Hidden London - Looking for Dylan

The 14th of May annually is Dylan Thomas day. It's not his birthday. It's not his death day. It's the date Under Milk Wood was first read on stage in New York. And why not commemorate that? Feeling anti-social this year, I decided to make my own little pilgrimage to somewhere very much off the beaten track of all things Dylan. No boat house in Laugharne. No Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. I look myself down to the river not far from home. 

Dylan and his family lived at 13, Hammersmith Terrace in the winter of 1941-42 and on into the spring of 1942.  It's a five storey Georgian terraced house that backs directly onto a famous stretch of the Thames. Lots of artists have lived around there over the years (Eric Ravillious, Emery Walker, A.P. Herbert who owned number 13 and invited the Thomases to stay, and William Morris had his press very nearby). 

Next door at number 12, can this be conicidence to his choice of studio/bedsit? was apparently the birthplace of his wife, Caitlin MacNamara. 

I look up at the typical London brick and wonder what Dylan got up to in Hammersmith. His carefully collated Collected Letters helpfully supplies some answers from the few he wrote from this address. He was writing, but only in the time left to him after his work for a film company producing short films for the Ministry of Information.

Dylan hated London at this point where 'even the sun's grey... the grey gets in your eyes so that a bit of green nearly blinds you and the thought of the sea makes you giddy as you cross the road like a bloody beetle,' and his colleagues odious 'straw men, sponge and vanity boys, walking sacks full of solid vinegar and pride, all the menagerie of a world very rightly at war with itself (And even now the ink is spitting.)' (May 1942) 

And he hated his poverty: 'You don't know, I suppose, anyone with any furniture stored in London and who would want to give it to a good home? The only things I have are a deckchair with a hole in it, half a dozen books, a few toys and an old iron. These would not fill even a mouse's home. It is very good sometimes to have nothing; I want society, not me, to have places to sit in and beds to lie in; and who wants a hatstand of his very own? But sometimes on rainy, nostalgic Sunday afternoons, after eating the week's meat, it would, however cowardly, whatever a blanketing of responsibility and conscience, be good to sprawl back on one's own bourgeois chair, bought slippers on one's trotters.' (May 1942)

Although writing such as this has always to be read realising his teasing use of hyperbole for dramatic effect. So there you have it. He was miserable and fed up and often on the move. Sounds very much like typical Dylan-times. I hope none of this rubs off on me this week as I am rather buoyant and pretty happy.

Further reading

Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: J.M.Dent, 1985)

Hidden London - Strawberry Hill House

Horace Walpole's 18th century Gothic fantasy is tucked away from the river in Twickenham. It fell into a ruinous state and was restored and reopened in 2010.

Thirteen years later and some eight years since my last visit, the exterior could do with a serious paint job. The interior is holding up well. On this Easter Sunday it was a relatively quiet place to come. 

A sunny day with others elsewhere meant we were unbothered by our fellow visitors and had our pick of spots in the garden for the first picnic of the year.

Even the guides were of the more unobtrusive kind. I hate being told the blindingly obvious or the readily researchable.

I love the garish bling of the house. It is mad, really bonkers. Yet one might imagine living there. A pity then that the furnishings and objet were scattered in a 19th century auction.

Go if you love gold, trope l'oil, stained glass and fabulous fireplaces, or want to see a first edition of the Castle of Otranto. Not cheap, but where is these days?

Ham House

Precious little open, it is a lockdown after all, but you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise as all of west London is out and about walking the high streets of Chiswick and Richmond to buy take away coffee, promenade along the river, or look for deer in the park. Booking anywhere to walk, like Kew Gardens, takes the forethought I am seldom capable of, hence, there is no chance of going there on a weekend. Instead we opted for a stroll around the gardens at Ham House. 

The box and yew parterre, interplanted with mounds of close clipped lavender and bordered by high yew hedges, is something out of A Draughtsman's Contract - very much the perfect winter garden (picture from slightly earlier in autumn last year though). I can only imagine its beauty enhanced by a frost. The kitchen garden is all but over, except for a row of splendid netted cabbages, and the ruby chard still shining on a pretty grey day. 

Very much worth the booking - it's owned by the National Trust and all its gardens remain open in this winter pandemic season. Plus coffee and a cake are still possible outside the cafe. Dress warmly, of course, and take a further stroll along a very pretty stretch of the river.

Hidden London - Derek Jarman at the Garden Museum

In lieu of a trip to Dungeness to see the real thing, check out the recreation of Jarman's beach cottage at the hidden way Garden Museum, which is tucked under the shadow of Lambeth Palace in a deconsecrated church, and easily missed. 

Paintings, small sculptures and his garden notebooks are on display along with films from the shingle garden and a series of haunting photographs, including one of him towards to end of his life showing the ravages AIDS related complications had taken on his body. Awful to see and remember the scourge AIDS was before effective drugs for HIV management. 

An interesting, but tiny exhibition in which I learned that Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd seemed to have met Jarman on a random trip to the seaside at Dungeness, culminating in Jarman sharing his plant list with Chatto. It is this encounter and list that was the genesis of her famous gravel garden. Who knew that little nugget of garden history? 

I rather liked reading in Jarman's notebook that he bought a dozen wallflowers at a boot fair for £1. So it's not just me then. More than admiring his beautiful handwriting, inked over initial pencil marks, one journal page includes a moving poem about AIDS victims with the refrain 'Cold, cold. cold they died so silently'. 

Other reason to visit the museum, which to be honest is rather dull even to me a garden nut, are the semi-tropical courtyard garden in the former graveyard packed with the kind of lush planting that might survive the average British winter, and two of its tombs. 

William Bligh, Captain of the Bounty, is memorialised for this and as the man who took breadfruit from the South Pacific to the West Indies, but not for any of his other expeditions, or acting as governor of New South Wales. Breadfruit was meant to be a food crop for the enslaved Africans on its plantations, but the small matter of a Mutiny put pay to plants being sourced in Tahiti as the Bounty did not make it there, hence a later and more successful expedition. 

A grand limestone tomb cornered by four carved trees and with scenes of exotic species and plants is that of John Tradescant, the elder who died in 1638. Plantsman and gardener, it is somewhat fitting that he ended up being part of a museum dedicated to his expert subject.