Humor me, gentle snowflakes. Quickly–in your heads, please–do a free association with the word “Yorkshire”. What do you come up with? Yorkshire pudding, perhaps. Proper tea. Swaledale sheep. I would hope that at least some of you thought immediately of the moors, and, depending on your level of literacy, of the Brontë sisters. Certainly few people have chronicled the characteristic Yorkshire landscape so memorably, so popularly and, yes, so skillfully (whatever you feel about Heathcliff and Cathy, you don’t forget ‘em.) It would have been thoroughly ridiculous to make a trip to Yorkshire and not visit Haworth parsonage, where Charlotte, Emily and Anne were raised, and where they all lived for most of their adult lives. (This is without even mentioning their impecunious brother Branwell, who passed his brief existence in spectacular mid-Victorian fashion, addicted to opium and alcohol, the creative impulse he shared with his sisters diverted into a dilettante career as a portrait artist and minor poet. He wasn’t unskilled, but he wasted his talents with remarkable single-mindedness, and died at home of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, with only his father for company.)
We drove to Haworth over the moors, their wintry expanse stretching away burnt orange and purple under grey skies. I peered out the clouded car window, swiped ineffectively at the condensation with my coat sleeve, watched for about thirty seconds as a patch of clear glass was briefly visible, then repeated the process as the combined breaths of five people refogged the window again. Looking out the front windshield gave a somewhat better view; the car plunged down into steep valleys, through collections of stone houses too small even to be called hamlets, then up onto the tops again. The Yorkshire moors aren’t exactly the Rockies, I grant, but they are quite high enough, and the ascents are steep. Half Pint’s car, which really deserves a medal of some kind, hauled up the incredible hill on the top of which historic Haworth is perched. It was not a slope up which I would have cared to walk, but the car, carrying five of us, wheezed into the parking lot at last. We had been told that Haworth was an extremely busy tourist attraction, particularly popular with the Japanese (and their Nikons), but there was no one else in the parking lot when we got there–just us, and a man with two very large black Labrador dogs, running to fat. I cooed at them whilst Half Pint, the Duchess and Princi commenced a sudden search for one of Princi’s earrings, which she had lost somewhere between the car’s interior and its exterior. Perceiving that Darcy and I were somewhat supernumerary, Half Pint dispatched us to find out ticket prices.
We wandered up around the side of the parsonage and into the front garden. It is an ugly house, shaped like a block of cheese, but solid and well-built, made of the yellow-grey stone that characterizes rural Yorkshire architecture. As the last outpost between tender civilization and the rugged moorland, Haworth could have done much worse. The front garden gate opens directly into the parish cemetery and thence into the church. The cemetery, it transpired, was responsible for some serious contagion in the village in ye olde times; more corpses than the sacred ground could, strictly speaking, accommodate resulted in a massive outbreak of cholera. Public health inspections twenty or thirty years before the Brontës’ time brought this to light, and conditions were amended (one assumes; it’s not actually clear), but I would not perhaps have looked upon the scene as one of such secluded tranquility had I known earlier. The ticket prices were printed on a board outside the front door. It was £5 for students, which was favorable. Princi and the Duchess were not interested, and excused themselves to go shopping, but Darcy, Half Pint and I brassed up and went in.
The house museum is a curious little place. It’s laid out such that you wander from room to room, consulting a glossy pamphlet which tells you what happened in each place. Generally, this information is of a fairly obvious nature (“Mr. Brontë’s study. This is where Patrick Brontë kept his books and wrote his sermons…Kitchen. Here the two house servants would prepare meals…” and so on), but there were one or two interesting tidbits–Emily is thought to have died on the sofa in the front sitting room, which lends it the macabre interest of a relic. In a similar vein, Charlotte’s clothes are on display upstairs in the room that was her bedroom. She was remarkably tiny, even when you remember that people used to be smaller; her shoes are like a child’s. There is, too, the bed in which Branwell died, in another upstairs room, and a room in which are hung some of the portraits that he painted. Looking at them is sad; he was a good enough painter, apprenticed to Thomas Lawrence, one of the most well-respected artists of the day. If he had lived longer and worked harder, he could have been, if not great, then at the very least, even better. But then, the Brontës are a sad family. Even their successes are sad. Emily was simultaneously wild and domesticated, hating to leave home but loving to wander the moors for hours on end, alone, once famously disciplining her unruly dog Keeper with her fists before weeping with remorse. Anne is more enigmatic, her two novels probably the least famous, but she was the only one of the three who managed a career as a governess and teacher. Charlotte married, but died just a year later, pregnant with her first child. Their father outlived them all.
With this on our minds, we emerged from the museum gift shop (which sells all the novels) and set about trying to find the Duchess and Princi. Half Pint texted them both, and we waited for a minute inconclusively by the church, just opposite a pub called the Black Bull. Darcy poked me and pointed at a plaque on the side of the building. It read, “Here Branwell Brontë used to drink himself into a stupor and assault the barmaids” (or near enough). So did the plaque on the next building. In fact, most of the center of Haworth seemed to have been the site of Branwell’s bacchanals. This was incredible, but must have been true. At that moment, Princi and the Duchess appeared at the top of the hill, swinging bags from a secondhand bookshop and looking very pleased with themselves. The evening was drawing in by now (we had set off late, needing the morning to sleep off the night before), but we wanted to see the high street of old Haworth before all the shops shut. The warm golden glow of a shop called Rose & Co. beckoned. It described itself as an 
apothecary, but sold all sorts of things: Yorkshire Tea, soaps that looked and smelled like tiny fragrant pastries, badger-hair shaving brushes in a corner, baskets full of shortbread and chutney. In a back room, there were frilly knickers (the temperature the day we visited was not much above freezing, but one supposes they’re hardy up there) and dresses made after vintage patterns. It was all utterly delightful. We left happy and took pictures of ourselves in the street in positions of varying silliness, then headed down the hill, but were stopped by the sight of an old stone building on the high side of the street. It was clearly a shop, and it bore a black-and-gold sign which read THE SOUK. We had to go in.
Well, it was wonderful. It was run by a woman in a tweed waistcoat and pince-nez called Diane, with her assistant who bore a striking resemblance to the character Joanna Lumley plays in Absolutely Fabulous. Joanna Lumley was talking to a man who was clearly a regular but who looked wildly out of place in a Yorkshire moor town, a straggly-haired character in a long shapeless camel-colored coat with a distinctly eccentric air. He glared at me as I moved past him, smiling apologetically. The shop sold vintage and second-hand clothing, shoes, hats, gloves, purses, jewelry. There were some glass decanters ranged along the far wall, but they were impossible to see from the door; you had to walk all the way around the shop to find them. You had to walk all the way around the shop to find anything, because it was crammed full of things and the aisles were about as wide as my waist. I nearly stepped on an unbelievably elderly dog, a liver-and-white cocker spaniel with goiters the size of my doubled fists, which gazed mildly at me, then whiffled a little and collapsed with a wheeze underneath a nearby dress rack. When I got back to the front of the shop, Darcy and the Duchess were trying on waistcoats together, and Princi was experimenting with hats. My eyes lit upon a rack from which hung six or seven corsets. Half Pint looked at them, then at me. I reached for one, and at that moment the straggly-haired man left. Joanna Lumley’s attention, now diverted, turned to me. “Do you want to try one on? You must. Diane can do the laces. Come here. No, not in the middle of the shop, come behind the screen, come on.” She herded me and Half Pint together. I grabbed one, a black-and-gold beauty which looked about the right size. “Diane!” Joanna Lumley shouted. The proprietress appeared and looked me up and down, then at the corset in my hand. “Oh, those are lovely,” she said. “I got them from a fabric factory that had shut down. The material was eighty quid a yard when it was on the market. Now turn around.” Helpless with the effort of trying to comprehend something worth eighty quid a yard, I obeyed. She immediately set about lacing me up. I couldn’t see what was going on behind my back, but from the way it felt, she must have looked somewhat like a deep-sea fisherman hauling up a catch. “Breathe in,” she instructed, then pulled even harder. Darcy and the Duchess had briefly ceased their waistcoat shopping to spectate. I hoped not to pass out. Half Pint was walking circles around me, talking out loud: “A long skirt would be good with that. A black one, maybe with some gold underneath–we’d have to make allowance for the bottom of the corset at the waist, obviously…” She gripped the material, tested it. She and Diane consulted, turned me around, turned me the other way, murmured about fabrics. I felt like a doll. I bought the corset.
The Duchess and Darcy made some purchases (waistcoats and a tartan smoking jacket, respectively: all gorgeous clothing) and we drove back over the darkened hills, the Duchess teaching us a song from the Second World War memorably entitled “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”, with regional variations. We were booked for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Hebden Bridge, where we drank rather a lot of red wine and consumed rather a lot of pasta, and where the waiter gave Half Pint a free brandy on discovering that it was her birthday. We sang to her, in harmony (as we had done the night before), and returned to the house content.
The next morning, I woke at five. Darcy, who had offered to drive me to the airport, was downstairs soon afterwards. We ate in the dark; Half Pint came down to say goodbye, which was awfully sweet of her, as did Princi (a fact which I forgot in the first edition of this post; mea maxima culpa, and I probably owe Princi a drink for it); and in the dark we left. My flight was from Manchester Airport at nine o’clock that morning. Darcy drove me through a night which did not lighten, down the M60, straight over the sprawling city (with a brief, exciting and unplanned visit to Bolton) and to the airport in perfect time. It is a kindness to drive anyone to the airport, let alone through one of England’s largest metropolitan areas at a peak travel time when it is still dark, and here I will thank him, and register my opinion that he is an officer and a gentleman.
And in two days’ time, back to England–to Cumbria first, then to Oxford for the beginning of Hilary. Stay tuned.
Ex/Elle 