later years, Ted liked to put about the myth that he got his place at Cambridge only because John Fisher sent the Master of the college a sheaf of his poems and a letter singing his praises as a budding writer, which led to his being admitted as a ‘dark horse’ despite failing the exam. But this would not have got him an exhibition and indeed in the Pembroke College archive there is a letter in which Fisher apologises for sending the poems, recognising that it might have been inappropriate to do so.1 Hughes got a place to read English at Cambridge on his merits as a schoolboy literary critic.
But there was a hitch. At the end of his first year in the sixth form, the government had introduced a National Service Act. The army was not getting enough recruits – hardly surprising after the long years of war – so conscription was introduced for healthy males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. The Act was due to come into force on 1 January 1949. Just weeks before it did so, in the very month in which Hughes got his offer from Cambridge, the period of service was increased from twelve to eighteen months, in the light of the ‘Emergency’ in Malaya and the Berlin blockade that began the Cold War. There was a genuine fear that another major war might be on the way all too soon.
Boys with university places on offer were allowed to serve before or after taking their degree. Ted decided to get it out of the way and, following in Gerald’s footsteps, applied for the Royal Air Force rather than the army. By the time his application had been processed and he had passed the medical, the eighteen-month period would have made it impossible for him to go up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1950. While he was still in uniform, the period of service was further extended, to two years, because of the outbreak of the Korean War.
He did not see active service. The RAF didn’t really know what to do with its compulsory recruits. There was an awful lot of sitting around, which for Ted meant the opportunity to read and to write. For two years he would be identified as ‘number 2449573 A.C. 2 Hughes E. J.’ (the abbreviation stood for ‘Aircraftman Second Class’). He sent witty, flirtatious and bored letters to Edna Wholey, first from Hut D35 of the RAF station at West Kirby on the Wirral, then from the Ops Section and after that from the Signals Section at RAF Patrington, near Hull in Yorkshire. His reports were of severe haircuts, rough and tumble in the barracks, dreadful food, pointless exercises, rain, rain and more rain, made bearable only by food parcels from home, the anticipation of the next ‘48’ (two days’ leave) and the quiet opportunity to read once he settled into his position as a flight plotter. He dated several local girls, none seriously, though he described one of them – Hilda Norris – as having ‘eyes like a tiger’.2
Patrington was a radar station for ground-controlled interception, whereby fighter planes would be guided towards an incoming target. Since there was no immediate prospect of Russian bombers or missiles winging their way over Bridlington Bay to the Holderness marshes of the East Riding, the screen was usually blank and, especially when on night duty, Ted was free to deepen his knowledge of the psychology of Jung and the canon of English literature. Shakespeare, Yeats and Blake were his constant companions. Among prose-writers, he especially admired William Hazlitt, regarding his essays as a model of ‘what-prose-ought-to-be’.3 The influence tells on the lucid, muscular prose he wrote throughout his life. He also composed poems for Edna, including an ‘epithalamium’ for her marriage – though he expressed some displeasure at the idea of her being with another man. They were pals who flirted rather than true lovers. He writes of kissing her wrists, not her lips. But he felt possessive about their special bond with each other and with their secret Crookhill places.
The finest poem he wrote during his National Service was addressed to another girl, Jean Findlay, the great beauty of Mexborough Grammar School. Ted had wooed her with poetry when he was a sixth-former.4 Now he saw her when he went home on leave. Walking back from a date, a love song formed in his head. On returning to duty – night watch, three o’clock on the morning of 13 June 1950, ‘after slogging at stupidities’ – he finished it in a two-minute heat of inspiration. It was the only early poem that he cared to preserve. Simply entitled ‘Song’, he included it (as a last-minute addition) in his first published volume, The Hawk in the Rain. He later said that it had a kind of ‘natural music’ that he never recaptured – or not at least until the more personal voice of his later poetry.5 Influenced by the medieval traditions of courtly love in general and the early lyrics of Yeats in particular, it turns Jean Findlay into an icy or marbled lady, blessed by ‘the tipped cup of the moon’, caressed by the sea and kissed by the wind but unwilling to give herself to the poet. His heart has fallen ‘all to pieces’ at the thought of her.6
The all-male world of National Service was frustrating for young men of nineteen and twenty. Ted had a lot of time to turn Edna and Jean into creatures of his imagination. Thinking about them both, and writing poems inspired by them, made him reflect on ancient types. Was Edna in the woods an embodiment of woman as nurturing Mother Nature? And Jean the incarnation of desirable but dangerous Beauty?
His thinking about such dualities was shaped by his reading of Jung’s Psychological Types, that book to which he had been introduced by his pathfinder Olwyn. She was now down in London, studying for an English Literature degree at Queen Mary College on the Mile End Road. She graduated in the summer of 1950 with a lower-second-class degree. As at school, she had not quite achieved her full academic potential: there was something prophetic in a sixth-form end-of-term report that read, ‘Olwyn has done creditable work on the whole. But she must not allow herself to be distracted.’7
Jung’s book divided human beings into two character types, introverted personalities who were highly subjective and absorbed in their own psychological processes, and extraverted personalities who were attuned to objects, to other people and to the external world. Jung treated this model as a key to all mythologies. His massive book worked through virtually the entire history of Western (and not a little Eastern) thought, dividing up ideas and writers according to extravert and introvert. Special value was attached to the inner life of the introvert, the type that was said to be typical of the creative artist.
Jung gave considerable space to a very distinctive exegesis of Carl Spitteler’s allegorical prose poem Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881), making it the basis for the proposition that the mythical figure of Prometheus is both the exemplar of the creative artist and the archetypal introvert who surrenders himself entirely to his inner psychic function. Hughes took the model to heart: he told Olwyn of how he tried ‘to inhibit all conscious thought and fantasy, so that my unconscious would compensate with an increased activity’.8 His hope was that poetry would emerge directly from his unconscious, rather as Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that the vision of Kubla Khan came to him fully formed in a dream. For Ted, dreams would always be the taproot into the unconscious. Throughout his life, many of his journal entries consist of records of extraordinary dreams.
According to Jung, the union of opposites in the works of Spitteler took the form of the worship of women, a symbol for worship of the soul. In a move typical of Jung’s development of Freud, it is suggested that the libido is originally attracted to woman in an erotic fashion, but then fastened on to a symbolic function that had something to do with the development of religion. As Ted would come to see it, the girl is replaced by the Goddess; the choice between two girls is transformed into a battle between two aspects of the Goddess.
Aircraftman Second Class E. J. Hughes finished his National Service and went home to prepare for university. His formal discharge was signed off later in the year, summarising his record as follows: enlisted, 27 October 1949; discharged from National Service 5 October 1951; ‘Trade – Ground Wireless Mechanic – care and maintenance of transmitting
