Aged seven-years old, sat with my grandfather in his front room, he would sip his tea and recite the poems he learnt at school to me.
Rudyard Kipling’s If was Granddad Harry’s particular favourite:
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run …”
I may have preferred Tiswas to Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade at the time, but it clearly had an impact.
I was lucky. Harry had a love of words and shared his passion with me from an early age – a tradition I now try to maintain with my own two daughters, aged four and eight respectively.
The fourth annual Fathers’ Story Week, starting today and running until Father’s Day this weekend, highlights the importance of male role models in getting kids to read.
So are dads (or granddads) better at story time than mums?
Dr Emyr Williams, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Glyndwr University in North Wales, believes that fathers can have more impact on a child’s fledgling grasp of literacy.
In a preschool world dominated by female figures, dads are different – hence they exert more potential to influence social learning. He explains:
“One of the ways in which children learn and develop is through mimicking and copying their role models.”
The role of father figures is, he says, particularly important to encourage boys to read independently, a group that traditionally looses interest in reading faster than girls.
“Fathers, grandfathers and other male relatives have the opportunity to change the path of literacy for young boys by encouraging a deep appreciation of literature established within a well-developed internal working model of seeing their hero read,” adds Dr Williams.
The importance of reading to young children has been well documented in recent years. Less well established, however, is how crucial the role of dads can be.
Recently, on Telegraph Men, Harry de Quetteville described story time as, “a humdrum yet powerful moment of communion between father and child, a moment when a bond of learning and trust is built.”
Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate and campaigner for children’s literacy, used a recent appearance at the Hay Festival to slam Government education policy for a fixation with the mechanics of reading, rather than fostering the enjoyment of reading for pleasure.
He said: “We constantly live with governments who concentrate on all these narrow aspects of reading, and not of interpretation and understanding.”
It’s a subject on which The Fatherhood Institute, a fatherhood think-tank focused on policy, research and practice, goes further.
“Evidence suggests that when dads do bedtime stories well, they can have more impact,” says Joint CEO Adrienne Burgess.
“Mums tend to stick to the script but dads talks round the story, respond to the child and ask more questions.”
“Mums could reflect and learn from that,” she adds.
Recent research compiled by the Fatherhood Institute highlights the importance of fathers to their children’s learning and development. It found, for example, that preschoolers whose dads read to them a lot behave and concentrate better at nursery, and do better in maths.
At age five, these children know and use more words, can pick out letters more accurately, and are better at problem solving. By age ten, their vocabulary is wider and their numeracy skills are better, too.
“Dads tend to have higher aspirations for their children. If they can harness that forward aspiration for reading, by demonstrating a passion for words, or being a more theatrical story teller, they set a very strong example,” says Burgess.
As a single dad, bedtime stories have always been a special bonding time for my children and myself.
At bedtime this week we’ll be turning pages as usual. We’ve polished off a couple of Roald Dahl books in the last month. Charlotte’s Web was a big hit. And, while The Secret Garden is slow going, an iPad poetry app featuring Kipling and Edward Lear is proving a grower.
I may not be necessarily better at story time, but I’d like to think I’m more passionate about it.
And that, Granddad Harry would be proud of that.
Do you agree with the ideas in this article? Post your views below.
I’ve been busy guest blogging for both the official DT 100 website and writing pieces for the Daily Telegraph‘s DT 100 microsite in association with Visit Wales – more of this in a forthcoming post.
The latest post for the former is about a recent journey in Dylan’s footsteps, tracing the early years in Swansea to Cwmdonkin Drive, where he lived as a boy, and the Kardomah Coffee Shop, where he cut his artistic teeth as a young man.
I even spent an afternoon poking around his old bedroom [pictured above], which has been lovingly restored to its shambolic 1934-era glory.
It’s like tour guide Matt Hughes told me over mugs of tea by Dylan’s old writing desk:
“Laugharne has The Boathouse, New Quay has the Apple House but Swansea has Cwmdonkin Drive.”
* Right up to date this weekend with Laugharne Live bringing Dylan Thomas devotees to West Wales.
As ever, follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to the RSS, for weekly updates from my travel-writing archive in the months to come.
It started with a shooting.
In March, 1945, the British army officer William Killick, recently returned from active service overseas, collected a machine gun from his home in southwest Wales.
He marched down to the neighbouring property and, fuelled by drink and a heated discussion in the Black Lion pub, fired several shots into the bungalow, Majoda. Inside was the poet Dylan Thomas [pictured above], his wife Caitlin McNamara and Kellick’s wife, Vera, Thomas’ childhood friend from Swansea.
Thomas refused to testify against Killick at the subsequent court case in Lampeter and the soldier was acquitted. But the shooting also marked the end of a tremendously creative period in Thomas’ life.
By July 1945, Thomas and his family had left New Quay never to return.
This brief but important period forms the backdrop to The Edge of Love, a semi-fictionalised film about Thomas’ life released in 2008 with Rebekah Gilbertson, a descendant of William and Vera Killick, acting as producer.
Thomas had moved to Majoda on the fringe of New Quay in September 1944. It was one of the coldest winters on record and the bungalow, little more than a wood-and-asbestos shack, had no amenities.
Yet despite the conditions, Thomas was happy here and this reflected in his output. He completed several major works, including A Winter’s Tale and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, plus the radio script Quite Early One Morning.
“It was,” says David N. Thomas, author of Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Tow Mansions and a Bungalow, “one of the most productive periods of his adult life. A second flowering.”
A place by the sea
Wales is expecting an influx of Dylan devotees in 2014 with a major cultural programme to mark the centenary of his birth.
Most Thomas pilgrimages lead from Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, where he was born, to Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, where both he and Caitlin are buried.
The well-trodden trail leads via Swansea pubs and the country lanes of West Wales to The Boat House, where the family moved in 1949.
It was from here that Thomas left for New York in 1953 as part of an American reading tour. He was just starting to receive critical acclaim for his work when he died on November 9 at St Vincent’s Hospital.
But to leave out New Quay is to omit a crucial element of Thomas’ story.
That’s why I’ve come to Ceredigion for a self-drive weekend, exploring the country lanes and rustic pubs that inspired one of the shortest but most creatively dynamic eras of his life.
The journey mirrors a project by Literature Wales, a series of one-off walks during summer 2014, whereby in-situ contemporary writers and actors will bring places from this period of his story to life.
I start my odyssey in his footsteps by approaching the charming seaside town of New Quay the same way Dylan would have approached it – walking along what is today the Ceredigion Coast Path from Majoba towards the town.
In Quite Early One Morning he describes this very walk, creeping out after dawn to breathe the sea air and walk the silent streets of the “the cliff-perched town at the far end of Wales.”
The windows of the pastel-coloured, matchbox houses still glisten in the morning sun just as he described them.
The approach to town via Brongwyn Lane, repurposed as Goosegog Lane for Under Milk Wood, opens up before me to reveal New Quay, higgledy-piggledy and sea-breeze blown, to be little different now from Dylan’s day.
The Dylan Thomas New Quay trail map, available from the tourist information centre, highlights places around town that Thomas frequented, taking in the old post office, from where he posted his scripts to London, Manchester House, the former draper’s shop, and notably the Black Lion Hotel, the bar most often frequented by Dylan and his friends.
For fans of his work, it’s a chance to connect with the landmarks he recorded in his punch-drunk verse.
Local hospitality
That night over dinner at the Black Lion Hotel, now re-opened as a restaurant with rooms, the locally based writer Roger Bryan describes how Thomas’ time in New Quay inspired some of his best characters.
This ear for gossip and personality traits became a key device for developing the script for Under Milk Wood. Indeed, many suggest that New Quay, not Laugharne, provided the real inspiration for Llareggub, the setting for his best-known play for voices.
“He drank in the Black Horse Hotel and was fascinated by the local characters, especially the then landlord, Jack Pat, who sometimes rode his horse right into the tiny, one-room bar,” says the Lancashire-born owner of Plas Llanina, the erstwhile country pile of the patron of poetry and arts Lord Howard de Walden.
“He repurposed the local farmers, shopkeepers and sea captains to populate his own stories.”
The painter Augustus John introduced de Walden to Thomas and his lordship was suitably impressed by the young poet’s work to offer him free use of the 18th-century Apple House [pictured below] as a writing studio.
The dilapidated storage shed was located in the grounds of his mansion, Plas Llanina. Dylan was living down the road at Majoba with his young family at this time and craved a place of tranquillity to work.
Today the ruined structure of the Apple House remains at the bottom of the tree-fringed garden. Ivy creeps defiantly through the broken-down window frames while the stone chimney clings to the roof with an air of perilous desperation.
Roger plans to open the grounds on selected dates in 2014 for people to admire the Apple House in all its ruined, falling-down glory – eventually to start raising funds to save it.
The Apple House
From the archives
The next morning I venture beyond New Quay, driving the country roads of Ceredigion that Thomas came to know so well.
Heading towards Aberystwyth, I eschew the coast road in favour of the more circuitous but scenic backroads.
The drive takes me through the rural wooded valley of the River Aeron, passing tiny farm estates and lost-in-time chapels.
These are the roads where Dylan would join the local vet, Tommy Herbert, on his rounds of the farms to gather material for his stories.
On the way, I stop off at Plas Gelli, a modest country-house estate located near the hamlet of Tal-sarn.
Today privately owned, Dylan and Caitlin lodged here between 1941 and 1943 at the invitation of William and Vera Killick, the redwood-engulfed house providing wartime shelter from the bombing of London and Swansea.
Today, a wooded public footpath leads past the house, towards the banks of the River Aeron, where it is suggested that Dylan’s first child, Aeronwy, was conceived.
A letter Thomas sent in August 1942 to a friend in London describes the sanctuary of life at Gelli. He wrote: “I watch the sun from a cool room and know that there are trees being trees outside and that I do not have to admire them.”
The letter and the sketch map he drew of fictionalised Llareggub are just two of the items to feature in Dylan, a major exhibition from June 28 to December 20, 2014, at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
The library is home to the extensive Dylan Thomas collection, which will be bolstered by the arrival in March 2014 of a set of Thomas’ original notebooks on loan from the University of Buffalo in New York City.
The library hopes to digitise the entire collection for posterity in due course.
“Before I joined the library I’d probably only ever read A Child’s Christmas In Wales. But now, having studied the archive, I feel like I know Thomas as a man,” says interpretation officer Mari Elin.
“He was much more than his popular image as a poet and a drunk. There is much more depth to his work.”
The three key elements of the exhibition are a set of more interpretative exhibits and sound installations in the Gregynog Gallery, the temperature-controlled Hengwrt Gallery to display more delicate items and an installation piece, based on life at the writing shed in Laugharne, by the visual artists Pete Finnemore and Russell Roberts.
One treasured exhibit, finding its place amongst a literary bar to pull poems, a walk-through Llareggub and a legacy section to record your own reactions to Dylan’s life and work, is a hand-written wordlist, columns of rhyming words Dylan used to compile his verse.
“This proves,” says Mari, “how important the sounds of the words were to him.”
Llareggub reborn
Back in New Quay, I meet the poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch to discuss the age-old theory about the true location of Llareggub.
Visitors to West Wales next summer will have an opportunity to decide for themselves if they venture beyond the traditional haunts of Swansea and Laugharne.
“Generations of my family have lived in this house,” says Wynne-Rhydderch, whose latest book, Banjo, was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2012. My maternal grandfather was Dr Jones, the village doctor for 30 years.
“He remembered patching up Caitlin one night after a particularly heavy session in the Black Lion.”
The poet has opened a retreat for writers and artists, Write by the Coast, in her converted 19th-century stable block in time for the centenary year, and will be poet in residence at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse during June 2014.
“Knowing the setting and the local characters, my feeling is that – while probably an amalgam – more of Under Milk Wood was based on New Quay than Laugharne,” she says.
“Quite simply,” she adds, “Dylan was always attracted to the most inaccessible places.”
* The tenth edition of the annual D.H. Lawrence Festival is currently under way in Eastwood, Lawrence’s home town in Nottinghamshire. It runs until September 21 with the The D.H. Lawrence Society’s Birthday Lecture on Wednesday this week. The next big literary story for me is the Dylan Thomas centenary in 2014 – more on that soon. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS for more story updates.
The quiet in the reading room is almost tangible.
Librarians busy themselves filing rare first editions of novels, corrected proofs and crinkly old newspaper reviews. Students scrutinise leather-bound texts.
But, despite the hushed reverence of scholarly activity, there’s also a sense that deep passions are simmering beneath the surface – the subject of study is just that kind of author.
“I first read Sons & Lovers when I was 16 years old and found the way he expresses sexuality through nature to be totally different to any other writer,” says Annalise Grice, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, researching the modernist writer D.H. Lawrence’s depiction of the new women genre. She adds:
“He’s a very sensual writer, not a sexual one.”
I meet Annalise while visiting the university’s D.H. Lawrence Research Centre and she takes me to see the Reading Room, where part of Lawrence’s prodigious output is held.
The university has been steadily building a collection of some 4,500 items since the mid 1950s. It plays a key role in the annual D.H. Lawrence Festival, staged in September in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, and will contribute academic expertise to events this month to mark the centenary of the publication of Sons and Lovers.
For many, the image of D.H. Lawrence is summed up by the poet Philip Larkin, who wrote:
“Sexual intercourse began / In 1963 (which was rather late for me) / Between the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”
This refers to Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned for obscenity.
The publishing house, Penguin, brought the test case for publication to the Old Bailey in 1960, where the prosecuting counsel, Mr Mervyn Griffith-Jones, famously asked the jury whether they considered Lawrence’s novel was something they would wish their wives or servants to read.
The trial marked a watershed in attitudes towards public decency and, when the ban was lifted, it became a best seller, ushering in a new age of sexual freedom in Britain.
Lawrence had become one of the most distinctive voices of the 20th century – not bad for a sickly miner’s son from working-class Nottinghamshire.
Early days
David Herbert Lawrence was born in the mining town of Eastwood on September 11, 1885, the fourth of five children to Arthur John Lawrence and his wife Lydia.
Ill health and a sensitive nature marked him as an outsider from a young age, caught between the marital tension of his social-climbing mother and hard-drinking father. These are themes he would return to many times in his career.
The young Lawrence was desperate to escape the mining town and gained a scholarship to study for his teacher’s certificate at University College, Nottingham from 1906 to 1908.
After a stint teaching in Croydon and bouts of ill health, he returned to Nottinghamshire in 1912 and a chance meeting changed the course of his life forever.
He went to see his old languages professor, Ernest Weekley, for advice and instead found the professor’s German wife, Frieda von Richthofen. The couple eloped soon afterwards, the women six years his elder causing a scandal by leaving her husband and young children behind.
They spent several itinerant years travelling, first to Munich and then to Gargnano, near Lake Garda, where Lawrence worked on Sons and Lovers, published the following May.
They made a brief return to England in 1919 before travelling extensively to Australia, Sri Lanka and New Mexico, Lawrence the struggling writer and Frieda the doting partner who claimed, “I love him with 1,000 different loves.”
The intensity of this relationship, and the Freudian relationship he had shared with his own mother, informed the sexual nature of his work. As Lawrence writes in Sons and Lovers:
“It was as if the pivot and pole of his life from which he could not escape, was his mother.”
For Andrew Harrison, Director of the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre, there is more to Lawrence’s work than the overt sexuality of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
“I was in sixth form in Warwickshire when I first read some of his short stories, notably Odour of Chrysanthemums and You Touched Me. I felt an enormous sense of intimacy,” says Harrison. “Lawrence deals brilliantly with burgeoning sexuality and speaks to adolescents in a very tactile way.”
“People say Lawrence is a writer you grow out of and into Joyce. “To me, that’s moronic. I think he grows with you.”
Home town tour
From Nottingham, I pick up the trail at the D.H. Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwoo0d [pictured above].
This is the starting point for the Blue Line Trail, a one-hour walking route through residential streets, past terraced houses and local pubs, to places associated with his life story.
The walk takes in the Mechanics Institute, a Victorian lending library for working men where the young Lawrence would read, the Congregational Chapel where the family attended service and the Three Tuns pub, the favourite watering hole of Lawrence senior after a day’s work down the pit, which would turn up in Sons and Lovers as the Moon and Stars.
From the top of the hill on Lynncroft, and looking across the green space of the Canyons on Walker Street, the view extends to the mining villages beyond – Brinsley, Moorgreen and Annesley – where he documented the encroachment of industry on the Midlands landscape.
In Sons and Lovers he wrote:
“The hills were golden with evening; deep in the wood showed the darkening purple of bluebells. It was everywhere perfectly still, save for the rustling of leaves and birds.”
It’s 8a Victoria Street, the cramped miner’s cottage where he was born, that offers the greatest insight into Lawrence’s early life.
The cottage now houses the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum and offers a glimpse of the tough conditions of Victorian mining communities. The gaslight burns in the front parlour, kept for Sunday best, and the fire glows in the hearth in the kitchen with its slop-stone sink and carbolic soap.
I can imagine the family sat around the kitchen table, his mother sewing, his father eating supper, and the young Lawrence drawing on the floor along side his siblings. Even the floral wallpaper in the children’s bedroom has been recreated to capture a snapshot of family in the Victorian era.
“What I admire about Lawrence is his attitude as a non-conformist and his ability to transcend his working-class roots,” explains Senior Heritage Assistant Carolyn Melbourne, as we walk through the family home from the adjoining exhibition about his life next door.
Lawrence always had an uneasy relationship with Eastwood and there was a lot of antipathy towards him locally for many years after his death, explains Carolyn. He often based his characters on real local people, barely changing their names, and locals said of him:
“E wor nowt b’r mardy bugger” (local dialect for being a moody character).
“Yet, today, he is a cult figure,” she adds. “He may be best known for his views on sexuality but, for me, it is his insight into ecology that makes him more relevant today than in any other previous generation.”
I finish the walk at the Heritage Centre, which puts Lawrence’s legacy into the broader social context of the East Midlands, and explores the impact of the Chatterley trial after his death. To this day Lawrence, it seems, stirs conflicting emotions.
On the blackboard in the recreation of the Victorian schoolroom, the chalk-dust graffiti reads: “D.H. Lawrence, I love and hate him. Liz, USA 2013.”
Exile years
Lawrence rarely returned to Britain after his self-imposed exile and died in Vance, Southern France, on Sunday March 2, 1930.
He was buried in the local cemetery and Frieda commissioned an elaborate gravestone, bearing a mosaic effigy of a phoenix, to mark his final resting place. This cane now be found at the Birthplace Museum in Eastwood.
Back at the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre, the students are dispersing and the librarians filing away the folios. Lawrence enthusiasts from around the world will converge on the centre (open to the public if you book and bring photo identification) and flock to Eastwood this month to celebrate Lawrence.
They will come to remember a man whose writing may have shocked the establishment, but it also managed to capture something of the emotions that stir within us all.
“It was the sheer intensity of his work that really spoke to me,” smiles Annalise Grice as we say our goodbyes.
“He says in one of his letter that he wanted to really dig down into the carbon when he writes. I feel that. It’s as if he’s writing what I am.”
* This story first appeared in Discover Britain magazine in August, 2013. A follow-up piece appeared on the National Geogrpahic Traveller blog. Read Nottinghamshire: the D. H. Lawrence Trail.
