Dylan Thomas served briefly as an anti-aircraft gunner during WWII, but was ultimately rejected from service due to illness. In order to avoid the London air raids, he returned to his native Wales, settling on the “cliff-perched” town of New Quay. Here he continued to write poetry, and started a number of screenplays for the producer/director Donald Taylor (addressed below). In the following letter, Thomas writes about his work on the script for Suffer Little Children, a project which he soon aborted, although parts of it were used in the 1948 film Good Time Girl. Though the screenplay was never finished, the Biblical phrase stayed with him, and he would later invoke the passage in “Unsex the Skeleton”: “Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.”
To Donald Taylor
Tuesday March 28 [19]45
Majoda, New Quay, Cards
Dear Donald,
Today, limp in the hut, watching the exhausting sea, lost in our Betty—Betty dark?—drowned in our Sophie—Sophie fair?—but writing little until tomorrow, first, cold thing in the morning, with the dew on the grass, and the Captains in bed, and the trees talking double rook. I was so very sorry you went back. Did you get a sleeper? And even the Captain is gone, with all his wheezy rumbling as though he were trying to bring up from his cavernous inside a very old, rusty, seaweedy anchor. Frank sparkles still, but the Lion lies down. This is only to say (1) I hope you’ll be back soon, (2) I do hope you can, somehow, manage a little money this week, by some not-so-Verity ruse, (3) I’ll work as hard as I know on the synopsis or whatever we call it, as long as we call it good, and (4) Please don’t forget to have a shot at doing those ‘personal’ thousand words for the introduction to my American Selected Writing. Let me see what you bang out. If you’re too busy, I can ask Tommy E. to do something, but I hope you aren’t. You’ve got Laughlin’s letter, haven’t you? He wants the thing very, very, very soon. Let me know.
Tomorrow morning I shall be fit as a tuba again, and will work, work, work,
Ever,
Dylan
Note: Both Betty and Sophie were characters in Suffer Little Children.
From The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas. Edited by Paul Ferris. London: J.M. Dent, 2000.
FURTHER READING
His love letter to Wales.
On Under Milk Wood, the famous radio play reputedly based on Thomas’s stay in New Quay.
Full text of “Unsex the Skeleton.”