Duffy’s poem does not sidestep the dark reality of much of Charlotte’s life. In May 1849, Anne Brontë died, leaving Charlotte motherless, brotherless and sisterless. The poem is full of oppressive imagery: ‘the vice … clamps you’; ‘cold circles’; ‘vile knot’. But it also offers salvation in verse form. Writing was Charlotte’s escape, and though she was only four feet eleven inches in height, she became a literary giant.
‘This is where they were all born,’ I say. ‘And this is the Charlotte Sto—
‘I know this,’ she says. ‘Come on, I want to see moor. This is why I come.’
We head up West Lane and straight across the open ground to the left of the Black Horse. Kipping House is below us. I think about stopping here and explaining the Firth connection but then think better of it. We make our way past the Great Northern and turn up Royd Street. At the top, we turn left along a grassy bank below a small playground that the locals call ‘the mugger’. We climb up the hill along a narrow-walled track and turn left at the top through a gap, joining the Brontë Way as it crosses several small fields that enclose young bulls that are fearful of my dog, who is running ahead of us.
‘What is your dog called?’ Alina asks.
‘Wolf. Or Wolfie. He answers to both.’
‘The wolf is my symbol. I am the wolf.’
She pulls up her jacket and blouse and shows me a tattoo on her back. The ink is mostly black and depicts a snarling wolf emerging from a forest.
The now-fenced path soon enters Thornton Cemetery. We stop by the Brontë Stone, carved with Jeanette Winterson’s poem:
BRONTESAURUS
Fossil record of a miracle
Bone by Bone
Word for Word
Three Women writing the Past into the Future
Line by Line
Listen to the Wildfell of your heart
Do not betray what you love
The earth opens like a book
You are come back to me then?
BRONTISSIMO
It’s a sort of tribute to the legacy of all the family and what they achieved. It is the most playful of the four pieces and alludes to how literary reputations become fossilised over time. It links the ‘now’ of the poem with the ‘then’ of the literary work. Ultimately, though, it asks us to reappraise their writing, to find what is still fresh and original.
The poem directly references Anne Brontë’s second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was condemned by Charlotte following Anne’s death and subsequently fell into obscurity. One could argue that the subject of this novel was far ahead of its time; now is a good time to reappraise its value and see it as the radical text that it was. Not only does the novel’s protagonist, Helen Graham, leave her husband, taking her son with her (a then illegal action), she goes unpunished for it. The novel also shows Helen to have had an independent income as an artist – a profession that was dominated by men throughout the nineteenth century – and tackles the subject of marital rape, which wasn’t outlawed in the United Kingdom until 1991. Today, it is considered a landmark in feminist literature.
The stone lies beneath the shade of sycamore trees, staring out over Pinchbeck Valley. The cemetery feels like a fitting place for the tribute, referencing, as it does, bones and words. That’s what we are surrounded by: bones and words. And the words will outlive the bones.
Jeanette was nervous about being included with three other writers known for their poetry rather than their prose, but she needn’t have been. The poem stands up well. When Pip and I selected the stone, we wanted something that had a rough back and top, to fit the idea in the poem of the earth opening up like a book. But some of the residents of the village thought it was broken. ‘What have they put it in like that for?’ one woman said. ‘The bleedin’ top has snapped off.’ It does look, in contrast to the black marble tombstones close by, with their gold lettering, to be unfinished. But that was the intention.
‘You take photo,’ Alina says and passes me her phone.
Next, we make our way back to the main path and through the gate at the far end. We follow a path above Close Head and climb to a bend, where we bear left through another gate. We follow the edge of the fields through a series of gates till we reach Close Head House, where a track leads up to the road near the White Horse pub. We follow the road left for a short while through Well Heads then turn right, taking a path that bends left to cut a defined line across a series of fields towards Morton Farm. To our right, we can see the remains of Doe Park, a medieval deer park, commissioned by the same Richard Tempest who built the Old Bell Chapel and lived at Thornton Hall.
There are still deer to be found in these parts, but not the large red deer Tempest and his men would have hunted. The roe deer that now roam the wooded parts of the valley are much smaller. I often see their white skuts as they retreat into the undergrowth. They are sprites of the forest. Back in the time of the Tempests, this area would have been surrounded by an earth bank and a wooden palisade fence. It covered most of the area around Denholme Beck between Denholme and Cullingworth. The name Denholme Gate refers to one of the entrances to the deer park. Eventually, deer hunting fell out of fashion, and the land was divided up when the Tempest family fortune was gambled away in the early seventeenth century.
‘It is beautiful,’ Alina says. ‘I take picture.’
I look at the darkening clouds above us. The air fizzes with water particles. Rain is heading our way.
We keep left of the farm building at Morton, which is guarded by a dog the size and temper of Cerberus, and head straight across the track and through a field gate. There’s a good view of Denholme Beck here and Doe Park Reservoir, with strange outcrops of rock and moss that make the fell look lumpy. We then follow a wall across the hillside towards the building at Denholme Clough. We cut left through a gate just before the stream and soon after join the drive leading up to the road.
Next, we turn up Cragg Lane and follow a path behind the houses that leads to a busy road. We cross this and follow Black Edge Lane up onto the cusp of the moors. There are rough fields on either side and some wild meadow. A curlew cries out its warning: ‘music as desolate, as beautiful / as your loved places’, according to Norman MacCaig’s poem ‘Curlew’. We watch it fly above us. The curlew is named after a sliver of moon, the shape of its bill. A little further on, lapwings dance and flap. The collective noun for a flock of lapwings is a ‘deceit’. The birds are known to feign injury in order to lead their predators away from their chicks. Wolfie has caught the scent of something, and he runs off across a quarried area of wasteland. He returns with a rabbit in his mouth. Alina gasps, ‘What is this?’
‘I think it’s a rabbit,’ I say.
‘But we must take it to the vet.’
‘It’s too late for that. It’s dead.’
‘We must do something.’
I think she is going to cry, so I wrack my brains to find words to comfort her. ‘It had mixy,’ I say. ‘It was in a lot of pain. He was doing it a favour.’
‘What is mixy?’
‘Myxomatosis,’ I say. ‘It’s a disease that affects rabbits. It’s horrible. They get tumours and go blind. Eventually they die, but it takes weeks. It’s a slow and agonising death. So, you see, it’s better this way.’
‘I see. But your dog, will he catch it?’
‘No, it’s OK. Only rabbits get it. It’s not contagious for other animals.’
‘No?’
‘I think hares can get it. But that’s it.’
‘Your dog is a good dog. He saved this rabbit from pain.’
We turn left through a gate and drop down to join Foreside Lane, which leads past the ruins of Ash Tree Farm. The path crosses bleak and dramatic moorland, and despite the clouds the view is clear for many miles around. The moor undulates with dark tracts of peat bog, green ridges of fern and patches of purple heather. Behind us looms the large ridge of land that encompasses Bingley, Ilkley and Rombalds Moor. In front of us looms the less elev
ated Ovenden Moor.
‘These are the moors that inspired Emily,’ I say.
‘Ah, yes, the moors. I take picture.’
We soon reach Ogden Kirk and the Emily Stone. ‘Kirk’ is a local word for rock. It rises up from Hebble Brook at the cusp of Thornton Moor. This jagged hump stands sentinel over Skirden Edge. When the sun shines on its face, it sparkles with spots of quartz, tiny diamonds embedded in the skin of the stone. It’s the most remote spot along the nine-mile Brontë Stones walk from Thornton to Haworth, from where the Brontës were born to where they matured into adulthood.
The face of the kirk is mottled with ochreous orange and murky black patches. Freckled with green lichen. It brings to mind fire and iron. Where Pip has cut into the kirk’s skin with tungsten chisels, the rock beneath is exposed and has a bright-yellow colour that shines gold in some lights. The words are framed by cragged ridges of stone and fretted with verdant ferns:
She stands outside
A book in her hands
‘Her name is Cathy,’ she says
‘I have carried her so far, so far
Along the unmarked road from our graves
I cannot reach this window
Open it, I pray.’
But his window is a door to a lonely world
That longs to play.
Ah Emily. Come in, come in and stay.
Kate Bush’s poem is something of a mystery. The first line, ‘she stands outside’, is perhaps a reference to the first lines of her song ‘This Woman’s Work’. Emily has carried her character ‘Cathy’ to her grave and now she stands outside a window. The window, which she cannot reach, is perhaps a reference both to the scene in Wuthering Heights when Cathy’s ghost appears outside the sleeping Lockwood’s bed chamber and also to the lyrics of Bush’s 1978 debut, with the refrain, ‘let me in at your window’. It is in any case a porthole to another world.
Alina and I stop to read the poem. As we do, the sun appears from behind the clouds and illuminates the rock face so that the letters glow gold and the tiny diamonds of quartz sparkle in the light like stars.
‘It is destiny,’ Alina says.
We read the poem. Alina takes pictures. I extract my lunch from my rucksack, a sandwich and broth from my flask.
‘Do you want some?’
‘I had a big breakfast. English breakfast. Very big.’
‘They share the same birthday,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘Emily and Kate. The thirtieth of July. Kate Bush was sixty this year, the same year as Emily’s bicentenary. It’s also forty years since Kate’s debut single “Wuthering Heights” reached number one in the charts here.’
‘Ah, yes, I read about this in magazine. This is where your love of Emily Brontë starts? You were a child and you listened to the song.’
She’s done her homework. ‘I’d just turned seven,’ I say. ‘I got a tape machine for my birthday. I taped the song off the radio. I was obsessed by it. I filled a C60 cassette with it. I think my mum was worried about me. She took me to one side and told me the story of Wuthering Heights.’
‘And this is where you began?’
‘I suppose.’
‘What is it about this song?’
‘I don’t know. I think it was the lyrics. This woman asking to be let in at the window. I couldn’t work out why she didn’t use the door.’
‘You were a strange child.’
‘My mother thought so.’
We sit in the sunlight and absorb the surroundings. It’s a secluded beauty spot that was well known to the Victorians. Surely Patrick would have talked to Emily about his picnic here with Elizabeth Firth, and perhaps Emily would even have come to find the spot herself. On the edge of Thornton and Ovenden moors, which are cut in two by the sharp incline of Ogden Clough, the air is peaceful with the pleasant trickling sound of the beck below. In front is Round Hill, to our right Skirden Edge and to our left the wooded tops of Spice Cake Hills. Above us the clouds have dispersed. It looks like the forecast was wrong, or Alina has cast a pagan spell.
I think back to early June when Pip was here carving the letters into the stone. It was the hottest week of the year – in fact, the hottest on record for many years – and Pip had to submerge herself fully clothed up to her neck in the peaty waters of Hebble Beck every half hour or so, just to stop herself from overheating. It was so hot she also had to bury her diamond-encrusted sharpening block. I watched her chip into the rock with my heart in the roof of my mouth. One mistake and the whole thing would have been spoilt.
‘It is lovely here,’ Alina says. ‘Has Kate been to see it?’
‘Yes, I think so. She was spotted by a walker. Someone emailed me.’
I put my flask away and fasten my rucksack. We leave the dramatic crest of Ogden Kirk and take the main path to the shoulder of Thornton Moor. Beneath our feet, newts scurry. The earth is soft with peaty soil and spongy with sphagnum. As we reach the brow of the moor, the view opens up again and Rombalds Moor reappears. We continue down Hambleton Lane, soon joining a fence line, descending steeply to join Thornton Moor conduit. To our left, we can just make out a dark shape close to the horizon: Top Withens, the main inspiration for the location of Wuthering Heights. We head straight on past the gate, then fork left at a sign to descend past the remains of a metal hut. The fells here are populated with a breed of sheep known as Lonk, hardy enough to tackle the braying winter winds and musket balls of ice-cold rain. The wool is too tough for clothing and is used instead in carpet manufacturing.
To our right is a lonesome sycamore tree that marks the abandoned farm of the Hays. Here the ‘Book Stones’ lie, two huge slabs that cover an open cellar, or what is left of it. They now contain a bonus carving – this was going to be the original site of the Emily Stone, and I’d wanted Pip to mark the spot. I point out the carving to Alina.
‘What is “E.B.”?’
‘It’s just Emily’s initials. Pip carved them for me.’
‘Why did she do this?’
‘I asked her to.’
After telling Anita Rani, one of the programme’s presenters, on BBC Countryfile, along with millions of viewers, that this was where Pip was going to carve Kate’s poem, I’d thought I had better do something. It was only after the programme had aired that I’d discovered Ogden Kirk and changed my mind about where the poem should go.
Beneath the slabs, in shadow of the cellar, we can just make out the remains of a sheep, the fleece stained with peat soil and the bones picked clean, first by corvids then by tiny insect life. The skull peers out at us, as though it has been placed here as part of a Satanic ceremony. We sit on the slabs and take in the stunning vista of Oxenhope.
After a stone stoop, the path bears down to reach a bridge over Stubden Conduit. We follow this conduit as it meanders and snakes a line around several steep cloughs. One such clough is a wooded hollow called Nan Scar. In the 1880s, there was a rifle range here. The name comes from the Welsh word ‘nant’ for a small river. There is said to be a twite reserve around here, but I have never been fortunate enough to see these small, shy brown finches.
‘Where is the Anne Stone?’
‘Well, the thing is … it’s in Dent.’
‘Dent? Where is Dent?’
‘About a two-hour drive away. It’s in a field near Pip’s studio. It was the first stone she carved. It’s supposed to be in the meadow behind the parsonage in Haworth.’
‘Why is it not there?’
‘There have been problems with the contract.’
‘What problems?’
‘It’s complicated … we can go and have a look at the hole the stone mason has dug if you like. I can read you the poem off my phone. It’s a very good poem.’
‘Why would we want to look in hole?’
We eventually arrive at Leeming Reservoir, with its ornate valve tower, and follow the track behind until we reach the village of Oxenhope and the steam railway station. The Reverend Donne in Charlotte Brontë’s n
ovel Shirley was inspired by Joseph Brett Grant, who was Patrick Brontë’s assistant curate. He became the first vicar of Oxenhope in 1851, when the fine Norman-style church was built here. Its name means ‘valley of the oxen’. Though there are no oxen now, just comfortably well-off commuters with 4x4 vehicles and topiary hedges.
We take a path that follows the river into Haworth and walk past a row of pretty cottages. ‘This is not safe,’ Alina says.
‘What’s not safe?’
‘This door. This window. I wouldn’t sleep if I lived here.’
‘It’s not so bad.’
‘But there are no bars. And not enough locks. Where I live, Romanians would easily get through this.’
We walk up the main street of Haworth past the Black Bull pub, a favourite drinking hole of Branwell Brontë. Branwell was the secretary of the Freemasons Lodge of the Three Graces which met at this inn. He was also a leading member of the Haworth Temperance Society, which might seem odd, but it appears that Branwell only took to drink towards the end of his short life. Why he did will become clearer later.
According to Elizabeth Gaskell, who we now know, due to the work done by Juliet Barker and others, was not a very reliable source, Branwell’s conversational talents were a bit of a pull. She claims that he was known to make his escape through the back door or by jumping through the kitchen window when his family came to seek him at the front of the inn, or when fleeing from debtors who came to settle his bar bills. Today, it is in the hands of a voracious pub company whose punitive contract ties in the tenant to an exclusive buying deal. I’ve seen a succession of young hopefuls take on the place, filled with foolish optimism and go-getting spirit, only to find it is hardly possible to make a living when the profit margins are so thin. It should be the best pub in the village, instead of the last-chance saloon.
A group of big-bellied, bald-headed lager drinkers huddle round the entrance, smoking and vaping.
‘The English, they drink too much. They drink and drink.’
‘They do. They used to blame it on the water,’ I say. ‘The water here was particularly unclean. The streams ran through the graveyard.’
Walking the Invisible Page 3