Moors and Pity: N M Browne

I grew up in Lancashire but every now and again we would pop into Yorkshire on day trips: Skipton was a favourite for the castle and the shopping, York, especially the museum and, rather less frequently, Howarth. I visited it again recently on a cold wet spring day. I haven't been there for more than thirty years but if felt much the same and the story of the Brontes captured my imagination as it always has. It's a grim location in cold, driving rain, up a steep hill overlooking bleak moorland. The house, though substantial, is a kind of reverse Tardis, smaller than it looks for a large family with servants. You can't help wondering what it was like to live with so little privacy, in that small island of intense creativity where everyone you love dies young. It's a fruitful place for stories. They assault you as you walk around the Parsonage, as you look out at the moor, even as you climb up the main street imagining the trouble of hauling shopping up that incline, encumbered by long skirts that tangle around your legs as you try to stride. Along with every other writer that visits Haworth I have become a little obsessed. I am reading their works again, some of them for the first time. I don't know why I have never read 'Wuthering Heights' unless someone insisted I should and I didn't out of perversity. I was up far too late reading it, unable to put it down. Afer a long period where I've felt little inclination to write longform fiction, I am beginning to feel that restlessness with which I am sure that you are familiar. That strange sense that there is something that I need to be doing. Characters are still shadows whispering to each other slightly out of earshot, but I am straining to listen. I can't be too optimistic; my ideas are barely more than cobwebs and sometimes they fall apart under the gentlest of prodding but it's exciting. I might be at the beginning of a beginning or at the beginning of nothing much at all. I hope it is the former and I am considering digging out my shawl and stout boots for the long haul.