Walking the Invisible Read online

  In 1816, Patrick and Maria’s family expanded with the arrival of Charlotte. Branwell followed in 1817, then Emily in 1818 and finally Anne in 1820. I think we can conclude from this that Patrick and Maria were fond of each other – Maria’s nickname for her husband was ‘Saucy Pat’. Patrick wrote that their five years in Thornton were the happiest of their lives. And you can see why. In April 1820, having outgrown the Thornton parsonage, Patrick moved the family to Haworth, and very soon things took a turn for the worst. Maria became very ill and died of uterine cancer in 1821. A few years later, the two eldest daughters died of consumption. Their time in Thornton was the only sustained period that they were all together as a family. When they loaded their possessions onto those flat waggons and made the journey to Haworth, they must have thought they were travelling to a better future, not to one of tragedy.

  Charlotte was four years old when they moved and would have had a living memory of the village. But that’s not to say that the other children wouldn’t have been familiar with Thornton’s streets and the surrounding countryside. When Maria died, the family spent some time at the Firths’ on Lower Kipping Lane. Dr John Scholefield Firth was the local physician who befriended the Brontës when they first moved to the village.

  The heather is blooming and the bilberry bushes are flecked with blue berries. At the end of the judd wall, I follow the path to a fine viewpoint which overlooks The Towers observatory and the chimney of the adjacent fireclay works. A kestrel hovers over Hanging Fall, and it is here that I often see a falconer, training his hawks: the strong, sneaky winds are a good test for any juvenile raptor. During the summer months, it is a place where a local bagpiper stands, blasting out his discordant tunes.

  From here you can see all the village clearly – the viaduct to the left and the remains of Prospect Mills in front, which burnt down so spectacularly in 2016. The fire reached up high above the horizon, and the ensuing conflagration resembled the gates of hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But today the view is peaceful, and the air is still, and I imagine Patrick standing here, the view of the village less extensive, and the surrounding countryside more dominant, composing one of his sermons, or working on a literary endeavour. Perhaps this view inspired The Cottage in the Woods? At over thirty pages long, it is one of his most ambitious narratives and starts with a strange statement about the ‘sensual novelist and his admirer’ being creatures of ‘depraved appetites and sickly imaginations’.

  The story itself is a didactic work about a young girl called Mary and her pious parents, devout Christians who lead a simple life of prayer and labour, and a classic rake by the name of William Bower, who falls for Mary and eventually finds God. There are clearly parallels with the Book of Job, and it is a rather dreary read. Nevertheless, there are some fine phrases with an ear for poetry, such as ‘their hearts were sweetly tuned to every note of nature’s music’ and ‘a pure spring of water, which issuing in a crystal rill, tinkled down to a rivulet in the vale’.

  His next literary endeavour was even more ambitious. The Maid of Killarney is also a work of religious didacticism, but it is a more accomplished text. Over seventy pages, it is his most sustained piece of writing. It is episodic and uses some novelistic techniques, such as detailed description, character development and dialogue.

  Two characters, Albion and Mr Mac Fursin, are discussing the beauty of the Irish countryside compared to England and Scotland when they come across a cabin and a fair maid nursing an old dying woman. The men want to know what the old lady has done to prepare for death. It becomes clear that she is a Catholic. They ask her what she thinks of the Pope – can he open heaven’s gate? No, she replies, only Christ can do this. And what of the priest, the men want to know – can he forgive sins? Once again, the woman answers that only Christ can do this. But when they ask her if she wishes to die as a Roman Catholic, she answers yes. They are perplexed. The old lady dies, and Albion attends the wake, where he meets the father of the maid, who he learns is called Flora. Albion is seduced by Flora’s harp playing, and the subsequent chapters are a series of ordeals that prove that Albion is pious enough to marry Flora, and Flora is pious enough to be his bride.

  It is formulaic, and the moral is too obviously forced: that if you read your Bible and follow its instruction, and live a pious life, you will be rewarded with a fair maid. But it is also possible to see Patrick stretching his narrative abilities here, trying to go further than he had before. Had the family stayed in Thornton, perhaps he would have gone on to write a full-length novel. I wonder to what extent Patrick’s writing inspired his children?

  I bear right down some steps to reach Brow Lane on the edge of Clayton, turning right briefly down Brow Lane only as far as a narrow gate on the left opposite the drive to Fox Brow. A path leads down the fields and then along the wall beside the former railway line, before crossing it at a broad stone bridge. I head straight across the rough track beyond to reach a stile in the wall behind Station House. I follow a narrow track to the end then turn right on a path that soon becomes the Great Northern Railway Trail by the site of the former Queensbury Station, linking Bradford, Halifax and Keighley. The station was one of only a few in the country with platforms on each side of a triangular junction and was known as the Queensbury Triangle. The construction of the line began in 1874 and was completed in 1878. Ten men died building it. There is no memorial to mark their deaths. Passenger services were withdrawn in 1955, goods in 1961. It seems like a lot of blood, sweat and toil for such a short-lived service. If it were still in use, the village would be a very different place, another middle-class commuter town.

  On the left is where the railway line went under a tunnel beneath Queensbury, coming out in Holmesfield. At one and a half miles, it is one of the longest tunnels in England. When Sustrans first opened the tunnel to examine it with a view to building a cycle- and footpath, they found the remains of a mighty cannabis farm. The tunnel was full of abandoned growing equipment, hydroponic systems and withered plants, stripped of their psychotropic buds. It was a canny spot, so deep beneath Queensbury that even heat-detecting helicopters couldn’t find it, and the sounds of the petrol generators were muffled by tonnes of earth and rock. Despite talk of reopening the tunnel, it still remains boarded up, and pitch-black anti-vandalism paint festoons the entrance.

  Further along the path is the gravestone of John Dalby. The headstone is sited here for rather obscure reasons. John Dalby worked for the rival Midland Railway for more than fifty years, first as a clerk and later as a canvasser espousing the virtues of his company over the Great Northern. So, its location here is more the product of accident than intent. Dalby was born in Clayton in 1817 (he was the same age as Branwell, who also worked for some time in the railway industry, although his stint was to be brief and disastrous) and was working as a porter when he married a local farmer’s daughter, Ann Greenwood, in 1848 (the year of Emily and Branwell’s deaths). He died three years after her in 1893 and was buried in St John’s Church in Clayton, but some of the gravestones were subsequently dumped here. Most were disposed of, but perhaps John’s lay hidden under the brambles until it was rescued and resurrected. In any case, situated by a leafy glade and moss-covered stones, it is a magical place to sit and rest a while.

  Beyond Ashby House, I head straight across Cockin Lane and along the trail as it continues above High Birk Beck. I come to Headley Lane, with Upper Headley Hall to the left. A grade I listed building from the reign of Elizabeth I, it is now a working farmhouse. Built by the Midgley family, who were Lords of the manor of Headley, it remains remarkably unaltered. The porch is dated 1604. From here, I could continue to follow the Great Northern Trail over Thornton Viaduct, but instead I bear right along an ancient stone-flagged packhorse route that connects Headley Hall to Kipping House, where the Firths lived. This is the route that Patrick would have taken between these two esteemed establishments. Next to Kipping House was Kipping Barn, which was a meeting place for nonconformists. Like Patrick,
John Scholefield Firth was an evangelical, so both men would no doubt have been sympathetic to the nonconformist cause.

  Maria and Patrick became good friends with Elizabeth Firth, John Firth’s only daughter, who was eighteen at the time, just a few years younger than Maria. Elizabeth had just lost her mother, who had been thrown into the road when her gig was overturned. The women would regularly meet for afternoon tea, and Elizabeth, who kept a diary of these meetings, became godmother to Elizabeth Brontë in 1815 and to Anne in 1820, and was also proxy godmother to Charlotte. When Maria died in 1821, the children stayed with the Firths, and Patrick later proposed marriage to Elizabeth. She turned him down, but they remained friends throughout their lives. She records in her diary a picnic with Patrick at local beauty spot Ogden Kirk in 1818 (the year Emily was born), where the Emily Stone is now carved.

  Kipping House is now privately owned. I was invited to view it a few years ago, when the then owner had restored much of the original features. Regency carved-mahogany furniture and authentic wall decorations made it possible to get a sense of how it would have been in the early nineteenth century, with a large, light-filled main room facing south over an extensive garden that rolled down to the beck.

  As I re-enter the village and make my way along Thornton Road up across the small area of parkland known locally as Ebor, I arrive at the Black Horse pub. It’s late afternoon and the sun is way past the yardarm. The Black Horse is the only extant tavern from the time of the Brontës. When the family moved to the village in 1815, there were six drinking establishments. Now there are only three. Public houses are closing at an alarming rate across the country.

  Inside the pub it is dark and cool. I pay for a drink and sit in a corner. I remember my first visit, after my wife Lisa and I had viewed the house we were buying. The pub had been much busier then. I’d got chatting with a bloke at the bar and had bought him a lager. I found out later that he’d just got out of Armley Prison. Done six months for shooting up the village taxi rank after a night out. He’d got a taxi home and then realised that his wallet was missing, so he’d gone back to the rank and argued that it must be in the cab. He was told there was no wallet. Not satisfied with this answer, and feeling cheated, he had gone home, dug up his father’s gun, which was buried in the back garden, returned once more to the taxi rank and shot the place up. Afterwards, sitting on his sofa, reflecting on the incident as he waited for the police to come and arrest him, he had discovered his wallet down the back of the seat. It had been there all along.

  This is a pub where anything can happen. It’s always been welcoming, a friendly place, but not without incident. I’ve often wondered what specific qualities it has that have made it last the test of time, when all the other pubs are long gone? It can’t be the bricks and mortar, which are unremarkable. I look around at the clientele – hard lives and hard livers, faces like unmade beds – and wonder how different they are from the drinkers who came here in the early nineteenth century, the labourers and tradesmen, still in their work clobber. Hewn from the same rock, drawn from the same waters, they know how to enjoy themselves in the here and now. The clothes have changed but not the lines on their faces or their attitudes. Perhaps it is just its location, positioned centrally in the village so that everything else seems to spoke outwards from it. It was here where the village stocks were originally positioned, and Patrick must have seen thieves, drunks, the blasphemers and adulterers, fastened to the boards, receiving their rough punishment. He was a life-long opponent of alcohol.

  I finish my drink. Outside the air is heavy with the pungent stench of heat-treated animal waste from the fat refinery up the hill. I think about the maggot farms that were around in the nineteenth century and played an important part in the local economy here. Perhaps the air that Patrick and his family breathed was just as foul. The local mills and factories, belching out toxic smoke, were newly built. Now they have been bulldozed, blazed or stand derelict. I walk past Kipping School, built by Congregationalists in 1819, and eventually arrive at my destination: the birthplace of the Brontës. It was here that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were all born.

  When I first moved to the village, the birthplace was a museum owned by the crime writer Barbara Whitehead. On sunny days, I used to play chess with her in our garden. After her death, it was sold to a landlord who covered up a lot of the original features and partitioned the building, turning it into flats. Then, in 2013, Mark and Michelle De Luca bought the property, restored a lot of its original features, including the fireplace downstairs, close to where the literary siblings were born. Sitting by the hearth, it is possible to imagine them playing on the rug. It is now a café.

  When I first had the idea for the Brontë Stones project, I approached Mark and asked him if I could put a stone near his property to commemorate Charlotte’s bicentenary. He said, ‘I can do better than that,’ and suggested I apply to Historic England to have a stone mounted in the outside wall of the building. I supervised the cutting of the hole in the wall and the instalment of the four-hundred-kilogram stone, with the help of a friend and my son. I watched Pip carve the letters of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem in situ. It took her weeks to complete. Looking at it now, just a few months after all the work has finished, it already seems like it has always been here. It is part of the fabric of the building, and to remove it would be to destroy the outside wall.

  I look at the stone, tall and narrow, stretching up like a door or a coffin lid. At this time of day, the sun draws deep shadows in the carved letters and an optical illusion makes them stand out as though they are embossed rather than engraved. To the left of the stone is the family plaque, and above the door the date stone. I think about what Patrick said, in a letter written in 1835: ‘I’ve never quite been well since I left Thornton. My happiest days were spent there.’ Sadly, things were about to take a turn for the worse for the family.

  2

  ‘Are You a Pagan?’ – On the Trail of the Brontë Stones

  Out of the blue, I receive an email from a Hungarian woman called Alina. She has booked a hotel, she has booked a flight and she has booked a tour guide to give her a tour of my Brontë Stones trail. Only the tour guide, whose name is Johnny Briggs, is in hospital and can’t now do it. He has contacted her to say that, in any case, it is my project and that I will be glad to do it. I’ve never spoken to Johnny Briggs. I’ve never heard of Johnny Briggs (only the actor of the same name who played Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street), and I don’t really fancy the gig. I try to wriggle out of it.

  ‘But I have booked a flight. I have booked hotel. I cannot cancel. I lose money.’

  ‘The thing is—’

  ‘Please. I will pay you anything. I have to do this.’

  I try and think of an excuse. It isn’t a question of money. The forecast is rain, and after a few months of tours of the various walks and stones, I’m a bit Brontëd out.

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ I say.

  ‘Then you will do it?’

  I agree to meet her at 1 p.m. on Saturday outside the Old Bell Chapel. Three days before, I look at the weather forecast. Saturday is heavy rain, and the Met Office have issued weather warnings. But Sunday is sunny. I contact her and ask her if she can do Sunday instead. She tells me that her flight gets her in to Yorkshire on Friday evening and she flies back Sunday morning. Saturday is the only day. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘but bring waterproofs.’

  When I arrive at the gates, she is already there. She is wearing spray-on jeans, thin canvas pumps and a quilted bolero jacket, the sort you’d wear for a shopping trip in Covent Garden. It’s not yomping gear, and certainly not waterproof. She also has a large, white-leather handbag over one shoulder, with gold chains and gold trimmings. It has an open top.

  ‘Hello, my name is Alina.’ She holds her hand out for me to shake. ‘Are you a pagan?’

  ‘Err … well … erm … a bit … I suppose.’

  ‘I knew it. I knew you were a pagan. I am also pagan. I hate Christia
ns. I hate Muslims. And I hate Romanians.’

  Great start, I think. I change the subject: ‘Have you brought waterproofs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The forecast is heavy rain.’

  She shrugs. We look at the sky. It is bruised with dark-grey clouds that hang low like a threat. ‘Are you walking in them?’ I ask, pointing to her canvas pumps.

  ‘Yes.’

  The walk is fairly easy going, but it does take us over moorland with some boggy patches. ‘I thought we’d start here,’ I say. ‘Patrick brought his family here in eighteen—’

  ‘I know all that,’ she says, interrupting. ‘Let’s go.’

  We cross Thornton Road and squeeze through the snicket that runs between St James’s Church and the rectory. We walk along Market Street past the Baptist Chapel, until we get to the Brontë birthplace. We stand near the steps and stare at the Charlotte Stone:

  The vice of this place clamps you;

  daughter; father

  who will not see thee wed,

  traipsing your cold circles

  between needlework,

  bed, sleep’s double-lock.

  Mother and siblings,

  vile knot under the flagstones, biding.

  But the prose seethes,

  will not let you be, be thus;

  bog-burst of pain, fame, love, unluck.

  True; enough.

  So your still doll-steps

  in the dollshouse parsonage.

  So your writer’s hand

  the hand of a god rending the roof.