Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
one joy at the end of the Great War was that Billie Hughes was safe. He was a Gallipoli survivor. The story went that he had been saved from a bullet by the paybook in his breast pocket. Edith first met him in 1916 when he was home on leave, having just won the Distinguished Conduct Medal but then broken his ankle playing football when resting behind the lines – he was always a great footballer, could have been a professional. After the war, they spent their courtship walking the hills and moors, and once a week went to a dance club. In 1920, they discovered that she was pregnant and they married on a pouring wet day. For two shillings and ninepence a week they rented a cottage in Charlestown, to the west of Hebden Bridge. It had a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and an outside toilet. They scraped together the money for a suite of furniture and on their wedding day Mrs Farrar gave them a carpet and a sewing machine. Billie’s mother was radiant on the wedding day, her white hair and fair skin set off by a mauve hat and veil.
Gerald’s birth was traumatic. The newborn boy lay blue and stiff on the washstand, and the nurse cried, ‘The baby is dead – fetch the doctor.’ But Edith told her to shake and smack him, and before they knew it he was crying and the doctor arrived and said he would be fine. When he was two, Edith went back to work and young Gerald was looked after by Granny Hughes.
They were happy in their little cottage on the hillside above the railway, though Edith didn’t like it when Billie went off for away football matches and did not return until very late at night. In 1927, they moved to Mytholmroyd, the other side of Hebden Bridge, buying the house in Aspinall Street. Now the Hughes family was truly among the Farrars: Uncle Albert, married to Minnie, was down the road at number 19 and Edith’s mother, with teenage Hilda, just round the corner in Albert Street.
The other brothers were doing very well for themselves. In the year of Gerald’s birth Uncle Walter, in partnership with a man called John Sutcliffe, started a clothing factory. When Sutcliffe left, Uncle Tom took over from him. Edith went to work for them. Walter marked and sometimes cut the cloth. He was very good at laying the heavy leather patterns for the trousers, then cutting out from the great long rolls of cloth. He was, his sister saw, ‘the director in every sense of the word’. Tom was more subdued, still affected by the gas of the trenches; Edith was terrified that his mind would drift, costing him a finger on one of the great flashing blades of the cutting machines. He was often to be found sitting in the office next to his little sister Hilda, who did the paperwork.
It was not easy for Edith and Billie to see Tom and Walter in their detached houses on the outskirts of the village: Walter and his wife Alice at Southfield, a handsome villa set back from the Burnley Road, Tom and his wife Ivy at Throstle Bower, at the top of Foster Brook, up towards the moors. Having a house with a name instead of a number was a mark of upward mobility. In addition, the brothers had cars, the ultimate sign of affluence. None of the family liked Ivy Greenwood, who looked down on the Farrars, would not even acknowledge them and certainly never deigned to invite them up to her big house. Olwyn thinks that Ivy was jealous of the close family bond among the Farrars.
The brother who really struggled was Albert. Minnie was regarded as a good catch, but she pushed him hard, resentful that Tom and Walt were getting rich on the factory, while they couldn’t keep up. Albert was a carpenter, like Billie Hughes. They both got work making prefabricated buildings. Albert would make wooden toys, to give to his nephews and nieces, or to sell: ‘toy ducks / On wooden wheels, that went with clicks’.27 One day he was knocked off his bike on the way to work and he was never the same after that.
Like all the Farrar children, Hilda left school at thirteen, but she took evening classes, learned shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, enabling her to become company secretary for her brothers. She married a much older man called Victor Bottomley, who had something to do with the motor trade. He turned out to be ‘a wrong ’un’,28 and before long Annie Farrar was instructing her sons Tom and Walt to go and bring Hilda home, where she stayed with Minnie and Albert at 19 Aspinall Street (eventually Hilda and Grandma settled at number 13).
Walt had his sadness. His two elder children, Barbara and Edwin, were, as their cousin Vicky put it, ‘witless’. Barbara seemed conscious that something was wrong with her as she struggled to learn to read. Edwin was in his own closed world. James, the only ‘normal’ son, died at the age of eleven.
When Gerald left school, he too went to work at Sutcliffe Farrar, which was located just beyond the Zion chapel. When the slump came in the early Thirties, men and women were laid off, or reduced to working two or three days a week. Billie had been working for his brothers-in-law but he was put on short time too, and in 1936 he got fed up, gave in his notice and went off with a friend to do building work for the government in South Wales. With no work at the factory, Gerald had taken to roaming the moors, leaving Edith miserable and alone with Olwyn and Ted, both under ten. She worked a little at the factory, sewing hooks and eyes on flannel trousers, and they had enough money to get by. They had paid off the house by then, food was reasonably cheap and Edith’s sewing skills meant that clothes could be mended. Billie came home once a month and soon realised how much he was missing the children. They had come into a little money from Granny Hughes and with many people struggling through the Great Depression there were opportunities in small business. Billie decided he wanted a newsagent’s. Eventually, they found one that was suitable. There was only one problem: it was 50 miles to the south-east, near Doncaster, in a ‘dark dirty place’29 called Mexborough.
They all went down in the removal van. When they arrived, Billie stood behind the counter of the new shop and the family walked in, trying to look confident. Then they went out and helped with the furniture. When the van left, Gerald sat down and cried.
2
Dumpy, bustling Moira Doolan was a powerhouse of ideas at the BBC in the early Sixties.1 Middle-aged and unmarried, she spoke with an Irish lilt and was passionate about her work as Head of Schools Broadcasting. In January 1961 Ted Hughes wrote to her with an idea for a radio series. She invited him to lunch and they worked up his proposal. It eventually became Listening and Writing, a sequence of ten talks for the Home Service’s daytime schools programming, broadcast between October 1961 and May 1964.2 Nine of the ten, together with illustrative poems by Hughes and others, were published in a book, aimed at teachers and dedicated to his own English teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Edward Fisher. Entitled Poetry in the Making, it became a classroom vade mecum for a generation and indeed one of Hughes’s bestselling books.3
In a brief introduction, he described the talks as the notes of a ‘provisional teacher’ and of his belief in the immeasurable ‘latent talent for self-expression’ in every child. The teacher’s watchword should be for children – he was typically thinking of pupils between the ages of ten and fourteen – to write in such a way that they said what they really meant. With self-expression comes self-knowledge and ‘perhaps, in one form or another, grace’.4
The series started from autobiography. The first talk, entitled ‘Capturing Animals’, began: ‘There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish. I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways, and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.’5 When the harvest was gathered in, little Ted would snatch mice from under the sheaves and put them in his pocket, more and more of them, until there were thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of his coat. He came to think that this was what poems were like: experiences captured and kept about the person.
He then explained that his earliest memory was of being three, placing little lead animals all the way round the fender of the fire in the front room, nose to tail. There was no greater treat