Kitabı oku: «Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life», sayfa 4

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 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 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 forgot 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.

The site was recommended by Uncle Walter. It had been a favourite camping spot for him, Uncle Tom and their friends before the Great War. At the top of the valley, there was a pool and a waterfall, with an old packhorse bridge going over. This had long been a favoured picnicking place for locals. The Hughes family cherished an old photo taken there: it showed six young men in Sunday best, before the war.

There was a drystone wall along the slope above the clearing where the boys pitched their tent. On their second day, they found a dead fox there. It had been killed by a deadfall trap – a heavy rock or slab tilted at an angle and held up with a stick that when dislodged causes the slab to fall, crushing the animal beneath. That night Ted slept restlessly in the tent. He told Gerald of ‘a vivid dream about an old lady and a fox cub that had been orphaned by the trap’.11

This was the dream that, according to Ted’s letter to Donald Crossley nearly fifty years later, turned into all his writing. It was his first thought-fox. He told the tale himself in ‘The Deadfall’, a short story from the last decade of his life, written for a collection of ghost stories, published to celebrate the centenary of the National Trust and edited by one of his closest friends, the children’s novelist Michael Morpurgo.12 All the stories are set in houses or landscapes owned by the Trust, of which Crimsworth Dene was one.

In the story, it is Ted’s first time in the secret valley, with its steep sides and overhanging woods. He immediately senses that it is the most magical place he has ever been to. The enclosed space means that every note of the thrush echoes through the valley and he feels compelled to speak in a whisper. At night, he can’t stop thinking about the fox for which the trap has been set. The idea of the creature near by, in its den, ‘maybe smelling our bacon’, makes the place more mysterious than ever. On the second night he is woken by the dream of the old lady, calling him out of the tent. He follows her voice up the slope to the trap, where he finds a young fox, still alive but with tail and hind leg caught beneath the great slab of stone. He is choked by ‘the overpowering smell of frightened fox’. He realises that the woman has brought him to the cub, wants him to free it. She has not gone to Gerald, because she knows that he would be likely to kill it. Summoning all his strength he manages to lift the corner of the slab – the cub snarling and hissing at him like a cat – just enough to set the animal free. It runs away and the old lady vanishes. But when he looks back at the deadfall there is something beneath it. At this moment, his brother wakes and calls him back to bed. It rains. In the morning, they go up to the deadfall and there is a big red fox, the bait (a dead wood pigeon) in its mouth.

According to the story, Gerald then digs a grave for the fox. As Ted helps him push the loose soil away, he feels what seems to be a knobbly pebble. When he looks at it closely, it turns out to be a little ivory fox, about an inch and a half long, ‘most likely an Eskimo carving’. He treasures it all his days. He and Gerald conclude that the old lady in the dream was the ghost of the dead fox.

Hughes admits in the preface to his collected short stories that this version of the incident, prepared for Morpurgo’s ghost collection, has ‘a few adjustments to what I remember’. In Gerald’s account, Ted’s dream of the old lady comes the night after they have discovered the body, whereas in the story it is a premonition of the fox’s death. Ted insisted on the reality of the memory, yet neither Gerald nor Olwyn has any recollection of the ivory fox.13 It was only as an adult that Ted began collecting netsuke and Eskimo carvings of animals.

‘The Deadfall’ was the only short story of his later career. He had not written one for fifteen years. Morpurgo’s invitation was an irresistible opportunity to round off his work in the genre. He gathered it together with his earlier stories and made it what he called the ‘overture’ to his writing.14 The camping trip with Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, the dream of the freed fox and the ivory figure that symbolically transformed his lead animal toys into tokens of art came together as his retrospective narrative of creative beginning.

The radio talks for schools that were eventually published as Poetry in the Making give incomparable insight into Ted Hughes, poet in the making. As the boy Ted sculpted his plasticine animals, so the adult writer created poetic images of fox, bird and big cat. In the same way, Ted the teacher found the right voice to capture the attention of ten- to fourteen-year-olds – exactly as his own attention had been caught by Miss Mayne and Mr Fisher.

Early in the second talk, called ‘Wind and Weather’ (there was no shortage of either in the Calder Valley), he suggested that the best work of the best poets is written out of ‘some especially affecting and individual experience’. Often, because of something in their nature, poets sense the same experience happening again and again. It was like that for him with his dreams, his premonitions and his foxes. A poet can, he argues, achieve greatness through variation on the theme of ‘quite a limited and peculiar experience’: ‘Wordsworth’s greatest poetry seems to be rooted in two or three rather similar experiences he had as a boy among the Cumberland mountains.’15 Here Wordsworth stands in for the speaker himself: the deadfall trap in Crimsworth Dene was Ted Hughes’s equivalent of what Wordsworth called those ‘spots of time’ that, ‘taking their date / From our first childhood’, renovate us, nourish and repair our minds with poetry.16

At school, Ted was plagued with the idea that he had much better thoughts than he could ever get into words. He couldn’t find the words, or the thoughts were ‘too deep or too complicated for words’. How to capture those elusive, deep thoughts? He found the answer, he tells his schools audience in the talk called ‘Learning to Think’, not in the classroom but when fishing. Keeping still, staring at the float for hours on end: in such forms of meditation, all distractions and nagging doubts disappear. In concentrating upon that tiny point, he found a kind of bliss. He then applied this art of mindfulness to the act of writing. The fish that took the bait were those very thoughts that he had previously been unable to get into words. This mental fishing was the process of ‘raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender’ that released what he called the ‘inner life’ – ‘which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense’.17

Though a fisherman all his life, Ted did not follow in Gerald’s footsteps as a hunter, despite being an excellent shot. To judge from his sinister short story ‘The Head’, in which a brother’s orgiastic killing of animals leads to him being hunted down himself, he was distinctly ambivalent about Gerald’s obsessive hunting.18 At the age of fifteen, Ted accused himself of disturbing the lives of animals. He began to look at them from their own point of view. That was when he started writing poems instead of killing creatures. He didn’t begin with animal poems, but he recognised the analogy between poetry-writing and capturing animals: first the stirring that brings a peculiar thrill as you are frozen in concentration, then the emergence of ‘the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness’.19 To create a poem was as if to hunt out a new species, to bring not a death but a new life outside one’s own.

Like an animal, a living poem depends on its senses: words that live, Hughes insists, are those that belong directly to the senses or to the body’s musculature. We can taste the word ‘vinegar’, touch ‘prickle’, smell ‘tar’ or ‘onion’. ‘Flick’ and ‘balance’ seem to use their muscles. ‘Tar’ doesn’t only smell: it is sticky to touch and moves like a beautiful black snake. Truly poetic words belong to all the senses at once, and to the body. Find the right word for the occasion and you will create a living poem. It is as if there is a sprite, a goblin, in the word, ‘which is its life and its poetry, and it is this goblin which the poet has to have under control’.20

Poetry is made by capturing essences: of a landscape, a person, a creature. In one talk, Hughes suggests that ‘beauty spots’ – he was remembering his childhood places such as Hardcastle Crags and the view from 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.