Ted Hughes Poem

[Mark]

Just received the book today and went straight to pages 60 and 61. :thumb:

[The Sweetcorn Kid]

Just ordered....£2.95!!!

[GregF]

This has just reminded me of something. Has anybody ever seen a piece of writing by Ted Hughes about carp fishing? Ted describes an unconventional method of catching carp in this piece, and I was very surprised when I read it (in a library about fifteen years ago) because it reminded me of something my grandfather told me when I was a youngster, just getting into carp fishing. My granddad was never an angler but as a small boy in the 1930s, so he said, he used to go to a pond at Mitcham Common near his home and with his pals, set out to catch carp using this technique. An old sack would be sunk in the shallow margins with a boy holding each corner. They would mash up some bread, place it on the centre of the flattened sack and wait for the carp to arrive. When they were sure the carp was engrossed in its meal they would, on the count of three, lift the sack, pulling the four corners together and trap the unsuspecting fish. The book in which Ted Hughes wrote about the same method was, I think, a children’s book called What is the Truth? I wonder if anybody else has ever come across this?

[Stathamender]

What a great topic. I was lucky enough to grow up on the same hills and moorland as Hughes did above Mytholmroyd. I'd like to think that the pike that inspired the poem was from either the river calder or rochdale canal. It makes fishing there all the more evocative.

The pike poem was almost certainly about a water near Mexborough where he moved at the age of seven. It was either the 'old oxbow lake' mentioned in other poems, which is now Ferry Boat Fisheries (which was badly damaged in the floods of Winter 2019 https://www.anglersmail.co.uk/news/ferr ... lood-84339) or, rather more likely, a lake on the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough where he spent a lot of time with his close friend John Wholly whose father was the gamekeeper there. The land is now mainly occupied by the Crookhill Park Golf Course and the two lakes there are silted up and overgrown.

When he was at Mexboro Grammar School Hughes was in the same class as Brian Blessed and Keith Barron.