The royal family surely had crockery to spare.

The London funerals were sub-rosa affairs, or at least that’s how Ed Murrow made it seem. Public mourning wouldn’t do with the bombing being ongoing, the German invasion, or so everyone assumed, being imminent, and an entire generation of young men being sent to sea with the warranty that not one of them would return whole. Lamentation and its by-product of guilt were the prodigal parents of Ted’s generation; prodigal in the sense that they were always coming, always rounding the corner, and always ambling up the way with their bills of lading in hand. They never seemed to arrive, that’s all. This is why the war, in one sense, had never really ended for Ted’s generation. It was the most formidable event of their formative years. The times were much more appealing when people lived as though they were about to die and did not give one damn.

Dad would drive Ted down on Sundays. They would slip under the cordons of the bomb sites. Wardens in yellow slickers would shoo them off by throwing handfuls of pebbles. London was teeming, squalid, philistine, and farcical, a towering machine-age variation on the Yorkshire wilderness. He had not loved London as a boy. But he loved it, in memory, in America.

There were riots, he had heard, in Notting Hill in ’58. “Teddy Boys” squaring off against the inner-city “Immies.” Acrimonious labor strikes were becoming common. Ted was one for tolerance but not at the price of lethargy, and the news from London heartened him. The 1950s heretofore had remained war years in Britain, rife with shortages and sacrifice. The kvetching common man remained functionally anesthetized by the voices of Churchill and his proxies, and the Grand Man’s retirement, promised and put off, now seemed the seminal factor that his leadership once had been. But near the decade’s end, the picture brightened considerably. Faber and Faber brought out Ted’s Hawk in the Rain in ’57. Eliot and Auden announced the arrival of the standard-bearer, albeit in absentia, of a new generation. He and his wife often made mention of this at Smith or Amherst staff parties. The response from the male professors would either be a terse “So I’ve heard,” or a flustered “Oh?” The ladies of the faculty did not seem to care what sort of poems Ted may have written (none of them ever asked for a copy of the volume); they were preoccupied with the fact that such a hulking fellow wrote poetry at all. How Brontë sisters that seemed. Ted was anxious for his due reception. Sylvia was equally desirous for him to have it. She wanted, in part, to know what it would be like in anticipation of her own foreordained due reception. The English women could not be any worse, or shall we say more rapacious, than the Americans, Sylvia reasoned. If it were any indication, one girl she roomed with at Cambridge had once tried to use Sylvia’s diaphragm, gathering dust in a drawer, as a thermal demitasse dome when Sylvia was suddenly called away to the telephone.

Ted and Sylvia junked their prospects for tenured faculty positions and returned to England as the anomalous decade was drawing to a close. They had heard the all-clear sounding.

There was an afternoon opera on the BBC daily. Wagner’s Nibelung cycle was a great favorite and one interminable annoyance, subtly goading at the twilight of the empire and doing so in the language of the recent enemy. Had they won the war only to learn the adversary’s song? Ted found himself straying from the writing desk into the sanctum of Sylvia’s occultish, candlelit loo to look at the willow’s reeds that he had hung upon the wall and to get a breath of the lavender soap that smelled like a grande dame’s knitting circle.