SPEND A NIGHT IN DYLAN’S BEDROOM
For fans of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, it is the ultimate experience: spend the night in his childhood bedroom, now restored to the way it was back in the 1930s, complete with a jumble of books, cigarette stubs and scraps of paper bearing his scribbled poetry.
Thomas’s birthplace at No 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, is open to visitors for guided tours – but you can also take over the whole property for short breaks during the week or at weekends, for one night or a week or more.
It has become a shrine to the poet – Prince Charles called in for tea in 2012 – and has become a base for Dylan tours.
The young Dylan was doted on here by his parents. His mother cut the top off his egg, and it was a duty he came to expect from all the women in his life.
There is also good fun in following the routes that would once have been taken by the young Dylan and which no doubt provided inspiration for his poetry-crammed school exercise books.
He would go on to write one of the 50 most quoted lines in English verse (against tough competition from Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson): ‘Do not go gentle into that good night…’ Midway along Terrace Road – Thomas’s route to school – I pause to look down over the new Swansea, to the glorious sweep of the bay that Dylan would have known so well, and on to Mumbles.
He would wander his ‘ugly lovely town’ (it became a city in 1969) in search of conviviality and conversation, until he left for London at the age of 20. Few cities are so imbued with the memory of a writer
and 2014, the centenary of his birth, will be marked by the Dylan Thomas 100 Festival.
The organisers will celebrate his achievement as lyrical poet and writer of short stories, scripts for radio, plays and films with readings, theatre performances, music and exhibitions throughout the year.
I was privileged to walk around Swansea with his granddaughter Hannah Ellis, patron of the Dylan Thomas 100 Festival, and Dylan expert Jeff Towns. We met close to the now condemned Bush Hotel in High Street, where Dylan took his last drink before his train to London, and on to New York, where he died in 1953 after a mammoth drinking session at the White Horse Tavern.
We walked down Salubrious Passage, where a mischievous schoolboy Dylan would drop coins heated on a Bunsen burner and watch passers-by pick them up and drop them with a yelp.
We saw the offices of the newspaper where he worked as a reporter, the BBC studio where that rich stentorian voice would boom at the microphone in many a live broadcast, and the former Swansea School of Art where the platinum-tongued lothario once chatted up my mother, who was a student there.
It’s a sad fact that Swansea, in his day and after it, never fully accepted the bibulous, flirting scribe, whose behaviour was moderate by today’s standards.
But now there is The Dylan Thomas Centre, with its exhibition on his life and work, in Swansea’s Maritime Quarter.
One of Thomas’s – and my – favourite places is not a stop on too many tours. It’s the serene calm of the St Helen’s cricket ground, where the poet, who was close friends with the eloquent commentator John Arlott, spent many a contented summer afternoon watching Glamorgan.
For more information about No 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, visit 5cwmdonkindrive.com.
For Swansea Bay, go to visitswanseabay.com.
For more on Dylan Thomas 2014 and Dylan in Swansea, visit dt100.info and dylanthomas.com.