Writer Dylan Thomas and broadcaster Cerys Matthews grew up looking at the same view of Swansea Bay and share a love of nature and landscape – now Cerys has brought one of his most famous works to life for a new, younger audience
Hear the recordings
Cerys Matthews unlocks the fascinating recordings of Dylan Thomas’ family and friends made by her uncle Colin Edwards, on BBC Sounds. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04m9z8t
Listening to Cerys Matthews, BBC radio broadcaster, musician and author, read from Under Milk Wood is thrilling, enlivening and soothing all at the same time. Her eyes sparkle with mischief and the sheer joy of reading aloud as her silken musical voice with its beautiful Welsh lilt compels Dylan Thomas’ characters to leap off the page.
We’re sitting on a bench in London’s Kew Gardens on a blue-sky December day talking about Cerys’ latest book, a retelling of writer Dylan Thomas’s 1954 ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood – an adaptation for younger readers illustrated in superb detail by artist Kate Evans. We’d been walking and recording for the magazine’s Plodcast, and after chatting about the book and her deep love of the countryside, I was bursting to ask the former singer of 1990s band Catatonia to read aloud these words she knows so intimately. Her lyrical tones transported me to the “cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street” of fictional seaside village Llareggub (bugger all backwards).
A GATEWAY TO LLAREGGUB
It took Cerys 10 years to bring this, her fourth book for children, to fruition. After getting the blessing of Thomas’s family, including his granddaughter Hannah Ellis, Cerys created an abridged version “to exist as a gateway for those who are not old enough for the full-fat version”. “The original is so exceptionally brilliant, but it wasn’t something I could read, as it was, to my very young children,” she explains. “I love books that sound great and are so characterful and books that have such great texts that you bring them along with you during the daytime. That’s where the idea was born really.”
“It becomes abundantly clear when you distil down the text that this is a love letter to life”
The play, originally commissioned for radio by the BBC, tells the story of 24 hours in the life of Llareggub’s flawed and complex residents. Kate Evan’s atmospheric illustrations fill in many details found in the original, such as Mrs Cherry Owen’s trotters for feet, the cluttered, chaotic one-room home she shares with drunken Mr Cherry Owen and the layout of Llareggub’s Coronation Street.
“You’ve got all walks of life in there – the fun ones, the dreamers. That’s why it’s so brilliant,” adds Cerys. “Then there’s the ones who are so mischievious – Jack Black, the cobbler, we just don’t know quite what he’s up to. He goes out into the ‘already sinning dark’ and you see off he walks with his trousers done up with a bit of cobbler’s thread, the bible in his hand…”
Cerys believes Under Milk Wood has a message of positivity and love at its core. “It’s about warts and all life and living as a community, and about us all being different and us all being flawed, but ultimately having hope that there is goodness in us all as well. It becomes abundantly clear when you distil down the text that this is a love letter to life, wherever you’re from in the world.”
The play, which Thomas began writing when he was still at school, is shot through with cheeky humour, but also with his love of the natural world and the Welsh landscape: “Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls’ gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan’s general shop…”
“It’s the beauty of his writing,” says Cerys, “and being able to read it out loud and put voices to the characters. There are so many elements I love in it. But I love reading full stop; it doesn’t just have to be Thomas. It’s music isn’t it? When you hit writing that you love you just hear it sing.”
And Cerys has created music for his words. For her 2104 album A Child’s Christmas, Poems and Tiger Eggs, Cerys composed orchestral music for Thomas’s story, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a project that premiered as a Christmas ballet at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff in 2016. It has been performed many times since, including last Christmas at Theatr Clwyd in Mold, North Wales. Produced to mark the centenary of Thomas’ birth, Cerys’ album also put music to his poems And Death Shall Hath No Dominion and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,
FAMILY STORIES
Perhaps Cerys’s most unique connection to the poet is through her uncle, broadcaster Colin Edwards, who in the 1960s, spent his spare time recording interviews of over 150 people who had known Thomas. “There was a moment when everyone was turning away from Thomas because of his disrepute, and my uncle wanted to do something about it. My uncle, as a broadcaster living outside of Wales, recognised that he was a huge literary figure and that if nobody took notes and made interviews it would forever be lost who the real Dylan was,” explains Cerys. “So he interviewed Florence Thomas his mum, Aeronwy the daughter, the sons, the friends, family, the pub owners, the doctor that saw to him in New York [where Thomas died in 1953 aged 39], the editors, the publishers, the patrons, anyone who had anything to do with Dylan my uncle got in touch with and recorded. I had the tapes, the physical tapes – it’s lovely when it’s one touch away isn’t it?”
Colin Edwards’ tapes are now in the National Library of Wales, available for anyone to hear.
WILD IN WALES
While she grew up in Swansea, looking out on the same crescent bay that Dylan Thomas knew when he was a child, Cerys spent a lot of her childhood holidays on a farm, and her parents instilled a love of the natural world in their kids. “My mum and dad loved the outdoors. A lot of my family are from West Wales, which is very wild. We had a caravan there and my cousins had a farm there, so when school breaks allowed we’d be in West Wales. That meant picking periwinkles from the rockpools, helping out on the farm with the milking, it was helping calving and with the slurry – everything. I wanted to be a farmer when I was growing up. It didn’t feel that we were brought up to be city kids so much.”
Her love of the outdoors has a huge influence on Cerys’s approach to life and helps her to stay grounded. “The world makes no sense – the urbanised, the suburbanised world – all the information all the injustices and all the moronic things that humans do to each other is very hard to make sense of. So, to walk out, if you can find it still, into relative wilderness and see what the natural world is up to after millions and millions and millions of years of changing, there’s a sense to it that can refill the batteries, for sure.”
Not many DJs will base a three-hour programme on Imbolc – the ancient Gaelic celebration of the arrival of spring – or fruit trees, as Cerys has done on her recent BBC Radio 6 Sunday morning shows. “I love plants and nature. In any time off I tend to want to drag the family to mountains and go hiking.” But Cerys’ outings with her blended family of five children and husband, producer Steve Abbott, tend not to be your average rambles. “My favourite trip was to Everest base camp [in 2019] when my sons were nine and 12 – it was so astonishing and exceptional.” A winter hike to Ben Nevis followed, then a pilgrimage walk to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall; Scafell Pike is next on her horizons. “We all went up Snowdon [Yr Wyddfa] – I think it was January, it was wet and cold and misty, but we did it. I did have to push one of them up with my head for the last few metres,” she laughs.
“I’ve got that kind of brain – I like a challenge. I like pilgrimages and mountains. You start there and go to the top and go down again. It’s a bite-size bit of understandability – maybe it’s a control thing, a small thing in life you can control.” Whichever challenge Cerys takes on next, you can be sure remarkable words and music will be her companions.
Countryfile Plodcast
Listen to Margaret’s chat with Cerys Matthews, episode 183 of the BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast, on all podcast providers. countryfile.com/podcast
Production editor Margaret Bartlett lives in South Wales and enjoys discovering more about Welsh history, language and culture.