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 Aeronwy wth Fiona Green (right) |
Daughter’s memories of life with a genius
Dylan Thomas’s daughter has published a unique collection of her childhood times with her father, writes Fiona Green
A Daughter remembers Dylan by Aeronwy Thomas, Merton Books, £4.95. click here to buy
TO be the child of a genius cannot be an easy role in life, especially if you have talent of your own – it invites invidious comparisons.
Aeronwy Thomas has taken on her father’s mantle in her own ‘write’ with style and panache, as this small book clearly shows.
A Daughter Remembers Dylan is a collection of stories and memories from her childhood, which evokes a period, still alive in Wales, where Dicky the Milk and Dai Bread were a regular part of Aeron’s daily life.
Aeron is the second of Dylan and Caitlin’s three children, and the one who has elected to promote her father’s work.
She had a mixed education which included Dartington School, Devon, where we met and became life-long friends. At Dartington, where she stayed only two terms, Aeron read voraciously, mainly thrillers – like her father – and kept a series of notebooks and journals.
Just as she was settling in (or so it seemed to me) her mother, Caitlin, wrote to me in 1958 to explain why she was taking her from the Dartington.
“The primary reason is that I want Aeron near me, in sympathetic contact with her family… also I am sorry, but I do not like the Royal English pastel-shaded background, the emancipated system of mixed, all jolly tomboys and hearty hooligans together, education which eradicates the pleasant differences between the sexes.”
She ended the long letter by asking me to join them in Sicily and Rome where I got to know the family, and also became friends with her older brother, Llewelyn, then at Harvard.
Following that, a convent in Catania, and later in Rome, Aeron went on to achieve a BA (Hons) in English and comparative religion.
She by-passed writing initially, in favour of nursing, but that, fortunately, was short-lived, and she became a publicist for the Dino de Laurentis Film Studios and a journalist in Rome.
In 1970, she married Trefor Ellis, a chorister in the London Welsh Chorale and they went on to have Huw (now with grandson Oscar) and Hannah, a teacher.
In this collection, Aeron lets us in on aspects of her early life that proved formative in her literary career as the recognised poet she has become.
Bedtime stories with her father, the special Christmases that Caitlin organised, exposure to many different characters in whose homes the family stayed, and the endless visitors that came to pay homage to her father, or to court her mother – Our Poisonous Tea Party is an hilarious account of one such visit.
I especially enjoyed the way she moves back and forth in time, in the chapter Dylan and Caitlin in London, where she carries on imaginary conversations with her parents while taking us on a guided tour of their pub haunts in Chelsea.
Nowadays, she will bring members of the Dylan Thomas Society to Fitzrovian pubs in Charlotte Street, where Dylan spent the final decade of his life.
Aeron’s older brother, and Augustus’s godson, Llewelyn, lived on and off in nearby Tottenham Street, until his death in 2000.
Aeron is closely associated with the Dylan Thomas Society and was instrumental in having a commemorative plaque to her father, laid in Westminster Abbey where, each year on the anniversary of Dylan’s death, there is a ceremony.
Here is Aeron’s poem Last Word to her mother, Caitlin, from another collection, Rooks and Poems, published by Poetry Monthly Press, Nottingham.
“Well, she’s done it now
No one can deny it
She’s had the last word.
She told me to come,
I didn’t: she died.
And if she knows
something
More than I do
She’s not telling,
Not since she died
Though I’m listening
(Most of the time)
for another last word.”
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