Lucy’s Dad: Did I ever tell you that your grandfather once got into a fight with Dylan Thomas in a pub?
Lucy: Yes, I think you may have mentioned that twenty or thirty times during my O Levels. And again during my A Levels.
Lucy’s Dad: Did you do Dylan Thomas for A Level as well?
Lucy: No, but it didn’t stop you.
Lucy’s
Dad: I haven’t been to the pictures since I took you to see Robin Hood
in 1993. I had to take you out after Robin Hood fell in the moat and
you thought he was dead. We stuck to DVDs after that.
Lucy: So what did you think of the movie?
Lucy’s
Dad: I didn’t think Sienna Miller sounded significantly Irish. Or Welsh
or particularly English come to that. She looked quite like Caitlin
Thomas though.
Lucy: Apart from what the women looked like…
Lucy’s
Dad: Well, it’s not really about Dylan Thomas, is it? It’s about the
people around him. You didn’t learn much about him as a poet or his
life outside of his own home. For example, it showed you a glimpse of
his writer friends but only so they could be painted as villains. I
wanted to know who they were and why he sought out their company – how
they influenced him – but there was nothing about that.
Lucy: It
felt like quite a long film – it’s long on atmosphere and short on
incident. I do however have a new life goal as a result of having seen
it. I want a job like Keira Knightley’s, got up in a cocktail dress and
singing songs in the London Underground during air raids with piano
accordion accompaniment and a young man to operate a spotlight.
Lucy’s Dad: I don’t think they’d arrange air raids for you.
Lucy:
Unless you already knew something about their story I’m not sure from
the film that you’d understand that Dylan and Caitlin Thomas stayed
together in large part because they were co-dependent alcoholics. I
mean everyone spent a lot of time in pubs and there was one symbolic
scene where they crashed in through the door and fell giggling onto the
floor, but none of the ugliness or secrecy of alcoholism.
Lucy’s Dad: No, that was your grandfather’s problem of course.
Lucy: Go on then, I’ve been deliberately not asking you since I was 15. What was the fight about?
Lucy’s Dad: Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. I expect they’d all been fucking around.
Lucy: Dad!
