What’s your favorite first line of a book or story, and why? Then tell us your favorite first line from one of your books and stories, and why.
Unlike my protagonist Cait Morgan I do not have an eidetic
memory, which would come in handy at the moment. Generally speaking, I don’t go
around memorizing the opening lines of anything, books included. So, ignoring
the obvious quotes about the best/worst of times, or the predilection to
marriage of single women etc. etc., I’m going to share with you the most
impactful words that I can never quite quote, but which have drawn me
into a magical world since I first heard them…yes, I heard them before I read
them, because these are the opening lines of a play, for voices, set in the
fabulously-named village of Llareggub (which is “bugger all”, backwards…something
that’s bound to make a young person titter).
Maybe it’s no surprise that, since I grew up in Swansea, I should gravitate towards the words of Swansea’s (possibly) most famous son, Dylan Thomas.
 |
| My rather faded copy of the play |
But I should warn you that his work is pretty divisive in some circles – for example, my late father thought Thomas was a preening drunk who took himself too seriously, and his work not seriously enough. But me? I adore Thomas’s work, and reserve my views about his personal life. I have several recorded versions of “Under Milk Wood” on vinyl – the Stan Tracy jazz version of it was my eighteenth birthday present from my classmates in school. Link here to see the Brecon Jazz Festival 2001 performance: https://youtu.be/KO2fuHVS2tE
I did memorize the wonderful “Fern Hill”, in its entirety, to recite at a school Eisteddfod in the 1970s. Thus, the opening lines of that are, in fact, etched in my mind, and always make me so happy that I speak them aloud whenever I can:
“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.”
*sigh*
As for my own paltry meanderings…I think I’ll stick with the opening
paragraph of my first Cait Morgan Mystery, “The Corpse with the Silver Tongue”
which I believe works well:
‘The chatter
among the dinner guests was bubbling along nicely, when Alistair Townsend
suddenly clutched at his chest, made gurgling sounds and slumped into his bowl
of escargots. Reactions around the table varied: his wife told him to stop
messing about, one of his guests looked surprised, one a little concerned and a
couple were quite cross. All of which led me to suspect that “How to react when
one’s host drops dead at the dinner table” is not tackled in any modern
etiquette books.’
No comments:
Post a Comment