No, not the one we’ve been hearing so much about recently, the ‘genius of pop’ who’s been celebrating his 70th birthday, but a true genius, a wizard with words, our very own home-grown Welsh ‘boily boy in love with shapes and shadows on his pillow.’   Dylan Thomas no less, arguably the finest lyric poet of the twentieth century, speaking of his teenage self.
 
So that was where our quest started: at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, a tidy semi-detached  in the aptly named Uplands suburb of Swansea where the poet was born in 1914 and lived until he was 23, more than half his life.   It was here, in the tiny bedroom, hardly bigger than a cupboard, with a restricted outlook but warmed by the boiler, that his poetic imagination was released into an outpouring of bewitching, often bewildering, sometimes experimental but almost always beautiful lines.   Between the ages of 16 and 20 he filled at least ten notebooks (of  which, sadly, only four survive), with hundreds of poems, all of them declaimed in ringing tones in the next door bathroom, over and over until he was finally satisfied with the result.  Thus was set the manner of his composition for the rest of his life.
  

His family home where he lived with his older sister Nancy, indulgent, gossipy mother Florrie, and stern schoolmaster father D.J., has been lovingly restored by Annie and Frank Haden.   Colours, curtains, carpets and furniture, although not original, have been carefully chosen in 1920’s style to replicate his parents’ bourgeois aspirations.   Caitlin Thomas once said that her mother-in-law couldn’t pass a sideboard without flicking a duster; she certainly didn’t allow her son to lift a finger which may partly explain why later the young couple were notoriously chaotic in their domestic arrangements.   Stories abound of their fecklessness and complete disregard for the possessions and money of their friends, but much was forgiven them, certainly in the early years of their marriage, he for his wit and good company, she for her beauty and free spirit.

From Cwmdonkin Drive we travelled to the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea where there is a permanent exhibition of manuscripts, letters, video and audio recordings  etc., plus at the moment an interesting show of portraits, including one by Augustus John, and a few executed posthumously.   The mop of unruly curls, the round dark eyes and the full, pouting mouth are immediately recognisable: the features of an ‘angelic pig’ or ‘ugly suckling’ as he was variously dubbed show how unconventionally attractive he would have been in his youth before the deadly combination of ‘Comrade Bottle’, fags and priapism took their inevitable toll.

Finally we travelled to Laugharne on the Taf Estuary which looks across the water to Llanstephan and farmhouses dotted in the folded hills, many with family connections for Dylan.  The tedium of a longish drive was assuaged by listening to Bill Moyle reading some of the poems and Jane Moyle giving us an entertaining account of the life and hectic times of Caitlin and Dylan.    Laugharne itself is charming in a shabby–chic kind of way with hardly a hint, thank goodness, of pandering to Dylan worshippers.   An ancient Norman enclave, still with its own charter, and of course a castle, the long winding street of houses, some quite grand, many with Dylan associations, in particular the Pelican where his parents came to live and Brown’s Hotel in whose bar Dylan passed more time than at home, dips down to a small harbour.   Dylan first visited Laugharne in his teens and fell immediately under its spell, an enchantment that was to last to the end of his life, however often he was tempted away.

Steep steps take you down to the Boathouse, a three-storied cottage huddled against the cliffs on the rocky shore.   It has hardly changed from the day in 1949 when Dylan and family took possession, an arrival evocatively described by Aeronwy Thomas in her touching memoir My Father’s Places.   The small cafe and bookshop are an unobtrusive addition and on a fine day you can sit outside, admire the view and look across the bay to Sir John’s Hill, the inspiration for one of his last, and best poems.   A little way down the cliff walk is the famous Shed on stilts, Dylan’s workplace.   A table, a couple of chairs, a bookcase, faded magazine pictures of well-known literary contemporaries pinned on the walls, crunched-up papers strewn across the floor: you can see it today as it was by peering through a small window cut into the padlocked door.  Here, no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, Caitlin would escort Dylan from Brown’s, his watering hole, into the Shed, his writing hole, and there she would leave him, firmly turning the key in the lock and pocketing it.   No one was allowed to disturb him for at least three hours, but Aeronwy describes tiptoeing to the keyhole and hearing her father, muttering, mumbling, sometimes shouting: Dylan was at work.

A mile out of Laugharne is the hillside cemetery where Dylan was buried after his death at 39 during his fourth immensely popular reading tour in America.  A simple white cross marks the grave and there are only two names on it, his and Caitlin’s who joined him in death after her long ‘Leftover Life to Kill.’

It was a splendid day of discovery and huge thanks to Jane Moyle, our Visits Secretary, who put so much work and time into making it the success it was.   I’m back to reading the poems and discovering more about the life.  How about you?  It’s a rich seam to mine.