Rachel and I had moved to west Wales into very early retirement. We’d spent the first two weeks unpacking our books. We would start after breakfast with good intent but within minutes we’d each find some old favourite and we’d spend the rest of the day reading. In the very last box, I found a pamphlet, The Forensic Examination of Stomach Contents, written by my uncle Jack, sometime a Chief Superintendent. The cover was splattered with faded blood stains, but Jack would never explain how they came to be there, though he wasn’t slow to tell you the pamphlet had come first in the King’s Essay Competition in 1948.
There have always been policemen in our family. My brother is a detective specialising in Internet fraud. Though my father hadn’t actually been a policeman, he’d been a personnel manager at Butlins, which was much the same thing. His cousin Will, the shabbiest man I had ever seen, had been in Special Branch, and collected Victorian typewriters. We didn’t talk much about him. He had once seduced my step-mother whilst my father sat sozzled on the sofa downstairs. My step-mother was good at that sort of thing. She’d even worked in a Bloomsbury hotel, renting out rooms to blue movie makers, and starring in one or two herself. “Iesu mawr,” she said a few hours before she died, whilst I was wiping her bum, “those boys had willies down to their knees.”
Leaving London for the countryside was all very well, Rachel had said, but I would soon need an interest, capital letters, and it was finding my great-uncle’s pamphlet that gave me the idea. I had policing in my blood, a good intuitive sense about people, and a sociologist’s eye for the quirks of human behaviour.
“How about private investigation?” I said one evening, having searched through Yellow Pages and found a dearth of country gumshoes.
“Good idea,” she replied, without losing concentration on the bacon omelette she was making. “You’ll be very good at it.”
So that night, as enough rain fell for a year and the river burst its banks and took away our seed potatoes, I planned a different kind of future. I rented an office under the town clock in Lampeter, put ads in the papers and filled in a card for the noticeboard at the supermarket. I phoned the local solicitors to tell them I’d started up, and one sent me a good-luck present the next day – a desk, three odd chairs and a wooden filing cabinet containing a photograph of Diana Dors with a pencilled-in moustache. I sat in the office for two weeks and my only callers were the postman with his circulars, and shoppers asking the way to the discount store. Then one day a plump and rosy-cheeked woman came in, whose grey hair swirled round her head like smoke. She was wearing a hand-knitted, bright blue cardigan that waterfalled from her shoulders, stopping within a ragged inch of the top of her black wellington boots. A farmer’s wife, I thought. She sat in the chair facing me, folded her arms and leaned across my desk: “Mr Pritchard? Mr Martin Pritchard?”
“How can I help you?”
“They tell me your wife’s a poet.”
I nodded, too surprised for words.
“You’ll need her help to investigate this.” She drew out a copy of the Cambrian News from her shopping bag. She thumbed through the inside pages, found what she was looking for, folded the paper in half, and edged it across the desk for me to read. I put on my glasses and read the report: a shed had been stolen from a field near the Scadan Coch pub.
“I should be interested in this?”
“It’s part of our cultural heritage.”
“A shed?” I was incredulous.
“Would you mock the Boat House at Laugharne? The Muse sailed well enough from there.”
I picked up the office diary, and made a show of flicking through the pages, distracted by tiny red flames at the front of her mouth. Not lipstick on her teeth, because she wore none. I wondered if her gums were bleeding.
“You won’t have much in there,” she said.
“Can you meet my terms?”
“Don’t you think,” she asked, looking scornfully at me, flashing more fire from between her lips, “that the satisfaction of putting the record straight is worth more than money?”
“I’ll find the shed, in between other things...”
“Take this.” She passed across the desk a double rabbit’s paw, stitched back to back with gold and silver thread. “Now, be care-ful...” She smiled. I stared. She held her smile. I kept on staring, mesmerised by the red dragon etched across her front teeth.
I found out later that she was the only child of a prosperous abattoir owner, and taught moral philosophy at the university.
Rachel has a habit of saying: “If you’re hungry, go look for a bagel.” Fed up with waiting for nothing to happen, I took her advice. I locked the office and drove to Ciliau Aeron. The Scadan Coch was at the end of the village, next to the church. I’d been there many times before, for although we had only just moved in, we’d been holidaying in the area for years.
The landlord was a one-legged, two-fingered Irishman called O’Malley, who’d once been a leading light in the Free Wales Army. He was also part of Ciliau’s pink community, which made many local young farmers apprehensive about using the pub. “We’re all poofters at heart,” he was fond of telling them, “but some of us have the pleasure of it down below as well.” Many thought him handsome, but his face was round and his head as bald as a goose egg.
It was usual for only Welsh to be spoken in the bars, and any persistent transgressors were often asked to leave. “There’s nothing like a good thirst to help a man find his tongue,” O’Malley used to say. He was famous for his prejudice against the English, but he took to them if they had soft voices, blended with the wallpaper and tried to learn Welsh. “What I can’t stand,” I once heard him say, “is the weekenders, all turbo cars and turbo boats and bloody turbo voices.” The pub’s pride and joy was a miniature llama called Llewela, who was trained to spit at anyone with a loud English accent.
O’Malley was behind the bar polishing the pumps. I asked for a pint of Brains. He pulled it gently into the glass, placed it on the counter and handed me some olives and a laverbread dip.
“That missing shed,” I said. “How long’s it been there?”
“First world war, off and on,” he replied over his shoulder, as he went across to serve another customer. “Lorry full of turkeys going to market, pulled out of the car park and hit a wagon carrying timber. The village salvaged the turkeys but Dai Fern Hill took the wood and built the shed from it. That’s the story, handed down, like.”
I dipped another Crinkle in the laverbread and asked: “What was it used for?”
O’Malley passed across some bubble-and-squeak rissoles. “Dai killed his pigs in there. Strung them up by the back feet from the rafter, sharp knife in the neck, and a bucket to catch the blood. They say you could hear the squealing from the top of Surgeon’s Hill.”
The rissoles were delicious, made with potatoes and wild garlic. When I’d finished, I paid O’Malley, and walked down the road. I soon found the sign for Fern Hill Farm, painted in white on the side of a rusty milk churn. A piece of blue slate on the wooden gate warned: “Loose Dogs. No callers.” The gate was chained and padlocked.
I was wondering what to do when Basset the Post arrived, a man so lugubrious that the rims of his sunken eyes seemed to fall down his cheeks and rest on his droopy, always-damp moustache. “Wouldn’t go down there, if I were you,” he murmured dolefully.
“How d’you deliver the letters, then?”
He nodded towards a wooden box next to the churn. “He don’t get much, just bills, and letters from abroad sometimes.”
“What’s he like?”
“Bitter,” said the mournful Basset.
“About what?” I tried to lighten up the question with a smile but Basset wiped it from my face with a melancholic sigh.
“His woman got pregnant by the fertiliser man.”
“And?”
“They ran away to Slough.”
“And now his shed’s gone missing.”
“It meant a lot to him, that shed.”
I jumped over the gate and walked apprehensively up the track. The trees on either side had not been cut for many years, and their branches intertwined above the track, blocking out much of the daylight. I came to a second gate, also chained, and guarded by something more sinister. A line of dead birds were tied to the top rail with orange baler twine. The three thrushes I cared little about, but it upset me to see the red kite. Someone had broken its neck before tying it to the gate by its legs. Flies were buzzing in and out of its empty eye sockets, whilst little coffee-coloured maggots burrowed through the flesh. As I clambered over, its razor beak caught the inside of my trouser leg and made a small tear.
Another five minutes of walking uphill brought me to the farmhouse. It was a dilapidated building of old Welsh stone, smothered by imperial ivy and climbing roses that reached to the eaves. Ferns had taken root in the gaps between the stones, and a twisted elder grew flag-like from the chimney stack. Pigeons flew in and out of a broken bedroom window, and crows pecked like addicts for the linseed oil in the putty. I relaxed a little as I crossed the yard because I was sure there were no dogs here. The front door was open. An inquisitive sociologist, I had always told my students, should never let a threshold hold him back. I stepped inside.
I found myself in a large room that would have made the turbo-weekenders gasp both with joy and horror. There were two inglenook fires, a slate floor, white-washed walls and black-stained oak beams smothered with bunches of drying herbs. Three rabbits hung from an old bacon hook near the window.
A long kitchen table took up most of one side of the room; it was covered in rusty agricultural tools and oily parts from some engine or other, presumably a tractor. A couple of tins of rat poison sat at one end, next to a pile of Picture Post magazines and a bowl of rotting apples covered in vinegar flies. In one corner of the room stood a television on an upturned diesel drum, and in the other, a mattress covered over with a patchwork quilt, with a bowler hat hanging on a nail above a cracked mirror. A dozen empty Guinness bottles were lined up on the floor beside the mattress. On the wall above, was a signed photograph of a football team called AC Portoferraio, from one of the Italian leagues presumably, though I had never heard of them.
The right side of the room was almost bare. It was dominated by a large, gilt-framed canvas above the fireplace. Even I recognised it: Monica Sahlin’s famous painting of her cousin rising to heaven in a wicker-basket, looking wistfully down through a cloud of harebells. On the mantelpiece below stood a sheep’s skull with plastic miniature daffodils sprouting from the sockets of the eyes.
On either side of the chimney breast were shelves upon shelves of books and quaintly-bound periodicals, and, in the middle of the room, a small writing desk, with a chair set at an angle as if someone had just got up or was expecting to return. A blank writing pad lay on the desk, and, to one side, a tarnished pewter mug filled with sharpened pencils. On each corner stood a black and white photograph. The one on the left was a very fuzzy snap of a chubby, curly-haired man with a cigarette hanging from his lower lip. My stomach bled sour anxiety, for he looked like my father, who had only once brought me happiness and that was on the day of his dying.
The photo on the right of the desk was of an upright man in a sombre business suit, carrying a furled umbrella. Here, too, was a sense of deja vu: he looked like the men who had chased my mother for the money that my father had borrowed and never repaid. They had harassed me, too, as I was sent to the front door with well-prepared excuses: “Sorry, he’s gone to Venezuela on business, and won’t be back for six months.” I saw again the shock on my grandmother’s face when the bailiffs took possession of her house to pay off my father’s debts. This was the man who’d told me to send him half of my student grant, and made me feel it was the right thing to do; this was the man who stayed for two years in London hotels without paying his bills, was caught, imprisoned, released on probation and landed a job as general manager of a posh West End hotel, before careering downhill to Butlins. This was the man...
I moved quietly to the centre of the room and almost hit my head against something hanging from one of the beams. It was an old Corona lemonade bottle with a tapered, unstoppered neck. Inside was a little stuffed bird, or so I first thought, but when I looked more closely I was shocked to see it was actually a live wren, sitting on its own droppings, gasping for breath in the thin, warm air that managed to drop down to the bottom. I was trying to work out how the wren had been put in the bottle, when I heard someone spitting. I turned and moved towards the back of the house where a lean-to kitchen and bathroom had been built. I could see a washbasin with a pair of black shoes in it. Next to the basin was a bath, with a man bending so far in that his head was almost touching the bottom. He unfurled and stood upright. I could see something wriggling in his mouth. He turned away and spat into the lavatory bowl. He went back to the bath and leaned over, again stretching down inside. He came back up. There was a large brown spider between his lips.
I back-tracked nervously from the house, and sought refuge in the pub. O’Malley came over.
“Brains?” he asked.
“Look,” I said, holding the pump against his pull. He looked up curiously, as the flow stopped and tiny splutters of foam filled the glass. “Small sheds don’t have rafters, nothing strong enough to hold a kicking pig.”
He put down the glass, and brought across a plate of tapas. “Clams covered in pancetta, then baked.”
“Shed some light on the mystery.”
The awful pun brought a generous smile. “It didn’t stay forever with Dai Fern Hill, you know.”
“Tell me.”
“Geoffrey Faber took it to Tyglyn Aeron.”
“Faber? T.S. Eliot’s publisher?”
“The very same.” He finished pouring my beer, and placed it on the counter with all the satisfaction of a fisherman playing out his line. “Go and see old Eli. I’ll give him a ring to say you’re coming.”
I drove to Lampeter to pick up a curry. Lampeter I liked. It was cosmopolitan, just like the part of London we had left. The pasty, chapel-serious faces of the locals were leavened by the black, brown and Chinese faces of students from the college. Hasidim rubbed shoulders with farm labourers in the Spar, hippies strummed in Harford Square, and Muslim women floated down the High Street in deep purdah.
A thickening mist slowed my drive home with the take-away. I remember the table was already laid, and Rachel was in the kitchen making raita, and warming some home-made nan. After that, my memory of what happened is extremely disconnected. We sat down at the table. We lit the candles and said a silent prayer. Rachel was picking up a spoon to serve the rice, and I remember that I was trying to tear the nan bread in two. I heard the creak of the yard gate, and wondered why the geese were so quiet. I heard footsteps outside, someone moving quietly around the yard. Mably was in the back room but, instead of barking furiously as he usually did at the slightest noise, he came whimpering through the house, and flung himself trembling under the table. There was a sound of scuffling feet outside the front door – we have no lobby and the door opens directly into the room where we were eating. I remember looking over my left shoulder, and seeing a white envelope come through the letterbox, and glide down to the doormat. I went across to pick it up. No address on it, just the lines
Find meat on bones that soon have none,
And drink in the two milked crags,
The merriest marrow and the dregs
Before the lady’s breasts are hags
And the limbs are torn.
Rachel said something about the food getting cold, so I put the envelope on the table beside me and ate some mutton muglai. Then I saw the envelope move. I stopped eating, picked it up and slit open the back with my knife.
I heard Rachel screaming and the sound of her fork hitting the plate. I jumped to my feet and stood riveted as a black spider came through the slit in the envelope and worked its way towards my hand. The touch of its feet on my finger made me shudder and the envelope fell to the table. Dozens of spiders came spilling out. They scuttled across the table, some abseiling down to the floor, but most running wildly between the plates. Some of the larger ones had already clambered into the silver cartons and were now desperately trying to extricate themselves from the burning curries. I recall seeing three or four small green spiders burrowing into the pilau rice, and Rachel running to the other side of the room.
Foolishly, I picked up a nan and began swotting the spiders but the bread was not well suited to the task. I rushed into the kitchen to fetch a can of fly spray from under the sink. I sprayed it vigorously across the top of the table, Rachel angrily shouting “Poison us, go on, poison us, I would.” Then I heard something squealing with pain, the noise a small creature makes when the talons of a hawk strike through its flesh. I dropped the can and ran outside. The orange hazard lights on the car were flashing across the darkening yard. I walked nervously across. I could see the outline of a bird trapped in a layer of mist above the car. A live house martin had been impaled on the aerial.
I arrived late at the office the next morning. After a wasted hour shuffling papers across my desk, and wondering about the spiders and the man at Fern Hill, I rang the National Library. Tyglyn Aeron, they said, had been built in the early nineteenth century. Geoffrey Faber had bought it in 1930 and T.S. Eliot was a regular summer guest.
I grabbed a seafood ciabatta from the deli, and drove munching to meet Eli Morgan. O’Malley had said he was a gardener, and that was where I found him, leaning on a spade in the front garden of his small white cottage. He was tall and well-built, and looked surprisingly fit for his age. His eyes were hidden by a peaked cap, so that his face was dominated by the strong chin that jutted out like Mr Punch’s, though much broader. We shook hands, and sat on a wooden bench beneath an old apple tree. I clipped a tiny microphone onto his lapel. Old habits die slow. I had carried a tape recorder almost every day of my working life as a sociologist. I could give all my attention to the speaker, not worrying about taking notes or trying to remember what was being said. It would be just as useful in my new role as rural sleuth.
I asked Eli what he remembered about Geoffrey Faber, and let him talk away.
“I worked down there in Tyglyn as second under-gardener, vegetables mostly, which we were sending by train up to London to Faber’s house. The Head Gardener was Oaten, who came down here from South Wales with his wife and daughters, and you daren’t glance at those girls for Oaten would give you a good beating. He was a brute.
“I seldom was talking to Faber, he was one above us. He was in church sometimes, or the shop. His tongue was sharp if you was upsetting him.”
“What did he want with Dai Fern Hill’s shed?”
“Somewhere quiet to write, you see.”
“For himself, you mean?”
“Eliot.”
“Used to write in the shed?”
“That’s it.”
“Did you ever see Eliot about?”
“He would stay mainly in the house. Sometimes we would see him writing in the shed. He and Faber used to go shooting, I know that. Big bugs they were, they weren’t for mixing.”
“So Eliot didn’t know any locals?”
“Not many.”
“None you can remember?”
“Well, that’s not for me to say. But there are stories.”
We talked a little more about his prize vegetables, and then I left. As I walked down the lane, I had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching me. When I reached the car, I felt that something wasn’t quite right, though I couldn’t see what. I put the key in the door but it was already unlocked. I looked through the window but could see nothing missing or amiss so I opened the door and climbed in. I turned the ignition and started the engine. I pulled over the seat belt and snapped it in across my chest and looked, as I always did, in the rear view mirror.
But the rear view was missing. Someone had covered the mirror with a piece of paper. There was a verse on it, written in faint red ink:
Chew spider
suck wren
bitch’s blood
fountain
penned.
Find meat on bones? Not his.
War on the spider and the wren!
I pulled the paper off, and opened the glove compartment to keep the verse for Rachel. Inside, still oozing blood, was a ring of puppy tails, threaded together with orange baler twine.
I drove fast to the Scadan Coch and asked O’Malley for a glass of RUC, and he quickly poured a double Bushmills into a pint of Guinness. “I’ve got some tapas for you,” I said, putting the tails onto the bar. “Fry for two minutes with sage, onion and tomato and serve in a roll, your original, authentic Ceredigion hot dog, your very own chien chaud, serve with relish if not enthusiasm.” I quick-marched half the RUC into my stomach. “Look, what the hell’s going on?”
“You been asking about the shed?”
“You encouraged me.”
“You’ve upset him somehow.” O’Malley lifted the ring of tails from the counter. “I’ll fry these over for the ferret.”
I finished my drink, and went home, taking the shortcut through the field behind the pub. As I crossed the old bridge, I could see Rachel rounding up the chickens. She was having difficulty in enticing the flighty Seebrights into the coop, and the big Sumatran cockerel was refusing pointblank to go in with the hens. I watched for a minute, enjoying the chaos, and then walked up the dark lane to the cottage.
I let myself in. I was half-way across the room when I saw the upturned bucket on the table. I padded round warily whilst I took off my coat, checked the answering machine and put the kettle on. “It’s a letter,” said Rachel, coming in with one Seebright still clinging to the top of her shoulder. “I thought it was the safest place to put it.”
I rescued the bantam and took it down the garden path to the coop. When I returned, Rachel was standing by the table, fly swat in hand, convinced that the letter contained more wild life. I lifted the bucket, and we stared at the pale lavender envelope. It remained perfectly still but even so Rachel lunged forward and began furiously beating the envelope with her swat.
I picked it up and clipped off a little corner with the kitchen scissors. Nothing came out except the smell of eau-de-cologne. We both relaxed, though Rachel kept the swat in her hand. I slowly slit open the envelope. There was a letter inside, no spiders or puppy tails. I gingerly unfolded the single sheet of paper and read the note out loud: “Come and have coffee this evening. I should like to talk about Mr. Eliot, amongst others. Yours, Rosalind A. Hilton.”
Rosalind Hilton’s welcome was warm and effusive. She insisted on giving me a tour of her cottage, at the same time reeling off the names of the talented people who had lived on the banks of the Aeron. Not just Eliot and Dylan Thomas, she said with pride, but opera singer Sir Geraint Evans at the mouth of the river. “Not to mention,” she concluded with a wink, “the new Aeron poets like Rachel Mossman.”
“My wife,” I said in what I hoped was a modest tone.
“I know,” she replied. “I like Rachel’s poetry a good deal. She’s Jewish, isn’t she?”
“Straight out of Hackney.”
“And you?”
“No. Her toy goy.”
After pouring coffee, Rosalind sat on one side of the fire, and told me to sit opposite. I asked her if I could record our conversation, and after some hesitation, she agreed. Looking across the hearth at her, I guessed she was in her eighties, like old Eli Morgan. Her face was bright and sharp, her hair tied back in a bun. Three gold rings on her right hand gleamed brightly in the light of the fire. She rolled them between the finger and thumb of her other hand, as if she were trying to hypnotise me. Though she looked small and rather frail, when she spoke her voice was so deep and powerful that her presence filled the room.
“I’ll come straight to the point, and then, no doubt, you’ll want me to start at the beginning.” I said that was fine, and then she said in a matter-of-fact voice: “Eliot and I...” She paused and I saw a faint blush on her cheeks, though it might well have been the flames from the fire “...were lovers.”
And then she began at the beginning.
“I was born and brought up in the east end of London, in Copley Street, Stepney. My mother’s maiden name was Shodken and my father, who was a tailor, was a Hintler. That was a double cross to bear, so to speak, to be Jewish in the 1930s and called Hintler.
“You smile, but it was no joke to be the daughter of Mr and Mrs Hitler, for that was what people called us.
“My parents could see which way things were going in Germany, so in 1935 they made two decisions which they thought would save our lives, or at least make life more tolerable. They changed the family name to Hilton, and we moved out of London to Ciliau Aeron, where I’ve lived ever since.”
“Why Ciliau?”
“Geraint our milkman was always going on about how pretty it was.”
“He ran the dairy in Copley Street?”
“Two cows in a tin shed behind the shop, and a churn pulled round the streets on a three-wheeled trolley.”
“Did your parents really think that Jews from London could hide in the countryside?”
“Perhaps it was naive but many families did the same. Lubetkin, for instance, who designed the penguin house at London Zoo. He took his family to Gloucestershire, didn’t he?”
“But why Wales?”
“It was as far away west as you could get from Europe and the Nazis. And my father had always believed that the Celts were fond of Jews. Perhaps they are, Dylan Thomas certainly was, but I’ll come to him in a minute.”
“How did you get by?”
“In the time-honoured way. My father did alterations for the bachelor and widowed farmers, my mother took in washing. And we helped out with the haymaking and other farm work. My father was also a scholar – he’d thought seriously of being a Rabbi when he was young but the Communist Party got to him first. The Welsh like scholarship so they took to him quickly.
“No, we told no-one we were Jewish because we were convinced the Germans would eventually invade. We were simply regarded as Londoners who had fled the city for a quiet country life. We were treated politely and kindly, if a little suspiciously. Within a month of being here, my parents were going to church. It caused them some pain but not much. They were both atheists and hadn’t been religious Jews since their early teens. Going to church was part of the new identity, like going to the agricultural shows and the eisteddfodau. The worst thing was getting rid of our duvets – deks, we called them – and learning to sleep with blankets. Only Jews had duvets at that time, and my parents didn’t want to keep anything that would give us away.”
“Didn’t you miss London?”
“Strangely enough, no. I already knew that I had a little talent for painting and that blossomed here in the countryside. I loved the sea, which I had only ever seen once or twice before. I could wear lipstick without being hissed at by the neighbours, some of whom were very frum. Here we had our own little cottage, but in Copley Street we all lived upstairs in three rooms, with Mrs Presse and her children downstairs. The lavatory was at the bottom of the garden, and we had to go through Mrs Presse’s kitchen to reach it. I didn’t miss that, I can tell you, and besides, I felt at home here.”
“Really?”
“Wales is Old Testament country – the men were Isaac and Jacob and Esau, and the villages Carmel, Hebron and Bethlehem, even a Sodom or two. You see, Wales is Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia rolled up into one. It was heimisher.
“Social life? I had little of that in London. I was more interested in books and painting, and, besides, not many wanted to date the daughter of Mr Hitler. Down here it was better. I went on rambles with the theology students from Lampeter, and that helped both my painting and my Welsh. And on Friday evenings there was always a dance in Aberaeron. I used to catch the train in with the two Oaten girls and we had a wonderful time.
“Within a year of arriving, I was helping out at Tyglyn when the Fabers were down. I was just a general handy girl. Sometimes I looked after the children when the nanny was ill. If there were guests for dinner, I helped in the kitchen or prepared the tables for auction bridge. And that is how I first met Eliot. I was sitting on a bench in the garden sketching. Eliot came out of his shed and walked down the path towards me. He stood behind me for a while, watching as I sketched. Then he sat down. I noticed how fastidiously he arranged his plus fours, which he always wore at Tyglyn. He sat with me for about twenty minutes. We talked mainly of painting and he wanted to know what I thought of the Surrealists. I knew nothing of them, I’m afraid, and he gave me a little lecture on Salvador Dali. That was to be the first of many conversations. And the next year, I met Dylan Thomas. Such things could not have happened to me in Stepney.
“I’ll tell you a bit about Dylan and then go back to Eliot. It was in July 1936, in the evening. I was alone in Tyglyn baby-sitting – I think the nanny had been got rid of by then. The Fabers were at a poetry reading at another mansion just up the road. Eliot was upstairs in his room writing. There was a hammering on the door. I opened it and this young man with tousled hair stood there, looking slightly unkempt in corduroy trousers and a black polo-neck sweater. I noticed a two-seater sports car in the drive with an older man with flaming red hair behind the driving wheel. The young man came into the hall, looked about and said: “Where’s Vernon hiding?” I replied that he had come to the wrong house, and that if he wished to hear Mr Watkins read then I could re-direct him.
“He gave me a huge smile and said he’d much prefer to read some poetry to me. He stretched out his hand and said ‘I’m Dylan Thomas.’ Well, of course I’d heard of him. Eliot had mentioned him. And my father was always talking about him, too.
“I invited him into the Drawing Room, and he fell back into the red leather sofa and almost disappeared between the cushions, he was quite slim, really, at least he was then. I asked him if he’d like a drink and he said yes, but nothing alcoholic. I had the impression that he was recovering from an illness and he’d been told to stay off alcohol for a while.”
“I suppose he wanted sweets,” I said.
“No, he asked for a glass of milk and cake, so I went to the kitchen and brought some for him. There was a certain chemistry between us straight away. After all, I was twenty-one at the time and he was only a year older. I told him that Eliot was writing upstairs and asked if he would like to meet him. ‘What, and play altar boy to his Pope?’
“He stayed for more than an hour. He asked to see the Library, and he sniffed along the shelves like a truffle hound. He found some Hardy, which he read to me, and then Rilke, das Stündenbuch, I think, which I read to him, translating as I went along. Then a quick tour of the house, avoiding upstairs. We talked a lot about London, and he asked me about Copley Street and all the goings-on. He said he was fascinated by neighbours because his father hated them so much. He soon picked up it was a mainly Jewish street, so I told him, rather cleverly I thought, that we used to give our Jewish neighbours a box of Matzos at Passover, and they would give us a pudding at Christmas.
“Copley Street felt like thin ice so I changed the subject and told him about the Faber’s home-made electricity. There was a waterwheel in the farmyard linked to a generator, which fed into a very large bank of lead accumulators in a room next to the kitchen. He wanted to see it for himself, and that’s how we spent the time. And, of course, to the kitchen for more milk and some widgeon pie that had been left out for Eliot’s supper. Dylan ate it all. On the way out, he took Eliot’s scarf, only for a borrow, he said, but he never returned it. He asked me to help him put on his jumper, which I did, though I thought it rather odd. And off he went to find Vernon.”
I felt buoyant and pleased with myself. It had been a good interview, and Rosalind Hilton had asked me to come back to talk some more. Maybe I should have gone straight home but I didn’t, and in retrospect that may have been a mistake. I drove, without really thinking much about it, to Fern Hill. Perhaps I was taking myself too seriously, but I wanted to know why we were being sent unsolicited spiders and puppy tails.
It took only a few minutes to get there. I parked the car, and got the torch from the boot. Not that there was much use for it because the moon was full and shining brightly. I padded cautiously up to the farmhouse. I stopped at the edge of the yard. I could hear owls, and no doubt they were watching me as I watched the house. Something was whimpering in the barn but I couldn’t make out what it was. The vinegar scent of burning oak disinfected the air, which stank of rotting flesh, perhaps a sheep somewhere in the trees at the back of the house.
One of the downstairs windows was lit up, and cast a yellow light onto the cobbles of the yard. I moved slowly and quietly forwards. I could see him in the square of the window, as if I had chanced upon a portrait in a secluded part of a gallery. He was crouched over the desk, his chin cupped in both hands. His two index fingers were behind his ear lobes which he pushed absent-mindedly back and forth. He was looking at a notebook in front of him, and once or twice he would take a pencil from the pot, try to write something, and then put it back again. As he did this, he would glance at one of the photographs on the desk, and then at the other, shaking his head as he did so.
I found myself thinking of paintings I knew but I couldn’t quite conjure them up. A Rembrandt, perhaps, a man huddled over a kitchen table...Van Gogh looking at his face in the mirror...and then, without warning, I was taken over by a vision of myself sitting at a table. I wasn’t outside the farmhouse at all, I was inside another room, in another house. In front of me was a plate, with four fat sausages on it, at which I picked with my fork. I heard a great whooshing noise behind me. I looked round just as the fishing rod peeled into my back.
“Eat those sausages,” thundered my father.
I jumped to my feet in shock. “I hate fat sausages,” I cried out.
“They’re just the same as thin ones.”
“In that case, why can’t I have thin ones?” I retorted, and this time the rod came down across the side of my face.
I felt angry but also disappointed. I rushed forward and hit him. He fell back into the armchair, sprawled like a boxer on his stool, waiting for the trainer’s sponge. Blood spurted from his nose and drenched the front of the white shirt that I had ironed for him before going to school.
He stood up from the chair...and I was outside the farmhouse window again. I saw him cross the room, and heard the door open. I crouched so low that I could feel the cool of the ground on my face. He stood in the doorway looking across the yard, sniffed the air several times, and then fumbled with his trouser zip.
“Do not come, gentile, into my good night,” he whispered. A stream of water splashed onto the cobbles with such force that it sprayed sideways across my hands and face. He went back inside and bolted the door.
I ran across the farm yard and back to the car. I remember nothing of the journey home. There was a fine smell in the house as I came through the front door, and Rachel called from the kitchen: “Ready to eat?”
“What you got?” I asked, making my way to the bathroom to wash away the stink of urine.
“Red cabbage.”
“And?”
“Sauté potatoes.”
“And?”
“Bratwurst.”
The next morning I drove to Rosalind Hilton’s, and took some home-made bagels with me. I know how to get on with the natives. She found some smoked sewin and cream cheese, put them on the coffee table between us, and was ready to talk.
“People think that Eliot and Thomas were chalk and cheese. Well, to some extent they’re right. Eliot liked order and discipline around him, Dylan lived in chaos and dirt. Eliot was cool, reserved, the great chiller, you might think, but Dylan was warm, out-going, in public at least.”
“Eliot the Harvard graduate...”
“And Dylan, the failure at grammar school...”
“The banker and the scrounger, the cat lover and the cat hater...”
“Dylan had an absolute craving for sweets. Eliot sneered at them. Pointless self-gratification, he said. That rather sums them up, I think,” said Rosalind tartly.
“Did they have anything in common?”
“Oh, yes, love of the sea for one thing, and molly-coddling mothers, for another.”
“They were both frail children,” I said, as if Rosalind needed an explanation. “And sickly for most of their lives.”
“Isn’t it curious that they both married in secret and to women obsessed with dancing?”
“I understand Dylan and Eliot were rather puritanical about sex...”
“...and neither was very good at it,” interrupted Rosalind.
I wanted to ask how she knew but I was a little taken aback by her frankness. I decided to leave it for later. I could see that Rosalind was impatient to continue.
“Drinking was important to both of them,” she said, “but other things, too. Dylan loved his bed, sucking a beer bottle, eating cake, reading trash novels. Eliot had his detective stories, and was totally obsessed with murders altogether.”
“And politics?”
“Dylan was never political, except when it suited him, but he found Eliot’s right-wing views distasteful. He was very upset when he heard about Eliot’s tirade against the Jews. Eliot had given a lecture somewhere, and talked about America being invaded by foreign races. I knew nothing about Eliot’s anti-semitism until much later, and saw no signs of it myself.
“I’ll say one more thing about Eliot and the Jews: he may have thought a society should be based on blood-kinship, as he put it, but he certainly didn’t put that concept into practice himself – not when his trousers were down, anyway.
“Well, that brings us nicely to sex. My parents, you understand, were communists and free thinkers. They passed to me no hang ups about sex or related matters. From my early years, I was always encouraged to think for myself, and to care little for convention.”
Rosalind paused. I wasn’t clear whether she was having difficulty in recalling events or whether she was looking for courage to continue.
“My first full sexual encounter was with a Baptist student called Mansel, whilst we were on a painting excursion in Snowdonia. It was a chilly experience. Thereafter, there were a number of men, mainly students, or others interested in the arts. We saw ourselves as part of the bohemian rainbow, and this sharing of our bodies was perfectly natural. I want you to know this because I would want no-one to believe that, when I went to London to visit Dylan, I was a sweet and innocent country girl who was cruelly exploited by a rapacious poet. On the contrary. As I remember things, it was I who did the taking to bed, and when I got him there, I found that I was more experienced, or at least adept, in these matters than was he.”
“When was this?”
“Early in 1938. After that, we met once or twice a year, and then quite frequently when he moved to Talsarn.”
“And Eliot? How did that begin?”
“We became good friends on his visits to Tyglyn. I was always in and out of the Faber house. He liked to walk with me along the river, and he would write whilst I sketched. He would always take his binoculars in case we came across an interesting bird. My father was a twitcher too, and Eliot helped him log the kites. They got on quite well, and Eliot loved talking in our front room with Dad.
“They argued a lot about Germany and what was happening in Europe. I remember vividly one occasion in 1940. They had talked all afternoon. They came out of the front room after tea. My father took Eliot to the door. Both looked flustered and over-wrought and shook hands rather stiffly. Eliot walked down the path without looking back. My father shouted after him: ‘Mr Eliot, why do you and Mr Pound sneer at us so?’ It was as if the world had ended. All those church services and eisteddfodau for nothing!
“When Eliot came down the next year, I sensed there was something different about him. He certainly seemed more approachable, less guarded. I was a little frosty after what had happened the previous year, but I found, to my dismay, that I also wanted to ingratiate myself...I think I must have felt our future was in his hands.”
“How was he different?”
“He seemed more inclined to touch me, which was extremely unusual for Eliot. He would take my elbow over a stile, tap me on the shoulder to draw my attention. That definitely hadn’t happened before. One day we went out along the Beech Walk and turned up the hill. It’s quite a steep climb, and when you get there you can see the sea. We were about half way up when I lost my footing and slipped. Eliot put out his arm and caught me round the waist. His hand stayed there until we reached the top. I turned to thank him, and kissed him on the cheek. He held my hands and said: ‘This is our last summer together. They’re selling the estate.’
“The next day he asked me to go to New Quay Fair with him, and Oaten drove us over. We walked around the booths, and I put my arm through his, though he took no interest in me or the booths, and seemed to be searching for something else. It turned out to be the boxing ring. Well, actually it was nothing of the sort, just a patch of grass squared off with rope and fence posts. We stayed there most of the afternoon. Some big bruiser from Bristol was taking on the local farm lads. Eliot was fascinated, he screamed and shouted for all he was worth. The man from Bristol made short work of most of the lads. Except one.
“I felt someone pushing their way through the crowd from the back, and the people making way for him, almost respectfully. He was quite young, stocky like a prop forward, huge hands. And he was black. That really shocked Eliot, I could see.
“He was well known to the locals, for they cheered and cheered when he climbed in the ring. He took off his shirt, and laid it carefully in one corner. He took out a small tin from his pocket and rubbed his body with grease till his chest gleamed like cocoa in candle-light. The man from Bristol was taunting him, I can’t remember what he said, but nowadays we would say it was racist. The young man took no notice, and calmly came to the centre of the ring.
“The referee started the fight and then quickly jumped out of the way. The two men moved around each other cautiously. A few blows were landed, but not many, and then a handbell was rung to end the round. As the young boy turned to go back to his corner, the Bristol man hit him on the side of the head. Well, that made the crowd absolutely livid and for a moment we thought they’d invade the ring and lynch him.
“The second round was pretty bloody, and I can only say that Eliot was engrossed. I doubt if he knew I was beside him, or that half of west Wales were shouting their heads off behind us. It lasted far longer than it should have, because someone forgot to ring the bell, or if they did, no-one heard it. Eventually, the local policeman climbed into the ring and dragged the two men apart.
“As the third round started, someone shouted some comment about the Bristol man’s legs. The crowd burst out laughing. The young boy lost his concentration, and was hit badly. He staggered back across the ring and fell on the grass. The crowd went silent again. Eliot whooped with joy and gave me a hug. He leaned forward and kissed me. You might describe it as passionate.
“The young boy staggered to his feet, and they threw a bucket of cold water over him. He came forward, quite steady and snarling. He threw one punch to the Bristol man’s face, squashing his nose and mouth, and he collapsed. The crowd cheered wildly and some started singing ‘Bread of Heaven’. He was up on eight, and staggered back to the ropes. The young boy moved in, and that was it. The Bristol man pretended to stumble, the boy hesitated and was caught on the side of his face. His legs gave way, and he dropped to the grass. And there was Eliot, leaping to his feet, arms outstretched in joy, suddenly twisting in mid-air as if he were a dog catching a fly. Then he dropped to the ground, and was scrabbling round on his hands and knees, looking for something in the grass. He jumped up with this wonderful smile on his face and held out his upturned hand. It was a blood-smeared tooth, lying there like a beached seal pup. He unscrewed the top of his cane, put the tooth in the top, and screwed it back on again. He took me in his arms, and kissed me again.
“We caught the little bus back to Ciliau, though I felt like making my own way home. The incident with the tooth had upset me. We sat in the front seat and Eliot talked, rather incoherently as if he were drunk, about the time he had spent in Paris. It was early evening when we arrived back at the house. The Fabers were out. Eliot rang the bell in the drawing room and asked Annie to prepare some food. He paced about, still muttering about Paris, and took two or three sizeable whiskies. After we’d eaten, we walked down to the river, and came back up the field to the Beech Walk. By now, we were holding hands. We stopped at the walled garden, and went down the path to his shed. He shuffled his papers about, had another whisky from a bottle that was hidden in a bag of compost, and said something silly about not being able to get a decent bottle of Irish whiskey so the next best thing was to put the scotch in peat.
“I took his hands, pulled him towards me and put his head on my shoulder. I put one hand on the back of his neck and the other around his waist. He went completely limp and folded into me. I stroked the back of his head and he started to moan. ‘Tom,’ I said in my best encouraging voice, ‘please kiss me.’ And he came to life...it was as if I had just pulled the plug on the Hoover dam. There was another passionate kiss, and he started fumbling with the buttons of my cardigan. And then disaster! An uproar in the garden. We could hear someone running down the path. Eliot leapt away from me and sat down at his little desk. I took up a studied pose at the window, looking down across the river. Oaten burst in, and was clearly disappointed to see that it was only Eliot and me in the shed. ‘There’s bloody poachers hiding about,’ he cried and went off down the garden.
“Anyway, it was all shattered by Oaten’s interruption. We walked back up to the house and I wondered how I might ever again pull Eliot back into some semblance of ordinary humanity. I needn’t have worried because he was plotting his own escape. Annie brought us some coffee. Eliot diligently laid out the cups and poured the coffee and milk. He passed the cup to me, and I asked for some sugar. He had some ready on a spoon. He dropped it in the cup and immediately the coffee started to fizz, and scores of little fish popped up on the surface. Eliot was in hysterics. I was annoyed, it seemed such a childish thing to do. He came over, lifted me from the chair, and said: ‘I’ve only ever known dull duty.’
“We embraced, and he whispered: ‘My sweetest Volupine.’ We went upstairs to his room. There wasn’t much in the way of preliminaries, not least because the room was so chilly. Eliot was hesitant at first, and there was a spot of embarrassment over his truss, which he didn’t really want me to see. Anyway, I’ll spare you the details. Sophisticated he was not, but he was certainly lustful. We were at it all night, playing Bola, as he called it. A few weeks later, I realised that I was pregnant.”
“And Eliot was the father?”
“Or Dylan.” She paused, and looked away into the fire. “Dylan came to see me the following week.”
“Did you tell them?”
“Dylan seemed rather taken aback, if not a little shocked. But we went for a long walk along the Aeron and by the time we’d come back, he was more like his usual self, and quite excited at the thought of another son, as he assumed it would be.
“Eliot was different. He seemed pleased at first, but when I told him I couldn’t be sure that he was the father, that it might as easily be Dylan, he was furious. No, not with me, but with Dylan, for some reason. He wasn’t at all rational about it and went off in a rage.”
“And what happened?”
“I stayed good friends with them both. Dylan would drive across to see us once or twice a year. I saw a lot of him when they were in New Quay, at Majoda.”
“And Eliot...?”
“He came less frequently, but wrote quite a lot.”
“And the child...?”
“A boy, born the same week as Aeronwy, but a year older. That was always a problem for Dylan, two birthdays in the same week. I felt sorry for Caitlin, he wasn’t with her when Aeronwy was born, and she assumed he’d been pubbing. This was the time when she realised that Dylan had become two people, as she put it, though she didn’t know the reason. Anyway, he did his best for her. He left here soon after Waldo’s first birthday party, and rushed up to London in my father’s old dressing gown. It was terribly cold and that’s all I could find in the house for him, but he was too late for Aeronwy’s birth.”
“And that was his name? Waldo.”
“Waldo Sweeney Hilton. I asked each of them to choose a name for him, and that’s what they picked.”
“What did he like to be called?”
“Oh, definitely Waldo.”
I wondered if appearance would provide any clues so I asked her who he looked like.
“He has Eliot’s height and build, but it’s Dylan’s nose he’s got.”
“Does he know about them?”
“They were uncles to begin with, but I told him the day that Dylan died, the whole truth.”
“How did he take it?”
“Very badly. I’m sure it’s why he failed the scholarship. He became very introspective. And he really missed Dylan. He didn’t visit very often, but when he did he made such a fuss of Waldo, especially on his birthday. Dylan loved birthdays, and he only once missed one of Waldo’s.
“Mind you, he lost interest when Waldo started growing up. He only liked them when they were babies. By the way, have you noticed there are no proper families in Milk Wood, except Butcher Beynon’s?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“There aren’t any children in Llareggub.”
“Polly Garter’s?”
“That’s my point. There’s only her babies, and Lily Smalls, the teenager. There’s nothing in between. True, there are children in the school playground, but never with their families. It has something to do with the way Dylan was excluded by his own father. Do you and Rachel have any children?”
“No.”
“Never wanted any?”
This was not something I wished to discuss, and it was taking me away from the interview.
“What happened to Waldo?”
“You could try asking him yourself.”
“He lives here?”
“No, at Fern Hill.”
We paused for lunch. I walked around outside, whilst Rosalind prepared the food, and I wondered how such a person could be the mother of someone who eats spiders, and makes presents of puppy tails. I was rather absent-mindedly admiring the cottage, when I noticed a note under the windscreen wiper of my car. I was in no doubt who’d left it there. I went out of the wicker gate onto the road, and pulled the paper from under the wiper. It simply said
Rat’s hair, dogskin, owlheart,
Pigs’ eyes, womanchop.
Stir well and stew the lot.
I went back inside. There were curried turkey sandwiches, and a herb and rabbit pâté which, Rosalind said with pride, Waldo had prepared. I took the sandwiches. We drank from a pitcher of wine that Rosalind had made herself from vine leaves and sage. It was slightly medicinal, like a weak Campari, but it cut cleanly through the rich tastes of the sandwiches. I wanted to know more about Eliot, and asked her to tell me what happened after Dylan’s death.
“Eliot took a lot more interest, but that caused quite a few problems. He wanted to take Waldo out of the secondary modern and pay for him to go to public school. That started a major row. He also objected to Waldo’s not going to church. But on the plus side, he set up a trust fund for him in New York.”
“Eliot was taking his responsibilities seriously?”
“Partly, but he was also buying his way in, and that was fine by me. I wanted Waldo provided for.”
“What did Eliot want in exchange?”
“His Princess Volupine.”
“Did he get her?”
“Yes, he got his princess, his Jewish princess.”
“The typist in ‘The Waste Land’.”
“There was no other way, Martin. I was past the haymaking age, and was no good at sewing farmers’ fly buttons back on, or raising their turn-ups.”
“Did you ever tell Waldo he was Jewish?”
“He found out quite by accident. We were clearing out the house, just after my father had died. There was an old trunk in the small bedroom. We opened it together, Waldo had to lever the lid off with a crow bar. And what did we find sitting on top? A skull cap! And a menorah. I was so angry with them. All that pretence to hide from the Germans...”
I hesitated for a minute, and then plunged straight in. “You know he’s sending me funny letters?” I passed the latest note across for her to read.
“He’s only doing what he’s been told.”
“By you?”
She looked up angrily. “Of course not.” After a moment’s silence, she said: “Waldo’s not well, you know.”
That I did know.
“I’m sorry, I should have explained sooner.” She was twisting the ring on her finger so violently that I could see a small bruise appearing. “He hears voices.”
“Any old voices?” I asked, sounding more flippant than I’d intended.
“Voices from his father’s pen.”
“Which father?”
“Dylan.”
“The voices from Milk Wood?” I asked, this time sounding incredulous.
“Usually Beynon the butcher.”
Beynon the hunter of wild giblets. Sneaking up on corgis with his cleaver, swaggering down Coronation Street with a finger in his mouth, not his own, purveyor of the finest shrew and budgie rissoles...
“Waldo’s always been fascinated by Mr Beynon.”
Fox pâté, cats’ liver, mole surprise and otter pie...
“I hope Waldo’s letters haven’t upset Rachel.”
Heart of owl, eye of mouse, tail of puppy-dog...
“Waldo’s quite harmless really.”
Slice of buttock, cut of thigh, womanchop...
I rushed from the cottage and drove recklessly fast through the narrow lanes. I found our back door open and no sign of Rachel. I searched the outbuildings, the garden and the hut where she sometimes wrote her poetry. Then I remembered that she often went with Mably at this time of day to walk by the river. I ran down the hill, crossed the old bridge and crashed wildly through the trees to the river bank. I followed the path past the walled garden, and as I rounded the corner near the otter pool, I saw Rachel leaning against the wall with Mably lying on the ground beside her. I hugged her until it hurt and she squealed in protest.
“I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I’m fine but the dog isn’t. He won’t move.”
Mably looked panic stricken, the look he always had at the vet’s. “What scared him?”
“We came around the corner and saw a man standing by the hide. Mably rushed up to him barking like he always does. The man touched him on the head and Mably fell to the ground. By the time I got there, the man had disappeared.”
We pulled, shoved and cajoled Mably but eventually we had to pick him up and carry him home. He lay in his basket for the rest of the afternoon, and not even food would entice him out. The vet came and pronounced him fit and well. We had supper, watched television and went to bed. I came down in the morning to make tea, and Mably was dead in his basket.
It was not easy going back to Rosalind Hilton’s, but it was helped by knowing that Rachel would be safe, out all day at Welsh classes. We had buried Mably by the poetry hut, near a spot we knew would be covered in daffodils in the spring. We had stood silently whilst the Aeron rushed past, and then trudged tearfully back to the house. I left Rachel at the bus stop, and drove to Rosalind’s, pondering on how recent events had affected our relationship – it seemed that her son had killed our dog, and perhaps our own well-being was at stake. I felt responsible for what had happened, but I also wanted to see things through to a settled outcome. It wasn’t in my nature to let matters hang in the air, incomplete. And, to be honest, I felt excited at the prospect of unravelling the mystery that was being spun in front of me. I’d been engaged to find a missing shed that was linked to both Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot, but it was giving me the opportunity to investigate, through Rosalind’s story, their lives and works. Sleuth and sociologist were coming together in one project, and that was very satisfying.
Besides, where was the proof that the man Rachel had encountered was Waldo Hilton? I resolved to say nothing at the moment, and I arrived just as Rosalind was making coffee. We sat as usual next to the fire, and I switched the tape to record.
“There was the most awful row one year. I think it was early 1944, and Waldo was just coming up to his second birthday. Eliot was lecturing in Swansea and when he’d finished he came to stay for a few days. I was still quite fond of him then. He used to spend the morning writing, and then after lunch we would catch the bus to New Quay and walk along the beach. We had just returned from one of those walks when I heard a car pull up. I looked out and it was Dylan, jumping out of a taxi.
“I opened the door and went down the path to meet him. I thought it was better that Eliot saw as little as possible of Dylan’s greeting, because he was usually exceptionally affectionate, and often a little lewd. I was carrying Waldo and, thank goodness, that helped to cramp Dylan’s style a little. As we entered the house, Dylan stopped and sniffed the air. ‘Cats,’ he said, ‘the bloody place stinks of cats.’ It wasn’t that he didn’t like cats, they just closed his chest up, as if he were asthmatic. Then he saw Eliot and said: ‘Dr Crippen, I presume?’
“Eliot nodded his head and said: ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Thomas.’
“Dylan hated that kind of affected politeness, and, sure enough, he farted. Loudly. Then he held Waldo up in the air, the way most men seem to want to do with babies, and said: ‘And how’s my little flannel-bottom.’
‘Yours, Mr Thomas?’ said Eliot, reaching out to take Waldo from Dylan.
‘Bugger off.’
‘Fine words from a man who pretends to be a poet.’
‘Pretends, Mr Eliot, pretends?’
‘Such coarseness sits uneasily with responsible fatherhood, Mr Thomas.’
‘You know as much about fatherhood, Mr Eliot, as I know about banking,’ replied Dylan, which was true in a way because Eliot had had no children in his own marriage. By this time, I had prised Waldo away from Dylan and put him down in his cot. It was just as well. Eliot crossed the room, and shoved Dylan out through the door. He tried to close it but Dylan managed to wedge it open with his foot. They were both shouting at each other, the baby had started to cry and I was in tears. I grabbed Eliot and dragged him away from the door. Dylan burst through, and threw a punch that skidded off Eliot’s shoulder. Eliot didn’t respond but stood there smiling down rather condescendingly at Dylan. I managed to get between them and Dylan backed off. Eliot continued to sneer and Dylan said: ‘Don’t play the church warden with me, you trussed-up prig.’
“Now I swear Dylan knew nothing about Eliot’s truss. How could he? I certainly hadn’t told him, any more than I had told Eliot that Dylan rarely wore underpants. It was just a chance remark. Eliot went incandescent, I knew how sensitive he was about the truss, and how wounded he must have felt.
“Eliot left the room and came back carrying his suitcase. ‘You’re welcome to stay, Mr. Thomas, but remember, I shall do everything in my power to keep the boy. Everything.’
“Dylan turned to me: ‘Let the old fart go. It’s time you had a young man singing in your sheets.’
“The rest of the year was fairly uneventful. Eliot sent me a series of letters asking me to make him Waldo’s legal guardian but I refused. He suggested we came to live in London. It was not difficult to say ‘no’ to that. There were more letters from his solicitors but I ignored them, too. And, fair play, he always sent presents down to Waldo, including, of course, lots of practical jokes which were of no use at all to a baby. Still, at least he was thinking about Waldo, and that meant something to me.
“In September, Dylan moved into Majoda bungalow, just outside New Quay. He was happy living there, always boasting about the wonderful views he had of the bay, with a pub just down the road for the evenings.”
“What was Majoda like to live in?”
“The rooms were tiny and the walls were thin. There was nowhere quiet for Dylan to write. So I arranged for Eliot’s shed from Tyglyn Aeron to be taken down and put on the cliff next to the bungalow. That made Dylan very happy though I didn’t dare tell him that Eliot had used it for writing.
“October started badly. Vernon Watkins and Gwen were getting married, and Dylan was to be the best man. He was very excited about it, and asked me to come up to London, and Waldo, of course. The worst of the blitz was over, I’d been away for almost ten years and the thought of going back was too much to resist. We travelled up in a train crowded with troops, but I was never without a seat. The plan was that Dylan would attend the wedding, whilst Waldo and I would go down to Stepney, and maybe find some of our old neighbours there.
“We were on our way to drop me off, with plenty of time to spare for Dylan to get to the church, when Waldo had a seizure. This was the very first sign of something seriously wrong with him. It was the most frightening moment of my life, but thank God we were in London where there were plenty of hospitals. Dylan ordered the driver to take us to St. Mary’s which he thought the nearest, though he was wrong about that. Directions weren’t his strength, and he ignored the driver who said there was one much closer. Anyway, we were at St. Mary’s all afternoon. Waldo settled down, but they wanted to keep him in for observation. I was distraught and Dylan refused to leave me. He had missed the wedding but he could still have gone to the reception. ‘Vernon will understand,’ he said, and we both stayed near the hospital overnight.
“Vernon was devastated, Gwen was furious and all Dylan’s biographers have been beastly about it since. Of course, he was never able to tell Vernon what had really happened because no-one, not even Vernon, knew about me and Waldo, and nor would they ever.
“After Waldo’s seizure, Dylan spend a fortune on doctors. He wanted the best, and remember there wasn’t much of a health service then. When he went to Prague, they told him about a special clinic for children like Waldo. Dylan paid for us to go there for three months. It must have cost a fortune, though it didn’t help very much.
“You can see now why Dylan was always on the cadge. Even after the war, when he was earning quite well, he was always borrowing from his friends. Caitlin could never understand why he had so little money to spare.
“Christmas came and went, Dylan arrived on New Year’s Day looking the worse for wear, and he spent most of the time in the rocker near the Aga, drinking milk and feeding himself and Waldo with the leftover plum pudding. In the evening, we sat in the parlour in front of a roaring fire. I was reading a book and Dylan was bouncing Waldo up and down on his knees. I remember Dylan saying: ‘What’s Christmas without an uncle?’ when a huge piece of coal fell out of the grate and rolled across the hearth onto some newspapers that we’d foolishly left on the carpet. They caught fire instantly. Dylan put Waldo in the cot, and rushed to the kitchen to fetch water. But the pipes were frozen. I started to stamp on the papers as best I could but without making much of an impression. Next thing, Dylan was racing back and forth with armfuls of snow and dumping them on the flames, looking for all the world like someone carrying a baby in swaddling clothes. I believe it was that piece of coal that started Dylan off on A Child’s Christmas.
“Things began to go sour in the New Year, particularly with the shooting. You know the story?”
I nodded. It had been the most sensational event of Dylan’s life. He’d escaped death by inches. There’d been a quarrel in the Black Lion in New Quay with a war-weary special forces commando called William Killick. After a brief exchange of blows, Killick had been thrown out of the pub by Alastair Graham, an old friend of Dylan’s. Graham was extremely well connected, with friends in government and the royal family. He had come to live in New Quay after resigning from the diplomatic service. His bacchanalian house parties were a gay assortment of London friends, so much so that his mansion became known locally as Bugger Hall.
“Graham drove Dylan home to Majoda. We were playing some silly games when the shooting began. Then Killick burst in, and threatened to blow us all up.”
“But no-one was hurt?”
“No. Dylan was on his knees licking Caitlin’s legs pretending to be her spaniel, and the rest of us were on the floor drinking beer out of cereal bowls – it was Dylan’s favourite party game. The bullets went right overhead, thank God.
“Dylan was marvellous. He was the bravest of the lot, and took the gun away from Killick. And then he worked out the cover story for everybody. That’s how Dylan became involved with British intelligence. Alastair was very impressed and arranged for Dylan to meet Ian Fleming.”
“As in James Bond?”
“Yes, though he hadn’t written anything at that point. He was high up in naval intelligence, I believe. Anyway, Dylan played along, it was great fun for him, but he was flattered, too, and he needed the money. He went to lunch at All Souls, with Rouse I think, and that’s where the deal was done, in the rose garden, early 1946.”
“I just can’t see Dylan as a spy.”
“Intelligence was full of writers in those days – it was excellent cover.”
“What did they ask him to do?”
“They used him in the BBC at first, keeping an eye on the lefties. They were worried about a communist ring there. They sent him to Italy in 1947, and then to Prague, just sniffing around the intellectuals, and reporting back, pockets of resistance, underground press, civil liberties, that sort of thing.
“No, he wasn’t strictly on the payroll, just cash in hand for each job and a small retainer. They used Margaret Taylor to channel the money to him. And it was MI6 who paid for the Boat House.”
“And the trip to Iran for the oil company?”
“Now that was rather interesting. One of MI6’s agents in Iran had sent a message claiming he had a list of Soviet spies who had infiltrated British intelligence and the Foreign Office. His difficulty was, of course, that he didn’t know who to trust with this information, so he insisted that they sent out someone known to him, and he suggested Dylan. MI6 knew that the oil company had plans to make a film, so it was just a question of making sure that Dylan was given the job of scriptwriter.”
“But why Dylan?”
“The agent in Iran was Araf Lloyd-Morgan. His father was an engineer from Laugharne, and his mother a local girl working in the accounts department. The company put him through school, he was very bright, and they saw quickly what an asset he would be to them. Araf went to the university in Tehran and then the company sent him to Oxford for a year, and that’s where he met Dylan, and became good friends. But MI6 had spotted Araf’s potential, too, and they recruited him.”
“So Dylan agreed to go and collect Araf’s list?”
“Not at first. He simply refused. His marriage was in tatters, because Caitlin had learnt of his affairs in America. And he didn’t relish the prospect of six weeks in the desert with nobody but oil men for company. But MI6 leaned on him, blackmail really. They had John Davenport intercept the love letters that had been sent to Dylan at his club.”
“I thought Margaret Taylor had done that.”
“Did you ever think how a woman could enter a men’s club and get hold of a member’s letters? No, it was Davenport. So they told Dylan that they’d send one of the love letters each week to Caitlin until he agreed to go to Iran. Of course, he caved in, and he went out to make the film. Araf passed on his list to Dylan to bring home. And that’s where it all went wrong.
“Dylan was supposed to take the list to Harold Nicolson, who would pass it to the Cabinet Secretary. But as soon as Dylan set foot in London, he went on the binge. He ended up in the Gargoyle with the usual cronies. Guy Burgess was there – he and Dylan had been great friends for a long time. He gave Araf’s envelope to Burgess: ‘Give this to Old Nick – save me going into the office tomorrow.’ Dylan was anxious to get back to Laugharne to repair things with Caitlin, and he caught the milk train that night.
“Burgess, of course, opened the envelope, and found his name on the list. Three days later, Araf was killed in a car crash in Tehran, not an accident, Philby’s doing. It gave Burgess enough time to warn the others, and in June he defected to the Soviets, and the others went soon after.”
“It was Dylan’s fault they all got away?”
“Oh yes. And they took everything with them. Nuclear secrets, lists of our agents, defence deployments, the lot.”
“You’re saying that Dylan’s mistake helped the Russians catch up in the arms race?”
“Yes, the final irony. He hated those bombs so much. He was devastated. Didn’t write a line of poetry after that.”
“And no more work for intelligence?”
“Of course not. And in the end, they had to get rid of him. He’d worked out what the Americans were up to in Iran in 1953, and didn’t like it. The CIA intercepted his letters to Bert Trick. The last straw was his suing Time magazine. They couldn’t risk anything coming out. So the Agency leaned on the hospital.”
“You mean..?”
“A winking injection too far.”
“That’s unbelievable!”
“It was the height of the Cold War. No chances were taken.”
I left Rosalind’s, drove home the back way, and called in to see O’Malley. The pub was packed and I could smell why. There were plates of roulade on the tables, most likely spinach or chard, chopped garlic sausages, and slices of fried aubergine. O’Malley came across, with a Brains in one hand, and a small plate of sausages and roulade in the other. “You know something,” I said to him as I picked up the beer, “when my mother was alive, we always had thin sausages.”
She and my father ran an oil and hardware business. We had a shop on the main street of the village, and a green Commer van that toured the farms and council estates. Selling paraffin had been in the family for three generations. The business declined under my father’s stewardship and eventually he was declared a bankrupt. This was largely because of his liking for long holidays in expensive hotels (where he called himself Wing Commander, though he had never been near a plane in his life), and by his thirst for whisky and late nights in the back room of the Wheatsheaf.
I was always eager to help on the Commer on Saturdays. Up at six, I would lay two fires and take tea to my parents in the middle bedroom, where it usually remained undrunk. Then I’d run to the yard where we kept the Commer and the stores. My job was to open up the old stable, and fill and cork two hundred bottles with parazone ready for the coming week.
I’d usually be finishing just as Sid the driver arrived, and we’d load the day’s supply of parazone into the Commer on racks behind the passenger seat. Sid would drive us down to the shop. I’d grab some breakfast, and Sid would collect the leather money bag from my mother, who had by this time opened up the shop and taken bacon and eggs to my father upstairs.
We would finish around early evening, and the routine at the end of the day was just as well established. Sid would park on the main road outside the shop, and take the day’s money into my parents. My mother and I would count it on the kitchen table, and it was my father’s job to go out to the Commer and take a note of the paraffin gauges, and check inside to see what stock had been sold. The routine was changed one Saturday evening, and it was my mother who was killed, not my father as it should have been.
We were back much later than usual. A thick winter’s fog was swirling in off the estuary and we had to inch along the lanes. We came in and found my father sitting in front of the wireless. He was filling in the scores on his football coupon, with a half a bottle of whisky on the table beside him. He refused to go out to the van until the results were over. Sid was anxious to get home, and he couldn’t take the Commer to the yard until the gauges and stock had been checked. My mother said she would do the checking and that my father would move the van later.
She found a torch, pencil and paper, and went outside. I put the kettle on, went to the bathroom to pee, and chatted to my brother who was splashing about in the bath. I walked through to the front of the house, where I had my bedroom, overlooking the main street. I could only just make out the shape of the Commer, but I could see the fuzzy light from my mother’s torch as she checked the gauges. Next thing, the headlights of a car came up behind her. I heard the screech of brakes, like fingers down a blackboard, and then a tremendous bang. The headlights went out, steam came gushing through the fog, and the torch come spinning up towards me.
I ran downstairs. My father was still in the kitchen. I screamed at him and ran out into the fog. I didn’t think at all about what I’d find, but wondered what we would do at Christmas.
She was squashed flat against the paraffin tank, her face turned sideways, looking up at the house as if she had tried in that final second to ask for my help. I watched the blood dripping from her mouth, and heard someone retching in the gutter behind me. Neighbours appeared, splashing frantically through the leaking paraffin, and took me away inside.
“Christmas,” I said to O’Malley “was a disaster. He took us to a hotel in Cornwall but we ran away with the train tickets and went home. Not bad for two kids in short trousers.”
“And fat sausages for ever more?” O’Malley really knew how to put two and two together.
When I arrived home, the house was silent and gloomy. Rachel was in the garden room. I could see she’d been crying. I sat down beside her, and she handed me the Cambrian News.
“Page eight,” she said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.
At the top of the In Memoriam column was a picture of a black and white collie. The name underneath was Mably, with the words: Caught in a spinney of murdering herbs.
“Who could do such a horrible thing?” Rachel asked.
“It’s Milk Wood, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
“Beynon the butcher?”
“No, Pugh the poisoner.”
The day started with slaughter.
I try to let our hens have as much daylight as possible so that they give us lots of eggs in return. I get up about 7-30, and whilst the tea is brewing, I put on my gumboots and walk down to the poultry sheds in my dressing gown and night-shirt. I scoop feed from the bins, and spend a very happy five minutes whilst the ducks, hens and geese scrabble around me fighting for food. And then back for the tea, and upstairs to bed for another hour or so, depending on the weather and the time of year.
I usually let the small birds out first so that they have time for a fair share before their big sisters come running in with their aggressive shrieks and needle-sharp beaks. I opened up the Seebrights, and they came tumbling out of their pop-hole like wild flurries of snow. I unlatched the door to let out the Welsummer bantams but, surprisingly, they didn’t emerge. I knelt down and peered into the coop. The five hens lay headless on blood-spattered straw and the young cockerel had wedged himself up near the roof. No fox could have entered the coop so I guessed a stoat had found a small hole in the wire. Not a rat, because rats just chew away at the neck and the eyes, leaving most of the head intact. Stoats and their various relatives, on the other hand, eat the whole head and neck, leaving behind a perfectly formed headless corpse.
No amount of rational argument would persuade us to eat poultry that had been killed by a predator, so I gathered up the hens and put them in a plastic bag, ready for the rubbish collection. I prised the cockerel away from the roof of the coop, and when I put him on the floor I noticed his leg was broken. I would have to kill him.
I went back to the house, poured the tea, and went upstairs where Rachel was already sitting up in bed reading. I told her about the Welsummers and she simply said “Waldo.” I said I didn’t think so, and explained how the head had been cleanly taken off. No human could do that, I said, but I immediately remembered an incident in a pub in Oxford when I’d seen a student bite off the head of a pigeon as cleanly as any stoat would have done.
Then the phone rang. It was Rosalind Hilton. “I’m coming round to see you,” she announced, “it’s extremely important.”
I was in the shower when she arrived. I heard the bell ring, and then the sound of Rachel and Rosalind talking excitedly together. When I came out, they were in the garden room. Rosalind was sitting on the settee with a bulging plastic bag at her feet, and Rachel was laying out a small breakfast of pain chocolat, fruit, and coffee. They were discussing writing and self-discipline, and Rachel was describing the poetry workshop she went to each week.
“Dylan would have found a workshop useful,” said Rosalind. “All he had was Vernon.” She put down her cup and reached into the plastic bag. She took out a letter and put it on the table.
Rachel recognised the small, cramped handwriting immediately. “It’s Dylan,” she exclaimed.
“I was lying in bed last night, going through the Collected Letters. It made me very angry. It’s so unbalanced, just a mere handful of the letters he’d written to women.”
“But they were the important women in Dylan’s life,” I replied, realising too late that that was not the most diplomatic thing to have said. “Caitlin, Edith Sitwell...”
“I’ve decided to put the matter right,” interrupted Rosalind. “This bag holds all of Dylan’s letters to me, plus one or two to Waldo. There’s also about twenty poems which have never been published, love poems, sent to me, and a few children’s stories written for Waldo, though I must say they are a little imperfect and mostly improvised with Waldo on his knee. How you sort them out,” she said, looking at Rachel, “is entirely up to you.”
“Me?” said Rachel, rather lamely.
“I’d like you to prepare Dylan’s letters, and the poems, for publication, as one collection. You’re a good poet, you know his work, and I believe you are honest – most Quakers are. And you’re Jewish, I like that.”
“And your role? asked Rachel.
“You prepare the collection, and we’ll work on an introduction together. I can’t pay you anything, but you and Waldo can share the royalties.”
“And the letters? What’s to happen to them?”
“The National Library can have them.”
“And time scale?” asked Rachel.
“One that’s suitably speedy for an impatient octogenarian who may pop her clogs at any time.”
“But why now, after all these years?”
“You’re the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Besides...” Rosalind paused and looked across at me “...the conversations with Martin have stirred up too many memories. I need to put a few ghosts firmly in their place.”
Rosalind’s reply was plausible but I wasn’t convinced. I felt that we were being used for some purpose that was being kept from us. Perhaps this was an unworthy thought, but I felt uneasy and certainly not as pleased as Rachel clearly was.
“Here’s one I thought you would be particularly interested in,” continued Rosalind. “From Dylan’s first American trip.”
Rachel took the letter, read it with obvious enjoyment, and passed it to me.
Hotel Earle
Washington Square
New York
16th May 1950
Oh Rosalind,
I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am, & sick like an old dog with mange, sick of this country, sick of trains, sick of planes and Spillanes, sick of poems, sick of not hearing from you, sick in my shoes when I hear my voice in the audit-orium (sic), because my lines are an abacus, and Brinnin counts the money. Did you get the last cheque from Detroit, an awful city where they make motor cars? Did Waldo get the postcard from Seattle? I loved San Francisco! I ran guiltless from the readings to a pub on the water-front called Leprecohens, run by a Jew from Dublin, & read Yeats to fish-oiled sailors who told me stories about Al Catraz. The sea is awash with sardine fleets, and the hills with whizzing cable cars. There is so much to eat, & more to see, in a wonderful clear sunlight, all hills and bridges, slipping down to a bold, blue, coldblew boat-bobbing sea.I’ve seen lobsters bigger than cats, & crabs the size of space ships. Cockles are clams & soups are chowders, and women wear pads in their shoulders. I’ve sucked Baby Ruths and squeezed Tootsie Rolls but I miss Daddie’s sexy brown bottles. But the American dream is a nightmare except that the people are not sleeping and will never have the relief of waking up. I have seen men without shoes, beggars without bowls, and Indians with not a bow and arrow between them. It’s a moonless, deathfounded night in the back streets, where the eternal poor are spat upon and robbed. Yet I have travelled gloriously: I’ve met Eisenhower, kissed Ella, played cards with the Duke & heard a scratchy recording of Victoria Spivey, which made my flesh creep and my hair uncurl. I have been to Harlem and back, & wondered why I’ve never seen Tiger Bay.
Have I mentioned Merle before? Her cousin is a paediatrician, & runs a clinic that could help Waldo. I’m having cocktails with him tomorrow. I will ask Brinnin to put some of my money into an American bank because hospitals here run out of patience if their patients run out of sense. I was stopped in the Bronx last night by a boy no older than Waldo. ‘Gimme a dollar,’ he said, ‘or I scream you to shitsville.’ I told him I was an English poet. ‘What’s so special ‘bout poetry,’ he rasped, ‘just another way of making you poor, right?’ I blessed the quality of American education, gave him my autograph and walked on. What a strange word autograph is! The rest of the world is content with a signature.
Merle took me to her Quaker Meeting last Sunday, & I’ve not been the same since. (Did you know that Caitlin’s mother was a lesbian Quaker? Or was she a Quaker lesbian?) We sat down together in a little circle of comfy armchairs, no priests or creed or mumbo-jumbo, & not a cross or crucifix in sight. The silence seemed eternal. Then an old lady started to talk about peace and the coming war. More silence which I drank and drowned in all at once. Then a very intense Negro stood up and spoke for a few minutes about the fate of the Palestinians. As he sat down, he said: ‘A mill can’t work on the water that has gone’. And that’s exactly how I’d been feeling about my writing! How did he know? We all shook hands on the hour, & went off for coffee and gooey cakes in the room next door. They called each other Friend & so they were. If I hadn’t had a hangover, I would have been inspired. I was more content than the bottom of a bottle of Buckley’s. Do they believe in God? Who knows? Some do, others don’t. But they all believe “there’s that of God in everyone”, even in me! There’s hope yet. When I return, I shall have a few more drinks in The Fox and Penn, and ask you how it’s possible for a Jew to become a Quaker. Merle did.
I’m bringing a space suit for Waldo, and a hermaphrodite monkey that climbs up a string.
Love, Dylan.
PS. Did Tommy Herbert get the Negro picture magazines?
As I finished reading, Rosalind said: “I’m sure that you’ll see this as a labour of love, but you will have to deal with Waldo. He may not approve of the collection, or of you. He’s a very private person.”
“Have you discussed it with him?”
“No, but I shall inform him this evening.” Rosalind stretched out her hand across the coffee table. “Well, Friend, do we have a deal?”
“Let’s shake on it,” replied Rachel.
I was dispatched to Lampeter to photocopy the papers. It was lunch time when I returned, so we sat outside overlooking the river and ate granary rolls and smoked venison. “I’ve been thinking about the revelatory power of anomaly,” I said between mouthfuls.
“Meaning?”
“Rosalind knew you were a Quaker.”
“So?”
“But how did she know? I’ve never mentioned it.”
“Why don’t you go and kill that Welsummer. We’ll have it for dinner one day.”
I did as I was told. The cock was still cowering in the coop. I picked him up and carried him outside so that the other poultry didn’t see the dirty deed. I held his body under my right arm, gripped his neck with my left hand and twisted till I heard the snap of his neck. I tied some string around his legs and hung him upside down on a nail, and started plucking. It’s easy and therapeutic work when the flesh is warm. When I’d finished, I scooped up the feathers and put them in the rubbish bag with the headless hens. I went inside and laid the bird on the kitchen counter.
I pierced the skin, and cut along the back of the neck, right up to the head. Rachel looked up from Dylan’s letters and asked: “Can you do that somewhere else, please?”
“Why did she just suddenly turn up and ask you to work on the papers?”
“I was deeply honoured...”
“But you’re a complete stranger. She only met you this morning, but she entrusts her love letters to you.” I cut the neckbone with the kitchen secateurs, and pulled off the head and the loose blood vessels, just as the stoat would have done using its teeth. Out came the neckbone. I put my hand inside, loosened the innards and pulled out the gullet.
“She knows my poetry, and she’s obviously taken with you...”
“It doesn’t make sense.” I turned the bird around, cut round the vent, slipped in my hand and pulled gently on the luke-warm intestines until they slithered out across the counter.
“You’re too suspicious.”
“There’s something strange about it.” I searched inside for the liver and heart and set them aside for stock. Finally, I pulled out the crop.
“I like her and I trust her.”
“I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for.” I made a small cut above the feet, snapped the legs down against the edge of the counter, and pulled out the tendons.
“I’ll never get another opportunity like this.”
“You could get completely caught up in it, spoil your own writing.”
“I’ll cope.”
There was no more to be said. I tied up the legs and wings, and pulled the thread tightly across the parson’s nose.
I had arranged with Rosalind to have one last interview with her. When I arrived I asked her about Waldo and the letters that she’d given to Rachel. She had told him, and he seemed to have taken the news rather badly. He had tried to persuade her to change her mind. Some of the letters, he had argued, were rightly his, and he did not wish them to be published. It had been left that Rosalind would consider removing these letters but she wanted to discuss the matter with Rachel.
We sat down in front of the fire as usual. “I want to talk about Dylan and his father, because only then will you understand Waldo.”
D. J. Thomas, I remembered, was a school teacher for most of his life, contemptuous of his colleagues and pupils and disappointed about not getting a professorship at the university. He had wished to be a poet but in this, too, he was unsuccessful. Dylan bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to DJ, who was taller, and whose features were both more regular and angular.
“History repeats itself, first Dylan and then Waldo.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, and tried to interrupt but she ploughed on.
“As with the father, so with the son.” This was irritating me, but I held my tongue and listened patiently. “When something out-of-the-ordinary happens the first time, we might find it unbelievable. But the second time it happens, it doesn’t become more unbelievable at all. On the contrary, we accept it more easily.”
“What’s this to do with DJ?”
“He wasn’t Dylan’s father.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and wished immediately I hadn’t.
“That’s precisely my point. If the same kind of event were to happen a second time, as it did with Waldo, then it becomes more believable.”
“Who was Dylan’s father, then?” I asked without conviction because I felt no interviewer now, but straight man to Rosalind’s funny guy.
“Lord Cut-Glass.”
“A Swansea watch-maker?” I asked facetiously.
Rosalind looked at me disapprovingly, as if it were sinful to mock the voices of Milk Wood.
“Lord Howard de Walden,” she replied.
I was not as really surprised at this as I might have been. After all, there had long been rumours that de Walden was Dylan’s real father. He had supported him with money and allowed him to stay at his house in New Quay, and much more besides.
“You see,” said Rosalind, interrupting my train of thought, “if you just see him as an aristocrat, then you can’t imagine him as Dylan’s father. How on earth, you would wonder, did an English aristocrat come to meet Florence Thomas, an unprepossessing Swansea woman married to a school-teacher?”
“That did cross my mind.”
“Howard de Walden was a writer, using the family name of Scott-Ellis. It’s from him that Dylan inherited his own talent.”
And then the penny dropped. Scott-Ellis had been a leading figure in the so-called Celtic revival, just before the First World War, mainly writing operettas. “Did Dylan ever find out about him?”
Rosalind ignored my question but I guessed she would eventually come round to it. “Howard de Walden was a swordsman and hunter, and especially interested in falconry. He liked to invent little tricks for his hawks. His favourite was the German Helmet Call Off. It had started as a prank at a small party he gave towards the end of the war. He invited Dylan to give a reading, and I went with him. No, I left Waldo with my mother.
“To be honest, it was terribly boring. We knew nobody there, which was just as well, I suppose. And Dylan was absolutely furious. The guests behaved rather badly and chatted all the way through his reading.
“When Dylan had finished, one of de Walden’s daughters read some Wilfred Owen. She went on a bit too long, and the party were even more restless. De Walden sensed the mood needed changing and announced that he’d fly some peregrines. There was loud applause. I think people were just bursting with energy after the dreary war years, and poetry wasn’t what they wanted. We all went outside except Dylan, who sulked in the Library, drank champagne and ate American chocolate.
“We trooped down to the Hawk House on the lower lawn. De Walden instructed one of the falconers to send the peregrines up. One of the more drunken guests had come out wearing an old German army helmet, the sort with the spike on top. I think it was part of de Walden’s military collection in the Great Gallery. De Walden took it from him, and ordered a servant to the kitchen for a cut of sirloin which he then impaled on the spike. He sent the peregrine away, put on the helmet and called the bird back. It came swooping down at tremendous speed. I was absolutely terrified, and some of the women were screaming. I didn’t know if de Walden was simply brave or too drunk to notice the danger. Anyway, it turned out fine, and the peregrine took the meat cleanly off the spike.
“Two years later, the autumn of 1946, de Walden was at home. He was expecting friends to call the next morning to buy some young peregrines. There was one that he wasn’t sure about, worried it was still a little hood-shy. At the inquest, the butler said that de Walden had decided to go outside and take a last look at the young bird. It was around four in the afternoon and the light was fading. He went out on his own so nobody knows what really happened. Perhaps it was the bad light or an inexperienced bird. Who knows?
“When de Walden hadn’t come back to dress for dinner, the butler went out to search for him. He told the inquest that he found de Walden on the ground, and the peregrine beside him, both dead. The coroner deduced he’d been trying the German Helmet Call Off, that the bird had mis-judged it badly and collided with de Walden’s head. Its talons had ripped away the side of his face, and the force of the impact had broken his neck. Since then, of course, that particular call off has been banned.”
“And Dylan, when did he know about Florence and de Walden?”
“January,1947. He arrived here one day without warning. He was carrying his little doctor’s bag, in which he kept the odd clean sock and change of shirt, not much else. When we went upstairs that night, I had to lend him one of my father’s old nightshirts – Dylan would never come to bed naked. Anyway, the bag was mostly full of letters. He said he’d been away, had returned to Caitlin at Oxford, there’d been a huge row and he’d walked out, heaping all the letters that had come for him into the bag.
“We went for a long walk along the Aeron, had lunch at the Red Lion in Talsarn and then walked up to the Halt to catch the train home. Sixpence in third class, as I remember. Dylan spent the rest of the afternoon fast asleep upstairs. He came down about five, played with Waldo for a while, fetched a flagon of beer and then emptied his letters on the table. While I cooked dinner, he opened and sorted them into rather untidy piles. I was just about to serve up when I heard a great whoop. I ran into the front room. Dylan was waving a cheque in the air, and shouting ‘Bugger me for a saucepan.’
“It was a letter from Howard de Walden’s solicitors. Dylan had been named as a beneficiary in de Walden’s Will. There was a cheque for £5,000, as well as a sealed envelope which de Walden had instructed his solicitors to send to Dylan along with the legacy. The envelope simply read: ‘To Dylan, with affection, Lord Cut-Glass.’
“He opened the envelope tentatively, as if he expected to be taken aback. And he was. The letter was six-pages long, closely typed. He skipped through it and dropped the pages on the table. ‘Sweet Lucretia,’ he whispered, ‘the fowl hears the falcon’s bells.’
“We sat in silence whilst he read through the letter again, this time carefully. He poured another beer, picked up the letter, sniffed at it, held it up to the light, rustled it against his good ear and said: ‘I’m not a Welsh pervert after all.’
“When I came down from putting Waldo to bed, Dylan handed me the cheque and said ‘Buy a farm for him.’ And that’s what I did, I bought Fern Hill. I think Dylan wanted Waldo to be a real boy, climbing trees, chasing squirrels, that sort of thing.
“Dylan was quiet for most of the evening but more like himself when it was time to go to bed. He clowned around a bit, affecting an even sharper cut-glass accent than he already had: ‘Dylan Thomas Esquire, the only son and heir of Lord Howard de Walden,’ he said, lifting up his night-shirt, ‘at your service ma’am.’
“I’d say he was bewildered more than shocked but it didn’t last. That’s the thing about Dylan, the outer world didn’t touch him for long and he was soon his old self. In fact, I saw him scribbling some verses, the first for more than two years. ‘Some lines for my new pater, and his birds’, he said. That was the start of ‘Over Sir John’s hill’ but he soon lost interest. The next year he wrote ‘Me and My Bike’.”
“Meaning?”
Rosalind gave me a withering look. “It’s an operetta,” she said, and I felt the cold wind of exasperation on my face. “Don’t you see?”
I nodded.
“Like father, like sunbeam. The fuse was blue not green, and Dylan flowered thereafter.”
“Did he tell Caitlin?”
“Yes, but she didn’t believe him. She thought it was one of his stories again, and he couldn’t show her the letter without explaining where the money had gone. Anyway, she loathed de Walden, something one of his ancestors had done in Ireland.”
“Did he say anything to DJ and his mam?”
“Of course not. What was the point?”
“Did it change his relationship with DJ?”
“They became much closer. Not so much father and son but good friends. They did more together, doing the crossword... the attachment grew but I had the feeling that Dylan felt freer, not of DJ and the family, but free of his Welsh baggage, if you like.”
“But he settled in Laugharne.”
“That was part of it. Once he felt free of being Welsh, he felt comfortable about settling in Wales, and not being brought down by the bits he despised. The letter helped him understand why he felt such an outsider in Wales, he stopped feeling guilty about it. It also made him more detached, turned him into an observer, and that really helped Under Milk Wood to develop, and the later poetry, too.”
I wanted to move on. “Can we talk about Dylan’s mother?”
“He spoke little about Florence.” Rosalind paused as though she were making a judgement about the wisdom of what she was about to say. “Children usually have a very narrow view of their parents, so when a surprise comes along it affects the way they see the world generally, not just the parent. And I think that’s what happened to Dylan. The Cut-Glass letter put Florence in a whole new light, and that made Dylan see his Welsh world differently. The Welsh weren’t perverts anymore but eccentrics, full of colour and light, a rich people behind the grey conformities, individualists and nonconformists in the real sense. That’s why there are so many wonderful characters in Milk Wood. I don’t think Dylan would have divined them without the impact of de Walden’s revelations about Florence. And Caitlin’s abortion, of course.”
Rosalind had a knack off going off on a tangent to her main story, and I felt she enjoyed being tantalising. I decided to stay focused and come back to Caitlin’s abortion later.
“Did de Walden say how the affair began?”
“I think ‘affair’ is wrong, it was more a brief fling.”
“How did they meet?”
“In Swansea, in 1912.”
“But how?”
“You see, you’re thinking de Walden again. Don’t think horse-breeding, falcon-flying aristocrat. Think Scott-Ellis, think Welsh-speaking song writer and minor poet. Think Scott-Ellis and you think of someone who loved Welsh culture and the language as much as Florence’s cantankerous DJ despised them.”
“Think Florence....”
“And you think of someone who was warm and generous, who loved talking and company, unlike DJ who never invited anyone into the house in all the time they were there. They lived separate lives. He had his books and a pint or two every night. She had the kitchen, her friends from chapel and the nights at the Grand, where her gaiety was given full rein. He was bookish and intellectual, but Florence was shrewd and intelligent, and people often made the mistake of under-estimating her, sometimes to their cost.
“Florence was born and brought up in Swansea, she was an urban child, and far more cosmopolitan than DJ. She knew more about the real world. He knew nothing much of modern times save what he learnt from Lawrence and Hemingway. She was inquisitive and searching, and knew about the great capital cities. She’d never visited them, of course, but her father was a railwayman who had worked his way up to Inspector. He’d been all over, including the Orient Express, and his stories filled her mind with the excitement of travel and the wonder of life outside Wales.”
“So tell me how they met.”
“Howard de Walden – Scott-Ellis – went to Swansea in 1912 to collaborate with Dr Vaughan Thomas, setting traditional Welsh poems to music. Vaughan Thomas and DJ were good friends, as were their sons later, and that was how Florence met de Walden. There were tea parties at the Vaughan Thomases, and outings to the beach when the weather permitted. All this is in the Cut-Glass letter, by the way. In 1914, just after Christmas, de Walden came back to Swansea to stage a minor opera at the Grand, and there met Florence again. The Grand was her abiding passion, much looked down upon by DJ who could never understand why a theatre was necessary when you could read Shakespeare from a book and recite it aloud, if needs be.
“Florence was one of the volunteers who helped out back stage. She’d been a seamstress before she met DJ, so she helped in making up the costumes.”
“Did she act?”
“I think she’d have liked to but that would have brought a sharp word from the deacons.”
“Dylan was a great play-actor...”
“He had a wonderful sense of theatre, and it was from Florence that it came. His acting ability came from her, too, and most of his voice power. Even in old age, she had a rich, wonderful voice.”
“So the Grand was the opportunity, and perhaps the place,” I said, “but what was the motive?”
“By which you mean?”
“Why did they fall for each other?”
“We can only guess, the Cut-Glass letter tells us nothing on that score. De Walden and Florence were much younger than DJ, of course, who was entering middle-age. In fact, he’d been middle-aged most of his life, bald at twenty-six, sitting down to meals in his hat, and even going to bed in it. De Walden, on the other hand, was not only young but well-travelled. He’d been on a late-Victorian version of the Grand Tour and could regale Florence about Florence, and all the other cities that she had heard about from her father. And they could do all this in Welsh, which DJ had become more and more reluctant to use.
“Then there’s the question of sex. Both DJ and Florence had enlightened views on that. When they married, she was already pregnant, but the baby was lost soon after. Then Nancy was born but it was another eight years before Dylan came along. Was there something amiss in the marriage bed? Was Florence desperate for another baby? Who can tell?
“It was often said that DJ had married below himself, and I’m sure Florence thought so at times. Catching de Walden must have been a great confidence-booster. It was also a way of thumbing her nose at DJ for his insufferable superiority. He may have thought she was only good for warming his slippers, but she now knew she could get on with the toffs, and even fall into bed with one.
“I suspect she found a kindred soul in de Walden who didn’t despise her gaiety and simple love of life in the way that DJ did. I think she wanted affection, she wanted respect and, of course, a more sociable life than DJ could offer. She only really came into her own after DJ and Dylan had both died. She blossomed, showing the tourists around Laugharne, being Dylan’s Mam. She loved meeting people, telling the stories about Dylan, making fun of the Americans, showing where the grave was, because that was all the Japanese wanted to see...poor Flo, she lost her husband, son and daughter all within the space of eleven months.”
“But she was chapel. Would she really have allowed herself to fall for de Walden?”
“The Welsh weren’t so prim and proper, you know. That’s what made Carodoc Evans so angry, the hypocrisy, the chapel elders, Bible in one hand, the key to Rosie Probert’s bedroom in the other, and heading for the backroom of the pub on Sunday nights.”
“But a Lord and a schoolmaster’s wife? Chirk Castle and number 5, Cwmdonkin Drive?”
“Since when has a contumescent man enquired which school one has been to? Did Eliot worry about screwing a Jew? Did he make his excuses and leave?”
“But...” I stumbled, shaken by the power and frankness of this old woman’s language.
“No buts. You know all this. Weren’t you the one who wrote a thesis on the sexual behaviour of the British aristocracy? And what did you find?”
She was right, but I was rigid with shock. How did she know? I’d written that thesis in 1968, in between times, whilst I helped organise the Vietnam war demonstrations at the London School of Economics. How could she possibly have found out? And why had she bothered? Waldo’s puppy tails were nothing to this.
“Anyway, she let de Walden know that she was pregnant but that she wanted to hear nothing more from him whatsoever, and certainly never to see him again. DJ apparently assumed the baby was his, and perhaps it was. Who knows? But de Walden did write once, just to say that he had written an opera, that it was called Dylan, Son of the Wave, and might the opera be dedicated to the child, if it were a boy, as a token of de Walden’ appreciation of the friendship and hospitality he had received in Swansea? The letter was addressed to both DJ and Florence, and written, I imagine, in the most circumspect terms. Florence wrote back on behalf of DJ and herself. Her husband, she said, had no views on the matter of a name, but she herself would be delighted, if it were a boy, to call him Dylan.”
Rosalind stopped, and went to the kitchen to make some tea. I sat in a rather sombre mood by the fire, still puzzled by her reference to my thesis. She was quite right, of course. There had been a considerable weakening in the economic position of the aristocracy in Victorian times. They had compensated by marrying their children into the new wealth of industry and finance. Partly as a result, social conventions became much less exacting. Peers and their sons were permanent fixtures at theatre doors, and they were marrying singers and actresses by the score. What happened between de Walden and Florence at the Grand Theatre, I mused, was not an extraordinary event, but an insignificant moment in a process of wider social change.
I heard the sound of someone sobbing in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It sounded like the crying of a young child in a hospital ward late at night. Not the tears of pain or neglect, but loneliness.
Rosalind came back into the room carrying a tray with tea and some food. “Imitation sausage rolls,” she said, putting the tray on the table between us. “Dylan came unexpectedly one day, and I had nothing to give him. So I invented these. Not real sausage because you couldn’t get that in the war. Just cold haricot beans, put through the mincer with a bit of cold meat, a rasher of bacon, lots of pepper and sage, some herbs, and then well pounded.”
I thought of Mr Beynon and Mr Pugh.
Rosalind passed the plate across. “I hope you like them, Martin.”
I looked at the plate. There were two rows of thin sausages, not sausage rolls at all, because they had no pastry. “You made them the right size for me.”
“Go ahead, you must be hungry.”
“No, please, after you. I’ll have some tea first.”
She took a sausage from the row nearest to her, and put the plate back on the table so that the full row was closest to me. “Now, where were we?”
“How did you find out about my thesis?” I had meant to ask why had she gone to so much trouble but she understood what I was really after.
“You think I’d have these talks with you without first doing my homework?”
“But it’s from such a long time ago.”
“It’s all on the Net.” She let the pause tease me. “Don’t look so surprised. This old lady knows how to surf.”
I heard the creak of a bed. I wondered if it would be polite to ask who was upstairs.
“You still haven’t had a sausage.”
“In a minute.”
“There’s some sorrel in them and one or two things from Fern Hill.” She took another sausage from her side of the plate. She fixed her gaze on me, willing me, or so I felt, to take one. “All that trouble I took to make them.”
I could hear crying again from upstairs. Either Rosalind heard nothing or she was determined to ignore it and pretend everything was normal. She stood up, and went to the kitchen to re-fill the tea-pot. I snatched up a sausage from my side of the plate, and put it in my jacket pocket. She came back into the room with the fresh tea. “That was lovely,” I said, smacking my lips, “best sausage I’ve had since O’Malley’s.”
“Let’s get back to Under Milk Wood.”
This is Milk Wood, I thought.
“You see, it hasn’t got much of a plot, it depends totally on character revelation, and Dylan didn’t see the characters until he’d seen the identical ambiguities of his own and Waldo’s conception. And that’s precisely where the play comes unstuck. It’s hopelessly unbalanced...”
“Too much sex...”
“No, that’s what they all get wrong. Dylan was obsessed with paternity.”
I heard the bed creak again, followed by the sound of someone shuffling across the floor.
“You may not have realised...” pausing as if telling me to brace myself for some startling information, “...but Milk Wood contains six menage à trois, numerous fatherless babies, three loose women and even more looser men, all neatly tied symbolically together in Mr Waldo’s many paternity summonses.”
“And Dylan saw himself as both Mr Waldo senior and little Waldo his son?”
“Yes, the bastard who begot another.”
“And Lord Cut-Glass, whose letter made the genius flower?”
“The time lord, tending his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of de Walden’s life. The clues are there if you want to find them.”
I heard someone upstairs quietly clearing their throat.
“And DJ’s in there too, the tidy, anal, bullying personality, the obsession with cleanliness, the refusal to allow visitors into the house...”
“Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.” I said confidently. I decided it was time to explore another path: “You mentioned Caitlin’s abortion earlier.”
“Dylan had great trouble with Under Milk Wood. The news about Florence and de Walden started the ideas flowing, but it only really fell into place after Caitlin’s abortion in 1951. Beynon the butcher was really Beynon the abortionist, that was the name of the doctor who did it. And that’s how Caitlin described it, like being in a butcher’s shop. The foetus was six-months, a perfectly formed baby. The doctor had to cut it up to get it out, pulling the baby out in chunks, Mr Beynon’s chops, bits of leg and arm everywhere. The awful thing was Caitlin only had it done so that she could go with Dylan to America.”
“It’s a bit shocking, killing a six-month foetus like that.”
“At least Milk Wood was born of it even if the baby wasn’t.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. This time, Rosalind heard them. “Don’t worry, it’s only Waldo. He’s been rather poorly, since I told him about Rachel doing Dylan’s letters.”
I imagined him quiet on the stairs, crouching low to catch the conversation, like a small child listening to the grown-ups talking late at night. The latch of the stairwell door clicked open. Rosalind looked across and said: “Come in Waldo, it’s only Mr Pritchard.”
I looked apprehensively across the room. Waldo was standing at the foot of the stairs, hunched up inside a voluminous dark blue night-shirt. He seemed to have shrivelled, and shrunk so small that he wasn’t the man I had seen at Fern Hill. I remembered his dark, wavy hair that night when I had watched him at his desk, but now it was greasy and matted, and stuck out like spikes from his head. His white face was puffed up in blotches, and his nose was covered in spots of blood as if he’d been scratching it in his sleep. His left eye was bloodshot and the skin below badly bruised. He looked distraught, and stared helplessly at his elderly mother who at that moment seemed twenty years younger than him. She radiated energy whilst he looked empty and pathetic.
Rosalind beckoned him to cross the room. “Come and meet Mr Pritchard, Waldo.”
I forced a smile that said hello. Waldo stared at me, his bloodshot eye watering down his cheek.
I got up from my chair and took a few steps towards him, stretching out my hand. “I’m pleased to....”
“Must the hawk in the egg kill the wren?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Will the fox in the womb kill more chickens?”
There seemed no point in staying. I drove home and parked the car outside the house. I felt in my jacket pocket for the key to the front door, but my fingers found only Rosalind’s sticky sausage. I withdrew it carefully from my pocket and threw it on the ground, and next door’s cat came rushing through the hedge and carried it away.