said those same people, was the natural winding-up place for all subjects who go stamping about like stallions without being supported by those regular meals that steady work will bring. This Walter James Mathias had been seen many times loafing around Simeon’s oak plantation, so the story held water. Our imagination played tenderly with the thought of that Walter James Mathias, who had slid into the valley like a comet, kindled fires here and there, then vanished into the dark.