Kitabı oku: «Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life», sayfa 7

In the Anchor, Ted was a brooding silent presence, content to let others make the conversational running. The most opinionated was Roger Owen, Liverpool Welsh, all politics and sociology. But when Ted spoke, everyone listened. He wasn’t interested in politics but was an oracle on matters literary and was scathing about many of the dons in the English Faculty. Everyone in the group had a store of anecdotes, mostly mocking, about the lectures of Dr Leavis. Ted especially loathed the one on his beloved Yeats. In the Cambridge system, it was the weekly college supervision that counted. Lectures were an optional extra. Ted went to fewer and fewer as he progressed through his degree, but he thought well of both the theatrical Dadie Rylands and the sometime surrealist poet Hugh Sykes Davies on Shakespeare.

Towards the end of the pub evenings, much beer consumed, Terence McCaughey, with his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish ballads, led them in singing. Ted would eventually be cajoled into participation. ‘He had a soft, light voice,’ Huws recalled, ‘with the slight tremolo which later characterized his reading voice.’10 His party pieces were traditional numbers such as ‘Eppie Morie’ and Coleridge’s favourite, the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. Then they would all join in a round of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Others who joined the Pembroke group at the Anchor were Fintan O’Connell and Joe Lyde, Northern Irish grammar school boys, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. Lyde was loud and sometimes rude, a trumpeter and jazz pianist with the best band in Cambridge. A ladies’ man, he would get to play in New Orleans, aggravate Sylvia Plath with his outlandish tales and brash words, and die young, of drink.

As for Ted’s studies, there were supervisions on the Victorians and a special paper on Wordsworth and Coleridge, very much to his taste. Always able to read poetry with close attention, he jumped easily through the hoop of Cambridge practical criticism and achieved a 2.1 classification in Part I of the English Tripos, the honours examination at the end of the second year. Only nine candidates achieved first-class honours in English that year, and over 120 got a 2.2 or a Third. Ted and three of his Pembroke contemporaries were among the thirty 2.1s, outshining the four other Pembroke students, so this was a very creditable if not an outstanding performance.

The Cambridge degree is very flexible: it was perfectly possible to take one part of the Tripos in one subject and the other in something completely different. After Part I, half the Pembroke English students changed course. Ted’s choice was Archaeology and Anthropology. He thus missed out on the paper that he would most have enjoyed had he stuck with English: the study of Tragedy from the ancient Greeks via Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Chekhov and Yeats, a course in which Sylvia Plath would immerse herself a couple of years later.

Many times over the years Ted Hughes told the story of why he switched away from English. It was one of his party pieces, often used to introduce public readings of his best-known poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ – though that poem was not written until well after he graduated. He was not always consistent in the details of the tale, so there may well be a characteristic element of invention, or at least embellishment, in the telling. But there is no doubting the centrality of the story to his personal myth.

A cornerstone of Cambridge undergraduate life is the ‘essay crisis’. Terms are short, reading lists are long and extra-curricular distractions are legion. The essay for the weekly supervision is accordingly left to the last minute, written deep into the night. Ted sometimes wrote with great facility, especially if the subject was one of his passions, such as William Blake. But sometimes he could not get going on his essay. He’d stare at the blank page on his desk, write and rewrite an opening, cross it out, give up and go to bed.

One night when this happened, he dreamed that he was still at his desk, in his ‘usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another’. The lamplight fell on the page. In the dream the door slowly opened. A head appeared in the dim light: at the height of a man but with the form of a fox. The creature descended the two or three steps down into the room. With its fox’s head and ‘long skinny fox’s body’, it stood upright, as tall as a wolf reared on its hind legs. The hands were those of a man: ‘He had escaped from a fire – the smell of burning hair was strong, and his skin was charred and in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits.’ The creature walked across the room to the desk, placed the paw that was a human hand on the page and spoke: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ The burns were worst on the hand, and when the fox-man moved away there was a bloody print upon the page. The dream seemed so wholly real that Ted got up and examined his essay for the bloody mark. He determined forthwith to abandon his course in English Literature. In some versions of the story, he dreams again the following night. Either the fox returns and nods approvingly, or the creature returns in the variant form of a leopard, again standing erect.

In his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for Leavis-style dismantling of texts’, indeed an almost ‘sadistic’ aptitude for it, but the procedure – surgical and objective, the antithesis of schoolmaster Fisher’s spirit of ‘husbandry and sympathetic coaching’ – seemed to him both a ‘foolish game’ and inimical to the inner life.11 The critical impulse cauterises the creative spirit.

Given his interest in folklore and comparative mythology, fostered by The White Goddess, Archaeology and Anthropology was an obvious choice for Part II of the Tripos. He was able to focus on the anthropological side. An added advantage of changing subject was that, in order to mug up his new discipline, he was encouraged to come into residence during the ‘Long Vacation term’ (an opportunity to study in Cambridge for part of the three-month summer break). This was an escape from the boredom of home. There were a demanding eight papers to prepare for. General Ethnology was an introduction to race, culture and environment, exploring different types of human economy in relation to habitat. Two papers on prehistory gave him an introduction to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, and the ‘origins of higher civilization’. Then there was Physical Anthropology: man’s zoological position in relation to the animal world, a subject of considerable interest to Hughes. Social Anthropology was less attractive to him, but it was compensated for by a special paper in Comparative Ethnography that gave him the opportunity to read such classics as Margaret Mead’s Growing up in New Guinea and Bronisław Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic. The course was rounded off with an essay on a subject of the student’s choice and a practical examination, ‘being a test of the candidate’s power of recognizing and describing bodily features and artifacts, ancient and modern, including those drawn from the culture or area specifically studied’.12 Ted enjoyed identifying bones.

Promising as the prospect of such a course seemed, he quickly grew bored with the slog of factual learning. He attended very few lectures and instead borrowed the notes of his supervision partner. Pembroke did not have an ‘Arch & Anth’ don, so he was farmed out to St John’s College, where he was supervised by Glyn Daniel, who later became a highly successful populariser of prehistory while writing Cambridge-based murder mysteries in his spare time. Ted spent most of his final year in the University Library, pursuing his own course of reading. Unlike the Bodleian in Oxford, the Cambridge UL housed most of its stock on open stacks, with an arcane classification system that led to serendipitous juxtapositions. It was perfect for browsing, for following one’s nose, for the gathering of eclectic wisdom. Ted had a lust for free-range intellectual enquiry: he told a friend that he got an erection every time he entered the library.13

For his Finals, he leaned heavily on Graves’s White Goddess, a book mistrusted by professional ethnographers, and he scraped a third-class result. Academically, he would have done better to stay with English Literature. Nevertheless, Mead’s work gave him fascinating insights into alternative views of sex, marriage, the rearing of children and the supernatural, while Malinowski’s ‘ethnographic theory of the magical word’14 could be read as an endorsement of his own attitude to the supernatural: its argument was that the magical spells of the Trobriand islanders had an essentially pragmatic function. Like all forms of language, they must be regarded as ‘verbal acts’ intended primarily not to communicate thought but to bring about practical effects. This was very much Hughes’s view of the horoscope and the Ouija board (several of his contemporaries expressed some alarm at his attempts to conjure up the spirit world). Another set text – of which he would have got the gist, even if he didn’t read it through – had the potential to contribute to his sense of modern civilisation’s damaging alienation from nature: Ian Hogbin’s Experiments in Civilization was a report on how the arrival of European culture severed a native community in the Solomon Islands from its ancient ways.

Cambridge had its own social anthropology. There were divides between the posh colleges and the more middling, between the hearties and the aesthetes, between the entitled public school crowd and the meritocratic grammar school boys. Cavalry twill and flamboyant hacking jackets were set against grey flannel trousers and tweed. Ted and his provincial friends, drinking in the Anchor, looked with a mixture of awe and scorn upon the metropolitan sophisticates who dominated the Union, the Amateur Dramatic Club and the student literary magazine Granta. Among the stars of their Cambridge were Peter Hall, future founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and first artistic director of the National Theatre; Karl Miller, who would be literary editor of the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener and then found the London Review of Books; Thom Gunn of Trinity, regarded as the best student poet in Cambridge; and, most glamorous of all, Nick Tomalin, president of the Union and editor of Granta. Tomalin would marry a literary-minded Newnham College girl, Claire Delavenay, daughter of a French academic and an English composer. He became a journalist who was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, she a leading biographer.

Ted published a couple of poems in Granta, hiding himself under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. He also submitted work to new, smaller literary magazines. Peter Redgrove, something of a loner with unfashionably short hair and a leather jacket, set up delta explicitly to rival Granta. He took on Philip Hobsbaum, one of Leavis’s Downing men, as an assistant editor. Hobsbaum, who could be malicious, recalls Hughes sidling up to him in that other pub, the Mill, where the preferred beverage was strong Merrydown cider. Ted muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear you and Redgrove are starting a poetry magazine. Here are some poems I’d like you to look at.’ With that, ‘he shuffled off to the gents’:

The wad of manuscript he had thrust at us was greasy and typed in grey characters, as though the ribbon in the typewriter had been used a great many times over a period of years, and never been changed. Redgrove looked at this dubiously, and uttered these memorable words: ‘Ted’s a nice chap, but I don’t think we ought to publish his poems.’15

After Ted had graduated, delta did publish one of these poems. Entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, it tells of a woman slick with makeup coaxing a man into the darkness and stabbing him: ‘Men become wolves, but a wolf has become a woman.’16

The June 1954 issue of another little magazine, Chequer, appeared, in a bright yellow cover, in his final term. Daniel Huws, who had had a poem accepted there himself, was surprised to see Ted with a copy in his hands when he turned up in the Anchor one evening. Neither knew that the other wrote poetry. Ted quietly asked Dan his opinion of a poem by one Peter Crew. ‘I wrote it,’ he then explained.17 Entitled ‘Song of the Sorry Lovers’, it features a couple in bed, a hyena laughing outside and a rousing of the ‘animal faculties’.18 Later that night, Hughes and Huws went to see Redgrove, who also had a poem in Chequer. There were six bottles of German wine in his room at Queens’. They got drunk, crashed a party on another staircase and Ted got into a fight and damaged his thumb. On another occasion, he received a police caution for being drunk and disorderly after an undergraduate escapade involving a purloined road sign.

He was growing in confidence. Stories about him began circulating in college. His final-year room was on the top floor of the eastern side of Pembroke’s front court. He painted life-size pumas and what his bedmaker referred to as ‘bacchanalian orgies’ on the sloping ceiling. The Tutor, a benign classicist called Tony Camps, came to investigate. Ted suggested that the Tutor should lie down on the floor in order to appreciate the frescoes fully. He did so, then ordered whitewashing at Ted’s expense. Camps noted in the Tutor’s file that Hughes was often tipsy and that his manner had a bearish quality, but he still wrote him enthusiastic and affectionate job references.19 An even better story was that a college porter informed the Tutor that Mr Hughes was entertaining a lady in his rooms. Camps went to investigate, knocking on the heavy old door. After a few moments, it opened slowly to reveal Mr Hughes ‘stark naked with his arms outstretched like a cross’. Ted spoke: ‘Crucify me.’20

As with most undergraduates, there was many an incident involving climbing into college at night. Gallingly for ex-National Service men, it was like being in the forces again: lock-up at 10 p.m., fines for staying out late (twopence, doubled to fourpence if it was after eleven), and no overnight female guests. All the Cambridge colleges were single-sex and many girls at Newnham and Girton, the only two female colleges, kept to themselves or were intimidatingly bluestocking. Outnumbering female students by fifteen to one, male undergraduates looked to the town, and in particular to the nurses training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital on Trumpington Street, conveniently close to Pembroke. Ted started going out with a nurse called Liz Grattidge. Tall and blonde, from Manchester, she sat quietly in the Anchor, when she was free at weekends, ‘smiling indulgently at the proceedings’.21 Coming from a northern city of industrial grime and rain that was forever scudding in off the Pennines, she dreamed of making a new life in Australia – which she eventually did.

Ted was up for this. It would take him back to Gerald, who was now settled in Tullamarine, a suburb of Melbourne. He was married to a woman called Joan and sending home wafer-thin light-blue airmails filled with easy living and Australian light, perfect for painting (Gerald was showing a talent for watercolour). Just before sitting his Finals in May 1954, Ted surprised his mother and father with a letter. He had filled in emigration papers for Australia. Like Gerald, he would become a Ten Pound Pom. He told his parents that he was going to take a girl with him – she was up for anything. They would probably get married before going. He didn’t mention her name, but explained that she was a nurse and that all his friends said that from certain angles she looked just like him (apart from the fact that she was blonde and he was dark). There was something comforting about the idea of marrying a nurse who was happy to submit to his will: ‘I kick her around and everything goes as I please.’22

6
‘a compact index of everything to follow’

After graduation, Ted treated himself to a trip to Paris. Olwyn had been working for various international organisations there and eventually settled into a job as a secretary-cum-translator for a theatre and film agency called Martonplay, where she would encounter such legendary figures as the Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Ted had previously been on a motoring tour of Spain with Uncle Walt, but this was his first self-sufficient time abroad. At the end of his life he looked back at this young man in a Paris café, drinking claret and eating Gruyère cheese, experiencing their taste for the first time. Sophistication, cosmopolitanism, sensuality. A world away from Calder Valley and Cambridge fen. In a poem, he tried to recover the immersion and innocence of that moment, the sense of hope, of being on the threshold of a life not yet lived. The young man has no idea what is about to hit him: ‘He could never imagine, and can’t hear / The scream that approaches him.’ A scream in the shape of a panther, a scream in ‘the likeness of a girl’.1

He also had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland with his girlfriend Liz, whose sister lived out there. They rowed on the lakes, fished and walked. Their plans had slightly changed. He would go to Gerald in Australia, and get a job, while she went to Canada with her parents to visit her brother there, then she would return to the United Kingdom and join him ‘down under’ some time later.2

He kept his options open, applying not only for a passage to Australia but also for a postgraduate diploma in Education that would have qualified him as a teacher. Then he dreamed up one of his schemes: to make a fortune out of mink-farming. It would be an extension of the animal-trapping of his wanderings around Old Denaby. But Australia House informed him that mink would be out of the question down under. He contemplated Canada instead. Canada House told him that the climate for mink was much better in Britain. So for a while he would go back home and get some experience on a big mink farm. He made notes in his Collins Paragon pocket diary: ‘30 buckets for 1250 mink. In every 30, 4 buckets wheatmeal and bran or oatmeal etc., with grass-meal. 2 buckets milk and chemical feed.’3 Before and after work, he could write poetry and – like the young Shakespeare – do a little poaching now that there were deer up on Hardcastle Crags.4 Mink, though, did not inspire him into poetry in the manner of fox and fish, hawk and crow, or big cat.

Nor did he really want to return to Yorkshire. Friends and girlfriend were in the south. Over the course of the next year, he drifted. The passage to Australia came through, but he asked to defer it for a year. Dan Huws’s father let him use a flat that he owned in Rugby Street in the Holborn district of London. Having made a little money doing casual work, Ted got into the habit of returning to Cambridge and reading in the University Library until the money ran out, at which point he would go back to London to earn some more. In Cambridge he stayed with his girlfriend Liz in her unheated ground-floor flat in Norwich Street, conveniently near the station and a favoured address for nurses and students in ‘digs’. Most of his friends were still at the university. Terence McCaughey was pursuing graduate work in Celtic studies, while Dan Huws and the others were in their final undergraduate year.

At various times in the spring and summer terms of 1955 Ted slept on a camp bed in the room of a Queens’ student called Michael Boddy or pitched his tent in the garden of St Botolph’s Rectory, beside a converted chicken coop occupied by an American student who had placed an advertisement in the Varsity newspaper seeking accommodation, to which he had received a reply from the rector’s widow asking ‘whether you would be interested in a sleeping hut in my garden, which you could have rent free with free light and electric fire and radiator, in return for the stoking of two fires – an Aga cooking stove and a Sentry boiler’.5

Boddy of Queens’ – a twenty-stone-plus trombonist, son of the Dean of Ripon – shared Hughes’s love of country life and the writings of Henry Williamson. He was bemused when Ted took him on a tour of the occult section of the stacks of the University Library and intrigued by his advice on how to treat women. The theory was ‘to build up the relationship gently stage by stage’ so that the woman would be subjugated before she knew what was happening: ‘First say “Bring me that cup.” Then say, “Bring me that cup full of tea,” until, I suppose, the woman was cooking a five-course meal, feeding the goldfish, walking the dog, and doing the laundry without argument.’6 None of this was entirely serious: Ted was still playing the undergraduate. One night they commandeered a punt and stole along the Backs, Ted towering in the rear with the pole, until they reached St John’s College, where Chinese geese grazed on the lawn. Boddy jumped out of the punt, caught one and broke its neck. Ted said that since it was dead it should be eaten, so the body was taken back to St Botolph’s and boiled in a pot. It stunk out the kitchen and proved too tough to eat.7 During exam season, Ted helped his friends prepare. He told Olwyn that Boddy wrote an entire set of answers on the basis of quotations he had selected. His gift of recall was coming in handy: he provided further assistance by recovering the argument of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry from his recollection of a lesson at Mexborough Grammar.8

His horizon was becoming more cosmopolitan. Assorted Americans appeared in the Anchor crowd, among them the pot-bellied future critic Harold (‘Hal’) Bloom, who, like Ted, seemed to hold the whole of English literature within his prodigious memory. The two of them did not get on. Another new arrival was Danny Weissbort, who brought polyglot credentials. He was the son of Polish Jews who had arrived in Britain in the 1930s by way of Belgium. At home they spoke French and Danny answered them in English. He had come up to read History at Queens’ while writing poetry under the influence of Dylan Thomas: ‘I went up to Cambridge the year after Thomas died and I very much remember trying to write like him – and, of course, the idea of the poet as a bohemian wild boy was very attractive, even though I didn’t really know what it all meant.’9 The premature death of Thomas, in the Michaelmas term of Ted’s third undergraduate year, had struck them all like a thunderbolt, though no one knew to what extent it could be attributed to his legendary drinking. After graduating, Weissbort went to work for a while in the family clothing factory (a similar path was open to Hughes), but then took up research on the subject of poetry in post-Stalinist Russia. He made a significant return to Hughes’s life a decade later, when they launched the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.

The American who had moved to the chicken coop in order to escape the constriction of college lock-up was Lucas (‘Luke’) Myers from Tennessee. He had been drawn to Downing College by the reputation of F. R. Leavis. In later years, he would become the correspondent to whom Ted opened his heart most fully. They were the same age; they had both done military service before university; they both began with English Literature and switched to Anthropology. And they both had vigorous relationships with attractive girlfriends. They enjoyed exchanging stories of their escapades, Luke telling of sex in the chicken coop and Ted describing how he had been in bed with Liz in her lodgings one morning when the landlady came in with tea. He dived under the covers and in answer to the question ‘What’s that lump down there?’ Liz replied, ‘That’s Ted,’ with the result that she was obliged to find new lodgings the same day. On another occasion, Ted came up from London for a party and the first thing he and Liz did was dive into an unoccupied bedroom. He felt remorse for ‘violating hospitality’.10

Ted was getting a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a ladies’ man. Myers recalled only a single one-night stand, but its circumstances had momentous consequences. It was the final week of the summer term, known in Cambridge as the Easter term, of 1955. A Peterhouse student, a friend of Dan Huws and his roommate David Ross, had invited a girl up from London for a few days. One night she was asleep in Dan’s bed while he and Ross were out on the town with Ted and Luke. A porter observed two figures preparing to climb the wall back into college after hours. He thought he recognised the culprits, so went up to their rooms with another porter to check if the beds were indeed empty. They observed a trail of long yellow hair on Dan’s pillow and a set of female underclothes draped over a chair. The girl was escorted out of college. The boys gallantly directed her across Coe Fen to the St Botolph’s Rectory garden and then entered college to face their fate. Later, Ted and Luke returned to find the bed in the coop occupied by an attractive eighteen- or nineteen-year-old (this time clothed). With true Southern hospitality, Luke offered to sleep on the floor. But Ted and the girl decided that there was plenty of room in the tent, so Luke had his usual bed to himself. In the morning, the girl took him aside and said, ‘Ted’s so big and hot.’11

Huws, Ross and the student who had invited the girl in the first place were summoned before the Peterhouse authorities. Myers was implicated and his college informed. Ted’s name was also given, but since he had graduated he was not under college jurisdiction. However, the University of Cambridge had an ancient right to exclude miscreants among their graduates from an area within a radius of 3 miles from Great St Mary’s University Church. Peterhouse rusticated Huws and Ross, meaning that they had to leave the city for the remainder of the term (which was only a matter of days), while the boy who had issued the invitation was sent down permanently, thus losing the chance to get a degree. Downing decreed that Myers must move out of the debauched chicken coop and find other lodgings. The next term, the kindly widow allowed him to sleep in her dining room, so St Botolph’s Rectory remained his home a little longer. As for Ted, he was summoned before a specially convened university committee. After returning to London, he was informed that he would indeed be prohibited from setting foot within the prescribed radius of Great St Mary’s. He paid no attention. If he had done, he would probably never have met Sylvia Plath.

In the interim between trial and sentencing, Huws, Ross, Myers, Danny Weissbort and a medical student called Nathaniel (‘Than’) Minton met over wine in the ill-fated rooms in Peterhouse. It was then that David Ross announced that he wanted to start a new literary magazine. His father had generously agreed to put up some money. In the light of the recent misadventure, there was an obvious name for the new publication: Saint Botolph’s Review. They would set to work on it when they returned after the Long Vacation.

In that summer of 1955 Ted took an outdoor job as an assistant rose-gardener at a nursery between Baldock and Hitchin. In the autumn, he was back in Rugby Street, putting out feelers at the BBC, winning the odd sum of cash in newspaper competitions, taking on more casual work, for instance £8 a week as a security guard in a girder factory. When he wasn’t contemplating becoming a sailor on a North Sea trawler, he was dreaming up new money-making schemes: perhaps he could save up for five years to buy a house in Oxford or Cambridge and let it to students and nurses at £3 per head per week, with a landlady accommodated gratis in the basement. Or maybe rent out a string of garages, or act as agent for the sale of Gerald’s paintings, or teach English language in Spain or Hungary, where one could live cheaply.

The deferred offer to become a Ten Pound Pom lapsed. He did not want to commit to the other side of the world if there was any chance of making it in literary life at home. Philip Hobsbaum of delta had moved to London and revived the evenings of poetry reading that he had begun at Cambridge. He and his friends called themselves ‘the Group’. Their first meeting was held on a wet October evening in Hobsbaum’s bedsitter off the Edgware Road. Peter Redgrove was there, along with an Anglo-Argentinian poet who had also been at Cambridge, his American wife, a couple of aspiring actors, Hobsbaum’s young fiancée and Ted, who read some poems that would soon appear in Saint Botolph’s Review.12 Over the following couple of years, Ted was a frequent, though not regular, presence at meetings of the Group, which was soon joined by the brilliantly inventive Australian Peter Porter and the talented Jamaican-born poet and artist Edward Lucie-Smith, an Oxford man.

Hobsbaum never forgot the power of Hughes’s verse-speaking: ‘One night he read Hopkins’s “I wake and feel the fell of darkness, not day” in so vibrantly personal a manner that a young lady present took it to be a sonnet of his own recent composition.’13 He also recited a large chunk of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Peter Redgrove’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. A tape survives, now in the British Library, of an informal meeting of the Group and of Ted reciting some of his own poems as well as Yeats and Hopkins. His Yorkshire vowels are long but by today’s standards he sounds quite posh, his lilting incantation learned from Dylan Thomas.14