I anticipated the Guild trip to Yorkshire with curiosity, never having visited the county of my birth as a tourist. It was like visiting a different country. The names reverberated from distant memory: Hebden Bridge, Wensleydale, Ilkley Moor, Whitby. I heard my father’s Northern vowels again, and recalled his ringing sermons. “From Hell, Hull and Halifax may the good Lord deliver us” was a great joke back then, but only now have I discovered that it was a 17th-century thieves’ litany – Hull because there was a notorious gaol there, Halifax because of its famous gibbet, a precursor of the guillotine, with the curious distinction of being operated with a rope which all could grasp, a fair administration of rough justice.
It was in the landscape that I felt once again at home; the elemental beauty of the moors, rushing waters, rugged stone walls and hardy Wensleydale sheep. Most of all the wild skies and cloud shadows. And it was the artists and writers that made sense of it all. That’s what they are for. I felt most in harmony with place and past at Haworth, home of the Brontes, bleak as it is. Jane Eyre was the first grown-up novel I read and it so captured my imagination. The Brontes were all about imagination, they had nothing else, stuck in that cold parsonage between village and wilderness. In front of them the church and always the graveyard, the inevitably of death which came all too soon to all of them, then behind the house the wide scape of empty moorland. Liberty was always Emily’s watchword.
And then another memory of my father rises up, suddenly stopping on a moorland walk, and pointing to the heavens. “Wait, listen to the skylark!” And we would strain to hear what he heard soaring high in the sky above us.
Rosemary Bailey