What has Ted Hughes’s ancestor got to do with his poetry?

Scandalously, we never studied Ted Hughes at school. As the Poet Laureate is arguably the finest British poet of the 20th century this would be a scandal wherever I attended (‘studied’ would be pushing it) but I attended Calder High in Ted’s home town of Mytholmroyd. Though the grand total of my published poems stands at seven, we share connections, Ted and I. When my first novel was published — set in a fictionalised version of the Calder Valley — I was a guest of the Ted Hughes Festival. As a teenager in the 1980s, I tended Sylvia Plath’s grave. By then Ted was already a bogeyman for some of the area’s more dour feminists, blamed as he was for Plath’s suicide.

Now, thanks to the British Library, Ted’s name is also synonymous with slavery. Apparently a distant relative, Nicholas Ferrar, was deeply involved with the London Virginia Company and so I suppose it’s only a matter of time before Hughes’s books are burnt on the concourse at St Pancras, the blue plaque jemmied from the wall of his modest Mytholmroyd home and his ashes hunted down, hoovered up and jettisoned into space.