MORNING SERIAL

FOR all that, and he had soon known this, too, such links were quick to break, trifling sentiments, when more profound issues, his own and abstract wider interests, intervened to assert their necessary priority. Not that he was alone in this understanding. They knew it, too, as Dai ceased to be and he became David until he died.

It would be the only story he would wish told of himself. It was not, for all that, the only story. Nor the only one to tell. Nor the only way to tell it at all. *Biography fragment c.1958: Early Days of DA Thomas. *Taliesin Arthur Lloyd Papers. Box 3.

*National Library of Wales Aberystwyth.

1987: TIME OUT

I was the Secretary. So, invariably, people believed what I said had occurred, and in the manner in which I made a record of it. That is a straightforward statement, one made in my best secretarial style. Whether it is a statement about the fashion employed in shaping public memory, rather than a statement of unvarnished fact, if there is ever such a thing as you might wish to say, is something I prefer, even now and almost at the very end of life, to avoid. Or, at least, to obscure. And that is because, truly, I have no reassuring answer to give in final settlement of such a question. No matter. It is, in another sense, all the same. To you as well as to me. At least, so far as outcome is concerned. Yet not as to its shaping. The evidence for that which is past, and to be quizzed for the meaning it might tell as history, largely came from such as me, and was filtered through that series of witnessing which, such as I, necessarily perfected, in order for it to seem as if complete, for such as you who came after the event. I was a Secretary. So, I made it up.

Well, not literally so, of course. I did not, how could I, construct the wider agenda of which I was a part. But my role was not insignificant either. Tidying up, guiding, hinting, hiding, giving form and direction to what might otherwise remain in an inchoate state.