A childhood friend remembers...
I checked to see if there was anything new about Nick Hughes and found an article written by a friend that describes who Nick was, separate from his famous parents.
I was in Starbucks when I heard that my oldest friend had hanged himself. Starbucks is no place to hear such tragic news, to be left sobbing among the lattes and the cappuccinos.
I first met Nick Hughes at Bedales school in 1975. He was the son of two famous poets, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but at Bedales Nick’s parentage was irrelevant (with the children of Laurence Olivier and Princess Margaret among the pupils, it had to be). I had heard of Ted Hughes as the author of the children’s story The Iron Man. But, to a 14-year-old schoolboy, who on earth was Sylvia Plath? It was only later that I learnt of her grim history, her mental breakdowns, her turbulent marriage and her decision to gas herself while her children, baby Nick and his elder sister Frieda, slept in a nearby room.
Nick and I quickly became friends – a friendship that was to span a third of a century. Our shared interest in nature – we both studied zoology, Nick at Oxford, I at Cam-bridge – gave us a lifelong bond. When I visited Nick in Devon as a schoolboy we made first editions of Ted’s poetry on a hand press. The three of us went fishing – well, I sat on the bank. Ted, off-puttingly, asked me at breakfast: “Did you dream?” Not a question I quite knew how to answer.
When Nick and I shared a dormitory he never spoke of Sylvia, the mother he’d never known, but he talked cheerfully about the chaotic life he had led with his widowed father before Ted remarried in 1970.
He remembered driving around in a Morris Minor estate car with guinea pigs in the boot. In the dormitory I kept a pair of axolotls, rare amphibious animals. At the end of term I gave them to Nick. Six months later I asked him how they were. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other: “Well, you see Sag [his nickname for me], I wanted to see if they could catch a live minnow.” The minnow had introduced an infection and both had died.
We last talked when he rang last summer in excitement to tell me about his girlfriend, Christine, moving in and the vegetable garden they had started together. I asked him for a photo and e-mailed to remind him but never got the picture. Nick was hopeless with e-mails.
Reading the coverage of Nick’s death last week it would be easy to imagine that he was some kind of suicide sleeper: that because his mother committed suicide so tragically when he was just a little boy he was somehow doomed to follow suit. “Nicholas Hughes hangs himself at his home in Alaska 46 years after his mother gassed herself” was a typical line, followed by reams of intrusive speculation about a “suicide gene”.
Many people – those who didn’t know Nick – seem to have assumed that he was genetically predetermined to kill himself and that the years he did live must have been an unremitting catalogue of gloom.
The opposite is true. Until the death of his beloved father in 1998, Nick was a man in whom a zest for life and a thirst for learning welled over. Whether it was investigating Nile perch in Kenya for his undergraduate dissertation, working out how to make the perfect glaze for his pottery, discovering the ecology of grayling or trout, or “calibrating” (his term, not mine) how to only just lose at football in the garden against his godchild, my youngest son, his lust for learning was undimmed.
Nick’s father was his soulmate. He and Ted had a relationship of shared passion, shared pleasures and a deep love of fish. At the end of O-levels they went off to fish in Alaska together. Nick and I retraced some of their steps two years later. Alaska is beautiful in its own right but all Nick wanted to do, it was clear, was to relive their trip in the most excruciating detail. “Hey Sag,” he’d say, genuinely expecting me to light up with interest. “This is the branch where dad’s line snagged when he had a big salmon.”
Nick and Ted loved to fish together whether in Devon, Scotland or Alaska. Ted would often combine a fishing trip with an invitation to speak. The last time I saw them together was in the summer of 1998 at Ted’s home in Devon. Nick had already told me that Ted had cancer: he was worried, but he had at the time no inkling of how his father’s illness and death would affect him. We had fish for lunch – caught by Ted, of course. Carol, Nick’s stepmother, gave my oldest son a ride on the sit-on mower.
I once asked Nick whether he wrote any poetry and he told me he couldn’t hope to compete with his father’s grasp of the English language. I mentioned this to one ex-girlfriend and she replied dreamily: “You should have seen some of the letters I got, then.”
There was only one poem of Ted’s I ever saw Nick express interest in – not Birthday Letters, not Tales from Ovid, not Pike, nor any of the other dead rat plop poems. It was about woodpeckers.
When Woodpecker’s jack-hammer head Starts up its dreadful din Knocking the dead bough double dead How do his eyes stay in? Ted had hit on a biological conundrum and as a biologist Nick wanted to know the answer (which is, apparently, that it keeps its eyes shut and wraps its tongue around the base of its brain – a woodpecker’s beak is going at 1,300mph on impact).
Nick’s interest in the natural world never diminished. His intellectual curiosity made him a brilliant biologist, earning him a PhD in fisheries and a professorship at the University of Alaska. In latter years he split his fieldwork between Alaska and New Zealand where he spent the winter (when fieldwork in Alaska is much harder and the cold and dark of winter are not good for somebody prone to depression). I suspect he would have been a better-known fisheries scientist if he could have overcome his natural reticence and his loathing of academic bureaucracy and politics.
At school I always trailed in his wake. I once copied an essay of his on “alternation of generations” but he had to hand it in before I had finished copying. My teacher’s comment – “you seem to lose the thread towards the end” – was all too perceptive. I remember a biology teacher telling us that skin was the only connective tissue that had a role in fighting infection. “What about blood?” Nick piped up. “Blood and skin are the two connective tissues . . .” The teacher had to concede.
But Nick wasn’t just a fine brain. He was good with his hands. He and his best mate Lon built houses together and repaired boats. At the time of his death he was building a new type of kiln to create the perfect glaze. He was a keen cyclist. Ted promised him a titanium-framed bicycle if he got all As at O-level – he got the bicycle. (I always felt this was slightly cheating as he was so bad at French that he did CSE, not O-level. I later discovered that Ted had rung up Oxford University to get it to waive the foreign language requirement for Nick.)
For all his skills, though, Nick was wonderfully absent-minded on occasions. He bought my older son the same book on bats two years in a row. Most notoriously, he once went swimming at a pool in Alaska and after changing wasn’t sure why everybody was staring at him. He had forgotten to put his trunks on.
Nick and I met up in Alaska in our gap year. I had planned a year working with seals and whales. Nick was inspired to do something with his gap year, too, so he persuaded somebody that he should help them with their fieldwork. We joined up at Anchorage airport before setting off on some trips into the wilderness. My father had written to me saying he wondered if I should get a sawn-off shotgun in case we were attacked by grizzlies. I felt sure my penknife would do the trick until, waiting for Nick at the airport, I came across a stuffed grizzly standing on its back legs, 10ft tall. Suddenly I realised my penknife would be no use.
Three days later we had hired a car and were parked at the top of a trail to the end of a valley. As we prepared to set off, Nick was telling me about how the smell of food was what attracted bears. As he did so, he turned around and knocked our peanut butter over the only pair of trousers I had with me. He spent the rest of the trip teasing me. “Hey Sag,” he would chortle, “those bears are going to smell that peanut butter a mile off. All I’ll need to do is watch them run after you!” When the noise of an animal came from a bush 20ft ahead we both froze – until a moose emerged.
I read an interview once in which Ted described him as a loner. I will be gracious and interpret this as parent-speak for “he doesn't have a partner and isn’t married”, for I could never describe Nick as a loner. He had a small circle of very close friends. He had a vigorous circle of academic colleagues. And he was also a very attractive man. I remember him telling me about his uncertainty as to whether women (or “females” as he called them – always the biologist!) in Alaska were interested in him or in sleeping with Sylvia Plath’s son – or, worse still, in having her grandchildren.
Yet that never seemed to put him off the opposite sex. He wrote to me once of “a smouldering affair” and on another occasion that “female escapades have flopped one way or another”. But I suspect as he grew older he was made more hesitant about commitment and had a deep fear of repeating the mistakes of his father with Sylvia. If he had children he wanted to be sure that it was with the right person. After the birth of my first child he wrote to me and asked: “Can you recommend it?”
Right until 1998, when his father died, I and the other close school friend I have asked never saw any sign of the depression that was to plague him from then on. But Ted’s death meant that the most important relationship in his life was gone. Worse still were the repercussions: disagreements of the sort that many grieving families have when the family linchpin dies. Nick was in his late thirties then and his mental health began to suffer.
Being Nick, he read and read about his condition. When he and I walked up Scafell Pike in 2007 he told me all about the chemicals in his brain and how he now understood so much more about the bouts of depression. He told me he had reckoned it took two weeks between an event and the depression that followed. An event might be an argument with an ex-girlfriend, another bout of family wrangling or, in one case, missing out on a grant because the university had given him the wrong e-mail address. The emotional resilience that Nick had before Ted’s death had gone after it.
Mental illness of the kind Nick had in the last five years of his life is as debilitating as any cancer or physical disability. Lying in his house in New Zealand, he told me how he could see his neighbour mowing the lawn but couldn’t conceive how anybody could have the energy to do that. He tried medication but it was frequently as much a hindrance as a help.
He left his job at the University of Alaska, partly to reduce the stress in his life and partly to pursue his interests at his own pace: build more houses, do more work with clay, do the fish research he was interested in.
Taking your own life isn’t rational except in the tiny narrow logic of one person’s brain. Nick was loved and respected. He had found so much happiness with Christine. His work as a fish biologist was hugely respected. The income from Sylvia’s estate gave him financial security. His life had a thousand things to look forward to, yet the chemicals in his brain and his fear of another relapse just let him fall through the crack in one short moment. In a day, or a week, or a month, he might have felt entirely different.
There’s another reason why suicide isn’t rational: what happens to those around you. It’s hard to put into words the pain and sense of loss so many people feel – particularly those who were close to him every day. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a man who spent his life trying not to be seen as the son of poetry’s most celebrated suicide should, by the manner of his death, ensure that for many who never met him this is exactly how he will be remembered.
One of the hardest things for me was explaining to my nine-year-old son, Robert, that his godfather had killed himself. Robert asked: “How can you be that sad?” A question I still find very hard to answer. As I said, suicide isn’t rational.
Nick’s was the imperfect death, the worst kind of death, a life ended in its prime. A brilliant mind and wonderful personality were brought to a premature end by the terrible and fatal impact of dysfunctional brain chemistry.
Nick had gifts from both his parents. Not the gifts of poetry or prose, but the gifts of passion, curiosity, intelligence, generosity, ideas and human warmth. And for that, all those who knew him will always be grateful.
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