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Woman of Substance

      But where was No. 38 Tower Lane, supposedly opposite the tall wall of The Towers? There is No. 42 and 44 . . . but no label indicating No. 38. ‘We were thirty-eight,’ Barbara insists as she alights from the car to get a better look. We move through a gate into a front garden, and, set back from the lane, we see what might have once been a row of three tiny, terraced stone cottages, all that was left of the courtyard where they lived, ‘the small cul-de-sac of cottages,’ as she wrote in A Woman of Substance, describing the neighbourhood of Emma’s childhood home.

      ‘This seems very narrow,’ she says as we make our way gingerly down the flagged path like trespassers in time. ‘They’ve knocked it all down, I think, and turned it into this. All right, well, I’ll find it! There was a house across the bottom,’ she muses for her own benefit. ‘This, the first of the line [of cottages] was number thirty-eight. You went down some steps. Here it was a sort of garden bit, and where the trees are . . . There were three cottages along here and then a house at the bottom, which has gone. Wait a minute, are there three cottages or only two? Have they torn our house down? Well, this is the site of it anyway.’ Her voice breaks as she says this. ‘There were three houses there. There was our cottage, the people in the corner and the lady at the bottom. There were three houses.’ She then shows me the site of their air-raid shelter, where she and Freda would sit when the sirens sounded during the early years of the war. In the whole of the war only a handful of bombs actually fell on Leeds, but the preparations were thorough, the windows of trams and shops covered with netting to prevent glass shattering all over the place from bomb blast, entrances to precincts and markets sandbagged against explosions.

      ‘I went to school with a gas mask, I remember,’ said Barbara. ‘We all had them in a canvas bag on our shoulders and there used to be a funny picture of me with these thin little legs – I’ve got thin legs even today – thin little legs with the stockings twisted and a coat and the gas mask and a fringe. My mother was cutting her rose bushes and I was playing with my dolls’ pram that day in 1940 when a doodlebug, a flying bomb, came over, and she just dropped everything and dragged me into the air-raid shelter. I vaguely remember her saying to my father later – he was out somewhere – “Oh, I never thought I’d see that happen over England.”’

      No. 38 Tower Lane had two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms on the upper floor. That is all: a sweet, flat-fronted cottage; a tiny, humble abode. The house at the bottom of the garden is long gone. Its absence offers by way of recompense a spectacular view across the top of Leeds, although Barbara’s interest, as we walk the area, is only in how things were, and how they are no more.

      Being an only child had various repercussions. Her parents will have been able to feed and clothe Barbara to a better standard than most working-class children, which we know to have been the case. But it would have set Barbara apart for other reasons, too – single-child families were unusual in those days before family planning, and in the single-child home the emphasis was on child-parent relationships rather than sibling friendships and rivalries, which can affect a child’s ability to relate to other boys and girls at school; although when things are going well between child and parents it can make the relationship extra-special. ‘There were plenty of times,’ she says, ‘when I just knew that we were special, the three of us. I always thought that we were special and they were special. I think when you are an only child you are a unit more. I always adored them. Yes, rather like Christina does in Act of Will.’

      The closeness and reliance of Barbara on the family unit was never more clearly shown than in the only time she spent away from home during her early childhood, as an evacuee. The school log reads: ‘1st September 1939, the school was evacuated to Lincoln this morning. Time of assembly 8.30, departure from school, 9, to Wortley Station, departure of train, 9.43.’

      The school stayed closed until 15th January 1940: ‘Reopened this morning, three temporary teachers have been appointed to replace my staff, which are still scattered in the evacuation areas. Miss Laithwaite is at Sawbey, Miss Maitland at Ripon, Miss Musgrave at Lincoln and Miss Bolton is assisting at Meanwood Road. The cellars have been converted into air-raid shelters for the Infants. Accommodation in the shelters, 100. Only children over 6 can be admitted for the present.’

      ‘I went to Lincoln,’ remembers Barbara, ‘but I only stayed three weeks. It was so stupid to send us to Lincolnshire. I remember having a label on me, a luggage label, and my mother weeping as the school put us on a train. I was little. I wasn’t very happy, that I know, I missed my parents terribly. I was very spoiled, I was a very adored child. My mother sent me some Wellington boots, so it must have been in winter. She’d managed to get some oranges and she’d put them in a boot with some other things, but the woman had never looked inside. So, when my father came to get me the oranges were still there and had gone bad. My mother was furious about that.

      ‘Daddy came to get me. He’d gone to the house and they said, “She’ll be coming home from school any moment.” He said, “Which way is it? I’ll go to meet her.” And I saw him coming down the road and I was with the little girl who was at the house also. I remember it very well because I started to run – he was there on the road with his stick, walking towards me . . . and I’m screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” He said, “Come on, our Barbara, we’re going home.” We stood all the way on the train to Leeds. I was so happy because I missed my parents so much it was terrible. I was crying all the time – not all the time, but I cried a lot, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being away from them. I loved them so much.’

      I lead us back out of the gate and we return to the present with more sadness than joy. Walking further up the lane, which has a dogleg that leads eventually out onto Hill Top Road, we explore a steep track down the hill to the right, which Barbara calls ‘the ginnel’. Later I discover from Doreen Armitage, who also grew up in the area and let us into the church, that this is an ancient weaver’s track: ‘They would bring up the wool to the looms from the barges on the canal there.’ And, sure enough, I see on today’s map that it is marked as a quarter-mile cut-through to the canal across Stanningley Road. Barbara was lost once more in her own memories – the fun she had as a little girl skipping down the ginnel – before again being arrested by the intrusive present: the gardens behind Gisburne’s Garage, once so lovely, have been built upon and obscured.

      Despondently we make our way back up the ginnel towards the moor where she would often play after school. Past the main gate of The Towers we emerge from a tunnel of trees into a wide-open space, flanked on our left by an estate of modern houses, which has replaced the ‘lovely old stone houses’ of her youth. Off to the right, we come to what was always referred to as ‘the moor’, but is no more than half an acre of open ground, where now a few strongly built cart-horses are feeding. On the far side of it is a wall and some trees. Barbara at once exclaims: ‘That’s the wall! When you climbed over that wall, you were in something called the Baptist Field – I don’t know why it was called that, but . . . we used to play in that field, some other children and I, we used to make little villages, little fairylands in the roots of the trees, which were all gnarled, with bits of moss and stones and bits of broken glass, garnered from that field, and flowers.’

      Memories of the Baptist Field had been magical enough to earn it, too, a place in A Woman of Substance all of forty years later. In the novel, the field promises entry to Ramsden Crags and the Top of the World, symbol of the spirit of Yorkshire.

      Barbara’s fictional recipe may involve real places, but it is the feelings recalled from her youth that are especially true in the novels, and overlooking the Baptist’s Field I felt in at the very source of a little girl’s teeming imagination. As with Emma Harte, the years peeled away on her feelings as a child and ‘she had a sudden longing to go up to the moors, to climb that familiar path through the Baptist Field that led to Ramsden Crags and the Top of the World, where the air was cool and bracing and filled with pale lavender tints and misty pinks and greys . . . Innumerable memories assailed her, dragging her back into the past.’ (A Woman of Substance)

      ‘My father used to walk up here sometimes and go for a drink at the Traveller’s Rest,’ Barbara says, breaking the silence. I had already

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