Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
the moors above Mytholmroyd – ease the mind because they reconnect us to the world in which our ancestors lived for 150 million years before the advent of civilisation (the number of years is a typical Ted exaggeration). Poignantly, given that the broadcast went out a year after her death, the example he quoted at the close of this talk was ‘a description of walking on the moors above Wuthering Heights, in West Yorkshire, towards nightfall’ – ‘by the American poet, Sylvia Plath’.21
To capture people, you must find a memorable detail. ‘An uncle of mine was a carpenter, and always making curious little toys and ornaments out of wood.’ This memory of Uncle Albert was all that was needed to create the character of ‘Uncle Dan’ in his children’s poetry collection Meet My Folks!: ‘He could make a helicopter out of string and beetle tops / Or any really useful thing you can’t get in the shops.’22 To invent a good poem, though, you shouldn’t just transcribe your memories. You need to rearrange your relatives in imagination. ‘Brother Bert’ in Meet My Folks!, who keeps in his bedroom a menagerie of every bizarre creature from Aardvark to Platypus to Bandicoot to ‘Jungle-Cattypus’, is an exaggerated version of Gerald (who never kept anything bigger than a hedgehog). But the line ‘He used to go to school with a Mouse in his shirt’, Hughes reassures his listeners, does not refer to Gerald: ‘Somebody else did that.’23 The somebody else was Ted. In the poem, he and Gerald have become one. It was a way of registering his affection for his brother. His feelings about his mother, he admits, were too deep and complicated to capture: she is the one absence from the feast of Meet My Folks!
Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry.
He ended that seminal opening talk ‘Capturing Animals’ with two personal examples. Late one snowy night in dreary lodgings in London, having suffered from writer’s block for a year, he had an idea. He concentrated very hard and within a few minutes he had written his first ‘animal’ poem. It is about a fox but it is also about itself. The thought, the fox and the poem are one. In the ‘midnight moment’s forest’, something is alive beside the solitary poet. He captures the movement, the scent, the bright eyes. The fox’s paw print becomes the writing on the page. ‘Brilliantly, concentratedly … The page is printed’: it is a captured animal.24
The second example was one of his ‘prize catches’: a pike in a pool at Mexborough.
3
They moved on 13 September 1938, four weeks after Ted’s eighth birthday. They would stay for thirteen years to the day.1 Olwyn cried for a fortnight and the cat moped beneath a bed upstairs. Ted seemed least affected by the move. He was always adaptable, ready for a new direction. He was immediately enrolled at the Schofield Street Junior School round the corner, getting to know the local boys, some of them shopkeepers’ children, which is what he now was. His best mate was a lad called Swift, mother a greengrocer, father a miner. A neighbouring family had a brutal father, a miner who came home drunk, his face blackened from work. Ted befriended the redheaded daughter Brenda. On Saturday mornings he went to the local ‘flea pit’ cinema and watched Westerns.
The family’s new address was 75 Main Street, Mexborough: a newsagent’s in the centre of a busy mining town, where the bestselling paper was the Sporting Life, to be read daily before placing a bet on the horses. You went into the shop and diagonally to the right was a door to the downstairs living room. Edith and Billie had the front bedroom over the shop. Then there was a big bedroom to the right, over the living room. This had a double and a single bed. A door from here led to a smaller room over the kitchen. Beyond that, there was a room with just a bath. The loo was downstairs and outside. Ted played with his train set in the big bedroom. There was a garage behind, where Ted began keeping animals, notably rabbits and guinea pigs. He cried inconsolably when they died. It was not unknown for him to keep a hedgehog under the sofa in the living room.
Once again, they were overshadowed by a church: across the road stood the ugly red-brick edifice of the St George the Martyr Chapel of Ease to St John the Baptist Parish Church. Its clock had a loud tuneless chime. This was where, six years later, Edith would look out before dawn on D-Day and see crosses in the sky. It was within weeks of their moving to Mexborough that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler in Munich and was heard on the radio speaking of ‘peace for our time’.
The business went well. Billie ordered the magazines and the tobacco, and organised the paper rounds. He also took on a concession selling tickets for coach trips. Edith diversified the stock, ordering games, stationery and dress patterns. Gerald and Ted became paperboys. Ted read all the comics and boys’ magazines on the shelves before they were sold. Even his mature poetry would be shot through with a love of super-heroes and an element of zap, kerpow and kaboom.
In later years, Aunt Hilda and Cousin Vicky came down at Christmas. For the children, the whole shop was their Christmas present: each received a pillowcase stuffed with goods, toys, sweets, chocolate.
Gerald struggled to find work locally. He had a brief stint at a steelworks just outside Rotherham, but this was ended by an accident. Then he moved down to Barnet, just north of London, to train as a garage mechanic. He bought a motorbike and started roaring around the countryside, to the consternation of young Ted, who told him he should stick to pedal power. But Gerald’s heart remained in the fields. His favoured reading was the Gamekeeper magazine and it was in answer to an advertisement there that he got a seasonal job as a second keeper on an estate in Devon. This involved rearing pheasants and locating them in the right places to be shot when the 1939 season opened. It was in Devon that he heard Prime Minister Chamberlain on the radio once again, this time announcing that the country was at war with Germany.
The war brought painful memories for Billie and Edith. For Gerald, it began a new life. He returned home at the end of the shooting season, remained there through the ‘phoney war’ and joined up in the summer of 1940. His skill with his hands and experience with engines meant that he was well suited for aircraft repair and maintenance in the RAF. From 1942 to 1944 he was posted to the desert war in North Africa. Gerald’s absence meant that Olwyn and Ted clung close together, sometimes sharing a bed. One of his earliest unpublished poems, witty and affectionate, is called ‘For Olwyn Each Evening’.2
For an adventurous boy such as Ted, there was a thrill in the sound of bombers overhead. Industrial Rotherham, just 6 miles along the river Don, was a target, as was Doncaster, 8 miles upstream. That meant blackouts at night and taped-up shop windows to prevent flying glass. A bomb fell on Mexborough railway station, but Main Street escaped.
Olwyn was a very clever girl. She got a scholarship to the local grammar school. Ted followed in her footsteps in 1941, also winning a county scholarship. Mexborough Grammar was the intellectual making of him. This was where his love of literature matured and began to intersect with his love of nature. In his first year he explored the school library and found Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. He took it out and kept it, on and off, for two years, until he knew it almost by heart. This became the first of the talismanic books that shaped his inner life.
Williamson’s novel, first published in 1927, had become a bestseller and an acknowledged classic. Because it was written from an animal’s point of view, yet unsentimental and at times extremely violent, English teachers found it especially good to recommend to boys of Ted’s age. The combination of adventure (notably an extended hunting sequence), intricately observed natural history and heightened literary style truly caught Hughes’s imagination at a formative moment in his early adolescence. What especially impressed him was the otteriness of the book, its rigorous refusal to anthropomorphise. Tarka, he explained in a Sunday