Aeronwy at the Shed Door
Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet
Aeronwy at the Shed Door
She stands on tiptoes,
ear barely touching the door,
her mother twenty paces away,
Her whispers loud like
a chapel’s asthmatic organ.
‘Is he writing girl?’
A desperate question
scoured out of her
importunate, penuried state.
‘No it’s all quiet,
quiet as a domino’,
She replies
with one of her
father’s best lines.
‘He’s reading that
Agatha fecking Christie;
when he should writing’
and she takes a further
step nearer the girl.
‘What’s fecking mam’
The sandy haired
Welsh Irish child
rasps back with
a puckish grin.
‘Knock hard
and tell him to
get on with some
words or we’ll
not eat and he’ll
have no beer!’
‘Daddy, mammy
is coming’ she
leans down
to the keyhole
blocked with the key
that locked him in.
The sound of a chair
settling onto four legs
and the uncapping of
a fountain pen,
the scratch of the match
that ignites a cigarette.
‘It is night in the chill,
squat chapel, hymning in
bonnet and brooch
and bombazine black,
butterfly choker and
bootlace bow, coughing
like nanny-goats,
sucking mintoes,
fortywinking hallelujah.’
Her father’s voice
unmistakably declarative
all Welsh chapel and
the Reverend Eli Jenkins.
She nods to her
Mother ~ job done.
Caitlin leaves the girl
who leans in to the
door and catches the
mumbling voice:
‘Time passes. Listen.
Time passes.
Come closer now.’
She loved to hear
those merman mumbles,
his secret incantations,
the spell of the father on
his daughter’s generous soul.
When all her father’s
failings slowly washed away
she was left with her
mother’s dancing
and her ear at that green,
locked, writing shed door.
This poem was inspired by this quote :
‘My father was allowed to visit the Brown’s Hotel for gossip and the crossword in the mornings as long as he returned at 1 p.m. for a lunch fry-up.
Writing began at 2 p.m. – no excuses – in the shed. As I mentioned, Mother locked the door at times, particularly when he returned from trips abroad and was reluctant to follow his old schedule as laid down by her.’
Aeronwy Thomas,. My Father's Places
Aeronwy Thomas was the daughter of the famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The book this comes from is a wonderful read. It charts her childhood memories of life with her loquacious, hard drinking, gifted Father and her wild, dancing, Irish Mother - Caitlin Thomas.
Here is the blurb from the book:
In 1949, after years of nomadic existence, nine-year-old Aeronwy Thomas and her family arrived at the Boat House in Laugharne, a small village on the Welsh coast. Here her father, the poet Dylan Thomas and mother, Caitlin, hoped to find peace, a place to settle and work.
In Laugharne Dylan began some of his most famous works, including Under Milk Wood. Mornings were spent in Brown's Hotel, listening to the gossip at Ivy William's kitchen table. In the afternoons Caitlin would lock the poet into a shed in the garden, where he sat speaking his verse aloud as he wrote, or composed begging letters to patrons and friends. Often he would head off to London, and old haunts.
Little Aeronwy enjoyed the new world around her. In the Boat House, ruled over by Caitlin, there was baby Colm and in the holidays visits from big brother Llewellyn, as well as Dolly, the cleaner and cook, and the house became a refuge for village characters, including Booda the deaf, mute ferry man. The memoir paints scenes of sudden drama and poetry: reading Wind in the Willows with her father in the evenings; fish treading in the mud below the house with her mother; afternoons with Grandma Flo and DJ at the Pelican.
Dylan's fame grows and he tours the United States to read his poetry. Aeronwy watches as the marriage fractures, and at last the poet dies in New York, far away from his children. My Father's Places is a deeply moving portrait of growing up and an insight into the origins and the legacy of Dylan Thomas's poetry.
Reading the book is like eavesdropping on the life and reminisces of a child, the often tawdry world seen through innocent eyes. The story that my poem narrates is one I have spoken of when I do retreats and talks about Dylan. The Thomas’s were constantly in debt and short of money. Although Dylan was the first celebrity poet of the 20th century, he was very popular on the radio and sold well on Long Playing records they never seemed to get their heads above the financial water line.
Caitlin McNamara, as she was before she married Dylan, was born in Hammersmith to a literary and creative family from the Irish Ascendancy. A red haired girl who trained to be a dancer and featured in A Chorus Line in London. She was the perfect match for a budding and precocious poet from Swansea. She introduced Dylan to Laugharne where she was staying. They married in 1937 and had three children Llewelyn Edouard , Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis and Colm Garan Hart. Drink was a big feature in their relationship and Caitlin’s reminisces about her marriage was called My Life with Dylan Thomas: double drink story - The extraordinary memoir of a life dedicated to drink and Dylan Thomas.
Into this tempestuous world comes Aeronwy. A sensitive and vulnerable child, who derives great joy from both her mother and father, as well as a fair degree of heartache. When I stood looking into that writing shed door at the age of fifteen I instinctively felt all that hinterland that emerges in both the above mentioned books and all of the biographies and collections of poetry, about and by Dylan. I wondered at that tender age how great it might be to sit all day composing poems. It took me until the age of fifty to realise that dream. Here is what I say in a poem called Visits to Laugharne at Fifteen and Fifty.
In Laugharne was his writing shed,
as he left it, the chair hung coat,
screwed up lines wrinkling
dustily on a shabby rugged floor.
I hungered to gather those flung
away leaves, to unfurl, to touch
the dry bud of meaning.
I have stood at that door so many times since that first visit in 1976 and always that yearning hunger for writing comes over me. Having read Aeronwy’s book before a recent visit to Laugharne I noticed this little memorial.
The poem at the head of this post began to form in my mind. It is a tribute to Fathers and Daughters, Daughters and Mothers and the complex and dynamic relationship between them. It is also a celebration of the wonderful lyrical poetry that was born in that little room all those years ago and the lives it has influenced, Aeronwy’s, mine and countless others.
I have just sent the manuscript for my latest poetry collection to my publisher and editor. It has a number of chapters covering my dreams, my trip to the USA with my son Tom, my times in the Lakes and of course a section about Dylan that this poem will be part of. Hopefully it will be out in the autumn. Here is the draft cover featuring the Boathouse.
