Man Country

my autumn adventure in Yorkshire

In November, I was meeting a friend in York to drive to Haworth for some  Brontë tourism. The trip was an ambition of mine since having a crisis of writing last year after someone read my notebooks filled with messy outlines for stories I wasn’t sure I would write and other dark mental corners and they felt betrayed. I felt disembowelled, and since then, seemed to be cradling my disgusting innards in my arms to stop them spilling everywhere, the smell emanating in a cloud around me.I needed some female writers to prop me up, to disassemble my self-loathing and tell me to keep going, keep writing.

 I had a few hours to kill before meeting my friend and decided to go to the Jorvic  Viking Centre  having recently had to learn a lot about their influence on British culture for my “Life in the UK” immigration test . I was expecting rusty old swords, scraps of leather that were once shoes, indeterminate rocks. Entering, there was a glass floor over an old archaeological site, where skeletons and oyster shells and other bits and bobs had been found. Staff dressed in  fantasy con-esque outfits spewed facts in chipper university accents (over there was a toilet, just a hole in the ground! Imagine that!) as everyone lined up again as they had outside the centre for the next part of the museum which was an underground ride similar to Disneyland’s It’s a Small World . As you are shut in the ride,  a screen shows Britain speedily going back in time, hitting on facts and faces- Henry the 8^thhere, The Beatles there, until we were back Viking era Britain( Which I always assume was much farther in the past than it was) . The ride, underneath the streets of York, turned a dark corner, and I was suddenly faced with a Viking man, bobbing his head up and down. He wasn’t an actor, but an animatronic mannequin with a straw-coloured beard, a red tunic and a wolf on a chain. There was a whole village of them: Ironworking, haggling for cabbages, butchering eels and meat, performing  mysterious pagan ceremonies and one man, groaned in a small square made of sticks: he was taking a shit, a sign told me. It also told me a lot of the faces were based off of the Viking skeletons found on the same site. It wasn’t a museum but a silicone resurrection. I started to have a panic attack of the uncanny and lay down on the ride bench, but I could feel the mannequins looking at me with their artificial eyes, hear them humming and talking in some earlier form of English.There was a smell, specially produced for the experience, a fishy bloody smell, and beneath it, I was convinced, the awful smell of artificial flesh, or perhaps, as I read later, the aftermath smell of a flood, as this unnatural village had been submerged in filthy river water during a storm. There were animatronic cats with suspiciously real fur meowing. A friend who works at an old bookshop in Edinburgh told me that when renovating recently they found mummified cats in the wall, and it was some sort of centuries old tradition to put them there, for good luck. When the ride ended, there was finally what I had came for: displays of artefacts in glass cases. The first one I saw was a preserved chunk of Viking faecal matter. I ran out.

I went to a Tudor era pub after and wept into a steak pie and multiple  half pints of Guinness to wait for my friend. I don’t know why I didn’t order a whole one.  We tried to do a ghost tour but left after the guide had everyone mock choke each other and called one murderer handsome like the “Johnny Depp of his day” and slipped into an architecturally uneven pub covered in  grimacing and stiffening death masks like moulded white puddings.We went into a little bookshop in the shadow of York Minister cathedral where opening a book on painting, a bunch of newspaper clippings on Eric Gill, a notorious sexual abuser of his daughters and sculptor, fell out of the pages like a textual spectre.

The Brontë parsonage, unlike most houses, is much smaller inside than it looks from the outside. The walls are thick, the second floor landing opens onto five micro rooms. One, called the servant’s room has a bland contemporary art exhibition, another is the fathers room, set up as it would have been with a quilt thrown on a bed and  modest Victorian bric a brac. There is a sliver of a nursery room where the Brontë children wrote their  first amateur stories in tiny letters,a faded drawing one of them did on the wall, and the room which Charlotte  died in, assumingly the sisters bedroom, full of class cabinets containing the sisters sewing kits , embroidery samplers and writing desks. In the centre of the room was a costume from the inaccurate but wildly fun film Emily (2022).  The final room was a project made in part by the poet Simon Armitage, who wrote some bland poems to accompany it.

It was a recreation of what Bramwell Brontë’s room was imagined to look like. Paint, easels, and scraps of poems all over the floor, an unmade bed, oil stains on the walls, animal skulls and little metal sculptures, a stained chamber pot, spilled bottles of laudanum, facsimiles of his sketches and papers. Bramwell, like his sisters had literary and artistic ambitions but no talent or success, despite more access to education and opportunities. He died young, of illness related to substance abuse. Why, is a question Daphne Du Maurier asks, being compelled to write a biography, The Infernal World of Bramwell Brontë,  after visiting the parsonage( one of the special things about visiting is all the women writers who visited before you) .  Of his work, Du Maurier says what is generally accepted, that “a Sunday school child of seven could have done better”  There is “no literary merit” and  “ manner and style are crude”.  There have been unfounded claims he wrote the books and poems of his sisters.

The fantasy Bramwell Room

Bramwell was also arrogant, he sent his poems to Wordsworth ( the contemporary writer fears getting these in their inbox as I am sure Wordsworth did in the post) with a letter which said  “there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence”, obviously excluding himself,  and to Blackwoods’ magazine, upon the death of their writer James Hogg, he said they needn’t worry because now they would have Bramwell to replace him. Neither the poet or magazine replied. There is a tragedy both in his arrogance and lack of talent, but I was left disheartened and baffled at the romanticisation. Why not use the same amount of imagination to recreate one of the rooms the sisters slept in? Sewing kits and writing boards splayed open, crumpled bits of paper, corsets and hairbrushes, a bed for Emily’s dog Keeper which she did a magnificent drawing of, or a room from one of their novels; broken bloodied windows, rancid meat, bowls of burnt porridge, sinister red curtains. There seemed to be discomfort in the fact Bramwell was nothing more than a muse to his sisters, and muses are arbitrary. A spark of something may wrap itself around a person like a swarm of mosquitoes and take some blood but really it could be any old situation you find yourself in or meet, the person who passes through the swarm of you.

Downstairs, in the parlour was the room where Emily died, and where Charlotte continued to write novels despite all her grief, her tiny feet resting on the fireplace. Tea cups placed neatly here and there, and writing paraphernalia. It was basically literary embroidery, neat and quiet, they were engaging in it seemed to say, while the mad delight of genius happened upstairs in Bramwell’s room, though it had no tangible result beyond itself, his potential the most praiseworthy thing. It was a jarring, vintage sexism to encounter in such a place. On the Parsonage museum website, Armitage states he felt sympathetic to Bramwell’s ambitions as a poet. Why not Emily, who was also a poet? 

In the gift shop, there were illustrations of Emily, Anne and Charlotte with large, Bratz style heads.

We went to the church in front of the parsonage, and I cried, cried as I hadn’t in months. I started the process of going off prozac that autumn and everything in life was suddenly was sad and illuminating.

The town of Haworth has little tourist shops selling miniature perfume bottles and soap  wool socks and witchy homewares. The tourist draw is the sisters, but a pub had a sign on it that Bramwell used to drink there. We went to an old-fashioned candy shop to buy black liquorice, salty and vaguely mechanical in shape. It was so cold out, the liquorice, meant to be soft, was hard on our teeth.  Likewise, the sweet shop had fake English Breakfast’s made out of rock candy, a sugary gag. I imagined cruelly, offering it to a man I was angry at for breakfast who would break his teeth and therefore suddenly be silenced. To hide from the cold, we went into a Dickensian looking antique shop which stank and hardly had anything for sale. There was a broken mechanical parrot with real feathers on it, chicken I assume, and a giant stuffed fake elephant which smelled like urine and dirty clothes.Here, was quite simply, an elephant in a room. What was mine? Was the whole point of the shop this, a trick to make you wonder?

The poet Sylvia Plath visited the Parsonage museum, and the area, with her husband Ted Hughes who grew up nearby.  Plath wrote a poem on the experience, titled Wuthering Heights which she imagines, being drawn in and buried underneath the heather of the moors. After her death, she was buried by Ted  Hughes in Hebden Bridge, less than an hour from Haworth. The grave was hard to find. It was on the top of a steep hill. Like Simon Armitage( who has written introductions to Hughes’s poems) Ted Hughes was poet laurate, which allowed him to be buried in Westminster abbey.

The trek up to Sylvia’s grave was so arduous, the gravesite weedy, modern and unsightly, across the road from a church instead of in it,  that it felt like somewhere a Roald Dahl villain would bury their enemy. We brought her flowers, and rubbed some of our lipgloss onto her tomb because it seemed like something she would like. Amoung the weeds on her unkempt graves were soggy letters from bookish girls like ourselves, soon to be no more than paper porridge. I had only learned recently, reading A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Higgs, that Plath had written a second novel, about her divorce, now lost.  On the way down the hill, I kept finding bits of broken, patterned crockery as if someone was smashing teacups as they walked down the same way.  A few weeks later, visiting London, another friend told me she went into a pub in Hebden Bridge which had Ted Hughes poems on the paper placemats, and his family house outside the town is used as a writing centre. There is a cutsification of Ted Hughes, and cottage industry, perhaps helped by the novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers but I don’t think anyone will be making Bratz like illustrations of him soon.

We drove around the moors, listening to 80s new wave music, including the necessary Kate Bush. The landscape was brown and purple, like menstrual blood. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, both alluring and dangerous . It was too cold and wet, to walk on the moors, and too frightening as well, as two women. We thought of the Moors murderers, the Yorkshire ripper, that scene in the Alex Garland film Men (2022) when the female protagonist, on a country walk, sees a naked man in the distance like a moving stone. We didn’t have a large, mastiff like dog like Emily Brontë, to protect us.