From the marvellous author [especially of local history here in deepest Oxfordshire] Julie Ann Godson and her fascinating Facebook page comes this factoid about Dylan Thomas. Thomas was a family favourite and I inherited a passion for his writing from my dad who would read various of his works out loud to us as children from Under Milk Wood, Quite Early One Morning and his poetry. We holidayed more than once in Laugharne, Wales where Thomas worked also and we stayed once in the house next door to his and I recall visiting the small shed where he wrote and the house's interior is vividly and indelibly imprinted on my memory as is the surrounding countryside, the estuary and the calling curlews and the thigh deep mud flats when the tide went out. "Poky cottage" seems extraordinarily ungracious and rude of Thomas' comments about the house in South Leigh. I did not know he ever lived so nearby and really should have tried to find the house. The house looks enormous to me and is considerably bigger than the true 'little cottage' in Wales so Dylan's being driven to the local pub by its inconvenient size sounds like an alcoholic's excuse to me!
In the summer of 1947, Margaret Taylor (wife of historian AJP Taylor) purchased the Manor House at South Leigh for poet Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. Here, Thomas wrote most of his play "Under Milk Wood". As ever, he was dissatisfied with life: "My house here, though with such a dignified address, is a poky cottage full of old people, animals, and children. And everyone I want to meet, I have to meet outside somewhere: generally, and preferably, in a pub." In the Mason's Arms, a combined farm and pub during Dylan’s time, his favourite pint, Garne’s light ale, is long gone, as are his companions in the public bar, including farmhand Steve Claridge (who was also the barman), Lionel Drinkwater the cowman and Harry Moody the milkman, who remembers Dylan once asking him to leave bottles of beer on his doorstep, not milk.
Julie Ann Godson
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