inseparable. For much of the Easter term, he camped out on a mattress in a bare-boarded room on the top floor of Alexandra House, a soup-kitchen run by the Women’s Voluntary Service just off Petty Cury. He found himself sharing a blanket with one of the volunteers, ‘a lovely girl escaped freshly / From her husband’. For a month, they slept nightly in each other’s arms, naked but never once making love. She tenderly traced her hands over the love-scratches that Sylvia had ‘inscribed’ across his back, while he ‘never stirred a finger beyond/ Sisterly comforting’. Sometimes they were joined in the bed by a ‘plump and pretty’ friend of hers, who ‘did all she could’ to get Ted ‘inside her’ – without success.18 Like a medieval knight lying between two naked temptresses, he was proving himself in the art of fidelity. He did not fail.
Cambridge is at its loveliest in the Easter term. According to Jane Baltzell, Sylvia’s rival and housemate, one warm day Ted and Luke sat in a haystack in a field just outside town, drinking wine and making literary plans. Ted then walked to Whitstead with another bottle of wine, intending to share some of their dreams with Sylvia. She did not have a corkscrew, so Ted went down from her attic room to borrow one. The first door on which he knocked happened to be that of the resident don whose job it was to keep an eye on the Whitstead girls. Baltzell’s version of the incident has the door opening and a face, ‘framed in tight braids of dark hair’, peering out. Ted asks if she has a corkscrew that he can borrow. Almost before she can reply that she ‘most certainly has not’ – she happened to be a teetotal Methodist – Ted loses patience, strikes ‘the neck of the bottle off on her doorknob’ and bolts back upstairs.19 One never knows quite how much embellishment there is in the telling of such myth-making tales about Ted: Luke Myers was convinced that this story was pure invention, probably on the part of Sylvia.20
The lovers listened to Beethoven and Bartók in record shops. They went into the moonlight to find owls, and Sylvia immediately composed a poem called ‘Metamorphosis’. They were both writing at an unprecedented rate, Sylvia being inspired by Ted to take on ‘the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth’ and creating poems for him in pastiche of his own style, such as an ‘Ode for Ted’ that begins:
From under crunch of my man’s boot
green oat-sprouts jut;
he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout …
stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.21
They wandered the meadows around Grantchester, made love in the open air. Having at last found a man who loved food as much as she did, Sylvia cooked steak and trout on her single gas ring. Ted taught her – as he had once taught Shirley – how to cook herring roes and how to read horoscopes. He took her to ‘the world’s biggest circus’.22 They shared improvised recipes:
He stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of Shrimp Newburg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese; had it on rice with the trout. It took us three hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.23
They read and wrote and revised their poems in the garden of Whitstead, quoting swathes of Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare that Ted knew by heart. Each immediately became the other’s best critic. He sharpened her style, made her feel she was writing from her truest and deepest self for the first time. She organised his poems, typed them up and began sending them to American periodicals. He taught her to punt on the Cam. She took him to a Fulbright reception in London, where they met the American ambassador and the dashing Duke of Edinburgh who, mistaking Ted for a student, asked him what he was doing, to which Ted replied that he was ‘chaperoning Sylvia’ and the Duke smiled and said, ‘Ah, the idle rich.’24
She told of all this in effusive letters to her mother Aurelia. Otto Plath had died shortly after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. He had gone to have his leg amputated as a result of gangrene, and died of an embolism while still in hospital. On being told the news, Sylvia had announced that she would never speak to God again. Mother and daughter were inevitably drawn intensely close by their loss. When Sylvia moved to England, her letters were a lifeline to her mother. She also kept in touch with her brother Warren, who was two and a half years younger than her. Ted, she wrote to tell him, was the one man worthy of becoming his brother-in-law, though he would benefit from Warren giving him some American-style training in how to buy himself a decent wardrobe.
Her Fulbright scholarship having been renewed for a second year, she arranged for her mother to visit England at the end of term. Aurelia arrived in London on Wednesday 13 June and the three of them went to a cheap but good German restaurant called Schmidt’s, in honour of the Teutonic Plathian heritage. Sylvia was delighted that her mother and lover immediately hit it off. That night, Sylvia suggested to Ted that they should get married and he agreed.25
They rushed to make arrangements before Aurelia left town. This involved getting a special Archbishop’s licence, tracking down a local vicar, buying new shoes and trousers for Ted, and spending the last of their money on gold wedding rings. The night before the wedding Ted dreamed that he had caught a pike from an enormous depth in the pond at Crookhill. As it rose to the surface, its head filled the entire lake. He backed away, straining to control it.26
By good fortune, Aurelia had in her luggage a pink wool knitted suit dress that she had never worn. Adorned with a pink hair ribbon and a pink rose from Ted, this served as a wedding dress. The hurried ceremony, conducted by a twinkle-eyed old clergyman who lived opposite Charles Dickens’s house, took place at the church of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury, just across the square from the offices of Faber and Faber, on 16 June 1956 (‘Bloomsday’, Ted noted – the date of the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses). Ted wore his RAF tie and the corduroy jacket that he had three times dyed black. It rained. Aurelia was the only guest, so the curate was requisitioned as best man, delaying him from taking a busload of children to the zoo. ‘All the prison animals had to be patient / While we married,’ wrote Ted in Birthday Letters, where he turned the curate into a sexton, grimly foreshadowing Hamlet’s macabre dialogue over Ophelia’s grave. The vicar read an off-the-shelf printed marriage sermon entitled ‘Unto Your Lives’ End’.27 Sylvia’s eyes were like jewels, their brown glistening with tears of joy.28
Ted had told Olwyn that he had met a first-rate American female poet, ‘a damned sight better than the run of good male’, and that they were going to come to Paris in the summer.29 But he didn’t tell anyone in his family about the decision to marry. Sylvia, by contrast, poured out every detail in an ecstatic letter to her brother Warren. She explained that, because of the Newnham and Fulbright authorities, and the fact that Ted was probably about to go to Spain to get a job teaching English, the big wedding reception would be postponed for a second ceremony in Wellesley the following summer. For now, the official line was that they were engaged. The marriage was in keeping with their situation: ‘private, personal, legal, true, but limited in its way’. She did not hesitate to write that she could now be addressed – Warren could take his pick – as Mrs Sylvia Hughes, Mrs Ted Hughes, Mrs Edward James Hughes, or ‘Mrs E. J. Hughes (wife of the internationally renowned poet and genius)’.30
9
