There were wisps of snow in the liverish sky over Main Street, Mexborough. I passed a shop offering cash for clothes, 40p a kilo, across the road from a tattoo parlour, and then stopped outside its shuttered neighbour. This was, from 1938, the family home of Ted Hughes. The poet’s parents ran it as a newsagent’s.
But Hughes’ true domain was the open country just across the Don, reached via the old chain ferry. The river seemed to him “more or less solid chemicals – bubbling, fuming, multicoloured”, he later wrote. But, when I crossed the bridge downstream, a grebe was sliding across gunmetal water clean enough for his beloved salmon.
Denaby Main colliery, which dominated the valley of the poet’s youth “like the darkest badlands”, closed in the late 1960s. An area here, flooded by mining subsidence, was later turned into a nature reserve.
The young Hughes mostly inhabited two places, one being the copses and quarry of Manor Farm, where he would trap mice to sell the skins at school. The fields then were busy with partridge and hares. After he left for Cambridge, in 1951, the copses were grubbed up and the farm turned into one giant field, the farmhouse, to his horror, becoming a pub-restaurant.
The other place was the small lake stuffed with giant pike on the Crookhill estate, on the hill above Conisbrough with its ancient church and Norman castle. Here too there was “soul-damage” to come: revisiting in the late 1960s Hughes wrote to Assia Wevill about how the fishpond had become “a black basin of mud, with oil cans and rubbish”.
Crookhill is now a municipal golf course; the old fishpond is tidy enough, but choked with rushes. Hughes discovered his name carved in a tree here. I found the corpse of a crow, half smothered in dead leaves, “his every feather the fossil of a murder”, as Hughes wrote in his poem Crow.
Recalling how the poet was attuned to omens, this was disheartening, but then a boisterous charm of goldfinches settled in an alder overlooking the pond, filling the snow-flecked sky with their chattering song. The golf course, briefly, became a garden of earthly delights.
