My Father's Places: A Memoir by Dylan Thomas' Daughter by Aeronwy Thomas

Author:Aeronwy Thomas [Thomas, Aeronwy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616081010
Amazon: 1616081015
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2010-09-01T23:00:00+00:00

While he was betting, talking, listening and drinking, Mother and I tidied his shed. One day she lit the paraffin-fuelled stove as usual while he was out so that it was warm and snug for the afternoon’s session. I was told to pick up the two Penguin paperbacks from the rough kitchen table, which served as his desk. There was an Agatha Christie and a Raymond Chandler.

‘Hide them,’ Mother said, so I tucked them behind books on the heavy bookshelf but I’d tell him later where to find them.

My mother had drawing pins and a Picture Post with her and pulled out the centrefold: a reproduction of Bruegel the Elder’s Peasant Wedding. I helped Mother pin the shiny picture on the boards of the shed wall next to the portraits of Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence. My mother said Dad didn’t look at anything when he worked except the estuary and the hills on the other side. It was she who arranged to have the two windows installed into the old garage to make a workplace for him, she told me. He did not need to look at the pictures on the walls.

The view inspired many word pictures: ‘Poem in October’, ‘Poem on his Birthday’, ‘Over Sir John’s Hill’ and the unfinished, ‘In Country Heaven’. The poems record curlews, herons, hawks, cormorants and oyster-catchers, but not the fishing boat at full tide, though it makes an appearance in Under Milk Wood. Mother said I was very good at advising where to place the pictures in the shed and holding the drawing pins. After this praise, I loved her again, even more than Dad.

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