Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  The first and only volume of The Era was a small hand-written publication of eight pages, dated ‘January and February’, and priced ambitiously at two shillings and sixpence. With D. J. Jones and D. Marlais Thomas as editors, the contributors were listed as these two, plus Dan’s father and brother, and also Dylan’s father and twenty-one-year-old sister Nancy. D.J. had agreed to be associated with the venture. But although his name was on the masthead, he did not write anything, unlike Jenkyn Jones who penned an amusing foreword which noted he had been commissioned to report from Mars, adding that the editor Dylan Marlais was ‘already called (even by his rivals) “the second Milton” and “Byron re-hashed” ‘. Dan was in-house essayist and critic, while Dylan had a dual role, as a poet, trailed as ‘one of the proverbial long-haired ilk, [who] will sing often in our columns in surging verse and delicate haunting refrains’, and as a storyteller, he himself promising that ‘Mr Marlais, our specially engaged poet, will write for our unflinching perusal deep, vivid, sensational and bizarre stories of the world as it is, black and wild, filled with the tortured spirits of souls worn out by the perpetual grind and tear of our pessimistic and miserable lives … Not pleasant, but a wonderful change from simpering sentimentality.’

  Dylan’s draft for an introduction that did not appear in the review indicates his high regard for his own work: ‘It is unfortunate that the younger an artist is the less he is credited with being an artist and that [a] young audience is put down as immaturity, because the splendour of youth should be recognised before possible disillusionment. If a child writes an astonishingly good poem, that poem should be regarded in the light of its own merits, not as the precocious and unnatural outpouring of an unhealthy little brat.’

  Dylan’s reference in his letter to ‘exterior company’ may have reflected a degree of friction between Dan and D.J. This was curious, since Dan, on the face of it, was one of the schoolmaster’s best pupils. After leaving the Grammar School in 1931, he went on to gain a first class degree in English from Swansea University. Possibly D.J. was resentful that Dan was the attentive, academically inclined pupil Dylan never was. He probably balked at anyone getting too close to him or his family. Dan described D.J.’s relationship with his son as ‘very strained’, though he recognised Dylan’s respect for his father. He also noted Dylan’s attitude to Nancy, whom Dan found attractive, as she ‘whirled away, leaving behind an exotic perfume of fur and scent’. In the blurb for The Era she was described as ‘well known in society and acting circles’. But Dylan regularly put her down, leading his friend to speculate that either he hated her, or wanted Dan to hate her – an incestuous variation on the Thomases not wanting intruders.

  Aged fifteen in early 1928, Dan took a great interest in the opposite sex. His diary is full of stories of his being attracted to various girls when he is out. At one stage neighbours accused him of molesting their daughter and threatened to call the police. Dylan was slower in his sexual development. But by the time he reached the same age he began to catch up. The broadcaster Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who was at school with him, though slightly older, used to tell of taking a girl for a walk in Cwmdonkin Park and hearing Dylan’s voice whispering from the bushes, ‘Tell her you love her, boy. Tell her you love her.’

  In the spring of 1930 Dylan accompanied another Swansea school-friend Cyril James on a short holiday to St Dogmaels near Cardigan. James’s impoverished Welsh-speaking cousins ran a farm, Yr Hendre, in a beautiful spot looking out over Cardigan Bay. The two boys walked along the coast, took a trap into Cardigan, and frequented the local pubs. Dylan wrote a short poem in an autograph book which James’s cousin Bonnie had recently been given. Though she was only ten and their friendship entirely innocent, Dylan managed to inject some sexual innuendo into a delicate ditty starting:

  He said, ‘You seem so lovely, Chloe:

  Your pretty body and your hair …

  The visit had an unfortunate upshot. Dylan and his friend stayed a week longer than expected. Having come with only one pair of trousers, he borrowed another from Bonnie’s father, who never got them back. In addition, Dylan’s parents failed to pay for his visit, as arranged. Bonnie’s Aunt Ethel wrote several times to Florrie Thomas without receiving an answer. Eventually, it seems, the debt was written off.

  That summer Dylan joined some boys from the Uplands on a camping trip to the Gower peninsula. This was a local rite of passage when the sun beat down and tourists flocked to Swansea Bay. He and his friends took a bus down to Mewslade and pitched their rented Bell tents in a field at Pilton, a mile from the rolling Rhossili strand. So far as any of them could remember, Dylan played his part. He did some fishing and even helped with cooking, but showed no interest when, in return for ham and eggs, his colleagues helped a local farmer with haymaking.

  The reason soon became clear. Staying in a cottage in nearby Llangennith were three attractive High School girls who were known to some in the party. One was Evelyn (‘Titch’) Phillips, daughter of an insurance salesman. She had convinced her mother that a spell in the country would aid her revision for forthcoming exams. She was told she had to wear dresses, not shorts. Before long she had linked up with these boys at a dance in Llangennith, and she and her friends were invited back to the camp. When she went over, she encountered someone she had not met previously. ‘Suddenly I heard someone speaking in a voice such as I had never heard before, and I remember turning to see who owned this voice, and I could see nothing except a couple of boys I already knew and a little shrimp of a boy with light curly hair.’ She asked Glyn Thomas, with whom she was acquainted, about this waif-like creature. She learnt it was Dylan, son of D. J. Thomas, with whom she was familiar because her family also lived in Uplands and her brother Billy had been at the Grammar School.

  Although two years older than Dylan, she was immediately captivated by his sense of fun: ‘he really brightened up their camp.’ Since English was on her examination syllabus, he asked if she would like to read some poetry he had written. When she agreed, he gave her a small exercise book, full of jottings in pencil. It was clear that he had been filling this book while the others cut hay. ‘We both lay on our stomachs in the grass and read the poetry,’ Evelyn recalled. ‘I didn’t understand it all, I must confess.’ She knew about sonnets and the sort of poetry she studied at school. But this was quite different – ‘more poetic’, she felt, leaving a sensation that was even more memorable than seeing it all on the page. Even at that age, Dylan impressed on her that he wanted to become a poet. And he had an added advantage: he was the only person around who could tell her the meaning of the word ‘idiosyncrasy’ which she found in one of her textbooks.

  This was the first indication of the notebooks in which Dylan had begun his early personal experimental verse. Writing to Geoffrey Grigson in spring 1933, he referred to ‘innumerable exercise books full of poems’. He later said there had been ten, of which four survive, incorporating just over two hundred poems which satisfied Dylan between 1930 and 1934. These show Dylan at his most prolific, beginning to take his creative powers seriously. Much of his published verse originated in one form or another during this short period.

  FOUR

  MY BODY WAS MY ADVENTURE

  While Dylan’s trips to West Wales and Gower developed his awakened interest in a natural world beyond the Uplands, his regular visits to his relations in Carmarthenshire introduced him to the starker realities of rural existence which had shaped both sides of his family. Here Dylan discovered a tight-knit Welsh-speaking world where, amid inevitable hypocrisies and compromises, the chapel still dominated the community, the Bible served as literature and inspiration, and the preacher engaged his congregation with emotional orations, known as hwyl (meaning literally ‘full sail’). The sensitive bookish boy from Swansea’s Uplands found it both repellent and fascinating. As much as he sometimes tried to escape its influence, he always returned to it.

  The journey from Swansea was usually made by bus (occasionally by train) via the b
ustling county town of Carmarthen which, with its disputed reference to Merlin in its name, acted as a gateway to an older, darker world of Celtic myth. From there Dylan would take a bus run by the Thomas brothers from Llanstephan. After crossing the railway at Johnstown (close to The Poplars where old Guard Thomas had lived), he would wind up the escarpment to Llangain. Dylan described making the journey by pony and trap in his story ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, though he himself never visited a grandfather in this area (Evan Thomas died in 1905). He probably heard the tale from his father who was referring to his own maternal grandfather, William Lewis, a local man (born in Llangunnock) who, in his eighties, lived at The Poplars when D.J. was a boy.

  The straight road through Llangain passes Capel Smyrna, the Congregational chapel, where some of Florrie’s family worshipped. Just before this thoroughfare dips towards Llanstephan, the main town of the peninsula with its ancient castle, a lane on the right leads down to a brook, rising, on the other side, past a small wood of poplar and fir trees which sheltered a ramshackle white farmhouse, Fernhill. This was where Florrie’s sister Annie now lived with her husband Jim Jones and son Idris. The interior was cold and dank, with stone floors and smiling china dogs. After the cleanliness of Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan found it ‘insanitary’. But the surrounding fields were full of natural excitements, later providing the backdrop (as Gorsehill) for Dylan’s story ‘The Peaches’, before being immortalised as a romantic paradise in one of his most famous poems, ‘Fern Hill’.

  Dylan’s ‘ancient peasant Aunt’ Annie was a bent creature with a ‘cracked sing-song voice’ and ‘fist of a face’. She was generally kind, larding him with bread and broth when he arrived, and sending him money she could ill afford when he was away. But there was another side to her peasant character – the ‘well of rumours and cold lies’ Dylan noted in an early draft of his poem about her funeral in February 1933.

  With his ruddy countenance, moustache and bowler worn at a rakish angle, her husband Jim was either a loveable rogue or an alcoholic layabout, depending on one’s point of view. His family owned a local farm, Pentrewyman, but, as the post-war agricultural depression deepened, he was too lazy to apply himself to that, leaving the job of running it to his sister Rachel, Dylan’s ‘Auntie Rach’. In ‘The Peaches’ he sold pigs to support his drinking habit – a plausible enough caricature of a man whom one family member recalled selling his horse’s shoes to the local blacksmith so he could have enough money for a pub crawl. He considered himself a cut above his fellows, living in a gentleman’s house (bigger than the local norm) and preferring to worship in the Anglican parish church of St Cain in Llangain rather than in a Nonconformist chapel with the rest of his Welsh-speaking relations. (This latter point may have encouraged Dylan’s English-orientated parents to entrust their sensitive and often unhealthy son to the Joneses.)

  In ‘The Peaches’ the Joneses’ son, Dylan’s cousin Idris, comes across as an amiable boyo, with an energy that could be turned equally to either sexual conquest or silky preaching. In real life, he was a ruddy-faced wimp, who shared his father’s aversion to any form of toil. Before the war, he had worked in Ben Evans’s department store in Swansea (where his and Dylan’s Great-Uncle Daniel Williams had also been a salesman). One result was an unctuous salesman’s accent that even his friends found laughable. Unable to avoid being called up, he had served with the Royal Garrison Artillery. After being demobbed he could find no proper job. He liked acting in local amateur theatrical productions and, as in the story, may indeed have seen a future as a man of the cloth. But he failed to capitalise on this calling, and Dylan’s image of him as a Lothario was probably the natural hero worship of a young boy for a relation seventeen years his senior. The reality was Idris masturbating in an outhouse with a book in his hand (a memorable image in ‘The Peaches’), while sublimating his sexual drive in revivalist religion, full of Welsh hwyl, or emotional fervour. The pantheism of his sermon in the story initially seems attractive, until it becomes clear it is a humorous vehicle for Dylan’s later sense of the oneness of nature: ‘Oh God, Thou art everywhere all the time, in the dew of the morning, in the frost of the evening, in the field and the town … Thou canst see everything we do … Thou canst see all the time. O God, mun, you’re like a bloody cat.’

  Fernhill opened Dylan’s eyes to a different way of life. He fished in the brook, spent time at the blacksmith’s, and when a horse sank in a muddy field, he played his part in the rescue by lending his weight to others tugging on ropes. Rural values were certainly not those of the Uplands. Had he not seen his Uncle Jim, coming out of a pub and kissing two fat giggling women full on the lips? The countryside was also more raw, elemental and, so he discovered, strangely spiritual. To an adolescent boy, its rhythms were liberating: he could, as he put it in ‘The Peaches’, feel ‘all my young body like an excited animal surrounding me … I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name.’

  It was also a place of mystery and fascination. Until the beginning of the century Fernhill had been owned by Robert Evans, a former hangman who, in an effort to escape his notorious past, had in retirement changed his name to Anderson. Stories of Evans’s temper and sexual appetite abounded: he was said to have constructed bars on the house’s lower windows to prevent his daughter escaping to meet her lover. When he died in August 1901, the Carmarthen Journal noted that Wales had ‘lost one of the most eccentric of her sons’, around whose memory ‘weird, creepy sensationalism’ would always hang ‘like a veil’. This sense of the macabre appealed to Dylan’s imagination, contributing to the Poe-like feel of his early stories in the 1930s. The ghoulish detail could be used back in Cwmdonkin Drive, where literary fancies came to him ‘in the warm, safe island of my bed, with sleepy midnight Swansea flowing and rolling outside the house’.

  Not everyone could handle the profound change of culture. Once his friend Jack Bassett joined him as a paying guest of the Joneses. He arrived with his mother in a Daimler, suggesting the year was 1926–7, when his father was Mayor of Swansea and would have had access to a chauffeured limousine. But when Mrs Bassett refused to eat the peaches Aunt Annie served as a delicacy in her best room, an incident ensued. When young Jack overheard Jim Jones, probably drunk, complaining about this unintended slight, he too took umbrage and, despite his uncomplicated friendship with Dylan, demanded to return home.

  Dotted around Fernhill were Florrie’s other relations. Auntie Rach’s farm, Pentrewyman, was a mile further on toward Llanstephan, beyond the weir and along the rushy mill-race (known as Fernhill Brook). As an attractive girl in her early twenties, she had become pregnant out of wedlock, and had never subsequently married. Thirty years on, her dozy son Albert was even more of a wastrel than his cousin Idris. Dylan would often wander over from Fernhill. If still there at sunset, he would eat his cawl (a Welsh stew of mutton and leeks) and sleep overnight – sometimes, as a child, sharing a bed with May Edwards, one of many foundlings employed as servants on local farms.

  Opposite Pentrewyman, on the eastern bank of the stream, stood the grandiosely named Llangain Woollen Factory, a relic from the days when the natural combination of sheep, fresh water and access to the sea contributed to the economy. A smaller ‘factory’ operated a few hundred yards further on, beside a woody lane just off the main Carmarthen-Llanstephan road. Higher up this lane stood Waunfwlchan, where Florrie’s mother had been brought up, as well as Llwyngwyn, another farm in the extended Williams family, and Mount Pleasant, a smaller property owned by Annie Jones and her home after she and her husband gave up the tenancy of Fernhill in 1929.

  At the bottom, abutting the ‘factory’, were two small cottages, known as Blaencwm, which, over the years, accommodated different family members. This was where Dylan used to go after Fernhill was no longer available. One cottage became the home of his Aunt Polly and Uncle Bob, who had sold the old family house at 29 Delhi Street (though they retained number 30, which provided a rental in
come). Polly, one-time organ player at the Canaan chapel in St Thomas, was the pleasantest of Florrie’s siblings, but Bob was difficult. He was mentally unstable, which made him hostile and anti-social. His problems may have been the result of family inbreeding or may have had a more tangible cause: Nancy used to suggest that he had been gassed in the First World War, though a more likely explanation is that he had suffered an accident in his job as a coal trimmer at Swansea docks.

  Another relation in the vicinity was Ann Williams, nominally Florrie’s first cousin though consanguinity may have been closer. Ann’s mother Amy was Florrie’s aunt (her mother Anna’s sister). Some time around 1860 young George Williams, Florrie’s father, came to work as a labourer at the family farm at Waunfwlchan. The son of a local smith, he struck lucky and married his boss’s daughter, Anna (who, since she shared his surname, may have been a cousin). He had the first three children by Anna (including – to confuse matters further – Ann, later Dylan’s Aunt Annie Jones), before decamping with his wife and family to Swansea where he led his apparently blameless life on the railways.

  But George, the unassuming deacon at the Canaan Congregational chapel in St Thomas, was a dark horse with a scandalous secret he left behind in the Llanstephan countryside. In 1866, shortly after his move, Anna’s sister Amy had given birth to a daughter, Ann. In the 1871 census this girl was described as a niece of Anna and Amy’s parents, Thomas and Ann Williams, at Waunfwlchan; ten years later as a granddaughter. On her birth certificate Ann was reported to be the daughter of her grandfather Thomas Williams. But this was all done to conceal the fact that this child had been fathered by George Williams, the husband of Amy’s sister. (At least the census description of her as the niece at Waunfwlchan is technically correct.) Little wonder that George and his young family left for Swansea around the time the baby Ann was born. Florrie certainly learnt of this murky episode in her immediate family’s past from her cousin Doris, who was Ann’s daughter and Amy’s granddaughter.