Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  ‘I like the word “funicular”,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. I think in Latin it means something like rope.’

  ‘So, the idea is a vertical method of being pulled up or down?’

  ‘I think so. It comes up in pub quizzes round here all the time. In the summer, when you pass the tramway you always overhear someone saying, “You do know it’s called funicular, don’t you?” It’s just one of those things. Everyone thinks of it as a unique piece of knowledge.’

  ‘In the poem, you mention the suicides over Valley Bridge. What’s been done about that?’

  ‘They’ve put up these spiked railings that curve round. You can’t climb over them. It used to be a very regular occurrence, to have people jump there. People still do, determined people. My dad was a bus driver, and he was driving under the bridge one day. Someone dropped a guy off it, right in front of him. At first, he thought it was a person. But it was a Guy Fawkes effigy.’

  ‘Well, we all did it,’ I joke.

  ‘I never did it.’

  ‘Maybe it was just me. The poem mentions a statue of Richard III.’

  ‘Richard III was the last king to occupy the castle. They poked a cannon through the church tower and fired at the castle.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘This was much later. During the Civil War. The bombardment was so intense it destroyed half the building.’

  We look at the church tower and imagine the cannons firing up and over to the castle, which stands above us on a massive promontory of rock that rises above the sea. It’s not hard to see why it was a favoured location for a fortress.

  ‘There was a statue outside the Richard III restaurant. On the foreshore, a very old statue. But it got stolen,’ Wendy says.

  ‘Isn’t that a difficult thing to do? I mean, didn’t anyone notice?’

  ‘That’s Scarborough. At the spa there used to be a massive golden lion’s head sculpture, where the spa waters themselves would come out of the lion’s mouth, and someone pinched that as well.’

  ‘And that’s what the empty cage in the poem refers to then? Where the statue of Richard III was?’

  ‘We keep thinking in Scarborough that we’ve got something. Like we own our own history, but history in seaside towns is transient, it gets whisked away, it gets replaced with something supposedly better. Like the Futurist Theatre, which has just been demolished to build a roller coaster. It was a beautiful building, a hugely historical building, and now it’s gone. It’s difficult to have an identity when the identity you think you have is changed so easily. We don’t have an identity here. We have nostalgia. We need to write new stories, and we need to honour our old stories.’

  She explains that she has just finished writing a poem that deals with Anne Brontë in a more direct way, a tribute to her time here in Scarborough. She fishes into her bag and pulls out a piece of paper: ‘You can have it if you like.’ I thank her and tell her I will read it later. I fold it up and put it in my coat pocket.

  We head back into town to meet Wendy’s husband Chris for a drink. Just at the bottom of the slope below Anne’s grave Wendy points to a sign: ‘Paradise’. It’s the name of the street. Next to it is a brick wall with a gap in it. We look through the gap and see the whole of the bay, and it’s beautiful. Wendy points out that Anne’s grave is on Paradise Hill.

  We pass a pub with a Shirley Bassey tribute act and a sign outside saying ‘Dogs Welcome. Sorry, No Children’. It’s the day of the Grand National, and all the pubs are packed with punters. We start at the Merchant, opposite the Golden Last, a notorious drinking hole that is the headquarters to the Scarborough branch of the English Defence League and known locally as the Stabbers’ Arms. Outside there are six St George flags and two Loyalist flags flapping in the breeze. The landlord was arrested a few years ago on suspicion of supporting a banned paramilitary organisation. The white-and-black exterior is badly in need of a lick of paint. I want to go inside to get a better look, but I’m told this would not be wise.

  We have a few drinks in the Merchant, then we move on to the Turks Head followed by the Waterhouse. Huge plasma screens show the race, and people stand and watch, cheering on the horses. A horse called Up For Review falls at the first hurdle. It writhes in pain. It is taken away and shot. As I watch, I think about what Anne would make of it. She wouldn’t be a fan. We go to another bar with men dressed as nuns. We encounter those drinking their winnings and others who are sinking that losing feeling with vodka shots.

  We end up in the Sub-Aqua Club. We are surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of wreck salvage: old bells, brass lamps and ship wheels. We’re all a bit worse for wear. The night gets ragged round the edges. I’m standing at the bar, surrounded by Sub-Aqua Club members doing a pub quiz. There are wreck divers, underwater photographers and marine biologists. I think the drink in front of me is mine. The quizmaster says, ‘Question three: what does the word “funicular” mean?’ I smile. I look around for Wendy and Chris, but they’ve gone. I can’t remember saying goodbye to them. I see that a group of women have kidnapped my dog, and I go over to rescue him.

  I’m woken early the next morning by the shrieking gulls and crashing waves. Wolfie is still fast asleep. My van is parked close to the coast beneath a sign that says ‘no campervans to be parked here over night’. I get up, make some breakfast and brew a big mug of tea. I sit by the sea, watching the sun rise through the fret and the tide go out, wave by wave. I think about what Wendy said, about Anne not being able to see the sunset from her window. Did she instead sit and watch it rise over the waves?

  Once the tide has subsided and the remnants of tea have gone cold, I take Wolfie onto the beach. It’s more or less deserted, just two women clad in neoprene wet suits, attempting a bit of wild swimming. I think about the ‘solitary ramble’ Agnes takes in Agnes Grey, breathing in the ‘freshness of the air’. It is here, towards the end of the book, that Agnes and Weston are reunited. Weston is a country parson who Agnes falls in love with, but she believes he loves someone else. In the end, he and Agnes marry.

  There’s a sci-fi conference at the Spa, and people dressed as their favourite characters are parking up and congregating in the café. They seem a slightly older audience to the comic convention the day before. A Spock lookalike tumbles out of a Mitsubishi Mirage. A Darth Vader fiddles with his mask as he attempts to draw smoke from his vaping machine. A Princess Leia fastens her cinnamon-bun hairstyle with clips, a lightsaber lies to the side of her steaming cappuccino. The sea fret covers everything like a milky shroud.

  I walk back into town, dodging the puddles of last night’s vomit. I climb up by the funicular tram to the Royal Hotel where a statue of Queen Victoria overlooks the bay. She would have still been a young queen in Anne’s day. Born just eight months before Anne, they were more or less the same age. Outside the Grand Hotel a coach pulls up, and I watch as hotel staff help the elderly clients onto the coach. Some shuffle, others hobble using sticks and Zimmer frames – mostly old women, but a few old men too. A disfigured pigeon pecks at a squished chip.

  I wander around town. Above the bookies and the pawn shops, with signs outside saying ‘£10 per gram of gold’, there are still remnants of Victorian grandeur: splendid carved edifices and high bay windows. But the general atmosphere is heavy. As I walk up Castle Road again, towards Anne’s grave, I think, it’s not just the sea fret that makes this place oppressive; it’s more pervasive than that. It goes beyond the weather. It comes from the bricks and the concrete. It spills out onto the street from the £2-a-pint lager bars. It comes dressed in a J.D. Sports tracksuit, coughing up phlegm.

  I want to take in Anne’s grave without the tourists and the Brontë fans. I just want a moment alone with her. But when I get there the bells of St Mary’s are pealing. It’s only nine in the morning, but the clanging cacophony is deafening. I imagine they are no comfort to those sleeping off a hangover.

  Last night, I walked from the more popular South Bay to the North Bay. There isn’
t much between the two bays, and not much at North Bay when you arrive – just one bar and one shop. Boy racers were congregating in souped-up coupés, their one-litre cars modified with body kits and noisy exhausts, imitation alloy wheels, spoilers, and bonnet scoops. They bounced from the bass coming from the woofers taking up their entire boots. Girls in their teens gathered at street corners sipping from brightly coloured bottles of alcoholic pop.

  Scarborough now is no different to so many English towns: inward looking, dejected, unsure of its own identity. The town still wears the edifices of a once opulent and prosperous society, but it is crumbling into the ocean, turning into sand and dust, leaving a lurid scene of poverty and desperation. Plastic bottles and plastic bags are all that will remain of us. We are all like the gulls on high sills, huddled up against the oncoming storm.

  I sit on the bench staring at Anne’s grave, but there is no peace for the dead. I climb up to the castle where the air is clean. The branches of the trees are alive with green buds. I put my ear to a trunk and listen to the sap rise. It’s a great vantage point, and looking back at the town all the rude features that were brought into close range yesterday have now shrunken back, and the effect, along with the sea fret that still clings to the edges of buildings and softens them, is to make Scarborough look beautiful. Scarborough is beautiful. And I can feel for the first time that elevation of spirit that Anne must have felt as she stood here, looking over the bay at the grey seals and lobster pots. White-washed walls and terracotta roofs. The sun rising over golden sands and silver waves. The little houses clustered together, kittiwakes cutting into a gusty breeze.

  I sit at the edge of the promontory and feel in my coat pocket for Wendy’s poem ‘For Anne, a Stone’s Throw from Paradise’. I take it out and begin to read:

  At Paradise I saw the way

  the treadle-footed tourists came,

  how they’d worn the words to nothing

  on the faces of the other stones. Yet still,

  no votive offerings; no pens, no letters

  for this girl of sea frets and horizons.

  We’ve both been here before.

  Sometimes we up and leave,

  I drag you with me; bones and silk

  and boots, and walk you back to Wood’s.

  I leave you underneath your plaque

  and you fall down and down again

  among the OAPs and cigarettes.

  I puppet you along your death, add details

  and embellishments. But it can’t last.

  You’re mute; a doll thing, thin as air.

  We breathe your mizzle-ghost and pray

  to know you. The obsession’s there,

  we search for likenesses in photographs

  and diagnose your mental health, we scour

  the Antiques Roadshow for a locket of your hair.

  On Castle Road I walk your coffin path

  to sit beside the other beloveds, to see you fed

  into the ground. And I’m surprised each time:

  you’re peaceful here, above the sounds

  of paradise: the seagulls, kittiwakes,

  the penny slots and Kiss-Me-Quicks.

  On the Monday morning, not physically capable of descending the stairs herself, Ellen carried Anne in her arms to the room downstairs. She had a breakfast of boiled milk. She died at about 2 p.m. on 28 May 1849. Shortly after, dinner was announced. The last words she said were, ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage.’ A week later, Charlotte wrote to William Smith Williams, her literary adviser, ‘Papa has now me only – the weakest, puniest, least promising of his six children. Consumption has taken the whole five.’

  12

  Patrick’s Pistols – Walking Home

  Walking the Invisible is, in some ways, about recording an absence. It’s about what happens when you attempt to walk in the footsteps of literary figures. To strike the same earth, to trudge the same mud. Except it isn’t the same earth, or the same mud. The earth that the Brontës walked has eroded. The mud has been washed away. Or else, earth has accumulated, built up from rain silt and falling vegetation, so that it isn’t possible to walk exactly in their wake, only above or beneath.

  I’m at Oakwell Hall, the start of the Brontë Way, but I’m not joined by other writers today, just a dog. It’s the last day of May, and although the sky is blotched with inky clouds, the forecast is favourable. I walk round the park first to get a feel for the place. Cow parsley blooms in the meadows, and hawthorn trees are frothy with white blossom. The woods are spiced with the smell of wild garlic. It’s spring half-term, and the park is full of families with prams and toddlers on leashes. The circular walk around the park is about two miles. I encounter lots of dog walkers with French bulldogs and other toy dogs that seem to be the current fashion. The French bulldog, through no fault of its own, has permanent respiratory problems. Bred to be a freak. Bred to have all its strength, speed and agility taken away from it.

  I leave Wolfie, a healthy mongrel with no congenital problems, outside the hall while I enter to have a look around. The hall was built in 1583 for John Batt. The coat of arms that decorates the wall contains four bats, and I can only think this is a reference to the surname. The hall itself has been well preserved. The inside is oak panelled, and the great parlour is painted using a technique called ‘scumbling’. It gives a three-dimensional effect. When Charlotte Brontë visited, she said the walls were ‘a delicate pinky white’. By then it had become a girls’ school run by the Cockill family.

  The hall was to inspire her creation of Fieldhead in her second novel, Shirley. And much of the descriptions of Fieldhead match those of Oakwell: ‘the old latticed windows, the stone porch, the walls, the roof, the chimney-stacks, were rich in crayon touches and sepia light and shades’. A silent film of Shirley was made here in 1921, but no copies of it have ever been found. The house has been a film location several times since. It was used for the ‘Henry’s Wives’ episode of the TV series Horrible Histories and as the location for Wuthering Heights in the 2009 ITV adaptation of the book starring Charlotte Riley as Cathy and Tom Hardy as Heathcliff. Most recently, it was used as a set in the BBC’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, adapted from Susanna Clarke’s debut novel.

  When Charlotte wrote Shirley, the name Shirley was most associated with male characters, and the novelty of calling a female character by that name is lost on a modern audience. Now, Shirley is most associated with female characters but only because of the popularity of Charlotte’s novel. The only male Shirley in my living memory is Shirley Crabtree, a professional wrestler from Halifax, better known as Big Daddy. Perhaps he entered the profession of wrestling precisely because he was named Shirley. In fact, the idea of a man being called Shirley was made into a famous joke in the 1980 satirical film Airplane! Robert Hays, playing pilot Ted Striker, turns to Leslie Nielsen, who is playing Dr Rumack, and says, ‘Surely you cannot be serious?’ To which Dr Rumack replies, ‘I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.’

  I leave the main entrance and turn left and then immediately right down a dirt track by the side of fields. I pass a field of shire horses. At one time bred for dragging ploughs or barges by the side of the canals, or for pulling carts and brewer’s drays along roads, they are no longer working animals and have been repurposed as pets. Birstall is cloth and coal country – a mining town and a manufacturing town. The forebears of these horses would have pulled carts of coal and cloth. There’s a Shetland pony in the field as well, a breed chosen for pit work, due to its reduced size. They are low set, heavy-bodied beasts. In shaft mines, pit ponies were stabled underground, only seeing the light of day on colliery holidays.

  Carrion crows pace and turn like funeral directors with their hands behind their backs, before stabbing the earth for worms. The path leads me onto the main road, and I make a slight diversion, turning left to go to St Peter’s Church, a heavily turreted structure with quite a low, squat clock tower. The church is closed. Two dog-headed gargoyles guard
the entrance. This is where Joseph Priestley is buried, the man who discovered oxygen. It is also where Charlotte’s closest friend Ellen Nussey is buried, and Miss Wooler, who first taught and then employed Charlotte at nearby Roe Head School. The church is fictionalised as Briarfield Church in Shirley.

  I head back the way I came, turning up Monk Ings towards Friary Court through a modern housing estate. I follow a gravel path past the back of some houses. The posters in the window all say ‘Vote Labour’, with a photo of Tracy Brabin, the local labour MP. Best known as a television actor, she played the part of Tricia Armstrong for three years in Coronation Street. It was a colourful three years that included shoplifting, offering sex for rent and a brief dalliance with the street rake, Terry Duckworth. She is now elected in the seat previously occupied by Jo Cox, who was murdered by Thomas Mair in 2016. Cox was shot and stabbed multiple times outside Birstall Library, where I’d given a talk a few weeks before. Mair, who had links with neo-Nazi groups and shouted ‘Britain First’ as he stabbed her, was given a whole-life tariff and will never be released from prison. The memorial service took place at St Peter’s. Cox was a campaigner for social justice, as Patrick Brontë was.

  It was during his stay in this area that Patrick encountered the West Riding Luddites for the first time. They were part of a larger Luddite movement, a secret oath-based organisation of textile workers that had originated in Nottingham, where lace makers had protested against mechanisation by destroying machinery. Among these Luddites were a high number of croppers whose skilled labour was under threat.

  I left school at sixteen to become an apprentice winder. Like the croppers of the West Riding Luddites, my trade no longer exists. The machines the men were replaced with were shearing frames, driven by belts powered either by waterwheel or steam engine, that mechanically cropped the nap off rolls of cloth, doing the same work as seven croppers using handheld shears. The end product was inferior to that produced by human labour. The men were not just fighting for their livelihoods. They were also fighting to maintain the quality of the cloth. Their jobs were highly skilled and well paid. They used huge cutting shears that weighed between fifty and sixty pounds (about the weight of an eight-year-old boy) and were four feet long. You could spot an experienced cropper by the hoof of skin on his wrist caused by the handle (or nog) of the shears rubbing against it.