like a cross’. Ted spoke: ‘Crucify me.’20
As with most undergraduates, there was many an incident involving climbing into college at night. Gallingly for ex-National Service men, it was like being in the forces again: lock-up at 10 p.m., fines for staying out late (twopence, doubled to fourpence if it was after eleven), and no overnight female guests. All the Cambridge colleges were single-sex and many girls at Newnham and Girton, the only two female colleges, kept to themselves or were intimidatingly bluestocking. Outnumbering female students by fifteen to one, male undergraduates looked to the town, and in particular to the nurses training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital on Trumpington Street, conveniently close to Pembroke. Ted started going out with a nurse called Liz Grattidge. Tall and blonde, from Manchester, she sat quietly in the Anchor, when she was free at weekends, ‘smiling indulgently at the proceedings’.21 Coming from a northern city of industrial grime and rain that was forever scudding in off the Pennines, she dreamed of making a new life in Australia – which she eventually did.
Ted was up for this. It would take him back to Gerald, who was now settled in Tullamarine, a suburb of Melbourne. He was married to a woman called Joan and sending home wafer-thin light-blue airmails filled with easy living and Australian light, perfect for painting (Gerald was showing a talent for watercolour). Just before sitting his Finals in May 1954, Ted surprised his mother and father with a letter. He had filled in emigration papers for Australia. Like Gerald, he would become a Ten Pound Pom. He told his parents that he was going to take a girl with him – she was up for anything. They would probably get married before going. He didn’t mention her name, but explained that she was a nurse and that all his friends said that from certain angles she looked just like him (apart from the fact that she was blonde and he was dark). There was something comforting about the idea of marrying a nurse who was happy to submit to his will: ‘I kick her around and everything goes as I please.’22
6
‘a compact index of everything to follow’
After graduation, Ted treated himself to a trip to Paris. Olwyn had been working for various international organisations there and eventually settled into a job as a secretary-cum-translator for a theatre and film agency called Martonplay, where she would encounter such legendary figures as the Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Ted had previously been on a motoring tour of Spain with Uncle Walt, but this was his first self-sufficient time abroad. At the end of his life he looked back at this young man in a Paris café, drinking claret and eating Gruyère cheese, experiencing their taste for the first time. Sophistication, cosmopolitanism, sensuality. A world away from Calder Valley and Cambridge fen. In a poem, he tried to recover the immersion and innocence of that moment, the sense of hope, of being on the threshold of a life not yet lived. The young man has no idea what is about to hit him: ‘He could never imagine, and can’t hear / The scream that approaches him.’ A scream in the shape of a panther, a scream in ‘the likeness of a girl’.1
He also had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland with his girlfriend Liz, whose sister lived out there. They rowed on the lakes, fished and walked. Their plans had slightly changed. He would go to Gerald in Australia, and get a job, while she went to Canada with her parents to visit her brother there, then she would return to the United Kingdom and join him ‘down under’ some time later.2
He kept his options open, applying not only for a passage to Australia but also for a postgraduate diploma in Education that would have qualified him as a teacher. Then he dreamed up one of his schemes: to make a fortune out of mink-farming. It would be an extension of the animal-trapping of his wanderings around Old Denaby. But Australia House informed him that mink would be out of the question down under. He contemplated Canada instead. Canada House told him that the climate for mink was much better in Britain. So for a while he would go back home and get some experience on a big mink farm. He made notes in his Collins Paragon pocket diary: ‘30 buckets for 1250 mink. In every 30, 4 buckets wheatmeal and bran or oatmeal etc., with grass-meal. 2 buckets milk and chemical feed.’3 Before and after work, he could write poetry and – like the young Shakespeare – do a little poaching now that there were deer up on Hardcastle Crags.4 Mink, though, did not inspire him into poetry in the manner of fox and fish, hawk and crow, or big cat.
Nor did he really want to return to Yorkshire. Friends and girlfriend were in the south. Over the course of the next year, he drifted. The passage to Australia came through, but he asked to defer it for a year. Dan Huws’s father let him use a flat that he owned in Rugby Street in the Holborn district of London. Having made a little money doing casual work, Ted got into the habit of returning to Cambridge and reading in the University Library until the money ran out, at which point he would go back to London to earn some more. In Cambridge he stayed with his girlfriend Liz in her unheated ground-floor flat in Norwich Street, conveniently near the station and a favoured address for nurses and students in ‘digs’. Most of his friends were still at the university. Terence McCaughey was pursuing graduate work in Celtic studies, while Dan Huws and the others were in their final undergraduate year.
At various times in the spring and summer terms of 1955 Ted slept on a camp bed in the room of a Queens’ student called Michael Boddy or pitched his tent in the garden of St Botolph’s Rectory, beside a converted chicken coop occupied by an American student who had placed an advertisement in the Varsity newspaper seeking accommodation, to which he had received a reply from the rector’s widow asking ‘whether you would be interested in a sleeping hut in my garden, which you could have rent free with free light and electric fire and radiator, in return for the stoking of two fires – an Aga cooking stove and a Sentry boiler’.5
Boddy of Queens’ – a twenty-stone-plus trombonist, son of the Dean of Ripon – shared Hughes’s love of country life and the writings of Henry Williamson. He was bemused when Ted took him on a tour of the occult section of the stacks of the University Library and intrigued by his advice on how to treat women. The theory was ‘to build up the relationship gently stage by stage’ so that the woman would be subjugated before she knew what was happening: ‘First say “Bring me that cup.” Then say, “Bring me that cup full of tea,” until, I suppose, the woman was cooking a five-course meal, feeding the goldfish, walking the dog, and doing the laundry without argument.’6 None of this was entirely serious: Ted was still playing the undergraduate. One night they commandeered a punt and stole along the Backs, Ted towering in the rear with the pole, until they reached St John’s College, where Chinese geese grazed on the lawn. Boddy jumped out of the punt, caught one and broke its neck. Ted said that since it was dead it should be eaten, so the body was taken back to St Botolph’s and boiled in a pot. It stunk out the kitchen and proved too tough to eat.7 During exam season, Ted helped his friends prepare. He told Olwyn that Boddy wrote an entire set of answers on the basis of quotations he had selected. His gift of recall was coming in handy: he provided further assistance by recovering the argument of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry from his recollection of a lesson at Mexborough Grammar.8
His horizon was becoming more cosmopolitan. Assorted Americans appeared in the Anchor crowd, among them the pot-bellied future critic Harold (‘Hal’) Bloom, who, like Ted, seemed to hold the whole of English literature within his prodigious memory. The two of them did not get on. Another new arrival was Danny Weissbort, who brought polyglot credentials. He was the son of Polish Jews who had arrived in Britain in the 1930s by way of Belgium. At home they spoke French and Danny
