When I was about
seven years old I was sitting on the classroom
floor listening to the teacher read The
Iron Man by Ted Hughes. I was frightened by the giant tin man who roamed
around the countryside attacking and destroying industrial tractors and
combined harvesters without being stopped. I didn't know much about the author
- that he was a famous poet. Here I am in Mytholmroyd
in West Yorkshire outside the home where he was born in the front bedroom. In
boyhood I didn’t think anybody famous - except Manchester United/City
footballers - came from the north but this man did.
I remember learning about him through an article
about his two wives who'd both committed suicide (his first wife Sylvia Plath is
buried not far from this house.) This was a little unfair as it seemed to push
to one side a broad volume of poems and novels. I go rambling around the Calder
Valley locations where Ted walked and the moody landscapes were distilled quite
accurately in his poetry.
As I looked at the end terraced house I wondered
which room was his. He lived here till he was seven years old, the youngest of
three children. His dad, a joiner, almost died having enlisted with the Lancashire
Fusiliers and took a bullet while fighting in Ypres (a bullet stuck in his pay
book which he kept his breast pocket.) The trajectory of Ted’s imagination was set
in this end-terrace house and he later said "my first six years shaped
everything."
Though the area was strewn with textiles mills
his parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. Ted wrote a lot about
animals. He was fascinated by them rather than loved them (he hunted and fished)
and started drawing them. Soon he was writing poems about them and the career
as a poet - that carried him to the end of his life - was set in stone. He
didn’t know it at the time - nor when the family moved forty miles away to
Mexborough in Yorkshire. The teachers at his grammar school encouraged his
poetry but he left wanting to be a train driver or footballer.
After university, living in London and Cambridge,
he had many jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman
and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He even worked in a
zoo which enabled him to observe animals at close quarters.
We now him know as a poet and he was so effective
with words he was the country's Poet Laureate for nearly fifteen years until
his death. Eventually he published eleven volumes of poetry as well as several
children's books. He married the poet Sylvia Plath (they had two children) but
left her for Assia Wevill.
Both women killed themselves - also the daughter he had with Assia.
He moved to Devon and died aged 68 of myocardial
infarction (heart attack) while suffering with colon cancer. He was cremated in
Exeter and his ashes scattered at a remote location where the River Taw started
(where he loved fishing.)
It all started here in this stone end-terrace house.
I looked up at the front bedroom window where he was pushed out into the world
in 1930. Sometimes I stroll up to the cemetery at Heptonstall
to observe visitors to his first wife's grave. Some brook at the idea that he
had his wife Sylvia buried here rather than have her flown back to the US and
the "HUGHES" letters have been chiselled off the headstone.
Ted wrote a poem called Stubbing Wharfe
named after a pub in Hebden Bridge. I went to have a
quick look at it. It recalls a real event in the early years of Ted and
Sylvia’s marriage. They had just returned from America in December 1959 and
Sylvia was four months pregnant with Frieda. They spent that Christmas in
Yorkshire with family.
Perhaps some famous folk are born in the north afterall. I did a salute and left.
Note blue plaque
outside last house…
Wonder which was
his bedroom?
Ted’s wife, the
poet Sylvia Palth, is buried nearby in Heptonstall Cemetery. Not the "Hughes" has been
removed...
Outside Stubbing
Wharfe pub in Hebden Bridge
(frequented by Ted and Sylvia.) Ted wrote a poem of the same name.