The Woman of Substance - Piers Dudgeon

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I have no idea.’

      ‘Did you say anything about it to your mother at the time?’

      ‘No, she just knew I loved to go.’

      When I drove Barbara to Middleham Castle, we had a similar conversation while exploring what remains of the massive two-storey twelfth-century Keep with Great Chamber and Great Hall above, ‘the chief public space in the castle’, I read from a sign. ‘The Nevilles held court here. Walls were colourful with hangings and perhaps paintings. Clothes were colourful and included heraldic designs . . .’

      Barbara interrupted me: ‘I have always been attracted to Middleham and I have always had an eerie feeling that I was here in another life, hundreds of years ago. I know it; why do I know it all? How do I know it all? Was I here? I know this place, and it is not known because I came in my childhood.’

      From outside came the sound of children playing. We made our way gingerly up steps nearly one thousand years old, the blue sky our roof now, held in place by tall, howling, windowless walls that supported scattered clumps of epiphytic lichen and wild flowers. Barbara stood still in the Great Hall, taking it all in with almost religious reverence. Then, inevitably, the larking children burst in. She turned, her look silencing them before even she opened her mouth: ‘Now look, you’ve got to stop making a lot of noise. You’re disturbing other people. This is not a place for you to play!’ It was as if they had desecrated a church. We descended to areas which were once kitchens and inspected huge fireplaces at one time used as roasting hearths, and discovered two wells and a couple of circular stone pits, which a signpost guide suggested may have been fish tanks.

      ‘It was much taller than this, it has lost a lot,’ she sighed, and then asked, ‘Would it have been crenellated?’

      I said I thought that likely, adding, ‘It is gothic, dark,’ before my eyes returned to the wild flowers in search of a lighter tone. ‘Look at the harebells,’ I said, but Barbara was not to be deterred. She had come from New York to be there, she wanted me to grasp a point.

      ‘I don’t understand why I have this feeling. I don’t understand why it is so meaningful to me.’

      ‘There is a very strong sense of place here,’ I agreed.

      ‘For me there is.’

      I felt a compulsion to test the subjectivity of Barbara’s vision. ‘I think anyone would find that there is a strong sense of place here,’ I said.

      She leapt back at me immediately: ‘No, no, I know this, I have been here, not in this life.’ Then, as suddenly, the spell was broken: ‘And then you see, you can go down here . . . I had the feeling as a child, I thought I knew it. I had this really strong pull, and I don’t know why. I feel I was here in that time, in the Wars of the Roses. I feel that I lived here in the time of Warwick.’

      An ability to empathise with the spirit of place is a characteristic of all writers grouped together in the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, not least William Wordsworth, whose poem, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’ was one of Freda’s favourites and crops up time and again in Barbara’s novels. The verses tell of an empathic moment in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, near Ullswater in the Lake District, where the poet and his sister, Dorothy, come upon the most beautiful daffodils they have ever seen: ‘Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and peeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew them over the lake . . . ever glancing, ever changing,’ Dorothy recorded in her diary. But Barbara’s déjà vu experiences are different in an important respect from those of the Romantics. For her, sympathetic identification with Middleham Castle or Temple Newsam or Studley Royal always carries with it a conviction not only that the past is contained in the present, but of herself as part of it. The Romantic notion of empathy is absolutely the opposite of this: it is the disappearance of self. Empathy between Keats and the nightingale was contingent on the poet becoming the immortal spirit of the bird. Barbara’s feeling that she has been to a place before, in another life perhaps, comes from somewhere else. The ‘experience’ carries a sense of belonging. She seems on the verge of finding out more about herself by being there. It has something to do with identity.

      Also inherent in what she terms déjà vu (literally ‘already seen’) is a feeling of disassociation with what is felt to have been experienced before; a sense of loss, a sense that there is a past which was hers and has been lost to her. Such a sense of loss can be a powerful inspiration for an author. For instance, Thomas Hardy’s novels were inspired by the loss he felt deeply of the land-based, deep-truth culture into which he had been born at Bockhampton in Dorset in the nineteenth century, and we will see that only after Barbara made her return in imagination to the landscape of her birth, and drew on the values that she associated with it, could she write the novels that made her famous.

      But unlike Hardy, Barbara was not born into the culture or spirit of the times that inspired these values, and there was nothing that she could give me about her past to suggest that something in her identity had been lost to the passing of the times of which Middleham, Temple Newsam or Studley Royal belonged. I was, however, strongly aware that these experiences occurred and had been repeated on many occasions in the company of her mother. The image came to mind of Freda standing hand-in-hand with her daughter in the Keep at Middleham. Everything seemed to lead back to Freda. Why had Freda thought it so important to take Barbara to these places? Was it a committed mother’s desire to share their history, or can we see in the intensity of feeling that the trips engendered something more?

      Interestingly, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ poem is used in Barbara’s novel Her Own Rules to demonstrate that Meredith Stratton has a problem of identity – a terrible feeling of loss, of being robbed, of being incomplete, which is resolved in the novel when she discovers who her mother is. Meredith hears the poem and thinks she has heard it before – but not here, not in this life. It is the first of many so-called déjà vu experiences linked to Meri’s true identity, her secret past. ‘Her Own Rules is about a woman who doesn’t know who she really is,’ as Barbara confirmed.

      Was this how it was for Freda? Was she, like Meredith Stratton, drawing something from the spirit of the place that answered questions about her own identity? Was she sublimating the sense of loss, which her daughter noticed in her but could never explain, in the noble spirit of places like Middleham, Temple Newsam, Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal? And did the intensity of the experience encourage her daughter Barbara, with whom she was ‘joined at the hip’, to identify with their history and experience this déjà vu?

      Freda’s very being was redolent of the sense of loss which permeates not only the narrative but also some of the best imagery of Barbara’s novels, as when the winter sets in ‘for its long and deadly siege’ and the landscape is ‘brush-stroked in grisaille’ – a technique to which Barbara alludes not only in A Woman of Substance but also in The Women in His Life and Act of Will invariably to describe a beauty pained by loss.

      Barbara, who knew no more about Freda’s problems than I did at the time of our trip to Middleham, allowed only that her mother did definitely want her to have a fascination for the history of the places they visited. But she herself had connected these déjà vu experiences with Meredith Stratton’s search for her roots of existence, and, as I mulled over our trip to Middleham, I remembered her appraisal that the fundamental theme of all her novels – including A Woman of Substance – is one of identity: ‘to know who you are and what you are’.

      It would be some time, however, before the burden of the theme could be laid at Freda’s door.

       Beginnings

       ‘I was the kind of little girl who always looked ironed from top to toe, in ankle socks, patent leather shoes and starched dresses. My parents were

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