Martin Booth

Welsh Wordsmith

Dylan Thomas: A New Life

By

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IN THE WINTER of 1964, having recently arrived in Britain, I possessed pretensions to being a poet. Having little money, a dead-end clerical job in London with the General Accident insurance company and frigid lodgings in the attic of a brothel in Tavistock Place, I supplemented my meagre income by serving and washing dishes in the Green Café on the corner with Marchmont Street. I did not mind: it was the Swinging Sixties and I was swinging with them, living: the life poetical, and Orwell washed dishes in Paris.

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