Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  At Mrs Hole’s he met his lifelong friend, Mervyn Levy, whose cosmopolitan Jewish family offered a very different outlook on life than most inhabitants of the Uplands. Mervyn’s father Louis was an idler who ran a tobacconist’s shop in Castle Street in the centre of town. His mother Havie was one of the rich Rubensteins who supported Swansea’s small Jewish community. However soon after giving birth to her younger son Alban in 1920, she was stricken with cancer and died the following year. As a result Mervyn’s home life was strained and disrupted, a situation made worse when he quickly acquired a step-mother, Dolly, whom he could not stand.

  Dylan was happy to find a fellow misfit who wanted to get out of his house. In the narrow lane behind their ‘dame’ school, the two boys developed their creative talents, as they learnt to fib and make up stories with their friends. ‘My Dad’s the richest man in Swansea,’ one would say, and the rest would try to trump that: ‘mine’s the richest in Wales’, chimed another, and someone would claim no-one in the world had more money than his father. Dylan and Mervyn also enjoyed more laddish japes – taking out their penises and writing ‘God Save the King’ with their urine on the wall, observing a buxom nursemaid employed by the Levys naked at her ablutions (there was a story, no doubt apocryphal, that she played strip poker with them), and, inevitably, starting to smoke or, as Dylan later called it, indulging in the ‘Boy Scout’s Enemy’.

  Through his school and his parents, Dylan came to know the children of several local families. The heads of these households were not usually tradespeople. Nor were they from the polluted working-class communities on the other side of town. Dylan might visit relations in Gower and further afield in Carmarthenshire, but he seldom ventured to see his aunts and uncles in St Thomas. Instead the social circle encouraged by his parents included boys such as Jackie Bassett, whose father, the mayor in 1926–7, owned several of Swansea’s leading hotels and lived in a large house, Rose Hill, abutting waste land on Town Hill, above Cwmdonkin Drive. On Richmond Road, the street immediately below the Thomases, lived Ivan and George Grant-Murray (the Murrays of ‘Return Journey’), whose father William ran the municipal art gallery, and also Hugh, son of William Crwys Williams, a distinguished Baptist minister whose poetry was considerably more successful than D.J.’s. Crwys won the crown at the National Eistedfodd in 1919. He went on to become Archdruid of Wales, but also found time to be secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Wales and a Governor of the Grammar School.

  Dylan showed no interest in the paintings and art books strewn around the Murrays’ house. Nor, being monolingual, was he inspired by Crwys Williams’s Welsh language verse. Dylan did, however, follow up the professional interests of another inhabitant of Richmond Road. A fellow pupil at Mrs Hole’s was Joyce Daniel, daughter of a metal merchant. In his broadcast ‘Return Journey’, Dylan recalled how he once filled the unfortunate girl’s galoshes with water. When he visited her parents’ house, he was fascinated to learn that her mother Winifred had had stories published. When he said he wanted to be a writer, she lent him a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She even recalled that he used it to enter a competition which he won.

  The Murrays were leaders in the youthful gang wars fought out on the exposed scrubland up the hill from Cwmdonkin Drive. Dylan joined them in fierce battles with the Mitchell brothers, otherwise known as the Sioux Indians. He had learnt about the Wild West from regular visits to the Uplands cinema. Every Saturday morning he and his friends went to the children’s matinée. Part of his weekly ritual was that he first went to Mrs Ferguson’s shop opposite the flea-pit picture house where he bought a three-penny bag of sweets, comprising gob-stoppers, liquorice allsorts and wine-gums. Apart from providing welcome, perhaps even needed, sugar input (some observers have described his abiding fondness for sweets as a physical addiction caused by a form of diabetes), these acted as ready missiles when the film started. Then he and his friends would stand up on their broken seats and would shout, jeer and throw anything they could lay their hands on at the screen.

  Throughout his childhood Dylan showed a talent for getting into scrapes. His mother recalled how, when he was ‘very small’, he was playing in the upstairs nursery at the Crwys Williamses. ‘Crwys’s little boy Huey came down complaining of a pain in his tummy, Dylan stayed upstairs but leaned over the banister, mocking Huey and saying, “Oh I’ve got a pain in my tummy, Mummy.” He leaned too far and fell down, flat on his nose. It was flat to his face.’ He was rushed to hospital but, despite an operation, his features were never the same. Thenceforward, he was burdened with his flat boxer’s nose. Another accident occurred when he and a friend played see-saw on a plank outside a new house being built on Cwmdonkin Drive. The inevitable happened: after jumping on one end without a counter-balancing weight at the other, Dylan tumbled over and was knocked unconscious.

  Around the age of ten, he was given a new bicycle (probably a present for gaining a place at the Grammar School in September 1925). The following June he wanted to ride over and watch the annual regatta at Mumbles, but his father forbade him, saying the road to the seaside resort at the western edge of Swansea Bay was too busy. Dylan’s good intentions were quickly challenged by some older boys, who persuaded him that his bicycle was too big and he should swap it with one of theirs. He was careering down the hill by West Cross when he found that the brakes on his replacement machine were non-existent. In order to avoid a stopped bus, he swerved into the road, and was hit by an oncoming delivery van owned by the big department store, Ben Evans, where his Great-Uncle Dan (his maternal grandmother’s brother) had once worked. The result was a multiple fracture of both wrist and arm which kept him in hospital for three weeks – an early instance of the ‘chicken bones’ that regularly afflicted both him and his family.

  Afterwards, unable to write, he had to stay at home to convalesce. In her maternal way, Florrie put a table in the garden so he could practise writing with his left hand. She was shocked to look out of the bedroom window and see her son not writing but casually smoking a cigarette. She said nothing at the time, but waited until her husband returned from school. D.J. was unconcerned: he suggested waiting until the weekend when Dylan was likely to have stocked up with cigarettes before visiting the cinema. Then he would swoop.

  Apart from moving pictures, Dylan’s imagination was stirred by words. Even before he could read, Dylan had shown signs of enjoying their sound as revealed in nursery rhymes. ‘I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill and the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions made in my ears; I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes … I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words.’

  He later claimed he was six or seven when he began to understand how words could be strung together euphoniously in what was known as poetry or, as he once jokingly put it, ‘the Spinster’s Friend’. His mother dated this epiphany to a couple of years later when verse suddenly started pouring out of him. He wrote about literally anything. Sometimes he would ask his sister Nancy for a subject and, if she suggested the kitchen sink, he would turn neat rhymes on that. For paper he used whatever came to hand. A favourite medium was the cardboard that came back from the laundry as stiffener inside D.J.’s freshly ironed shirts. Visitors to Cwmdonkin Drive often found these pieces of card, duly filled with Dylan’s neat, rounded script, hung on the walls of the back parlour, allowing them to follow the progress of a poem around the room from one storyboard to the next. Dylan liked his poems to be visual, engaging the eye as well as the ear. From an early age he also drew spikey little pictures – another addition to the parlour décor.

  He later showed one of these laundry cards to his friend Tom Warner. Perhaps the earliest example of a Dylan Thomas poem, it read succinctly:

  I Like

  My Bike.

  However, dating, or even laying hands on,
his juvenile work is difficult. One reason is that most was destroyed. The Thomases used to keep Dylan’s output in what has been described as a ‘dinner wagon’ with two cupboards. At some stage, so the family story goes, Florrie tidied the contents of this oversize trolley into two piles – one to keep (containing his juvenilia), the other to throw out – and she accidentally despatched the wrong material.

  Some person did transcribe parts of Dylan’s output, but that does not make chronology any easier. One can only point to some youthful talented work. The University of Texas owns a manuscript of a poem called ‘My Party’, with an identification (not in Dylan’s hand), ‘Dylan Marlais 5 Cwmdonkin Drive Swansea’, but not dated. The subject-matter is clearly a child’s:

  If I had a party at Christmas

  I’ll tell you who I should invite

  I’d ask the wee mouse in the corner

  Who only comes out in the night …

  Young Dylan runs through the other animals he would like to join his festivities, including a toad and a bat. But unfortunately his nurse is afraid of them, leaving him to conclude that he will have to wait until he is older and then have his party when nobody knows.

  Even at this age, Dylan was able to knock off competent pastiches of known verse forms. In ‘Decision’ he recalled some rousing imperialistic boys’ epic:

  As eager captains pent behind the wall

  Of some sieged city, yearn for clash of steel

  And thrust of sword; for battle close and real

  And fiery onset when fierce foemen fall …

  Despite over-indulgence in alliteration, the lines show a keen appreciation of the poetic qualities of words. On the manuscript someone has pencilled in the sharp reminder: ‘re/al is two syllables & cannot rhyme with steel.’ Probably it was his father, perhaps even his sister Nancy who had left school in April 1925 and was hosting a regular reading group for her friends at Cwmdonkin Drive. By that date Dylan’s childhood freedom was coming to an end. In the autumn he was set to enter the Grammar School, where tiresome rules extended to everyday behaviour as well as to language and literature.

  THREE

  VIRTUE AND GOOD LITERATURE

  Just before eight o’clock every morning, a mad scramble occurred on the hill outside the imposing Gothic Revival edifice of Swansea Grammar School. For several minutes beforehand, caretaker William Marley had tolled a bell summoning pupils from all quarters of the town. Then two or three minutes before the hour, he stopped, slowly walked across the courtyard, and then abruptly brought down a bar across the main front door. Anyone still outside was late and was duly punished.

  On his first morning at his new school in September 1925 Dylan almost certainly made the journey there with his father. Florrie had dressed him in his uniform of bright red blazer, with matching cap, and had added a scarf to protect the sickly boy against Swansea’s changeable elements. Then he and D.J. took the back route – a fifteen-minute stroll along Terrace Road to the school on Mount Pleasant.

  Founded in 1682 by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Hugh Gore, and set in a commanding position overlooking Swansea Bay, the Grammar School was, like its senior English master, D.J. Thomas, a curious mixture. A visitor might imagine he or she had strayed into a typical British public school, with its quaint traditions, daily religious observance and academic bias – a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge university being the goal for the more ambitious pupils. Nevertheless, headmaster Trevor Owen, a stocky North Walian with a top degree in Mathematics from Cambridge, had little of the usual public school enthusiasm for games. Beatings did occur and masters were known to cuff pupils around the head. But generally the atmosphere was easygoing and discipline relaxed. Certain teachers had to endure endless ragging, among them W. S. ‘Soapy’ Davies, the senior classics master who was D.J.’s regular Wednesday lunch-time drinking companion at the nearby Mountain Dew. Classroom wags would torture Jimmy Gott, who taught art during Dylan’s first year, by asking him distractedly, ‘Sleep with your wife, sir?’, and when asked for clarification, would say: ‘Lend me a knife, sir?’

  The school had moved up the hill from the town in the 1850s. A carved inscription above the main door read ‘Hear instruction, be wise and refuse it not’, a sentiment subtly echoed in the school motto, ‘Virtue and Good Literature’. Arms of the founders and early trustees adorned the stained glass windows in the main assembly hall where the mitre was the most obvious decorative motif, though another surprising feature was the preponderance of pen nibs. A favourite pastime was to steal a fellow pupil’s pen, add a dart-like paper tail and launch it at the ceiling where dozens of these lethal missiles were imbedded.

  During the First World War the school had sprung dutifully to the defence of the Empire. A cadet corps was set up and drilled by the physical training master, Sergeant O. A. Bird, a former NCO known to Dylan and his friends as ‘Oiseau’. But the conflict took a heavy toll: of around 900 old boys who volunteered, seventy-six were known to have died, including all but one member of the 1917 upper sixth form. Nearly a decade later the losses were still mourned. With so many former pupils among the casualties, D.J. felt some shame at having avoided the bloodbath. Commemorating the dead became a personal crusade. Daniel Jones (Dylan’s best friend at the school) recalled how, beneath his outward calm, the senior English master seethed with a barely controllable rage. Once, when a pupil dared to giggle while a war poem by Wilfred Owen was being read, D.J. lost his temper and administered a savage beating. D.J. had had ‘a hard time school-teaching’ during the war, remarked Jones.

  D.J.’s unease was not helped by a new breed of younger master, usually without a university degree, but with a maturity that came from wartime service at the front. Their casual manner was in marked contrast to older teachers in their stiff collars. One of the school’s most distinguished old boys, Llewelyn Gwynne, Bishop of Egypt and the Sudan, and war-time Deputy Chaplain General to the British Army in France, came back to address the pupils. The general atmosphere of a nation still struggling to come to terms with the battlefield carnage could not fail to have made an impression on young Dylan. When the school commissioned a bronze memorial, unveiled by local grandee Lord Swansea in June 1924, Florrie noted that her nine-year-old son was ‘very impressed’.

  By then the school had long outgrown its Victorian shell. Seventy years earlier it had taken boarders, but now its dormitories were commandeered for use as chemistry laboratories, while the main classes were conducted in a filthy asbestos-ridden corrugated shed at the back of the main building.

  A traditional feature of the establishment was the ritual chastisement meted out to new boys by their peers. During their first week, recent arrivals would be taken to the lower of the school’s two playgrounds, beside the fives courts and cricket nets, and unceremoniously thrown into the brambles and bushes beneath. With a resilience that belied his delicate physique, Dylan survived this barbaric initiation and began making his mark on the school. For his first couple of years, he played the game as a member of Mansel House, called after an early patron of the school. In the fast-stream class 3A, he had a reputation for being bright but lazy. When, despairing of Dylan’s repeated failures to complete any homework, his young Latin master, J. Morgan Williams, boxed him around the ears, he was surprised to hear a staff colleague advise against such punishment, as D.J. would disapprove. Dylan usually played on this perception, trying to get away with doing as little as possible, because he knew that most masters stood in awe of his stiff father.

  Initially at least, Dylan’s Latin improved under this regime and he may not have been as bad a student as his proud boast of being thirty-third in trigonometry would suggest. One of his physics exercise books survives, and it shows a conscientious second-year pupil who, despite a tendency to scribble random verses and sign his full name – Dylan Marlais Thomas – wrote up his experiments neatly and regularly received good marks. One doodle showed his interest in the physical properties of light. ‘Light’, he wrote. ‘Light
is invisible/Light travels in straight lines.’ It could almost have been a draft of his early poem ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’.

  As other snatches of his back of the class verse suggest, however, his mind was never fully occupied in his studies, for he was already more interested in poetry. At the end of his first term, when he was just eleven, his ‘The Song of the Mischievous Dog’, an accomplished humorous ditty reminiscent of Hilaire Belloc, was published in the school magazine. This was followed a year later by ‘His Repertoire’, a delightful ballad in rhyming iambic hexameters, about a boy who only ever learnt one piece, called ‘Alice’, to play on his violin. When his friends, who were tired of this, demanded an encore at the school concert, he surprised them by launching into a wailing piece they had never heard, let alone expected. Questioned about this afterwards, he replied:

  ‘Well you know of encore pieces I have always been bereft,

  So I gave you Alice backwards; that was all,’ he said, and left.

  Some of Dylan’s critics might be tempted to read this as an insight into his manner of poetic composition. It suggests that, as he searched for his own voice, he was wrestling with issues of creativity. These became more marked as he entered a phase of writing war-related poetry, which reflected his father’s concerns, if not direct influence. ‘The Second Best’, published in the Boy’s Own Paper in February 1927, focused on the poignant quality of the memory of ordinary unheroic people killed in battle. The following month Dylan returned to the school magazine as an outlet for ‘The Watchers’ which adopted the blustering heroic style of Sir Henry Newbolt to ask the ‘mighty dead … who rest by Ypres and Pozières by Vimy and Cambrai’ if they heard the progress of the Allied armies overhead, marching victoriously towards the Rhine. ‘Missing’, just over a year later, called on the sun to seek out a dead soldier on the battlefield and ‘bless/His upturned face with one divine caress’.