Читать книгу The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford - Piers Dudgeon - Страница 10
Оглавление‘I think we ought to go to Ripon. We’ve quite a lot of things to review, and to discuss . . .’
Meredith Stratton in Her Own Rules
Edith Walker, Freda’s mother, was the daughter of John and Mary Walker (née Scaife). John Walker was a slater’s apprentice when Edith was born on 4th September 1880, the youngest of six children. The occupation seems odd in that John was thirty-seven at the time, which is late to consider being an apprentice in anything. The family lived at Primrose Hill, Skipton Road (the Ripon side of Harrogate), close to what is now a roundabout by a pub called The Little Wonder.
It seems that Edith never knew her mother, for John Walker was registered in the 1881 census as a widower. Perhaps Mary Walker died in childbirth. Living in the Primrose Hill house with John and Edith in that year were his other children: Thomas (sixteen), Elizabeth Ann (twelve), John William (ten), Minnie (five), and Joseph (three).
One cannot help but wonder how her arrival on the scene was received by the rest of the family. Was she regarded as the final drain on the meagre resources available to a family of eight, in which the breadwinner was on apprenticeship wages? Was she rejected for being the cause of their mother’s death? Or was her advent greeted with great love and pity for the poor little mite, and was she spoiled and fussed over by her elder sister, Elizabeth Ann, and, indeed, doted on by her father, John, who may even have caught glimpses of his lost wife in her?
Being motherless, even with the care of others in the family, Edith may have suffered from maternal deprivation, a condition believed to be as harmful as poor nourishment. It can have a child yearning throughout its life for the kind of unconditional love that only a mother can give, and which no substitute can hope to assuage. Edith may also have suffered physically, for feeding infants was mainly by mother’s breast in those days.
The family does seem to have been a close one. It was largely still intact ten years later, and some members of it remained close for a considerable time into the future. It is indeed tempting to surmise that Edith was the apple of her father’s eye. If so, it is all the more tragic that he was unable or, for some reason beyond resolution, unwilling to save Edith from the abyss into which she was to fall.
Typically for a working man of the period, John Walker stayed in one area for his entire lifetime. He was born in 1844 in Burton Leonard, a tiny village midway between Harrogate and Ripon, his parents having moved there from Pateley Bridge, ten miles to the west, where his elder sister Mary was born in 1839. After marrying, he went with his wife to live in Scotton, a village three miles to the south of Burton Leonard. Their first son, Thomas, was born there in 1865. The family then moved to Ripon in or around 1869, where siblings Elizabeth Ann, John William and Minnie were born. Then, around 1877, came the move to the outskirts of Harrogate, where first Joseph and then Edith (Barbara’s grandmother) were born. By 1891 the family had moved back to Ripon.
The city, twenty miles or so north of Leeds, lies just west of the Vale of York, which runs north–south between the North York Moors to the east and the softer Dales to the west. To anyone who doesn’t know Yorkshire, the names of these two great land masses may be misleading, because there are plenty of dales in the North York Moors and plenty of moors in the Dales. Dales are valleys; moors are high, largely unsettled tracts of wilderness, naturally enough separated by dales. Indeed, as we have seen, perhaps the most famous moor in all England – Haworth Moor – is not in the North York Moors at all, but way to the southwest, near Leeds.
In the immediate vicinity of Ripon there is some of the most beautiful countryside in all England. It was built at the confluence of three rivers. From Middleham to the north, a sense of Warwick’s struggles washes down east of the city through Wensleydale on the Ure, the river’s Celtic name – Isura – meaning physical and spiritual power. There it is met by the Skell, which is itself met southwest of the city by the River Laver.
In Act of Will, Audra refers to Ripon as ‘a sleepy old backwater’ compared to ‘a great big metropolis like Leeds’, but the description belies the tiny city’s unique and many-faceted appeal. Its population was a mere 7500 at the time of the Walker family’s incursion. Today it is little more than double that size, and retains the feel of a small, busy, rural community with tremendous reserves of history at its fingertips. There is a twelfth-century cathedral or minster, a seventeenth-century House of Correction, a nineteenth-century workhouse and debtor’s prison, old inns bent and worn by time, and, nearby, twelfth-century monastic ruins – Fountains Abbey at Studley Royal.
Bronze-age earthworks and henges to the northeast suggest human habitation thousands of years BC, but Ripon itself can be said to have first drawn breath in AD 634 with the birth of the city’s patron saint, Wilfrid, in Allhallowgate, Ripon’s oldest street, just north of what was then a newly established Celtic Christian monastery.
The monks sent Wilfrid, an unusually able boy, to be educated in Lindisfarne (Holy Island) off the Northumberland coast, where St Aidan had founded a monastery in 635. Later, Wilfrid championed Catholicism over Celtic Christianity as the faith of the Church in England, and was appointed Abbot of the Ripon monastery, then Archbishop of York. The church he built in Ripon became a ‘matrix’ church of the See of York, and his work inspired the building of Ripon Minster in 1175 and the foundation of various hospital chapels, which established the city’s definitive role in providing food and shelter for the poor and sick.
St Mary Magdalen’s hospital and chapel were built in the twelfth century on the approach to the city from the north, and had a special brief to care for lepers and blind priests. St John the Baptist’s chapel, mission room and almshouses lie at the southeast Bondgate and New Bridge approach to the city over the River Skell, which also offers a view of seventeenth-century Thorpe Prebend House, situated off High St Agnesgate in a peaceful precinct with another hospital chapel, St Anne’s, already a ruin in Edith’s time, but founded by the Nevilles of Middleham Castle. Thorpe Prebend was one of seven houses used by the prebendaries (canons) of the minster, and a house with a special place in Barbara’s memory.
When Freda brought Barbara to Ripon as baby and child, they would invariably stay at Thorpe Prebend with a family by name of Wray, who were caretakers of the house. Joe Wray was married to Freda’s cousin, Lillie, and Barbara became firm friends with Joe’s niece, Margery Clarke (née Knowles). ‘I spent a lot of weekends with Margery when I was a young girl,’ Barbara recalls, and later as teenagers they would go to dances together at the Lawrence Café in the Market Place. The Lawrence had a first-floor ballroom famous because the dance floor was sprung: ‘We used to go, she and I, to the Saturday night dance there at fifteen, sixteen . . . When I reminded her and I recalled that we stood waiting to be asked to dance, her swift retort was, “But not for long!” Apparently we were very popular.’
Margery still lives in Ripon today and took me to the spot beside Thorpe Prebend House where Freda and Margery’s father, who went to school together, used to play on stepping-stones across the Skell. Later I learned from Barbara of the celebrated occasion when, according to Freda, he pushed her in. ‘She was wearing a dress her mother Edith had dyed duck-egg blue and she dripped duck-egg blue all the way home on her white pinafore!’
Jim Gott, no obvious relation of the acquisitive Gott of Armley, but a working-class lad born seven years before Freda at 43 Allhallowgate, recalled in his memoir that playing on these stones was a popular pastime. What comes across in Jim Gott’s book, Bits & Blots of T’Owd Spot, is the fun he had as a child and the empathy he and his contemporaries enjoyed with the spirit of Ripon – past and present fusing in its ancient architecture and traditions, and the daily round. These were the riches of a life that in other ways was hard, and Freda, despite the particular difficulties attached to her childhood, would have shared in them too, and, as an adult, looked back with similar wonder.
The spirit of the place, matured over time, was celebrated on a weekly basis at the twelfth-century Market Place, with its covered stalls, self-styled entertainers and livestock pens. It features in Barbara’s novel, Voice of the Heart. Every Thursday, long before the market bell sounded at 11 a.m. to declare trade open, folk poured in from the surrounding moors and dales, and Ripon awoke to the clatter of vehicles laden with fresh produce and squawking hens, and the drovers’ fretting sheep and lowing cattle as flocks and herds made their way through the city’s narrow lanes to the colourful square on the final leg of what was often a two- or three-day journey. All came to an end at 9 p.m., as Gott recorded, when the Wakeman Hornblower announced the night watch, a tradition that survives in Ripon to this day.
Home for Edith and her family in 1891 was a small stone cottage just two minutes’ walk south of the Market Place at No. 8 Water Skellgate, a whisper from where Barbara and Margery would dance the night away half a century later. (The 1909 map in the second picture section charts the area clearly.)
By this time Edith’s father, John, was forty-seven and had married again, his second wife, Elizabeth, being four years his junior. Edith herself was ten, going on eleven, and very likely a pupil at the nearby Minster Girls Primary School. The only other alternative would have been the Industrial School, reserved for the very poor and substitute for the Workhouse School, which had closed its doors for the last time a few years earlier.
Siblings Elizabeth Ann, John William and Joseph (twenty-two, twenty and thirteen respectively) were still at home, but there is no sign of eldest brother Thomas or of Minnie, who, if she was alive, would have been fifteen, old enough to be living out as a maid. Also sharing the house is a lodger, John Judson, and a ‘grandson’ (possibly Elizabeth’s or even Minnie’s child) by name of Gabriel Barker. It must have been a tight squeeze.
John had quite possibly made the move back to Ripon to avail himself of the wealth of job opportunities. The city’s position on the western fringe of the Vale of York – good sheep-rearing country – had made it the centre of the mediaeval wool trade, its three rivers diverted into a millrace or water course, which flowed from High Cleugh, southwest of the city, through Water Skellgate, to Bondgate Green in the southeast, serving three mills in the process. Ripon’s pre-eminence in this had continued into the late fifteenth century, but then steadily declined and various other industries had come to the fore. In the seventeenth century, Ripon rowels (spurs) had gained a worldwide reputation, so that Ben Jonson could write in his play The Staple of News (1626):
Why, there’s an angel, if my spurs
Be not right Rippon.
The city was also renowned for its saddletrees, frames of saddles worked from local ash, elm and beech – horse racing has been part of Ripon’s life since 1664, and fourteen days of flat racing are still staged between April and August at Yorkshire’s Garden Racecourse. Button-making made another important economic contribution and, a century later, out of the French Revolution came a gift of an industry from a band of Ripon-bound French refugees, who were befriended by a French-speaking Yorkshireman called Daniel Williamson. In return for his welcome the immigrants handed Williamson the secret details of a varnish-making process, and the lucky man set up the first varnish-making business in England, becoming so successful that today Ripon manufacturers are still doing business in every major country of the world.
Besides these, an iron foundry made a significant contribution from the nineteenth century, and the city also supported a hive of little industries, such as bone-and rope-millers, tanners, fell-mongers, coachbuilders and chandlers. Finally, as many as nineteen per cent of those in employment in the city at this time were able to find work as unskilled labourers.
Upon arrival, Edith’s brother, Joseph, found work as ‘a rope twister’, while his father, John, took up as a lamplighter. ‘One of my earliest memories is of kneeling on a chair by a window waiting for the lamplighter,’ wrote one J. Hilsdon, a Ripon citizen of those days. ‘He was a tall figure, who carried a pole with a light on the end. The street lamps were gaslights and he tipped the arm to release the gas and lit the mantle. Presumably he made a second round to extinguish them.’
When one soaks up the history of Ripon in late Victorian and Edwardian times, the chief impression is of the huge divergence of lifestyle between rich and poor, who nevertheless lived on top of one another in so small a place as this. When Beryl Thompson arrived in 1956 she was spellbound by the accessibility of the city’s history, and has spent her life looking into the plight of the poorest citizens ever since. ‘I have done this over a period of about thirty or forty years,’ she told me, ‘and some of the places that children lived in Ripon at this time – if you read the medical inspectors’ reports – were not fit to be in. They were no better than pigsties down St Marygate or Priest Lane [this is the oldest part of the city, site of the original Celtic monastery]. If you look at the early maps you will find a lot of courts all over the city – there’s Foxton’s Court and Thomson’s Court and Florentine’s Court and so on. I think there were a lot of hovels in these courts and they probably shared lavatories or there’d be a cesspool outside or a midden. They were trying to clean it up at the turn of the century, but the reports still comment on this.’
These courts were a throwback to mediaeval times and a common sight in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in Ripon. The imagination of Charles Dickens, as a boy alone in London, his parents incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, was set alight by ‘wild visions’ as he lurked around their entries and looked down into their inky depths. In Ripon, the city centre retained its mediaeval street plan right into the twentieth century, and the labouring poor were consigned to cottages in just such dark and dismal courts or yards, set behind the narrow streets. Very often at the top of them you’d find workshops – a blacksmith, bakery or slaughterhouse.
There was tremendous movement by the poor within them. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Edith’s brother Joseph (Barbara’s great uncle) moved at least four times in the space of four years through one maze of them. In 1907 he could be found at 2 York Yard, Skellgarths (a continuation to the east of Water Skellgate), having just moved there from 3 Millgate Yard. By 1910 he had moved to 1 York Yard, then to 4 York Yard. In 1911 he took up residence at 3 Johnson’s Court, between 14 and 16 Low Skellgate (continuation to the west of the street), settling there and getting wed. Sadly, he was then almost certainly killed in the First War, for when records resumed in 1918 the sole occupant of 3 Johnson’s Court was his widow, Ruth Matilda Walker. Within a year she remarried, her second husband a man called James Draper. And life went on.
These yards were private, often close-knit communities, safe from outsiders because few dared venture into them unless they had business to perform, but Beryl was right that conditions were grim. In 1902, a Ripon sanitary inspector reported: ‘The really antiquated and disgusting sanitary arrangements now existing in the poorer quarters – where it is not unusual to find numbers of homes crowded round a common midden, which is constructed to hold several months’ deposit of closet and vegetable matter, ashes and every sort of household refuse imaginable, and which remains in a festering and decaying condition, poisoning what pure air may reach the narrow courts . . .’
A Ripon Council report, dated seven years before Freda was born, records one domicile ‘where ten human beings have been herded together in a space scarcely adequate for a self-respecting litter of pigs,’ and it is recorded in A Ripon Record 1887–1986 that in 1906, when Freda was two, increasing numbers of children were turning up at school without shoes.
The awful conditions in which unskilled working-class people lived in Edwardian England was so widely appreciated that in the hard winter of 1903, the New York Independent could find no more deserving case than England to cover: ‘The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.’
As in London, so in Ripon. These horrors were to be found ‘within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces’, as William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, noted in his book, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). George R. Sims, a respected journalist writing a year earlier, had conjured up a picture that would not have seemed out of place in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, of ‘underground cellars where the vilest outcasts hide from the light of day . . . [where] it is dangerous to breathe for some hours at a stretch an atmosphere charged with infection and poisoned with indescribable effluvia.’
