Coal, Rent and Chaos

A couple of years ago the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction decided that none of the sixty two books submitted was funny enough to win, so they withheld the award. One of them, the publisher David Campbell, explained: ‘Despite the submitted books producing many a wry smile amongst the panel during the judging process, we did not feel than any of the books we read this year incited the level of unanimous laughter we have come to expect.’ Humour is notoriously subjective, but I am confident that if the prize had existed sixty-seven years ago, Gwyn Thomas’s A Frost on My Frolic would have been a strong contender.

Thomas, who died in 1981 aged 67, was a popular writer in the Fifties and became a minor television personality; yet he is scarcely remembered today. His readers could certainly look forward to both wry smiles and guffaws, before being pulled up short by some searing emotional or political outburst that conveyed a more serious intent: the frost on his frolics. With a style rooted in his native Wales, he shared with Wodehouse a gift for creating strong characters and examining closely – in unorthodox, imaginative and often hilarious language – how they reacted to the extreme situations in which he placed them; albeit that the worlds the two authors chronicled are at opposite poles of the social scale. While ‘the poor man’s Wodehouse’ is not a characterization Thomas would have relished or even recognized, it is, in a literal sense, applicable to at least some of his writing. Contemporary critics gave him rave reviews. John Betjeman lauded his ‘heavenly gift of amusing description’. Howard Spring detected in him ‘the gusto of genius’. Lionel Hale declared: ‘There is poetry in him – even the fun is poetical.’ And reviewing A Frost on My Frolic, published by Gollancz in 1953, John Connell called Thomas ‘a comic genius whose work takes you by the throat and shakes you with laughter, wonder, joy and gratitude’. My copy carries an inscription revealing that I acquired it in August 1955, when I was 17. I must have bought it from a second-hand shop, since the green ‘Boots Booklovers [no apostrophe] Library’ shield on the cover has been properly cancelled with a heavy printed X: evidence that I had not simply forgotten to return it to the local branch. Although it is in no sense targeted at teenagers, what probably appealed to me at first was that its principal characters are a group of youths in their last year at school, as I was – and the description of the school’s location on the first page would certainly have taken me by the throat:

My friend Spencer and I walk up the hill towards the school. We bend forward to make the hill seem less steep. This is our fifth year at the school and our thoughts about this slope have grown more plentiful and profound with the passing of each month. No doubt the governing body and their friends have heard of such schools as Harrow which are also built on hills and thought, by hoisting this one on its present perch, to give Mynydd Coch, which is as rough a place as you will find in this sector, a better tone. But those young elements at Harrow get more regular injections of self-esteem and more building foods than we do at Mynydd Coch. We hear also that they do not go home at the end of each school day but sleep in the buildings and do not have two furlongs of uphill walking to get to their lessons, and that must be an advantage from the point of view of turning up fresh in the morning. We climb and a lot of us get bent nearly double in the process, for whatever substance it is that keeps spines straight seems to find it easy to give up the ghost in this area.

That not only establishes a clear sense of place from the very start but signals also the social, spiritual and political preoccupations of the book and its characters, as well as introducing us to Thomas’s florid prose style. ‘Elements’ was one of the two words he regularly employed to describe people in general: ‘voters’ was the other. In real life Mynydd Coch did not exist as a village but he borrowed the name of a hill in Powys, east of Dolgellau. He actually came from farther south, in the Rhondda valley, the youngest of twelve children whose father looked after the pit ponies in the local coal mine. His description of the fictional village as ‘nothing more than a quadrangle of slopes, coal, rent and chaos’, where life was ‘bleak and confusing’, must surely reflect his own childhood experience, embellished with the fruits of his extravagant imagination. Later, when visiting the house of a comparatively wealthy farmer, his narrator observes: ‘The furniture in the room strikes us as remarkably solid, for there are few articles in Mynydd Coch meant to outlast a short generation or a stubborn bailiff.’ Thomas acknowledged the tradition of Nonconformism in Welsh villages by endowing Mynydd Coch with two rival sects. The Lookers are constantly on the watch for the first signs of Armageddon. As one of their number explains: ‘The Lookers think there is no hope for man, the whole species being a corrupt lot of rodneys, that doom is whizzing towards them with a fierce light in its eye and an armful of destructive paraphernalia that will take the crease out of man’s trousers for evermore.’ (As his interlocutor remarks: ‘I don’t see how that clashes really with the broad principles of the Church.’) The other sect is the Drummers, whose founder Evan Jacobs once saw a cloud formation that looked like a hand cupped over an ear, persuading him that God is deaf. His followers bang their drums with gusto to attract His attention. ‘If God was not deaf at the time that Evan saw the ear in the sky, it might well be true after 24 months of hard beating on the pig-skin by this body of Drummers.’ We learn, too, that the historical research section of the school library contains little but the memoirs of Welsh preachers; and we are introduced to the League for the Protection of Young Girls, whose members are devoted to rooting out lust, principally by disrupting lovers’ trysts. Set in the early 1940s towards the end of the Second World War, A Frost on My Frolic has little in the way of an over-arching plot but is rather a series of comic incidents and catastrophes that climax in a surprisingly brutal ending. The victim of many misfortunes is Mr Rawlins, the teacher who runs most aspects of school life. When the collapse of several dining-tables in the newly equipped canteen finds him spattered with bits of food, we are told: ‘All in all, he has never looked more like a chosen and anointed offspring of the force that arranges the neat seat of mankind’s breeches in perfect readiness for marriage with the swinging toe-cap of disaster’s patient pendulum.’ Thomas had lived through some of the most severe hits of disaster’s pendulum in the Twenties and Thirties, when the closure of many Welsh pits provoked industrial unrest. This is reflected in the novel, as he describes the experience of two former miners who had taken part in the protests. One of them had started out as a fearless militant, whose face during demonstrations ‘was always alight with a great joy’. That did not last, though.

The movement began to falter and rust. The mine-owners beat us to a frazzle. It was a sullen, mad, mouldering sort of world we lived in when the last of the big strikes found us even nearer the grave than we had been before. Men like Lew Price were large enough to see the closing of collieries and the gutting of whole towns as nothing more than incidents in a struggle to which many more generations might yet have to be given up. He led the first hunger marches to London and that hurried up the job the lung-dust had begun.

As the book progresses, such bleak reflections begin to crowd out the jokes. Rereading it after sixty-five years, I realized that I had forgotten the stark ending, the sting in the tail, and how it strikes a note that will grate with most readers today. It involves a rape whose perpetrator – the farmer with the nice furniture, as it turns out – gets away with it. Who’s laughing now? Writing novels was only one part of Thomas’s eclectic life and occupied a relatively short period. The first of them, The Dark Philosophers, was published in 1946, the tenth and last, The Love Man, in 1958. After that he wrote some moderately successful plays – mainly for radio – and developed a new career as a witty television pundit, appearing quite often on the panel of The Brains Trust, which had moved from radio to TV in 1955. He also became a frequent contributor to Punch. All the same, it took him a while to acquire the confidence in his earning abilities that would allow him to give up the day job: he worked as a schoolteacher from 1940 until 1962. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sums up his craft with insight and elegance: ‘What disturbed and enthralled Thomas’s readers was that the stuff of gritty realism and documentary melodrama was being shifted by hyperbolic wit and cascades of metaphor into a completely different mode: murderously savage in intent and relentlessly conscious that self-aware laughter is the only way the joker ever manages to be the judge.’ He merits a renaissance.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Michael Leapman 2020