In such a world ghosts should not exist, but there is one, entirely credible, in this story.

Of these late narratives ‘The Followers’ is the only one not written for broadcasting, and ‘A Story’ the only one written for television. I saw Thomas tell this story on the old black and white screen. He filled it with action and colour with his unaided words. His enormous uncle, ‘the loud check meadow of his waistcoat littered, as though after a picnic, with cigarette ends, peelings, cabbage stalks, birds’ bones, gravy’, grew out of words bigger than John Wayne. The tale is the account of an outing to Porthcawl, in which the small Dylan is both participant and, as a child, observer. The ancient boys who go on the trip never reach Porthcawl, since they stop at every public house on the way. The child, left to ‘keep an eye on the charra’, stays outside, listening and watching. I recognize delightedly the confrontation between a stranger and Enoch Davies in the Hermit’s Nest on the journey home, the men having stopped for ‘a rum to keep out the cold’.

‘I played for Aberavon in 1898,’ said a stranger to Enoch Davies.

‘Liar,’ said Enoch Davies.

‘I can show you photos,’ said the stranger.

‘Forged,’ said Enoch Davies.

‘And I’ll show you my cap at home.’

‘Stolen.’

‘I got friends to prove it,’ the stranger said in a fury.

‘Bribed,’ said Enoch Davies.

I have myself taken part in such a duel. Some years ago, John Ormond, distinguished film-maker, friend of Dylan Thomas and himself a poet, was shooting a film in west Wales. I was involved in this programme and was to go down to the Teifi river, very photogenic in spate, and cast a line into the water. This was strictly illegal, the fishing season having closed, but we cleared this by getting permission from the agent of the estate through which the stretch of water ran. It would be fine, he said, as long as I didn’t put a lure on my line. Dressed in my fishing garb, I stood on the rocks above a foam of water and cast my harmless line. The cameras rolled. For about five minutes. Then the river bailiff appeared, large and implacable.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

‘I’m pretending to fish,’ I said, ‘so that these men can make a film.’

‘Not allowed,’ he said, ‘the river’s closed.’

‘We’ve seen the agent,’ I said.

‘You may have,’ he said, ‘but I’m the river bailiff and I say you stop now.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I’m only pretending.’

‘So you say,’ he said.

‘Look,’ I said, reeling in my line, ‘I don’t have a hook on. What do you think I’m going to do, lasso the fish?’

‘You might,’ he said darkly. The ghost of Dylan Thomas, I felt, was not far away.

The ghost of Dylan Thomas. He is certainly present in ‘Return Journey’, the long narrative in which Dylan goes back to Swansea to find his former selves, the first of whom he described unflinchingly as ‘above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean, he’s five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken after playing a game called Cats and Dogs, in the Mermaid, Mumbles; speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know’—before passing down the years through ‘the departed stages’ of the boy he was pursuing. At the end of the journey, the park-keeper who ‘knew him well’, had ‘known him by the thousands’, says he is ‘Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead.’

I still find that death unnecessary, all these years later, particularly after reading these stories, so full of the man, his warmth, his voices. Toward the end of his life he wrote to his friend Dr Daniel Jones (whom we met as a boy in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog): ‘Isn’t life awful? Last week I hit Caitlin with a plate of beetroot, and I’m still bleeding. I can’t finish a poem or begin a story’.

He was to the end ‘a writer of poems and stories’. One of my friends told me that his mother would not read Dylan Thomas ‘because he was such a horrible man’. Persuaded to read these stories, she has changed her mind and is convinced he’s a wonderful man. I agree with her.

Leslie Norris

After The Fair

The fair was over, the lights in the coconut stalls were put out, and the wooden horses stood still in the darkness, waiting for the music and the hum of the machines that would set them trotting forward. One by one, in every booth, the naphtha jets were turned down and the canvases pulled over the little gaming tables. The crowd went home, and there were lights in the windows of the caravans.

Nobody had noticed the girl. In her black clothes she stood against the side of the roundabouts, hearing the last feet tread upon the sawdust and the last voices die in the distance.