I should think that everyone grows up in Wales knowing who Dylan Thomas is. But I wasn’t taught anything about him in school, and had no interest when I was young. Poetry was for white middle-class people. I loved stories, but again never read any by Dylan Thomas.
This all changed when I started creative writing classes and fell in love with poetry. I started exploring Welsh poets, which meant finally reading Thomas’s work and having my eyes opened. Better late than never. I found I needed to know more about the man and the poet.
Young Dylan Thomas
The son of an English teacher, Thomas rebelled against his father, who wanted him to be academically-minded. I relate to that, as I wanted to be a writer when I was young but my family had other ideas. Still, I finished school with decent GCSEs, while Thomas left Swansea Grammar School with just one qualification, in English.
Yet while he lacked certificates he carried abundant confidence. According to his mother Florence, Thomas believed he’d be better than Keats. He edited the school magazine (something else we have in common). The more I’ve learned about Thomas, the more I like him. Especially as he was maligned a bit throughout his lifetime as being ‘not really Welsh’. I’m not regarded as Welsh by many people I come across, despite being born here, because I’m Asian. Welsh culture still runs through my veins.
I’ve come to believe that Thomas wasn’t quite like the persona he became most known for – that he wasn’t loud and drunken (well, not that much or that often). Saunders Lewis wrote that he was quiet, shy, and unassuming. And he believed that Thomas’s ‘Welshness’ shone through in his work.
Then again, others had very different memories of Dylan Thomas. And his daughter – though an ambassador for his work her whole, too-short, adult life – described the atmosphere in their family as “demonic”. Perhaps the rest of us can know of him but never truly know him.
Interrupted lives
I went in search of Dylan Thomas, starting at Laugharne one sunny Saturday in May. The Taf Estuary glistened under the sun and the views were breathtaking. I immediately saw why he kept returning to this place and finally made it his home. He spent childhood summers with aunts and uncles in Carmarthenshire and loved it there – chwarae teg, it’s a beautiful county.
When Dylan Thomas finally settled in Laugharne with his wife Caitlin and children Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm, he was supported by fellow writers such as the novelist Richard Hughes. The family lived in several houses in Laugharne including Sea View, which would suit me down to the ground, but it was too large, cold, and expensive for them to maintain.
He wasn’t good with money – oh dear, will these similarities between us keep coming? – and was regularly bailed out by his friends. He didn’t start making much money from his work until nearer the end of his life. His friend Margaret Taylor bought The Boathouse at Laugharne for him. If only we all had such generous benefactors!
Before you get to The Boathouse you arrive at the Writing Shed, the most famous converted garage in history. You can’t go in, but can look through a window at Thomas’s desk with papers all over it, his jacket hanging on his chair, as if he’s just stepped out for a moment. That made me incredibly sad. Isn’t that just the same for all of us? We will all leave our lives behind, unfinished.
From Sea View to Swansea
The Boathouse, while small, has the most incredible views of the Estuary. You can understand why Dylan Thomas found it so inspiring. Though his greatest work, Under Milk Wood, was written there, he created the majority of his published work aged 16–20, at his family home in Swansea. So off I went to the rather grand semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, where the nearby Cwmdonkin Park sparked the imagination of Dylan Thomas in childhood.
His father’s writing desk and other Thomas belongings fill the The Boathouse, but nothing of the family remains in the Swansea house. After they sold it, the building was a short-lived Dylan-themed B&B, then a student let, which left the house in quite a state. It wasn’t until 2003 that Swansea-born civil engineer Geoff Haydn, who was appalled, worked with other interested people to restore the property.
A woman called Emily worked as a maid for Dylan Thomas when aged 15–20, and in her 90s was able to tell the restoration team exactly how the house had been furnished. The UK was scoured for items for 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, to make it look as like his childhood home as possible. If you go through the house – enjoying an amazing view of the harbour from the rear bedroom – you’ll see they did a fantastic job.
Not far from the house, near the marina, is the Dylan Thomas Centre. It contains a permanent exhibition about his life, and the original doors of the Writing Shed. You can also see the last photo taken of him alive in New York, days before his death, and another by a mortician of Thomas in his coffin before he was returned to Wales for burial in Laugharne. It’s morbid and, if you’ll excuse the phrase, sobering.
Dylan after death
It was long believed that Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. Some objected to a memorial plaque in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. It wasn’t until former President Jimmy Carter, a huge fan, supported a campaign to recognise Thomas, that a plaque was installed in the Abbey, in 1982. In 1995 Carter opened the Dylan Thomas Centre, and visited The Boathouse where there’s a lovely photo of him with Aeronwy. She kept her father’s legacy alive, then her own daughter took up that mantle.
Dylan Thomas was the Michael Jackson or Matthew Perry of his time. He didn’t die from ‘18 whiskeys’ but pneumonia, made worse by a doctor ‘to the stars’ who mistakenly thought Thomas had delirium tremens while withdrawing from alcohol, and overdosed him on morphine. Thomas had a lung condition, most likely something like emphysema, which is why he couldn’t enlist during WWII.
Morphine is a respiratory depressant, dangerous when given to somebody with reduced lung function. It cut down a talent in his prime, not long after his father and sister Nancy had died. What a tragedy for Florence to lose her family in such a short space of time.
Just as fame increased and money rolled in after the deaths of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson, the same happened with Dylan Thomas. His writing is better known now than during his lifetime, even being brought to a new generation by a name-check in a Taylor Swift song.
I know my writing will never be on a par with that of Dylan Thomas – or Keats! – but I write about my life, what I know, and the places that shaped me, just as he did. He’s inspiring writers 71 years after his passing. What a legend – a true Prince of Wales.
