Tag Archives: Dylan Thomas

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: JESSIE CAHALIN AND THE NO SIGN BAR

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Nobody followed me to the No Sign Bar, Swansea – a regular haunt of Dylan Thomas.  Seated next to the window, I searched inside my handbag for Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas. I found The Followers, a ghost story, hidden inside the anthology.

A ping from my phone confirmed a signal, but I ignored the emails. I sat in the bar Thomas renamed the Wine Vaults.  I read the opening lines of the story, but there was no sign of the beer I had just ordered.  Without anything to quench my thirst, there was nothing I could do apart from read on.  Between words, I felt compelled to search for two pairs of eyes outside of the window, but there was no sign of anyone.

Outside the window, ‘the rain spat and drizzled past the street lamps’. No one wore ‘squeaking galoshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies’. Alas, the ‘rattle of bony trams’ was silenced long ago. Only the swish of car tyres, hum of engines and slamming of car doors filled the silence on the streets.  Gazing at the decaying red window frames, I did not see ‘a young man with his arm around a girl’. Instead, I glimpsed a young couple hand in hand dashing across the road while there was a break in the traffic.  Outside, there was a mass of coloured jackets and everyone wore jeans, leggings or trousers.  No one looked inside the tatty building. They didn’t seem to care that Dylan Thomas once frequented this watering hole.

Reading the short story, I pursued the followers, as they scurried through the alley.  Inside, No Sign Bar, I could smell the old musty wine cellar.  No one was responsible for the spontaneous spark of colour in the open fire. The pitted floorboards had been battered by tired and drunken feet for centuries. Words echoed around cavernous room. Perhaps, these were the words that inspired Dylan Thomas’s story The Followers: his only ghost story.  And I heard the rise and fall of the Welsh accent that probably escaped into the pages of Thomas’s mind, as he imagined the story.   I read the final sentence, ‘And we went our separate ways.’ I departed.

Near to Paradise Alley, I heard a voice echo.  ‘Spare some change, madam?’ The homeless soul was clutching a fleece blanket.  His watery, bloodshot eyes regarded me as he rolled himself a cigarette.  I spared him fifty pence, but this wouldn’t even buy him a beer. He caught the meagre offering with a grateful nod that punched my conscience.

‘Have you seen Leslie?’ mumbled the man. He looked at my handbag as I retrieved more change.I nodded.  ‘Only bread and jam in my handbag,’ I declared.

I ran to the car park. The rain drizzled until diluted my memory of the bar. I heard the distance tapping of footsteps and turned around. Thankfully, there was no sign of anyone following me. Checking Twitter, I did note I had two more followers.

 

No Sign Bar and The Followers

No Sign Bar is believed to be Swansea’s oldest pub and dates to 1690.  The wine cellars date back to the 15th century.  The name ‘No Sign’ originates from legislation of licencing when public bars had to have a recognisable sign.  This building was not public house and did not require a sign, hence was later given the name ‘No Sign’ to announce its presence!

Dylan Thomas frequented No Sign Bar, as a young man. No Sign Bar is featured as the Wine Vaults in Dylan Thomas’s story, The Followers.   Salubrious Passage, next to the bar, is referred to as Paradise Alley in the short story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: JAN BAYNHAM ON HER LOVE FOR UNDER MILK WOOD

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Those of you who know me or read my posts on Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page will realise I’m a big fan of Dylan Thomas and his writing, from his wonderful poetry to his short stories and especially his famous play for voices, Under Milk Wood. My first encounter with the play was, in fact, not on the radio but a stage performance at the tiny but grandly named theatre, the Albert Hall, in my hometown of Llandrindod Wells. As a teenager, I can remember being mesmerised by the poetic language, his use of imagery, and the wide range of eclectic and eccentric people he’d created.

The characters live in a small fictional Welsh village by the sea, named Llareggub (read it backwards!) or Llaregyb (contrary to Thomas’s wishes) in some earlier versions of the play. A long time in its making, the play tells of the ‘dreams, fantasies and realities of the inhabitants’ of Llareggub ‘as they unfold across the cycle of one spring day’. The villagers are presented in a humorous, ribald way, created and exaggerated maybe from the poet’s observations of the oddities and the pieces of gossip of a small-town community that he lapped up every morning in Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.

The play opens at night and a narrator invites the audience to listen in on the dreams of the townspeople of Llareggub while they sleep, “from where you are”.

“To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea…”

We are taken straight there, invited to listen to the villagers’ innermost thoughts. They include Captain Cat, the blind sea captain, reliving his times at sea and his drowned ship mates and Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands. Almost all the characters in the play are introduced as the audience witnesses a moment of their dreams until “…dawn inches up.”

Through the characters, more than sixty of them, we are given a glimpse of village life albeit through their eccentricities. The Reverend Eli Jenkins delivers a morning sermon about his love for the village. I love the choice of names – Gossamer Beynon, Willy Nilly, Evans the Death, Dai Bread, Nogood Boyo. Through their actions and what they say, the characters come alive. Taking up her morning tea, Mr. Pugh imagines poisoning his nagging wife and whispers:

“Here’s your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit…
Here’s your…
…nice tea, dear.”

At Mrs. Organ-Morgan’s general shop, women gossip about the townspeople. Children play in the schoolyard; Polly Garter scrubs floors and sings about her illicit lovers of the past. Later, Mrs. Organ-Morgan shares some of that gossip with her husband:

“I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly Garter. She was martyred again last night…”

As night begins, Reverend Jenkins recites another poem. Cherry Owen heads to the Sailor’s Arms, where Sinbad still longs for Gossamer Beynon. The town prepares for the evening and the inhabitants of Llareggub return to their dreams again.

Since my first introduction to Under Milk Wood as a teen, I’ve heard it played many times with a variety of casts, seen stage performances and film versions. It never fails to intrigue me, and I find new snippets of language to marvel at each time. It has been called poetry but Dylan Thomas’s own description of it is ‘prose with blood-pressure’! If you are not familiar with the play, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

 

 

 

Dylan Thomas’s Last Days Inspires Novel by Award-Winning Screenwriter

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EastEnders’s longest-serving scriptwriter, Rob Gittins is launching his brand-new novel, The Poet and the Private Eye at Dinefwr Literature Festival this weekend. The novel depicts the last three weeks of legendary Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s life, and is based upon real life events.

Dylan Thomas’s Last Days Inspires New Novel by Award-Winning Screenwriter

The year is 1953, and a private investigator takes on a tail job in New York City. His quarry is a newly-arrived visitor from the UK ̶ the private eye has never heard of him, but he will. The mark is the legendary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, and in three weeks’ time, he’ll be dead.

“As far as the poet Dylan Thomas is concerned, nothing that happens in this story is invented,” explains author Rob Gittins, who published his first novel Gimme Shelter last year. “All of the events in the novel actually happened.

“In October 1953, Time magazine hired a private detective to shadow Dylan Thomas during what turned out to be his last visit to New York. Dylan had taken out a libel suit against Time because of a less-than-flattering profile the magazine had published about him some months before. Time intended to use any new material gathered by the detective to defend its portrait of Dylan who, they alleged: ‘… dresses like a bum… drinks like a culvert… smokes like an ad for cancer… sleeps with any woman who is willing… is a trial to his friends and a worry to his family…’.

“To shape the events into a fictional form, however, I have taken liberties in mixing events from different trips, as Dylan Thomas visited America four times in total. So taken as a whole, the story presents an accurate account of the poet’s time in the US. As little is known about the private eye, his character, background and history is, necessarily, entirely my invention.”

The Poet and the Private Eye tells a tragic, but ultimately life-affirming story. It also engages with an issue: how an artist can change the life of even the most hard-bitten and cynical onlooker – and how an artist’s work can then live on to change the lives of countless others.

Wales Book of the Year winner Wiliam Owen describes the novel as “…a gripping story which takes a highly original look at the unravelling of Dylan Thomas’s chaotic life and ultimate death. But central to the novel is the power of Dylan’s poetry and how it’s ultimately a force for hope, reconciliation and even redemption in the lives of the people it touches.”

Rob Gittins is an award-winning screenwriter who has written for numerous top-rated television drama series – including EastEnders, Casualty and The Bill – and film as well as creating and writing original drama series of his own. He lives in Rhydargaeau near Carmarthen. The Poet and the Private Eye will be launched in Newton House at Dinefwr Literature Festival this Saturday, 5.45pm and at Waterstones, Carmarthen on Thursday 17 July at 6.30pm.

The Poet and the Private Eye is available here.