Seven Miles To Kidwelly

Thomas Hopper, self-confessed architect and teetotaller, decided to ignore the illogicality of the competition's rules as he did not want to become a snake with its tail in its mouth like the other entrants. If the City authorities wanted the place re-designing, they should not tie brilliance down with dogma and endless ribbons of red tape. And Hopper, if nothing else was as clean-cut as his profile was sharp. Uncaring of fog and folly, he would wind the lanes of the City, eyes awake for a likely cornerstone, a precocious river’s bending or an unknown cathedral’s hazy spire.

He knew his candidature should be based on a river scheme . . . circling St. Paul’s with a wondrous moat or entering its very portals, curling from aisle to aisle through a straddling church for worshippers to hymn across its surging shores. That was centuries ago. . .

***

“Jack’s in the salt-cellar Gammy ga ga,” was chanted by the marchers as they wended between the East End streets. Incidents and causes had been forgotten since the demonstration started in the years following the war. All that was known stemmed from a Messiah in South Wales tying himself to the railings of Llanelly’s town hall . . . a trek that spent itself even before the enthusiasm died. The call was taken up; the chords were struck and echoed from mind to mind along their collective sewers.

“Jack’s in what bleeding salt seller?” scorned the gossips as they churned along the streets in ungainly array. They were off to the pub near St. Paul’s tube station, to quaff the new brew. Their banter reverberated along the cobbled wharves and lean-to warehouse ways, as the night drew black clouds across the sky in the shape of a giant necromancer.

In the snug, later, the gossips doffed their caps and did what they knew best:-

“You know who broke the dome in two?”

“Was it the war, wasn’t it, yobbo?”

“No, ol’ Tom Hopper – he did it while all the burghers slept off a drunken foray.”

“Mere pipe talk . . . git Guv!”

One particular gossip, with a homely hat seemingly sewn to his head, signed halt to the idiosyncracies that pub talk characteristically embodied:-

“It was the night that the Great Railway Station exploded and the train careered driverless through the square mile . . .”

“.. . . like a beast off the river . . .”

“ . . . ending up in the pews!”

Chortle guffaw chuckle.

Old Tom Hopper popped his head over the bar-counter and scowled. Taunts were thrown at him by the motley locals and the landlord, Matthew Shakewell, poked his tongue out at him in mock salute. And drinks inspired a royal flush and a crate of laughter.

But colour drained from all the faces, as night drew on. Arthurian figures and Welsh wizards, etched on the bar mirrors, faded in the afterglow of yet another sudden blackout drill . . . and tongues wagged and coiled to tales of deeper myth and machination. Hours on . . .

“Well, nuncle,” said one nearest to Tom’s hangdog brows, “tell us of the shapes in the sky . . .”

Tom fetched a cough, broke a pork scratching between brown teeth and chose a word to start off:-

“Wings . . . and scales across the nose of the storm. Cometh the Great Old Ones, mighty as the mountains of Scotland, and stretching from Cardiff to Croydon, casting their mammoth shadows and dire doom across the heartland of our squares and inns’ swinging signs. Jack and Jill went up the hill but ne’er was the top in sight. A pinch over yon shoulder, and ‘scape the tomb’s very dungeon . . . not in mine eye though, for it’ll sting, it’ll weep, and I’ll then not warn off the signal shapes . . .”

“You told them that, nuncle?”

“I told ‘em till I was blue in the chops . . . they strung me over the railings for preaching witchdom, and others too in far off lands within our seas were broken-backed for swearing out the shapes . . . in the darkening skies of our green and pleasant land.”

A tear budded at the corner of old Tom’s deep well . . . and he told of a river of his dreams, where gondola-steamers would stretch their paddle-wheels to the strong wine of song.

The locals gathered in close formation as if to hear the ensorcellements of Tom’s tales. They crowded in so tight, that only his voice could be heard piping . . . until even that stopped.

A black sun was coughed from the throat of dawn, as the drunkens barged home, their wings folded tight above their nodding heads to protect them against the shedding of the sky.

Published in 'Cerebretron' 1987.
This was my second ever published story and the title derives from a black and white snapshot of me as a little kid standing by a milestone saying: 'Seven Miles To Kidwelly'. Like a lot of my stories then, it was inspired by my own novella 'Agra Aska' written in the early eighties and by my unpublished novel 'The Visitor' written in the early Seventies. The story leaves a lot to be desired!