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"Dylan," said the late Poet Norman Cameron, "you're in danger of being widely regarded as a sponge." Replied Thomas indignantly: "I'm not a sponge. I'm an exploiter." Reprobate Innocent. He began to get assignments writing and reading for the BBC. He also wrote documentary films, though producers sometimes had to lock him in a hotel room to wring a finished script out of him. People loved him as a sort of raffish reproach to the world of respectability, a reprobate innocent. He got away with almost anything. The story goes that as an honored guest for an Oxford poetry society which served only select wines, Thomas asked for a jug of beer at the outset, cheerfully poured each successive vintage wine into the same jug and mixed it up with his teaspoon.
Between London pub rounds, he lived in Laugharne, a silted-up old South Wales cockle port, bright with pink-washed cottages, near where he used to visit his grandfather as a boy. Life at Laugharne seemed to suit him. He played with his three children, visited his parents, who lived in the same village, cut his daily beer intake to ten pints. "It's lovely, on the sea," he said. "You can spit right into the sea from our window, and we frequently do — all the time, in fact. I potter in the morning. I'm a very good potterer. I shop, I go to the village, and speak to people.
It's a short street, and it takes hours to get from one end to the other. I stop at the pub and get back for lunch. In the after noon there's nothing to do, so I work." About Danny Boy. The Thomas legend will be enhanced by the three chapters from Adventures in the Skin Trade, and the 20 stories published with them. Many a poet, when he writes prose, sounds as stodgy as a beached carp, but Thomas easily swam through prose, with a flashing of fins and a show of unexpected twists that could have made him famous as a prose writer if he had never so much as rhymed hell and seashell. Some of the stories sing of the same Welsh town he saluted in Under Milk Wood; others are rambling, obscurely symbolic excursions into weirder regions. In Skin Trade it was Thomas' sardonic intention to tell how a youngster from the provinces lands in London, much as he himself did. Before the boy sets out for the big city, he daydreams about what it will be like. He sees himself knocking at a rooming house and an Irish girl appearing at the door.
"Good morning, madam, have you a cheap room?" asks the boy. "Cheaper than sunlight to you, Danny Boy," says the girl.
"Has it got bugs?" "All over the walls, praise be to God." "I'll take it." But twelve hours after his actual arrival (according to Thomas' plan for the book), the boy was to be arrested in the raw at a railway station—"a kind of Strip-Jack-Naked. He's parted with everything, or they've taken it." In the 82 slaphappy and possibly autobiographical pages Thomas finished, the kid slides from one loony scrape to another, encumbered much of the way with a Bass ale bottle that has unaccountably got stuck fast on his finger.