Dylan Thomas's writing shed

 Yesterday’s note on guidebooks should have included an example: a piece of writing that gives a reader a sense of a place. Roger Deakin made a trip to Laugharne, Wales to see Dylan Thomas’s writing shed. Here are highlights:

 

Thomas mostly wrote not in the boathouse, but in its wooden garage. So, like garage music, his was garage poetry. I see straight away that it has the optimum dimensions for a writing shed: fourteen by nine, with a whitewashed boarded ceiling over a pair of pine cross-beams a foot above head height.

 

Deakin had several writing sheds and was opinionated about what made a good one. Deakin was interested in the pin-ups that Thomas had tacked to the wall — Yeats, Lawrence and Joyce — and in the portrait of Thomas painted by Augustus John. But he was annoyed that the “heritage industry” was trying too hard. Thomas’s shed had been staged to make it appear the poet had just stepped out for a minute. Balled up bits of paper littered the floor. An exercise book, open to the manuscript of a poem, showed he’d been crossing out a lot of what he’d written.

 

The shed, or garage, has a wood-stove on one wall, wooden kitchen table by the window that faces south out on to the estuary and miles of mud flats, and two simple slat-backed wooden chairs, one with the poet’s jacket half slung over it.

 

Deakin could hear a heron out on the flats. Through the window, he could see the tide was running out, leaving boats to settle in the mud.

 

Dylan Thomas put himself on the edge of the known world, in this minimal space, looking out across the estuary, about as far away from human civilization as possible.

 

I like the piece because Deakin, without saying a word, is thinking about his own need for solitude, his own move from London to Walnut Tree Farm. It’s a moving piece for readers who know that they also need solitude.

• Source: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 142-4.