A humorous novel, I said. He lost interest at once, telling me that it seemed to him that every poet in the country, intent on self-destruction, was writing a funny novel. Relieved, I threw away the new-born idea of a comic novel. Even Dylan Thomas, said Baker, had written one, or part of one. He had himself read it only a few weeks before and thrown it back as rubbish. I perked up considerably. If Dylan Thomas couldn’t write one it was certain I couldn’t. Dylan’s novel, never completed and published posthumously in 1955, was called Adventures in the Skin Trade.

Despite its late appearance, most of it seems to have been written in the early summer of 1941, before Dylan was employed as a scriptwriter for Strand Films. I read the first section of it after I had spoken to Peter Baker, discovering that it had been published in 1941 in Folios of New Writing, but I didn’t see the rest of the work until Putnam issued it, with an interesting Foreword by Thomas’s friend, the poet Vernon Watkins. In a sense the novel is a continuation of the fictionalized autobiography Dylan had started in Portrait, his hero, Samuel Bennet, leaving Swansea early in the narrative by the train that Dylan had taken when he left home to live in London. Watkins felt that the novel had not been finished because of the impact of war, particularly the London air-raids, on what he called Thomas’s ‘essentially tragic vision’, but he also suggests that Thomas mistrusted his own facility. Certainly he was able to write this kind of prose very quickly, in marked contrast to the painstaking, phrase-by-phrase way in which he wrote his poetry. Reading the book now, many years later, I still find it funny and inventive, and I can only think that Thomas did not continue with it because he had come to the end of what he had to say. He was not a novelist, he was a natural writer of short stories. The novel was too long for him. The short story, like the poem, is a selective form, but you can pack anything into the novel. And while Thomas recognized his kinship with Dickens when he called Adventures in the Skin Trade ‘a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber, and good old 3-adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, it was Dickens’s energy, humour and poetry that he acknowledged, not the novel form. Still, this fragmentary novel, incomplete as it is, bears the mark of its author. Its characters are as logical as life, and as unexpected; it has bounce and colour. Dylan still hoped to complete it years after he set it aside, suggesting as late as 1953, the year of his death, that he would go on with it.

It was put away for all practical considerations when Dylan went to London to work as a scriptwriter. This work left him little time for his own writing, and in addition he was in increasing demand as a broadcaster and, later, as a reader of his own poems and those of other poets. There are left only seven short prose narratives from this late period, and six of these were written for broadcasting. It is ironic that his great popular reputation rests on one or two of these. But it is also understandable, for they are memorable pieces, bringing us the whole man, his warmth, his humour, his incredible memory for the days of childhood and youth, his moving sadness for what was irrecoverable, his poetry even. The first of these late stories, ‘Quite Early One Morning’, was written in 1944 and reads now like the first draft of Under Milk Wood, dealing as it does with the dreams of the sleeping town in the early morning, where Captain Tiny Evans, predecessor without doubt of Captain Cat, sleeps through his ‘big seas of dreams’ and watches ‘a rainbow hail of flying fishes’.

But it is ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ that everyone knows. Compounded of two similar stories, ‘Memories of Christmas’ and ‘Conversation about Christmas’, this is the unforgettable narrative we hear broadcast every year. What is there to say about this rich confection, as full as a Christmas stocking with gifts: great, sheepish uncles and singing aunts, snow by the skyful, those Polar cats sleek and long as jaguars, wonderful Miss Prothero who ‘said the right thing, always’, the cosy, terrifying ghost story that sends the boys scuttling home? It’s the best Christmas since Dickens.

‘The Followers’ is a ghost story. It is filled with hard evidence of the real world. I read it often, never failing to be convinced of the existence of the wet streets, listening to the voices of the ‘youngish men from the offices, bundled home against the thistly wind’ as they call to each other. It is in this palpable and recognizable world that the two young men begin to follow an unknown girl, an ordinary girl.