The naked truth from West Wales

Byron Rogers

CAITLIN by Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett

Sacker & Warburg, £10.95

My father's apprentice told me the story when I was about 12, and he some years older. One of a group of Laugharne adolescents, he had been lounging on the rocks, watching the tide come in, when suddenly Mrs Dylan Thomas appeared, and walked past them.

They watched, open-mouthed, as she began to undress, still walking, dropping her clothes behind her. By the time she got to the water's edge she was stark naked, and Caitlin Thomas, he added grimly, was a good-looking woman. You do not forget stories like that, told you when you are 12; at least in West Wales you don't. I used to daydream in chapel, looking at the mat- rons, casting face after improbable face in the role of Mrs Thomas.

There were other stories, of how she had cycled down a steep hill and fallen off, breaking both arms, and of how she had sexually initiated the youth of Laugharne. I spent a lot of my adolescence thinking about Mrs Thomas, and of what might have been; but I was seven years too young and eight miles away, a bit like Arnhem really.

By 1953 she had gone from Laugharne, though not from the folklore of West Wales (for the mothers the courts will always be in session on Caitlin Thomas). This extraordinary book, dictated to George Tremlett, a fan of her husband's, once a GLC councillor, now, because of his enthusiasm, a Laugharne book-seller (in the last days of the GLC this remark- able man would commute between Laugharne and County Hall, a round-trip of some 500 miles), is her account of how she came to enter that folklore.

She will never leave it after this. 'Within minutes of starting work on the recordings, Caitlin said: "I want you to understand, before we go any further, that I never had an orgasm in all my years with Dylan, and that lies at the heart of our problems . . .".' Her entry in the index begins: 'Abortions, 95, 150-2, 172-3.' In the par- lours of West Wales steady hands will be turning the pages.

Her father, a rake and a member of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, de- serted the family, but would reappear from time to time with mistresses, when he would fornicate noisily (It couldn't have mattered less who was beneath him be- cause he would even break into a sea shanty, and then right at the crucial mo- ments as he was coming to his climax he would shout, "Ship ahoy!" I didn't find it funny at all . . .'). Her mother, she says, was a lesbian.

Then there was the painter Augustus John, with whose family she had been brought up: he raped her (It was a catastrophe from which I have never quite recovered'). Finally there was Dylan Tho- mas, whom she married, who never spent an evening at home throughout their mar- ried life, who had affairs when she was giving birth, who scrounged, lied and deceived, and died before the money came in.

This is the demon lover of the campuses as seen by his wife. 'Dylan was the most imperfect image ever seen, and never stopped talking; just walking along the street with him I felt self-conscious because he looked so comical. That was one of the reasons why, whenever people had talked of his infidelities in the past, I had always said, "But who would ever go with a comical man like that? It's not possible. These rich women wouldn't want to bother with him, stinking of beer and sweat and stale cigarettes and God knows what." ' That Irish chap who lures people into his psychiatrist's chair on radio must be fro- thing with exasperation at the poet's early death. Every morning there was the pub, and every night there was the pub, but think what he would have made of this, the Poet in his Bath. 'I would fill the bath for him and put out his sweets — dolly mixtures, boiled sweets, humbugs — and pickled onions and savoury things in little saucers, which I used to lay across the soap tray, always with a bottle of fizzy lemonade beside the bath.'

It is impossible for anyone not brought up in West Wales to appreciate how spoilt pretty male children can be. A Welsh professor of history has recorded his grati- tude to the British Army for teaching him to tie his own shoe-laces on the eve of D-Day, and Thomas's mother cut the tops off his eggs for him until he was a married man. But the tragedy is that if you play your cards right there will always be someone to carry on the spoiling, and for him there were people to be stolen from, who wouldn't complain, people like A. J. P. Taylor's wife who would pay bill after bill, and then, finally, the poetry-mad graduates of America.

It was a pity, for he was a friendly little man (even Caitlin-marvelled at his toler- ance), who had written some good poems, some funny prose and the very entertaining Under Milk Wood. But they told him he was a genius and he got away with murder, though one bleak Welsh uncle had early on advised his father to have the boy put in a madhouse.

This is a very shrill book, with a lot of self-pity thrown in. But it is enormously readable, and, in spite of herself, she can be funny as when she writes about Dylan's mother who could not pass an ornament without dusting it and was cheerful to the end, gossiping and discussing other, peo- ple's ailments. Among the adulterers, les- bians and geniuses, Mrs Thomas seems to have materialised like some creature from the stars.

Caitlin must have led a hell of a life with Dylan; she drank, she says, just to save her marriage, for if she hadn't she would have seen little of her husband apart from bed, when he wasn't ringing the bells anyway, and his elaborately choreographed baths. He loved his children, but would never eat with them or even travel in the same train compartment; every night they were aban- doned when the Thomases were at the pub.

Her main trouble was vanity. Look at me, look at me, I am someone too; I was a dancer. And of course they did look at her when she was taking off her clothes in pubs, and they probably looked at her too when she was seducing them. Her later years in Laugharne, a small village where everyone knows everyone else, sound like a nightmare.

You feel sorry for her, but you do not like her. No hand that fed them was left unbitten (Caitlin even stole a dress from Adlai Stevenson's wife when she was her guest at lunch). With the exception of Thomas's parents, who amazed her, she has not a good word to say of anyone. It is always someone else's fault.

But, ah, if she'd had that orgasm, everything would have been different.