All the beauty of the estuary and the calls from the river and still his attention was being pulled back over his shoulder, to the sight of Dylan’s writing shed – his ‘shack’, as the poet called it – perched precariously on the side of the bluff, hoisted upon its steel pillars. The rock here looked almost scorched and the rainwater that was still escaping over it and down to the river sounded as if it was sizzling as it made its way back home. The seared colour gradually gave way to the rose red sandstone of the under-cliff and he climbed over this blushing rock and up the steep concrete steps.  Innumerable fingers of branches were reaching out of the cliff and around the sides of the shed and in Padam’s mind he could see those New York photographs of Dylan ensnared or crucified amongst the tangle of a wisteria vine. The sensation of approaching the ‘house on stilts, high among beaks’ – bubbled up through his skin.       

The front of the shed was pale green; Padam recalled it as a deeper blue before. He knew the original face was in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, having been saved by someone from a council rubbish tip in the early seventies - which must have been before the Boat House itself had opened to the public. He’d taken the whole family there to see the exhibition, ‘Dylan Thomas: Man and Myth’. They’d asked him what he was doing when he tried to place his hands exactly where Dylan's might have landed when going through the door. While there, unbeknown to him, his daughter had surreptitiously broken off a flake of paint from the curve of the small entrance. When they’d got home she’d given it to him with all the honour for something sacred a child could muster. He still kept it in an empty sample bottle beside his computer.

When he first came here himself, before the children were born, there’d been a plaque at the apex of the roof, he recalled its dramatic gothic script.

‘In this building Dylan Thomas wrote many of his famous works – seeking inspiration from the panoramic view of the estuary’.

Now it had been replaced by an information stand to the right of the structure. ‘This is not the Boathouse…’ it said immediately, as if answering a question already on the lips of the visitor. There was still a glass panel in the door of the converted garage though it had obviously become much larger; for now he could press his forehead, both his palms and his stomach against the glass, where before he had only peered between shading hands through a small square. Through it he could see the austere wood and paper life there. Table, chairs, bookcase; all the photographs still hung there, curled up at their edges like dried leaves; Whitman, Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Sitwell, Marianne Moore and Auden. There was a reproduction of Modigliani’s ‘Little Peasant’, some dancing girls by Breughel, a clown by Rouault as well as other paintings that Padam had never identified. On the shelf in the top corner, ‘Lives of the Great Poisoners’, a large dummy book there solely to appease those tourists who only knew ‘Under Milk Wood’. The solid black coal stove had been filled with balls of old paper and smooth logs. Books lolled on the bookcase. The oil lamp, the beer bottles, the sweet wrappers, all failed to escape their fate as dramatic props. Papers, carefully strewn across the table or apparently crumpled and discarded; even the wood of the floor; everything looked so arid and stale. The interior was not so much abandoned in ghost ship fashion as desiccated with boredom. A tie was slung over the back of the simple chair. Padam couldn’t recall noticing that before.

He knew this manufactured scene very well; it was the desktop background on his computer. It confronted him every time he sat there waiting for the thing to warm up so he could access the emails from his children. Apart from all the superimposed stamps of shortcut icons down one side and the blue taskbar running across the bottom of the screen the picture was exactly the same. He could have played ‘spot the difference’ if he’d been of a mind to do so. He’d viewed the original mock-up when the desk was merely strewn with open books and papers and not burdened with the lamps and the bottles. He was even aware of a photograph taken just two years after Dylan’s death when it looked only a deserted sanctuary, an almost bare desk and blank walls. They could have kept it like that, he thought, there was more sense of death in it.

Padam looked through the shed and out of the window that stood guard over the desk. He knew across the water and over the near horizon was the farm of Fern Hill; that Bouda, the huge deaf mute who lived next door in the Ferry House had sometimes carried Dylan on his back across the fringes of the estuary at low tide so the poet might reach the villages of Llangain and Llanstephan visiting strands of family.

Padam could hear the birds were busy in the trees all around him, too many songs and squawks, coos and caws for a city boy like him to really comprehend. They either didn’t mind him or his presence was provoking them, he couldn’t tell. He chose to believe they didn’t care, that they were drunk on the busy sun and their surroundings and were singing their way home without a thought for people like him who were just stumbling through it all.

He stood to the side of the shed and watched the sideways strata of sunlight search across the water and the sand bars. Then the clouds opened wider and the too bright, blinding clash of sun and sea made him wince.

‘Your burnished estuary …’ he scrawled.

Extract from 'The Writing Shed' - a novel by Simon Tonkin