Mad About Shakespeare

13. Ariel and Cal

I woke early one Monday morning in February 1978, after a night of strange dreams. In one of them I had tried to kiss Marianne, who was now the leading lady in my production of W. B. Yeats’s play about spiritualism, The Words Upon the Window-Pane. She had resisted, pushing me roughly away into another dream in which I was pursued by creatures out of a medieval bestiary. That was probably because it was the term when we were studying literature of the age of Chaucer and I had been reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Yeats was my lodestar, Sir Gawain my newest discovery. I could have guessed that Ted Hughes, who was on my mind, was also obsessed with Yeats, but I was not yet a good enough reader of poetry to have intuited the line that ran from his own work back to the alliterative, Northern, grounded dialect of the Gawain-poet.

During the day, I walked through the streets of Cambridge three times, pulling a college porter’s trolley bearing a coffin of bleached pine. I was directing a production of Shakespeare’s last play, The Two Noble Kinsmen. The action begins in ancient Thebes with three widowed queens kneeling in supplication before the coffins of their dead husbands. A friendly local undertaker had lent us the necessary props, on condition that we transported them ourselves and brought them back undamaged. Three coffins, so three journeys. In the evening I had dinner with Marianne at a Greek restaurant called Eros.

Then we went to the Hobson Gallery, close by Christ’s College. It was a dank, chill, misty evening. Typical Cambridge weather. Exactly twenty-six years earlier, another first-year undergraduate reading English – at the college over the road from mine – had written:

Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret. There is something in the air I think which makes people very awake.

The thing that was in the air that night, keeping us sharp, was his presence. Ted Hughes was back in Cambridge.

I hand over a prized pair of tickets. Marianne and I press our way up the stairs into the little Hobson Gallery. Leonard Baskin’s crow prints are on the walls and the room is packed for the poetry reading. At this time in his career, plagued by the wrath of Sylvia Plath fanatics, Ted Hughes is not making many public appearances. We have struck lucky.

Only the cliché does justice to his appearance: he is rugged. His eye is sharp, his voice commanding.

He began with ‘The Thought Fox’, said that it was his first poem, written after seeing a fox on a mound and combining its memory with a Swedish fox film he’d seen two weeks earlier. That was a completely different account of the poem’s origin from the one that became part of literary legend: a dream in which a fox, singed and smelling of burnt hair, came into his room at Pembroke College, put its paw on an English Literature essay he had been struggling to write, left a bloody mark and said, ‘You are destroying us,’ so persuading Hughes to change his subject of study from English to Anthropology.

Then he read ‘Thistles’, ‘Pike’, ‘Hawk Roosting’: a spoken anthology of the poems that had established his unique voice and his fame. Leonard Baskin was in the room. Hughes announced that the reading was dedicated to him and that the chosen poems were all Baskin favourites. Then he went on to explain the background to Crow, on which poet and artist had worked so closely together. God had a nightmare about a crow dragging him around. Crow is then born. He is questioned in an examination. His answers? The word death is repeated, fifteen times, maybe more. Then who is stronger than death? – Me, evidently. At times the imagery is intensely violent or sexually charged. Of lovers: In the morning they wear each other’s faces.

Afterwards, I say thank you to him. He nods, then he looks at Marianne – who has beauty, brains and acting ability in equal measure – and winks at me. Wishing me luck with – what? – not, I suspect, my studies or my poetic aspirations, but rather my pursuit of Marianne. His renowned sexual charisma did not transmit itself to me. ‘We’re just very good friends,’ she said as we parted opposite Falcon Yard, where Ted Hughes had first met Sylvia Plath. She walked away into the Cambridge fog.

How would he have replied if I had had the courage to say more? Would he have recognized a kindred spirit if I had told him that I was directing Yeats’s Words Upon the Window-Pane and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen? He was fascinated by Yeats’s poetic ‘system’, by ouija boards and spirit voices. And Kinsmen? I had chosen it because I was convinced that the verse of the play’s first and last acts was some of Shakespeare’s richest, despite – or because of – its knotted texture. Would Hughes have told me of the formative poetic experience he underwent at the home of his first serious girlfriend when he was eighteen?

At their house, too, I had the next big literary shock since discovering Yeats: this mother of my girl friend owned a Shakespeare with the apocryphal plays included. I already knew all the plays pretty well, and the poems. I read them constantly. But in her book I found The Two Noble Kinsmen. The passages of verse in Act I of that play had an effect on me very like the effect of Wanderings of Oisin formerly: very brilliant and special dreams came out of it somehow. That puzzles me slightly, now – how I could have reacted so strongly to such a slight novelty in the verse. Anyway, I did. I was 18 then.

No, he would not have told me any of this. In public, he was an intensely private man. He had more reason for this than any other English poet.

‘One of the great evenings of my life,’ I wrote before bed, suppressing my disappointment that Marianne had not returned to my room. ‘Won’t forget Ted Hughes in a hurry.’

He had been my favourite when I was introduced to poetry as a teenager. My friend Jonathan gave me a copy of Lupercal. ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘The Bull Moses’, ‘View of a Pig’, ‘The Retired Colonel’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘Pike’ and ‘Pibroch’: we discussed them for hours. We went in search of the Wodwo. Our admired English teacher had reservations about Crow. We stood up for it.

From Cambridge, I went to Harvard. I was still putting on plays. Wanting a showcase for three extremely talented actresses I’d met, I commandeered a basement space known as Explosives B. Deep in the bowels of one of the Harvard houses – Eliot, Lowell, Adams, I forget which – it was little more than a boiler room. There I staged an intimate studio production, lit only by candles, of Barry Kyle’s Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait, a biographical drama that skilfully interwove passages from her journals and letters with dramatized renditions of many of her best poems – ‘Lesbos’ performed while peeling a pan of potatoes; ‘Daddy’ played as an exorcism in which the three women stamped on a swastika; Nela, the most gifted of the three, swaying her body as if riding on a horse called Ariel

at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

In researching the play, I immersed myself in Plath’s poetry and life and her recently published Letters Home. This was the period when Hughes was in the eye of the feminist hurricane. It seemed to me that those who were so eager to condemn had no understanding of mental illness. The crude equation ‘no errant husband, no death’ was profoundly wrong. Depression killed Sylvia Plath, not Ted Hughes. Early in the play, there was a quotation from A. Alvarez’s The Savage God that seemed to me to come much closer to the truth:

Just as the suicide adds nothing at all to the poetry, so the myth of Sylvia as a passive victim is a total perversion of the woman she was. It misses altogether her liveliness, and harsh wit, her vehemence of feeling, her control. Above all, it misses the courage with which she was able to turn disaster into art.

It was only when I read The Bell Jar in my Harvard dorm, with the snow piled thick outside, that everything fell into place. I still have the tanned paperback copy, cover half torn away, in which I scribbled in pencil on page 137, just what Mum said – so much of this book rings true. This was above a passage in which Plath wrote:

Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death.

My mother hadn’t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.

Another part of the book unlocked a past I’d tried to forget. We are sitting in the garden in most of my memories of childhood visits to Top Meadow, the home of my mother’s parents in the genteel town of Tenterden, where the great Victorian Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry once kissed my aunt in her perambulator and said that she had a mouth like a rosebud, meaning that she was forever known as Bud. Cousins are sometimes there, and Gran’s ginger tom Marmaduke is stretched asleep on the patio or looking at the fish in the ornamental pond covered with wire mesh to keep away the herons. Once there was the music of a violin from beneath the old plum tree: Scylla Kennedy, my mother’s best friend from school, had come to tea along with her six-year-old prodigy Nigel, who was about to go to the Yehudi Menuhin School. Speaking in the poshest voice I had ever heard in a child, he said that he would play a little Mozart for us. Always it was a warm English summer’s day.

But there was a chill in the house. We were told not to make any noise, never to run up or down the stairs, not to speak at table unless spoken to, never to disturb Poppa when he was sleeping in his stiffly upholstered armchair after lunch. That was my grandfather, who was immensely tall, a remote and slightly forbidding figure. I’m not sure whether that was because of his temperamental hearing aid or whether he was nursing some inner demon. On the mantelpiece, there was a fragment of artillery shell on a wooden stand marked ‘Gallipoli’. It had flown into his tent behind the lines where he was conducting emergency dental surgery on wounded soldiers in 1915. Did the things he had seen continue to haunt his dreams half a century later?

My grandmother was usually full of life. She made exquisite stuffed toys for all her grandchildren, arranged the flowers in the parish church and took pride in her cottage garden. But something wasn’t right. There were whisperings, secrets. Then the dam burst. It was at a large family gathering – the celebration of a landmark wedding anniversary. Her four daughters had clubbed together to buy her a fridge. When it was unveiled, she broke into hysterics. She could not possibly use such a new-fangled contraption. She had always kept her food in the cold pantry. That was never going to change.

‘What’s wrong with Gran?’ I asked in the car on the way home. This was the first time I heard the words ‘nervous breakdown’. As I grew older, confidences were shared. Gran had a history of manic depression, which was periodically treated with Electroconvulsive Therapy. It was only when I read The Bell Jar that I gained a glimpse of what that must have been like:

Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.

I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.

Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

When I saw my grandmother after the shock treatment, it was as if all that life had been drained out of her. Her mouth twitched. She comprehended, I think, but said no more than one word in answer to anything. The electricity had plucked from her memory the rooted sorrow, razed out the written troubles of her brain, but it had taken her character too.

My mother was called Sylvia, a name that Shakespeare imported into England in his Two Gentlemen of Verona. The family doctor in Tenterden once said to me, ‘I’ve known your mother since she was a child – of the four sisters, I always knew that she would be the one to inherit their mother’s troubles.’ She seems to have inherited the lows, not the highs. I don’t think she was bipolar, though all through my childhood she too had immense energy. I see her in a bright floral 1960s blouse, cigarette always in hand, mothering, cooking the Sunday roast, harvesting strawberries and raspberries at the bottom of the garden, embroidering hassocks for the church, visiting a friend who was in the last days of terminal cancer, pumping out The Beatles on the little transistor radio in the kitchen and on one occasion dashing to Knole Park because the Fab Four were filming the videos for ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ there. ‘They rode on white horses,’ she said.

Then one summer, quite suddenly, all the energy disappeared. There must have been some trigger, probably the coincidence of menopause and my brother leaving home. Whatever the cause, for years to come there would be long months when she just sat in the living room. Her fingers scraped at the fabric of her armchair until the stuffing began to come out. She suffered from a ballooning digestive disorder, which made me wonder whether there was some truth in the ancient theory that melancholy was seated in the black bile of the belly – windy or flatuous melancholy, Robert Burton labelled it, that which the Arabians call myrachial, and is in my judgment the most grievous and frequent.

When things became very bad, she had spells as an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital. My most painful memory of those years is of her locking herself in the downstairs toilet and screaming, ‘Don’t make me go back there, please, please.’ But once she was there, she recovered remarkably quickly. That was partly because she was given Lithium, regarded at the time as a new wonder drug, but also because there were other patients whose condition was so much worse than hers that her natural kindness kicked in and she worked to cheer them up, to be the life of a place where the majority of the patients were silent, turned inward, exactly as in the hospital described in The Bell Jar:

none of the people were moving … there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust.

Then I saw that some of the people were indeed moving, but with such small, birdlike gestures I had not at first discerned them.

A gray-faced man was counting out a deck of cards, one, two, three, four. I thought he must be seeing if it was a full pack, but when he had finished counting, he started over again. Next to him, a fat lady played with a string of wooden beads. She drew all the beads up to one end of the string. Then click, click, click, she let them fall back on each other.

When my mother returned home after her first discharge from the hospital, she told us that she was so shocked by the tar-blackened fingers of the old-timers that she had instantly given up smoking. She never touched another cigarette. That was an incidental benefit, adding to my relief that ECT was no longer in favour.

Sylvia Plath’s novel was written from the experience of being under the bell jar of depression. It made me understand why no amount of cajoling from me had ever, or could ever, make my mother get up from her chair. Only the Lithium could do that. Reading Plath, I was angry with myself for being angry with my mother for being ill. And at that moment I saw the real reason why I could not get on with Shakespeare’s most famous play: like Hamlet, I was accusing my mother of letting my father down. Not by infidelity, but by getting depression. And because she had inherited the condition from her mother, I was afraid that I would inherit it myself. That I might one day become like mad Hamlet.

Mum only became her true, funny, bright-eyed self again in her very last days when she was dying of bowel cancer and had been taken off her psychiatric medications. Nevertheless, for more than two decades after my father died the Lithium enabled her to manage her condition. Though still sedentary, she was no longer vacant. She would read voraciously through books from the public library, new ones appearing almost every week. Sometimes, I picked them off the tottering pile on the little stool beside her chair and read them myself. We laughed together over The Moon’s a Balloon, the funny, sad, racy, self-deprecatory memoir of her wartime crush David Niven. Most, though, were romances aimed at her demographic, not mine. Catherine Cookson, who wrote almost a hundred novels, was a particular favourite. On the back of one of them it said, Love, fear, revenge, greed, hate and intrigue – you’ll find them all in a Catherine Cookson novel. Not so different from Shakespeare, then. The author of any book that has helped a reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it may be said to have added to the sum of human happiness.

Like so many dimensions of human behaviour, depression and bipolar disorder can only be explained by some combination of genetic inheritance and force of circumstance. Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s daughter, became a great friend when I was writing the biography of her father. It was during that time that her brother Nicholas, subject of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, one of the loveliest poems we performed in the Dramatic Portrait, took his own life in Alaska. Frieda told me that his depression – which was obviously in the genes – was only triggered to extremity by a family dispute after their father died. Anyone with the dark inheritance must live with the fear that one day some trigger will be pressed unexpectedly.

For Sylvia, a writer of such acute self-awareness that she could track her every mood swing, the black dog first called after her father’s death a few weeks after her eighth birthday. In her copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which she pored over during her time as a Fulbright Scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge, she heavily underlined Ariel’s song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change,

Into something rich and strange.

She made pearls of poetry as beautiful and fragile as coral out of the bare bones of mourning and melancholia.

Immediately above the song, she also underlined Ferdinand’s lines about how, as he sat on a bank weeping for his father’s apparent death in the shipwreck that begins the play, the music of Ariel – the spirit he cannot see – crept by him upon the waters. In the margin, she wrote ‘cf. T. S. Eliot Wasteland’. She was thinking of a passage that we read closely when trying to get to grips with Eliot in our last term at school:

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

‘Fisher king’, I pencilled beside these lines in the copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935 that had been a somewhat unromantic gift to my mother from a boyfriend during the war. The Waste Land, we learned, was shaped by the Grail legend, as described in Jessie Weston’s anthropological study From Ritual to Romance, in which a king wounded in the groin fishes in a land that has been rendered infertile by his impotence. He is the keeper of the Grail, which he will only release when a knight comes along and asks the right question. Then the land will be healed. Eliot was retreating into myth as his ‘objective correlative’; it was a way of distancing himself from his own depression and childlessness, and above all from the madness of his wife Vivienne. When I looked in the school library at the facsimile of the manuscript of The Waste Land, with annotations by Eliot’s miglior fabbro (‘better maker’) Ezra Pound, I discovered a line written by Vivienne that could equally well have been a contribution to the poem or a savage taunt: What you get married for if you don’t want to have children?

‘There isn’t a right answer to the interpretation of The Waste Land,’ Hurdy assured us, ‘or of the character of Hamlet or the meaning of King Lear. The whole point is to ask the right question.’ Chekhov said as much in a letter to his friend Alexey Suvorin:

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. In ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Eugene Onegin’ not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated in them. It is the business of the judge to put the right questions, but the answers must be given by the jury according to their own lights.

What was the question the questing knight was supposed to ask the fisher king? Whom does the Grail serve? What’s the question I’ve been asking in this book? The one that Aristotle (or a follower presumed to be Aristotle) asked in one of his Problems, though I’d substitute ‘many’ for his ‘all’: Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?

Whom does the melancholy, the madness, serve? It would be foolish to pretend to have an answer, but the end of King Lear comes closest. No critic has summed it up better than the greatest of the Cambridge close readers, William Empson:

The scapegoat who has collected all this wisdom for us is viewed at the end with a sort of hushed envy, not I think really because he has become wise but because the general human desire for experience has been so glutted in him; he has been through everything.

We that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Christopher Ricks, Empson’s truest successor as a literary critic, quoted these words when he heard of the sudden death – a heart attack at the age of just sixty, in a New York taxi in the summer of 1977 – of another poet who suffered from manic depression. Robert Lowell, who was always known as Cal.

Hurdy introduced us to this bipolar master-poet of contemporary America at school. At university, a memorable Practical Criticism class was devoted to ‘Skunk Hour’:

My mind’s not right …

I myself am hell,

nobody’s here –

I got to know the full range of his poems at Harvard, where the name Lowell was in the fabric of the place. Finding a copy of Life Studies second-hand in the basement of the Harvard Book Store, I saw how it had inaugurated a new kind of ‘confessional’ poetry. Lowell didn’t like the term, but it was merited by his honesty in confronting his family history and his own mental illness.

If Sylvia Plath was Ariel, Lowell was indeed Cal – Caliban, or was it Caligula? He was rough and wild. He treated his wives abysmally. There were times when he really was mad: during one of his manic episodes he turned up, drugged to the eyeballs and soon drunk as well, wearing a jacket over a pyjama top that was open to the navel, to present a poetry prize to Seamus Heaney. Instead of making a short speech, he began dissecting a Heaney poem line by line until his (third) wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, arrived with two men in white coats who carted him off to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, where John Clare had been confined for the last two decades of his life.

And yet Lowell was a supreme craftsman who turned his madness to art. There is no better poem about being in a psychiatric hospital than ‘Waking in the Blue’:

the pinched, indigenous faces

of these thoroughbred mental cases …

each of us holds a locked razor.

The poem is both tender and funny in its evocation of his fellow-patients – ‘Stanley’ like a seal in his bath and ‘Bobbie’ horsing naked at chairs – just as my mother was in her stories about Oakwood Hospital, where she was cured as much by her personal interactions as by the drugs. And it reminds the reader that mental illness is no respecter of class or privilege: the ward is peopled by ‘Mayflower screwballs’, Harvard men from the New England elite, yet now they are watched over by a night attendant who is a mere sophomore at the far less prestigious Boston University on the other side of the river.

I also admired Lowell as a great public poet. During my year at Harvard, he was my guide to American history. Standing by the bronze relief sculpture on Boston Common that honours Colonel Robert Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, I recalled his moving tribute to the Black soldiers who fought on the side of freedom in the Civil War:

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

In the summer of 1964, as Lowell was preparing to publish For the Union Dead, the volume named from this poem, he wrote to his close friend and fellow-poet Elizabeth Bishop. As so often, he was in what he called a place of ‘gruelling murk’. There was only one life that could save him, that of reader and writer:

Nothing could be more terrible than Lear and the Oresteia, both of which I have been reading. And there is no more harmless way for the elemental and black to come out than in words, paint and notes, where nothing can ever be hurt.

In his best poems, he succeeded in releasing the elemental and the black into words. It was often a struggle to do so. The first of his poems that we were given at school was the double sonnet – first half Shakespearean in form, second Petrarchan – ‘Night Sweat’. It begins with the poet sitting by lamplight at his desk surrounded by books and crumpled papers, his typewriter stalled. He is suffering from writer’s block. He wants to sweat his life’s fitful fever out into poetry, but he can’t:

one life, one writing! But the downward glide

and bias of existing wrings us dry –

always inside me is the child who died,

always inside me is his will to die –

His body is like a funeral urn, in which the animal night sweats of his spirit are burning. In the second sonnet, his wife comes up behind him. Elizabeth Hardwick, his second wife, an author herself. She is a muse. She brings light, absolution and release. She enables his poem, his child, to explode into life:

your lightness alters everything …

absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear

this world’s dead weight and cycle on your back.

‘Poetry is the art of showing, not telling,’ said Hurdy as we puzzled over Lowell’s train of thought, ‘a poem’s meaning isn’t something to be extracted like a tooth.’ Then I got it. In this poem, Lowell shows that he knew, at least in the moment, how to work and how to love. But that is not his ‘message’; the poem itself is the work and the love. Out of his hurt, and thanks to his wife’s love, which in life he would repay with desertion, in his art he created for her, and for us, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. It was because he bore so much of the dead weight of depression in the cycle of his own life that Cal could make the music of Ariel.

I wasn’t so convinced by his later work. I bought a copy of The Dolphin in the Harvard Book Store. It was written when he had moved to England, leaving Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter Harriet behind in America, and had begun an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood. They lived not far from my home in Kent, in a dilapidated mansion just outside Maidstone. Many of the poems in the collection included lengthy verbatim quotations from letters written by Hardwick, as Lowell was in the midst of divorcing her. This didn’t seem right. Anyone who enters into a relationship with a writer knows that they run the risk of becoming fodder for plot, dialogue and character. Sometimes words exchanged in the heat of passion are too potent not to use as raw material. But surely it was the writer’s duty to disguise and transform them. Maybe there was a time when Anne Hathaway berated Shakespeare in the manner of Adriana in The Comedy of Errors, but she wouldn’t have done so in exactly the words that he crafted for the play. There was something lazy as well as cruel about these poems. They served only the writer himself, not the reader.

Just occasionally, though, the old art was there. Taking a particular personal memory and enlarging it into an understanding of the difficulty of life. There was one called ‘Ivana’, about a six-year-old child:

Small-soul-pleasing, loved with condescension,

even through the cro-magnon tirade of six,

the last madness of child-gaiety

before the trouble of the world shall hit.

The previous poem had ended with a line about a boiling kettle dropped on a child. It must have been her, because the lines at the white-hot core of this poem were

Though burned, you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you

experience is what you do not want to experience.

I borrowed the recently published biography of Lowell from the library. Yes, Ivana was a child, Caroline Blackwood’s daughter. And she had been badly burnt in an accident at the house near Maidstone.

She would have been taken to the nearby hospital in East Grinstead, where there was a specialist burns unit that had pioneered plastic surgery on pilots who had been shot down in the Battle of Britain. Realizing this, I was taken back to an experience that I did not want to experience.

August 1980, the second anniversary of my father’s death. A few weeks later, I would be boarding a plane for the first time, off to begin my year at Harvard. Today, my brother was also heading for a maiden long-haul flight. His girlfriend was teaching in a school in a remote part of Nigeria, and he was going to visit her. My mother and I drove him to Gatwick. We saw him to his gate and then went up to the spectator viewpoint. I was frightened by the size, noise and frequency of the planes. One readjusted course just before landing; another crossed a jumbo’s path on the taxiway. My brother’s plane climbed steeply into the blue and diminished to a speck, as if it were a mark on my glasses. Then it dissolved into the clouds. I remembered Imogen’s image in Cymbeline of watching a loved one sail away into exile:

I would have broke mine eyestrings, cracked them, but

To look upon him, till the diminution

Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle:

Nay, followed him, till he had melted from

The smallness of a gnat to air, and then

Have turned mine eye and wept.

At that moment I realized how much I loved my only brother. Next time it would be me, carried away in the belly of the roaring sky whale.

We returned home for tea in the garden and, for the first time in those two long years, Mum broke down. ‘Sometimes I wish so desperately that Daddy were here.’ The words of Lear echoed in my head: Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never. ‘But I mustn’t be silly,’ she added. It was my job to comfort her: ‘It’ll be the holiday of a lifetime and he’ll be home soon after I leave for America.’

Three weeks later, just days before I was due to leave, Mum woke me abruptly. She was in tears again. There had been a phone call from my brother’s girlfriend’s parents. They had received a cable from Nigeria: ‘EMB’s legs moderately burnt. Returning home immediately.’ Struck dumb, my mother put down the phone. I called back to try to get more details, but there were none. Later in the day, there was a call from Gatwick airport: he would be arriving the following afternoon. I was to meet the wheelchair and take him to the burns unit in East Grinstead.

When he appeared at the arrival gate, adrenalin pushed me aggressively through the crowd. On the way to the hospital, he told me what had happened: late at night, during a power cut, he had been pouring petrol from a jerrycan into the car, lit by a hurricane lamp at a safe distance of fifteen feet. A spillage on his trousers, the vapour blown by a sudden gust of wind – the lamp ignited and the flame ignited him. A six-hour journey through the bush to the nearest hospital, four days of hell before a transfer to Kano, then a cock-up over flight clearance. And so on. In East Grinstead, he screamed as they removed the bandages. Skin grafts would be needed. It would be a long journey, but he was alive.

As I left the hospital he said, ‘God burned me and God will heal me and if God had wanted me to die, that is well and good.’ Though burned, he was hopeful.

I was still a kind of believer, but my faith had more to do with the comfort brought by the rhythms of the liturgy in the Cranmer prayer book, with Tudor polyphony in the college chapel and the calm of mind that descended during weekly evensong. I could not share the assurance of his faith – the faith to which Hamlet comes on his return from England:

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

I thought back on the whimsical idea that every island of desolation needs a Bible and a Shakespeare. The Bible had always been my brother’s guide and the faith that it brought enabled him to survive his ordeal with physical but no ostensible mental scars. But this time my guide, my Shakespeare, had let me down. I understood Hamlet’s words about providence and readiness, but I could not feel them or believe them.

Cambridge student Sylvia Plath underlines Ariel’s song in The Tempest

The Beatles filming in Knole Park, watched by Sevenoaks School pupils (and my mother, another Sylvia)