Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  I’m trying to picture all this as I wait for poet and playwright Wendy Pratt, who was born and bred in Scarborough but now lives in Filey, down the road. She has written five books of poetry. She has also just completed a play about Anne’s last days. She wants to show me around Anne’s Scarborough and take me to the key places. We meet in Greensmiths & Thackwrays, which is now a coffee shop but was once a ‘colonial outfitters’, as the writing above the window still attests.

  Wendy introduces herself. She is wearing a bright-yellow cardigan and carries a capacious satchel. We sit and chat before agreeing on our route. The forecast of light cloud and gentle breeze has so far held up, but as we walk down St Nicholas Street to the Grand Hotel the air turns icy. We’re passing my van, so I nip in and get a warmer coat.

  ‘Will you be warm enough?’ I ask her.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I’m a proper Yorkshire lass.’

  I wonder if Anne and Charlotte felt the same way about the breeze.

  We dodge kittiwake shit, which falls from the windowsills above us. Kittiwakes are protected seabirds, and they have made a welcome home in the nooks and crannies of Scarborough’s buildings. We stand underneath the blue plaques on the wall of the hotel, the highest of which is to mark Anne Brontë’s stay here, and her death. Juliet Barker talks about how, on the Saturday, Anne went to the bathhouse nearby but collapsed at the garden gate on the way back. I want to know where this was.

  ‘I think the bathhouse must have been there.’ Wendy points to the buildings opposite the Grand Hotel, which are now hotels and town houses, with a Masonic lodge in the middle. She shows me a sketch from Theakston’s Guide to Scarborough from 1841. It is of Travis’s Baths. The baths were made of wood and marble and were adapted for either ‘plunging, sitting, or the recumbent position’. Every tide, the baths were supplied with pure sea water. There were four other bathhouses in addition to Travis’s.

  ‘The garden gate must have been here,’ says Wendy, pointing to the communal garden that still stands between these buildings and the hotel. It is still gated, perhaps even with the same gate, and I imagine Anne clinging on to it, using it to pull herself upright again with arms ‘no thicker than a little child’s’, as Charlotte described them in a letter to Ellen when she wrote to warn her of Anne’s decline. She was carried indoors by the hired servant, Jane Jefferson.

  ‘Didn’t she take a donkey-cart ride in the afternoon?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, she took the reins herself. She didn’t like the cruel way the boy was treating the animal.’

  Anne always stood up to the abuse of animals. It’s in her poems and her novels. Barker recounts how Ellen Nussey came to meet Anne at the point that she was giving the boy a lecture, although the conversation was not recorded, so we can only guess in what way she scolded him. There’s a drawing of these cart rides in the archives of Scarborough Library, but most of the carts are being pulled by horses not donkeys.

  As we talk, we are passed by people dressed as cartoon characters: a Hulk, a Thor and a Black Widow. There has been a comic convention, and it must have just finished. To our left is Spa Bridge, which Anne walked across with Charlotte and Ellen, and would then have been a toll bridge. A day ticket was one shilling. Below is the sandy beach where Anne strolled.

  The reason Anne gave for wanting to visit Scarborough again was that she hoped the sea air, thought to be a cure for TB, would revive her. She wrote to Ellen that ‘the doctor says that a change of air or removal to a better climate would hardly ever fail of success in consumptive cases’.

  But Wendy thinks that the real reason for her visit was very different: ‘She knew she was dying. She was thinking about her father, and what he’d been through.’

  ‘Yeah, you think about the close succession of those deaths and how he must have felt.’

  However, Ann Dinsdale and other Brontë experts I have spoken to feel strongly that Anne didn’t know she was dying and was holding out for a miracle cure. Maybe she was hedging her bets. In the same letter to Ellen, she also wrote, ‘I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect.’ Scarborough perhaps held both possibilities for Anne: potential remedy and final resting place.

  The three women had stayed in York on the way to Scarborough, at the George Hotel in Coney Street, the site of which is now a Waterstones bookshop. We know from Ellen’s detailed record of the journey that they bought bonnets and ribbons there so that they could look their best in Scarborough. For me, this is evidence that can be used to bolster either case. Would she have wasted money on expensive garments if she knew she was dying? But if she knew she was dying, why would she care about money?

  We can see St Mary’s Church from where we are standing. This was Anne’s final destination, and we are heading in that direction. In Anne’s day, Scarborough was an up-and-coming spa town of great prestige. Like Bath, people came here to rest and restore their health. These days, Scarborough is down on its luck, with one of the highest mortality rates from opioid overdoses in the country. On the seafront, between the candied confectioneries, rainbow slush and pink candyfloss, are shops selling Day-Glo bongs, skunkweed grinding machines and poppers disguised as ‘room odorisers’. There’s an edge to the town, and it is no longer the holiday destination of the middle classes. It is April, outside of the holiday season, and there isn’t much work for the locals, unless you work at the McCain’s food factory up the road or at the local hospital. The bars are already starting to fill with hardened drinkers.

  Wendy explains the reason for this: ‘We just don’t get the sort of money coming into the town that we did, so it contributes to the poverty in a way. People who are lost and broken, people who are living in poverty often come to live in Scarborough because of nostalgic memories from the good times they’ve had on holidays here, which means we tend to get a higher number of impoverished people coming to the area and no jobs to support them if they are able to work. The town then revolves around squeezing money out of these impoverished people by offering many opportunities to gamble. So many betting shops.’

  ‘And pubs selling cheap alcohol?’

  ‘Yeah. We are basically offering them the dream that will never come true, and then anaesthetising them when they realise their life is just endless trauma. There’s a reason the town is the way it is.’

  We stand outside the Grand Hotel, reflecting on this contrast. I stayed here a few years ago, when I was invited to run a workshop for the National Student Drama Festival. It was more like an old people’s home than a holiday resort. I came back late one night and rang for room service, but the only thing they could offer me was a cream-cheese sandwich on milk-loaf bread. Going down for breakfast the next day, it was clear that the menu had been devised to be denture friendly. Porridge and mashed fruit for breakfast, soup and stew for lunch, and a dinner of shepherd’s pie. You could eat anything you wanted as long as it was pre-digested and didn’t require chewing. It seems as though people still come to the town to see out their last days, albeit with less hope of a remedy for their ailments.

  One day, I took the lift to the top floor, even though there was a sign saying that it was out of bounds. There was mould growing over the flock wallpaper and various receptacles were laid out on the mildewed carpet to capture fallen drops of rainwater as it leaked through the roof. There was even a plant growing out of a crack in one of the walls. The management, unable to afford the upkeep, and not needing the extra rooms, had abandoned it to the elements.

  Barker writes that in the evening Anne sat and watched ‘a particularly splendid sunset’, but Wendy points out that this wouldn’t have been possible as the view was over the east, over the sea, not the west. It’s a minor quibble in what is an otherwise assiduously researched tome.

  We walk up Vernon Road to where Christ Church used to stand, the church where Anne’s funeral took place, attended by only Charlotte, Ellen and Charlotte’s friend Margaret Wooler, who had come to offer her support.
She had taught Anne at Roe Head School. Where the church used to be is now a fish restaurant called Wackers.

  ‘Everyone worked at Wackers when I was growing up. You got a Saturday job,’ Wendy says.

  ‘It doesn’t sound very appetising. When was the church knocked down?’

  ‘I think in 1979. My mum remembers it.’

  We look at old photos of the church. It was a grand building with a four-cornered tower and Gothic windows. During Anne’s time here, the church would have stood apart from any other buildings, surrounded by trees.

  ‘Why did they knock it down?’

  ‘To build Wackers.’

  We walk up Westborough towards the train station. It’s a small terminus with five platforms and three rails.

  ‘At one point we had a train to Whitby, but they took it away.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘We are historically unlistened to in the town, over everything. The residents are always put second to the need to keep tourist numbers up and to save money for tourism. Apparently, the line was very steep and became very slippery in the frequent sea frets, leading to trains stalling a lot, which caused massive backlogs and delays, so they closed it, despite Scarborough residents petitioning against the closure.’

  The skeleton of the station is mostly unchanged. Its ribs are wrought iron, painted austere black.

  ‘They say you are thirty-seven miles from civilisation if you live in Scarborough,’ Wendy says.

  ‘And that’s the distance to York?’

  ‘It’s on a limb.’

  We look at the map in front of us, of Scarborough and the surrounding coastland. Scarborough sticks out like an epidermal cyst or a swollen knuckle. We walk through the station. It’s a generic space with a Pumpkin café, a chain that specialises in train stations and hospitals: places where journeys start and end. We pass a young mother with her son. She drinks from a foamy paper cup as he forks huge pieces of chocolate cake into his mouth. I don’t think dandelion coffee will be on the menu, a beverage that the three women purchased shortly after leaving the train. I wonder why dandelion coffee, a coffee substitute made from roasting the root and not real coffee. Perhaps they were attracted to the novelty of it, or to its comparative cheapness?

  Outside we are confronted by the Stephen Joseph Theatre, the first theatre in the round in Britain and home to the plays of Alan Ayckbourn. Its red-and-white curved corner and jutting brick sections are still an impressive example of art-deco design, but it wasn’t built as a theatre. Wendy explains: ‘The actual first theatre in the round wasn’t at the SJT as it is now. The original was in the basement of the library on Vernon Road, next to where Christ Church was. This was originally an Odeon cinema.’

  The sign above the door tells us that the latest show is called Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis. I once drove the actor Richard Wilson here, famous for portraying grumpy pensioner Victor Meldrew, with his catchphrase ‘I don’t believe it!’ We were late, and I’d forgotten to tell him that the seatbelt was faulty. As I pulled up, he was exasperated to learn that he was belted to the seat and couldn’t get out. I had to pull the belt loose so he could slip underneath it. Only he got caught up in the loose webbing. As he pulled and yanked the black strap, becoming more entangled, he went red in the face. He was very close to using his catchphrase.

  ‘It would be great if my play was produced here,’ Wendy says.

  ‘Yeah, that would be cool. Aren’t they doing a scene study of it soon?’

  ‘I’m really excited.’

  ‘You should be. It’s a really good play.’

  It tells the story of Anne’s last days and is structured around three interwoven monologues: Anne’s, Charlotte’s and Ellen’s. It’s funny in places, with Ellen providing most of the comedy, but ultimately it is a heartrending tale.

  We walk down Westborough and turn up St Thomas Street towards Castle Road. The terraced houses that line Castle Road are early Victorian. Anne’s coffin would have been carried along here on a cart.

  ‘Whenever I walk up this part of town, I feel like I’m following Anne’s wake. Especially since working on the play, where I was immersing myself completely in this part of her life and imagining it over and over. It’s like I can map out, in my head, what was and wasn’t there, what the view was like, what the sounds must have been like, what the smells must have been like, to the point that this part of the town is overlaid with Anne’s death.’

  ‘There’s a different feel to the town here, isn’t there?’

  ‘It’s almost immediately quieter, the hustle and bustle of modern Scarborough drops away. The sounds are muffled. It feels different. It’s reflective.’

  We walk past Wilson’s Mariners Home, a charity that once provided almshouses for ‘poor aged persons of good character being ship owners, shipmates’ and other nautical folk. Built in 1836, it would have been a comparatively new building. It’s an impressive design. The window surrounds are elaborately carved. The gulls screech above us. The route to Anne’s grave is well signposted.

  ‘It’s a big draw for tourism,’ Wendy says.

  As we approach St Mary’s, we see a group of Japanese tourists coming down the hill. I assume they have been to see Anne’s grave, as it’s hard to believe they have come all this way just to sample the £2-a-pint lager bars. The church stands above the town and overlooks South Bay. The remains of the earlier chapel are still within its grounds, giving the place an eerie feel.

  ‘Do you think Scarborough fully capitalises on the Anne Brontë link?’

  ‘We don’t embrace this part of our story here, and it’s always something of a surprise when you see the constant stream of tourists who may well have deliberately come to Scarborough for the specific purpose of visiting Anne’s grave. We could have a link to the parsonage. We could easily have a small museum to show the Scarborough of Anne’s time here on the east coast.’

  We reach the grave. There isn’t much left of the original headstone. The salt in the sea air eats into the soft sandstone, and many of the monuments are pockmarked or whittled away by the weather. In 2011, the Brontë Society placed a monument at the foot of the grave, recording the original inscription, which apparently contained five errors. It was refaced three years later when Charlotte returned and discovered the mistakes. And yet the most egregious error – the inscription gave her age as twenty-eight when in fact she was twenty-nine – was not corrected. It isn’t recorded anywhere what the others were.

  ‘You’ve written poems about both Sylvia Plath’s grave [in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire] and Anne Brontë’s. Sylvia Plath’s grave is full of pens and poems, little notes and letters that obsessive fans have left. But you don’t get that here. Why is that? They were both poets and novelists. They both died tragically young.’

  ‘It’s partly because of the location. You have to deliberately set out to come to Scarborough – it’s not on the road or a short diversion away from anywhere else. But I also think that there is a bit of a cult around Sylvia’s death. Suicide and mental health and the relationship problems – these are all things that people can relate to. They feel a deep sense of connection with Sylvia and want to give these little votive offerings to her to say thank you. Also, she died within living memory for a lot of people – she’s still fresh, we can see pictures of her, we know her life in miniscule detail. Anne died a long time ago, and to be fair she is the lesser known Brontë, unfairly seen as quite pious and prim. Her books are not tearing themselves inside out with passion. She is not romanticised in the same way that Charlotte and Emily have been. Anne seems boring, difficult to connect to, so perhaps the votives, that connection between reader, pilgrim, writer, isn’t quite as strong here. What you do get is people quietly tending her grave. There are people in Scarborough who visit every day, who make sure she is remembered as a part of our town story, our heritage.’

  I notice that the daffodils at the foot of the grave are blooming. The bench we are sitting on is dedicated to a l
ost loved one.

  ‘In memory of, and in loving memory of, that’s a Victorian tradition,’ I say. ‘It didn’t exist before. So, you can date headstones by that.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I had to research it for my last book.’

  We stare out at the sea and listen to the gulls scream.

  ‘She was five years with the Robinsons, wasn’t she?’ I say. ‘And this was their holiday home.’

  ‘Yeah, and she bloody loved it here.’

  ‘It was also her most sustained period of employment.’

  ‘Yeah, and I wonder with Anne, whether being apart from that family, and away from the claustrophobic parsonage, away from the dictated roles of the family, if that was something she was seeking. You know, it was a little house, crammed with people, tiny rooms and everyone on top of each other, all that life, all that death, all that creativity. I wonder whether coming here, all this space, a different sort of wildness to the moors she’d left behind, but something familiar too – distance, big skies, a sense of freedom. It was just so entirely different. It must have had a profound effect on her.’

  ‘She would have written some of both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall while she was here.’

  ‘I think there’s mention of this in one of her diary pages.’

  We talk about a poem Wendy has written about Scarborough that describes ‘hat stealing wind’. It’s a very exposed peninsula. There’s also a good line about the funicular railway.