Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  I climb up on to Milking Hill past a row of cottages called Jerusalem Mount and cross over a road with St Anne’s Church to the right. I then follow a farm track next to Pasture House to a quarry. On the Ordnance Survey (OS) map, a path seems to cut right through the middle, but there is no sign of it in the flesh. I ask a mechanic who is working beneath a huge Volvo excavator, ‘Does the path come through here, mate?’

  He stops what he is doing and looks over to me briefly: ‘Don’t think so, no.’

  Instead, the path drops down onto a field that leads to Walter Clough Hall, where John Walker made his disastrous decision to adopt Jack Sharp. Very little remains of the original Walter Clough Hall, and what is left is now a working farm, with milch cows, hens and a few rustic mares. Like many modern farms, it also seems to be a store for bricks, stones and scrap metal.

  I then make my way past Marsh Farm, an old building much unchanged from Emily’s time here. Perhaps she would have walked past, as she wandered from Law Hill to Walter Clough Hall, thinking about John Walker and Jack Sharp. Thinking about the cuckoo in the nest that kicks the others out. About foundling infants and acts of revenge. It has also been said that Jack was in love with one of John’s daughters. Was Emily already putting together the story of Wuthering Heights?

  The path takes me down past a high-sided drystone wall, black with industry and oxidisation. If you want to see through Emily’s eyes, you have to airbrush out the pylons and the wind farms, the burnt-out cars and piss-stained mattresses. But what you are left with is not quite a rural idyll. This space would have been functional: quarries, farmed land, coal mines and brick factories.

  When I get to Shibden Hall, the lawn outside the entrance is overgrown with grass and weeds. I think at first that it is closed, but then I see a sign: ‘Filming Gentleman Jack’. This is Sally Wainwright’s new project for the BBC and HBO. Written and directed by her, as was To Walk Invisible, her story of the relationship between the three youngest Brontë sisters and Branwell, the year before. Sally’s new film tells the story of Anne Lister, a landowner, mountaineer and traveller, but best remembered today for her personal life. Her diaries, hidden in the walls of the hall and written in a secret code, contain intimate details about her many lesbian relationships. She has been called the first ‘modern lesbian’, and she was known by the residents of Halifax as ‘Gentleman Jack’, because she dressed in male attire.

  Shibden Hall is also one of the possible sources for Thrushcross Grange (along with Ponden Hall) in Wuthering Heights. It is probably the only stately home Emily encountered that had a garden as vast as the one she describes at Thrushcross. It has also been said that the character of Shirley, in Charlotte Brontë’s second novel of the same name, could be loosely based on Anne Lister, in combination with some of Emily’s traits. Several novelists have created fictional encounters between Emily Brontë and Anne Lister, including Maureen Peters (in Child of Fire) and Glyn Hughes (in Brontë), although in real life they are unlikely to have met. And even if they did, Anne was a snob and would not have associated with a woman beneath her class, although it isn’t easy to say what class the Brontës or, in fact, any clerical family were. Patrick would have been paid little more than a humble labourer, yet he mixed with people of all classes and backgrounds. Most of his parishioners would have been farmers, labourers, artisans and mill workers. But his social circle was comprised of the middle and upper classes. Patrick himself was the eldest of ten, and his father was a farm labourer. There wouldn’t have been much opulence in his childhood. We do know, however, that Miss Patchett did meet Anne Lister, as it is recorded in Anne’s diary.

  The lawn has been left to mimic how it would have been when Anne Lister returned home from overseas travels in 1836. The film set is very impressive, and it is hard to know where Shibden Hall ends and the set begins. It is only when I knock on it with my fist that I can tell if it is stone, wood or MDF. I test out a huge kennel at the back of the hall, which looks like it’s constructed from brick and timber, only to find it rings hollow.

  I ask a volunteer if she knows where the High Sunderland Hall carvings are? She leads me to a yard out back, and I’m surprised to see that what remains of the carvings are heaped in a corner, without even a sign or plaque to explain what they are: a carving of a man’s arse, thrusting obscenely; a date stone; a beastly face; a sinister, impish creature; a naked male figure with no head and prominent cock and balls; part of the outside columns. The volunteer explains that they were acquired by accident, and no one knows where the rest of the carvings went. This is all that is left of High Sunderland Hall. The museum acquired these oddments some time in the sixties, several years after the hall was destroyed.

  It is not hard to imagine Emily’s reaction to these, standing beneath them in their original location, as it is highly probable that she visited High Sunderland Hall. The hall was positioned on Pepper Hill above Hag Lane, overlooking Shibden Dale and peering down on Shibden Hall. It must have been an austere and foreboding presence. But I imagine that while the carvings might have sent a shiver down Emily’s spine, she would have also chuckled at them. Either way, they must surely have been placed there as a provocation, albeit a grotesquely humorous one, and the opposite of a welcome mat, by someone who shared Heathcliff’s view of visitors.

  Some people miss Emily’s black humour when reading Wuthering Heights, but it’s clear to me that she delighted in the macabre, as Lockwood does when first encountering the entrance of Heathcliff’s home: ‘I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front … a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys’.

  The sculptures are surrounded by a basket-weaving shop, a tannery, a stable and a reconstruction of Crispin Inn. The original tavern once stood close to Halifax parish church and was a meeting place for Luddites. I leave the yard and make my way through the gardens, heading north-west, under a tunnel, climbing up to Beacon Hill, where an iron basket on a long pole is the only remaining indication of the millennium celebrations that took place across the country on New Year’s Eve 1999. I imagine the torch burning bright, connecting up with all the other fires in prominent high places across the land, forming a pattern of light that mimicked the constellations above. Lisa and I were living in Otley at the time, and I remember walking up the Chevin, a brooding hill behind our house, to watch the torch there being lit.

  The view opens out to show the whole of Halifax, and I’m reacquainted with Square Chapel, the railway, the library and Dean Clough, as well as Piece Hall, a unique architectural centre for the cloth trade. Dating from 1779, it would have been a thriving statement of wealth and ambition in 1838. Now it is repurposed and contains a theatre, a cinema, a bookshop and a deli, as well as lots of other artisanal shops. The other prominent landmark is Wainhouse Tower. This is perhaps the most recognisable feature over the town. It began as a mill chimney, but a neighbouring mill owner objected, and it was instead finished with a decorated top and a spiral staircase.

  It is really apparent from this angle why the basin of Halifax, surrounded as it is by steep moorland and therefore acting like a bucket to collect the water so necessary for the manufacture of cloth, became such a big player in the trade of handwoven textiles. The chimneys that point to the heavens are now just follies, relics of a former time. But Emily would have sat on this hill and watched the smoke billow out of them. She would have peered through a view that was thick with sooty effluence, which makes it even more remarkable that there is so little of the outside world in Emily’s novel. The north of England was at the cusp of a revolution: an industrial one, yes, but also a cultural and social one. She forgoes this upheaval to focus on the claustrophobia of Wuthering Heights itself.

  As I’ve mentioned, my fascination with the novel Wuthering Heights began forty years ago when Kate Bush’s debut single reached number one in the pop charts in February 1978. I’m not sure I really understood much about it. But it was everywhere that month: on Radio One, on Piccadil
ly Radio (my local radio station), on Top of the Pops. It sounded like nothing else in the charts, a million miles from Abba, Darts and The Bee Gees.

  My mother watched on, perhaps a little worried by her son’s strange, compulsive behaviour. By coincidence, she was reading the novel for the first time. Part of a large Irish Catholic family, she had left school at fifteen to support her siblings, so she never got to complete her education. She was studying an English literature O level at night school. She told me what the story was about. She told me about how, one summer night, after three days of travel on foot, Mr Earnshaw brought a dark-skinned orphan back from the streets of Liverpool to his farm in Yorkshire. She told me about how his daughter Cathy spat at the boy and his son Hindley booted him. And how Mrs Earnshaw had disapproved of the scruffy ragamuffin.

  There is something of the folk tale about Wuthering Heights, and this must have grabbed my young mind. And there was something fitting about hearing this story, as Mr Lockwood does from the housekeeper Nelly Dean. But it wasn’t until my late teens that I read the book for myself and could talk to my mother at length about the characters and the plot. Why had Mr Earnshaw brought the boy back, I wanted to know. It didn’t make sense. My mother couldn’t tell me. Instead, she just shrugged.

  I am thinking about this as I climb into bed that night. I redo the walk in my mind. When Daniel Defoe visited Halifax in the early eighteenth century, he saw a pre-industrial town engaged in the business of the clothing trade, confined to the terraced cottages that were stacked up together along every street and lane. He found in every house ‘a tenter, and almost on every tenter a piece of cloth, or kersie, or shalloon!’ Every domestic dwelling was also a ‘manufactory or work-house’, with a river running through each one. He found a town surrounded by hills that were full of springs and coal pits, just as Emily would have done. But by 1838, the landscape would have also contained the behemoths of a new form of industry.

  Historians are split about whether this social upheaval was to the benefit or detriment of the working people. But John Fielden writes in his 1836 pamphlet about the curse of the factory system that the factory labourer ages prematurely. And political economists were already blaming ‘foreign competition’ for the poor treatment of workers, a long time before Brexit. Richard Oastler, in his evidence presented to the House of Commons Committee on Child Labour in 1832, talked about how children worked thirteen hours a day or more. He then quoted a West Indian slave master: ‘Well, I have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of black slaves, but we never, in the West Indies, thought it was possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work twelve and a half hours a day.’

  I close my eyes and see the landscape in my mind. The moors, the forests, the terraced houses and factories, and, above all, the spires and chimneys, reaching up above the people, stretching to the heavens. I was born at the other end of the Industrial Revolution, at the cusp of post-industry. I grew up on the edge of an industrial estate. My bedroom, a small box room, was the coldest in the house and was cast in a perpetual shadow from the mill chimney across the road. Courtaulds was at one time the world’s leading man-made-fibre production company, employing thousands of people. I used to sit on my bed, staring out of the window, watching workers in the morning pouring into the main entrance, then, later on in the evening, pouring out, making their way to the pub up the road or catching a bus home.

  I used to stare at that chimney. It was so tall that I couldn’t see its top from my window – it loomed over me like an exclamation mark, daring me to climb it. One day, when I was nine or ten years old, Andy Garret and I dared each other. We’d been on the roof of the mill many times, pretending to kick our ball up there by accident, so that we had an excuse in case we were caught. We’d climbed over the roofs of all the surrounding factories, too: Petersgate Paper Works, Truman Steel, and so on. But the chimney was a different kind of challenge. We shinnied up the drainpipe at the side of the factory and made our way across the slate roof towards the base of the chimney, avoiding glass sky lights. I thought at some point that Andy would turn around, grin at me and say, ‘Only joking.’ But he didn’t.

  We got to the chimney. The metal ladder that went all the way to the top didn’t start at the bottom, but about seven or eight feet up. Andy went first. He stood on my shoulders and had to stretch as far as he could to reach the first rung. Somehow, he managed to pull himself up. Then he dangled down with his legs wrapped around the lowest rung while I jumped and jumped until his hand clasped mine. There was no going back now.

  Andy took the lead, and when he got to the top, he shouted for me to hurry up. I was about halfway. I remember looking over to my mum and dad’s house. I could just about make out that the television was on in the front room. It was Saturday afternoon, and my dad had returned from the pub and was now watching the football results. My mum was in the kitchen peeling potatoes, ready to make chips for tea. How small they looked. I felt like a god. Then I looked down, and the ladder became a length of elastic. It telescoped, and I clung onto the rungs for my life. I waited for the dizziness to fade away. Then I climbed to the top, where Andy was waiting, and I looked over the city of Salford. I could see everything. I could see in every direction. I could see the red-bricked houses and factories. I could see the River Irwell snake its way along. And in the distance I could see Winter Hill, at the edge of the Pennines that separate Lancashire from Yorkshire, not knowing that one day I would move permanently to the other side of this ridge.

  This cotton factory was where my Grandma Fanny worked as a girl. She told me that her and her mates had lured apprentice lads into the storeroom where the bobbins were kept. They’d strip the lads, put an empty milk bottle over their cocks and show them a bit of tit until they rose to the occasion and the bottle got stuck.

  The mill was at the centre of my part of Salford, providing work and camaraderie for many, but by 1987 it had closed down, the work outsourced overseas. And in 1989, Fred Dibnah, a local steeplejack who drove around in a steam engine and was often on the television, came along and knocked the chimney down. The site was flattened.

  That night, I dream about chimneys and factories, villainous orphans and open moorland. In my head, it’s all jumbled up. The next day, I return to Law Hill. I want to ask whoever lives there if I can have a look round. It’s a massive imposition, and I’ve been putting it off, but it’s important for me to be able to see the interior. It seems significant somehow to be in the same room where Emily slept and dreamt about errant orphans. But when I pull up outside, I have a change of heart. I can’t just knock on someone’s door out of the blue. It’s not what you do. I hang around for a bit, unable to decide where to go next.

  Law Hill is one of a number of origin myths that all stake a claim to being the inspiration for Emily’s novel. Another is that of the story of Hugh Brunty, Emily’s grandfather. Hugh’s grandfather had a farm by the banks of the Boyne. He was a cattle dealer, and on one of his voyages he returned with a strange child: a dark, dirty, very young boy. The family adopted him and called him ‘Welsh’ because of his gypsy complexion. The boy grew in his adopted father’s favours, pushing out his birth children to the point where he took over the business. Juliet Barker in her book about the Brontës offers the story of Rob Roy, written by Walter Scott, a favourite author of the siblings, as another source. And there are precedents in the sisters’ own juvenilia and in Branwell’s unfinished novel.

  I sit in my car and stare at the stark exterior of Law Hill. Its stout walls are surrounded by a wounded sky. I put the key in the ignition, start the engine and drive home. Whatever secrets lie in the bricks and mortar of the building will remain there. I wonder if the family who now live under its roof ever dream about Emily.

  Post Scriptum

  I returned to Law Hill almost a year later, and finally got up the courage to knock on the door and ask if it would be OK to look around. The owner of the house, Nicky, gave me a warm we
lcome and was happy to show me around. She lives there with her husband, and although her children have flown the nest, they were all visiting when I arrived.

  Her house contains many of the original features that Emily would have seen, such as the fireplaces and windows, and Regency carvings and coving. She showed me the view Emily would have enjoyed from her bedroom window, with Pepper Hill in the far distance, once home to High Sunderland Hall. The view then would have been fairly bleak, with just a farm or two, and the rest open fields and moorland. Pepper Hill would have dominated the northern horizon with little else to break up the scene. At 303 metres above sea level, it is the highest point in the area. Siddal Top, to the south, is 247 metres. And although the view now is dominated by new-build housing, it wasn’t difficult to get the sense of why the hall would have fed so strongly into Emily’s imagination.

  It was a beautiful, late summer’s afternoon, but Nicky stressed how austere and desolate the place can be in midwinter, when Emily perversely wrote her ‘happy’ poem. The school where Emily taught is next door and is also now a private residence. But I didn’t knock. I thought I’d pushed my luck far enough.

  4

  Emily’s Boots – Walking Emily’s Moors