Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  This was in the middle of the Great War. Walter had joined up by this time, along with some of the Church Lads Brigade. The whole village turned out to see them off, singing ‘Fight the good fight’ and ‘God be with you till we meet again’. Just weeks after Miriam’s death back home, Walter was wounded at High Wood on the Somme. He returned with a shattered leg that troubled him for the rest of his days. But it could have been worse: at first, he was reported killed in battle, only for the family to receive his Field Card saying ‘I am wounded.’ Mrs Farrar shouted up the stairs, ‘Get up all of you. He’s alive! Alive alive!’ Tom, who was in the Royal Engineers, came back gassed, broken by the death of many of his dearest friends.

  Edith and her friends collected eggs and books to take to the wounded, the gassed and the shell-shocked in hospital. On the drizzly morning of 11 November 1918, she was working on army clothing when a male colleague tapped on the window, said, ‘War’s over,’ and threw his cap in the air. A flag was hoisted over the factory and everybody was allowed home, but there was no rejoicing, only deep thankfulness that it was finally over. Thirty thousand local men had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers. Over 13,500 of them were killed.

  Years later, Ted Hughes would write ‘you could not fail to realize that the cataclysm had happened – to the population (in the First World War, where a single bad ten minutes in No Man’s Land would wipe out a street or even a village), to the industry (the shift to the East in textile manufacture), and to the Methodism (the new age)’. As he grew up in Mytholmroyd in the Thirties, looking around him and hearing his family tell their stories, it dawned on him that he was living ‘among the survivors, in the remains’.26

  Edith’s 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

  Capturing Animals

  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 o
f 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 than a trip to Halifax, where his mother or Aunt Hilda would buy him one of these creatures from Woolworth’s. Then for his fourth birthday Hilda gave him a thick green-backed book about animals. He pored over it, read the descriptions over and over again, drew copies of the photographs of animals and birds. Sometimes he would place the lead figures on the fender and read their descriptions from the book: the words put together with the things, the poet in the making. When he discovered plasticine, the possibilities for his personal menagerie became infinite, bounded only by the limit of his huge imagination.

  He confided to his listeners that his passion for wildlife came from his elder brother. Gerald was his hero. And his saviour. One Christmas Billie Hughes bought his boys a Hornby clockwork train set. It was laid out in the front room by the piano. Three-year-old Ted loaded his lead soldiers aboard and Gerald wound up the engine. But an excited Ted tripped on the fender and fell towards the fire. Gerald scooped him out, but not before his hands had been blistered. ‘Fires can get up and bite you,’ Ted would say in later years.6

  But this is Gerald’s memory. Olwyn’s earliest recollections are of trotting out into the fields with her mother and baby Ted, then of Ted’s two close friends, Derek Robertshaw and Brian Seymour, coming round every Saturday morning while the Hugheses were having breakfast, planning with Ted where they would go for the day and what animals they would find. They lived in the fields and they were never bored. As Olwyn remembered it, Gerald was always off with friends his own age. In Ted’s adult writings, the bond between the two brothers has a mythic force which exaggerates their closeness.

  It was just before his fifth birthday that he joined Gerald on a camping trip for the first time. They were to spend the night up by the stream in the woods known as Foster Clough. Edith told Gerald not to let Ted take his model boat, for fear that he would sail it in the stream and get soaked. Those two friends, Derek and Brian, came round with advice, then the brothers set off, stopping on the way to buy sweets from the shop just past Uncle Walt’s factory. Watched by some very interested cows, they set up their tent and made a fire in a little clearing, fenced off with wire to keep the cattle out of the wood. Just before midnight, they heard their father’s call. He had come to check on them and was taking Ted home because there was a bull among the cows, making them too frisky for comfort. Ted was very excited by the bull.

  From then on, Ted would often accompany Gerald on to the moor. He scurried silently beside his brother, pretending to be a Red Indian hunter. He kept a tom-tom drum hidden in Redacre Wood, where, according to local lore, an Ancient Briton, buried spirit of land and nation, lay beneath a half-ton rock.7 They loved the silence of the hills, shrouded in morning mist as they looked out over the valley below. They flew gliders and kites. Gerald taught Ted to identify all the different birds. The younger brother was fascinated by hawks and owls. Gerald shot rats, wood pigeon, rabbits and the occasional stoat, Ted acting as his retriever. Sometimes Gerald would let him have a go with the air rifle. Once the slug ricocheted back and gave him a bloody forehead, but they managed to keep the accident from their parents. They met an old-school gamekeeper called McKinley who regaled them with stories and sometimes paid them a shilling for a fat rabbit. They fished in the canal, using nets made from old curtains.

  They poked around the site of a crashed plane – an RAF bomber on a training exercise had run into fog over Mytholmroyd – and salvaged bits of tubing for their own model planes. On the same site, they unearthed dozens of old lead bullets: it had been a firing range in the Great War.

  In winter they sledged all the way down the fields above Jubilee Street. On snowy nights, they opened the skylight and listened to the shunting engines strain at the frozen trucks in the sidings. In summer, they would help out their uncles in the allotment or play tip cat in the fields with Uncle Albert – this was a game in which you balanced a block of wood on the end of a bat, then whacked it as far as you could send it. Occasionally, there was a special treat: a trip to the seaside, a first sight of big cats at Blackpool Zoo.

  Olwyn did not join them on the hills, but she was there for family picnics at Hardcastle Crags and dips in the rocky pool on Cragg Vale. Mrs Hughes (‘Mam’ to Gerald, ‘Ma’ to Olwyn and Ted) was a great walker and swimmer. The children’s love of nature came from her. They all shared in the peace and magic of Redacre Wood, which seemed like their own private paradise.

  The three siblings played in the open air around the Zion chapel. They stole gooseberries from a lady’s garden up on the Banks. They gave a fright to a younger boy called Donald Crossley by tying him to a tree, spreading leaves around his feet and setting fire to them as they danced and whooped like Red Indians.

  Time spent indoors meant model-making with Gerald or reading with bookish Olwyn. Ma wrote poems for them and made up tales. They all loved the one about Geraldine mouse, Olwyna mouse and Edwina mouse because it echoed their own adventures. Grandma Farrar was charmed when they went round and read her the words of Edward Thomas, the poet and countryman who had died in the war. It was Edith who also instilled a passion for poetry in Olwyn and Ted. Wordsworth was her favourite, as might be expected of a woman who loved walking and the beauties of nature.

  The war haunted Ted and his father because it had decimated a generation of the Calder Valley’s young men. The sorrow in the air of the valley came more from the war than from the decline of industry.

  Gerald’s earliest memory was of finding his father’s sergeant’s stripes in a drawer and wondering what they were. Billie Hughes brought two other relics back from the war: his Distinguished Conduct Medal and the shrapnel-peppered paybook that had been in his breast pocket at Gallipoli. He told the family that he was one of only seventeen men from the company to have survived. Olwyn had a pearl necklace, which she loved to play with. Her father explained that it had been taken from the body of a dead Turk. He would occasionally shout at night in his sleep, dreaming of the Turks charging towards his trench.

  When Ted was four and Olwyn six, for half a year every Sunday morning their father stayed in bed and they came in with him and said, ‘Tell us about the war.’ He told them everything, in the goriest detail, including things not very suitable for a four-year-old boy. Dismembered bodies, arms sticking out of the mud. Ted either suppressed or forgot all this, later saying that his father never talked about the war. When he wrote his story ‘The Wound’ he told Olwyn that it was something he had dreamed. The moment he woke up, he wrote it down. But he forg
ot certain details, so he went back to sleep and dreamed it again, filling in the gaps. But Olwyn thought that part of it was taken from their father’s memories of the war. The story includes a long walk to a palace: this was his father going up to the Front on the way to a particular sortie in which he, as Sergeant-Major, led a small group of men in a successful assault on a German machine-gun post. It was this walk up the line that Billie described so vividly in bed. He also talked about his time in the Dardanelles, but that mainly consisted of drinking tea and picking lice off his uniform. The Western Front was much more dramatic.8

  Ted was formed by his outdoor life and his books, by his mother’s stories and father’s memories, but he was an attentive schoolboy at the Burnley Road Council School, bright, always asking questions. The headmaster gave a fearsome talk on the evils of alcohol. The message stuck. Ted grew up to love good wine, but always held his drink and never became addicted. Many writers have become alcoholics without bearing anguish remotely comparable to his.

  A memory that became a foundational myth. In his fifties, Ted told his schoolfriend Donald Crossley that it was in Crimsworth Dene, camping under a little cliff on a patch of level ground beside what later became a council stone dump, that he had the dream that turned later into all his writing. It was a sacred place for him.9

  It was sacred to Gerald as well: he told Donald that the memory of Crimsworth Dene sustained him through his service in the desert war. This secret valley, just north of Hebden Bridge, became in memory the spiritual home of the brothers.10 Gerald remembered how they had pitched their two-man Bukta Wanderlust tent for the last time. Two days later the family moved to Mexborough and life was never the same again. He felt that they both spent the rest of their lives trying to recapture those early days in the happy valley, but they never did.