CHRICHARDMAS

I hoped to be reading Christmas Words and only Christmas Words by now, but I started The Fox in the Attic last week and it messed up my timing and now I'm stuck reading a Bavarian cousinfucking Hitler fantasia. Everyone is locked up together in a crumbling castle, and they want to do it but they are cousins, and all of them wish they were animals all the time.

LET'S MAKE THE BEST OF IT

Billiardrooms are never small. In childhood this one used to seem to Augustine as interminable as the vaults of heaven: it had always been a room of wonder, moreover, for what might not happen in a room where a rhinoceros--lurking in an Africa that must have been just behind the plaster--had thrust head and horn clean through the wall? (Often as a small thing he had peeped in fearfully before breakfast to find if during the night that rhinoceros in his collar had inched any further through.)

But most of all Polly was sad because she was lonely--and that happened only when she came to London! She never felt lonely at home in Dorset; for at Mellton Chase there were animals to play with, but in London there were only children.

That was what was wrong with London: "If only there were fewer people in the world how much nicer it would be for we animals, " Polly told herself...

"We animals!" --Polly could think a rabbit's kind of thoughts much easier than a grown-up's kind, for her thinking like an animal's was still more than nine parts emotion.

All the most interesting hours of the day still tended to be spent on all fours, and even in bodily size she was nearer to her father's spaniel than she was to her father.

Girls' clear minds...In tranquility like this how lovely they are to watch! First, a whitish motion, deep in the bottom-darkness: an irised shadow on the shining gravel...then suddenly, poised beautiful and unwitting in the lens-clear medium, that whole dappled finny back of some big thought--as blue as lead...

True, their word was their bond, but they acted spoilt, like babbies...

A moment later the woman's whole nether person began to heave with unseen poultry.

AND THAT UNSEEN POULTRY WAS ME
--JESUS

--A FOUND POEM BY RICHARD HUGHES AND JESUS

 

A crumbling Bavarian castle 

overrun

with animal multiplication