Ruth Bidgood

Matthew Jarvis

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783162703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-length scholarly study of the prize-winning poet Ruth Bidgood, a writer who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home.

1

Finding Mid-Wales

The poet and local historian Ruth Bidgood is primarily associated with the remote mid-Wales village of Abergwesyn (some eleven-and-a-half miles to the west of Builth Wells) and more generally with the surrounding areas of north Breconshire and Radnorshire. However, her connection with Abergwesyn did not begin until she was in her early forties, in the mid-1960s, and she did not live there full-time until a decade later. Nonetheless, it was the association with Abergwesyn that, in Bidgood’s early middle age, seemed abruptly to instigate her life as both poet and local historian. Her first collection of poetry, The Given Time, was published in 1972 – the year she turned fifty. As the dust jacket notes to this volume indicate, ‘It was not until … she came to live for part of each year in Abergwesyn, North Breconshire, that she started to write’, with the same remarks even going so far as to suggest that, without her involvement with mid-Wales, none of the poems in the book ‘would have been written’. As Bidgood has stated, bar poetry written at school, ‘There were no pre-Abergwesyn poems.’1 However, since her arrival in the mid-Wales area in the mid-1960s, she has published twelve volumes of poetry as well as an array of work on local history (a full-length book, various pamphlets and nearly seventy articles). In the words of Jason Walford Davies, Bidgood’s arrival in Abergwesyn, now more than four-and-a-half decades ago, occasioned a ‘striking conversion’ to writing (‘HW’, 49).

* * *

Ruth Bidgood’s life before Abergwesyn is essentially a story of physical, though not emotional, movement out of Wales. Born on 20 July 1922 in the mining village of Seven Sisters (Blaendulais), Glamorgan, Ruth Jones was the only child of Revd William Herbert Jones (1874–1945) – known as Herbert, and then vicar of St Mary’s Anglican church in the village2 – and his wife Hilda (née Garrett, 1887–1971), ‘a former teacher in Aberdare’ (RB) and a native of the West Country (figure 1).3 Herbert Jones, who came from Conwy, had grown up in what is now the National Trust property of Aberconwy House, which his parents had run as a temperance hotel.4 He was a Welsh speaker (‘HW’, 47) and whilst his daughter never learnt more than ‘a little’ of the language (‘H’, 7) – a situation she has described as ‘a deep regret’ (‘HW’, 47) – she did learn from him what she has called a ‘love of Wales and a conviction of Welshness’ (‘H’, 7). Bidgood notes that she was always keen to ‘know more about the Welsh side’ of her family, and ‘didn’t want to be half English at all’. Indeed, this ‘mixture’ of heritage was something that she suggests caused her ‘sorrow’ when she was young (‘HW’, 47). Bidgood recalls a relatively bookish home environment in her childhood years. Her father’s study contained ‘a great many’ theological works, and there were ‘a lot’ of nineteenth-century novels around the house as well as some poetry volumes (RB). Shelley was the first of the latter that she remembers reading. Describing herself as ‘a very early reader’, Bidgood recollects a fondness for Christmas annuals, whilst one of the novels to which she found herself ‘addicted’ was Sabine Baring-Gould’s Eve (RB). Her particular memory of a ‘gory accident with a scythe’ (RB) in this book is perhaps significant, given the interest identifiable in her own writing with violent or gruesome events.5

In 1929, the Jones family moved twelve miles south when Herbert became vicar of St Mary’s church in Aberafan, Port Talbot.6 This meant that, in 1933, the young Ruth joined the grammar school that was then called Port Talbot Secondary School,7 and so came into contact with the English master Philip Burton (best known for his formative role in the life of Bidgood’s fellow pupil at the school, Richard Jenkins – later, Richard Burton). Philip Burton’s influence was to be a strong one on Bidgood’s future direction, even if she was not particularly conscious of such influence at the time,8 and it is telling that she dedicated her first volume of poetry to him. Perhaps most importantly, she has credited him specifically with ‘mak[ing] me believe that some day I could be a writer, though I doubt if he thought it would take so long, or that the form of writing would be poetry’ (‘H’, 7).9 Clearly having caught something of Burton’s ‘enormous enthusiasm for life and letters’ (‘H’, 7), Bidgood set her sights on admission to Oxford to read English. Thus, she entered St Hugh’s College in 1940 (RB), albeit only after her headmaster had talked her out of a ‘somewhat melodramatic attempt to give education a miss and join up’ at the start of World War II (‘H’, 7).

University was an experience much treasured by Bidgood, and she ‘flung’ herself into it ‘with zest’. Moreover, she actively sustained her Welsh engagements whilst away from Wales itself as she ‘helped to run the Celtic Society’, which she has described as ‘a meeting-place for Welsh undergraduates’ (‘H’, 7). However, Oxford seems to have done nothing for Bidgood’s creative life, even if (as she has put it) the ‘academic habit of meticulous analysis … was a useful corrective to woolly romanticism’ (‘H’, 7). University thus saw the production of no poetry at all, although Bidgood discovered through her studies a particular enthusiasm for Thomas Wyatt and John Donne (‘H’, 8). Called up to the Women’s Royal Naval Service (figure 3) after finishing her degree in 1943, Bidgood spent most of her service life in Alexandria working as a coder, following initial stationing in the south-west of England (Devon and Cornwall) and then Scotland. Ironically, perhaps, whilst an English degree at Oxford had brought her nowhere near the actual writing of poetry, military service led her closer. In response to Jason Walford Davies’s shrewd question as to whether it could be said ‘that the kind of intense involvement with language’ which being a coder required ‘is related in some way to the poetic process’, Bidgood replied:

Yes, I think it probably is akin to writing poetry … My particular line was dealing with signals that didn’t make any sense, deciding how the script had got into the state it was in, what minute changes of letters and figures would cause it to start making sense again. (‘HW’, 49)

Alongside the formative belief that she could be a writer, inspired in her by Philip Burton, the wartime business of coding thus helped foster an acute sensitivity to linguistic minutiae – as well as a capacity to deal with puzzling detail, which Bidgood has connected with the particular challenges of local history (‘HW’, 49).

In some ways, the stage was now set for the creative and scholarly life for which Bidgood has subsequently become known. However, the last piece of the jigsaw, her arrival in mid-Wales, was not to fall into place for nearly another two decades. In that long period, Bidgood worked for ‘about a year’ (RB) for Chambers’s Encyclopædia in London; got married in 1946 (to David Edgar Bidgood; figure 5); moved to the town of Coulsdon in 1949 – ‘not far from London, in Surrey suburbia’, in Bidgood’s description (‘H’, 8); and had three children (the first in London, the latter two after the move to Coulsdon). During these years, which were overwhelmingly dedicated to being a full-time mother, there seems to have been a rather forced attempt on Bidgood’s part to engage emotionally with England:

At the time there seemed little hope of getting back to Wales – I made a conscious effort to identify with the England I seemed likely to live in, even deciding on English names [Anthony, Janet and Martin; figure 4] for the children. (RB)

Pulling against this, however, Wales formed a constant undertow. As Bidgood has explained, ‘Increasingly I wanted to come back, not to my native Glamorganshire, but to mid-Wales’ (‘H’, 8). Mid-Wales had held a particular attraction for Bidgood since a visit there in her teens when she had holidayed with her parents and a school-friend in Llandrindod. ‘We had no car,’ she recalls, ‘so hired a car and driver to take us to the Elan Valley’, and she found that ‘this wilder side of Radnorshire appealed to me very much’ (RB). But it was not until the mid-1960s that a small legacy enabled her and her husband to buy ‘a corrugated Victorian bungalow’ in the region. This became the family holiday house for the next ten years (their regular presence meaning that they were ‘accepted as something more than “summer residents”’) and Bidgood’s permanent, full-time home after divorce in 1974 (RB).10 As Bidgood has explained:

Houses in the Welsh countryside were then very cheap. We didn’t manage to find a suitable one in Radnorshire, but were told of a bungalow in a beautiful North Breconshire valley, and found it was in Abergwesyn, which I had spotted on the map and been fascinated by – it looked so remote … We bought it in spring 1964. (RB)

The bungalow was called Tŷhaearn (‘iron house’; figure 6), and Bidgood’s arrival there was the key moment in the generation of her writing career. She recounts that, whilst living in Surrey, neither the history nor the natural world of the surrounding area ‘touch[ed] me at all’. However, as soon as she came to mid-Wales, ‘immediately there was the call of the land and the ruins – drawing me up the side-valleys into the remains of communities’ (‘HW’, 49). The upshot, ‘within about a year’ of buying Tŷhaearn, was a surge of poetry production and local history work (‘HW’, 49). Bidgood’s return to Wales, in other words, coupled with a rediscovery of Edward Thomas’s poetry around 1966 (‘H’, 8), ‘was powerful enough to start me off quite compulsively writing’. It was, she has explained, ‘as if I was making up for lost time’.11

* * *

Ruth Bidgood’s poetically productive life thus began in 1965, whilst her 1966 reacquaintance with Edward Thomas’s work was inspirational in the sense that she saw in his poetry ‘a sort of uncertainty’ that she found both appealing and ‘formative’ (‘HW’, 50). ‘The influence of place and the influence of this writer came together’, she has suggested, and she was quickly spurred on not only to write but also to read ‘more of what was being written in Wales in the English language’ (‘H’, 8). Publication of her poetry soon followed, from mid-1967 onwards, in countryside magazines (the long-standing English magazines Country Life and The Countryman, as well as Wales’s relatively new Country Quest12), in explicitly literary periodicals (The Anglo-Welsh Review, Poetry Wales and Vera Rich’s London-based Manifold) and also in Tudor David’s increasingly important social/cultural periodical London Welshman.13 Indeed, whilst Bidgood’s first volume of poetry did not appear until 1972, she had an extremely lively publication record in magazines during the final three years of the 1960s, publishing more than forty poems over a period of about thirty months.14

This early material is an interesting mixture. For example, the very first of her poems to appear, ‘Tree-felling’, is rooted in the country life with which Bidgood has been much associated over the course of her career. Published in the June 1967 edition of the Wrexham-edited Country Quest,15 this poem portrays a group of men ‘felling the oaks’ on a ‘rainy hill’. The event has a notable violence about it:

A great black horse drags the logs in chains,
Wrenching strong hoofs from the mud.

Mist, and blue smoke from burning brushwood,
And steam from the sweating, struggling horse,
Soften the yellow of cut wood,
And mask raw mutilation.

Although the scene is somewhat ‘Soften[ed]’ by mist, smoke and steam, the horse finds itself ‘Wrenching’ and ‘struggling’, with the description of the logs making them sound like prisoners (they are ‘in chains’), whilst either the ‘cut wood’ or the landscape itself has been nothing short of mutilated. Notwithstanding the poem’s appearance in a magazine of rural life, it is manifestly not some easy celebration of the then-contemporary countryside. Rather, there is brutality here, made even more incomprehensible by the fact that, as the poem’s third stanza makes clear, such brutality is not the act of strangers, nor is it vindictive. Instead, the men are ‘acquiescent in the end of a landscape / Of which they had been a part.’ Destruction here is effectively self-destruction, and seemingly complacent self-destruction at that. As such, in the fourth and final stanza, the horse becomes an ‘archaic beast’, part of the now-disappearing world that he is forced to tear to pieces. Indeed, at the poem’s end, it is quite clear that Bidgood sees this destruction in terms of a manifest cultural downgrading, as the great horse ‘heav[es] behind him / The ruins of a kindlier world.’ For Bidgood, in other words, the destruction of the oaks is, in an act of grimly muddy violence, suggestive of a rather brutal sort of regression.

‘Tree-felling’ is not explicitly a mid-Wales poem; indeed, it does not even identify itself as a poem about Wales. Significantly, however, it dates from a point just after the years 1947–65, during which time official UK forestry policy had pursued a programme of especially intense, and equally contentious, coniferization of Welsh land. According to William Linnard, part of this process involved the ‘wholesale coniferization of low-grade broadleaved semi-natural woodlands, mainly oak’. Moreover, as Linnard also notes, ‘In Wales especially’, such actions, coupled with the ‘large-scale planting of pure blocks of conifers, with insensitive boundary lines’, were ‘giving forestry a bad name’.16 Within this context, ‘Tree-felling’ starts to look very much lik...