Then they bit. Then they tried to drown each other. Then they tried to burn each other’s hair. They tied each other up, they twisted wrists, they wedgied, they spat.
Then they found a poison book and took turns to make each other sick. Then they hanged each other. Then they flayed each other. Then they crucified each other. Then they drove rusty nails into each other’s skulls.
One day the king, who happened to be strolling through the palace maze, chanced upon his bloodied sons armed with crossbows, each prince ablaze with murderous intent.
‘My little yearlings, my lovely hoyden boys, why do you play this way?’ asked the king.
‘Because we miss our mammy so,’ the little boys sang in unison.
The king roared with laughter and patted his pig-tight belly.
‘My darling imps, you’ve got so much to learn about what it means to be king. The queen was no more your mother than she was my own. God only knows which corridor wenches spat you two out, but it certainly wasn’t that friend-of-a-friend I called Queen.’
So the boys, quite relieved, shook hands and went on to become very successful kings of large and profitable kingdoms.
CROW
Krickle krackle, hop sniff and tackle, in with the bins, singing the hymns.
I lost a wife once, and once is as many times as a crow can lose a wife. Ooh, stab it. Just remembered something.
He flew a genuflection Tintagel — Carlyle cross Morecambe — Orford, wonky, trying to poison himself with forbidden berries and pretty churches, but England’s litter saved him. Ley lines flung him cross-country with no time for grief, power cables catapulted loose bouquets of tar-black bone and feather and other crows rained down from the sky, a dead crow storm, a tor top burnt bird bath, but our crow picked and nibbled at Lilt cans and salted Durex and B&H, and the fire storm passed over his head, as written history over the worker. Blackberry, redcurrant, loganberry, sloe. Damson, plum-pear, crab-apple, bruises. Clots, phlegm, tumours and quince.
He looks in a puddle of oil and sees his beak is brightly coloured, striped red, green, purple and orange. Like a fucking puffin.
He opens his mouth to scream and beautiful English melody comes out, garden-song, like a blackbird or Ivor blooming Gurney.
This is another one of Crow’s bad dreams.
BOYS
Once upon a time our Dad took the bus to Oxford to hear his hero Ted Hughes speak. This was when Ted Hughes was grey and nearly dead and Dad was just out of school. He’d never been to Oxford before and he was shocked that there were normal shops, McDonald’s and stuff. He couldn’t believe there were yobs throwing cans in the bus station. He thought there would only be professors mulling things over.
He arrived three hours too early, so he bought some records in a trendy record shop. He got something he didn’t want because he was too embarrassed to correct the man behind the counter. He went to a pub and drank two pints of Guinness and smoked cigarettes, one after the other. Our Dad was quiet and shifty and romantic and you could smoke indoors then.
Our Dad was disillusioned by the size and modernity of Oxford. He had thought he might bump into Ted, or Peter Redgrove, before the reading. Then he was embarrassed at his own naïveté and had a third pint. He was reading Osip Mandelstam and underlining and folding pages, copying bits into his notebook. He had assumed the pub would be full of young thinkers behaving in the same way, but the pub was empty apart from a man in a Spurs shirt with a beagle.
Our Dad was in a shit pub right by the bus station.
He had bang-up-to-date views on Hughes and Plath. One of those views was that it was all over. It was time to shed all that crap and assess the poetry without partisan biographical bickering. He was pro-Ted, our papa. On the bus to Oxford he had imagined some vigorous arguments in a wood-panelled pub with a gaggle of Plath fans. ‘OK, OK, we’ll accept River,’ they’d say. ‘Fair enough,’ Dad would say, ‘I’ll have another go at Colossus.’
To be fair to our Dad, he was authentic. Quiet, shifty and tragically uncool. We had to take the piss out of him as hard as we possibly could. We were convinced that it was what our Mum would have wanted. It was our best way of loving him, and thanking him.
He got a free drink with his ticket.
He kept his ticket and still has it in his Ted folder.
He sat halfway from the front.
He waited for his hero.
(Big man with a grubby marked hardback, probably a Barbour jacket, perhaps even the whiff of the Devon farm or a smear of salmon guts on the pocket. The iconic cowslip has fuzzed and faded, Dad knows, but what will his hair be like? A smart Laureate crew-cut perhaps. And will it all be Shakespeare talk, or will there be a poem or two? A new poem or two, Ted? For your young fans? For the boys that have you up there with Donne and Milton?)
Ted, when he did arrive, looked a little unwell.
The talk passed by in a reverential haze. He never remembered much of it, except that it was very, very Shakespeare-heavy, and one of the panel was hostile to Ted.
It was time for questions and our eighteen-year-old Dad already had the hot neck-up blush and sweaty palms of a question-ready fan. At the back, a question about Caliban and empire. Yes, Madam at the side, a question about bad reviews. Yes, Sir, here at the front, a question about Sylvia, met with a sigh from the Ted-savvy crowd, and a polite ‘not relevant’ from the chairperson. Then, joy oh joy, Yes, Young Man, in the middle.
Dad stood up, which was funny because none of the others had. We chuckle at the standing up.
His question was very long and very earnest, and it came out a bit muddled, but it was about nuclear war, and censorship, and pollution and James the First. Ted nodded, smiled, nodded, and the chairperson said, ‘Thank you, lovely, more of an essay than a question, but thank you. I’m sorry to say we’re out of time.’
Dad sat down painfully hard on his bum-bones, crimson, with tears prickling.
Mum apparently cried once when he told this story, but wait! Wait! we all shout. Wait Dad, you tragic twat! You are not left shamed by the chairperson! This is why we love and mock you. There’s a happy coda.
As our Dad was shuffling his way to the exit a vast poet’s hand clapped down on his shoulder and the full-fathom-twenty drone boom-dry loveliness of Ted Hughes’ warm Yorkish accent coated our happy Daddy.
‘Yes,’ said Hughes, looking Dad in the eye.
‘Yes?’ said our Dad.
‘Yup,’ said Hughes, and turned away.
And our Dad forgot what he asked, and Ted Hughes died, and so did our Mum, and my brother tells the Oxford story differently to me.
CROW
This is the story of how your wife died.
DAD
I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to hear it.
CROW
But that’s the whole point. She banged her head.
DAD
Crow, really, it’s fine. I know. I don’t need to know.
CROW
Fancy that.
DAD
Dear Crow,
You once stood by my bed and spoke in the voice of black birdcall and told me never to marry again, to seal off my heart and tie up my cock. Us crows are monogamous, you said, and tapped my forehead with your jut-jutting beak.
Then, later, you stood by my bed and told me the story of Ted. You spoke in the voice of a Yorkshire teacher and told me to get back on it, find a lover, buck my ideas up, think of the boys. Crack on, you said. You should shack up with a friendly young thing who likes the sound of ‘Stepmum’. Have a roll in the hay. I flung the duvet off and flailed and swung and spat at you but you were elsewhere and I had to fall asleep crushed between what you’d said and what I thought. No sleep.