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was germinating. It will be easier to get a shop here. Rents will be cheaper than in Leeds, she reasoned logically. Maybe I can open my first shop in Armley, after the baby comes. And it would be a start. She was so enthusiastic about this idea that by the time they reached the street where Laura Spencer lived she already had the shop and was envisioning its diverse merchandise.

      Today, beyond Town Street’s maze of subsidiary terraces, where Barbara’s father Winston’s family once lived, stand Sixties tower blocks and back-to-back housing with more transient tenants not featured in Barbara’s fiction. And at the end of the line stands Armley Prison, its architectural purpose clearly to strike terror into the would-be inmates. This does register in A Woman of Substance – future architect Blackie O’Neill calls it a ‘horrible dungeon of a place’. Nearly a century later, multiple murderer Peter Sutcliffe – ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ – added to its reputation.

      Now, twenty-five per cent of Armley’s inhabitants are from ethnic minorities where English is a second language. The great change began as Barbara left for London in the 1950s. As a result, the culture of Armley village today is unlike anything she remembers, even though, according to local headmistress Judy Blanchland, inhabitants still feel part of a tradition with sturdy roots in the past, and have pride in the place. Certainly there is continuity in generations of the same families attending Christ Church School. The school, and the church opposite, remain very much the heart of the local community, with around 100 attending church on Sunday, seventy adults and some thirty children. There always has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the two, even if changing the name of Armley National School, as it was in Barbara’s day, to Christ Church School did cause something of a stir.

      Barbara enrolled there on 31st August 1937, along with eleven other infants. Her school number was 364 until she was elevated to Junior status in 1941, when it became 891. Alan Bennett, born on 9th May 1934, one year after Barbara, joined on 5th September 1938, from his home at 12 Halliday Place. The families didn’t know one another. ‘My mother used to send me miles to a butcher that she decided she liked better [than Bennett’s shop on Tong Road]. It was all the way down the hill, almost on Stanningley Road.’ After leaving the school, the two forgot they had known one another until the day, fifty years later, when they were both honoured by Leeds University with a Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa degree.

      Bennett became a household name in England from the moment in 1960 that he starred in and coauthored the satirical review Beyond the Fringe with Dudley Moore, Peter Cooke and Jonathan Miller at the world-famous Edinburgh Arts Festival. Later the show played to packed audiences in London’s West End and New York. He was on a fast-track even at Christ Church School, passing out a year early, bound for West Leeds High School, according to the school log. From there the butcher’s son won a place at Oxford University.

      Barbara and I walked the area together in the summer of 2003, mourning the fact that generally little seems to have been done to retain the nineteenth-century stone buildings of her birthplace. Even many of the brick-built worker terraces, which have their own period-appeal, have been daubed with red masonry paint in a makeshift attempt to maintain them. There was, however, enough left to remind Barbara of her childhood there.

      We drove up Town Street towards Tower Lane, where she lived until she was about ten. At Town Street’s west end, you can filter right into Tower Lane or left into Whingate, site of the old tram terminal and the West Leeds High School, now an apartment block. (See 1933 map in the first picture section.) The small triangular green between Town Street and Whingate which appears at this point must have been a talking point for Barbara and her mother from earliest times, if only on account of its name – Charley Cake Park – mentioned in both A Woman of Substance and Act of Will. ‘Laura told me that years ago a man called Charley hawked cakes there,’ says Blackie. Emma believes him, but only because no-one could invent such a name for an otherwise totally insignificant strip of grass.

      As we wind our way towards Barbara’s first home, she has a mental picture of ‘me at the age of three, sitting under a parasol outside 38 Tower Lane, near a rose bush. It is a lane, you know,’ she emphasises, ‘and it was a tiny little cottage where we lived. Do you think it is still there? We got off the tram here . . . Whingate Junction . . . then we walked across the road and up Tower Lane, and there was a very tall wall, and behind that wall were . . . sort of mansions; they were called The Towers.’

      At the mouth of the lane she points to a cluster of streets called the Moorfields: ‘That used to be where the doctor I went to practised – Doctor Stalker was his name. One of those streets went down to the shop where I got the vinegar. Did I tell you about the vinegar? Boyes, a corner shop, that’s where I used to get it. I wonder if that’s still there?’

      The vinegar turns my mind to Barbara’s penchant for fish and chips. I had heard that when she comes to Yorkshire she likes nothing better than to go for a slap-up meal of fish and chips, mushy peas, and lashings of vinegar. That very night I would find myself eating fish and chips with her in Harrogate. Nothing odd, you might say, about a Yorkshire woman eating a traditional Yorkshire meal, only Barbara has her posh cosmopolitan heroes and heroines do it in the novels too, and has herself been known to request, and get, a bottle of Sarson’s served at table in the Dorchester Grill.

      What is Emma Harte, the woman of substance’s favourite dish? Fish and chips, preceded by a bowl of vegetable soup, served in Royal Worcester china of course, the only concession to Emma’s transformation. Again there is this feeling of fairytale about it all, except that one knows that the writer has herself made the same journey as Emma Harte, and that she does in fact order fish and chips too. The desire seems to pass down the generations, so that Emma’s grandson, the immensely wealthy Philip McGill Amory, insists on eating fish and chips with his wife Madelena – what matter if she is wearing a Pauline Trigère evening gown?

      ‘My mother used to send me to get the household vinegar from Mr Boyes,’ Barbara continues, ‘and she sent me with a bottle because it was distilled from a keg, and when I returned with it she’d always look at the bottle and say, “Look at this, he’s cheating me!” Until one day she went in herself with the bottle and she said to Mr Boyes, “You’re cheating me. I never get a full bottle,” and apparently Mr Boyes replied, “Eeh, ah knows. Tha’ Barbara’s drinking it.” He was very broad Yorkshire, and it’s true, I did drink a bit of it on the way home. Even today I like vinegar on many things, but especially on cabbage . . .

      ‘There’s Gisburne’s Garage!’ I slow down as we pass the garage on our right at the mouth of the lane, and she points out an old house, pebble-dashed since she was a girl. ‘This was where Mrs Gisburne lived and it had a beautiful garden in the back. But where this is green there used to be a pavement, surely . . . but maybe it wasn’t, perhaps I am seeing . . .’

      This is the first time that Barbara has set foot in the place for fifty years. What will turn out to be real of her childhood memories? What part of imagination? Childhood memories play tricks on us. She looks for the ‘tall wall’ that she remembers should be on our left, containing the mansions known as The Towers. There is a wall, but it is not tall, nor have the original blackened stones been touched since the four- or five-foot construction was built all those years ago.

      ‘That wall used to seem so high when I was a child,’ she says in amazement. ‘Anyway, these are called The Towers and this is where Emma had a house and they were considered to be very posh. It was all trees here.’

      The Towers stretched many floors above us and must have seemed to a child’s eye to reach into the sky. Their castellated construction of blackened West Riding stone gives them a powerful, gothic feel, and it was the majesty of the site that captured Barbara’s wonder when she was growing up here. Her eyes must have fallen upon the building virtually every day during her most impressionable years, whenever she emerged from the garden of her house opposite:

       The Towers stood in a private and secluded little park in Upper Armley that was surrounded by high walls and fronted by great iron gates. A circular driveway led up to the eight fine mansions situated within the park’s precincts, each one self-contained, encircled by low walls and boasting a lavish garden. The moment Emma had walked into the

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