I Wish I’d Written: Geraldine McCaughrean

Geraldine McCaughrean on Ted Hughes’ Creation Tales, where there is no predicting what will happen next …

I first came across Ted Hughes’ Creation Tales not in print but told aloud by Bill Paterson on Jackanory: the best piece of storytelling I ever saw. And the stories! I know it is absurd to covet the talent of the Poet Laureate, but I can dream, can’t I?

In this menagerie of ‘invented’ myths, the language is, of course, sumptuous and poetical; images settle in locust clouds over his early world. God himself, experimenting in his workshop, overturns all preconceptions. (So do his mother and the poltergeist on his mantelpiece.) Better still, as each quirky story unfolds, there is absolutely no predicting what happens next. The story structures involve so many ricochets that nothing ends up where you thought it was heading. You can’t even guess at a sad or happy ending – always somewhere infinitely more satisfying.

Ants are monstrous, sparrows are Dan Dare heroic. These are the Just-So Stories on a cosmic scale, with too broad a wingspan to be pigeon holed: ‘for children’, ‘for adults’ – too good, in fact, for anyone to miss.

Ted Hughes’ Tales of the Early World (0 571 14478 0, £4.50 pbk / 0 14 086435 0, £7.99 tape),The Dreamfighter and other Creation Tales (0 571 17567 8, £4.99 pbk / 0 14 086434 2, £7.99 tape) and How the Whale Became and other Stories (0 571 14184 6, £4.99 pbk / 0 14 086433 4, £7.99 tape) are published by Faber and Faber, and in Penguin Audiobooks (read by the author).