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