1
âfastened into placeâ
Coming west from Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, along the narrow valley of the river Calder, you see Scout Rock to your left. North-facing, its dense wood and dark grey stone seem always shadowed. The Rock lowers over an industrial village called Mytholmroyd. Myth is going to be important, but so is the careful, dispassionate work of demythologising: the first syllable is pronounced as in âmyâ, not as in âmythâ. My-thâm-royd.1 For Ted Hughes, it was âmyâ place as much as a mythic place.
His childhood was dominated by this dark cliff, âa wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sunâ. This was the perpetual memory of his birthplace; his âspiritual midwifeâ, one of his âgodfathersâ. It was âthe curtain and back-dropâ to his childhood existence: âIf a manâs death is held in place by a stone, my birth was fastened into place by that rock, and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain.â2
Young Ted kept away from Scout Rock. He belonged to the other side of the valley. Once, though, he climbed it with his elder brother, Gerald. They ascended through bracken and birch to a narrow path that braved the edge of the cliff. For six years, he had gazed up at the Rock â or rather, sensed its admonitory gaze upon him â but now, as if through the other end of the telescope, he was looking down on the place of his birth. He stuffed oak-apples into his pockets, observing their corky interior and dusty worm-holes. Some, he threw into space over the cliff.
Gerald, ten years older, lived to shoot. He told his little brother of how a wood pigeon had once been shot in one of the little self-seeding oaks up here on the Rock. It had set its wings âand sailed out without a wing-beat stone dead into space to crash two miles away on the other side of the valleyâ.3 He told, too, of a tramp who, waking from a snooze in the bracken, was mistaken for a fox by a farmer. Shot dead, his body rolled down the slope. A local myth, perhaps.
There was also the story of a family, relatives of the Hugheses, who had farmed the levels above the Rock for generations. Their house was black, as if made of âold gravestones and worn-out horse-troughsâ. One of them was last seen shooting rabbits near the edge. He âtook the plunge that the whole valley dreams about and fell to his death down the sheer faceâ. Thinking back, the adult Hughes regarded this death as âa community peace-offeringâ.4 The valley, he had heard, was notable for its suicides. He blamed the oppression cast by Scout Rock.
He wrote his essay about the Rock at a dark time. It was composed in 1963 as a broadcast for a BBC Home Service series called Writers on Themselves.5 Broadcast three weeks earlier in the same series was a posthumous talk by Sylvia Plath (read by the actress June Tobin) entitled âOcean 1212-Wâ. The letter in which BBC producer Leonie Cohn suggested this title for the talk was possibly the last that Plath ever received.6 Where the primal substance of Tedâs childhood was rock, that of Sylviaâs was water: âMy childhood landscape was not land but the end of land â the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic . . . My final memory of the sea is of violence â a still, unhealthily yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violets in its eye.â7
Though a suicide far from the Calder Valley preyed on Hughesâs mind as he wrote of the Rock, there is no reason to doubt his memory of its force. Still, whenever writers make art out of the details of their childhood, a part of the reader wonders whether that was really how they felt at the time. Is the act of remembering at some level inventing the memory? William Wordsworth was the great exemplar of this phenomenon. He called his epic of the self a poem âon the growth of the poetâs mindâ. And it was there that he pondered questions that we should always ask when reading Hughesâs poetry of recollection. What does it mean to dissolve the boundary between the things which we perceive and the things which we have made? What is the relationship between the writing poet and the remembered self? Is a particular memory true because it is an accurate account of a past event or because it is constitutive of the remembererâs consciousness? Each member of a family remembers differently. Reading a draft of this chapter, Olwyn Hughes was angry: she did not recognise her own childhood, which in her memory was filled with light and laughter, happy family life and the absolute freedom of outdoor play. âHard taskâ, writes Wordsworth, âto analyse a soul.â8
Wordsworth, too, remembered a towering, shadowed rock as a force that supervised and admonished his childhood â the similarity of language in Hughesâs âThe Rockâ suggests a literary allusion as well as a personal memory. For Wordsworth, the overseer was a cliff face that loomed above him as he rowed a stolen boat across a lake. It cast a shadow of guilt and fear over his filial bond with nature. For Hughes, too, to speak of living in the shadow of the Rock was a way of externalising a darkness in his own heart.
From the Rock, young Ted could also see the arteries leading out to east and west. The railway, fast and slow lines in each direction. The station building was perched on a viaduct. Below, there was the largest goods yard in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Inward goods: wool from Yorkshire and cotton from the Lancashire ports. Outward: clothing and blankets from the mills and sewing shops. Corduroy and flannel, calico and moleskin; menâs trousers in grey or fawn. New fashions: golf jackets, hiking shorts, blue and khaki shirts. The yard was also packed with boxes of chicks and eggs: overrunning the hillside above were chicken sheds belonging to Thornbers, pioneers of factory poultry farming.
Below the railway was the river Calder. A âmytholmâ is a meeting of streams. Just by the Co-op and the old Navvy Bridge, the Elphin Brook, darting down from the narrow gully of Cragg Vale, flows into the Calder. Beyond the river was the main road, the old cross-Pennine turnpike â rumbling lorries but some of the traffic still horse-drawn â that linked Halifax to Burnley, Yorkshire to Lancashire. The Calder Valley is on the cusp of the two great counties of northern industrial productivity, with their deep history of rivalry going back to the Wars of the Roses.
On the far side of the road â Tedâs side â ran the Rochdale Canal, still in use for transporting goods, but only just. Now it was a place for the local children to fish for gudgeon and stickleback. Beyond the canal, a network of terraced houses clustered, back to back or back to earth, on the northern hillside. This was the Banksfield neighbourhood, where he and his family belonged. Some of the muck streets went vertically, others (including his own) ran horizontally, in parallel with the canal. The surrounding fields were dotted with smallholdersâ hen pens. Scattered above, where the fields sloped gently up to the moors, were farms. The path up the hill to the moor was always there as an escape from the blackened mills and terraces.
Down in the valley, Ted felt secure, if hemmed in. On top of the Rock that day in 1936 or â37, he was exposed. He looked down on a community that was closed in on itself. Nearly all the buildings were made of the distinctive local stone. Known as millstone grit (âa soul-grinding sandstoneâ),9 it oxidises quickly, whatever the condition of the air. Add a century of factory smoke and acid rain. Then, as a tour guide will put it in one of Hughesâs poems about his home valley, âyou will notice / How the walls are blackâ.10 This was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere, blackened chimneys known as lumbs rose skyward from the mills.
On his side of the valley, 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 âfirst world-directionâ.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 Tedâs 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. âWhen he was born,â his mother Edith remembered, âa 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.â12
Gerald, just a few weeks off his tenth birthday, lent a helping hand. Despite the rain, Edithâs husband Billie went out for a spin in her brother Walterâs car. Minnie, wife of another brother, Albert, who lived along the street at number 19, had offered to look after Olwyn, but she didnât 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 âsolar midnightâ. 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 âascendantâ sign was Cancer, bonding him to home and family. And Neptune, the maker of symbols and myths, was âconjunctâ. His horoscope, he explained, meant that he was âfated to live more or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in airâ.14 Bound for fame, that is to say, but fearful of scrutiny.
Did he really believe that his fate was written in the stars? âTo an outsider,â he once observed in a book review, âastrology is a procession of puerile absurdities, a Babel of gibberish.â He granted that many astrologers peddled rubbish and craziness. Others, he thought, did make sense. He did not know whether genuine astrology was an âesoteric scienceâ or an âintuitive artâ. That did not matter, so long as it worked: âIn 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.â15 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 âdiscoveredâ 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.
âIntuitiveâ is the key word in Hughesâs reflections on astrology. If the danger of a horoscope is that it is an encouragement to the abnegation of responsibility for oneâs own actions, a forgetting of Shakespeareâs âthe fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselvesâ, the value of a horoscope is its capacity to confirm oneâs best intuitions. The major superstitions â astrology, ghosts, faith-healing, the sixth sense whereby you somehow know that a person you love has died even though they are far away â are, Hughes thought, impressive because âthey are so old, so unkillable, and so few. If they are pure nonsense, why arenât there more of them?â16
His birth was formally registered in Hebden Bridge, the nearest large town. Father was recorded as William Henry Hughes, âJourneyman Portable Building makerâ, 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 âCrag Jackâ. Family legend made him a local sage â âsolved peopleâs problems, wrote their letters, closest friends the local Catholic and Wesleyan Ministers, though he spent a lot of time in pubsâ.18 Crag Jack was said to have been a great singer. He was a bit of a âmystery manâ, who came to the Calder Valley from Manchester and, before that, Ireland. In the young Tedâs imagination, he is perhaps a kind of bard or shaman, certainly a conduit of Celtic blood.
âCrag Jackâs Apostasyâ 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 âstoopedâ over his âcradleâ. He finds a god instead beneath the stone of the landscape.19 Here Ted takes on Grandfather Jackâs 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 âMachinist Fustianâ, 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. Tedâs widowed Granny Hughes kept on the King Street shop for many years. She died in her eighties.
Like her husband, she had been born i...