Europe > United Kingdom > Wales > Swansea > Articles > Dylan Thomas

‘Dylan called it his “ugly, lovely, town”,’ Pat tells me in her sonorous south-Wales lilt, ‘and from here you can see why’. We are standing on Mount Pleasant, a fancifully named hill overlooking a Victorian cityscape reshaped by blitz and 1970s concrete. But, despite the attentions of the Luftwaffe and town planners Swansea’s soul is intact, bustling to the musical chatter of a people immortalised in the poetry of its greatest son: Dylan Thomas.

Pat Hughes is my guide to Dylan’s Swansea. Known to locals as ‘Pat the voice’ she is a walking one-woman-show of Thomas fact, folklore and off-the-cuff recitals. I followed her blond shock of hair down to the Uplands area of Swansea, where the Dylan story begins.

Any writer born at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive was destined to savour the surreal. The Thomas’s polite suburban Edwardian house clings on to the side the hill at such a madcap angle, it should long ago have slid down into Swansea bay. Baby Thomas’s view of the world was framed by the criss-cross of glass panes that look down from the first-floor front bedroom onto the park.

Little Dylan grew up adventuring in Cwmdonkin Park. His schoolmaster father DJ was desperate for his son to go to university, but Thomas junior discovered the nearby Uplands Tavern – and his life-long love affair with beer began.

The Thomas pub trail leads to the port. In Dylan’s day the haunt of sailor’s molls, it is now a shiny dockside marina - begun well before Cardiff trumpeted its docklands development, Pat insists. If Swansea turned a blind eye to its wayward son when he was alive, they’re making up for it now: outside the Dylan Thomas theatre, in Dylan Thomas Square, is a squat, gun-metal statue of the poet. Visitors rub his foot for good luck, and pay homage by offering him a sip of beer.

The former port-side town hall is now the Dylan Thomas Centre. The collection is the work of Jeff Towns, who migrated from West Ham to West Wales in the 70s. Discovering that his favourite singer Bob Dylan took his name from the town poet, Jeff started reading Thomas, opened Dylan’s Book Store, and began acquiring Thomas memorabilia. In 1995 the city bought the collection to create the Thomas museum.

To the north of Swansea is the village of Bronwydd. This tiny town, flanked by wooded Carmarthenshire hills and trout streams, is home to the Gwilli Railway, a vintage steam line lovingly tended by local volunteers. The railway is famed for its Thomas-the-Tank-Engine days, but it was the poet Thomas’s legacy which brought a film crew here to shoot scenes for the starry new Dylan biopic: The Edge of Love.

The Gwilli Railway’s friendly controller is Jeremy John. Sitting in the dusty Victorian wooden waiting-room-cum-office, like many a good Welshman Jeremy has a Dylan story to tell: ‘I was a policeman for thirty five years. One of my jobs was to control the funeral of Thomas’s wife Caitlin in Laugharne. It was just me and a traffic warden, all very orderly, until Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy threw a flower into the grave, then the press went mad’.

The modern media went mad at Bronwydd – swarming the adjoining fields during the filming of the Edge of Love, desperate for a glimpse of Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley. Amidst the paparazzi frenzy, Jeremy and his volunteers steamed up the trains, and dressed up in 40s costume to be extras. ‘They cast me for my WW2 moustache,’ chuckles Jeremy, ‘make up were delighted they didn’t need a false one’.

The Gwilli Railway poses as ‘Tenby station’ for the film. Tenby was never on the railway, but the film takes dramatic licence. In any case the ever-penniless Dylan barely had money to pay for a rail fare, as he hitched and blagged his way around the coastal towns of West Wales in search of a place to write.

What the little fishing village of New Quay made of Thomas and Caitlin when they stayed in a cliffside bungalow here in 1944 is hard to imagine. Even today New Quay, is a gloriously old fashioned bucket-and-spade town of ice-cream cones, slot machines, and whitewashed gwely y brecwast (bed and breakfast) houses.

The town’s single main street snakes past the Black Lion Hotel. Characteristically, this is New Quay’s monument to Dylan. Thomas called it his ‘pink washed pub….waiting for Saturday night as an over-jolly girl waits for sailors’. Inside, on the wooden beams, is a quote from Under Milk Wood: “Time passes. Listen. Time Passes”. Though in New Quay, I’m not sure it does.

If there is one place which captures the soul of Dylan it is the ‘the timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings)’ sea-village of Laugharne. Thomas joked that he got off the bus here, and forgot to get back on. Its not difficult to see why: a writer could not wish for a more romantic setting - with the raggedy remains of the castle standing watch over the green marshes and ‘heron-priested shore’ of the Taf estuary.

Thomas loved his Laugharne boathouse home, which he called a “seashaken house on a breakneck of rocks”. As I scaled the steep cliffside steps to visit, a local, seemingly drawn from the pages of from Under Milk Wood (based on Laugharne), wondered how ‘the bugger ever got up ‘ere, being drunk all the time’. The inside is furnished as it was in Dylan’s time; a house-proud parlour and a modestly neat lounge.

Dylan lived here from 1949 until he boozed himself to oblivion on a visit to New York in 1953. His body was brought for back for burial in Laugharne’s gothic Saint Martin’s Church. A simple white cross stands at the centre of the graveyard. Pilgrims bring tributes, from a white plastic toy horse to an aptly empty whisky bottle. Dylan is here in spirit. Why would he want to get back on the bus out of Laugharne?

Articles

• More from Marc Zakian