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'There's another train coming,' I said. It tore over us, the arch bellowed, the wheels screamed through our heads, we were deafened and spark-blinded and crushed under the fiery weight and we rose again, like battered black men, in the grave of the arch. No noise at all from the swallowed town. The trams had rattled themselves dumb.
Dylan Thomas, 'Just Like Little Dogs,' from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, New Directions, 1955, p. 89.
TIME: early 20th c.
PLACE: Wales
CIRCUMSTANCE: three young men under a tram arch
Tom began to tell a story. I thought of a new stranger walking on the sands past the arch and bearing all of a sudden that high voice out of a hole.
I missed the beginning of the story as I thought of the man on the sands listening in a panic or dodging, like a footballer, in and out among the jumping dark towards the lights behind the railway line, and remembered Tom's voice in the middle of a sentence.
Dylan Thomas, 'Just Like Little Dogs,' from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, New Directions, 1955, p. 82.
TIME: early 20th c.
PLACE: Wales
CIRCUMSTANCE: three young men under a railway arch.
Birds in the Crescent trees were singing; boys on bicycles were ringing their bells and pedalling down the slight slope to make the whirrers in their wheels startle the women gabbing on the sunny doorsteps...
Dylan Thomas, 'Who Do You Wish Was With Us,' from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, New Directions, 1955, p. 105.
TIME: early 20th C.
PLACE: Wales
CIRCUMSTANCE: the 'whirrers' were probably bits of paper stuck into the spokes of the wheels to make a flapping sound in imitation of motorcycles
At the end of the humped and serpentine body, more gulls than I had ever seen before cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages. On the point, the sound of my quiet voice was scooped and magnified into a bollow shout, as though the wind around me had made a shell or cave, with blue, intangible roof and sides, as tall and wide as all the arched sky, and the flapping gulls were made thunderous...
Dylan Thomas, 'Who Do You Wish Was With Us,' from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, New Directions, 1955, p. 111.
TIME: early 20th C.
PLACE: Wales
CIRCUMSTANCE: two boys on the edge of a huge rock formation
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