Post by sir on May 18, 2010 4:26:43 GMT -5
Aeronwy Thomas on life with poet father Dylan
Literary legend's daughter, who died last week, wrote a brutally honest memoir of a childhood with him and Caitlin MacnamaraAeronwy Thomas
Recommend?
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas enjoys a boat trip with his wife Caitlin and baby daughter on the River Taff, Laugharne, South Wales, circa 1950
My mother found out through a letter. Father had been having another affair, she read, this time with a bluestocking American journalist who’d come to England to see him; he’d spent the weekend with her in Brighton.
In the shouting match that followed I heard “American bitch” over and over and the words I’d been warned not to use: “Bastard” and “F*** you”.
“Oh, she’s at him again,” said Dolly, our mother’s help. “You wait till they’ve had a few tonight. She’ll kill him.”
Aged seven, I was used to the bitter fights in which Mother lashed out physically and verbally, followed by reconciliation. That had always been the pattern and I’d never felt threatened by it. Having one of the most famous poets in the English language as a father didn’t intimidate me either.
Later that day while I waited for Father’s return from the garden shed where he wrote every afternoon, I saw Mother arranging her hair and make-up at the dressing table. “If you see your father, say I’m at the Mariners,” she said, heading for the pub. He followed her later.
I woke in the night to a slam of the front door but no arguing. I woke again to it opening quietly. They had returned separately. She hadn’t killed him.
We had lived since I was six in the Boat House at Laugharne, a small village on the Taf estuary in Carmarthenshire. From our first glimpse of it in the early summer of 1949, we were in paradise.
One day as my mother, her sister Nicolette and I sat by the harbour, eating crusty bread smeared with olive oil and garlic, I was told about my birth in London during the war. Dad was conspicuously absent from the hospital. After a week, Nicolette was sent to find him. She looked in all the usual Chelsea haunts and found him at the Anglesea Arms, in the middle of an amusing story. She stayed on the edge of the crowd, someone offered her a drink and she joined in the laughter: “He was such a good storyteller and so funny. He made you forget everything.”
At their studio flat in Chelsea, Mother came home to chaos. Newspapers, bottles and empty cigarette packets littered every surface, including my cradle, which she had prepared lovingly with clean bedding. The woman next door, who had 18 cats, peered in to see if she could help. Dad eventually turned up unwashed and unshaven in an old dressing gown and slippers.
This is where I spent my first few months, regularly left alone at 7pm sharp, abandoned to the cold, the falling plaster, the rain from the glass roof and the bombs while Mum and Dad went off to the pub.
I’d been lying under the glass roof when Mother returned one evening, she said, the air-raid siren wailing, to find the bombs falling and the filthy cat woman with me in her arms. Indignant that the smelly woman should be holding her “beautiful, feminine, small-boned, delicate baby”, she ungratefully snatched me back. She told me it never occurred to her to stay at home rather than follow the nightly routine: “I would have lost Dylan if I had.”
My father’s patron, Margaret Taylor, the wife of the historian AJP Taylor, lent us the Boat House so he could write his poetry. I remember arriving on that first day, toiling down the uneven pathway as we looked over the low cliff wall. Whenever people had been drinking at our house, they were warned of the dangers of falling over the cliff. Regulars crawled or walked four-pawed up the path from our door.
Even my father sometimes had difficulties. One Christmas Day I watched his portly figure swaying towards our front door. He was carrying a doll’s house — and veering towards the cliff. “Look out!” I shouted as the doll’s house swayed and a companion pulled him back from the brink. Llewellyn, my elder brother, looked disgusted, knowing the doll’s house, made lovingly by a local carpenter, could only be for me. Later, after one of our disagreements, he threw it over the cliff. We watched it shatter and imagined what it must be like for a human to go over instead.
I always knew whether Dad was working or reading forbidden detective novels. If you passed his shed and heard nothing he was reading, for as soon as he picked up his fountain pen he spoke every word out loud. For him, the sound of the words was integral to the poem. Sometimes his voice was loud and booming; at other times I had to put my ear to the thin door to hear his mumbles.
He was allowed out to the pub in the mornings so long as he returned at 1pm for a fry-up. Then Mother locked him in the shed from two till seven, her contribution to his literary output. After he’d finished writing, he could count on her to collect him from the shed and accompany him to the pub, where they stayed till 10pm, leaving me alone with my newly born younger brother, Colm.
On Dylan’s weekly bath-night, he came back early and we’d hear him singing, then speaking in his low mumbled boom. Once I listened outside the bathroom while the deep bass changed into a woman’s sultry contralto. I think it must have been Dai Bread's two wives from Under Milk Wood.
After his bath he would come out steamy as an African warthog, passing me a dolly mixture from a perspiring hand. Mother always arranged the tiny sweets along the rim of the bath as part of the preparations. “There’s probably more in the bath,” he’d advise me, and I dived into the wet room, grabbing sodden sweets, then rushed out again to see Dad drying off and open to entreaties.
“Will you read to me?”
Soon he was as absorbed as I, as maidens fled in terror of wolves and other brutes. I’d ask where the nice lady who lived in the sweet-house was hiding, or where the woodchopper was waiting to save the day. Once, with a great deal of puffing and grunting, he rearranged the furniture so that scuttle, armchair and footrest marked Hansel and Gretel’s sweet-house, the mound of leaves where they rested and the cauldron where they were nearly boiled. He used cushions to add sheds and an outside privy.
Before they left for Brown’s hotel, Mother dried his hair briskly in the kitchen. When they came home from the pub, I would be woken by drunken songs. Once, when Margaret was staying, I crept down to have a look. I saw friends singing drunkenly. Mother was cranking up the gramophone and I thought, “Look out.”
Swan Lake was turned up and Mother leapt around so embarrassingly that even Margaret warned her she’d hurt herself. “F*** you,” answered Mother, slamming the front door. I didn’t dare peer out again because I didn’t want to see her cartwheeling on the front lawn showing her knickers. She’d trained as a dancer but was sacked from the London Palladium chorus. She kept asking why, eventually realising she must have been drunk and had forgotten which leg to raise during the high kicks.
I could never keep up with her need for physical exercise, though I shared her wish to get into the sea at every opportunity. The citizens of Laugharne were not so tolerant when they discovered Mother — and sometimes me — swimming at low tide with nothing on. After hearing the gossip, I kept on my voluminous navy-blue knickers. Unlike her, I couldn’t abide sunbathing, which Mother indulged in even more than swimming. Visitors couldn’t believe it when they walked round the veranda and saw a semi-naked woman basting her skin with olive oil.
A constant stream came through to see Father. Memorable among them was a university professor, an old man of 40 or so. One day, when I was still six, he and I were on our own in a dinghy and he moved to touch me. Pretend ignorance, I thought to myself. He might stop. Coldly, I looked at him as if from a vast distance, measuring the look in his eye, the slant of his shoulder, as he tilted his way towards me, unsure of his footing. The rubber dinghy lurched to one side and he fell near me. The dinghy began to sag at one end as he extended an arm to encircle my waist.
“We’re about to hit the rocks,” I said. “The tide’s turning, can’t you see?” As he lunged at me, the dinghy spun on its axis, hit the rocks and his arm dropped. I can see him now, a large man drenched and frightened as the current swept us onto the mudflats and rocks, while on the shore our dog Mably barked with excitement.
I could manage the professor. He gave me my first gold ring, which I took because it was so splendid. I wasn’t going to tell my parents, so the ring was compensation.
I soon thought I knew all about sex. Clive, a boy caned for stealing at my primary school, stopped me one day on the cliff walk, kissing me on the lips. But his older brother said kissing wasn’t enough. He asked me if I knew what we had to do in order to brag we’d had sex. He persuaded me “to go” with a gang of older boys. I was seven and curious to know what all the fuss was about.
The brother, a heavyweight boxer in build, was offered first “go”. He told me to lie on the rock immediately below my father’s shed. His friends formed a circle round us, leaving a gap so that children looking through the cliff railings could have a good view. Clive’s brother hovered over me, then held himself above me in a press-up position.
“Go on . . . pull them down,” he said, tugging unsuccessfully at my baggy navy-blue lisle knickers.
I looked up at Clive who was peering from the railings with the others. The rock under me was digging into the small of my back. I didn’t think much of this sex business. You had to take your knickers off, lie on a jagged rock and have a big boy suspended over you, and an audience. “I’ve got to join my friends now,” I said, and with a shrug he let me go.
“You have to keep your knickers on so that the boy can’t see your navel,” I informed the boys and girls who asked for information later. “If you kiss too long, you get a baby.”
While the possession of a famous father left my school friends cowed but not impressed, this sexual expertise earned me respect and awe.
It was only after my father began long lecture tours in America that I felt a new, sinister atmosphere enter the Boat House. My parents’ battles seemed more earnest and more public, taking place in front of anyone who happened to be around. When we were visited by two mild-mannered Americans — one of them the organiser of Dad’s visits to the States — an enormous fight erupted during lunch. My mother and father were rolling on the floor. Dolly cleared up the scattered plates, cutlery and food.
Dad first flew out in February 1950 for a gruelling tour of the US and Canada. He hoped to be offered a post at an American university. He nearly succeeded but came to be seen as unreliable because of his drinking at faculty parties.
Mother had been grumbling about the conquering hero and the slave at home and how he would be bragging to all and sundry when he returned. As it happened, he was so tired and ill that she didn’t keep her threats not to speak to him ever again. She gave him clean clothes and a bath, fed him and took him to the doctor.
In a week or two he was again one of the fold. It was Margaret who then wrote to Caitlin to tell her about his infidelities while away. We’d been in the Boat House for less than two years and the creative idyll was starting to disintegrate.
For his 1952 tour Mum went too. Their rows in America were legendary. Mother remembered one where green toothpaste was smeared all over a hotel room. She spent most of her time shopping at Macy’s, her clothes eventually filling what seemed like 40 borrowed suitcases and bags.
On returning to Laugharne, she wailed she had no occasion to wear them, particularly the two silver and gold lamé bathing costumes. Hardly any money was made from the tour, what with staying in expensive hotels, buying drinks and purchasing so many clothes. “I went a bit mad,” she later said. “I had never seen such abundance.”
In the aftermath of the tour, real work started. Under Milk Wood had to compete for time with radio talks and other public engagements that were hardly ever turned down.
One day that summer my father burst into the kitchen with a letter in his hand, blurting out that he had won the Foyles poetry prize. “And here’s a cheque to prove it . . . £250.” My mother discarded her pinny, poured two glasses of beer and disappeared into the dining room with him.
As the date of the next US tour approached, Mother wore a face of gloom that Father tried to dispel with promises of holidays in Italy or Portugal and “no children”. When he left again in April 1953, she did not accompany him. She accused him of looking for “flattery, idleness and infidelity”, and her resentment helped her justify her own growing promiscuity to herself. One affair was with a young TV cameraman who turned up to film Dylan.
Dad started an affair with a woman called Liz Reitell after a reading of Under Milk Wood at Harvard. At the same time he was writing love letters to my mother. A couple of months later he was back home but his health had visibly deteriorated: his lungs sounded like the bellows we used on our open fires.
He was upset to discover that I and my friends had visited a local man he regarded as an “old lecher”, though only to comfort his dying dog. As a result, my parents decided I should leave home for the Arts Educational School, a theatrical boarding school in a mansion in Tring, Hertfordshire.
When we visited Tring, Dad was impressed by the Elizabethan gardens where pupils performed Shakespeare and the classics. He couldn’t resist miming a line or two when our guide turned her back. This was the last summer of his life. I was 10.
There seemed to be a truce between my parents until a visiting journalist sparked off a terrible row by asking about Dad’s plans to return to America. When Father said they were well advanced, Mother went berserk, landing a swipe on his head. “You bloody bastard,” she said to my father, who tried to ignore her. “You said that you’d only return the family.”
She punched him in the gut. This signalled a proper fight with the two of them locked in a deadly embrace, Mother continuing to rain blows on his back and Dad defending his front by squeezing her uncomfortably. Not long afterwards they had another brutal fight. I ran away screaming.
I can’t remember whether my father or I left first that autumn, he for the United States and I for school. In New York he struggled through rehearsals of Under Milk Wood, sometimes helped on and off stage by Liz Reitell. Devoured by anger and pain about his infidelity, Mother sent him a letter informing him their marriage was over.
At 39 he was drinking heavily and administering injections of morphine and cortisone; he managed only a handful of engagements before he collapsed and was taken as an emergency to St Vincent’s hospital.
My mother received the news in a telegram. She didn’t want to face the consequences immediately and later told me she went on to dance somewhere for the rest of the evening. “I was just trying to blot it all out,” she explained, “but drink and enjoying myself didn’t work for long.”
In her heart of hearts she knew it was the end but hoped her instincts were wrong. After a hastily arranged flight she arrived to find her husband under an oxygen tent. It is well documented how she tried to light a cigarette and lost all control after being forcibly removed. She was in a psychiatric ward when she was told Dylan was dead — before he actually was. She wasn’t sure for a long time whether he had received her last damning missive.
Mother accompanied the body back to Laugharne. The morticians had transformed Dad into a tailor’s dummy with a new American-style executive suit. She told me much later that his hands were still the same: narrow like fish fins, “like yours, but useless”.
At the funeral in Laugharne she thought briefly of throwing herself into the grave. Considering the passionate nature of their relationship, I don’t think my father would have expected less.
I wasn’t invited. Instead, my Aunt Nicolette came to see me at school. I was looking forward to a treat in the village with her. While we were walking down the drive, with me still in my new uniform and grey hat, she told me my father was dead.
I couldn’t think of anything to say and concentrated on settling my stomach, which was heaving uncontrollably. Then I felt faint. “Now sit down and put your head between your legs,” said Nicolette. After a minute or so I could lift my head without feeling dizzy and we talked about other things.
The teachers asked the pupils to check whether I was crying at night. No, they reported, no sign of grieving. No one could understand how I carried on my life at school as if nothing had happened.
Within two years Mother went to live in Italy with Colm while Llewellyn and I stayed in Britain. When Father died she was bereft. Her attempts to forget with other men, drinking and unruly behaviour did not give her any lasting satisfaction.
I tried to block out the pain, but all my activity on Father’s behalf, during most of my life, has been a form of reconciliation to his loss.
© Aeronwy Thomas 2009
Extracted from My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas, to be published by Constable on August 24 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
The bard
Dylan Thomas was the archetype of the roistering literary figures of post-war Britain. Born in Swansea in 1914, he published his first poetry in 1934 and moved to London, where he met his Irish wife, Caitlin Macnamara, in a literary pub, the Wheatsheaf.
Literary legend's daughter, who died last week, wrote a brutally honest memoir of a childhood with him and Caitlin MacnamaraAeronwy Thomas
Recommend?
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas enjoys a boat trip with his wife Caitlin and baby daughter on the River Taff, Laugharne, South Wales, circa 1950
My mother found out through a letter. Father had been having another affair, she read, this time with a bluestocking American journalist who’d come to England to see him; he’d spent the weekend with her in Brighton.
In the shouting match that followed I heard “American bitch” over and over and the words I’d been warned not to use: “Bastard” and “F*** you”.
“Oh, she’s at him again,” said Dolly, our mother’s help. “You wait till they’ve had a few tonight. She’ll kill him.”
Aged seven, I was used to the bitter fights in which Mother lashed out physically and verbally, followed by reconciliation. That had always been the pattern and I’d never felt threatened by it. Having one of the most famous poets in the English language as a father didn’t intimidate me either.
Later that day while I waited for Father’s return from the garden shed where he wrote every afternoon, I saw Mother arranging her hair and make-up at the dressing table. “If you see your father, say I’m at the Mariners,” she said, heading for the pub. He followed her later.
I woke in the night to a slam of the front door but no arguing. I woke again to it opening quietly. They had returned separately. She hadn’t killed him.
We had lived since I was six in the Boat House at Laugharne, a small village on the Taf estuary in Carmarthenshire. From our first glimpse of it in the early summer of 1949, we were in paradise.
One day as my mother, her sister Nicolette and I sat by the harbour, eating crusty bread smeared with olive oil and garlic, I was told about my birth in London during the war. Dad was conspicuously absent from the hospital. After a week, Nicolette was sent to find him. She looked in all the usual Chelsea haunts and found him at the Anglesea Arms, in the middle of an amusing story. She stayed on the edge of the crowd, someone offered her a drink and she joined in the laughter: “He was such a good storyteller and so funny. He made you forget everything.”
At their studio flat in Chelsea, Mother came home to chaos. Newspapers, bottles and empty cigarette packets littered every surface, including my cradle, which she had prepared lovingly with clean bedding. The woman next door, who had 18 cats, peered in to see if she could help. Dad eventually turned up unwashed and unshaven in an old dressing gown and slippers.
This is where I spent my first few months, regularly left alone at 7pm sharp, abandoned to the cold, the falling plaster, the rain from the glass roof and the bombs while Mum and Dad went off to the pub.
I’d been lying under the glass roof when Mother returned one evening, she said, the air-raid siren wailing, to find the bombs falling and the filthy cat woman with me in her arms. Indignant that the smelly woman should be holding her “beautiful, feminine, small-boned, delicate baby”, she ungratefully snatched me back. She told me it never occurred to her to stay at home rather than follow the nightly routine: “I would have lost Dylan if I had.”
My father’s patron, Margaret Taylor, the wife of the historian AJP Taylor, lent us the Boat House so he could write his poetry. I remember arriving on that first day, toiling down the uneven pathway as we looked over the low cliff wall. Whenever people had been drinking at our house, they were warned of the dangers of falling over the cliff. Regulars crawled or walked four-pawed up the path from our door.
Even my father sometimes had difficulties. One Christmas Day I watched his portly figure swaying towards our front door. He was carrying a doll’s house — and veering towards the cliff. “Look out!” I shouted as the doll’s house swayed and a companion pulled him back from the brink. Llewellyn, my elder brother, looked disgusted, knowing the doll’s house, made lovingly by a local carpenter, could only be for me. Later, after one of our disagreements, he threw it over the cliff. We watched it shatter and imagined what it must be like for a human to go over instead.
I always knew whether Dad was working or reading forbidden detective novels. If you passed his shed and heard nothing he was reading, for as soon as he picked up his fountain pen he spoke every word out loud. For him, the sound of the words was integral to the poem. Sometimes his voice was loud and booming; at other times I had to put my ear to the thin door to hear his mumbles.
He was allowed out to the pub in the mornings so long as he returned at 1pm for a fry-up. Then Mother locked him in the shed from two till seven, her contribution to his literary output. After he’d finished writing, he could count on her to collect him from the shed and accompany him to the pub, where they stayed till 10pm, leaving me alone with my newly born younger brother, Colm.
On Dylan’s weekly bath-night, he came back early and we’d hear him singing, then speaking in his low mumbled boom. Once I listened outside the bathroom while the deep bass changed into a woman’s sultry contralto. I think it must have been Dai Bread's two wives from Under Milk Wood.
After his bath he would come out steamy as an African warthog, passing me a dolly mixture from a perspiring hand. Mother always arranged the tiny sweets along the rim of the bath as part of the preparations. “There’s probably more in the bath,” he’d advise me, and I dived into the wet room, grabbing sodden sweets, then rushed out again to see Dad drying off and open to entreaties.
“Will you read to me?”
Soon he was as absorbed as I, as maidens fled in terror of wolves and other brutes. I’d ask where the nice lady who lived in the sweet-house was hiding, or where the woodchopper was waiting to save the day. Once, with a great deal of puffing and grunting, he rearranged the furniture so that scuttle, armchair and footrest marked Hansel and Gretel’s sweet-house, the mound of leaves where they rested and the cauldron where they were nearly boiled. He used cushions to add sheds and an outside privy.
Before they left for Brown’s hotel, Mother dried his hair briskly in the kitchen. When they came home from the pub, I would be woken by drunken songs. Once, when Margaret was staying, I crept down to have a look. I saw friends singing drunkenly. Mother was cranking up the gramophone and I thought, “Look out.”
Swan Lake was turned up and Mother leapt around so embarrassingly that even Margaret warned her she’d hurt herself. “F*** you,” answered Mother, slamming the front door. I didn’t dare peer out again because I didn’t want to see her cartwheeling on the front lawn showing her knickers. She’d trained as a dancer but was sacked from the London Palladium chorus. She kept asking why, eventually realising she must have been drunk and had forgotten which leg to raise during the high kicks.
I could never keep up with her need for physical exercise, though I shared her wish to get into the sea at every opportunity. The citizens of Laugharne were not so tolerant when they discovered Mother — and sometimes me — swimming at low tide with nothing on. After hearing the gossip, I kept on my voluminous navy-blue knickers. Unlike her, I couldn’t abide sunbathing, which Mother indulged in even more than swimming. Visitors couldn’t believe it when they walked round the veranda and saw a semi-naked woman basting her skin with olive oil.
A constant stream came through to see Father. Memorable among them was a university professor, an old man of 40 or so. One day, when I was still six, he and I were on our own in a dinghy and he moved to touch me. Pretend ignorance, I thought to myself. He might stop. Coldly, I looked at him as if from a vast distance, measuring the look in his eye, the slant of his shoulder, as he tilted his way towards me, unsure of his footing. The rubber dinghy lurched to one side and he fell near me. The dinghy began to sag at one end as he extended an arm to encircle my waist.
“We’re about to hit the rocks,” I said. “The tide’s turning, can’t you see?” As he lunged at me, the dinghy spun on its axis, hit the rocks and his arm dropped. I can see him now, a large man drenched and frightened as the current swept us onto the mudflats and rocks, while on the shore our dog Mably barked with excitement.
I could manage the professor. He gave me my first gold ring, which I took because it was so splendid. I wasn’t going to tell my parents, so the ring was compensation.
I soon thought I knew all about sex. Clive, a boy caned for stealing at my primary school, stopped me one day on the cliff walk, kissing me on the lips. But his older brother said kissing wasn’t enough. He asked me if I knew what we had to do in order to brag we’d had sex. He persuaded me “to go” with a gang of older boys. I was seven and curious to know what all the fuss was about.
The brother, a heavyweight boxer in build, was offered first “go”. He told me to lie on the rock immediately below my father’s shed. His friends formed a circle round us, leaving a gap so that children looking through the cliff railings could have a good view. Clive’s brother hovered over me, then held himself above me in a press-up position.
“Go on . . . pull them down,” he said, tugging unsuccessfully at my baggy navy-blue lisle knickers.
I looked up at Clive who was peering from the railings with the others. The rock under me was digging into the small of my back. I didn’t think much of this sex business. You had to take your knickers off, lie on a jagged rock and have a big boy suspended over you, and an audience. “I’ve got to join my friends now,” I said, and with a shrug he let me go.
“You have to keep your knickers on so that the boy can’t see your navel,” I informed the boys and girls who asked for information later. “If you kiss too long, you get a baby.”
While the possession of a famous father left my school friends cowed but not impressed, this sexual expertise earned me respect and awe.
It was only after my father began long lecture tours in America that I felt a new, sinister atmosphere enter the Boat House. My parents’ battles seemed more earnest and more public, taking place in front of anyone who happened to be around. When we were visited by two mild-mannered Americans — one of them the organiser of Dad’s visits to the States — an enormous fight erupted during lunch. My mother and father were rolling on the floor. Dolly cleared up the scattered plates, cutlery and food.
Dad first flew out in February 1950 for a gruelling tour of the US and Canada. He hoped to be offered a post at an American university. He nearly succeeded but came to be seen as unreliable because of his drinking at faculty parties.
Mother had been grumbling about the conquering hero and the slave at home and how he would be bragging to all and sundry when he returned. As it happened, he was so tired and ill that she didn’t keep her threats not to speak to him ever again. She gave him clean clothes and a bath, fed him and took him to the doctor.
In a week or two he was again one of the fold. It was Margaret who then wrote to Caitlin to tell her about his infidelities while away. We’d been in the Boat House for less than two years and the creative idyll was starting to disintegrate.
For his 1952 tour Mum went too. Their rows in America were legendary. Mother remembered one where green toothpaste was smeared all over a hotel room. She spent most of her time shopping at Macy’s, her clothes eventually filling what seemed like 40 borrowed suitcases and bags.
On returning to Laugharne, she wailed she had no occasion to wear them, particularly the two silver and gold lamé bathing costumes. Hardly any money was made from the tour, what with staying in expensive hotels, buying drinks and purchasing so many clothes. “I went a bit mad,” she later said. “I had never seen such abundance.”
In the aftermath of the tour, real work started. Under Milk Wood had to compete for time with radio talks and other public engagements that were hardly ever turned down.
One day that summer my father burst into the kitchen with a letter in his hand, blurting out that he had won the Foyles poetry prize. “And here’s a cheque to prove it . . . £250.” My mother discarded her pinny, poured two glasses of beer and disappeared into the dining room with him.
As the date of the next US tour approached, Mother wore a face of gloom that Father tried to dispel with promises of holidays in Italy or Portugal and “no children”. When he left again in April 1953, she did not accompany him. She accused him of looking for “flattery, idleness and infidelity”, and her resentment helped her justify her own growing promiscuity to herself. One affair was with a young TV cameraman who turned up to film Dylan.
Dad started an affair with a woman called Liz Reitell after a reading of Under Milk Wood at Harvard. At the same time he was writing love letters to my mother. A couple of months later he was back home but his health had visibly deteriorated: his lungs sounded like the bellows we used on our open fires.
He was upset to discover that I and my friends had visited a local man he regarded as an “old lecher”, though only to comfort his dying dog. As a result, my parents decided I should leave home for the Arts Educational School, a theatrical boarding school in a mansion in Tring, Hertfordshire.
When we visited Tring, Dad was impressed by the Elizabethan gardens where pupils performed Shakespeare and the classics. He couldn’t resist miming a line or two when our guide turned her back. This was the last summer of his life. I was 10.
There seemed to be a truce between my parents until a visiting journalist sparked off a terrible row by asking about Dad’s plans to return to America. When Father said they were well advanced, Mother went berserk, landing a swipe on his head. “You bloody bastard,” she said to my father, who tried to ignore her. “You said that you’d only return the family.”
She punched him in the gut. This signalled a proper fight with the two of them locked in a deadly embrace, Mother continuing to rain blows on his back and Dad defending his front by squeezing her uncomfortably. Not long afterwards they had another brutal fight. I ran away screaming.
I can’t remember whether my father or I left first that autumn, he for the United States and I for school. In New York he struggled through rehearsals of Under Milk Wood, sometimes helped on and off stage by Liz Reitell. Devoured by anger and pain about his infidelity, Mother sent him a letter informing him their marriage was over.
At 39 he was drinking heavily and administering injections of morphine and cortisone; he managed only a handful of engagements before he collapsed and was taken as an emergency to St Vincent’s hospital.
My mother received the news in a telegram. She didn’t want to face the consequences immediately and later told me she went on to dance somewhere for the rest of the evening. “I was just trying to blot it all out,” she explained, “but drink and enjoying myself didn’t work for long.”
In her heart of hearts she knew it was the end but hoped her instincts were wrong. After a hastily arranged flight she arrived to find her husband under an oxygen tent. It is well documented how she tried to light a cigarette and lost all control after being forcibly removed. She was in a psychiatric ward when she was told Dylan was dead — before he actually was. She wasn’t sure for a long time whether he had received her last damning missive.
Mother accompanied the body back to Laugharne. The morticians had transformed Dad into a tailor’s dummy with a new American-style executive suit. She told me much later that his hands were still the same: narrow like fish fins, “like yours, but useless”.
At the funeral in Laugharne she thought briefly of throwing herself into the grave. Considering the passionate nature of their relationship, I don’t think my father would have expected less.
I wasn’t invited. Instead, my Aunt Nicolette came to see me at school. I was looking forward to a treat in the village with her. While we were walking down the drive, with me still in my new uniform and grey hat, she told me my father was dead.
I couldn’t think of anything to say and concentrated on settling my stomach, which was heaving uncontrollably. Then I felt faint. “Now sit down and put your head between your legs,” said Nicolette. After a minute or so I could lift my head without feeling dizzy and we talked about other things.
The teachers asked the pupils to check whether I was crying at night. No, they reported, no sign of grieving. No one could understand how I carried on my life at school as if nothing had happened.
Within two years Mother went to live in Italy with Colm while Llewellyn and I stayed in Britain. When Father died she was bereft. Her attempts to forget with other men, drinking and unruly behaviour did not give her any lasting satisfaction.
I tried to block out the pain, but all my activity on Father’s behalf, during most of my life, has been a form of reconciliation to his loss.
© Aeronwy Thomas 2009
Extracted from My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas, to be published by Constable on August 24 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
The bard
Dylan Thomas was the archetype of the roistering literary figures of post-war Britain. Born in Swansea in 1914, he published his first poetry in 1934 and moved to London, where he met his Irish wife, Caitlin Macnamara, in a literary pub, the Wheatsheaf.