at some level inventing the memory? William Wordsworth was the great exemplar of this phenomenon. He called his epic of the self a poem ‘on the growth of the poet’s mind’. And it was there that he pondered questions that we should always ask when reading Hughes’s poetry of recollection. What does it mean to dissolve the boundary between the things which we perceive and the things which we have made? What is the relationship between the writing poet and the remembered self? Is a particular memory true because it is an accurate account of a past event or because it is constitutive of the rememberer’s consciousness? Each member of a family remembers differently. Reading a draft of this chapter, Olwyn Hughes was angry: she did not recognise her own childhood, which in her memory was filled with light and laughter, happy family life and the absolute freedom of outdoor play. ‘Hard task’, writes Wordsworth, ‘to analyse a soul.’8
Wordsworth, too, remembered a towering, shadowed rock as a force that supervised and admonished his childhood – the similarity of language in Hughes’s ‘The Rock’ suggests a literary allusion as well as a personal memory. For Wordsworth, the overseer was a cliff face that loomed above him as he rowed a stolen boat across a lake. It cast a shadow of guilt and fear over his filial bond with nature. For Hughes, too, to speak of living in the shadow of the Rock was a way of externalising a darkness in his own heart.
From the Rock, young Ted could also see the arteries leading out to east and west. The railway, fast and slow lines in each direction. The station building was perched on a viaduct. Below, there was the largest goods yard in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Inward goods: wool from Yorkshire and cotton from the Lancashire ports. Outward: clothing and blankets from the mills and sewing shops. Corduroy and flannel, calico and moleskin; men’s trousers in grey or fawn. New fashions: golf jackets, hiking shorts, blue and khaki shirts. The yard was also packed with boxes of chicks and eggs: overrunning the hillside above were chicken sheds belonging to Thornbers, pioneers of factory poultry farming.
Below the railway was the river Calder. A ‘mytholm’ is a meeting of streams. Just by the Co-op and the old Navvy Bridge, the Elphin Brook, darting down from the narrow gully of Cragg Vale, flows into the Calder. Beyond the river was the main road, the old cross-Pennine turnpike – rumbling lorries but some of the traffic still horse-drawn – that linked Halifax to Burnley, Yorkshire to Lancashire. The Calder Valley is on the cusp of the two great counties of northern industrial productivity, with their deep history of rivalry going back to the Wars of the Roses.
On the far side of the road – Ted’s side – ran the Rochdale Canal, still in use for transporting goods, but only just. Now it was a place for the local children to fish for gudgeon and stickleback. Beyond the canal, a network of terraced houses clustered, back to back or back to earth, on the northern hillside. This was the Banksfield neighbourhood, where he and his family belonged. Some of the muck streets went vertically, others (including his own) ran horizontally, in parallel with the canal. The surrounding fields were dotted with smallholders’ hen pens. Scattered above, where the fields sloped gently up to the moors, were farms. The path up the hill to the moor was always there as an escape from the blackened mills and terraces.
Down in the valley, Ted felt secure, if hemmed in. On top of the Rock that day in 1936 or ’37, he was exposed. He looked down on a community that was closed in on itself. Nearly all the buildings were made of the distinctive local stone. Known as millstone grit (‘a soul-grinding sandstone’),9 it oxidises quickly, whatever the condition of the air. Add a century of factory smoke and acid rain. Then, as a tour guide will put it in one of Hughes’s poems about his home valley, ‘you will notice / How the walls are black’.10 This was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere, blackened chimneys known as lumbs rose skyward from the mills.
On his side of the valley, the dark admonitory presence was not a rock but a building. A stone mass towered beside the Hughes family home: the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was black, it blocked the moon, its façade was like the slab of a gravestone. It was his ‘first world-direction’.11
Number 1 Aspinall Street stands at the end of the terrace. Now you walk in straight off the street; when Ted was a boy, before the road was tarmacked, there was a little front garden where vegetables were grown and the children could play. Go in through the front door and the steep stairs are immediately in front of you. The main room, about 14 feet by 14 feet, is to the left. From the front window the Hughes family could look straight up Jubilee Street to the fields.
There was a cosy little kitchen with a fireplace in the corner and a window looking out on the side wall of Mount Zion. According to Ted’s poem about the chapel, the sun did not emerge from behind it until eleven in the morning. His sister Olwyn, however, recalls the kitchen being bathed in afternoon light. The poems have a tendency to take the darker view of things. By the same account, Olwyn always thought that Ted exaggerated the oppressive height and darkness of the Rock.
A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table. One day Mrs Edith Hughes woke from a dream in which she had bought a bath in Mytholmroyd. She went straight to the shops, where she found one that was affordable because slightly damaged. The back door led to a ginnel, a passageway shared with the terraced row that stood back to back with Aspinall Street. The washing could be hung out here and the children, who spent most of their time playing in the street, could shelter from the rain. Which never seemed to stop.
The kitchen also had a door opening on some steps down to a little cellar, which had a chute where the coal was delivered, the coalman heaving sacks from his horse-drawn cart. Some of the terraces had to make do with a shared privy at the end of the row, but the Hughes family lived at the newer end of Aspinall Street, slightly superior, with the modern amenity of an indoor toilet at the top of the stairs.
Mother and father had the front bedroom and Olwyn the side one, with a window looking out on the chapel. Ted shared an attic room with Gerald. When he stood on the bed and peered out through the little skylight, the dark woods of Scout Rock gave the impression of being immediately outside the glass, pressing in upon him.
This was the house in which Edward James Hughes entered the world at twelve minutes past one in the morning on Sunday 17 August 1930. ‘When he was born,’ his mother Edith remembered, ‘a bright star was shining through the bedroom window (the side bedroom window) he was a lovely plump baby and I felt very proud of him. Sunday was a wet day and Olwyn just could not understand this new comer.’12
Gerald, just a few weeks off his tenth birthday, lent a helping hand. Despite the rain, Edith’s husband Billie went out for a spin in her brother Walter’s car. Minnie, wife of another brother, Albert, who lived along the street at number 19, had offered to look after Olwyn, but she didn’t that first day. A neighbour was called to take in the unsettled two-year-old.
As a teenager, Olwyn would develop a serious interest in astrology, which she shared with Ted. The conjunction of the stars mattered deeply to them.13 He was born at what astrologers call ‘solar midnight’. With knowledge of the exact time and place of his birth, a natal chart could be cast. He was born under the sign of Leo, the lion, which endowed him with a strong sense of self, the desire to shine. But because he was born at solar midnight, he would also need privacy and seclusion. His ‘ascendant’ sign was Cancer, bonding him to home and family. And Neptune, the maker of symbols and myths, was ‘conjunct’. His horoscope, he explained, meant that he was ‘fated to live more or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in air’.14 Bound for fame, that is to say, but fearful of scrutiny.
Did he really believe that his fate was written in the stars? ‘To an outsider,’ he once observed in
