The Kindness Of Strangers

*



REV. ELI JENKINS

Dear Gwalia! I know there are
Towns lovelier than ours,
And fairer hills and loftier far,
And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring
And bright with birds' adorning,
And sweeter bards than I to sing
Their praise this beauteous morning.

By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,
Or Moel y Wyddfa's glory,
Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,
Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,
By Penmaen Mawr defiant,
Llareggub Hill a molehill seems,
A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,
Edw, Eden, Aled, all,
Taff and Towy broad and free,
Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,
Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,
Small is our River Dewi, Lord,
A baby on a rushy bed.

By Carreg Cennen, King of time,
Our Heron Head is only
A bit of stone with seaweed spread
Where gulls come to be lonely.

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood
By golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.

[ Slow bell notes ]

FIRST VOICE

Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchens. The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down from Bay View, where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, in smock and turban, big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread and sips lemon-rind tea, to Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo, in bowler and bib, gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers and swigs from the saucebottle.

FIRST VOICE

There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse-shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.

MOG EDWARDS

I love you until Death do us part and then we shall be together for ever and ever. A new parcel of ribbons has come from Carmarthen today, all the colours in the rainbow. I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair a white one but it cannot be. I dreamed last night you were all dripping wet and you sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins went down the street. I see you got a mermaid in your lap he said and he lifted his hat. He is a proper Christian. Not like Cherry Owen who said you should have thrown her back he said. Business is very poorly. Polly Garter bought two garters with roses but she never got stockings so what is the use I say. Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman's nightie outsize he said he found it and we know where. I sold a packet of pins to Sinbad Sailors to pick his teeth. If this goes on I shall be in the poorhouse. My heart is in your bosom and yours is in mine. God be with you always Myfanwy Price and keep you lovely for me in His Heavenly Mansion. I must stop now and remain, Your Eternal, Mog Edwards.

FIRST VOICE

And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away downhill with his patched pants falling, and his tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and his mother's shame and his father's wickedness with the loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum, for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and Welshcakes and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her arms, he'll never forget as he paddles blind home through the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, wine-gums, hundreds and thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nugget to tug and ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue in girls' curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood, ice-cream cornets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.

From Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas.



If on a winter's night, or even in the winter of discontent, his head filled with contrary images, they basked in pleasure, time eroded their instincts. All was not lost. Oddly, the sound of birds began to surround him with the rising dawn. He felt, for the first time since the previous day, that there was some chance after all that he might survive. He was collapsed inside. He was still cold. His clothes were still dank. But now the chambers of hte heart began to sing, and his always boundless imagination, the enthusiasms of his heart, began to take hold. The ruins of the church grew louder and his stomach ached, it had been a long time since he had eaten.

He had always assumed his final years would be ones of eccentricity and wealth; that the extravagant gestures of his youth would translate into material success. Before the second depression. Before global warming hysterics destroyed the economy, and warring ethnic groups destroyed the cities. Before the plague came. Far off behind him, he saw a car on the road. It could be a source of danger or escape, more likely danger, as the hooray Henrys went splashing by, ignoring beggars such as himself. It was cruel what had happened. He had lost all control of his life. The books had failed, the jobs fallen apart, and his disease wracked body had expelled him from his once comfortable home.

Oh halleluyah, he thought, but he didn't know whether to hide behind a bank or stand in the middle of the road, pull up the car and beg for help. The chance of compassion was just about zero. Perhaps if he had been younger, better looking, he might have had something physical to offer, but those days were long gone. In the end common sense prevailed, and he hid behind one of the larger mounds of garbage, an old washing machine, a refrigerator, unidentifiable, twisting pieces of medal. He sat quietly as the car approached and then roared past. It was indeed the Hooray Henry's, in a giant open Rolls Royce convertable, a guard riding shotgun on the rear, his gun cocked and ready for anything.

They would have shot him without hesitation, and he breathed a sigh of relief that he had chosen a sensible course of action. Catastrophe had overtaken his life, but he was still alive, there was still a chance he could build some sort of life. Perhaps it lay in the ruins of the old church, perhaps there he could build a garden, have some hens, perhaps, one day, even find a wife to share his final days, a gap toothed fellow beggar as ugly as sin, a woman who would be as gratefui as he for comfort and warmth during the long long nights.

He approached the ruins with trepidation. His mind had been doing overtime, as always, and his hunger had mounted to the point where he was worried he would faint. The clothes were drying, but he knew they stank, he knew he had to do something. And oh what delight, he saw a wisp of smoke, he saw, as he came within the last 100 yards, a garden. He heard the crowing of a rooster. His heart quickened and his steps grew longer, and before he knew it he was there, standing in the ruins, trying to make sense of the haphazard building that had been built along one outside wall.

There was no sound and no one approached him. There were no dogs. The landscape stretched into an infinity of garbage mounds, and the colours grew more concrete as the sun rose in the sky. He stood and stared at the front door of the shack, wondering whether to knock, when it opened of its own accord and a woman dressed in filthy clothes, indeed gap toothed, just as he imagined, stared at him in a mixture of shock and fear. No doubt strangers were not a source of comfort.

What da ya want? she asked in a rough voice.
He smiled and tried to look non-threatening.
I mean you no harm, he said.
I've heard that before, she snarled.
It's true. I mean you no harm. I've walked all the way from Qxaty.

She looked at him then with something almost approaching interest, taking in his thin, shivering frame, his wretched clothes. She seeemed to decide, it was as if he could see the thoughts moving across her brain, that indeed he posed no danger.
I suppose you want something to eat...
He nodded in agreement.
Sit there, she said, gesturing at an upturned pale.

And so he eased his tired frame down, and sat quietly, as she went back inside and banged things in what must be a makeshift kitchen, and his stomach turned again. He hadn't eaten in three days, and then he hadn't eaten much.

An old phrase, from his educated past, from a different world and a different era, sprang to mind: "the kindness of strangers".



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24225835-16741,00.html

August 23, 2008

Getting too far ahead on an ETS is bad economic policy

IT is neither desirable nor remotely feasible, Ross Garnaut wrote in his interim report in June, "to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries." As Professor Garnaut noted, Australians would not accept such an approach. This is why the Business Council of Australia's "real world" analysis of the economic consequences of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme is so effective and devastating.

It reveals that even with the Government's proposed compensation, three firms of the 14 companies that opened their books to Port Jackson Partners for the analysis would face a carbon cost so high they would close. Four others would be forced to review operations to remain viable after losing between 32 per cent and 63 per cent of pre-tax earnings. Many potential investments would be canned.

The companies, with annual revenues ranging from $90 million to more than $3 billion, are in cement manufacturing, petroleum refining, steel making, sugar milling and zinc and nickel refining. On average, the ETS would reduce their pre-tax earnings by 22 per cent, with the worst-affected suffering a 136 per cent reduction. The ETS will apply to 1000 Australian companies, each producing more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon pollution ayear.

The ramifications of the BCA analysis are clear. Giving more compensation to trade-exposed high-emitters to stop them going broke or taking their businesses and jobs off shore would reduce the amount of compensation available to others. But without it, new investment and business growth would be decimated and unless remedied, growth in living standards would be substantially slowed - precisely the scenario Professor Garnaut acknowledged was unacceptable.

The analysis for the electricity generating sector, too, is sobering, warning that a 10 per cent emissions reduction target by 2020 involves a "major risk" to power supply and a lift in retail prices of 25 to 40 per cent.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24182333-7583,00.html

Xenophon put his finger on the Government's problem of balancing perception and reality when he said: "I just don't think it's going to do what it's meant to do."

This is at the heart of some of the Government's biggest challenges: how to manage the gap between expectation, perception and reality, and how to avoid simply pandering to illogical and misplaced public fears instead of pursuing reform and defending good policy.

There are misunderstandings about high petrol prices, rising grocery prices, interest rate rises outside Reserve Bank movements, labour market reform, water shortages and an emissions trading scheme that must be challenged instead of simply being assuaged or even encouraged.

A climate of confusion, ignorance and disappointment does not help government and undermines the development of good policy in the public interest. How can there be an informed public debate and a sensible political dialogue on an emissions trading scheme when 32 per cent of Australians believe "climate change is entirely caused by human activity", according to a Newspoll survey last month?

That means one in three of those surveyed, and 40 per cent of those surveyed aged 18 to 34, are unaware of climate changes before human existence or of dramatic changes - ice ages - since humans were but a pinprick on the Earth's surface.

Not even Al Gore suggests that humans are entirely responsible for climate change. Yet the Rudd Government is planning the most momentous reform for the Australian economy with one-third of the voting and tax-paying population completely misinformed.

Unfortunately for poor old Bowen, FuelWatch and GroceryChoice (universally and incorrectly referred to as Grocery Watch) are the political vanguard in the battle to match political perceptions.

Both schemes bear the hallmarks of ill-prepared, rushed responses shaped by public relations consultants and graphic designers with a fetish for capitals.

Before the Howard government had even worked out the legislation for its last round of industrial relations changes, it started a public campaign for what was to become Work Choices.

Of course, Rudd has public sympathy for wanting to do something about petrol and grocery prices and interest rate rises as well as climate change, but policies and schemes that are rushed through despite a lack of public understanding of their consequences and without solid preparation are likelier to be bad policies and bad politics.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24316293-2702,00.html

THE majority of Australians continue to endorse the Rudd Government's approach to a carbon emissions trading scheme - even if it means higher costs for them.

Most people also endorse the plan to go ahead with an Australian trading scheme regardless of what other nations do, including the big greenhouse gas emitters India and China. But a majority of Coalition supporters believe there should not be any trading scheme, or at least that Australia should wait until other countries introduce similar measures.

The Reserve Bank said yesterday that a preparedness by the public to accept a "one-off" increase in prices because of a carbon trading scheme would help contain inflation.
According to the latest Newspoll survey - conducted exclusively for The Australian last weekend and after the release of Ross Garnaut's detailed climate change report, which suggested a $20-a-tonne tax for carbon emissions - there was no change in support for the major parties.

But while the primary vote for Labor and the Coalition was stable, support for the Greens went back to double figures - 11per cent - on a weekend when environmental issues played a part in various elections.

Labor continued to dominate the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis, 56 to 44 per cent, based on preference flows at the last election. But Kevin Rudd's personal support fell as Brendan Nelson's rose slightly. Satisfaction with the Prime Minister fell three points to 54 per cent, while the Opposition Leader's satisfaction rose from 31 to 35 per cent and his dissatisfaction level fell six points to 42 per cent.

On preferred prime minister, Mr Rudd's support fell from 65 to 62 per cent - his second-lowest rating since the election - and Dr Nelson's rose two points to 16per cent, his second-highest since the election.

On the issue of carbon trading, 88 per cent of those surveyed saidAustralia should introduce acarbon reduction scheme, with 61 per cent saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did.


A mural on the side of a terrace, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.