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.
‘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