by Tom Mooney
It seems extraordinary that it took a three hour trip by a Stena Line ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard to bridge a lifetime’s ambition to visit Laugharne, the place most associated with the poet and dramatist Dylan Thomas, the sixtieth anniversary of whose death is this November. He was 39.
It should have taken place before now. I had been all over Wales on camping trips in my youth, but Carmarthenshire always seemed out of reach. When illness after a spell in Calcutta cut short plans to attend the launch of Jackie Hayden’s book about Thomas (A Map of Love, published by Iconau) in Laugharne last year, I despaired of ever making the pilgrimage.
Having seen Jack Howell’s documentary about Thomas (with Richard Burton as narrator) as a wee chap, I have held a fascination with the Welsh bard, which bore fruit with my involvement in a live radio production of Under Milk Wood when I was a student.
And though the years passed, as they do, the poems I learned in school (Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London) never lost their imaginative and visceral grip.
Today, the locale which gave rise to some of Thomas’s best work, Laugharne, which he first visited in 1934 on ‘a fallen angel of a day’ with Glyn Jones ,and the gaping estuary of the River Taf, has never been as close to Wexford.
Drive onto the Stena Line ferry from Rosslare at nine in the morning and you will find yourself cosily ensconced in Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne with a bowl of soup by lunchtime.
Laugharne is not that far off the beaten track, and yet it overpowers you with the charm that seduced Thomas. His affection for the village – which he immortalised as Llareggub in his play for voices – and the people is borne out memorably in Rollie McKenna’s book, Portrait of Dylan, among others.
Re-reading Jackie Hayden’s ode to Thomas whilst strolling down the hill in the village, I could appreciate how he was smitten by its timelessness when he first visited in the mid-seventies.
The charcoal headland which inspired the eponymous Over Sir John’s hill, where ‘the hawk on fire hangs still’, draws you to the estuary waters lapping against the marooned boats; Poem in October, another famous Laugharne poem,’with water praying and call of seagull and rook,’ was deemed fit for publication by Thomas only after he spent fives years working on it.
The village is a stone’s throw from Thomas’s writing shed on what could pass as a cliff walk, referred to in Poem on His Birthday as ‘in his house on stilts high among beaks’, and the accoutrements of his craft are still there: the old lamp, the stove without a chimney, the pictures of his favourite poets: Auden, Yeats and Whitman and, finally, the view of the sea from the ‘word splashed hut.’
Further on is the boathouse. A gift from Margaret Taylor in 1949, and where Thomas spent his last remaining years with his wife and children. There are few places on these islands as enchanting and as charming as Laugharne, but a rudimentary appreciation of the work Thomas composed there is essential to any distillation of its magic.
