influenced by the Anglo-Catholic Eliot’s idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that fractured English culture and poetry at the time of the Civil War, Puritanism was the great enemy of those ‘ancient occult loyalties’ to a deeper, mysterious world that were embodied by such superstitions as astrology.
Ted’s belief in a world beyond the normal came from his mother. Edith Farrar felt that the spirit world was in touch with her. Ever since childhood, she had often felt the sensation of a ghostly hand. One night in June 1944 she was woken by an ache in her shoulder. She got up and saw crosses flashing in the sky above St George’s Chapel, which was across the road from their Mexborough home. She tried to wake William (whom she called Billie) to tell him that a terrible battle was going on somewhere and that thousands of boys were being killed. The next day the radio announced that the D-Day landings had begun early that morning.23 Later, when she and her husband moved to the Beacon, she saw a shadow in the house. She learned that the previous owners had died and their daughter had sold the house and moved into Hebden Bridge. She told the shadow, who was the mother, where her daughter now lived. It never reappeared.24
Mr Farrar, from Hebden Bridge, was a power-loom ‘tackler’ – a supervisor, with responsibility for tackling mechanical problems with the looms. Tall and quiet, with black hair and a heavy black moustache, he was fond of reading, played the violin a little and had a gift for mending watches. His grandson Ted would be good with his hands. Grandma Farrar, Annie, was a farmer’s daughter from Hathershelf, ‘short and handsome with a deep voice and great vitality’. When they went to the local Wesleyan chapel, ‘tears would roll down her cheeks under the veil she wore with her best hat’, so moved was she by the sermon or the hymns. As well as regular chapel attendance, there were prayer meetings once a week in the evening. But on Sunday afternoons came the freedom of country walks and picnics at picturesque Hardcastle Crags. The Farrars had eight children, the eldest born in 1891, the youngest in 1908: Thomas, Walter, Miriam, Edith, Lily, Albert, Horace (who died as a baby) and Hilda. In May 1905, Lily died of pneumonia, aged just four and a half.
As she grew up, Edith got on especially well with Walter, who was both easygoing and strong-willed. He wasn’t good at getting up in the morning. Soon he started work in the clothing trade, while taking evening classes to improve himself. Miriam and Edith left school at thirteen and went into the same trade, training to be machinists making corduroy trousers and moleskin jackets. Miriam was delicate. In June 1916, she caught cold and it turned to pneumonia and she died, aged nineteen.25
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
