To Blackie’s wife, sweet Laura Spencer, with whom Emma lodges, ‘there was something frightening about her’, the feeling that ‘she might turn out to be ruthless and expedient, if that was necessary. And yet, in spite of their intrinsic difference, they shared several common traits – integrity, courage, and compassion.’ While ‘understanding of problems on a personal level, [she] was hard-headed and without sentiment when it came to business. Joe [Lowther, her husband] had once accused her of having ice water in her veins.’ But granddaughter Paula admires Emma’s ‘integrity in the face of incredible pressure and opposition’, and while she can be ‘austere and somewhat stern of eye’ and there is a ‘canny Yorkshire wariness’ about her, when her guard is down it is ‘a vulnerable face, open and fine and full of wisdom.’
References to Middleham are legion in the novels. In Angel, research for a film takes us there. In Where You Belong Barbara chooses it as the site for the restaurant, Pig on the Roof, and there’s a lovely Yorkshire Christmas there. In Voice of the Heart, Francesca Cunningham guides Jerry Massingham and his assistant Ginny to the castle in search of film locations. Key scenes in the film of A Woman of Substance were shot in the village, and when you climb up the main street towards the castle you will see to your right the iron-work canopied shop, which, though placed elsewhere in Barbara’s imagination, became the film location for Harte’s Emporium (Emma’s first shop in her empire).
When I visited Middleham with Barbara, an army of horses clattered down the road from the castle to meet us, descending from the gallops and tipping me straightaway into the pages of Emma’s Secret and Hold the Dream, where Allington Hall is one of the greatest riding stables in all England. Barbara, however, was back in her childhood with Freda: ‘We’d get the bus to Ripon and then my mother had various cousins who drove us from Ripon to Middleham . . .’
In Hold the Dream, past and present find a kind of poetic resolution in this place. Shane O’Neill believes that he is linked to its history through an ancestor on his mother’s side. It is ‘the one spot on earth where he felt he truly belonged’, and at the end he and Emma’s granddaughter Paula come together there. This sense of belonging plays an important role in the author’s own imaginative life: ‘I have very strange feelings there. I must have been about eight or nine when we first went. I thought, I know this place, as if I had lived there. I want to come back’
No matter whether it is Middleham Castle, Studley Royal or Temple Newsam, Barbara readily enters into an empathic relationship with Freda’s favourite places, feeling herself into their history, and it is a strangely intense and markedly subjective relationship. Talking to me about Temple Newsam in Leeds, she said, ‘I can’t really explain this to you – how attracted I was to the place, my mother and I used to go a lot. It was a tram ride, you’d go on the tram to town and then take another tram . . . or was it a bus? I loved it there, I always loved to go and I felt very much at home, like I’d been there before. Yes, déjà vu. Completely.’
‘Can you think why that was?’ I asked her.
‘No. I have no idea.’
‘Did you say anything about it to your mother at the time?’
‘No, she just knew I loved to go.’
When I drove Barbara to Middleham Castle, we had a similar conversation while exploring what remains of the massive two-storey twelfth-century Keep with Great Chamber and Great Hall above, ‘the chief public space in the castle’, I read from a sign. ‘The Nevilles held court here. Walls were colourful with hangings and perhaps paintings. Clothes were colourful and included heraldic designs . . .’
Barbara interrupted me: ‘I have always been attracted to Middleham and I have always had an eerie feeling that I was here in another life, hundreds of years ago. I know it; why do I know it all? How do I know it all? Was I here? I know this place, and it is not known because I came in my childhood.’
From outside came the sound of children playing. We made our way gingerly up steps nearly one thousand years old, the blue sky our roof now, held in place by tall, howling, windowless walls that supported scattered clumps of epiphytic lichen and wild flowers. Barbara stood still in the Great Hall, taking it all in with almost religious reverence. Then, inevitably, the larking children burst in. She turned, her look silencing them before even she opened her mouth: ‘Now look, you’ve got to stop making a lot of noise. You’re disturbing other people. This is not a place for you to play!’ It was as if they had desecrated a church. We descended to areas which were once kitchens and inspected huge fireplaces at one time used as roasting hearths, and discovered two wells and a couple of circular stone pits, which a signpost guide suggested may have been fish tanks.
‘It was much taller than this, it has lost a lot,’ she sighed, and then asked, ‘Would it have been crenellated?’
I said I thought that likely, adding, ‘It is gothic, dark,’ before my eyes returned to the wild flowers in search of a lighter tone. ‘Look at the harebells,’ I said, but Barbara was not to be deterred. She had come from New York to be there, she wanted me to grasp a point.
‘I don’t understand why I have this feeling. I don’t understand why it is so meaningful to me.’
‘There is a very strong sense of place here,’ I agreed.
‘For me there is.’
I felt a compulsion to test the subjectivity of Barbara’s vision. ‘I think anyone would find that there is a strong sense of place here,’ I said.
She leapt back at me immediately: ‘No, no, I know this, I have been here, not in this life.’ Then, as suddenly, the spell was broken: ‘And then you see, you can go down here . . . I had the feeling as a child, I thought I knew it. I had this really strong pull, and I don’t know why. I feel I was here in that time, in the Wars of the Roses. I feel that I lived here in the time of Warwick.’
An ability to empathise with the spirit of place is a characteristic of all writers grouped together in the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, not least William Wordsworth, whose poem, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’ was one of Freda’s favourites and crops up time and again in Barbara’s novels. The verses tell of an empathic moment in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, near Ullswater in the Lake District, where the poet and his sister, Dorothy, come upon the most beautiful daffodils they have ever seen: ‘Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and peeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew them over the lake . . . ever glancing, ever changing,’ Dorothy recorded in her diary. But Barbara’s déjà vu experiences are different in an important respect from those of the Romantics. For her, sympathetic identification with Middleham Castle or Temple Newsam or Studley Royal always carries with it a conviction not only that the past is contained in the present, but of herself as part of it. The Romantic notion of empathy is absolutely the opposite of this: it is the disappearance of self. Empathy between Keats and the nightingale was contingent on the poet becoming the immortal spirit of the bird. Barbara’s feeling that she has been to a place before, in another life perhaps, comes from somewhere else. The ‘experience’ carries a sense of belonging. She seems on the verge of finding out more about herself by being there. It has something to do with identity.
Also inherent in what she terms déjà vu (literally ‘already seen’) is a feeling of disassociation with what is felt to have been experienced before; a sense of loss, a sense that there is a past which was hers and has been lost to her. Such a sense of loss can be a powerful inspiration for an author. For instance, Thomas Hardy’s novels were inspired by the loss he felt deeply of the land-based,