What can you talk about flatfish?

Milk churns stand at Coronation Corner like short, silver policemen.

It's lunchtime in Llareggub.

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty and echoing as a dining room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in, from 'Lives of the Great Poisoners'. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret.

MRS PUGH

Persons with manners do not read at table,

says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.

[Pause.]

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

MR PUGH

Pigs don't read at table, dear.

Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

Pigs can't read, my dear.

MRS PUGH

I know one who can.

Fawlty Towers comes irresistibly to mind, though there's a bit of Dubliners in there too. 

Mr Pugh is schoolmaster. We don't witness him at his work, though we do see his fellow teacher Gossamer Beynon the butcher's daughter, teaching the children to sing Shakespeare. To Sinbad Sailors' dismay, Gossamer Beynon is educated and is thus (he thinks) unreachably out of his sphere. If only his sprightly grandmother would die! 

Love and death are comically intertwined in Under Milk Wood. Only once, for a moment, does the comedy of that intertwining suddenly fade away, while Captain Cat naps in the afternoon and reminisces.

CAPTAIN CAT

I'll tell you no lies.

The only sea I saw

Was the seesaw sea

With you riding on it.

Lie down, lie easy.

Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

ROSIE PROBERT

Knock twice, Jack,

At the door of my grave

And ask for Rosie.

CAPTAIN CAT

Rosie Probert.

ROSIE PROBERT

Remember her.

She is forgetting.

The earth which filled her mouth

Is vanishing from her.

Remember me.

I have forgotten you.

I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.

I have forgotten that I was ever born. 

CHILD

Look,

says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of Schooner House,

Captain Cat is crying. 

Houses and streets are named, people are named and their line of work is named. Yet the play unmistakably occupies the world of pub anecdote, from which the actual business of working is excluded. The unbuttoned energies of the play, the unbridled loving and drinking and babies, contrast with a precise observation of the forms of popular discourse, as fierce in rules of decorum as any genteel dinner party.

So the play adroitly sidesteps the town's fishing industry with a joke about the fishermen proclaiming today's perfectly calm sea "too rough" and all heading in a body for the Sailors' Arms. It's the only glimpse we have of them.

And in the night: 

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt, and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

Presumably exhausted. Raking for cockles is notoriously hard work. 

At one time in the play's gestation Dylan Thomas intended to say more of the Floyds. On his map of Llareggub (in the National Library of Wales) there's a scrap of an idea:

Me, Curly Floyd, the cockler, 

going after cockles with m

Also on the map, though crossed through, is "Sarah". In the play Mrs Dai Bread One addresses a Mrs Sarah, asking after her boils. Even these shadowy, evanescent figures had backstories in Thomas's imagination.

But he had a sure instinct. Under Milk Wood in the end said all it needed to say. Like most of his other major works it had been in the back of his mind since his teens.

I don't know when he drew the map. It's fascinating. Here are the main streets: Coronation Street, Cockle Street, Donkey Street;  and here are most of the main characters, beginning top left with "la-di-da" Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard overlooking the town in Bay View. 

On the map, Cockle Street and Donkey Street are side by side, both running down to the sea. 

The cockle industry has largely existed in Wales in the same way since the 1800s. Cockles were originally collected by women using donkeys, but they were displaced by men who left heavy industry and used horse and cart.

(From this article in Wales Online: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/welsh-seafood-considered-among-best-2231747 .)

And yet, there's a host of differences and additions when we compare the finished text with the map. Cockle Street becomes Cockle Row (mostly). New names abound: Manchester House, Schooner House, Coronation Corner. Cherry Jones becomes Cherry Owen and moves to Donkey Street; Thomas the Death becomes Evans the Death, and Mr Waldo's "pink-eyed cottage" (Bottom Cottage) is now next door to him. 

And where, on the map, is Eli Jenkins' Bethesda House, and the Bethesda graveyard? The River Dewi? Most significantly of all, where is Milk Wood itself? 

And maybe "Shad", at the sea end of Cockle Street, was an idea for a named fisherman that in the event Thomas didn't pursue. In the finished play the only person seen on the water is Nogood Boyo, who catches anything but fish.

Yet the play is fishy enough. A drunk Cherry Owen comes home with a bucket, 

and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels.

Captain Cat breakfasts on sea fry, Mr Waldo on kippers, Lord Cut-Glass on fish scraps. At lunchtime Mrs Organ Morgan feasts on small flounders. 

Flounders are found in the sand and mud of every river estuary around the Welsh coast.

(From the Wales Online article linked above.)

But the play turns away from talking about the work itself, like any pub conversation. As Captain Cat remarks:

Who's that talking by the pump? Mrs Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish. What can you talk about flatfish? 

(Mrs Boyo? Nogood's mother?)

Work isn't altogether absent from Under Milk Wood, of course. There's Utah Watkins and Bessie Bighead among the cows at Salt Lake Farm. There's the "treasure" Lily Smalls making morning tea for the querulous Mrs Beynon, and Dai Bread hurrying to the bakery, and Polly Garter scrubbing the floors for the Mothers' Union Social Dance that she won't be going to. In the background work is taking place everywhere: The fishermen grumble to their nets... A car drives to the market... The shops squeak open.... Bread is baking, chop goes the butcher, saws sing.... But still, there's also a shyness about mentioning work which manifests as a vacuum when it comes to Llareggub's economy. In addition to the stay-ashore fishermen, there's Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard's resistance to actually admitting any paying guests into her spotless BnB. The Cherry Owens, in their single room, have no apparent source of  income. Butcher Beynon is incessantly teasing about the source of his meats. Even those chaste capitalists Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price seem to achieve only the most pitiful sales.

The town is sustained by a kind of magic, because Thomas recognized the pull of popular anecdote towards the fantastic, towards visions that celebrate the power of storytelling just because they aren't drawn from the everyday. For instance the Willy Nillys and their hens living entirely off tea, or the primrose blooming in Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard's fingerbowl.

Which I suppose is to belabour the point that Under Milk Wood isn't entirely realistic. It's a portrait constructed from sunnily comic sketches. While writing it Thomas jotted down several darker elements he thought he ought to include; but he never did.

And as in sketches, the characters tend to embody a single trait or situation. But their eccentric individuality is measured against a background of reassuringly traditional gender stereotypes: women as nags or gossips, men as boozers or idlers. There is no gay in this village (though I had a passing thought here about the Reverend Eli Jenkins).  

But in another way Under Milk Wood feels very real. It feels like the way a small community would talk about itself, using the popular forms of anecdote, gossip, children's games and jeering, ballads and fortune-telling and timeworn jests. And in fact there's a precious truth here; that what most deeply sustains us isn't only work but a magic beyond our remit, begetting an idleness that's also an act of faith.

Fishermen grumble to their nets. Nogood Boyo goes out in the dinghy Zanzibar, ships the oars, drifts slowly in the dab-filled bay, and, lying on his back in the unbaled water, among crabs' legs and tangled lines, looks up at the spring sky.

NOGOOD BOYO [Softly, lazily]

I don't know who's up there and I don't care.

He turns his head and looks up at Llareggub Hill, and sees, among green lathered trees, the white houses of the strewn away farms, where farmboys whistle, dogs shout, cows low, but all too far away for him, or you, to hear.

The contrast between the play's inward chorus and the stuffy Voice Of A Guide-Book is perfectly poised, and it arouses no protest in us. Though his unmistakable style pervades the narration, Thomas contrived to absent himself, the educated outsider, entirely. Here, as in so much else, his long creative labour was about discovering what not to say.