Last week it transpired that Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law tried to have a notebook of his draft poems burned, but did not succeed, because one of her household staff secreted it away in a Tesco bag. The superstore may just see what a real profit looks like next month when the bag of papers goes up for auction at Sotheby’s.
Some will scorn poor old Yvonne Macnamara for what might have been an innocent mistake – did she know that her son-in-law’s book was full of poetry and among the papers marked for burning? I reckon she did, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling sorry for her. Why, if I had a son-in-law like Dylan Thomas, I’d bloody well want his work on the fire, too.
No ordinary hearth would suffice for this conflagration. Macnamara, whose daughter Caitlin married the perpetually sozzled Thomas in 1937, intended the papers for the kitchen boiler.
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