Spectator's Notebook

Sir Keith Joseph's swift admonition to heart transplant surgeons "to defer any vast enthusiasm " for this operation until immunology problems were cleared up, has my most enthusiastic lay support. I was dismayed at the news of the transplant operation carried out at Uxbridge by Mr Magdy Habib Yacoub leading a team of 12 doctors. Mr Denis Felstead, secretary of the hospital group concerned, said later, after the patient had died, " Nothing went wrong with the operation. Technically it was very good indeed. The man was really just too ill. He would have died anyway."

The Social Services Secretary points out that it would be quite wrong to divert large medical resources to heart transplants at the expense of other operations. I hope surgeons take note, and do not suddenly indulge themselves with another outbreak of heart transplant operations together with their attendant and unavoidably tasteless publicity. I am by no means sure that, supposing the immunological problems were to be cleared up and heart transplants become relatively safe, the human lot would be improved by the medical advance. I can see all too clearly a future in which good young peasant hearts are removed and transplanted to replace rotten old tired hearts of rich and powerful men. And what other organs will follow? I have the deepest reservations about each and every development in this field of spare-part surgery. Rich and powerful men are often most desperate not to age and not to die, and many of them would stop at nothing to obtain new organs which might enable them to avoid the debilities of old age and postpone the onslaught of death.

Coolness in Ireland.

The Prime Minister's visit to Dublin is opportune. It will provide an occasion to undo some of the damage caused by Lord Carrington's inept handling of the Littlejohn affair. I spent several days in the southwest of Ireland last month and the impression I received there — which has since been confirmed by talks I have had on the telephone with Dublin friends — is that there is more coolness towards the English than there was last year, and that the chief cause of this is the Littlejohn nonsense. What on earth induced Peter Carrington to instruct Geoffrey Johnson Smith to see Littlejohn following the highly amateurish go-betweening of Lady Onslow I am unable to imagine. Carrington cannot possibly have consulted with the security people over this, for they would surely have told him under no circumstances to allow a named, indeed wellknown, minister and television personality to engage in discussion of any sort which could result in the embarrassing disclosures made in the Dublin court.

Routine mess

It is possible that Mr Heath intends to move Willie Whitelaw from his Northern Ireland secretaryship in the much-anticipated Cabinet reshuffle, and that his visit first to Belfast and now to Dublin are partly intended to refresh his thinking on the Ulster problem. It is remarkable how used England has become to the awful routine of the Irish mess. A few bomb scares in England, none of which would have rated more than a' paragraphin Belfast, is a salutary reminder of the unnatural way of life which has now become normal in Ulster. It may well be soon time for Willie to be replaced — a new mind, a new will, a new face may itself create a new opening, or at least a new determination. But I think I have detected, in speculation about the Irish secretaryship, that in the run-up to the election, it is desirable to bring Willie back into the thick of things. Well, yes. But, the Chancellorship apart, the Irish job is the most important in the Cabinet, or, if it isn't it should be. I sometimes get the impression that a more junior fellow will be handed Ulster and sent on his way with a "There's a good chap, now, go and do your stint in purgatory and you'll be rewarded in due course."

The English people may not want to know much about Northern Ireland, but it remains part of the United Kingdom, and easily the most distressed part. No government can shrug it off.

The Boat House

I see that Dylan Thomas's widow, Caitlin has sent their son Colm from Rome to London to set in motion the selling of The Boat House at Laugharne in Carmarthenshire. This is where the poet, his wife and their young family spent most of their time in the last years of his life. He left The Boat House on his last fatal journey to New York, and his body was brought back to Laugharne — the model for Llareggub in Under Milk Wood — to be buried. The Boat House is a pleasant but inconvenient little cottage on three floors with two rooms on each floor and a staircase with a rope for bannister rail. The front door is on the middle floor, there is a rocky garden and a spectacular view of the estuary. Up above there is a shed where much of Thomas's writing was done, undone and re-done. The Boat House has apparently recently been valued at £20,000 which seems a bit steep for a place where you are liable to be continually pestered by visiting devotees, unless you fancy yourself as a shrine-keeper.

Auction in Carmarthen

It was put up for auction back in 1969 (I think) and did not make its reserve price. I remember the auction well: I went to Carmarthen for the fun of it. The auctioneer, brought down from London, fair-haired Mr Ackroyd, got to his feet in St Peter's Church House — a building which seemed custombuilt for dancing and bingo — to explain to prospective purchasers: "Dylan Thomas lived in the house for many years ... left an indelible impression ... in this country and abroad, especially in America and Holland Mr Rubinstein, who acts for my client, Mrs Caitlin Thomas, who is very regretfully selling the property, tells me that the furniture, which has been taken away, will be returned ... It is Mrs Caitlin Thomas's desire and hope that The Boat House will be bought by someone associated with the literary trade,.

At this point a splendid woman called Madame Nellie Klugt, describing herself as the President of the Dutch Dylan Thomas Society, got to her feet and rhetorically demanded "Is there somebody in this room who will buy the house of the late Dylan Thomas? Don't do that. Do as I do. Let it be in the hands of the Laugharne people as a homage."

"I fully agree with those remarks," said Mr Ackroyd, the auctioneer. "It will not be taken away to Pennsylvania. I hope like you it will be used as a shrine. Well, now, what am I bid?"

The bidding dithered up to £7,500. "Well ladies and gentlemen," said Mr Ackroyd, "I in afraid that my instructions from Mrs Caitlin Thomas were slightly in excess ... withdrawn ... if any of you, sirs, would come to see in afterwards ..."

The audience was absolutely delighted. Madame Klugt told us that in an attempt to raise funds to buy the property she had written to four hundred American universities, two of which had replied. It was also revealed that a joint bid on behalf of the Laugharne Corporation, Mr Mervyn Levy and others, had ceased at £3,500. They upped this bid after the auction to a final offer of £5,000 which was turned down. The reserve price had been £8,500, and the hope had been that it might have gone for as much as E15,000 or £20,000.

Bought for £1,800

Oddly, The Boat House never belonged to Dylan Thomas. Originally he had rented it. He fell behind with his rent and looked like being kicked out. A friend and patron, Mrs Margaret Taylor, wife of the historian, bought it in 1952 for £1,800. When Thomas died the next year she sold it to the trustees who were administering the estate for the same amount. Dylan Thomas died just when the money was beginning to pour in. It is now twenty years since he set sail for New York, to lecture and to clear his debts, and drank himself into a coma and to death instead. His royalties nov■', earn his estate over £20,000 a year, keeping his children comfortably off, and allowing Caitlin, with her leftover life to kill, her Italian lover and Tomas° their child, to live in considerable style in Italy.

1 happened to be driving through Laugharne a few months ago, and I visited The Boat House again. The furniture had been replaced much as it was: cheap furniture, a kitchen table, a few chairs, several of old Mrs Thomas's tea pots — the poet's mother collected them. It was almost exactly as it had always been, except that there were no half empty bottles of booze about the place.

Nasty foreign habit

Those golden days of late, or high, summer induced great drowsiness in me during the hottest afternoon sun. I don't recall ever having had to take siestas in England before and 1 am not at all certain whether the languors which assail me are brought about solely by the heat or are a sign of ageing. However, I do recall that in hot Arab countries, or in India or the Far East, or indeed in the Mediterranean, wherever the siestWis 8 part of life, I succumbed, even when most youthful and fit. So I conclude that it is the weather and not my years that has me wilting around about three thirty. I dislike siestas intensely, partly because they are a nastY foreign habit, but chiefly because when wake up after a siesta I feel as if I have a particularly liverish kind of hangover. MY mouth tastes filthy, I have headaches and I am extremely irritable. I am not one who thinks that climate is the only explanation of national characteristics and historical change, but I do think that a succession of summers like the present one would just about finish this country off. Ted Heath and high summer are too debilitating by far. What we reallY want — and what I suspect many of us would like — is a fierce winter combined with a fuel crisis. Back to 1947!

But then I recall that marvellous 1947 MaY and June suddenly following that terrible winter, Did it undo the good done to us all bY the preceding hardship? Such desultory reflections betray my puritanical nature, which normally I keep battened down but which, every now and then, comes oozing through.