Memories of snow: Nostalgia, amnesia, re-reading

Abstract

The 1952 audio recording of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales is, for all my family, an object of nostalgia. The nostalgia of the lyrical memoir itself is obvious enough: it harks back to a childhood of guttering gas lamps, paper bags bulging with humbugs, and moustachioed men puffing on pipes as they take their ‘constitutional’ along the ‘Swansea prom’. Thomas’s prose self-consciously amplifies the immemorial quality of the story: Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, […] before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.2