While out of the country this year, I evidently missed an important documentary movie on the plight of one of England's most beautiful spots, and one I visited briefly in 2009, when I also visited Ted Hughes's town of birth 1.5 miles away: Mytholmroyd.
Shed your tears and Walk Away is about the present state of former mill town Hebden Bridge, which was severely affected by Thatcher's cuts in the 1980s, and which has continued to be affected by similar - indeed probably in many ways worse - abuse by succeeding governments. It has serious unemployment, drug, and alcohol problems. Jez Lewis took 18 months to make the film, during which 11 young people died in the small town.
We are talking about a beautiful tourist town, but one which one of the young residents in the documentary calls 'a drug town with a tourist problem'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lewis had many problems while attempting to make the film: the M.P. for the area and the mayor (although co-operative) refused to acknowledge that the situation existed, as did people in the street, while others, such as the local school, refused to talk to him, the police pestered him, and people threatened to call a public meeting if he began filming: it appears that many people were (and no doubt still are) just in denial.
Suicide figures in Hebden Bridge, according to Jez Lewis, are included in Halifax suicide figures - that is, of a much larger area, so the high rate of suicide in Hebden Bridge gets lost.
I can't yet comment on the film itself, as I have to wait for the release of the DVD on 17 January 2011. I wonder if I'm correct in thinking that the Hebden Bridge Visitor and Canal Centre won't be selling it, though?
Ted Hughes (1930–98) was the British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. He was born in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, a village just a mile away from the town of Hebden Bridge. He lived there for seven years before moving to Mexborough in South Yorkshire, and these early years were to prove a formative influence on his poetry. At the train station, five large panels show extracts from Hughes's children's story The Iron Man, and have been illustrated by local schoolchildren.
A plaque on the wall of 1 Aspinall Street informs us that Ted Hughes was born here. Aspinall is one of a small cluster of streets immediately north of the Rochdale Canal. Hughes's uncle on his mother Edith's side – Albert Farrar – lived at number 19, and is mentioned in the poem 'The Sacrifice'.
On Midgely Road, the surname is still present on Mount Pleasant Hill:
A two-minute walk along the south-east side of the towpath reveals a tunnel, described in Hughes's poem 'The Long Tunnel Ceiling'. This is where the A646 goes over the canal.
A very informative booklet, which contains the above information and much more about Hughes's early life around Mytholmroyd, often linking features mentioned with particular poems, is John Billingsley's A Laureate's Landscape: Walks around Ted Hughes' Mytholmroyd (Mytholmroyd: Northern Earth, 2007).
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