THE LINE OF CAEDMON AND OWEN
(Ted Hughes' Memorial Service, Westminster Abbey, Thursday 13 May 1999)
To
Liverpool Street then down onto the tube for Westminster. Found we were going in the wrong direction on the Circle,
which meant a journey of forty minutes instead of fifteen, and we were supposed
to be at the Abbey in time to be seated at 10:45. Joan was calm, saying we'd
make it. Even I knew we'd make it, but
had to 'put my parts on' and stand swearing like an infantile actor-manager.
Showed our
yellow tickets to an usher after pushing through all these crowds held back by
barriers, then strutted through a cleared space where photographers waited to
our right. I took my cap off as we went
in. ('Truly, he was a man of God.') Lots of prelates in their finery
with silver rods. We were shown to some
rows of seats where sat the semi-privileged public.
Didn't see
many celebrities. Studied the
cream-covered, well-printed Order of Service.
Then we looked up and in a black dress like a little round bird creakily
comes in the Queen Mother and beside her Charles, her favourite Grandson. It had to be Charles representing the Queen,
he's arty. Anne
wouldn't do. And the Queen Mum--Hughes
wrote about her on her ninetieth as the spirit of a great oak tree. (We found out later he often visited the
house at Balmoral.)
The
Service was made up mainly of Ted Hughes poems read out in those massive hollow
acoustics by various people, including Lord Gowrie and Seamus Heaney. (Not Simon Armitage, whom we saw coming out
into the sun later drinking from a bottle of designer spring water.) Heaney's speech about his friend made some good points. About, for instance, the way Hughes' coffin
had been carried at knee height at the funeral in Devon, as if floating like
King Arthur going down to Avalon. Also, how Hughes wouldn't have been out of
place beside Caedmon or Wilfred Owen. There was some music, which I thought went on too long. To the right of the
doors as you come in, just beyond the modern glass (probably bullet-proof)
porch inside there I noticed a faded, stained Union Jack spread out on the
wall. Must date from Wellington's
time. The last piece of poetry was a
recording of Ted Hughes reading Shakespeare's 'Fear no more the heat of the
sun....'
Waiting
near the entrance were Hughes's family, ten yards or so from us: his son and
daughter, Nicholas and Frieda, Carol the widow, and his sister Olwyn, who
handled his publicity and kept off the feminists. The Queen Mum spoke to them all for quite a long time, so did
Charles. The whole thing had lasted
an hour and a half--a long time for someone of ninety-eight. In the Abbey it was like being outside--the
roof so high, and the winds blowing and blowing through.
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