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.
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Denne historien er fra October 27, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
