The Dylan Thomas Murders (8 page)

“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?”