hinterland between journal-writing and poetry.
Tarka the Otter also got him thinking about the role of typography in literature, something in which he would take a keen interest throughout his career, whether in collaborating with his sister and others on private presswork and hand printing, or in complaining to Faber and Faber about their choice of font for a particular poetry collection. When Tarka and the hounds go down to a watery death at the very close of the book, the diminuendo of the typesetting enacts their drowning:
and while they stood there silently, a great
bubble rose out of the depths, and broke, and as
they watched, another bubble shook to the
surface, and broke; and there was a
third bubble in the sea-going
waters, and nothing
more.
Williamson was a Devon writer through and through. Tarka the Otter vividly and exactly evokes the landscape of the valleys of the twin rivers Torridge and Taw that share a North Devon estuary. Shortly after Ted and Sylvia found the house called Court Green, he realised that he had landed upon another spiritual home. On the first day he went fishing on the Taw, at the beginning of the 1962 season, an otter leapt from a ditch and led him to the river. Unawares, Ted had walked into his own ‘childhood dream’, stumbled upon Tarka’s two rivers.7 Later, he would gain riparian rights on the Torridge, at the very spot where Tarka was born. And in the Eighties, when the twin rivers’ otters and fish were threatened by pollution, he spent months and years fighting to save the aquatic life of the estuary.
Just as Tarka the Otter allowed Ted’s readerly imagination to follow brother Gerald to Devon, so Williamson’s war books, encountered later, would give him a way of comprehending his father’s experience of the trenches. He regarded The Patriot’s Progress (1930) in particular as one of the very finest of the many novels and memoirs that came out of the war. The incantatory quality of the prose, the transformation of the day-to-day realities of the soldier’s life into something epic and biblical in cadence again shaped the tones and textures of his own writing: ‘Their nailed boots bit the worn, grey road. Sprawling midday rest in the fields above the sunken valley road, while red-tabbed officers in long shiny brown boots and spurs cantered past on the stubble, the larks rising before them. But the sunshine ceased; and it rained, and rained, and rained. On the sixth day they rested.’8
John Bullock, the protagonist of Williamson’s war novel, is a symbol of England. There is danger here. Disillusionment following the war brings temptation: the search for a strong leader who will clear up the mess, stiffen the national backbone and lead a patriotic march to a New Jerusalem. In the Thirties, Henry Williamson saw such a man in Adolf Hitler. He attended the Nuremberg Rally in 1935 and was inspired by Hitler’s charisma. He idolised Oswald Mosley and became a member of the British Union of Fascists. This would turn him into a pariah in the literary world.
Hughes did not shy away from Williamson’s ugly politics. In his memorial address, he acknowledged that the stories of nature red in tooth and claw came from the same impulse as the fascism. That is to say, from a worship of natural energy that led to a fear (always close to rage) of ‘inertia, disintegration of effort, wilful neglect, any sort of sloppiness or wasteful exploitation’. Williamson’s ‘keen feeling for a biological law – the biological struggle against entropy’ sprouted into ‘its social and political formulations, with all the attendant dangers of abstract language’. His worship of ‘natural creativity’ meant that ‘he rejoiced in anybody who seemed able to make positive things happen, anybody who had a practical vision for repairing society, upgrading craftsmanship, nursing and improving the land’. This reverence for ‘natural’ as opposed to artificial life ‘led him to imagine a society based on natural law, a hierarchic society, a society with a great visionary leader’.9 The trajectory was very similar to that of D. H. Lawrence, whom Hughes would also come to admire. Such ideas, said Hughes, had ‘strange bedfellows’, but who was to say ‘that the ideas, in themselves, were wrong?’ Hughes himself shared exactly this vision of natural creativity and biological law. ‘It all springs’, he said, ‘out of a simple poetic insight into the piety of the natural world, and a passionate concern to take care of it.’ In this, Williamson was an ecowarrior before his time, ‘a North American Indian sage among Englishmen’.10 The lines of correspondence between Green thinking (‘Back to the land!’) and fascism (‘Blood and soil!’) are complex and troubling.11 Hughes, though, was too canny and grounded, too suspicious of the ‘abstract language’ of ideology, to make the fatal move from biocentric vision to extreme right-wing politics.
In the schoolroom, the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other. On winter days, biscuits and little bottles of milk for morning break were thawed on the black iron stove that stood in the middle of the classroom.
Miss McLeod, Ted’s first English teacher at Mexborough Grammar, praised his writing. His mother responded by buying him, second-hand, a library of classic poets. A children’s encyclopedia introduced him to folktales and myths. Rudyard Kipling was the first poetic favourite: the lolloping rhythms, the voicing of animals and the fables of their origins (‘How the Leopard Got his Spots’), the robust and conversational English working-class voices. Ted’s teenage poems, which he was soon publishing in the school magazine, brought Kipling’s style together with the substance of his Saturday-morning viewing of Westerns and jungle adventures. He rejoiced in imitating Kipling’s ‘pounding rhythms and rhymes’: ‘And the curling lips of the five gouged rips in the bark of the pine were the mark of the bear.’12
He also benefited from the attention of his next teacher. Sensitive to both praise and criticism, he showed her his Kiplingesque sagas. She pointed to a particular turn of phrase and said, ‘This is really … interesting … It’s real poetry.’ What she had highlighted was ‘a compound epithet concerning the hammer of a punt gun on an imaginary wildfowling hunt’. Young Ted pricked up his ears. This was an important moment.13 Soon, this second English teacher, Pauline Mayne, would introduce him to more demanding fare: the sprung rhythms and compacted vocabulary of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the challenging obscurity of T. S. Eliot.
There were many happy returns at the end of the war. The towering figure of Gerald arrived on the doorstep in September 1945, to be greeted by a now tall and handsome fifteen-year-old who stared and then, with tears streaming down his face, called out, ‘Mam, it’s him, it’s him!’14 Ted picked up his big brother’s kitbag and in they went for the reunion with Olwyn and their parents. At the grammar school, meanwhile, the masters were returning. Among them, coming out of the navy, where he had served on the North Atlantic convoys, was John Fisher, tall, with a long slim face and a copy of the Manchester Guardian tucked under his arm. Said to be the finest English teacher in Yorkshire, he put on plays, edited the school magazine – in 1947 the sub-editors were Olwyn Hughes and Edward Hughes – and taught poetry with a passion. He had the Bible, Shakespeare and classical mythology at his fingertips. He would sit on the edge of the desk and announce to the class that they were going to study Shakespeare, so they would all be bored to tears. But they never were. He brought wit and wordplay to the classroom, conjuring up Shakespeare’s characters and moving seamlessly between close reading and historical context. Whether it was Wordsworth (whom Fisher especially loved because he was raised on the Cumberland coast) or Wuthering Heights or the First World War poets, he brought the text to vivid life. He would gaze intently as he nurtured the class in the art
