Free Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas

Prospect’s future, of creating confusion and making our thinking bitty. Cynlais Coleman, at best a staccato thinker, and always prone to be hypnotised by Sewell, queried this.
    â€˜ A nyway,’ said Gomer, ‘carry on, Willie, with your remarks about Moira Hallam.’
    â€˜What better than to have her walking right in front of Coleman’s new band, dressed up as Carmen?’ asked Willie.
    He addressed his question to Sewell, but there was no reply from him. He was in the cold mental vaults of his memories of the Messiah , that white acreage of banked sopranos, and his treatment of those shouts of praise.
    â€˜That’s a first-class notion, Willie,’ said Gomer, ‘Paolo,’ he said to Tasso, ‘give Willie Silcox another raspberry cordial. He’s the Livingstone of our mental Congo.’
    During the next week the bullfighting uniforms for Cynlais and his band were stitched from cheap cloth and rough recollections of Blood and Sand, a film which had been screened at one of our cinemas, The Cosy, a year before. On a reasonably flat part of the waun the band practised its marching and playing. The wind came down to us scalloped by the sharp, quick step beat of ‘The Nuts of Barcelona’.
    We were full of hope for Cynlais and his boys. We needed that hope. A week before the great Trecelyn carnival at which Cynlais was to make his first appearance with his matadors, the Sons of Dixie had registered their tenth total defeat in a row at a town called Elmhill. They had gone to Elmhill with an arrogant faith in themselves and sure of triumph. Georgie Young the Further Flung had drilled them more ruthlessly than ever, and at their last rehearsal he had wept with pride at the sight of their speed and precision. Under heavy pressure he had decided to abandon his phobic faith in an all-black turn out and the wives of the Dixie’s had laundered their trousers and shirts into an incredible snowiness and that gentle, theatrically minded voter Festus Phelps the Fancy, who was in general control of décor in our stretch of the valley, had blackened their faces with an especially yielding type of cork down to the very soul of sable.
    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