Free The Dylan Thomas Murders by David N. Thomas Page B

abortion, of course.”
    Rosalind had a knack off going off on a tangent to her main story, and I felt she enjoyed being tantalising. I decided to stay focused and come back to Caitlin’s abortion later.
    â€œDid de Walden say how the affair began?”
    â€œI think ‘affair’ is wrong, it was more a brief fling.”
    â€œHow did they meet?”
    â€œIn Swansea, in 1912.”
    â€œBut how?”
    â€œYou see, you’re thinking de Walden again. Don’t think horse-breeding, falcon-flying aristocrat. Think Scott-Ellis, think Welsh-speaking song writer and minor poet. Think Scott-Ellis and you think of someone who loved Welsh culture and the language as much as Florence’s cantankerous DJ despised them.”
    â€œThink Florence....”
    â€œAnd you think of someone who was warm and generous, who loved talking and company, unlike DJ who never invited anyone into the house in all the time they were there. They lived separate lives. He had his books and a pint or two every night. She had the kitchen, her friends from chapel and the nights at the Grand, where her gaiety was given full rein. He was bookish and intellectual, but Florence was shrewd and intelligent, and people often made the mistake of under-estimating her, sometimes to their cost.
    â€œFlorence was born and brought up in Swansea, she was an urban child, and far more cosmopolitan than DJ. She knew more about the real world. He knew nothing much of modern times save what he learnt from Lawrence and Hemingway. She was inquisitive and searching, and knew about the great capital cities. She’d never visited them, of course, but her father was a railwayman who had worked his way up to Inspector. He’d been all over, including the Orient Express, and his stories filled her mind with the excitement of travel and the wonder of life outside Wales.”
    â€œSo tell me how they met.”
    â€œHoward de Walden – Scott-Ellis – went to Swansea in 1912 to collaborate with Dr Vaughan Thomas, setting traditional Welsh poems to music. Vaughan Thomas and DJ were good friends, as were their sons later, and that was how Florence met de Walden. There were tea parties at the Vaughan Thomases, and outings to the beach when the weather permitted. All this is in the Cut-Glass letter, by the way. In 1914, just after Christmas, de Walden came back to Swansea to stage a minor opera at the Grand, and there met Florence again. The Grand was her abiding passion, much looked down upon by DJ who could never understand why a theatre was necessary when you could read Shakespeare from a book and recite it aloud, if needs be.
    â€œFlorence was one of the volunteers who helped out back stage. She’d been a seamstress before she met DJ, so she helped in making up the costumes.”
    â€œDid she act?”
    â€œI think she’d have liked to but that would have brought a sharp word from the deacons.”
    â€œDylan was a great play-actor...”
    â€œHe had a wonderful sense of theatre, and it was from Florence that it came. His acting ability came from her, too, and most of his voice power. Even in old age, she had a rich, wonderful voice.”
    â€œSo the Grand was the opportunity, and perhaps the place,” I said, “but what was the motive?”
    â€œBy which you mean?”
    â€œWhy did they fall for each other?”
    â€œWe can only guess, the Cut-Glass letter tells us nothing on that score. De Walden and Florence were much younger than DJ, of course, who was entering middle-age. In fact, he’d been middle-aged most of his life, bald at twenty-six, sitting down to meals in his hat, and even going to bed in it. De Walden, on the other hand, was not only young but well-travelled. He’d been on a late-Victorian version of the Grand Tour and could regale Florence about Florence, and all the other cities that she had heard about from her father. And they could do all this in Welsh, which DJ