Vera helped the Thomases with food and money, and shared child care duties with them when one of the women was baby-sitting, Dylan would take the other to the pub, an arrangement that set the Bethel tongues a-wagging.ĭylan and Vera had a good deal in common, both coming from Welsh-speaking families with the same kind of farming background. A year later, they were living in adjoining bungalows on the cliff-top at New Quay. Dylan was best man at Vera’s wedding in 1943. She rented Plas Gelli in Talsarn, where Caitlin and Dylan soon joined them. Īfter the bombing of Swansea in 1941, Vera’s mother took her family to Cardiganshire, where her own family had come from. She was no singer, as the film would have us believe, but a talented dancer and actor, who joined a professional touring group, where she played alongside Desmond Llewelyn, later ‘Q’ in the James Bond films. Vera and Dylan went up to London at the same time, where she studied interior design, and they lived a few streets away from each other. They were beautiful and talented girls.they anticipated by twenty years many of the things being done today in self-expression, in liveliness, behaviour and in their friendship with most people in Swansea who were trying to do anything in that period. Home and family meant so much to us all, for we spent a great deal of time there.Dylan, too, came often to Vera Phillips’ house. One of the group said of Vera and her sister, Evelyn, that their Vera’s mother hosted parties for Dylan and his friends, both at her home and at the Phillips’ beach hut at Langland. As teenagers, they mooched around Swansea art school, hung out in the Kardomah cafe, and joined the Little Theatre. They went to the same dame school and elocution teacher, and played together in the Park when they were older. Born within fifteen months of each other in neighbouring streets, they were pushed in their prams together through Cwmdonkin Park. Vera and Dylan’s lives had always gone closely side by side. 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. 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. 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. Yet the truth about Dylan and Vera is altogether more interesting than Macdonald’s inert fiction, as one reviewer described it. The film “is not true, it's surmise on my part, it's a fiction… I made it up.” She allowed herself to “take liberties” with Dylan, she said, because she did not see him as an iconic figure. 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. In the film, the jury acquits Killick in defiance of the judge but in the actual trial the judge instructed the jury to acquit. The film also tells us that Vera’s husband, William Killick, was jealous of Dylan (says who?), 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). 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.
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