My grown-up son Lindsay was over for a week. He lives & works in Hamburg & is able to visit only occasionally. It was wonderful to have him stay with us for a couple of months. He’s devoted to Reuben – now 16 months old 7 (fanciful, even sentimental though I’m sure the notion is) Reuben seemed to bond with him too.
The three of us drove through rain & gales to my mother’s nursing home, Pirton Hall, in the rolling farmlands on the other side of Hitchin. Although its fees are comparable to most other such homes, it occupies a magnificent Victorian mansion standing in 15 acres of grounds. Mum’s in her 90th year & she tends to fade in & out a bit, somewhat like an insecurely tuned radio station. But she was fully on frequency & as happy as I’ve seen her in months in the company of her two grandsons. As I watched the three of them I realised with that frisson of pleasure that the incidence of symmetry can bring about that, chronologically, from Mum down to Reuben, each of us was separated from the other by (give or take a bit) 30 years.
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I’m currently reading Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Ted Hughes. It’s a fascinating read, not least because of how acute a picture is created of Sylvia Plath & how elusive Hughes, the subject, remains. Across the Plath biographies the balance of judgement has her distinctly more sinned against than sinning. Ted Hughes emerges as sexually & emotionally irresponsible (to say the least) & his infidelity is identified as the principal force behind her suicide.
Elaine Feinstein takes a kinder view of Hughes & her depiction of Sylvia Plath, whilst by no means unsympathetic, differs strikingly from the now-familiar image of a woman tragically wronged. Since the Plath/Hughes schism & its dreadful aftermath still has great resonance 41 years after the event, I shall be interested to see whose corner is fought by the movie.
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I was greatly influenced by Ted Hughes’ poetry when, as a student, I was filling little blue exercise books with grim & gritty portrayals of natural life in the raw. When I started to write more seriously a couple of decades later, my chosen themes & treatments had changed significantly & my slim volumes of Hughes’ poetry had long since gathered dust. But – without drawing invidious comparisons – some of that dust seems to have settled on ‘Mal’…
MAL
Strange word, ‘stroke’ - a savage sleep
and then you wake up,
changed. Caressed by infirmity
on the brown hill, kissed
by disability as you climb
the long drive. The farmhouse tips
and, heart in crescendo,
you embrace the grass.
Indifferent sheep manoeuvre,
crowding out your sky.
You lie in a lump, adrift
at the field’s edge, floating
on the dead raft
of your limbs.
The sun nails light
into your one good eye.
Near dusk her scarecrow voice
scatters your crowding dreams:
she calls you from the house,
the sound of your name
curling out of the past,
a gull-cry now, fierce, impatient,
tearing at the membrane
that has dimmed your world.
Root-still, potato-eyed,
you are another species now.
Your medium is clay and saturation.
Mummified, like the bog-man
trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded,
mud-bound and uncomprehending
as the sun slips down
behind the hill.
The urgent fingers
scavenging for a heartbeat,
fluttering like bird-wings
at your throat,
are busy in the dark.
You feel nothing
of their loving panic,
their distress.
All love, all optimism, pain,
all memory, desire coarsen,
thicken into vegetable silence.
A dim siren wobbles in the dark.
And then rough hands manhandle
your clod-heavy bulk..
Night swallows the spinning light
and closes in like smoke.
12:09:34 AM 
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