In the early 1950s Jim Downer, fresh out of Leeds College of Art, was living in the top floor flat of an architecturally interesting but dilapidated Georgian terrace house at 18 Rugby Street in Bloomsbury. There was no bathroom (he went to Holborn Public Baths), no toilet (he used the outdoor loo in the coal cellar) and no running water; he would go to a sink, with a single cold water tap, on the half-landing down the stairs. Downer recalls: “That is how I came to meet Ted Hughes. His flat, which he used when up from Cambridge and elsewhere, was on the second floor, two below my own, but the sink just above his flat was blocked and he had continued on up the stairs in search of water.”
With no electricity, no television, and usually no money to buy batteries for the wireless, they spent their evenings drinking instant coffee “and, when we were flush, bottles of Bulls Blood” and talking into the early hours. “There was Ted and later, for a while, Sylvia Plath; there were the actors Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney and Siân Phillips, all then at RADA; there was the painter Robert O’Brian, living round the corner in Great Ormond Street; there were the potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper; occasionally there was Jacques Tati, when he was in London, and Wendy Craft, who was Jacques’ film editor and was then working on the English version of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. And there was Philip Wrestler, who would later direct the Mini Cooper race around Turin in The Italian Job.” They all clubbed together to buy batteries for their radio so they could listen to Richard Burton reading the first performance of Under Milk Wood on the BBC’s Third Programme.
Downer began working on the story of Timmy the Tug – with his own “rather amateurish” verses as well as his watercolour-washed drawings – in an attempt to convince Wendy that he was proper marriage material. “Creating this book was all about impressing her that I was a suitable sort of husband – someone who might make a good father. Ted, dropping in for a coffee, saw what I had done. Until then no one had seen it – it was to be a surprise for Wendy – I did, though, want Ted’s opinion. Ted, always generous, was kind about the verses, and then quietly asked if I would like him to provide his own version. Having no illusions about my writing, I accepted, and handed over the original illustrated manuscript.”
This bohemian group of Bloomsbury friends inevitably began to leave Rugby Street and go their separate ways. Hughes for America with Sylvia; O’Toole for David Lean and the desert and Lawrence of Arabia; and Downer to marry Wendy – Timmy had done the trick – and become an exhibition designer. “We all continued to meet well into the ’60s, but somehow I didn’t ever get Timmy back from Ted. But 52 years later, in 2008, Carol Hughes found Timmy the Tug among Ted’s archive and, after searching me out, kindly returned it to me. To my delight, I found that Ted had indeed written his verses.”
The newly-rediscovered 34 string-linked pages of Indian inked and watercolour-washed drawings by Downer and hand-typed verses by Hughes are reproduced here in an exact facsimile. It is the first time this 164-line children’s poem, written by Hughes but based on Downer’s illustrations and his orginal verse, has been published.
Hughes, who died in 1998, was, arguably, the most important English poet of the post-war period. Collections such as The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Moortown and, especially, Crow, as well as his translations of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, Oedipus by Seneca, Alcestis by Euripides, Racine’s Phèdre and Lorca’s Blood Wedding and anthologies such as The Rattle Bag, which he edited with Seamus Heaney, made an enormous contribution to English literature in the second half of the 20th century. He also wrote more than 20 books for children, including How the Whale Became, Meet My Folks and The Iron Man.
This tale of Timmy the paddle-boat – “hale as a whale and twice as strong” – who yearns to escape the sleepy quay where the seagulls tease him and “rust ate the paint off his plates” isn’t among his finest work – it wasn’t, after all, written with a view to publication but as a favour for a friend – but it is still a lot of fun.
The cheeky little tug slips his moorings and then, after a run-in with two ocean-going ships, sets off on the high seas where he enjoys an excellent adventure with a trawler – freeing the fish – and tries but fails to free a steamer which has run aground on a rock. Finally, he saves “a ship on the sea’s green racing hill” who loses her sails in a sudden squall and tows her triumphantly back to harbour.
The story is slight but the verse, which would appear to have been written shortly before his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published to critical acclaim in 1957, is characteristically vigorous: “The hail fell. There was no sun. / Like a hammer the wind beat. / But Timmy sang as he sailed on: / ‘I’m more than a match for anyone / Or anything I may meet’.”
It’s a curiosity, of course, rather like The Father Christmas Letters by JRR Tolkien, but it should appeal to anyone who enjoys reading poetry to their kids as well as to Hughes completists. Because it’s an enjoyable romp and visually as well as verbally interesting.
And it’s nice to know – “reader, I married him” – that Timmy the Tug, like Jim Downer, wins the hand of a fair lady: “The seagulls cheer, the small waves bow, / Curtsy and wave a hand. / High with pride is Timmy’s prow / As home he leads his lady now / The happiest tug in the land.”
Keith Richmond
