DYLAN THOMAS’S entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that he considered his ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, a poor relation to his poetry. Yet, with its array of characters, from Captain Cat dreaming of his lost loves to the twice-widowed, obsessively neat Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, it is the work for which he is best known. Despite it only being first performed in the last year of his life, he had been working on an idea for a tale or play about a small Welsh seaside town since he was in his late teens.
The fictional town of Llareggub, (the ‘joke’, such as it is, lies in reading its name backwards) made its first appearance in the Surrealist story The Orchards, written in 1935, with references to ‘the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub’. Further inspiration arrived in 1938, when Thomas and his new bride, the dancer Caitlin Macnamara, moved to Laugharne on the Taf Estuary in Carmarthenshire. Clearly, he was fascinated by the inhabitants of what he called ‘the strangest town in Wales’, remarking to fellow resident and writer Richard Hughes (author of the bestseller A High Wind In Jamaica) that what the place really needed was ‘a play about well-known Laugharne characters’. His working title was The Town That Was Mad.
This story is from the October 27, 2021 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 27, 2021 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
A tapestry of pinks
THE garden is now entering its season of vigour and exuberance.
Bringing the past to life
An event hosted by COUNTRY LIFE at WOW!house is one of the highlights of a programme that features some of the biggest names in interior design
This isle is full of wonder
GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense— but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry.
Empire protest
Without meaning to issue a clarion call for independence, E. M. Forster perfectly captured the rising tensions of the British Raj. One hundred years later, Matthew Dennison revisits the masterpiece A Passage to India
Hops and dreams
A relative of marijuana, hops were a Teutonic introduction to British brewing culture and gave rise to the original working holiday
Life and sol
The sanctuary of the Balearic Islands has enchanted a multitude of creative minds, from Robert Graves to David Bowie
'Nature is nowhere as great as in its smallest creatures'
Giving himself neck ache from constantly looking upwards, John Lewis-Stempel makes the most of a sunny May day harvesting ‘tree hay’ and marvelling at the myriad wildlife including flies and earwigs–that reside on bark
'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything'
Country houses great and small were indispensable to D-Day preparations, with electricity and sanitation, well-stocked wine cellars, countesses to run the canteens and antique furniture to feed the stoves
The darling buds of May
May Morris shared her father’s passion for flowers, embroidery and Iceland, but was much more than William’s daughter. Influential both as a designer and as a teacher, she championed the rights of workers, particularly women, as Huon Mallalieu reveals
Achilles healed
Once used to comfort the lovelorn or soothe the wounds of Greek heroes, yarrow may now have a new starring role in sustainable agriculture
