When I Needed a Winter Project, I Turned to Dylan Thomas - a Tommy & Moon Story

Before the snow came the smell of cinnamon.

I wanted to track it all the way back to its source, to see who gave it flight. I imagine a woman, seventy-five, making herself a cappuccino next to an open window. The air is cold and sharp but she needs a quick blast of late autumn’s best before she gets out with the whippet. Wisp is looking at her from her basket, scanning for indications from mum that her walk is coming. Don’t worry, Wisp: walkies is imminent - but then a song comes on the radio that she hasn’t heard in fifty years. The Serge Gainsbourg ballad throws her into a deep dream-state, a reverie that takes her all the way back to Paris. She walks to the cupboard to find the cinnamon shaker, brushing shoulders with actors and actresses who’d worked with Godard and Truffaut and Antonioni. She remembers the time she once saw Jane Birkin at a party and witnessed first-hand the effect her beauty had on all the men in the room.

I was two miles away from home, running at an easy, steady pace, thinking of ways I could brighten the winter. That smell of cinnamon came with a memory of being warm and at peace in front of an open fire and it tugged at my sleeve towards a project. A winter carving project. I wanted to find something beautiful to do. In the last mile, I turned to Dylan Thomas. I would draw out and carve the opening monologue from Under Milk Wood, the surreal dream-play from the Welsh writer. It would be my first independent carving project. I spoke to Moon about it.

‘That sounds great!’

‘I’d have to find somewhere to do it.’

‘Do it here,’ he said. The workshop’s free in the evening.’

I ordered some dirt cheap Brazilian green slate from a man called Gilberto. I bought it as a paving slab and rubbed it down smooth. Brazilian green slate is known to bleach darker over time, which is why a lot of letter carvers stay away from it, but I heard it takes a letter well and that’s all I was looking for. I found the copy of Under Milk Wood I’d bought in Scotland. I held it in my hands and it made me think of my granddad.

When I was a kid, he taught me how to spot a good book in a second-hand bookshop.

‘The only thing you need to know about a good book is that it gets read and then lent to someone, and when it comes back it might get re-read or lent to someone else. Look for wear and tear. The spine is a good place to spot it, especially when you’re scanning through a bookshelf. A good book shouldn’t look as if it’s been looked after - its words are more useful than that. It should journey with the reader through the messiness of life. It should be lent out, given back, thrown about, taken on holiday, used as a coaster, dropped down the toilet and pulled out - and whatever water it gets soaked in, be it in toilet water or it gets half-soaked by rain in a rucksack while travelling through Peru or Slovenia or Vietnam, it’s still important enough to get dried on a radiator even though the pages will never sit together again. It’s okay, the book doesn’t mind. If you’re really lucky, the previous owner would have written his or her name in the book. If you’re really, really lucky, you’ll get a year and location and you’ll be able to imagine what his life might have been like for the reader and how the book had changed them.’

I didn’t agree with everything he said. I thought it was perfectly possible to love a book and look after it as well, but I liked the spirit in which he said it, and it was impossible not to hear an echo of his words whenever I was in a bookshop. It was important to hear romanticised takes on things, especially when you’re a kid. Drawing from seventy years of wisdom when you’re one seventh of that age is only going to be positive for a kid’s personal development. As I get older, I think more and more about how lucky I was to have had him.

This is how I found the book I held in my hands: about ten years ago I was in at a big Tesco near Dumfries House in East Ayrshire. There was a small charity bookshelf and a bucket for donations after the checkouts. I followed what I would call “The Spinesweeper Method” granddad had taught me, looking for broken spines, signs of wear and tear, indications of readability and use and love. One stood out: an old copy of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. The spine was almost shot to bits but that worked in its favour. I knew I’d buy it straight away, partly for the childhood nostalgia factor of my granddad’s theory and partly as a way to honour him. I opened it. On the second page, an inscription, written with a good pen and a fine hand:

Not only did I have a name, a place, a year, but I also had the name of the bookshop I assume Mr Murray had bought it from. I was delighted. I don’t know how the book got here. Inverkirkaig was in the north west of Scotland, almost six hours north of this big Tesco in the south west. But get there it did, and soon it would travel even further south. I put a crisp £5 into the bucket, ten times more than the recommended donation.

Had the book travelled alone or did it travel down with its previous owner? Was Gordon Murray a Highlander or was he an Ayrshire man born and bred? Either way, a Scot was reading a Welsh writer and I thought that was absolutely delicious. I got a shiver when I think this Scotsman might have acted in this Welsh play. I hoped he had. I hope his Scottishness embraced the Welshness of it. I’d like to think Gordon Murray bought that copy in his early twenties after being dismissive of a group of Scots choosing to act in a Welsh play. Not that he had anything against the Welsh. What was wrong with choosing a Scottish play? But then Gordon’s opinion of the matter softens when he hears it on the radio, recorded in the fifties by a cast of all-Welsh actors and actresses. He begins to understand the enthusiasm of the community around him as they’re given their parts. But Gordon has a problem: he can’t act. And he doesn’t want to act. That hasn’t stopped most of the people here, including me, his sister will tell him. I won’t do it unless I know I can do it well. He walks down to the post office to tell Mrs Munro, postmistress-turned-theatre director. A few days later, she gets back to him, says she’s got a part with his name on it. But I can’t act, he replies. You don’t need to act. You just need to read. Just read? Just read. The 19-year-old thinks for a few seconds. That, he said, I can do.

And that’s how Gordon Murray got the part of the narrator, one of the most important roles in Under Milk Wood. He would meet his future wife on that local community production and his part in it becomes the most exhilarating, most memorable experience of his life. For years afterwards, he would be known as Ayrshire’s answer to Richard Burton, his audience and fellow cast members remembering how his narration made them bubble with delight. Whenever he was asked, he would happily recite it with the same resonance and enthusiasm and joy as he had on that first night. And he still remembered every word.

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’ and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

He’d never met a Welshman and never would, but he would always appreciate, through his wife and their children and a happy family life, what Dylan Thomas and the Welsh people as a whole had done for him.