Do Not Go Gentle

Book 0: Quick Reads

by Phil Carradice

Genres: Biographical

Synopsis

It's November 1953 and Dylan Thomas, Britain's finest poet, is dying in a hospital bed in New York. What brought him to this end is not clear. But he is a man tormented by fear ? fear of failing as a writer, fear of a marriage doomed to end in disaster, even fear of death itself ? all of which have led him to find comfort in alcohol, outrageous behaviour and the arms of other women. Now, as Dylan lies waiting for the end, he thinks back over his life, from his childhood in Swansea to his days as a wild young poet in London, from his tempestuous marriage to Caitlin MacNamara to his final weeks in New York. Dylan Thomas may not have wanted to die but he had little desire to live. An interesting and attractive figure, who was doomed. Do Not Go Gentle paints a picture of a man who has clearly reached the end of his tether.

Release date: January 23, 2014

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 65

Sample

The room is coldly white, like hospital rooms the world over. White walls, white bed, white sheets. Even the nurses are dressed in white, in stiff, starched uniforms that creak when they walk or bend over the figure in the bed. Like giant seagulls they hover and swoop at the faintest sound.

Above the headboard of the bed, half hidden by the oxygen tent, is a white nameplate. ‘Dylan Marlais Thomas, admitted 11/5/1953’ – written the American way, with the month before the day. Not that anybody takes much notice. Such detail hardly matters to those who sit and wait.

He doesn’t move, the figure in the bed, just lies there like a rock on the seashore. He breathes slowly, noisily, through his nose. The tubes and wires that snake away from his body to the side of the bed, and the oxygen tent, make him seem like some science fiction robot.

Visitors have come and gone all day but, apart from the nurse and the patient, at the moment there is just one person in the room. He is a bearded man of medium height. He waits and he watches, staring around the room as if he is waiting for somebody to jump out and attack him. Eventually he sighs. The nurse glances across at him.

“It is sad, isn’t it?” she says. “A writer like him, a man of such wonderful words. And now there are no words, no words at all.”

The bearded man nods. “I guess so,” he says, his mid-west accent surprisingly strong. “But it’ll come to us all, sooner or later. The one guarantee we’ve got in life is that we’ll all leave it sometime.”

The nurse stares at him, trying to work out if he is serious or trying to be funny with her. Finally she decides that his words are genuine. “Are you a poet, too, Mr Berryman?”

The man smiles, embarrassed but happy to be included.

“A little poet. Not like him.” He points to the patient and then they lapse into silence again. Only the heavy breathing of the man in the bed breaks the quiet of the hospital room. Berryman sighs again and yawns. He tries to hide the yawn behind his hand – waiting for someone to die, even if he is a great poet – is tiring.

“I’m going outside for a smoke,” he says. “That’s OK, isn’t it?”

The nurse nods. “That’s fine, Mr Berryman. He doesn’t know if you’re sitting there or not. He can’t see or hear anything.”

Of course I can bloody hear. I’m not dead. Not yet, at least. I’ve just gone back, retreated, you could say, to somewhere safe, somewhere nobody can hurt me. Nothing unusual in that, I’ve done it all my life. First sign of a cold or sniffle? Bed, with Mam feeding me milky bread and sugar. Caitlin, my Cat, used to do it too – feed me, comfort me. But that was when she still loved me.

It’s restful, lying here like this. No more decisions to make, no problems to sort out, and the world such a long way away. It’s not telling a lie – and, believe me, I know all about telling lies – when I say I’m happy to be here, happy for the first time since Dad died.

I’ve always told lies. Why tell the truth, I think, when a lie can be so much more interesting? Except that waiting here like this, it doesn’t seem important to make things up any more. So maybe it’s time for a little baring of the soul, a little telling of the truth. I’ll try, anyway.

Childhood was magical. Not perfect, there were far too many rows and arguments for that – rows between Mam and Dad, between Nancy and me, between me and everyone really, apart from Mam – but still magical. Spoilt? You could say. Ruined to the point of cruelty, one very tidy uncle, a vicar and man of the church, used to say. He also said I ought to be in a madhouse. He may have had a point.

It was warm, that house in Cwmdonkin Drive, always warm, no matter what the weather outside was up to. And as I remember it, the wind was always blowing in from the Bristol Channel, battering the slates off the roofs. I suppose that’s what comes of building houses so high up on the side of the hill – they didn’t name the area Uplands for nothing. Our house was Number 5. Number 5, Cwmdonkin Drive, in, what did I once call Swansea? That ‘ugly, lovely town’ by the sea.

It’s a winter Sunday evening, Dad in his study, marking school exercise books, Mam making tea in the scullery. The scullery is where the cooking and washing-up takes place, the kitchen being the room where we eat and live most of the time. That leaves the other room downstairs for ‘best’ – very important in any. . .