Eros
Eros was named after the Greek god of love and so a curious name for a small Welsh cottage.
It was Dylan Thomas' first home in Laugharne when he moved in with Caitlin in 1938 just after they got married in Penzance.
The cottage was sourced by Richard Hughes of Castle House.
Laugharne bookseller George Tremlett speaks of them being, '...the first hippies in Wales', and Kitty John mentioned her parents
observing, 'Dylan in his dressing gown, walking down the hill.'
The newly married couple lived here from May to July 1938, but Eros wasn't the modern home with a large conservatory of today.
It was a damp ramshackle fisherman's cottage, and Dylan wrote, 'pokey and ugly with rooms like stained boxes'.
There was no inside loo so they used an 'earth lavatory'.
Bathing was irregular as it meant swimming in the estuary or carrying water from the pump on the Grist.
Dylan and Caitlin were broke (as ever) and survived on a diet of cockles, rabbits and fish.
They complained to Richard Hughes about the cottage, so he found them a much grander house in the centre of Laugharne named Seaview.
The summer of 1938 was a barren time for Dylan's craft - 'For three lean months now, no work done/In summer Laugharne
among the cockle boats/And by the castle with the boatlike birds.'
Poet, writer and lifelong friend of Dylan, Vernon Watkins visited and recounted the tale of when celebrated author Richard Hughes called.
One morning they heard two knocks on the door - 'That will be Hughes', said Dylan, giving the
surname 'an accent of awe.' Standing in the doorway was, '... a figure tall and solemn, with a high white forehead and black curly beard, his
powerful hands resting on a strong cane. I was quickly introduced... and then standing stock still opposite the window, like a sea-captain who
has taken up a vantage point in a small boat, focusing, with an invisible telescope, at something none of us could see.'
(The picture above shows Hughes at the tiller of his boat.)
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