CHAPTER X

DYLAN

Even at my young age, I noticed that one person in particular was never at these parties: the Thomas. I was bewildered, because Mother loved to regale guests with tales about Dylan, so I asked her why he was not invited. She brushed off the question by saying that, since the war, his alcoholism had become too much to put up with. Recently, while visiting Laugharne (the model for his most celebrated work: Under Milk Wood) in South Wales – where my Parents had lived before the war and been particularly friendly with Dylan, I believe I came nearer to understanding what really happened.

First of all, it seems that Dylan met Caitlin (his future wife) at my Parents’ house. They had invited Augustus John and Dylan for the weekend. John arrived in his big car and a date: Caitlin.

After lunch, at which John had noticed how interested Caitlin and Dylan had become in one another, John told Dylan that the two of them were going for a drive. The poet timidly objected, saying he wanted to stay home and write (as in: “Go for a lonely walk with Caitlin”.) Well, Dylan was a small man and always broke. John was a big man who drove a big car. That was why he was known by his surname. It was NOT an Optional Invitation. They went for a drive.

Twenty miles away, John stopped the car, leant across his passenger’s legs and opened the door for him: “This,” he said “is where you get out and walk.” Dylan protested, but there was no contest. Dylan went to the nearest pub. He was small and always broke, so people always referred to him by his first name. As it turned out, of course, the scribbler got the girl, while the dauber returned to his perpetual quest for conquests.

Dylan once told an interviewer that he lived in Father’s potting shed… poetic licence, for in fact he lived in a pretty little house called ‘The Boathouse’ a few doors away from my Parents’ house – the house with a ruined medieval castle in the garden. Then he and Caitlin moved to a cottage across the estuary, with no telephone and probably no electricity.

Not that all my Parents’ hospitality was for intellectuals or the upper class. Father wrote out invitations by hand for every fisherman and cockle man or woman (many of the cockle-pickers were indeed women), inviting them all to dinner at the Castle House.

He later said that a quite remarkable quantity of beer was consumed that night! I remember the piles of empty cockle shells down by the waterfront and the smell was not a savoury one. I came across a jar of preserved cockles in a shop and asked Mother if she liked them. “It all depends where they come from,” she replied, reading the label. When she saw they were bottled in Laugharne, she said: “Certainly not! They would leave the fresh cockles out on the dock in the sun for days on end and then wonder why people got sick eating them.”

Someone from Laugharne also remarked quite recently, when reminiscing about my Parents: “Mr Hughes would use the Bentley to take children to the hospital in an emergency. He had other cars all right, but the Bentley – that was the quick one. Ran fast indeed it did!”

One morning Dylan appeared at the front door in pyjamas and an old dressing gown. He told Mother that he had come to consult Father on some learned matter… to cross the estuary, he had been rowed by the deaf and dumb ferry boy, dressed as he was for the bedroom. Dylan disappeared into Father’s study in a small lookout room in the walls of the medieval castle. Eventually, it was time, and Mother went in to invite Dylan to stay for lunch – the two men were enjoying glasses of dry Amontillado. After lunch (with wine) they retired to their discussion again and soon it was dinnertime. Mother invited Dylan to stay (the two men had moved on to Scotch by then). After dinner, since it was quite clear that Dylan was not going home to his new wife, Mother invited him to stay the night… with the parting thrust of: “At least you will finally be properly dressed for the invitation!” She never forgave him for leaving his young wife with two babies, for more than twenty-four hours, without the possibility of telling her what he was up to – as I’ve said before, there was no telephone.

The dumb ferry boy, incidentally, was later accused of killing his grandmother, who had been bedridden for so long that she had never seen a car! So it may well have been a mercy killing, but only the family knew what really happened, for it is doubtful that the ferryman had much of a clue about anything. He was a bit simple, besides being deaf and dumb – which had been reason enough not to go to school for a single day. The world around him must have seemed quite incomprehensible. All he understood was the cheerful salutations he received when he went his daily rounds in the village, smiling and waving to people. That was how he got his human feedback. He was acquitted, thanks to a clever young defence lawyer who insisted that a Welsh-speaking deaf and dumb specialist was needed in order to communicate with the accused. When one was finally found, the ferry boy could not understand him at all, having never learned sign language. Could he indeed have understood anything? A mistrial was declared and the poor fellow went back to his work rowing the ferry to and fro. The inhabitants of Laugharne resented any interruption from the outside world. The ferry boy ‘meant no harm’ – after all, he was always checking in on people and waving to acquaintances across the street – even if he was accused of killing his grandma!

That, at least, was the story I was told. Once again, the story is apocryphal and there have been many more up-todate versions than those told to me by Father. Even my brother confirmed this version. But in point of fact, it was far more complicated than that. The victim was not his grandmother, nor was she so ancient and bedridden that “she had never seen a car”. It must have been an amalgam of different, disconnected stories, or perhaps just such a murder did occur in Laugharne earlier. Strange things came about in Laugharne all the time.

So indeed, Mother could have felt that Dylan was an enabler to Father, but I believe it went much further than that. Once, when Father was away, he let the poor young poet write in his little study in the lookout room in the castle ruins. Nearby, down a few steps, was the castle dungeon that Father used as a wine cellar. I heard from an old neighbour of my Parents that Father had come back one day to find Dylan in a drunken stupor, surrounded by empty bottles of his best wines. He was not using the study to escape the sound of squalling infants, but to enjoy the cellar nearby. Knowing Father well, I can just picture him taking his small friend (Father being a tall, strong and big man) by the scruff of the neck and walking him slowly off the property, closing and locking the gate without a single word and not once looking back at his brilliant, derelict friend. They never met again, though their mutual respect seems not to have paled.

Well, that is one version of the story, but my oldest siblings assure me that after the war, when Dylan was invited to go on the second (and fatal) lecture tour in America, he came and talked to my Parents about it. On the one hand, with his growing family, he desperately needed the money. On the other, he knew himself too well and had a premonition that he would not be able to resist the temptation of alcohol and its ready availability when he was away from home. What my Parents told him, history does not relate… but of course that was his last trip to America and he died in Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, New York in November 1953.

It seemed to me that everyone in the World was successful, though not necessarily rich, at least in our circles. We were brought up to disdain the rich or at least those who showed their wealth. But it certainly didn’t do to be poor either. Then you might have to go out and get a job – that was beneath the ipper class to contemplate! Now, after the war, more and more formerly rich people were indeed having to do just that, but Mother came from a wealthy family. Of course, her great grandfather had made a fortune in the textile industry up North, where the saying goes: ‘Where there’s muck [industrial grime], there’s brass [money]’. He was elected a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1858-80, was knighted on the recommendation of Prime Minister William Gladstone for ‘services to the Cotton Industry’ – he served on both the Royal Commission for Assimilating Mercantile Law and on both the Great Exhibition of London in 1851 and the Paris International Exhibition of 1855 (receiving the Légion d’Honneur). By the time he sold his company in 1861 it was the world’s largest manufacturer of fine cotton and lace thread. He bought a vast estate in Gloucestershire with farms and villages on it and moved there – though he never forgot his humble origins and his good fortune. He once wrote in a letter to his son that: “he was not long for this World (actually he lived to 88), that it was his money that had bought his baronetcy and his gentility, but his son should never forget that, for all their huge houses and carriages, they were no better than anyone else”. Naturally, his daughter-in-law, Granny Cadogan, was not bound by this credo – she came from a patrician family – and his grandchildren (such as Mother and her siblings) completely forgot his advice and felt they belonged in higher society. It was beneath Mother to open letters from her stockbroker so that, when she died, she still had the same shares in American railroads that she had received when she got married in 1932… which, upon her death, were worthless. I am sure that her grandfather would have turned in his grave had he heard of such lack of husbandry on the part of an heir to the fruits of his labours. After all, he was a highly successful businessman.

Mother’s mother, my Granny (his grand-daughter-inlaw), was furious when Mother’s elder sister married a banker

– (as mentioned before, she had referred to him as: ‘that counter jumper’) for it was beneath the ‘upper class’ to actually have a job and earn their living… but who bailed out Granny in her old age? Who else but the distinguished banker (the counter-jumper), of course. Meanwhile, Mother’s method of spending less was to wander round the house singing: “There’s no more money in the bank, oh there’s no more money in the bank…” I don’t know what we were supposed to do about it, there were no shops in which to spend money, save once a week when we used our petrol rations to go and buy a few essentials, such as kerosene (paraffin to us). If you asked for something in particular at the ironmonger’s shop, the invariable response was: “Oh no, such a thing doesn’t exist”. True, in post-war Britain supplies were very short, but it was quite clear that the Ironmonger’s horizon stopped abruptly at their occasional travelling salesmen. Otherwise, we walked a mile each way to the village shop for bread and other such simple essentials, or two miles to the Post Office. We had a new-fangled rucksack with a frame from Norway or a huge basket (said to be from Switzerland) with shoulder straps for carrying baguettes… not that there was anything as fancy as a baguette in Wales.

The only person in the house who always had some cash in his pockets was Father, but Mother paid for our education and the household expenses by cheque. When the local Bank Manager finally saw her coming into the branch for once, he hurried round the counter to corner her:

“Mrs Hughes, Mrs Hughes, it is many the letter I am writing to you, indeed, asking what you plan to do about your overdraft… and it’s not a single answer that you vouchsafe me. What are you going to do about it, Mrs Hughes?”

“Why Mr Jones, if I only knew what to do, I would have surely answered you, wouldn’t I?” That flummoxed the poor man!

While on the forbidden subject of money, Mother kept telling me that “When I came of age” I would “Come into money”. That sounded nice, if a little confusing, since she didn’t seem to have any left. She assured me that it had been put in Trust for me. Unwisely, I once asked her how much it was, to which she retorted: “It’s rude to talk about money and anyway, I don’t know. Don’t talk about it.” Fine, so I shut up, but when I turned twenty one, I was indeed given a check and told to spend it wisely, not fritter it away. It was £135, which was very nice to have, though it paled beside what I had already made from publishing a couple of novels… I had simply no idea what to expect from ‘coming into money’!

So my childhood was one of extraordinary privilege in which emotions were not encouraged, founded on the false premise that we were ‘upper class’ despite having no money – because we had a decrepit old car and never any cash around. In point of fact, my bohemian Parents (who had known many of the Bloomsbury Group) lived very much as they wanted. We had a large house, the grownups drank decent wine, we five children went to private schools (though two won scholarships) and our Parents travelled a great deal. It all made me want to earn a good living and be involved with the ‘unsavoury’ world of business, with its reality of profit and loss, gross and net earnings. I wanted to travel the world and to have enough money when I did so, to buy myself a drink instead of relying on polluted water.

Which brings me to ice cream: being without electricity, of course we had no refrigerator, save a pre-war kerosene one that worked only very rarely. Even then, sugar was rationed, so the nearest thing I had to ice cream was occasional plain milk frozen in the ice tray. When I was finally treated to a store-bought ice cream, I was already seven or eight and guessed how foolish it would be to bite off the bottom of the cone… but I did it anyway.