Caitlin and The Edge of Love: The Real Story
The railway never came to New Quay; not, that is, until 2008 when the scriptwriter of The Edge of Love blessed it with its very own station. This was one of the many deceits of a film that trivialised the friendship between Dylan Thomas and his Swansea friend, Vera Phillips, by depicting them as lovers, and broadly hinting at a love affair between Vera and Caitlin. The casting of Matthew Rhys gave some plausibilty to the idea of a ménage à trois but Vera herself was more realistic: Dylan, she once said, “looked like a giant frog."
The film makes much of the two women frolicking sexily in summer dresses on New Quay’s cliffs and pier, another deceit to groom us into seeing them as something more than just soul mates. In truth, Caitlin and Vera were in New Quay in 1945 during a winter so cold that many rivers froze over, but mufflers and woolly hats would not have produced the same frisson.
Some of the film’s hanky-panky takes place in and around the Thomases’ bath but Majoda, their cliff-top shack, had no such luxuries. Water had to be carried from a tap on the road; the nearest they ever got to a bath was a bucket and sponge in Majoda's "Toilet Room". And the only lavatory was outside in a wooden shed. Majoda, Caitlin later wrote, was “cheaply primitive.”
Much of the film’s fiction was pointless: Vera was given a Swansea accent (she’d had elocution lessons as a young girl) as well as a baby boy (all her children were girls), whilst baby Aeronwy was written out of the story altogether. The film also tells us that Vera’s husband, William Killick, was jealous of Dylan (he wasn’t), that Vera was present on the night he fired a machine gun into Majoda (she wasn’t) and that Dylan gave hostile evidence at Killick’s trial (he didn’t). In the film, the jury acquits Killick in defiance of the judge but in the actual trial the judge instructed the jury to acquit.
They claimed in the credits that the film was based on one of my books but the scriptwriter, Sharman Macdonald, had the grace to come clean. She allowed herself to “take liberties” with Dylan, she said, because she did not see him as an iconic figure. The film “is not true, it's surmise on my part, it's a fiction… I made it up.”
Yet the truth about Dylan and Vera is altogether more interesting than Macdonald’s inert fiction, as one reviewer described it. The early passages of their story are to be found not in New Quay or even Swansea, but in deepest, muddiest Carmarthenshire amongst the marriages made by the Williamses, Dylan’s maternal ancestors: Vera was family. And her side of the family included some very interesting characters indeed, including the “old shrew” of Llanybri who accused the poet, Lynette Roberts, of being a spy. Curiously, one of Vera’s cousins had married a Whitehall mandarin who knew all about spies and spycatching, whilst another was arguably the finest fly-half that ever played for Wales.
To read more of this essay on Dylan, Caitlin and Vera, please go to