Description

The theme ‘Belonging’ posed problems for me. Although I have worked as an artist in rural Wales for almost 30 years, I have a fractured sense of belonging. Sometimes I feel embraced by my father’s family background; strongly Scots and Irish. At other times I feel close to my South African mother whose parents trekked
in ox wagons when they were young, up from South Africa’s Eastern Cape to the Transvaal. Like them I feel ‘colonial’ for I spent much of my early life in New Zealand.

So how could I relate to Dylan Thomas and his strongly focused sense of belonging, to Swansea and to Wales? It was only when I read his prose and poetic work Return Journey that I felt an intense connection. He writes in this work of returning to Swansea after the Blitz and witnessing the destruction of his old haunts. Swansea, it is said, suffered forty bombing raids.

I was born in England and went to New Zealand as a boy of ten at the end of the Second World War. My father worked as a radar technician during the war, in a heavily militarised area of the Dorset coast. With my siblings I walked to school each day with my gasmask over my shoulder, and when there were air-raid warnings we would clamber under our desks until theAll Clear sounded. We lost our home in a bombing raid in 1942. I was rescued from our blitzed house and spent the rest of the war as an evacuee in Somerset.

This part of my early life has always remained a vivid presence in my consciousness. Return Journey brought pictures to my mind of the poet surrounded by the sort of destruction which I witnessed as a boy of seven. And I have included in my etching the aircraft; threatening presences throughout my formative years.

Robert Macdonald is a former chair of the Welsh Group, the senior association of professional artists in Wales, and exhibits widely. In 2013 he was one of eight printmakers from Wales whose
work was exhibited in the European Parliament, Brussels.