If you were a children’s artist looking for a poet who could craft some
narrative verses for your new book, you would gladly have settled for Ted
Hughes. This is just what a young art graduate called Jim Downer did more
than half a century ago, when they were sharing a house in London. After
they moved on, Hughes kept the pictures, married Sylvia Plath, went to
America, and embarked on his life of professional triumph and personal
tragedy. Eventually the two men lost contact, and Downer assumed Hughes had
never got round to doing the stanzas. Until now, 11 years after Hughes’s
death, with the book springing from his estate fully formed. It is called Timmy
the Tug, with the story of a little boat’s heroism told in a set of 33
characteristically robust verses by the late Laureate, with Downer’s bright
postwar illustrations.
Hughes wrote more than 20 books for children, but this is thought to be his
first. It came to light after his widow, Carol, found the manuscript among
his papers last year, the verses neatly typed and stuck on, the pages bound
with string, and the joint authorship in capitals on the title page: “JIM
DOWNER AND TED HUGHES.” When she discussed it with the lawyer handling the
estate, he mentioned that, by coincidence, he had met Downer at a lunch
party several weeks earlier, and got in touch with him at once to tell him
of the discovery. It is being published in facsimile form this month by
Thames & Hudson.
Downer, now 79, was not only staggered by the find, but also deeply moved; he
had dreamt up the Timmy project to show his girlfriend Wendy his credentials
as a possible husband and father. As it was, she didn’t need the finished
product to be impressed. There are pictures of her at various ages in his
home on the Isle of Wight, some of them taken not long before her sudden
death six years ago.
Talking to Downer about his time with Hughes at 18 Rugby Street, a Georgian
terrace house in Bloomsbury, is like opening a casement into another world.
It is England all right, but not as we have come to know it. It is the
Fifties. There is no electricity, no bathroom and just one toilet, which is
in the coal cellar beneath a metal plate in the pavement. This means that
everyone has a sooty backside.
The most extraordinary people come and go. There is Hughes himself, now in his
mid-twenties, who uses the house when he is down from Cambridge at weekends.
Sylvia Plath lives nearby and she comes round to see him. Some of the rooms
have floors with fine linenfold panelling, all covered over by the paint of
successive tenants. Downer has the top flat, which is the old servants’
quarters – low ceilings, tongue-and-groove timbered walls. He is just down
from Leeds College of Art. He bumps into Hughes at the shared sink on the
landing. They talk of Yorkshire, the countryside rather than the towns.
Downer is the youngest and most sociable, and the frequent parties take place
in his flat. Peter O’Toole shares this for a while, having had to leave his
previous accommodation for reasons that Downer never learns. He comes for a
weekend and stays six months. He still has a Pinocchio nose, which will be
altered by the time he is in Lawrence of Arabia. Downer met him at a party
where the RADA student was pretending to a girl that he had been at Leeds
College of Art, whereas he had really been a cub reporter on the Yorkshire
Evening Post.
Albert Finney, a fellow student of O’Toole’s, visits. So does the French film
star Jacques Tati, for whom Downer’s girlfriend is working as an assistant
film editor. Hughes and Tati have a curious, gentle relationship, each
finding some mystical quality in the other. David Lean also comes. Hughes
has a brooding presence, which the girls find irresistible. When he is
there, they don’t pay so much attention to O’Toole. Dylan Thomas is drinking
by himself in the Lamb, round the corner in Lamb’s Conduit Street. Downer
approaches him to say hello and is told to f*** off. The three of them,
Hughes, O’Toole and Downer, go busking outside cinemas, with the actor
giving word-perfect renditions from a new Broadway show called West Side
Story.
It changes when Plath appears. She and Hughes are an impenetrable bubble, so
engrossed with each other, they seem to have no need for anyone else. Hughes
was later to tackle the subject of this house in a poem, 18 Rugby Street,
with its
“…catacomb basement heaped with exhaust mufflers,
Assorted jagged shards of cars, shin-rippers
On the way to the unlit and unlovely
Lavatory beneath the street’s pavement.”
Downer lived there because his employer, the exhibition designer Monty Reed,
had a lease on the property, which was owned by Rugby School. Hughes had the
use of a flat through the father of a university friend. Into those
monochrome and still austere times, the Festival of Britain had arrived with
a splash of colour and the promise of artistic freedom. Downer, who went on
to become a highly successful designer and inventor, was enthralled by the
possibilities; you can see the now quaint modernism of mid-Fifties lines in
his illustrations for Timmy the Tug.
They certainly engaged Hughes’s attention. Fifty-three years later, Downer
still sounds a little disbelieving as he recalls the moment. “Ted saw the
drawings and he liked them. He looked at them very carefully and, I think,
approvingly. I had tried to write some lines of poetry to go with them and,
well, he probably thought, this is not poetry. What he actually said was,
‘Would you like me to take a look?’ I’d read his stuff about the foxes on
the moor and I thought it was amazing, so I jumped at the chance. We’d
talked about those things, done the same walks, the same watching of nature.
Sleeping behind stone walls, you know, you do see the foxes, and feel as if
the creatures are ghosts around you.
“In those days there were no copying machines, so I gave him the originals,
with the string binding and my own attempts at verses.” From Hughes’s
typing, he reckons his collaborator must have got to work fairly soon after
taking the pictures away. Not long ago, he too made a discovery among his
own papers – the original attempts at verse for Timmy, which Hughes had been
too polite to disparage. Downer is not so sparing, and is even now too
embarrassed to show them, even though they are just a few feet away in his
study. He prefers to say that, “Ted did a magnificent job. Everything is so
beautifully put together.” Not to mention vigorous, witty and, as in
all his subsequent poetry for children, free from the temptation of talking
down to his readers. If Downer is dating Hughes’s contribution accurately,
then he was writing it at about the same time that his first collection, The
Hawk in the Rain, was being prepared for publication.
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