Dylan Thomas: A New Life

by Andrew Lycett

  Unspoiled and independent in spirit, the village was part of the estate of Michael Mason, a local landowner who, as an author, had befriended Rudyard Kipling and, as an explorer and spy, had served as a model for his one-time colleague Ian Fleming’s fictional James Bond. Mason took little interest in this part of his property. Perhaps for this reason, South Leigh had a reputation in the wider county for the cantankerousness of its inhabitants. Somehow it enjoyed a quaint sort of local democracy, presided over by Albert Hopkins, owner of the pub, the Mason’s Arms, and by Bill Mitchell, the station master who was always happy to keep the Oxford train waiting for a minute or two if he saw Dylan puffing up the road hoping to catch it.

  In a cottage at the opposite end of the village from the Thomases lived Cordelia Sewell, a sprightly woman in her late thirties with a liking for the outdoor life. She was vaguely aware of the new residents, but did not meet them until around Christmas when Mrs Hopkins at the pub suggested she might find them congenial. When, one evening, she plucked up the courage to knock on their door and introduce herself, she found a party going on. A flushed Caitlin was dancing round the kitchen table, with a flower in her hair and another at the bosom of her velvet dress. People were making sandwiches and discussing a tea party, for which they eventually departed at around ten o’clock in the evening.

  Caitlin showed no interest in learning that Cordelia had been to the Slade School of Art, knew her sister Nicolette and had even stayed at Blashford. But she did recognise a fellow soul whom she adopted as the latest in a line of ‘best friends’ – the qualifications being that they should drink, smoke, care little for anyone else’s opinion and, above all, be good company. Granddaughter of the formidable Roman Catholic literary couple Alice and Wilfred Meynell, Cordelia and her two daughters had been parked in South Leigh during the war, after the breakdown of her second marriage. Within a week, she was looking after the Thomases’ black cat, Satan, and, soon after, Dylan and Caitlin came round, complaining that they itched and asking if they could have a bath. Although they spent a long time, they never again availed themselves of this facility. Caitlin said she did not like Cordelia’s bath-mat and thereafter performed her ablutions in the Mason’s Arms.

  Apart from drinking, their main point of contact was children. Llewelyn, who had been parked for so long at his grandmother’s that he scarcely knew what it meant to live at home, struck up a friendship with Cordelia’s younger daughter Nicola, who was the same age. The Thomases would drop him off at the Sewell house before going to the pub at night. ‘Bring him back when you’re sick of him,’ shouted Caitlin, while Dylan matched her for insouciance: ‘They’re in bed already wearing each other’s vests.’

  In an unpublished memoir, Cordelia recorded how, when her new friends took to rolling their own cigarettes, Dylan admitted this was another of his Bohemian poses, in the way he coughed, produced a little machine, and chuckled, ‘I use this and pretend …’ The rest of his statement was lost, a regular occurrence with Dylan who seemed to mumble. Cordelia so often had to ask, ‘What?’ that she mentioned this to Caitlin, adding that she was surprised because his broadcasts were so clear. Dylan’s wife answered, with a note of triumph, ‘Not heard a bloody word for years.’

  Cordelia’s tales of Dylan’s domestic ineptitude and Caitlin’s heroic perseverance are often overlaid with a touch of macabre surrealism. In one, Dylan was failing to make a pot of tea in the kitchen and shouting for his wife, who was in the garden cutting grass with a long gleaming scythe. ‘Cait’s just had it sharpened,’ observed Dylan. ‘She cycled across Magdalen Bridge with it over her shoulder.’

  Initially, at least, he warmed to South Leigh’s rural anarchy. He honed his skills at shove-halfpenny at the Mason’s Arms. If he needed to be ferried somewhere urgently, he could call on Bill Green, a bus driver (and son of the owner of the post office), who owned the only car in the village. For more social events, there was the van owned by Cordelia’s friends the Colgroves who lived in Stanton Harcourt. Cordelia remembered an outing in this van with some other local people and Dylan laughing: ‘Oh what a treat for Hitler! We’d be the first lot for the gas-pipe. Peasants, Communists, gypsies and intellectuals. Not much room for us in Russia either. A lot of layabouts living on other people.’

  One of South Leigh’s attractions was its proximity to Oxford, a twenty-minute journey on an old-fashioned two-carriage steam train. Dylan soon resumed his place at the bar of one of the city pubs – usually the Turf or the George but, occasionally, now he lived in that direction, the Perch or the Trout on the river to the north-west. New friends included Enid Starkie, a vivid Irishwoman who taught French literature at Somerville, and Dan Davin, a New Zealander working for the Oxford University Press. Dylan became excited when Starkie, a Rimbaud expert who had known Francis Macnamara in Dublin, told him she had discovered that the French poet had plucked some of his imagery from an eighteenth-century hermetic dictionary. Adamant that this was not cheating, Dylan said he wished he could lay his hands on something similar. However Starkie could never work out how much he had read of Rimbaud. He simply seemed to like the idea of ‘this dissolute character who went into every sort of experience’. Starkie felt that Dylan himself was not ‘a man of great education’, knowing nothing of life outside Britain, nothing of history and nothing of art. But she loved his conversation and his voice. ‘I wouldn’t have minded if Dylan Thomas had read the telephone directory.’

  After a good war on General Freyberg’s staff, Davin had found himself full-time employment in publishing. Early in their friendship, he invited Dylan home to meet his wife and daughter. As a result, Dylan promised to bring Caitlin to tea the next day. But she rang shortly before the agreed hour to say that Dylan had passed out and they could not come. Davin was left with a suspicion ‘that she might not be willing to meet any more of Dylan’s pub friends’. He may have been closer to the truth in his observations of Caitlin when he got to know her. He noted how, when they were out drinking, she used to look on with an anger amounting to hate as Dylan regaled his Oxford friends with his stories. Her antipathy was directed at her husband as much as at the rest of the company. Davin was well aware of her artistic aspirations and could see that, once again, she resented having to play second fiddle. He also could sense her disdain for bourgeois literati with indentured posts at the university, as they bought Dylan’s drinks and encouraged him to make a fool of himself, ‘spend[ing] on us the strength and energy he should have reserved for himself, his poetry and her’.

  In the background hovered Margaret Taylor. She had promised her husband that she would pull back once she had established Dylan in South Leigh. But, for various reasons, she found this impossible. Dylan, after all, was an artist who needed succouring. When she discovered that his financial affairs were in chaos, she saw to it, with the help of Higham, that he consulted an accountant, Leslie Andrews, in Sussex. The upshot was not as bad as feared: Dylan’s total tax liability to the Inland Revenue up to April 1948 worked out at just £85, or slightly under £2,000 in 2003 prices.

  But, as Cordelia Sewell could see, Margaret was also ‘besotted, ill, daft, sick with love’ for Dylan. This made matters difficult for Caitlin who, on a personal level, liked the don’s wife, as she too was a mother with young children. She was even prepared to humour her for the sake of her husband’s career and financial security. However, a letter from Margaret to Dylan which trilled, ‘To sleep with you would be like sleeping with a god’, went too far, even if Caitlin realised that, between the lines, this meant they had not been to bed together. When, by way of apology, Margaret sent her a pink taffeta petticoat, Caitlin cut it up and returned it.

  Another time, Margaret suggested to Dylan that they should elope and arranged to meet him at Paddington station. Dylan did not go, and showed his cruel streak in his wry amusement at the thought of ‘maudlin Magdalen Maggie’ waiting there, suitcase in hand. ‘She’s desperate for me to poke her,’ he told Francis King, an undergraduate at Balliol, ‘but wh
o wants to poke a bowl of cold porridge?’ There was an added frisson in the idea of an Oxford don’s wife fawning over him. By denying her, he gave himself a certain power in the relationship. The underlying psychology was complex: on the one hand, with his high opinion of his creative talents, he believed such adulation was due him as a poet; on the other, his shaky sense of personal esteem meant he thought that anyone who made a fuss of him was a fool and to be treated with disdain. In the background were the residual effects of his relationship with his mother whose indulgence had only brought his contempt.

  In February 1948 Margaret was on hand to drive the Thomases to Aldbourne, near Marlborough in Wiltshire. This was the domain of James Bomford, an art-loving millionaire who, during the war had served with Mervyn Levy in the Royal Army Educational Corps. Levy was living and teaching nearby, while Jankel Adler, another painter friend of Dylan, had a cottage in the grounds of Bomford’s large estate. On Saturday nights the hedonistic Bomford used to hold lavish parties, to which he invited artists, writers and plenty of girls, such as Diana Fluck, a buxom blonde from the county’s most industrialised town of Swindon, soon to become a famous Rank starlet under her screen name Diana Dors.

  Also resident in Aldbourne was the writer Gerald Brenan, one of Dylan’s drinking companions when he first arrived in London in the mid-1930s. On this trip, it emerged that Brenan had also known Caitlin around this period. When, during a pub crawl, he drunkenly tried to kiss her, she bit his lip. According to his biographer, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Brenan had last met her in Churriana in Southern Spain in 1935. If true, this indicates Caitlin travelled well beyond Paris on her continental trip that year. It also suggests that Brenan had had a sexual relationship with her, which he expected to revive. In his inebriated state, Dylan seemed not to worry: leaving Brenan’s house one night after the pubs had closed, he passed four large metal dustbins glistening in the moonlight. Throwing up his hands in mock terror, he cried, ‘Ali Baba! Ali Baba!’

  On his return to South Leigh, Dylan penned an introduction to the catalogue for a forthcoming exhibition of Levy’s paintings in Swindon. His clichéd references to his old friend – ‘Red chalk glows in his drawings because his passion for the human figure is glowing. His line is a line of love.’ – suggest that, unusually for his published output, he had been drinking, or at least was not taking the task very seriously.

  Dylan’s mind may simply have been elsewhere. For, in time-honoured family fashion, his mother had slipped in wintry Carmarthenshire and broken her thigh. On at least two occasions, he dashed to visit her in Carmarthen Hospital. Luckily, his sister Nancy was back in England after spending most of the war in India. She had married an army officer, Gordon Summersby, whose first wife Kay had been American General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s driver and mistress. As an army driver herself, Nancy was one of six women who accompanied British forces into stricken Singapore following the Japanese surrender in 1945. Her husband had briefly stayed on in India, working for IBM. But, well before independence in August 1947, he and Nancy returned to England, where he bought a trawler and established an up-market fishing business in the north Devon port of Brixham. From there she came to Blaencwm to look after her father, who was more glum than usual, partly because his brother Arthur had died the previous autumn and partly because he was suffering from a painful attack of angina. As a result of a family conference, Nancy agreed to have D.J. live with her in Brixham, while Dylan took home his parents’ boisterous mongrel dog, Mably, who would otherwise have been destroyed.

  Having been away, he managed to make his mother’s misfortune the excuse for, first, not producing an article on London for British Vogue and, then, not keeping a long-standing engagement at a teachers’ training college in Wrexham. The former was understandable: he had little stomach for recycling material from his unpublished book on London’s streets. The latter was unforgivable, as it was brokered by Bert Trick, who was working in Wrexham for the Inland Revenue. Even the indulgent Trick was annoyed with his old friend.

  When his mother was well enough, he arranged to rent Cordelia Sewell’s cottage in South Leigh as a summer convalescent home for his parents. Florrie arrived in late April and was soon complaining about Dylan’s friends. D.J. joined her a few days later, coming in an ambulance because his heart was still playing up. As usual when his parents were around, Dylan put on his most respectable Cwmdonkin Drive behaviour, while Caitlin dutifully scurried round with her home help Mary, trying to look after two households at different ends of the village.

  The Saturday after his mother arrived, Dylan managed to escape to Oxford for a rendezvous with Margaret Taylor at the George. He had arranged to meet Bob Pocock and ‘an actor friend of his’, have a few pints, and saunter over to the Parks to watch some cricket in the afternoon. After three hours in the pub, someone remembered the game. When Dylan suggested taking some additional drink, Margaret – ‘stupid bitch’, commented Pocock – interpreted this to mean a bottle of rum. They saw ten minutes of the game, before opting to bowl at some undergraduates in the nets who were frightened away by their oafish drunken antics. Dylan then suggested opening the bottle of rum. Pocock, who had been going through a divorce, got paralytically drunk and had to be driven back to the Fleece Hotel in Witney where three months earlier Dylan, in his role as a celebrity, had introduced a roving BBC programme, ‘Country Magazine’, which featured the nearby Windrush valley. The planned Saturday evening’s entertainment – a pub crawl with Cordelia and her friends the Colgroves in their van – had to be postponed.

  The actor was almost certainly Harry Locke, whom Dylan had met at a party at the McAlpines’. Bill and his wife Helen enjoyed being surrounded by artistic, particularly theatrical, people. During the summer, when Dylan was up in town, he attended a reception at the House of Commons for the American boxer Joe Louis. The McAlpines turned up with the all-black cast of Anna Lucasta, an American play which was running in the West End. Earlier Dylan had ‘declared drunken devotion’ to Louis’s former girlfriend, the singer Lena Horne. On another occasion he cherished the image of Helen singing Irish ballads to a group of West Indians. Locke was an Acton-born actor with regular slots on radio series such as the ‘Will Hay Show’ and ‘Workers’ Playtime’. He specialised in telling shaggy dog stories of the kind Dylan loved. At their first meeting, Locke liked to say, Dylan laughed so much he was sick. Locke came to South Leigh, where he recalled Dylan sitting at the end of the ailing D.J.’s bed feeding him bottles of beer. He also met Cordelia and they started an unlikely romance which was to result in her getting pregnant and marrying Locke. (The early blossoming of this relationship had been the spur to Cordelia vacating her house.)

  Having her parents-in-law so close, Caitlin was soon at her wits’ end, complaining to her sister Brigit not only about their surliness but also about the drudgery of her own work on behalf of five people – two very young, two very old and, always, ‘Useless Eustace Dylan’ (the thought of their dependency terrified her). Philip Lindsay heard from a friend: ‘There is hell in the place, poor Caith [sic] with two kids being such a slave to the tyranny of the aged couple that she was unable to slip out even for one drink. Under such circumstances, having to support a wife, two aged parents and two children, the poor bastard will have no time for poetry. He was luckier when he was poor, for then at least he was free.’

  Matters were not improved when the Thomas family was stricken with measles in June. Dylan claimed he had ‘to cook and char’, but the reality was conveyed in Caitlin’s complaint to Mary Keene about the ailing older Thomases on her doorstep, together with hordes of screaming children and Dylan, being unusually anti-social and swearing at everyone in sight. Caitlin was left feeling not just very weak, but self-conscious about her measles spots. Cordelia saw her in the village wearing a typically striking hat, but with her face covered with a half-veil. Another time she witnessed what must have been the nadir in the Thomases’ relationship – Caitlin with a bloody, swollen ear, and with her rings missing
. But when Cordelia exclaimed involuntarily at this evidence of domestic violence, Caitlin did not want to talk about it.

  Partly to convalesce and partly because she could stand it no longer, Caitlin upped with her children to her mother’s, whereupon Margaret Taylor insisted on moving in on the pretext of looking after Dylan’s parents. The experiment was not a success. Margaret drove D.J. mad with her patronising lectures on art and music. Feeling compromised, Dylan kept out of the way: on the one hand, he could not afford to alienate his generous admirer; on the other, he also bristled at her presence – or so he made out to the absent Caitlin, to whom he duplicitously described his benefactress as ‘the bitch’. He had to bite his tongue when Margaret asked if he wanted her to go. Alan Taylor bicycled out to remonstrate with his wife whom he felt was making a fool of herself over Dylan. After angry scenes in the road, she was reduced to tears. In the circumstances, Dylan begged Caitlin to come back quickly because ‘SHE will go then’. No doubt he did desire this, but he was torn by conflicting emotions.

  These events provided the backdrop to Dylan’s efforts to make a living. He wrote little poetry at South Leigh but, as his correspondence shows, he was in demand to give readings, even if he was not always the most enchanting guest. Invited to the Poetry Society in Richmond run by an attractive minor literary hostess, Wrenne Jarman, he arrived an hour late. He apologised profusely, but was clearly drunk. However the audience’s annoyance was soon forgotten when he began to read. As they broke into applause at the end, Dylan turned his back and vomited into the fireplace. After another encounter – a dinner throughout which Dylan smoked – Miss Jarman was moved to ask, unrealistically, ‘Don’t you think the writing of poetry should be limited to gentlemen?’