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CHAPTER TWO

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 well dressed, too.’

Barbara was born on 10th May 1933 to Freda and Winston Taylor of 38 Tower Lane, Upper Armley, on the west side of Leeds. ‘Tower Lane was my first home,’ Barbara agreed, ‘but I was born in St Mary’s Hospital in the area called Hill Top. My mother, being a nurse, probably thought it was safer.’

Hill Top crests the main road a short walk from Tower Lane. St Mary’s Hospital is set back from the road and today more or less hidden behind trees within its own large site. A map dated the year of Barbara’s birth still carries the hospital’s original name, ‘Bramley Union Workhouse’ (Bramley is the next ‘village’ to the west of Armley). The Local Government Act of 1929 had empowered all local authorities to convert workhouse infirmaries to general hospitals, and by the time Barbara was born, it was probably already admitting patients from all social classes.

As the crow flies, Armley is little more than a mile and a half west of the centre of Leeds, which is the capital of the North of England, second only to London in finance, the law, and for theatre – the Yorkshire Playhouse being known as the National Theatre of the North. More than 50,000 students of its two universities and arts colleges also ensure that it is today one of the great nights out in the British Isles. Straddling the River Aire, which, with the Aire & Calder Navigation (the Leeds canal), helped sustain its once great manufacturing past, Leeds is positioned at the north end of the M1, Britain’s first motorway, almost equidistant between London and Edinburgh.

Armley, now a western suburb of the city, sits between the A647 Stanningley Road, which connects Leeds to Bradford, and Tong Road a mile to the south, where the father of playwright Alan Bennett, a contemporary of Barbara’s at school, had his butcher’s shop.

Armley’s name holds the secret of its beginnings, its second syllable meaning ‘open place in a wood’ and indicating that once it was but a clearing in forest land. Barbara will appreciate this. Oft heard celebrating the ‘bucolic’ nature of the Armley of old (it is one of her favourite adjectives both in the novels and in life), she recalls: ‘In the 1930s this was the edge of Leeds. There were a lot of open spaces . . . little moors – so called – fields, playing fields for football, as well as parks, such as Gott’s Park and Armley Park.’ There is still a fair today on Armley Moor, close to where Barbara first went to school: ‘Every September the fair or “feast” came, with carousels, stalls, candy floss, etc. We all went there when we were children.’

The Manor of Armley and, on the south side of Tong Road, that of Wortley, appear in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Ermelai and Ristone respectively. Together they were valued at ten shillings, which was half what they had been worth before the Normans had devastated the North in 1069. In King William’s great survey of England, Armley is described as comprising six carucates of taxable land for ploughing, six acres of meadow and a wood roughly one mile by three-quarters of a mile in area.

Not until the eighteenth century did the village come into its own, thanks to one Benjamin Gott, who was the outstanding figure among the Leeds woollen manufacturers of the industrial revolution. He was born in Woodall, near Calverley, a few miles west of the town, in 1762. At eighteen, he was apprenticed to the leading Leeds cloth merchant, Wormald and Fountaine. By 1800 the Fountaines had bowed out and in 1816 the Wormald family sold up too. Just how far all this was down to manoeuvring on the part of the acquisitive Gott does not come down to us. What is clear is that long before the firm was renamed Benjamin Gott and Sons it was his energy that made it the most successful woollen firm in England.

Gott’s mills – Bean Ing on the bank of the Aire, and a second one in Armley – brought railway terminals, factories and rows of terraced houses for workers, so that Armley was already part of Leeds by the mid-nineteenth century and the whole area was covered in a pall of smoke. So bad was the pollution that as early as 1823 Gott was taken to court. At his trial, the judge concluded that ‘in such a place as Leeds, which flourishes in consequence of these nuisances, some inconveniences are to be expected.’

Such attitudes made Gott a rich man. He bought Armley lock, stock and smoky barrel, built himself a big house there and hung it with his European art collection. Like many Victorian entrepreneurs, he was a philanthropist – he built a school and almshouses, organised worker pensions and gave to the Church’s pastoral work in the area. After he died in 1840, two sons carried on the business, made some improvements to the mill, but refused to compromise the quality of their high-grade cloths and take advantage of the ready-made clothing industry, which burgeoned after 1850, preferring to exercise their main interest as art and rare-book collectors. Inevitably their markets shrank. When one of the next generation went into the Church, parts of Bean Ing were let out, and by 1897 one tenant had a lease on the entire building.

William Ewart Gott, the third-generation son who stayed in Armley, is lambasted by David Kallinski in A Woman of Substance for having built statues and fountains rather than helping the poor, although in fact he provided the land for the foundation – in 1872 – of Christ Church, Armley, where Barbara was christened, received her first Communion and attended service every Sunday, going to Sunday School there as well. He gave towards the building of it and appointed its first vicar, the Reverend J. Thompson, who served a longer term (thirteen years) than any vicar since.

Barbara likes to say that she was ‘born in 1933 to ordinary parents in an ordinary part of Leeds and had a similarly ordinary childhood,’ but there was nothing unexceptional in the times into which she was born. The industrial revolution had finally ground to a halt. Two years before she was born, in the General Election of 1931, the Conservatives had romped home with some twelve million votes, the party having been elected to stem the economic crisis. It was the last year they would enjoy anything like that tally for some time to come.

The steps leading up to economic crisis and the Tory majority in 1931 led also to Adolf Hitler becoming German Chancellor two years later, and, seemingly inexorably, to war six years after that. Those who lived through it will tell you that the slump started in 1928 in the North of England, but it became world news in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. Between 1930 and 1933, following President Hoover’s decision to raise tariff barriers, world trade fell by two-thirds. Unemployment in America rose to twelve million (it had been but two million in 1920); in 1931 nearly six million were out of work in Germany. In Britain, in the January of the year of Barbara’s birth – 1933 – the same year that Walter Greenwood’s classic novel of life in a northern town during the slump, Love on the Dole, was published – it reached an all-time peak of 2,979,000. The Depression was on. Barbara was born at the height of it.

There is no doubt that there was great suffering in areas of the northwest and northeast of England. Figures of the unemployed seeking ‘relief’ in the workhouses in these regions confirm it, but for some there was a less drastic and emotive story. Barbara’s family seem not to have suffered too badly, even though her father was unemployed ‘for most of my childhood’, and was once reduced to shovelling snow, getting paid sixpence for his work and later telling his daughter: ‘At that time, Barbara, there was a blight on the land.’ The memory went into Act of Will, the ‘blight on the land’ line causing Barbara some grief when her American editor cut it out.

So how did the Taylors make ends meet? ‘My mother worked. She worked at nursing and she did all sorts of things. She was a housekeeper for a woman for a while. Do you remember that part of Act of Will when Christina gives her mother Audra a party? I remember that party, and I remember having those strawberries. My editor in England, Patricia Parkin, said nothing in the book summed up the Depression better than the strawberries. I cried when I wrote it because I remembered it so clearly – when I say, “their eyes shone and they smiled at each other . . .” I mean, I still choke up now!’

‘It’s time for the strawberries, Mam, I’ll serve,’ Christina cried, jumping down off her chair. ‘And you get to get the most, ’cos it’s your birthday.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ Audra demurred, ‘we’ll all have exactly the same amount, it’s share and share alike in this family.’

‘No, you have to have the most,’ Christina insisted as she carefully spooned the fruit into the small glass dishes she had brought from the sideboard. They had not had strawberries for a long time because they were so expensive and such a special treat. And so none of them spoke as they ate them slowly, savouring every bite, but their eyes shone and they smiled at each other with their eyes. And when they had finished they all three agreed that these were the best strawberries they had ever eaten . . .

The dole, or unemployment benefit, was £1 a week in 1930, thirty shillings for man, woman and child. Barbara’s father may also have received some sort of disability allowance, for he had lost a leg. A day’s work might bring Freda in five shillings, say eighteen shillings a week, cash in hand. That’s only 90p in the British decimalised economy, an old shilling being the current 5p piece, but its value was many times greater. In 1930, best butter cost a shilling a pound, bacon threepence for flank, fourpence-halfpenny for side, fivepence or sixpence for ham, two dozen eggs (small) were a shilling, margarine was fourpence a pound, and one pound of steak and rabbit was a shilling. It was quite possible to live on the Taylor income.

Indeed, there was money over to maintain Barbara’s ‘ironed look from top to toe, in ankle socks, patent leather shoes and starched dresses’. Her parents, she tells us, were well dressed, too. Of course, it was easier to be well dressed in those days. Men wore suits to work whether they were working class or middle class, and few changes of clothing were actually required; women for their part were adept at making do. There is no doubt also that there was the usual Yorkshire care with money in the Taylor household, which Barbara will tell you she has to this day. Certainly, when she was a child there was money left over for her father’s beer, a flutter on the horses and even for summer holidays, taken at the east coast resort of Bridlington, the seaside holiday being a pastime whose popularity was on the increase, while foreign travel remained an elite pursuit for the very rich.

Another apparent anachronism of the depressed 1930s is that it was also the decade of the mass communication and leisure revolution, which facilitated industries that would be Barbara’s playground as an adult. British cinema began as a working-class pastime, films offering escapism, excitement and a new focus for hero worship more palatable than the aristocracy, as well as a warm, dark haven for courting couples. The first talkie arrived in Britain in 1929. By 1934 there was an average weekly cinema attendance of 18.5 million (more than a third of the population), and more than 20 million people had a radio in the home.

Sales of newspapers also burgeoned, with door-to-door salesmen offering free gifts for those who registered as readers – it was rumoured that a family could be clothed from head to foot for the price of reading the Daily Express for eight weeks. In 1937 the typical popular daily employed five times as many canvassers as editorial staff. It is interesting that Barbara is wont to say in interview, ‘I’d read the whole of Dickens by the time I was twelve,’ because complete sets of Dickens were a typical ‘attraction’ offered to prospective readers – perhaps to Daily Mirror readers in particular, for ‘When I was a child,’ Barbara once said, ‘we had the Mirror in our house and I have always been fond of it.’

Literacy increased throughout the country at this time, partly due to the expansion of the popular press, the sterling work of libraries and the coming of the paperback book. Allen Lane founded the Penguin Press in 1936 and Victor Gollancz set up the Left Book Club in the same year. Literature, as well as books not classifiable as such, was now available to the masses: 85.7 million books were loaned by libraries in 1924, but in 1939 the figure had risen to 247.3 million.

Freda took full advantage. ‘She was a great reader and force-fed books to me. I went to the library as a child. My mother used to take me and plonk me down somewhere while she got her books.’

Armley Library in Town Street was purpose-built in 1902 at a cost of £5,121.14s. It is five minutes’ walk from the family’s first house in Tower Lane and even less from Greenock Terrace, to which the Taylors repaired during the war. Libraries in the North of England are often supreme examples of Victorian architecture, like other corporation buildings an excuse to shout about the industrial wealth of a city. Though Armley’s is relatively small, there is something celebratory about its trim, and the steps leading up to the original entrance give, in miniature, the feeling of grandeur you find in Leeds or Manchester libraries, for example. What’s more, the architect, one Percy F. Robinson, incorporated a patented water-cooled air-conditioning system in the design. ‘It was a beautiful building,’ Barbara agreed when I told her that I was having difficulty getting access to local archives because it was now closed. ‘Don’t tell me they are destroying it!’ she exclaimed in alarm. It was closed in fact for renovation, and today there is a pricey-looking plaque commemorating Barbara’s reopening of it in November 2003.

‘My mother exposed me to a lot of things,’ Barbara continued. ‘She once said, “I want you to have a better life than I’ve had.” She showed me – she taught me to look, she taught me to read when I was very young. She felt education was very important. She would take me to the Theatre Royal in Leeds to see, yes, the pantomime, but also anything she thought might be suitable. For instance, I remember her taking me to see Sadlers Wells when it came to the Grand Theatre in Leeds. I remember it very well because Svetlana Beriosova was the dancer and I was a young girl, fifteen maybe. I loved the theatre and I would have probably been an actress if not a writer. I remember all the plays I was in, the Sunday School plays: I was a fairy – I have a photograph of myself! – and a witch! And then I was in the Leeds Amateur Dramatics Society, but only ever as a walk-on maid. We did a lot of open-air plays at Temple Newsam, mostly Shakespeare. I have a picture somewhere of me in an Elizabethan gown as one of the maids of honour.’ The involvement of Barbara and some of her school-friends in these plays was organised by Arthur Cox, a head teacher in the Leeds education system, whose wife was a teacher at Northcote School, which Barbara attended from 1945. A friend at the time, June Exelby, remembers: ‘We used to go and be extras in things like Midsummer Night’s Dream – as fairies and things like that. Barbara used to particularly enjoy it. I can’t remember whether she was any good at it.’

Affluence in Armley seemed to rise and fall with the topography of the place. Going west from Town Street at Wingate Junction, which was where the Leeds tram turned around in Barbara’s day, up Hill Top Road and over the other side to St Mary’s Hospital and St Bede’s Church, where Barbara went to dances as a girl, the houses were bigger and owner-occupied by the wealthier professional classes: ‘It was considered to be the posh end of Armley,’ she recalled.

Tower Lane, where Barbara lived with Freda and Winston, is a pretty, leafy little enclave of modest but characterful, indigenous-stone cottages. It is set below Hill Top but hidden away from the redbrick industrial terraces off Town Street to the east, in which most of the working-class community lived. It must have seemed a magical resort to Barbara in the first ten years of her life, and certainly she remembered Armley with a fairytale glow when she came to write about it in A Woman of Substance and Act of Will, Emma Harte and Audra Kenton both coming upon it first in the snow.

Audra saw at once that the village of Upper Armley was picturesque and that it had a quaint Victorian charm. And despite the darkly-mottled sky, sombre and presaging snow, and a landscape bereft of greenery, it was easy to see how pretty it must be in the summer weather.

In A Woman of Substance, it is ‘especially pretty in summer when the trees and flowers are blooming,’ and in winter the snow-laden houses remind Emma explicitly of a scene from a fairytale:

Magically, the snow and ice had turned the mundane little dwellings into quaint gingerbread houses. The fences and the gates and the bare black trees were also encrusted with frozen snowflakes that, to Emma, resembled the silvery decorations on top of a magnificent Christmas cake. Paraffin lamps and firelight glowed through the windows and eddying whiffs of smoke drifted out of the chimneys, but these were the only signs of life on Town Street.

It is a little girl’s dream. Although the description is unrecognisable of Armley today, and its ‘mundanity’ is again deliberately discarded when Barbara selects Town Street as the spot where Emma Harte leases a shop and learns the art of retail, setting herself on the road to making millions, we accept it because it was plausible to the imaginative little girl who lived and grew up there: ‘There are a number of good shops in Town Street catering to the Quality trade,’ Blackie tells Emma when she first arrives:

They passed the fishmonger’s, the haberdasher’s, the chemist’s, and the grand ladies’ dress establishment, and Emma recognised that this was indeed a fine shopping area. She was enormously intrigued and an idea 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 house on that cold December day she had wanted it, marvelling at its grandness and delighted with its charming outlook over the garden and the park itself.

A 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 noted the pub on Hill Top Road. Walking as far as we could up Tower Lane would bring us round to it. Later, Doreen Armitage would recall sitting up there ‘with me father and me Uncle Fred; we used to sit there on a Sunday morning.’ Barbara said she used to sit there with Winston: ‘We were probably waiting for the pub to open, I should think! I used to come here with my father, and we would sit outside and my mother would have a shandy. He liked to go out for his pint, you know, and have his bet . . . Ripon, York, Doncaster races. He bred in me a love of horses and racing.’

Barbara’s father, Winston Taylor, was born on 13th June 1900 at 6 Wilton Place, Armley, the first child of Alfred and Esther Taylor. ‘Daddy was called after Winston Churchill, who had just escaped from the Boer War.’ On Barbara’s admission, Winston is Vincent Crowther in Act of Will, the firstborn of Alfred and Eliza Crowther. He is also Emma Harte’s brother, Winston, in A Woman of Substance. ‘The fictional Winston Harte looked like him, thought like him, and had many of his characteristics,’ Barbara told me.

I also learn that she based Emma Harte’s father, ‘Big Jack Harte’, who, as a Seaforth Highlander, fought the Boers in 1900 and ‘could kill a man with one blow from his massive fist’, on Winston’s father, big Alfred Taylor, ‘because a certain ingredient of physical strength was required in the character of Emma’, the woman of substance she was concocting.

‘I loved my grandfather. He was in my mind when I created Jack Harte. He had a moustache, all lovely and furry white, and white hair. Big man, big moustache. He used to hold me on his knee, give me peppermints and tell me stories about when he was a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders. He loved me and I loved him.’

Grandpa Alfred Crowther in Act of Will also serves as a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders, and in A Woman of Substance Emma’s first husband, Joe Lowther, and Blackie O’Neill join the regiment in the First World War.

The real-life Alfred Taylor, who occasioned these many references in Barbara’s fiction, is described as a forgeman on his son Winston’s birth certificate and as a cartman on Winston and Freda’s marriage certificate. Barbara remembers him as the latter, as the Co-op drayman – the man who looked after the horses and drove the cart carrying stores for the Armley link in Britain’s first supermarket chain.

The senior Taylors lived five minutes away from Tower Lane in Edinburgh Grove, off Town Street. ‘The house was a Victorian terraced house with a series of front steps, but also a set of side steps leading down to the cellar kitchen. It was a through-house, not a back-to-back, but I can’t remember if there were doors on both sides. They then moved to 5 St Ives Mount, two streets closer. This was also a Victorian terraced house with front steps down to the cellar kitchen, where you’d always see my grandmother baking. Both were tall houses as I recall.

‘I also liked my grandmother, Esther Taylor. Her maiden name was Spence. She was very sweet and not quite Alfred Crowther’s wife in Act of Will. Eliza Crowther is always the voice of doom, saying, “Happiness, that’s for them that can afford it.” My real grandmother was full of other sayings like, “A stitch in time saves nine”, “You’d better watch your p’s and q’s”, though I do remember her baking like Mrs Crowther – bacon-and-egg pies (we’d call them quiche Lorraine today), also apple pie, and sheep’shead broth and lamb stews. On Saturday morning I used to go for her to the Co-op, but we didn’t call it the Co-op, it was called the Cworp – Armley dialect, I suppose. You could buy everything at the Cworp. It had a meat department, vegetables, groceries, cleaning products . . . She loved me. I think I was her favourite.’

All was as Barbara remembered of her grandparents’ houses, and she went on to tell me about the rest of the Taylor brood. ‘Winston had a sister called Laura, who lived in Farsley, was married and had a child. She was my favourite aunt. She died of lung cancer during the war, when I was about seven; she died at home and it was a horrible death. I remember going to see her. She was a very heavy smoker. After Laura died, her husband went to live with his family with their little boy, but died not long after. Laura Spencer in A Woman of Substance was based on my Aunt Laura, except our family were not Catholic. She was sweet and gentle and so good.

‘Then there was Olive, married to Harry Ogle. He had a motorbike and sidecar. He was in the RAF during the war. They never had children. And Aunt Margery, always called Madge . . . she was beautiful.’

Aunt Margery, I was to learn, had the ‘uncommon widow’s peak above the proud brow’ that was Emma Harte’s and granddaughter Paula’s in A Woman of Substance, and Vincent’s in Act of Will. It did not belong to Barbara, as I had imagined.

‘Madge lived in Lower Wortley. She was married, but didn’t have children either. I remember I was her bridesmaid when I was six. Olive was another favourite aunt. Everybody loved Olive. She managed a confectioner’s shop, Jowett’s at Hyde Park Corner – in Leeds, not London! – and I used to go and see her there. She used to let me serve a customer now and then. She lived in this house at twenty-one Cecil Grove, just the other side of the Stanningley Road, by Armley Park.

‘We would go on picnics together. She always took her knitting. On one occasion, so the story goes, I nearly drowned. Olive suddenly looked up and said to Uncle Harry, “Where’s Barbara?” They couldn’t see me. Then, far out in the river, they saw my dress caught on a dead branch, they saw me actually bob up and go under the water again and I was flailing around because I couldn’t swim. But the branch had hooked into my dress and was holding me up. Today I have a terrible fear of the sea where I can’t put my feet on the bottom. I panic, which I think must go back to that. They got me out in the end, soaked and crying, and dried the dress in the sun, but you know the English sun! They took me home to their house and Auntie Olive ironed the dress and got me back home looking like the starched child that I was.

‘So, Daddy had three sisters, and they spoiled me to death, of course, because two of them didn’t have children. Their brothers were Winston – my father – Jack, Bill, and Don, the youngest, who sadly died just recently. He and his wife, Jean, my one surviving aunt, had a daughter, Vivienne, my only cousin.

‘Jack and Bill Taylor lived at home with my grandmother and never married. I didn’t know them very well. Jack was in the army during the war, I think, and Bill was in minesweepers off the coast of Russia and places like that. Afterwards they came home and lived with my grandma, and then when she died they continued to live in that house – two bachelors, very straight, but very dour. I used to go and see my grandmother, and they would be sitting in their chairs and nobody spoke. I hated it. I wasn’t scared of them, I paid not a blind bit of notice because my focus was somewhere else.

Barbara says she owes her good looks to her father, and that ‘he was very good-looking, dark-haired, green-eyed. My father in particular was always very well dressed and very well groomed, and even today I can’t stand ungroomed men. Any man that I ever went out with before I knew my husband was always good-looking, always well dressed and well groomed. I loved my father. He would have charmed you.’ In Act of Will, Vincent, Winston’s fictional persona, boasts an almost feminine beauty, though ‘there never was any question about his virility’. Barbara describes him in fact and fiction as a natural star, charismatic, one who drew others (especially women) to him by force of personality, dashing looks and more than his fair share of beguiling charm . . . plus he had ‘the gift of the gab’.

Family legend boosted his reputation further with the adventurous story that at fourteen he ran away to sea and signed up in the Royal Navy, forging his father’s signature on the application form. Barbara gives the story to Emma Harte’s brother Winston in A Woman of Substance. It is not too far from the truth. The real Winston did join the Navy, but not until shortly before his sixteenth birthday. His naval record shows that he signed on as Boy (Class II) on 20th May 1916 in Leeds, that he had previously worked as a factory lad, and that he was at this stage quite small – height 5 ft 1 in, chest 31.5 ins. His first attachment was to HMS Ganges, a second-rate, 2284 ton, 84-gun ship with a ship’s company of 800, built of teak in 1816 at the Bombay Dockyard under master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia. By the time Winston joined it, Ganges was a shore-bound training establishment for boys at Shotley Gate. He remained in the Navy until 16th July 1924, when he was invalided out with a serious condition, which could have led to septicaemia and may have been the reason why he subsequently had one leg amputated.

They took him to what was then a naval hospital, Chapel Allerton in Leeds. Today there is still a specialist limb unit there. Barbara recalls that when he was lying in hospital, ‘He said to his mother, “I don’t want to have it off because I won’t be able to dance.” His mother said, “Winston, forget dancing. If you don’t have the leg off, you won’t live.” Gangrene was travelling so rapidly that it had got to the knee. That was why it was taken off very high up. And so he couldn’t dance, but he did go swimming. You can swim with one leg and two arms. He went swimming in Armley Baths.’

One can only speculate on the impact the loss would have had on one so sociable, though Barbara marks him out as pragmatic: ‘I think I take after my father in that way. He didn’t really give a damn what people thought, it was take it or leave me.’ Yet, however brave Winston was, losing a leg would have been a huge thing; it would have taken tremendous determination to lead a normal life. Barbara agreed: ‘He had to prove himself constantly, I think. I didn’t know that when I was growing up.’

The artificial leg he was given was the best available and made of holed aluminium, which according to the specialist at Chapel Allerton would have been light and possibly easy enough to manoeuvre to allow Winston to engage in his favourite pastime, though perhaps not the jitterbug, which was sweeping the country in the years leading up to the war. Some years before rock ’n’ roll, the jitterbug involved the disgraceful practice of leaving hold of your partner and improvising fairly frantic steps on your own. In Act of Will, when Audra meets Vincent at a dance, it is the less demanding waltz that brings them together:

Audra had almost given up hope that he would make an appearance again when he came barrelling through the door, looking slightly flushed and out of breath, and stood at the far side of the hall, glancing about. At the exact moment that the band leader announced the last waltz he spotted her. His eyes lit up, and he walked directly across the floor to her and, with a faint smile, he asked her if she would care to dance.

Gripped by a sudden internal shaking, unable to speak, Audra nodded and rose.

He was taller than she had realised, at least five feet nine, perhaps six feet, with long legs; lean and slenderly built though he was, he had broad shoulders. There was an easy, natural way about him that communicated itself to her instantly, and he moved with great confidence and panache. He led her on to the floor, took her in his arms masterfully, and swept her away as the band struck up ‘The Blue Danube’.

During the course of the dance he made several casual remarks, but Audra, tongue-tied, remained mute, knowing she was unable to respond coherently. He said, at one moment, ‘What’s up then, cat got your tongue?’

She managed to whisper, ‘No.’

Barbara’s parents married on 14th August 1929. Winston was living at 26 Webster Row, Wortley, at the time, and described himself on their marriage certificate as a general labourer, while Freda, of 1 Winker Green, Armley, described herself as a domestic servant even though she had been working as a nurse. ‘I don’t actually know where they met,’ admitted Barbara. ‘Probably at a dance. If my father couldn’t really dance any more because of the leg, perhaps he went just to listen to the music. I actually do think he met her at a dance; they used to have church dances and church-hall dances.’

Although Barbara adored her father, when she was a child there was little openly expressed of the love they shared. ‘He didn’t verbalise it perhaps in the way that Mummy did,’ but the depth of it was expressed in a touching scene one day, which had to do with his artificial leg, symbol of the man’s vulnerability.

It had been snowing and Barbara was walking with her father in Tower Lane when he fell and couldn’t get up because of the slippery snow. ‘He was down on his back, and there was nobody around, and he told me what to do. He said, “Go and find some stones and pile them up in the snow, near my foot.” He was able to wedge his artificial leg against the stones in order to lever himself up. I got him sitting up, I couldn’t lift him. I was six or seven years old. But he managed to heave himself to his feet eventually.’

But at least she had helped him, as she had always longed to do, and now he realised what a practical, efficient doer of a little girl he had fathered. The leg brought him close to her again when he died in 1981. ‘My mother said, “Your father wanted his leg taken back to the hospital.” So my Uncle Don drove me there with it, and three spare legs, and when I handed them over I just broke down in floods of tears. It was like giving away part of him and myself. I was very close to Mummy, but I was close to my father in a different way.’

After Barbara was born in 1933, however, relations between Winston and Freda were not all they might be. I knew that Barbara’s mother Freda didn’t always see eye to eye with Grandma Taylor. In Act of Will tension between wife and mother-in-law is created by Vincent being the favourite son – Grandma Crowther is forever undermining her daughter-in-law’s position. In reality as in the fiction, Winston, I learned, was Esther Taylor’s favourite, and Barbara recalls her father going ‘maybe every day to see his mother. Why do I think my mother always used to say, “I know where you’ve been, you’ve been to . . .”?’

‘Did it used to annoy Freda, his going to see his mother every day?’ I asked.

‘Probably. I should imagine it would. Don’t you think it would?’

I thought it would be perfectly natural, particularly given the proximity of the houses. Extended families were supposed to be the great boon of working-class life, and Freda with her small child would surely have warmed to such support. Wortley, Farsley and Armley – Freda was surrounded by the entire Taylor family and she had been otherwise alone, having been brought up in Ripon.

Barbara’s mother was not by nature big on company however, so perhaps she didn’t find it easy to ‘fit in’ to this extended family scene, which at first must have seemed quite overpowering. She was ‘a very sweet, rather retiring, quiet woman’ in Barbara’s words, ‘rather reserved, shy, but with an iron will’. Freda told Barbara little about her past, only that her parents had brought her up in Ripon and that her father had died. ‘Her mother Edith then married a man called Simpson. There were three daughters, Freda, Edith and Mary, and two sons, Frederick and Norman. I don’t know, to tell you the honest truth, but as far as I remember there was only one Simpson, Norman Simpson.’

I would discover that Freda always had a particularly strong desire to return to the tiny city where she was brought up: ‘My mother always wanted to be in Ripon,’ Barbara recalled. ‘All the time.’

‘You mean, some time after you were born, when you were eight, nine or ten?’ I asked.

‘No, much younger, I went back as a baby.’ Freda took Barbara back to Ripon from when she was a baby and constantly throughout her childhood. Was this a kind of escape? I wondered. Was marriage into the Taylor family so difficult an adjustment? It seemed unlikely, given that Barbara made Winston out to be such a catch and Freda as a woman who, in spite of her reserve, could fight her own corner with Esther.

In the novels we are given a number of reasons for a marriage hitting hard times. In Act of Will Audra is criticised by her mother-in-law for failing to see that her desire to go out to work is flouting the working man’s code, which says that if a wife works, her husband loses his dignity. This is odd, as the mills of Armley and Leeds were filled with working wives, and pretty soon we discover that the real problem is that Audra comes from a better class background. She has fallen on hard times, but – she the lady, he the working man – it can never work, the mother-in-law says.

There may have been similar strife for Freda and Winston. There is speculation that Freda had come, or may have had the impression that she had come, from better stock than Winston. We know that mother-in-law Esther Taylor sounded warnings to Freda that giving Barbara ideas above her station would lead only to trouble. Her counterpart in Act of Will does the same. In the North of England there was a nasty word for girls with big ideas – ‘upstart’. Barbara notes in the novel, ‘the lower classes are just as bad as the aristocracy when it comes to that sort of thing. Snobs, too, in their own way.’

In Everything to Gain, on the other hand, the cause of strife is laid firmly at the husband’s door. Mallory Keswick’s father is ‘very much a woman’s man, not a man’s man . . . He adores women, admires them, respects them . . . he has that knack, that ability to make a woman feel her best – attractive, feminine and desirable. [He] can make a woman believe she’s special, wanted, when he’s around her, even if he’s not particularly interested in her for himself.’

In Act of Will we sense the same about Vincent. There are arguments not only about Audra’s highfalutin ideas, but about Vincent’s drinking and a ‘fancy woman’, and fears that he will leave home and never come back. ‘“Go back to your fancy woman,” I heard that,’ said Barbara. ‘That happened when I was little, I remembered it and I did ask Grandma, “What’s a fancy woman?” And I know that my mother rejected Winston constantly. No, she didn’t talk about it, but I knew about it somehow when I was in my teens. How do children know things?’

Recently, as guest on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Barbara admitted that she hadn’t been able to write Act of Will until after her parents had died, ‘because I really wrote in a sense about this very tumultuous marriage that they had. They were either in each other’s arms or at each other’s throats. He was very good-looking and he had an eye for the girls at times.’ Later, she said to me, ‘But that’s life. I think Winston had a bit of an eye for the ladies, but that doesn’t mean that he did much about it. Listen, the more I write, the more I read of other people’s lives, the more I realise how terribly flawed we all are.’

In the novels this is the message about fathers in general. In Everything to Gain, Mallory Keswick says: ‘He was a human being after all, not a God, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect . . . Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child.’

In Act of Will, although Vincent’s family all dote on him, Grandpa Alfred has ‘no illusions about him’. Vincent has ‘temperament, stubbornness and a good measure of vanity’, and is easily sidetracked from his purpose. His daughter gets her strength of purpose from elsewhere, from her mother’s ‘iron will’, like Barbara.

Despite what Barbara said, that ‘when you are an only child you are a unit more’, one can imagine that this difference in character between mother and father was fertile ground for disagreement, and it is not uncommon for Barbara’s fictional heroines to recall a childhood trauma of expecting the father to up and leave the family home. In Everything to Gain, Mallory is suddenly shaken one day ‘not only by the memory but by the sudden knowledge that all the years I was growing up I had been terrified my father would leave us for ever, my mother and I, terrified that one day he would never come back.’

Mal and her mother discuss Edward, her archaeologist father, in this vein. Mal cannot understand ‘why Dad was always away when I was a child growing up. Or why we didn’t go with him.’ Her mother talks about his not wanting either of them along ‘on his digs’. Mallory is no fool, however. She remembers ‘that fourth of July weekend so long ago, when I had been a little girl of five . . . that awful scene in the kitchen . . . their terrible quarrel [which] had stayed with me all these years.’

In the electoral records of Upper Armley, there is a period when Winston is not included as an inhabitant of the family home. Freda is the sole occupant of electoral age when they are living at Greenock Terrace in 1945, the first record available after the war years (when none were kept), and Barbara considers that ‘the trauma [of expecting the father to leave] must spring from the war years. [In Tower Lane] we had an air-raid shelter at the end of the garden. My mother and I would go in with a torch and I’d worry about where my father was.’

‘Your father was very often not there?’

‘No, he was out having a drink. That was Daddy.’

Besides the Traveller’s Rest on a Sunday, his favourite watering holes were ‘the White Horse, and the other was the Commercial in Town Street. He’d have to walk home, and during the war I thought he was going to be killed,’ said Barbara.

‘So the picture I have is of you and your mother sitting in the shelter. Were you there alone or were the neighbours in there too?’

‘No, it was ours. There were three in a row, but they were awful. There were seats to sit on, but no radio because you couldn’t plug it in, could you? Yes, you put bottles of water and some things in there and a Thermos flask Mummy would fill. A woman wrote a very chastising letter about six months ago saying, “I don’t know who did your research for the Anderson shelters, but they weren’t like you made it out in The Women in His Life. I belong to the Society of Anderson Shelters People,” or whatever . . . she will have been all of eighty!’

‘It must have been strange to be in the dark with nothing to look at or do, in a makeshift shelter and in the knowledge that bombs could rain down on you at any time.’

‘Well,’ Barbara remembered, ‘we had candles and my mother always took a book, because she was a reader. She didn’t knit like my Auntie Olive.’

‘Did you take a book as well?’

‘I can’t remember, but I know that I listened for that unique, very particular step. It was like a missed step – because of the artificial leg, his was not an even step. There was a lot of worry about my father. I used to worry about my father, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

‘Children do worry about their parents,’ I say.

‘Why? A fear of losing them?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I used to worry about him being out when the sirens began to shrill. He always went out, not every night, but some nights a week he’d go down to the local for a pint. Usually he was down at the pub, locked in during the raid, and then later we’d hear his step down the garden. And I’d be so relieved I thought I would cry.’

What we have here is the classic ‘only child’ situation, touching in the extreme. You want to reach back in time and wipe the worry from the busy mind of this girl who took the responsibility for family relations upon herself. In reality, as in Act of Will, the only child was doing a balancing act between mother and father, which can’t have been easy. Barbara would have had to stand alone under the burden of any unhappiness in her parents’ marriage, and it was not done to complain about this. She would have had nobody to understand her worries and grief, and, clearly, the situation between Freda and Winston did become sadly polarised.

One day Barbara said to me about Freda, ‘She neglected my father,’ and, later, that Freda ‘shut the bedroom door’ on Winston. In Everything to Gain, Mal’s parents, like Vincent and Audra in Act of Will, sleep in separate bedrooms, and this is deemed by Mal ‘with a sinking feeling’ to have been the reason why eventually her father must have romanced other women. And it comes out that, yes, her father was having affairs. The hindsight conclusion reached is that the Keswicks were ‘a dysfunctional family’, and the uncertainty of her parents’ marriage made Mal want ‘to have the perfect family when I got married. I wanted to be the perfect wife to Andrew, the perfect mother to Jamie and Lissa. I wanted it all to be . . . to be . . . right . . .’

We see this in Barbara also, when, after her marriage to Robert Bradford in 1963, she wrote a trio of manuals for the American publisher Simon & Schuster about being the perfect wife – How to be the Perfect Wife: Etiquette to Please Him, Entertaining to Please Him and Fashions that Please Him. When a journalist discovered these in the 1980s, the cry went up: Can this be the same woman who created Emma Harte? No journalist had an inkling of the fear out of which Barbara’s desire for an even-keel marriage came.

However, it is also clear in both Act of Will and in reality that Winston, even if he was a bit flighty, was not the crucial factor. What led to separate bedrooms was the mother switching her attention away from the husband to the child – to Barbara – and that happened for reasons that went deeper than sex. One event that conspired to sharpen Freda’s focus on Barbara at the expense of Winston was the tragic death of their firstborn, a boy called Vivian. ‘He died from meningitis six months after he was born and some time before I was born,’ Barbara told me. In a confusing and quite extraordinary and upsetting coincidence, Alfred and Esther Taylor also had a late son called Vivian, who died. ‘She [Esther] would never lock the door at night and her youngest son, Don, who was probably still living at home in those days, said, “Mam, you’ve got to lock your door at night; it’s not safe.” And she’d say, “No, I can’t in case Vivian wants to get in.” He was her last child, I think, and he died as a baby, as a little boy. Then my parents had a son before me, who is Alfie in Act of Will, which is why I had Alfie also die of meningitis. Our Vivian Taylor was six or eight months old when he died, not even a year. It certainly affected my mother’s relationship to me, because she focused every bit of love and attention on me. If there was a purpose in my mother’s life it was me. That’s rather sad actually.’

But there was more to it than Vivian. ‘My mother didn’t want any more children because she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from giving me a better life than she had had,’ Barbara told me. In Act of Will, Audra is fired by her need to redeem her own lost opportunity. No sacrifice is too great to enable her daughter, Christina, to realise the opportunities that were denied her in childhood. There is an obsessive quality about it from the moment Christina is born and her mother announces, ‘I am going to give her the world.’

Barbara remembers well how this was expressed for real in her relationship with Freda: ‘We were very close. I was very close to Mummy. She totally and completely believed in me. There wasn’t a day of her life that if she spoke to me, even after I’d gone to live in London and then America, when she didn’t say, “I love you.” There wasn’t a time when she didn’t tell me that I was the most beautiful and the cleverest and the most talented and the most charming and the most wonderful person and of course that’s not true, we all know that we have faults. But what it did . . . it gave me tremendous self-confidence and a self-assurance that I had even when I was fifteen and sixteen. And she instilled in me a desire to excel. Her message was: “There’s nothing you can’t have if you try hard enough, work hard enough and strive towards a goal. And never, never limit yourself.”’

Barbara took away from their relationship an absolute conviction that she was capable of anything to which she set her mind. Inadequacy was not a concept ever entertained. Her friend Billie Figg noted this as her defining characteristic in her early twenties: ‘What she had was enormously high expectations of herself and a lot of assurance.’

In Act of Will, Vincent fears that Audra’s motivation to do the same for Christina is tinged with obsession. He notes a possessiveness about his wife’s relationship with their daughter, which seems to exclude him, and comes to frighten him. ‘There was a cold implacability in the set of the mouth and the thrust of the jaw, a terrible relentlessness in those extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes . . .’ And Vincent fears, ‘She’s going to make it a crusade.’

Audra announces her intention to give her daughter the world in the hospital, shortly after she is born. Both Audra’s husband, Vincent, and his doctor friend, Mike Lesley, bridle at her naked aggression, not seen before.

When it is all over in the novel, and Audra’s daughter, Christina, is the success she has made her, the girl says: ‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough, or repay you for everything you’ve done for me, Mummy. You’ve been the best, the most wonderful mother in the world.’ But, as Emma’s brother Winston says of his sister towards the end of A Woman of Substance, her success is attributable to ‘Abnormal ambition. Abnormal drive.’

In Act of Will, Vincent, convinced that his wife is victim to irrational forces, shows his mettle in his response to her. He is tender and loving. He masterminds a surprise birthday party for her. There is no hint of violence towards his wife, even when she brings him to his wits’ end with her obsession. Moreover, he gives his wife one hundred per cent support over her sense of loss of status. He could have gained the whip hand in the class turmoil of their relationship – that she always believed she came from a better class than he – but nowhere does he use it as a weapon against her.

Knowing now what happened to Freda in her childhood, and the loss she suffered, knowing what it was that made her so determined that Barbara should have the opportunities that were denied herself, it is safe to say that Winston’s response to Freda (if it is reflected in Vincent’s) was the very best that could have been made. There was in Freda something running deeper even than the loss of her first child, something which possibly no project of success – not even Barbara – could ever quite resolve. Maybe Freda’s mother-in-law, Esther, sensed it was never going to be resolved by her son Winston either – however good he was to her. Reason enough for her unsettled relationship with Freda.

The novels first tipped my research in Freda’s direction, and it was the novels that gave me a sense of the deepest roots of dysfunction I would find. Turning again to Everything to Gain, Mal searches for the reason for her mother’s unhappiness: ‘Perhaps [she] had experienced humiliation and despair and more heartache than I ever realised. But I would never get the real truth from her. She never talked about the past, never confided in me. It was as if she wanted to bury those years, forget them, perhaps even pretend they never happened.’

In Act of Will, Audra’s in-laws are all around her. She loves Vincent, but there is something getting in the way, a feeling of apartness certainly. Is it class, as in the novel? Is the belligerent ‘outsider’ in her really being outed by her better birth? Or is it, as in Everything to Gain, something in her childhood, some loss she suffered?

We never get to the heart of the matter in the fiction (because Barbara didn’t know), but, like Mallory Keswick, we cannot but suspect there is something we are not being told; indeed we only accept Audra’s strangely aggressive love for her daughter in Act of Will because we entertain such a suspicion.

In reality, I was to discover, there was every reason for Freda to behave so. Her story provides the crucial dysfunctional and motivational forces that led to her unique relationship with her daughter and Barbara’s extraordinary will to succeed. Much of it remained hidden during Freda’s lifetime, for Barbara’s childhood ‘was constructed on secrets layered one on top of the other,’ as she wrote in Everything to Gain.

These secrets provided Barbara with many of the narrative possibilities of her best novels, and one reason why they have been so successful is that Barbara is not simply writing good ideas, but ideas that are her inheritance. The novels are the means by which she shares in the experience of her past, her mother’s past, and that of her mother’s own mother. More strangely still, she does so without knowing anything about Freda’s history or that of her maternal grandmother, the extraordinary and beguiling Edith Walker.