Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel

  Rammed in the marching heart, hole

  In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled

  Death on the mouth that ate the gas.

  Birth and death, particularly the inevitability of decay from the onset of life: these were to be among his most potent themes as a poet. But that was in the future. Back at Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan entered the physical world in the bedroom at the front of the house. As customary in middle-class families, the Thomases maintained certain rooms for ‘best’. One was this bedroom and the other the living room directly underneath which Florrie ensured was kept spotless for relations making the journey from Carmarthen. The main door was set slightly to the side of the front of the house. The focus of domestic activity was towards the back where parlour and kitchen looked out on a small garden, bordered by utility buildings such as the coal-hole and washroom. This was Florrie’s domain, where she would cook and entertain. In later years Dylan’s friends enjoyed visiting his house: his mother would serve them cakes and sandwiches, with slices of bread cut so thin, she proudly and revealingly liked to say, that you could see London through them. His future wife, Caitlin, was not so impressed at this show of Welsh maternalism: she saw it as obsessive behaviour and noted dismissively that Florrie could not pass a sideboard without wanting to dust it.

  In between this social centre and the pristine front room D.J. bagged a study, known as his ‘den’, which he lined with books from floor to ceiling. Its seedy atmosphere, which mixed classroom chalk with smoke and beer from the saloon bar, was redolent of the disappointments of schoolmastering. A half-finished copy of The Times crossword usually lay on a chair. Otherwise the most obvious concession to external taste was a pair of Greek statuettes. In those days a door led from the study to the garden. If someone unwelcome came to the house, D.J. could escape through here and a gate at the bottom of the garden.

  Upstairs much the same plan was replicated. Initially, at least, the bedroom at the front was kept for special occasions (and a birth certainly counted). It looked out onto a reservoir and, slightly down the hill, onto an open field attached to a school where, if the pupils were not playing a lop-sided version of football, a flock of sheep grazed contentedly. Beyond the reservoir was Cwmdonkin Park, a municipally owned area of trees, ponds, and well-manicured lawns, made more aesthetically pleasing by the jaunty gradient on which it lay. Dylan’s parents slept at the back overlooking the garden, while Nancy, washing facilities, boiler and live-in help were all squashed in rooms in between. When Addie left after eighteen months, Dylan took over her box-like room next to the boiler: ‘very tiny,’ he later noted; ‘I really have to go out to turn around … Hard chair. Smelly. Painful. Hot water pipes very near. Gurgle all the time. Nearly go mad.’

  From the outset Dylan was a petulant child. He cried, would not sleep, and had difficulty keeping down food. D.J. was heard to want to ‘chuck the little bugger out’. Addie would resort to anything to make the baby smile. He seemed to like a game where she pretended to throw a vinegar bottle at him. But this backfired when the cap came off and the sharp liquid spurted all over his face, nearly choking four-month-old Dylan.

  The park had a calming effect when he was in a temper, Addie discovered. From the depths of his pram, he seemed to enjoy the trees and the birds – the earliest evidence of his response to nature. After she left, the Thomases employed other maids who took him there, such as the tall, broad-shouldered ‘Patricia’, who featured in his story ‘Patricia, Edith, and Arnold’. She may well have existed, for much of the other detail in that story rings true. A family called Lewis did indeed live next door, and one can imagine the alert, precocious young Dylan climbing on top of the coal in the shed so as better to hear Patricia’s cross-fence gossiping with Edith, the Lewises’ maid. The coal-hole was a station on the line of his imaginary railway, the Cwmdonkin Special, ‘its wheels, polished to dazzle, crunching on the small back garden scattered with breadcrumbs for the birds’. When he became filthy from the coal dust and Patricia took him inside to change, he exposed himself to her in a typically forthright, wholly innocent, startlingly exhibitionist manner. ‘He took off his trousers and danced around her, crying: “Look at me, Patricia!” “You be decent,” she said, “or I won’t take you to the park.” ’ ‘A precocious child,’ he described himself in 1933, having once been ‘a sweet baby’ and prior to becoming ‘a rebellious boy, and a morbid youth’.

  Before long the park – ‘a world within the world of the sea-town’ – offered more promising opportunities for play than the garden. While the spectre of war hung over the town, Dylan responded manfully by carrying a wooden rifle which he used to shoot down ‘the invisible unknown enemy like a flock of wild birds’. Although the park was not large, there was always some new area to discover. One day he and his friends would range over it ‘from the robbers’ den to the pirates’ cabin, the highwayman’s inn to the cattle ranch, or the hidden room in the undergrowth where we held beetle races and lit the wooden fires and roasted potatoes and talked about Africa and the makes of motor-cars, yet still the next day it remained as unexplored as the Poles, a country just born and always changing.’

  Dylan’s energy found an outlet in boyish pranks. Accounts abound of him climbing trees and taunting the park-keeper John Smallcombe by walking on the forbidden grass. Addie Drew specifically remembered him throwing missiles at the swans in the reservoir. Such tales (given to biographers and researchers over the years) are doubtless true, though they often seem to draw detail at least from Dylan’s own recollection of his youth, put in the mouth of the park-keeper in his 1947 radio broadcast ‘Return Journey’: ‘He used to climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of. Cut branches off the trees. Carve words on the benches. Pull up moss in the rockery, go snip, snip through the dahlias. Fight in the bandstand. Climb the elms and moon up the top like a owl. Light fire in the bushes. Play on the green bank. Oh yes, I knew him well. I think he was happy all the time.’ Once such a colourful self-portrait is established by an author, it is often difficult for others to contradict.

  Dylan had a mischievous though never nasty streak. But often self-promoted stories of his laddishness gloss over another side to his development. Throughout his childhood, he was considered delicate and sickly. (He later described how this made him suitable for a career as writer, because ‘the majority of literature is the outcome of ill men’.) His main symptom was asthma, which was ascribed either to a wheezy chest or to weak lungs. If his mother made more of this than warranted, she was terrified by the spectre of tuberculosis, her father’s apparent killer. So much was made of the disease in the Thomas household that Dylan later liked to pretend he had been afflicted with it, as part of his poet’s rites of passage. Florrie had another reason for caution. For two terms in 1922–3, her lively daughter Nancy was unable to attend the Girls’ High School after picking up a blood disorder which meant that any cut threatened to become septic.

  At least this gave Florrie something to do. She wrapped Dylan in scarves in winter, kept him in bed at the slightest symptom, and pumped him full of comfort foods, such as his favourite bread and milk – a regimen tacitly approved of by D.J. who was a fearful hypochondriac himself. The result was that Dylan grew up coddled by his mother, a warm memory he retained throughout his life.

  Looking after her children’s health also compensated Florrie for her disappointing relationship with her husband. Apart from regular Friday night sorties down town to the Empire Theatre on Oxford Street, her contact with D.J. was minimal. When not at school, he was either reading or drinking at the pub. Haydn Taylor, who was to marry Nancy, was astounded at the intellectual gap. Florrie never read and, when not scurrying distractedly around the house, concerned herself exclusively with local gossip. ‘Daddy’, as she always called D.J., looked on her with a ‘mixture of genuine affection and amused contempt’. He made fun of her mental
limitations and, if he imitated or repeated one of her sillier remarks, no-one laughed more heartily than she. Communal activity was strictly limited: D.J. sometimes read from Shakespeare or Keats, two favourite authors, or accompanied songs on a harmonium, a throw-back to his musical past. But it was hardly convivial. ‘There was no sense of any shared “homely” atmosphere,’ noted Taylor. ‘This was no family that went off to the seaside in the summer or played foolish games around the fire at Christmas.’

  Another writer D.J. rated highly was Thomas Hardy, whose novel Jude the Obscure he used to read and re-read with what Taylor described as ‘morbid satisfaction’. The parallels are obvious: Jude was a poor boy whose ambitions to study at Oxford were foiled after he was trapped into marriage by the blousy barmaid Arabella, who feigned pregnancy to win him. Perhaps, bearing in mind those stories that the Thomases were forced to wed, the ‘popular’ Florrie from St Thomas was better versed in the ways of the world than she let on, and did something similar to snare her Aber graduate. It is true she did not follow Arabella in immediately abandoning her man. And whether there was a free spirit such as Sue Bridehead who offered D.J. a vision of a better life is not known. However there was something of the grumpy D.J. in the unhappy, heavy-drinking Jude of the latter part of the book. Jude’s dying words were: ‘Wherefore is light given to him in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?’ ‘Bitter’ was a word frequently used to describe D.J.

  Was it Dylan’s ill-health or his father’s pernicketiness that took the family to Llandrindod Wells in the summer or autumn of 1918? The Thomases stayed in a boarding house in this once fashionable spa town in mid-Wales. Resident in the same establishment was Trevor Hughes, a Swansea Grammar School boy with literary aspirations who, although ten years older, later became a friend of Dylan. He must have been alarmed to encounter his English teacher while on holiday – a sentiment clearly reciprocated, because he recalled D.J. keeping to his room and not mixing much. Florrie, on the other hand, was typically outgoing, and it was at her side that Hughes first saw the ‘little face of a boy aged three peeping out from behind his mother’s skirts’.

  Dylan’s attachment to Florrie is evident from a photograph taken around this time in a Swansea studio. It shows a serious, slightly girlish child, head garlanded in a halo of golden curls, sitting staring disdainfully at the camera, as if he is practising an angry arrogant poet pose for the future. His chubby legs are crossed lazily, and his left hand is uncomfortably extended into the lap of his mother, who herself is caught in an emotional no-man’s-land between showing affection and restraining her son. The only person enjoying the exercise is Nancy who stands with another woman, perhaps a relation, behind this couple. She looks confident and pretty, her hair tied in an extravagant bow.

  With D.J. as father, Dylan might have found himself forced educationally. At school D.J. was known as a fierce taskmaster, as suggested by his nickname Le Soldat, with its Napoleonic connotations. His iron self-control extended to alcohol: though he liked to drink, he monitored his input, perhaps trying to lay the ghost of some youthful excess. But, as if exhausted by his daytime exertions, D.J. at home was indulgent to the point of laxity. According to Florrie, Dylan taught himself to read from second-rate comics such as Rainbow. From time to time he would climb into his parents’ bed where his father would declaim some Shakespeare. When Florrie asked if the child (aged just four) was not too young for this, D.J. said he hoped some passages would stick. ‘It’ll be just the same as if I were reading ordinary things.’

  A similarly laissez-faire approach was taken to his spiritual development. D.J. had no time for religion, but it is impossible to grow up in a Welsh household with Nonconformist ministers in the family without taking on board the rudiments of a chapel approach to life. Most weekends Dylan would accompany his mother on visits to her sister Dosie at the manse of Paraclete chapel in Newton, close to the Mumbles. Often he attended his Uncle Dai Rees’s Sunday School, winning a certificate for Bible studies that he hung with no great enthusiasm on his wall in Cwmdonkin Drive. One of his uncle’s interests was natural history: Dylan picked up much of his basic knowledge of fauna and flora from rambles with his uncle through rustic byways on the edge of the Gower peninsula. (There is no evidence he showed any interest in, or aptitude for, his uncle’s other passion – golf.) Sometimes the family ventured slightly further into Gower where another of Florrie’s brothers, Thomas Williams, lived. A hunchback variously described as ‘Bohemian’ and ‘a complete humbug’ (by his niece Nancy), he too had been a minister until a good marriage had given him the money and freedom to retire to a series of grand mansions, including Brook Villa at the entrance to the Clyne valley, where he and his wife Emma alienated neighbours by closing a former public right of way.

  Dylan’s formal education did not begin until the age of seven, when he was sent down the hill to Mrs Hole’s school in Mirador Crescent. In later years he liked to describe this grandly, in the English manner, as his ‘preparatory’ school, and in a way it was. Started a few years earlier by Isabel Hole, an English widow in her fifties, it provided the more prosperous young children of the locality with a grounding in Latin, French, Arithmetic, History, English and Geography, gently propelling them on their paths to the Grammar School and Girls’ High School. Surprisingly for parents such as Dylan’s, it was not only religiously based (every day began with Bible reading, hymns and a prayer) but avowedly Anglican, with regular visits from the vicar of Christ Church, Swansea, Canon J. H. Watkins Jones.

  Wearing a red and blue blazer, Dylan took his place in an all-purpose ground-floor classroom, arranged in a series of long hard benches, with girls at the front and boys behind. Mrs Hole sat authoritatively at a high desk, assisted by her sickly daughter Dorothy, whose job was to cuddle the youngest pupils if they cried or otherwise could not keep up. In the background lurked a son, with a reputation for enjoying his drink. Upstairs, in the late afternoons, Mrs Hole’s maid, Eliza Sadler, was allowed to teach music. Children who had misbehaved during the day were forced to stay on in the empty classroom during this period, allowing Dylan plenty of opportunity to hear what he called the ‘distant, terrible, sad music of the late piano lessons’.

  Afternoons were also a time for reading aloud, perhaps one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books which Dylan enjoyed or, a more direct literary influence, the German children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter (or Shock-headed Peter). These cautionary tales of youthful misbehaviour appealed to Dylan’s Gothic imagination, particularly the one about Conrad, whose habit of sucking his thumb led to it being chopped off by the tailor or ‘great, long, red-legged scissor-man’. Similar images occur in his own later output, for example, the half-naked girl with nails ‘not broken but sharpened sideways, ten black scissor-blades ready to snip off his tongue’ in his story of emerging adolescent sexuality, ‘A Prospect of the Sea’. These have given Freudian-inspired commentators scope for speculation about Dylan’s supposed castration complex. Did this result from his mother’s over-protectiveness? There were indeed childlike elements in the way he later related to women. And was it linked to another of the psychoanalysts’ bugbears, his supposed oral fixation? As he grew older, Dylan liked to stuff himself, not with good, nutritious food, but with sweets of the most infantile variety, such as gob-stoppers. He also found comfort in the breast: after the matrimonial conflict described in his poem ‘I make this in a warring absence’, he was able to relax in his knowledge: ‘Now in the cloud’s big breast lie quiet countries.’

  Reading aloud meant group recitation, which Dylan hated. Chanting a poem in unison one afternoon, he put his hands over his ears and burst out, ‘I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it.’ Subsequently he and his fellow pupils were allowed to recite poems of their choice. Standing alongside Mrs Hole, the seven-year-old Dylan announced he was going to do ‘my grave poem’, and started to intone:

  ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs

  Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
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  Mark sorrow on the bosom of the earth …’

  He ended with his audience in stunned silence. His class had no idea he had been quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II. But they could not help being affected by the sadness of the words and their delivery.

  Declaiming poetry introduced Dylan to one pleasure he never tired of – the sound of his own voice. Another stage in his journey of inculcation into English ways came around this time when he was sent for elocution lessons. Swansea’s aspiring middle classes were not content with the broad musical vowels of the Welsh valleys. In their search for respectability they had to imitate the precise modulated tones of the English. D.J. had already lost the warm burr of his forefathers; Florrie retained it only slightly. But they made sure that Nancy learnt to speak ‘properly’, and Dylan followed her once a week to the small academy in Brynymor Crescent run by Miss Gwen James, a grocer’s daughter who had studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. She recognised that Dylan had ‘a big voice for a small boy’ and set about polishing its rougher edges.

  His command of diction and his delivery set him up for leading roles in school plays at Mrs Hole’s. In one end of term entertainment he was cast as a colonel required to sit and read a newspaper. This proved too passive for Dylan. He contrived to poke a hole in the paper with a walking stick and to spit orange peel through the gap. He then jumped up and started twirling his stick, as if leading a group of minstrels. The audience (including his mother) loved this impromptu act. Mrs Hole was not so sure and promptly brought down the curtain. But Dylan had discovered a talent for performing and gaining attention which never deserted him.