The Dylan Thomas Murders

by David N. Thomas

  Mr Volvo led the family to the bar. “I gather you serve food here?”

  We waited to see how O’Malley would react. His prejudices were finely honed so he had no one particular way of dealing with English-speaking customers. He picked a response according to the occasion, the customer, how he was generally feeling about the world and whether or not his love life with Ringle, the coxswain from New Quay, was still intact. He put his needlework on the bar, glanced up but said nothing. Mr Volvo looked puzzled but it could have been irritation because the two children were tugging impatiently at his green and baggy corduroy trousers.

  “Do you have a menu?” asked Mrs Volvo, raising her voice as if she were on the Continent. Llewela cocked her ear but stayed quiet.

  O’Malley reached across with two menus. “Croeso,” he said.

  The family retreated to the Philip Larkin table near the window. They read the menu, then read it again, and finally turned it over, looking for an English translation. “I suppose its lasagne and chips again, it’s what they usually have down here.”

  The conversation dropped a little and I saw O’Malley prise himself off the high stool. I knew he didn’t care about the lasagne and chips, but he’d be furious about “it’s what they have down here.” It makes you wonder why people come to Wales on holiday. Last month, a group of English tourists signed up for an evening of traditional Welsh song and entertainment at the summer eisteddfod. They walked out during the interval, complaining that it was all in Welsh, and demanding their money back. The organisers gave it to them. Some thought this was wimpish and said the tourists should have been ejected. But one of the marvellous things about the Welsh is their politeness even in the face of extreme provocation.

  Mr Volvo got up and walked to the bar. “So sorry, but do you have an English menu?”

  “This is a Welsh speaking establishment.”

  Mr Volvo looked momentarily taken aback, but responded very heartily: “Don’t speak it, old boy.”

  Llewela twitched and O’Malley leaned across the bar. “What would you do in France?”

  “My wife speaks perfect French.”

  “In Italy, then, or Spain or Germany...”

  Mr Volvo hesitated and his wife called across: “We’d have a phrase book, wouldn’t we?”

  “And where’s your Welsh phrase book, then?”

  “But you all speak English, for goodness sake.”

  “So they do in Holland but you’d still take your phrase book with you.”

  “Mummy went to Dutch classes last year,” chipped in the oldest child.

  “Our anniversary, you know, had a wonderful fortnight in Amsterdam,” squirming all the way down from the neck of his Arran sweater to the soles of his Timberland boots.

  “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to translate,” asked Mrs Volvo, leaving the table and joining her husband at the bar.

  “That’s another thing,” said O’Malley. “Abroad, you’d ask the waiter to translate, wouldn’t you. But why not here?”

  “English is the language of commerce, old chap.”

  “Darling, let me deal with this...”

  Fellow!

  O’Malley heard the missing word as surely as the rest of us. Llewela stood up.

  “Now look here, we’ve been hours on the M4, the children are starving...”

  “Lobscouse,” said O’Malley.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “A Danish stew. Beef, potato and bayleaf.”

  “I’m a veggie, actually.”

  “Then there’s potato dumplings and beetroot in sour sauce.”

  “And for the children?”

  O’Malley turned, and looked across to the table where the children were sitting: “What d’you fancy?”

  What a saint O’Malley could be!

  “Chips,” said the younger child, smiling defiantly at her mother.

  “With?” asked O’Malley.

  “Lasagne,” replied her brother.

  “You got it,” said O’Malley, disappearing into the kitchen, beaming with delight.

  The Volvos sat back around the table. We carried on talking about holly, they began discussing the merits of various schools in Islington. The children fidgeted, bored and hungry but gave O’Malley, whom we’d never seen so tolerant of English in the bar, a big smile when he brought the knives and forks to the table. I took my cue from O’Malley, and smiled at Mrs Volvo. “My brother’s son,” I said, “did very well at Acland Burghley Comprehensive.”

  She looked at me in astonishment. “Isn’t it rather cosmopolitan?” she asked.

  “Look, mummy, there’s a camel in the corner,” said the boy.

  “Ssh, James, I’m talking to the nice gentleman...”

  “So you’re from London?” said Mr Volvo, brightening up. “On holiday?”

  “But mummy, there’s a camel...”

  “No, I live in the village.”

  “Not a camel, darling, a baby llama.”

  “We hope to buy a cottage down this way.”

  “It’s so important to take the children out of London now and again, don’t you think?”

  “What’s this say, mummy?” asked the girl, pointing at the Larkin poem on the embroidered cloth that covered their table.

  “Why Wales?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why choose Wales for your cottage?”

  “Perhaps you’ve relations here,” suggested Billy Logs, walking towards the door, with the chainsaw dangling from his immense fist.

  “What does it say, mummy?” asked the young child in frustration.

  “We did try Herefordshire,” said Mr Volvo.

  “But the prices were simply outrageous,” added his wife.

  “I’ll read it for you,” offered her elder brother helpfully.

  “Bet you can’t.”

  “So it’s just the prices then?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Choosing Wales.”

  “And the motorway to Carmarthen, it only takes four hours...”

  “Go on then, read it, if you’re so clever.”

  “But not the people,” I asked, “not the history, the scenery...?”

  “Oh, of course, that too...”

  “We rather like Dylan Thomas,” added Mr Volvo smugly.

  “It rhymes with ‘duck’,” I said, “not with ‘dill’.”

  “Duck in a dill and caper sauce. There’s an idea for you,” said O’Malley, appearing with the condiments.

  “I’ll read it backwards for you.”

  “Show off.”

  “And add some extra, just for you.”

  “Mummy, when’s the chips coming?”

  “They fill you with the faults they had.”

  “Your nephew liked Acland Burghley?”

  “They may not mean to, but they do.”

  “So it’s the prices then...”

  “But certainly not the Prices,” interjected Miss Price, nimbly.

  “Sorry?”

  “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.”

  “James!” shrieked Mrs Volvo.

  Llewela came rushing across from the bar. She stopped next to the Volvo’s table. Her ears were twitching, and her mouth was stretched in a grimace of effortless superiority that only llamas and chemists know how to make.

  “I’d stay quiet, if I were you,” I advised, “otherwise she’s likely to spit at you.”

  O’Malley emerged from the kitchen with a tray laden with food. He sent Llewela back to her basket, unloaded the plates and asked the Volvos what they’d like to drink.

  “And have you found anywhere to buy?” asked Dai Dark Horse.

  “We’ve only just started looking,” replied Mrs Volvo, still watching Llewela nervously, and even more apprehensively at her son.

  “There’s a place we’re going to see later,” said Mr Volvo.

  “Fern Hill,” added his wife.

  Now it was my turn to be shocked. It was less than two weeks since I had
last seen Waldo and Rosalind but I’d heard nothing about the farm being up for sale. “It’s just down the road,” I said. “Needs a bit of work, lots of character, though.”

  “Did you know that Dylan Thomas was Bob Dylan’s real father?” asked Mrs Volvo.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I replied, nodding my head sagely to humour her. It was the stalest of old chestnuts. Such stories were forever blowing in the wind down here.

  Mr Volvo stood up and held out his arm. “Stillness,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it vigorously. “Ogmore Stillness. Perhaps we’ll be neighbours soon.”

  The next time I saw Ogmore Stillness, he was lying face down in the Aeron, the sleeve of his Arran sweater snagged on a branch of blackthorn brought low in the river by the sloe-backed weight of its own fruitfulness.

  I walked home, and found Rachel at the kitchen table becalmed on a sea of photocopied letters. She had finished the main sorting of the material that Rosalind had left. There were twelve poems by Dylan, mostly undated; over a hundred letters from May 1949 to October 1953; a handful of postcards from Prague and Sussex; and six short stories written for, or about, Waldo, which Rachel felt should be published separately. Of all the things on the table, my favourites were the flotsam and jetsam from the Scadan Coch, upon which Dylan had scribbled fragments of poems, including an early draft of ‘Poem on His Birthday’, written on the inside of a packet of Sweet Afton.

  “Here’s Dylan’s first letter to Rosalind from America,” said Rachel.

  I took the letter and stared in some wonderment at the crumpled handwriting:

  Midston House

  22 East 38th Street

  New York 16

  Saturday, 25th February 1950

  My dear Rosalind,

  A long and ghastly plane trip, & then heaved Brinnin-ho into an audience of 800 people, and afterwards a grasping, clasping, fawning reception in an apartment (flat) large enough to hold the parish of Ciliau & all its cows, whose intelligence I sorely miss. Brinnin is the archetypal Thief, whip-cracking my time and sanity through a collideascope of dotty bow-ties and snakeskin handbags. Eminent professors push knock-eyed wives at me, doctoral students hang on every gallowed word (oh, that they would till their lips were blue) and dull and desperate dentists ask me gum-numbing questions about our new national health service. They quiz me about Aneurin Bevin and Ernie Bevan, & are they brothers, they ask. I promise them that Mr Attlee will bring clement weather, & that Beveridge is not a bedtime drink. I now at last understand politics: the Germans are cuckoos, the Italians are song thrushes, the English are wrens and the Americans pigeons. I miss you so, and wish you and Waldo were here so that we could hold each other in silence and let this country’s banshee noise wash through my head till only the splash of your feet kicking through the Aeron remains.

  Tell that Dylan-loined lion of ours that I have drunk milkshakes in cafés called drugstores, eaten hamburgers made from beef, sucked chips as thin and tasteless as wooden swans, & been sick into the hat of a very small lady who stood in front of me at the top of the Empire State Building (what Empire?) as it, or I, swayed in the wind. I shall eat beans with deans, scones with dons and swill Californian wine fermented from chinese dragon tongues.

  They want a poet here but I cannot, for the life or death of me, give them one. The muse has donkeyed into the desert. My peregrine genes are exploding like over-ripe zucchini (marrows?). Hello Scott-Ellis, come and get me Harry Parr Davies. Shout theatre, scream movies (cinema), trumpet television (is there one in Ciliau yet – you must go and see it. I’m sure Tyglyn will have one) – these are to be the bottle-bright milkmen of my waterfalling words. Soon I shall be a great writer of opera, too. Walton is keen to work with me, Auden’s hinted at Stravinsky. They murmur here about war in Korea, but I shall have my career from it. From liberation to libretti. Milk Wood is festering nicely, too, and Gossamer Beynon sends her regards. I must now get ready for another reading. I have to change my pants (trousers), take the elevator (lift) and telephone for a cab (taxi), though it would be quicker to walk (eccentric).

  The city is choked with automobiles (cars) and my chest is daily tightening in the smog. I must do something about it, but I loathe quacks, and where would the time come from? On my redgravestone, please put: “He died because he was never long enough in one place to have it seen to” (joke). I rest tomorrow, and then readings at Yale and Harvard, & a reading a day thereafter until May 18th. I shall see all America fast asleep.

  Love,

  Dylan.

  PS I’m sending Waldo some American comics. And lots of chocolates & candy (sweets) for his birthday. I’m a fat, sweating, aching beetroot. Oh, Rosalind, what am I doing here? I want to lie quietly with you in love & peace. Rustle your petticoats on the banks of the Aeron & send me the sound in a vase (vase).

  I hovered a while over the letters until I was clucked at to go away. “There was a man called Stillness in the pub,” I said, putting the kettle on, “with his barboured family. He’s thinking of buying Waldo’s place.”

  “It’s up for sale?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I asked O’Malley.”

  “And his two-fingered opinion?”

  “That Waldo’s not been the same since the shed was stolen.”

  “Or since you started interviewing his mother.”

  “With your encouragement, I remember.”

  “We’ve an agreed joint project here, Martin. You interview Rosalind and find Dylan’s shed, I edit the papers. It’s a very important piece of work for me.”

  “Have you wondered,” I asked, “why there aren’t any letters before May 1949? That was when Dylan and Caitlin moved to Laugharne.”

  * * *

  Appropriately enough, we met by chance in Conti’s café in Lampeter. I’m an ice cream addict and Leno Conti makes one of the best in the world.

  Rosalind was sitting at one of the tables near the door, eating a boiled egg with precision-cut soldiers soaked in garlic butter. I slid across the plastic bench already incised by two generations of teenage denim studs. Leno came across with a caffé macchiato and a bowl of ice cream covered in blueberries.

  “Boiled egg, the Italian way?” I asked, as Rosalind crunched into the last of her pieces of bread.

  “I’ve always liked the Italians.”

  “Italians are Jewish,” I said, remembering an old Lenny Bruce routine.

  “Only northern Italians.”

  “There was never ice cream as good as this in Italy.”

  “Dylan liked his covered in Sambuca.”

  “I didn’t think you could get either during the war.”

  “Not here you couldn’t. But this was afterwards.”

  “The Tuscany trip?”

  “He hated every minute. Much too hot for a fat man. And the beer was too cold.”

  “When was this?”

  “1947. He took the whole family, and Caitlin’s sister Brigit. He hated Florence, too many thin-lipped intellectuals, he said.”

  “So why did he go?”

  “MI6 sent him. They were worried about the communists on Elba. Did you know,” Rosalind said, cracking the empty eggshell between her fingers, “that even the policemen wore badges of Lenin on their uniforms?”

  “To spy on the politicians? Is that why Dylan went?”

  “No, much more serious than that. Elba had huge deposits of iron ore. It used to go to the works at Portoferraio for processing but after the war Italsider, the owners, closed it down. So all the ore had to be shipped to the mainland. We had intelligence reports that large quantities of it were being siphoned off by the Elba workers to the Soviet Union. Something to do with extracting uranium for the hydrogen bomb.”

  “Why Dylan?”

  “Elba was a closed community, especially Rio Marina, where the ore was being shipped from. We needed someone to pave the way. Dylan was perfect for the job. He could get on with virtually everybody, and he k
new something about mining. Not a lot, but enough. One of his best friends at New Quay, Evan Joshua, had managed the quarry there. And Killick, of course, had worked in the mines in Africa. It was enough for us to build on. And his obsession with Auden, of course.”

  “Sorry?”

  “All that stuff in The Prophets about lead mining.”

  “But Dylan didn’t speak Italian.”

  “Caitlin spoke some, and Brigit was fluent. And remember, Dylan didn’t need words to communicate.”

  Rosalind paused whilst Leno Conti put a plate of almond biscuits on the table. “The plan was for Dylan to make sufficient contacts in Florence to get an introduction to Elba. We knew that going in cold wouldn’t work. Once he was on the island, Ian Fleming and I – and Waldo of course – would join him. Fleming was still working for MI6, though he was on the staff of the Sunday Times by then.”

  “So you were working for MI6 too?”

  “I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. Just the odd job here and there, filling out someone’s cover, that sort of thing.”

  “As with Fleming?”

  “Yes, a journalist doing a feature on post-war Italian tourism, with his wife and child in tow. And it all worked out very well. One of Dylan’s regular visitors in Florence was Luigi Berti. He lived on Elba and was Italy’s leading expert on English literature. It couldn’t have been better! As soon as Dylan said he’d like to visit the island, Berti arranged everything. Then we got the British Council to place a few stories on Dylan in the local papers. Britain’s leading socialist poet, that sort of thing, who’d opposed the Mosleyites in the Swansea Plaza.

  “So when Dylan and family arrived in Rio Marina, they were met by the Mayor and the town band. Lots of speeches and spumante, flowers for the children. Berti had found them lodgings with his cousin Giovanni who ran the Albergo Elba, overlooking the fruit market. Fleming and I arrived a few days later. We stayed in the Clara, on Via Palestro, next to the port, which was perfect.

  “Dylan spent the time wandering round the town, just like he did at New Quay. You couldn’t miss him in his pink shirt and green trousers. He used to sit on a rock in the harbour reading the thrillers that Margaret Taylor had sent him, and when he’d finished he just threw them into the sea. Sometimes we took a picnic and walked along the cliff from the watch tower to the little bay at Porticciolo. It was magical!