Unweaving Rainbows

[steepholm]

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

I don't suppose I'm the first person who, on reading the opening lines of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales, has been inspired to check the Met. Office records. At any rate, I have joined their company, and can report that the Christmases of 1920 (when Thomas was six) and 1926 (when he was twelve) were both notable for the lack of snow in the Swansea area.

In December 1920, "abnormally mild weather [...] set in on the 18th and continued until the end of the year." The report adds that "rain was general on Boxing Day" - a nice echo of Joyce's "snow was general all over Ireland", I think. December 1926 too was unusual, this time for being "the driest December in the past 43 years": only about a quarter of average precipitation for the month fell in England and Wales. This is not a promising setting for six days and nights of continuous snow at the Thomas household.

So, full marks for an atmospheric evocation, Dylan, but bottom of the class for meteorology. This is why you should never write poetry without a licence.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"It is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true," says Johnson about an image of Cowley's, and we can say that it's the chance of Thomas's commutative permutation of even numbers to be the better for being confabulated by time and memory.

Lovely post. First I regretted the truth's breaking in (cf. Frost's "Birches"), but then I loved your last sentence so much that my regret vanished.

Didn't the July weekend when Lewis Carroll and the three little Liddels went gliding in the summer's heat turn out to have been dreary and (as you English say) dull?

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

More love from Mollberg and also, I can't help but point at the synchronicity "coincidence" nightspore discreetly avoids mentioning: http://proximoception.livejournal.com/597951.html on the most important matter of snow.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Was there any year in his childhood when there was a heavy fall of snow like that? I remember a few such in my childhood, but I couldn't tell you with great accuracy how old I was. Old enough to slide down a hill in a roasting pan, that's all. (I think I was the one who lost my mother's roasting pan out sledding, but it might have been one of the other kids.)

There was a terrific earthquake in Seattle which I've always thought I remembered, but it turns out I was not quite two and a half at the time, so I probably just remember being told about my reaction. Oddly enough, my son was about two and a half when we had our next really big earthquake.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

This might be of interest.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/12/dylan-thomas?fsrc=gp_en&google_editors_picks=true

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

The hottest summers of my life were the sixties. There were certainly some very hot summers in the sixties, but they weren't nearly as hot as my memory makes them. This is because my father decided to save money by having the hot water heated by the coal-burning stove and our whole house had heating all the time. One doesn't need a lovely warming stove when it's 35 degrees outside. When he and Mum decided to switch to gas in the 1970s the climate changed.