Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
the dark admonitory presence was not a rock but a building. A stone mass towered beside the Hughes family home: the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was black, it blocked the moon, its façade was like the slab of a gravestone. It was his ‘first world-direction’.11
Number 1 Aspinall Street stands at the end of the terrace. Now you walk in straight off the street; when Ted was a boy, before the road was tarmacked, there was a little front garden where vegetables were grown and the children could play. Go in through the front door and the steep stairs are immediately in front of you. The main room, about 14 feet by 14 feet, is to the left. From the front window the Hughes family could look straight up Jubilee Street to the fields.
There was a cosy little kitchen with a fireplace in the corner and a window looking out on the side wall of Mount Zion. According to Ted’s poem about the chapel, the sun did not emerge from behind it until eleven in the morning. His sister Olwyn, however, recalls the kitchen being bathed in afternoon light. The poems have a tendency to take the darker view of things. By the same account, Olwyn always thought that Ted exaggerated the oppressive height and darkness of the Rock.
A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table. One day Mrs Edith Hughes woke from a dream in which she had bought a bath in Mytholmroyd. She went straight to the shops, where she found one that was affordable because slightly damaged. The back door led to a ginnel, a passageway shared with the terraced row that stood back to back with Aspinall Street. The washing could be hung out here and the children, who spent most of their time playing in the street, could shelter from the rain. Which never seemed to stop.
The kitchen also had a door opening on some steps down to a little cellar, which had a chute where the coal was delivered, the coalman heaving sacks from his horse-drawn cart. Some of the terraces had to make do with a shared privy at the end of the row, but the Hughes family lived at the newer end of Aspinall Street, slightly superior, with the modern amenity of an indoor toilet at the top of the stairs.
Mother and father had the front bedroom and Olwyn the side one, with a window looking out on the chapel. Ted shared an attic room with Gerald. When he stood on the bed and peered out through the little skylight, the dark woods of Scout Rock gave the impression of being immediately outside the glass, pressing in upon him.
This was the house in which Edward James Hughes entered the world at twelve minutes past one in the morning on Sunday 17 August 1930. ‘When he was born,’ his mother Edith remembered, ‘a bright star was shining through the bedroom window (the side bedroom window) he was a lovely plump baby and I felt very proud of him. Sunday was a wet day and Olwyn just could not understand this new comer.’12
Gerald, just a few weeks off his tenth birthday, lent a helping hand. Despite the rain, Edith’s husband Billie went out for a spin in her brother Walter’s car. Minnie, wife of another brother, Albert, who lived along the street at number 19, had offered to look after Olwyn, but she didn’t that first day. A neighbour was called to take in the unsettled two-year-old.
As a teenager, Olwyn would develop a serious interest in astrology, which she shared with Ted. The conjunction of the stars mattered deeply to them.13 He was born at what astrologers call ‘solar midnight’. With knowledge of the exact time and place of his birth, a natal chart could be cast. He was born under the sign of Leo, the lion, which endowed him with a strong sense of self, the desire to shine. But because he was born at solar midnight, he would also need privacy and seclusion. His ‘ascendant’ sign was Cancer, bonding him to home and family. And Neptune, the maker of symbols and myths, was ‘conjunct’. His horoscope, he explained, meant that he was ‘fated to live more or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in air’.14 Bound for fame, that is to say, but fearful of scrutiny.
Did he really believe that his fate was written in the stars? ‘To an outsider,’ he once observed in a book review, ‘astrology is a procession of puerile absurdities, a Babel of gibberish.’ He granted that many astrologers peddled rubbish and craziness. Others, he thought, did make sense. He did not know whether genuine astrology was an ‘esoteric science’ or an ‘intuitive art’. That did not matter, so long as it worked: ‘In a horoscope, cast according to any one of the systems, there are hundreds of factors to be reckoned with, each one interfering with all the others simultaneously, where only judgement of an intuitive sort is going to be able to move, let alone make sense.’15 It is all too easy to select a few out of those hundreds of factors in order to make the horoscope say what you want it to say. Neptune is the sign of many things in addition to symbols and myths, but since Ted Hughes was obsessed with symbols and myths they are the aspect of ascendant Neptune that it seems right to highlight in his natal chart. By the time anyone is old enough to talk about their horoscope, their character is formed; at some level, they have themselves already written the narrative that is then ‘discovered’ in the horoscope. But there is comfort in the sense of discovery. For Ted, astrology, like poetry, was a way of giving order to the chaos of life.
‘Intuitive’ is the key word in Hughes’s reflections on astrology. If the danger of a horoscope is that it is an encouragement to the abnegation of responsibility for one’s own actions, a forgetting of Shakespeare’s ‘the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’, the value of a horoscope is its capacity to confirm one’s best intuitions. The major superstitions – astrology, ghosts, faith-healing, the sixth sense whereby you somehow know that a person you love has died even though they are far away – are, Hughes thought, impressive because ‘they are so old, so unkillable, and so few. If they are pure nonsense, why aren’t there more of them?’16
His birth was formally registered in Hebden Bridge, the nearest large town. Father was recorded as William Henry Hughes, ‘Journeyman Portable Building maker’, that is to say a carpenter specialising in the assembly of sheds, prefabs and outbuildings. Mother was Edith Hughes, formerly Farrar.
William Hughes was born in 1894.17 His father, John, was a fustian dyer, known as ‘Crag Jack’. Family legend made him a local sage – ‘solved people’s problems, wrote their letters, closest friends the local Catholic and Wesleyan Ministers, though he spent a lot of time in pubs’.18 Crag Jack was said to have been a great singer. He was a bit of a ‘mystery man’, who came to the Calder Valley from Manchester and, before that, Ireland. In the young Ted’s imagination, he is perhaps a kind of bard or shaman, certainly a conduit of Celtic blood.
‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ is one of the few early Hughes poems to mention his family directly. There Jack clears himself of the dark influence of the church that ‘stooped’ over his ‘cradle’. He finds a god instead beneath the stone of the landscape.19 Here Ted takes on Grandfather Jack’s identity: the cradle stooped over by the dark church is clearly his own, shadowed by Mount Zion.
The story in the family was that Crag Jack died from pneumonia at the age of forty, leaving Willie Hughes a three-year-old orphan, together with his younger brother and elder sister. But there is a little misremembering or exaggeration here. The 1901 census records that John Hughes, aged forty-seven, and his wife Mary were living over a shop in King Street, Hebden Bridge, with their nineteen-year-old daughter, also called Mary, a ‘Machinist Fustian’, and the two boys, John aged eight (born Manchester) and Willie, seven (born Hebden Bridge), together with a young cousin called Elizabeth. Crag Jack died in 1903, closer to the age of fifty than forty. Willie was not three but nearly ten when he lost his father. Ted’s widowed Granny Hughes kept on the King Street shop for many years. She died in her eighties.
Like her husband, she had been born in Manchester. Her father was apparently a major in the regular army, his surname also being Major. His station was Gibraltar, so family tradition knew him as ‘Major Major of the Rock’. He married a short, dark-skinned, ‘Arab looking’ Spanish woman with, according to Ted, a ‘high