'C' is for castle and curlews and cockleshells

I was excited to visit Laugharne again after so many years. I hadn’t yet introduced Dean to this special place that held me for seven and a half formative years when I lived here in my twenties as an art student and then a young Mum. Some friends lent us their home while they were on holiday and each evening after we had walked all my old paths (and discovered new ones), visited my old houses and said hello to some old faces, we would sit at the bottom of their garden looking out at the estuary and the castle, watching the tide and the boats, the people and the birds, quietly come and go.

I was an eighteen year old city girl when I moved to Laugharne in 1991. I’d applied to art degree courses in many cities and I lugged my portfolio to Brighton, Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham but I didn’t get accepted to any of them, even though I was bursting with enthusiasm and ‘making’ was everything to me. When the tutor from Carmarthen College came to give a talk to our year group about their HND in Crafts, something fit for me and when I went down for the interview they were so down to earth and friendly which was a refreshing change from all the pretension which seemed to be the norm on the BA courses. I excitedly accepted their offer of a place.

Me and my boyfriend at the time drove down to Carmarthen in his van to try and find me somewhere to live before my course started in September. The college had sent a photocopied list of all the student accommodation in the area and we drove around to check them out. There were lots of spare rooms in pebbledash bungalows around the town centre belonging to old ladies and kindly as they were with their offer of cups of tea and welshcakes they weren’t my idea of student life. 

But there was one on the list that held a glimmer and I can still conjure up that excited feeling in my belly when I read HUGE SHARED HOUSE WITH GARDEN AND ESTUARY VIEWS ADJASCENT TO THE CASTLE IN LAUGHARNE. 13 MILES FROM COLLEGE. I didn’t drive or have a car so thirteen miles was out of the question but we thought we’d visit just to see the castle and the coastline before we headed back up to Leeds. The house was stunning, slightly disheveled Georgian grandeur, weeds on the gravel drive, render crumbling on its frontage and altogether in need of some attention but all the windows with their wooden shutters were beautiful and I was so curious to step inside the big black front door.

Castle House stood at the top of the hill in between the clock tower and the castle ruins and overlooked the town and the hill beyond. It was charming. I peeped over the side gate and into the garden and saw one of its residents in the garden but I didn’t go in to look around as I really thought that living there was out of the question and I didn’t want to bother anyone. 

I don’t know how, but somewhere on our journey home (this was before the internet) I discovered there was a bus that ran every hour between Carmarthen and Laugharne. Maybe we passed it, the number 222 on our way back down the A40, my memory escapes me, but I do remember that the moment I arrived back home I got straight on the phone and I rang up Castle House and asked for a room. “Which room would you like?" said the voice on the phone. I said I had no idea as I hadn’t seen any but could I have one with a castle view and a fireplace?

September came and I waved goodbye to my Mum and Dad and sister and my red bricked terraced house in Headingley and headed off to my new life in the countryside. After the five hour drive we parked in the gravelly drive and I knocked on that black door with the big brass door knocker. Some moments later an old well dressed lady opened the door and said in a very posh voice “Are yoooooo the student?” I had a moment of panic about having ended up in a quiet elderly persons house after all but the lady who we would come to know as ‘Aunty Anne’ led me through to the back kitchen and introduced me to my new landlord and landlady, Adam and Susannah and all their dogs and cats and kitchen chaos and I knew I was in the right place.

I was so delighted to find I had a scan of this sketchbook page as I lost most of my Laugharne sketchbooks in the fire. It shows a corner of my room in Castle House which was the nicest room I have ever had. It had pale blue walls, bare floorboards, a chaise longue, a coffee table made of a slab of oak, abstract art on the walls, a huge wooden mantlepiece and a wood burning stove. It was on the top floor. One window looked out across town and the other, which had a silky cushioned window seat, looked out over the castle tower. I couldn’t believe where I had landed.

And outside of the house was a whole new world to discover. Instead of traffic and big buildings, there was a peaceful estuary where the tide would creep quietly in and then out again, leaving silvery sands stretching out for miles dotted with herons and cormorants and curlews. There was a lichen covered castle that would echo with the cackle of jackdaws, rooks and crows. 

I took woodland walks that felt safe rather than edgy, where the silvery water would peep through the big, old trees. I gathered kindling, made friends with trees and the first time I heard a curlew call under a full moon it blew my little mind. I loved my new life in the countryside.

And the wonderful thing was, thirty years later, nothing had changed.

“Can you really hear the mud popping?” Dean asked as we walked on the foreshore one morning. “Yes I can, listen. It pops and it trickles all the time.” His tinnitus didn’t leave room for this subtlety but I reveled in it. It was a sound I associated with this peaceful place. It smelled right too. Mud and seaweed and clean air. 

We watched the egrets wading with their big yellow feet (not unlike somebody else's footwear),

we collected cockleshells

And watched crabs sidling in the mud. Once you spotted one, you realised they were everywhere. 

It was so good to be here with Dean, his company tying together my then and my now.

When I told people I was moving to Laugharne some would say, "Oh, Dylan Thomas country!?” I’d never heard of him then. I wasn’t ‘into’ poetry, I didn’t ‘get it’ and in all the years I lived there I never visited his Boat House as I was a poor student who couldn’t afford the entrance fee. I once picked up Under Milk Wood in a non committal way and it was just a jumble of words to me then and I didn't get very far. But I would pass his famous writing shed on the way to the woods and peer inside, envious of the desk with views of the silvery water and rolling hills beyond.

Dylan Thomas came to Laugharne when he was just 19, only a few months older than I was! The writer Richard Hughes lived in the Castle House then and young Dylan, inspired by his work, came to seek him out and stayed there with him and his family for a while. He wrote Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog in the gazebo in the castle grounds. After Richard left the house in 1949 Dylan called it ‘the best house in the best place’ and asked if he could rent it but Aunty Anne, the SAME Aunty Anne that answered the door to me, didn’t want another literary type in the house and said no! I’m not sure how, forty years later, she ended up with a house full of art students! 

On the top floor of my new digs were the students and on the floor below, the ones who had dropped out of art school or had finished their course but didn’t want to leave! We were a creative crowd of painters, sculptors and musicians. There was always someone singing a song, drawing a picture or making something or other. I would hear the guys downstairs playing their guitars so I dusted off my flute that I’d not played since I was eleven and my saxophone, not played since my mid teens and made friends with them. I even plucked up the courage to sing for the first time in front of other people. Together me and my housemates wrote many songs. It was the first time I had begun to work with words and I loved it. 

Castle House Song

I remember when I came to you
When I walked in through your door
You were all that I needed
And just what I was looking for

You held me in your arms
I was taken by your beauty and your charms

You’ve seen so many faces
You’ve seen a lot of years
You’ve heard a lot of stories
And dried a lot of tears

I hope somebody comes around
and gives you the love that you need

I knew it wasn’t to be forever
And how the years flew by
We sang songs around your kitchen table
And sat around your fire

A good time was had by all
Just the kind that I was looking for

Then it was time to move on
Hope somebody loves you when I’m gone.

 

Even though my college course had been sold as a ‘multi-disciplinary’ crafts course, when I arrived we had to specialise in something and I ended up in a ceramics group as I’d been using plaster in my foundation but I wasn’t enjoying working with clay. I was always drawing though and I began to look over my shoulder at the other courses going on in college. Wildlife illustration? Surface pattern design? Maybe I should switch courses? I decided to take a year out to consider what to do. I’d keep drawing and building my portfolio and maybe it would become clearer, but in that year I accidentally got pregnant. At only twenty it was a bit of a shock but I embraced it fully and loved being a Mum. My little Ffion was born in Carmarthen Hospital in the spring of 1994 and my baby boy Euan was born the year after.

Being in Laugharne again, now in my fifties made me very contemplative and I was thinking about the twenty year old me a lot. I hadn’t established myself in life, I wasn’t at all confident about who I was, I was burdened by some trauma that was following me around and I got myself into a difficult relationship but WOW I birthed babies with grace and poise and I was a good Mum. And I always listened to my creative whispers and honoured them too. In the whirl of motherhood my desire to be an artist and to make things was like child number three pulling at my skirts and saying, "Come on Mum, what about me?" Sometimes I tried to ignore these cries because free time was scarce and I’d tell myself that the time would come, but the next day I’d be making something that couldn’t wait. My kids and my art (and me really) grew up together. 

We lived in a few houses around town which was a great way to get to know a place and me and Dean walked around town paying them all a visit. One of them was The Pelican, another house that is steeped in history.

Dylan Thomas's body was laid to rest in The Pelican on the very kitchen table we would eat off at our landlady Jo’s gatherings and book club lunches! And in December 1952 Dylan’s Dad died there. Dylan wrote his famous ‘Do Not Go Gentle into This Good Night’ poem about his last hours with him there. But there aren’t just stories of death and dying, there was plenty of life too. I gave birth to Euan in the top right hand room on a cold December morning in 1995. He came too quickly to make it all those thirteen miles to the hospital. Keith who lived downstairs was bottling his beer on the landing in time for Christmas, Jo was sitting in our washing basket to rest her bad hip and everybody (except me, I was as focused as I will ever be) was flapping. Our midwife arrived just in time to guide Euan out into the world. He came 'gentle into that good morning'.

When we were too big for the flat we moved to Belle Vue, opposite the tin shed where the Laugharne Cowboy kept his horse (!) and ran a T-shirt screen printing business from the front bedroom. I worked through Corel Draw for Dummies from cover to cover and learned how to prepare the artwork which was my first foray into computer aided design. I’ve been using Corel Draw ever since to set up my laser cuttings and design my wallpapers and window films even though people laugh at me for not using Adobe Illustrator (it does exactly the same thing)! But it wasn't a happy time and I left this house and my unhappy relationship and me and the kids went up to live up at Hillside which was one step even deeper into the countryside.

I took Dean to visit this place and I couldn’t believe how living up this long, steep, narrow track with towering hedgerows either side didn’t phase that young car-less single mother of two toddlers. It was here that I fell in love with the plants and flowers in the hedges and with the nuthatches, bull finches and green finches and all the little birds that came to the feeder outside my window. There were swallows nesting in the outhouse and I once met a little owl on the churchyard wall. The birds were my therapy at this difficult time and I’ve been forever grateful. 

When Ffion started school we moved back into the heart of town and lived in Gaisford House in a big flat next to the post office owned by Megan Jenkins, a lovely old lady who looked out for me and my young family. It was around that time I was commissioned to create an illuminated alphabet by a collector and he let me go and draw in their cabin in the woods near Llanddowror. It was spring and I remember so vividly how the woods came alive with birdsong as I slipped into drawing the bluebells on the forest floor. 

'A' was for Anemone’s and Annie’s garden

'B' was for bluebells and birch trees

'C' was for castle and curlews and cockleshells

'D' was for dandelions…

I so wish I still had these illustrations and the preparatory drawings but sadly they were lost in the fire. I only got to letter ‘D’. It was too much of a struggle to do a whole alphabet while the kids were so small and I had to back out, but my connection to the tiny details of nature was forever sealed and I’ve been drawing plants and flowers ever since.

I found this drawing though. Note Alfie the Castle House cat climbing on the crenelations. He did actually did that, the little dare devil. When I lived there the castle wasn't opened to the public but we could sneak into it through this gate in our garden and we had the place to ourselves. This time around I had to pay the entrance fee! 

The grounds are beautiful with box hedges and cockleshell paths and there's a shady seat under the 300 year old sweet chestnut tree that is as tall as the castle itself. You can sit in the gazebo and learn about when Dylan Thomas and Richard Hughes wrote in there (an enviable writing spot with a panoramic view) and learn all about the long time history of the castle. I remember at one point during my residence, the gazebo being full of ancient and curious things that the visiting archaeologists had found when they stayed with us in Castle House on a dig.

From the top of the tower I could see my old bedroom window,

over the wall into our old garden,

 

 and out over the water.

We had a birds eye view!

(If you ever visit the castle ask Sonya, who works in the ticket office, to tell you about the high fiving ants, the shrew conga, the wrens nests or about Bertie the badger who took up residence in the castle. She is a nature enthusiast and has many tales to tell! " Hang on" she said, "just one more and then I'll let you go!")

Those Laugharne days were good days and spending time in the place again made me wonder how I ever tore myself away, but I had a longing to be in Yorkshire again, to be nearer to family, to have a bit more going on, to be close to the city but not in it, perhaps somewhere I could grow a small business…

I read on the brilliant Laugharne Lines website that when Richard Hughes reluctantly left Castle House and Laugharne in 1949 he said, 

 

“It was a mistake to imagine it was right, or even possible, to live out one’s life in a fairy tale, which is what Laugharne is.”

 

When me and Dean first met and I told him tales of my Laugharne days it was he who played me Under Milk Wood, read out loud by Richard Burton. My gosh. Oh! Now I got it. It needed to be heard, not read. Laugharne is said to be the inspiration for the setting and its characters and there were phrases that took me right back and made me long to hear the town clock chiming again and feel the crunch of cockle shells underfoot and see the ‘fishingboat-bobbing sea’. Last night we watched the National Theatre's new Under Milk Wood play online starring Michael Sheen. It was absolutely brilliant. Intense but brilliant. It doesn't just need to be heard, it needs to be seen! I highly recommend it. Here's the trailer.

In The Laugharne Prose Dylan writes fondly and humorously about what it’s like to live in this, ‘mild, beguiling island of a town’ that is ‘minding its own strange business’ and every word he says is so familiar. This place holds so many stories and I'm so glad that it is a big part of mine.

 

 

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