Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas Page A

these antics go unchallenged. The rules we drew up at the Meadow Prospect conference, which are printed here in this little handbook, clearly state that bandsmen should keep a military uprightness on the march. It was with a faithful eye on this regulation that we told our own artistic adviser, Festus Phelps the Fancy, to avoid all imaginative frills that make the movement of the Meadow Prospect Matadors too staccato. And now here we have these Aberclydach Sheiks weaving in and out like shuttlecocks in their soft robes. This is the work of perverts and not legal.’
    Merfyn Matlock pointed his arm down at Gomer and we could see that this for him was a moment of fathomless delight. ‘Stewards,’ he said, ‘remove that man. He’s out to disrupt the carnival. Meadow Prospect has always been a pit of dissent. Here come the Sheiks now. Oh, a fine turnout!’
    We turned to take another look at the Sheiks as they moved into the square and as we saw them we gave up what was left of the ghost. The Sheiks had played their supreme trump. They had slowed their rate of march down to a crawl to confuse the bands behind them. And out of a side street, goaded on by a cloud of shouting voters, came the Sheiks’ deputy leader, Mostyn Frost, dressed in Arab style and mounted on an old camel which he had borrowed from a menagerie that had gone bankrupt and bogged down in Aberclydach a week before. It was this animal that Olga Rowe caught a glimpse of as she was led back into position on the square. It finished her off for good.
    At the carnival’s end Gomer and Cynlais said we would go back over the mountain path, for the macadamed roads would be too hard after the disappointments of the day. Up the mountain we went. Everything was plain because the moon was full.
    The path was narrow and we walked single file, women, child ren, Matadors, Sons of Dixie and Britannias. We reached the mountaintop. We reached the straight green path that leads past Llangysgod on down to Meadow Prospect. And across the lovely deep-ferned plateau we walked slowly, like a little army, most of the men with children hanging on to their arms, the women walking as best they could in the rear. Then they all fell quiet. We stood still, I and two or three others, and watched them pass, listening to the curious quietness that had fallen upon them. Far away we heard a high crazy laugh from Cynlais Coleman, who was trying to comfort Moira Hallam in their defeat. Some kind of sadness seemed to have come down on us. It was not a miserable sadness, for we could all feel some kind of contentment enriching its dark root. It may have been the moon making the mountain seem so secure and serene. We were like an army that had nothing left to cheer about or cry about, not sure if it was advancing or retreating and not caring. We had lost. As we watched the weird disguises, the strange, yet utterly familiar faces, of Britannias, Matadors and Africans, shuffle past, we knew that the bubble of frivolity, blown with such pathetic care, had burst for ever and that new and colder winds of danger would come from all the world’s corners to find us on the morrow. But for that moment we were touched by the moon and the magic of longing. We sensed some friendliness and forgiveness in the loved and loving earth we walked on. For minutes the silence must have gone on. Just the sound of many feet swishing through the summer grass. Then some body started playing a gazooka. The tune he played was one of those sweet, deep things that form as simply as dew upon a mood like ours. It must have been ‘ A ll Through the Night’ scored for a million talking tears and a disbelief in the dawn. It had all the golden softness of an age-long hunger to be at rest. The player, distant from us now, at the head of the long and formless procession, played it very quietly, as if he were thinking rather than playing. Thinking about the night, conflict, beauty, the intricate labour