Letter from Wales

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery…

‘Lovely and watery’ – as everyone will recognise, the lines are from ‘Fern Hill’, an evocation of childhood. I have a first edition of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, an eighteenth-birthday gift from my considerably older cousin, Bloom (his forename, passed down several generations). I suppose it came through the post to my digs in Aberystwyth only a couple of weeks after I had heard Thomas himself read his poems, with that distinctive, lovely voice, in the Examination Hall of the Old College building on the evening of 12 November 1952. A few days short of a year later, he died in New York. The book has lost its dust jacket and is showing considerable signs of wear. Of course I regret that, but then its condition testifies to a good deal of reading and re-reading over the years.

The altitude of Gilfach Goch, about six hundred feet at the valley bottom, where, when I was young, its river, the Ogwr Fach, wound between enormous tips of slag waste from three collieries, to eleven hundred at the highest point of the surrounding hills, may not sound impressive, but the steepness of the unforested eastern side presented both challenge and opportunity. It was a perfect adventure playground, all the better for being entirely unsupervised, an adult-free zone. The weather forecast for the valley is rain all day today, the same tomorrow and, ...