Thomas: ‘I went up to Cambridge the year after Thomas died and I very much remember trying to write like him – and, of course, the idea of the poet as a bohemian wild boy was very attractive, even though I didn’t really know what it all meant.’9 The premature death of Thomas, in the Michaelmas term of Ted’s third undergraduate year, had struck them all like a thunderbolt, though no one knew to what extent it could be attributed to his legendary drinking. After graduating, Weissbort went to work for a while in the family clothing factory (a similar path was open to Hughes), but then took up research on the subject of poetry in post-Stalinist Russia. He made a significant return to Hughes’s life a decade later, when they launched the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.
The American who had moved to the chicken coop in order to escape the constriction of college lock-up was Lucas (‘Luke’) Myers from Tennessee. He had been drawn to Downing College by the reputation of F. R. Leavis. In later years, he would become the correspondent to whom Ted opened his heart most fully. They were the same age; they had both done military service before university; they both began with English Literature and switched to Anthropology. And they both had vigorous relationships with attractive girlfriends. They enjoyed exchanging stories of their escapades, Luke telling of sex in the chicken coop and Ted describing how he had been in bed with Liz in her lodgings one morning when the landlady came in with tea. He dived under the covers and in answer to the question ‘What’s that lump down there?’ Liz replied, ‘That’s Ted,’ with the result that she was obliged to find new lodgings the same day. On another occasion, Ted came up from London for a party and the first thing he and Liz did was dive into an unoccupied bedroom. He felt remorse for ‘violating hospitality’.10
Ted was getting a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a ladies’ man. Myers recalled only a single one-night stand, but its circumstances had momentous consequences. It was the final week of the summer term, known in Cambridge as the Easter term, of 1955. A Peterhouse student, a friend of Dan Huws and his roommate David Ross, had invited a girl up from London for a few days. One night she was asleep in Dan’s bed while he and Ross were out on the town with Ted and Luke. A porter observed two figures preparing to climb the wall back into college after hours. He thought he recognised the culprits, so went up to their rooms with another porter to check if the beds were indeed empty. They observed a trail of long yellow hair on Dan’s pillow and a set of female underclothes draped over a chair. The girl was escorted out of college. The boys gallantly directed her across Coe Fen to the St Botolph’s Rectory garden and then entered college to face their fate. Later, Ted and Luke returned to find the bed in the coop occupied by an attractive eighteen- or nineteen-year-old (this time clothed). With true Southern hospitality, Luke offered to sleep on the floor. But Ted and the girl decided that there was plenty of room in the tent, so Luke had his usual bed to himself. In the morning, the girl took him aside and said, ‘Ted’s so big and hot.’11
Huws, Ross and the student who had invited the girl in the first place were summoned before the Peterhouse authorities. Myers was implicated and his college informed. Ted’s name was also given, but since he had graduated he was not under college jurisdiction. However, the University of Cambridge had an ancient right to exclude miscreants among their graduates from an area within a radius of 3 miles from Great St Mary’s University Church. Peterhouse rusticated Huws and Ross, meaning that they had to leave the city for the remainder of the term (which was only a matter of days), while the boy who had issued the invitation was sent down permanently, thus losing the chance to get a degree. Downing decreed that Myers must move out of the debauched chicken coop and find other lodgings. The next term, the kindly widow allowed him to sleep in her dining room, so St Botolph’s Rectory remained his home a little longer. As for Ted, he was summoned before a specially convened university committee. After returning to London, he was informed that he would indeed be prohibited from setting foot within the prescribed radius of Great St Mary’s. He paid no attention. If he had done, he would probably never have met Sylvia Plath.
In the interim between trial and sentencing, Huws, Ross, Myers, Danny Weissbort and a medical student called Nathaniel (‘Than’) Minton met over wine in the ill-fated rooms in Peterhouse. It was then that David Ross announced that he wanted to start a new literary magazine. His father had generously agreed to put up some money. In the light of the recent misadventure, there was an obvious name for the new publication: Saint Botolph’s Review. They would set to work on it when they returned after the Long Vacation.
In that summer of 1955 Ted took an outdoor job as an assistant rose-gardener at a nursery between Baldock and Hitchin. In the autumn, he was back in Rugby Street, putting out feelers at the BBC, winning the odd sum of cash in newspaper competitions, taking on more casual work, for instance £8 a week as a security guard in a girder factory. When he wasn’t contemplating becoming a sailor on a North Sea trawler, he was dreaming up new money-making schemes: perhaps he could save up for five years to buy a house in Oxford or Cambridge and let it to students and nurses at £3 per head per week, with a landlady accommodated gratis in the basement. Or maybe rent out a string of garages, or act as agent for the sale of Gerald’s paintings, or teach English language in Spain or Hungary, where one could live cheaply.
The deferred offer to become a Ten Pound Pom lapsed. He did not want to commit to the other side of the world if there was any chance of making it in literary life at home. Philip Hobsbaum of delta had moved to London and revived the evenings of poetry reading that he had begun at Cambridge. He and his friends called themselves ‘the Group’. Their first meeting was held on a wet October evening in Hobsbaum’s bedsitter off the Edgware Road. Peter Redgrove was there, along with an Anglo-Argentinian poet who had also been at Cambridge, his American wife, a couple of aspiring actors, Hobsbaum’s young fiancée and Ted, who read some poems that would soon appear in Saint Botolph’s Review.12 Over the following couple of years, Ted was a frequent, though not regular, presence at meetings of the Group, which was soon joined by the brilliantly inventive Australian Peter Porter and the talented Jamaican-born poet and artist Edward Lucie-Smith, an Oxford man.
Hobsbaum never forgot the power of Hughes’s verse-speaking: ‘One night he read Hopkins’s “I wake and feel the fell of darkness, not day” in so vibrantly personal a manner that a young lady present took it to be a sonnet of his own recent composition.’13 He also recited a large chunk of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Peter Redgrove’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. A tape survives, now in the British Library, of an informal meeting of the Group and of Ted reciting some of his own poems as well as Yeats and Hopkins. His Yorkshire vowels are long but by today’s standards he sounds quite posh, his lilting incantation learned from Dylan Thomas.14
Ted annoyed Hobsbaum’s Rhodesian landlady by cooking a black pudding in her frying pan and singing ballads in the small hours of the morning, cajoling a shy, plain schoolteacher poet called Rosemary Joseph to join in. Rosemary later had a poem called ‘Baking Day’ published in an anthology of the work of the Group.15 Hobsbaum believed that Ted portrayed her, with a change of profession though not of character, in the poem that was entitled ‘Secretary’ in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain.
‘Secretary’ first appeared, untitled, in Saint Botolph’s Review. It is a cruel little poem about a nervous, demure young woman who would ‘shriek’ and run off in tears if touched by a man. Hughes imagines her scuttling ‘down the gauntlet of lust / Like a clockwork mouse’, darning and cooking for her family, then going to bed early with buttocks clenched tight against the force of youth and desire.16 Hobsbaum’s identification of this despised virgin with Rosemary Joseph should be treated with caution. As a student of F. R. Leavis, he should have remembered that one of the first lessons of practical criticism was to distinguish the speaker in a
