Anne Lister and Shibden Hall

Shibden Hall, home for a time to Anne Lister (bottom centre), "wife" of Ann Walker (top right), subject of Sally Wainwright's forthcoming series, Gentleman Jack, as played by Maxine Peake (in 2010) and Suranne Jones in the new series

Gentleman Jack
Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, Scott and Bailey, To Walk Invisible, Unforgiven amongst many others) is currently preparing an 8-part mini-series about a Yorkshire heroine/anti-heroine/larger-than-life personality, Anne Lister. Anne is going to be played by Suranne Jones, having been played in a one-off film by Maxine Peake in the 2010 Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. The production should be broadcast on the BBC and on HBO during 2019. A family outing to Shibden Hall perched on a south-facing slope in Halfax’s happy valley revealed plenty and to spare about the remarkable Anne Lister.

Images of Anne Lister, Maxine Peake (top right) playing her in 2010, and Helena Whitbread (bottom left) whose careful work has helped decode the millions of words of Anne's secret diaries

A woman ahead of her (and our) time
Determined to become an independent, commercially successful woman, the free-thinking Anne took on the testosterone-heavy might of Industrial England and, in many ways, triumphed. In surprising ways. Having had a passionate affair with a doctor’s daughter, Mariana Belcombe, (an affair that continued after Mariana’s marriage to a wealthy man, an affair that combusted during a weekend in Scarborough), Anne inherited Shibden Hall without the means for its upkeep or to fulfil her plans to enter the coal industry as a mine-owning entrepeneur. She was also lonely. So began a campaign to woo wealthy heiress Ann Walker. Unbelievably (but truthfully) they had their union blessed in a church and wore wedding rings. Despite the sneering of the gentry who nicknamed Anne Lister Gentleman Jack (the title of Sally Wainwright’s script), Anne and Ann were notorious celebrities and were invited to the unlikeliest of soirées.

Shibden Hall

Go to Shibden Hall
Anne’s ambitions to climb mountains and travel to Persia proved her undoing and she contracted a fever aged 49 in what is now modern day Georgia. The grieving Ann had Anne embalmed and took six months to transport the body back to Halfax – you can only imagine the trauma of that journey in the winter of 1840 to 1841. Ann Walker’s own story is just as astonishing as Anne Lister’s. What happened to both women and how we know as much as we do owes a great deal of thanks to a woman called Helena Whitbread who narrates some of the features of Anne’s life in a display at Shibden Hall. The hyperlinks in the first paragraph of this blog will reveal more. I’m looking forward to Gentleman Jack being broadcast but, in the meantime, a visit to Shibden Hall is to be recommended. And, to recover from your awestruck wonder at Anne’s life, call in to nearby Dove Cottage nurseries and hidden garden (open March to September.) Smell nature. Anne Lister, you are remembered. You were a marvel. A force of nature.

The hidden garden at Dove Cottage Nursery near Shibden Hall

God's Own Country

The four principals of Francis Lee's film: Josh O'Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart

Atop the Yorkshire moors
There have been several memorable films shot on Yorkshire locations: the TV Brontë biography by Sally Wainwright To Walk Invisible is a recent good example. I have vivid memories of the visceral 2011 Wuthering Heights directed by Andrea Arnold. From childhood there are of course The Railway Children and Kes. There are notable black and white films of This Sporting Life and Billy Liar as well as popular comedies like Brassed Off, Four Lions and The Full Monty. An American Werewolf in London famously started on the moors and A Month in the Country showed parts of North Yorkshire other than the famous rooflines of Castle Howard (Brideshead Revisited.) The moors are hard to capture but a recent cinema trip has done just that – in a stunningly-photographed tale of muddy love among farmers.

Filmed in Yorkshire: Brideshead Revisited, Billy Liar, The Railway Children, Wuthering Heights, An American Werewolf in London, Brassed Off, Four Lions, A Month in the Country, Kes, This Sporting Life, The Full Monty

God’s Own County….
Angry, miserable, tormented Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) lives with his stroke-stricken Dad, farmer Martin (Ian Hart) and gritty grandmother, Deirdre (Gemma Jones). They struggle to “manage” even though Johnny shouts “I’ll manage” time and again. The family have a broken past and are clinging to their beasts and their land in the hope of making a living. Their lives endure, despite illness and scraping their pennies together. For one week only, Martin brings in the gentle, capable Romanian migrant, Gheorghe (Alex Secareanu) to help Johnny with the lambing – in the hope that Martin himself will be back on the farm before too long. You hope Martin will recover because it becomes obvious that not many people would want to graft such unsociable hours in such conditions; Gheorghe was “the only bugger who applied.” Thankfully, the film suggests, Gheorghe’s less rigid thinking might mean the farm will diversify after the credits roll and maybe survive Brexit.

Francis Lee, director, with cast and producer Manon Ardisson at the Edinburgh Film Festival and cinematographer Joshua James Richards on location in Yorkshire

Believable (grunting) masculinity
There was plenty to talk about after watching the film: in particular, how much sympathy does Johnny deserve given his frequent alcohol-induced vomiting, emotionless shagging and his thuggish refusal to say anything positive to the people who were making an effort to connect with him? (Patsy Ferran’s university friend, Robyn, gave a poignant hint of Johnny’s potential in the eyes of his old school friends)  I felt that Josh O’Connor’s performance was a pitch-perfect portrayal of an emotionally stunted man – and, for me, the film’s depiction of his agonising steps to a better way of being was one of the most moving things I’ve seen in cinema for ages. And all against the background of the Yorkshire moors!

He’s just going to be a runt
The rest of the actors were equally believable in their characterisations: Alex Secareanu played Gheorghe with integrity and magnetism. Gemma Jones and Ian Hart inhabited their steadfast roles with raw naturalism. I don’t want to include any spoilers but those who’ve seen it will know what I mean when I say Deirdre’s laundry/ironing scenes and Martin’s bath-time scene displayed acting skills of the highest order. The poster gives away that the film becomes a love story between Johnny and Gheorghe and their relationship drives the film’s plot, but the unfussy visual symbols (the white trail of an aeroplane, hands, gloves, jumpers/skin, clothes or lack of them, food, milk/cheese, spit, vomit, blood, mud, water, stone, walls, fences, doors, lambs, flowers, the fragility of living things) meant the film operated on a sweeping landscape bigger than two men in love. Sometimes you can’t let a runt fail…. people, like premature lambs, deserve a chance to live a life. They might only need a new coat (or jumper) –  I know this to be true, both from my years of teaching and from life’s bruises. Congratulations to the director, Francis Lee, local lad, for creating a celluloid work of art. And hats off to cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, for capturing the bleak beauty of what is, in my view, a universalised Yorkshire story with a beating heart.

Bradford Literature Festival 2017

Bradford Literature Festival 2017
The cover of the booklet proclaimed 400 writers, 300 events, 10 days, 1 city
I listened to 28 speakers in 10 events over 4 days
I felt insanely proud of the city where I live for hosting such an event – the fourth year now and getting stronger each time. A thousand congratulations to the driving forces: Syima Aslam, Irna Qureshi and their superb team.

Bradford Waterstones in the old Wool Exchange

Inclusive, surprising, chock-a-block with surprising juxtapositions
I’ve been to a number of literary and writing festivals during my lifetime but I haven’t experienced one with such a variety: from Harry Potter spell-making to Pakistani politics, from Jane Austen to Rebel Girls, from Star Wars to Cricket, from LGBTIQ events to J B Priestley, from Waris Shah’s epic love love poem to lessons on how to avoid writing bad sex scenes. The organisers seem to be fearless and determined to put in something for everyone. And everyone, it seemed, turned out.

Bradford: City Square, City Hall, R C Bridgestock in the Victorian courtroom (see below)

City square in the sun
I found something on both weekends to intrigue and pull me in. But my abiding memory of the festival might be sitting in City Square watching the fountains play and being astonished (and moved) by the smiling crowds going in and out of the book tent, by the individuals, friends, strangers, families, young, old, all ethnicities, all backgrounds and all types watching the pop-up entertainments. Many, I’m sure, were as equally contented as me that, after all the metaphorical earthquakes in the political world in recent years, the evidence of people congregating at the Bradford Literature Festival shows that the human race is overwhelmingly peaceful, loving, investigative and open-hearted. Culture and the arts celebrate communities, spread ideas and, yes, it’s true, they advance civilisation. Much to learn. Much to debate. Much to ponder. Much to love.

Samantha Ellis's book, the Arabian Nights event (Abdul-Rheman Malik, Robert Irwin and S F Said); the Arthurian legends (Kirsty Logan, Reluca Radulescu and Remona Aly); and Game of Thrones: Myths and History (Tom Huddleston and Carolyne Larrington)

So what did I learn, debate, ponder and love?

Book Bidding Wars

• Inside City Hall is as jaw-dropping as the outside, inspired as it is by the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence
• The women from the publishing industry who spoke at this event were inspiring, funny and encouraging (thank you Ailah Ahmed, Danuta Kean, Lisa Milton and Kate Nash)
• Update on my Rhenium Tales efforts: the arc of my second book is laid out with some material already dumped there because I’ve cut it out of Book One
• Book One, Raydan Wakes, is in the final stretch of complete first draft at 111,000 words split into 15 chunky chapters, each divided into three sections….
• Nothing at this event made me think I should stop writing and editing, writing and editing….

The Arthurian Legend and its Enduring Appeal

• Remona Aly (journalist and broadcaster) was an endearing and enthusiastic chair whose expressions of her fandom articulated exactly my own Arthurian obsessions (and that's what's great about the festival: where the internal worlds of a white Roman Catholic in his 50s and a young Muslim woman can meet in an unlikely space....)
• Kirsty Logan inspired me to buy her book The Gracekeepers 
• I wish I’d been taught at university by Professor Reluca Radulescu
• The three women debated the crux of the Arthurian canon: the fruitful jostle between the imaginative, the scholarly, the historical, the gender-focused, the patriotic, the European and the romantic approaches
• The Tag “King Arthur” in the list to the right will demonstrate how much I wallowed in this event

Arabian Nights: the Original Science Fiction

• There are way more stories in the Arabian Nights collection than I knew of
• From oral tradition to the printed collection(s) on shelves now, the journey of The Arabian Nights is fraught with cultural, political and linguistic complexities
• There are some wild and wonderful stories I never knew containing prophetic imaginings and leaps of technology
• The Arabian Nights is more mind-boggling and enticing than I thought before
• I need a new translation (thank you Abdul-Rehman Malik, Robert Irwin and S F Said)

Game of Thrones: Myths & History

• Tom Huddleston (author and film journalist) and Professor Carolyne Larrington (Oxford) made a brilliant double act with well-prepared questions (Tom) and authoritative answers (Carolyne) and conversation that was mesmerisingly entertaining (both of them, thank you)
• Another event, like the King Arthur session, that explored how history, geography, politics, gender studies, fiction and the imagination can work together to brew sci-fi and fantasy
• They revelled in the North-South divide of York/Lancaster and Stark/Lannister which tickled me to bits
• They revealed some crazy medieval anecdotes and prompted me to make four pages of notes

The Books they don’t want you to read

• Kevin Duffy helps run Bluemoose books which published STOP! Don’t read this by Leonora Rustamova and her students, a story which is worth researching if you don’t know it (click here)
• Melvin Burgess (who wrote two of my favourite “Young Adult” books Bloodtide and Bloodsong) is much more genial than I expected
• Tariq Mehmood is a funny guy – and sometimes scary in his emphatic challenges – but whose book You’re not proper is one I’m looking forward to reading
• All three men wrangled around the subject of banning books and acknowledged the empty chair reserved for Juno Dawson who had withdrawn from the festival for reasons which could be seen as ironic given the topic of this event – complex times – so I hope one day I’ll be able to hear Juno talking about her work; she would, I think, have had a different perspective to the three men on the panel, all of whom were interesting....

Branwell Brontë, Juliet Barker, the Bidding Wars panel (Lisa Milton, Ailah Ahmed, Kate Nash, Danuta Kean), Samantha Ellis, Michael Stewart, Louise Doughty and Robert Edric

And on the second weekend?

The Missing Brontë

• Juliet Barker really is the best speaker about the Brontës on the circuit
• She showed us extraordinary images of the Haworth Parsonage and analysed the ‘gun portrait’ in a fresh way
• She painted a picture of Branwell that was complicated and sympathetic, believable and sad
• She made a strong case for Branwell’s role in pushing the imaginative lives of the sisters when they were children

Inspired by the Brontës

• Samantha Ellis, author of Take Courage (about Anne Brontë) and How to be a heroine, is an absolute delight and would be a great dinner party guest
• Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard, won a place to be at the same dinner party; both she and Samantha Ellis spoke with humour and passion about the Brontës and how their writing had influenced their work
• I tried to ignore Robert Edric who seemed to be there under false pretences; and Michael Stewart (writer) asked some good questions and some rubbish questions; but luckily the two women had enough to say and illuminated the theme of the event

Boyd Tonkin and Germaine Greer

Gender Expectations in the Lives of the Brontës

• Boyd Tonkin (writer, journalist, editor) commented intelligently and asked pertinent questions
• Germaine Greer (academic, environmentalist) said a lot, often wittily, always memorably, frequently debatable
• On signing “To Tony” inside one of her Shakespeare books for me at the end, formidable Germaine looked me in the eye and said “I have a cousin called Tony who exposed himself to my little sister.” Which meant I forgot just about everything else she’d said earlier, except I remember that she admitted she didn’t know Wuthering Heights well, even though she was happy to deliver strong opinions about it.
• Greer’s book Shakespeare’s Wife is a brilliant account of Elizabethan/Jacobean social history so I’ll always be a Germaine fan because of it. But I’ll avoid listening to her talking about the Brontës in the future. She ain’t got nothing useful to say about them. Entertaining. Thought-provoking. Occasionally stubbornly wrong. Juliet Barker beats her hands down. Not that it’s a competition…

A Man’s Game

• Ross Raisin (ex Bradford Grammar School, award-winning author) is a thoughtful and philosophical speaker; his first novel God’s Own Country was (imho) an absorbing and poetic read; I got a copy of his latest A Natural signed at this event
• David Park is a Belfast-born writer whose words inspired me to buy his collection of short stories, Gods and Angels, so I’ll look forward to reading that
• Ellis Cashmore (sociologist and cultural critic) moderated, intervened, provoked and enjoyed his own thought processes awfully much
• Will women’s sport ever (again) receive as much media attention and financial investment as male sport?
• I was interested to learn how in the early part of the 20th Century women’s football flourished and was then banned by the FA….
• Is there a modern crisis of masculinity?
• Do fiction writers have any responsibility in attempting to portray an ‘ideal’ man?

Ellis Cashmore, Ross Raisin, David Park, A Natural, Melvin Burgess and the Banned Book event (Kevin Duffy, Melvin Burgess and Tariq Mehmood)

Realism in Crime Fiction & Tour of the Bradford Police Museum

• Who knew there was a fascinating Police Museum housed in City Hall? I know now.
• Who knew there were Victorian police cells to visit and an astonishing Victorian courtroom, often hired by film and TV production companies? I know now.
• R C Bridgestock (aka husband-and-wife team Bob and Carol) gave an entertaining account of their careers in the police force, their transition to writing crime fiction and their forays into consulting on series’ like Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley 
• Bob and Carol were generous in their enouragement and writing tips
• Pamela Clare, make-up artist, showed astonishing skill in demonstrating gruesome facial injuries on audience members
• Martin Baines was an informative, entertaining and thoughtful guide round the fascinating bowels of City Hall and revealing insights into the past (and present) practices of police custody
  

I’m already anticipating Bradford Literature Festival 2018

The founders of the BLF: Syima Aslam and Irna Quresh

"Her strong imperious will"

Apologies to the copyright holder of some photo I posted in a collage somewhere in this blog. I removed what I thought was the copyrighted infringement but have been informed again that something else needs removing (maybe I removed the wrong one first time?) so I have removed all the collages. It would have been more helpful if the person whose copyright I had infringed had just left a message on the blog, specifying which picture it was. As it is, I'll leave this as an illustration-free post. 

Invisible No More

All members of the Brontë family have their supporters and detractors. Around anniversaries or around new TV or film productions, commentators in The Media try to whip readers and viewers into declaring for Team Charlotte or Team Anne in pursuit of some fresh angle. The men at the Haworth Parsonage (father Patrick, brother Branwell and short-time husband of Charlotte, Arthur Bell Nicholls) often receive dismissive attention or downright hostility. One of the things I found impressive about Sally Wainwright’s fictional biographical film about the Brontës, To Walk Invisible, was its atmosphere of a busy town with family, servants, neighbours, acquaintances and employers swirling around the talented sisters and influencing them just as much as they influenced each other. Haworth was by no means a backwater in the mid-Victorian period. Prompting this blog is the news that Sally Wainwright is coming to the Ilkley Literature Festival to talk about To Walk Invisible and Sally-partner-wife-friend was quick off the mark to get tickets so I’m looking forward to that.

“Team Emily”

It’s no surprise that, if a Hogwarts Sorting Hat were to hover over me, I’d be in Team Emily. I’ve already declared that Charlotte’s Villette is my personal favourite of the Brontë novels and I have family reasons to have a deeply-felt admiration for Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The mythic archetypes and tropes of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are lodged deep within the DNA of all readers (and writers, for that matter.) But the writer of Wuthering Heights, and indeed Wuthering Heights itself, exercises my imagination and passion above all other facets of Brontëana. (Shirley, The Professor and Agnes Grey are still in my to re-read pile; in fact I think I’ve never read The Professor or Agnes Grey….must put that right!)

The tallest Brontë

Some aspects of Emily Brontë’s biography are agreed upon because of the consistency of the evidence:

• she always seemed tall – and taller than the other siblings
• she was the fifth of six children, her two eldest sisters dying in childhood
• she liked walking
• she was stubborn and willful
• she loved her bulldog Keeper who, when Emily died, “followed her funeral to the vault” and, according to Charlotte was “lying in a pew couched at our feet while the burial service was being read"
• my writer friend, Kerry Madden, reminds me of the story we heard when visiting the Parsonage in May 2014, that, when returning from Anne’s funeral in Scarborough, the Parsonage dogs bounded out to greet the arrivals but Keeper howled when only Charlotte appeared and proceeded to whimper outside Emily’s door for days to come
• she had only nine months of formal education in two stints aged 6 and 17
• at Cowan Bridge School (age 6) her report card reads Emily Brontë… reads very prettily and works a little 
• her father gave her, her brother and surviving sisters a box of toy soldiers in 1826 and this fired their imaginations
• in childhood she wrote chronicles of Gondal with Anne, whilst Charlotte and Branwell wrote the imaginary history of Angria

Strong imperious will

• she spent some time (unhappily) in Brussels learning to be a teacher before returning for her Aunt Branwell’s funeral (which she missed)
• the headmaster of the school in Brussels, Monsieur Heger, wrote of Emily: “She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.” 
• she learned some German
• she liked reading Sir Walter Scott, Shelley and Byron
• she enjoyed reading the lurid (and often violent) tales in Blackwood’s Magazine
• her poetry was admired by Charlotte and Anne
• she put out a fire at the Parsonage after Branwell upset a lighted candle
• she self-cauterised a wound from a dog bite
• she attended the funeral of her brother in September 1848
• she died of TB six days before Christmas Day in 1848.

Charlotte lived just long enough to understand the Brontë novels were gaining some critical acclaim and popularity, but not to appreciate just how phenomenal their popularity would still be in 2017. What would Emily have made of tourists running about the moors shouting “Heathcliff….Cathy….”?

To Walk Invisible

Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside

One of my favourite programmes over the 2016/17 New Year period was the Sally Wainwright-penned snippet of “Brontëana” To Walk Invisible. It was a treat to see the location-shooting (some sets were built on Penistone Hill, not far from Haworth, and the costumes and set dressing were impeccable.) The actors were uniformly strong:

• Charlotte, determined, industrious and judgmental: Finn Atkins 
• Emily, fierce, private and funny: Chloe Pirrie 
• Anne, generous, peace-loving and wise: Charlie Murphy 
• Branwell, disappointed, frustrated and self-sabotaging: Adam Nagaitis 
• Reverend Patrick Brontë, stoical, dignified and proud of his daughters: Jonathan Pryce

Moors above Haworth

Blazing imagination
What I found most impressive about the production was the selection of detail, given the amount that could have been included. I think Sally Wainwright’s script had a distinctive “take” which captured less mythologised aspects of Haworth’s famous inhabitants:

• the blazing childhood imaginations run riot
• the importance on Anne and Branwell of the Robinson household at Thorp Green Hall
• the focus on the three years of reunion (1845 – 1848) which brought the remaining family together after various working excusions
• the shocking impact on the whole family of Branwell’s complicated demons, petulant behaviour and fatal illness
• the believable relationships between father and offspring, between Emily and Branwell, between the sisters 
• the distinctive qualities of each member of the family
• the palpable presence of the Brontë neighbours, servants and friends
• the comic thrill and awe of Currer and Acton turning up at George Smith’s office in London

New Year's Eve 2016 with Michael, Janet and Alex walking to Top Withins

Emily Brontë’s undated untitled poetry

I’ve quoted from the following stanzas before (here, in July 2016) but I thought I’d put the whole sequence down in celebration of To Walk Invisible, in tribute to the glories of the Yorkshire moors and in memory of what I did in the hours before the Murder Mystery Game Death by Chocolate. Wherever I go, whatever I do and whatever happens after I am long gone, the moors above Haworth will remain. I’ve already recorded that it’s one of the best places I know to blow away cobwebs and get perspective. In her stanzas about walking, Emily Brontë makes the point that walking is the place to leave behind “busy chase of wealth and learning” and she goes where her instincts take her, to a place where you can see Heaven and Hell clearly, a place where the contrary sides of human experience can be “centred.” Since the stanzas are undated and untitled, I’ve taken the liberty of giving them a title, snatched from a repeated phrase inside the sequence.

I’ll walk…. by Emily Brontë

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

This England: Bluebells

A walk in the woods
The planet turns, life goes on, humans connect and we go for a walk in the woods.

Badby Bluebell Woods - all photos by Harriet

The famous Badby bluebells
I mentioned “Badbeee” in the blog “Living in the South” (here) and last weekend that’s where we stayed for a weekend checking out the latest Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Company.  The production was fascinating and I expect I'll blog about it in the future but another memorable and relaxing activity was a Saturday afternoon walk in the famous Badby Bluebell Woods.

Paths in the wood - all photos by Harriet

Happy Valley
Both Emily and Anne Brontë penned a poetic tribute to the bluebell, catching (as they would) the heartbreaking ambiguity of this tough perennial.  It was exciting to learn that Sally Wainwright is scripting a new drama about the life of the Brontës.

Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley, a 1979 French film poster

Happy Valley was one of the most compelling TV series I’ve seen in recent times. Her earlier work is also distinctive in giving natural voices to ordinary people and effortlessly fulfilling the Bechdel test with great roles for actresses.

I'm expecting the characters of Charlotte, Emily and Anne to have plenty to say to each other in Sally Wainwright's script - and rarely about men.  The bluebell poems of the Haworth sisters are interesting to compare and I copy them below for those who have time to pause.

Badby Bluebell Woods - all photos by Harriet

The Bluebell by Anne Brontë

A fine and subtle spirit dwells
In every little flower,
Each one its own sweet feeling breathes
With more or less of power. 

There is a silent eloquence
In every wild bluebell
That fills my softened heart with bliss
That words could never tell.

Yet I recall not long ago
A bright and sunny day,
'Twas when I led a toilsome life
So many leagues away;

That day along a sunny road
All carelessly I strayed,
Between two banks where smiling flowers
Their varied hues displayed.

Before me rose a lofty hill,
Behind me lay the sea,
My heart was not so heavy then
As it was wont to be.

Less harassed than at other times
I saw the scene was fair,
And spoke and laughed to those around,
As if I knew no care.

But when I looked upon the bank
My wandering glances fell
Upon a little trembling flower,
A single sweet bluebell.

Whence came that rising in my throat,
That dimness in my eye?
Why did those burning drops distil —
Those bitter feelings rise?

O, that lone flower recalled to me
My happy childhood's hours
When bluebells seemed like fairy gifts
A prize among the flowers,

Those sunny days of merriment
When heart and soul were free,
And when I dwelt with kindred hearts
That loved and cared for me.

I had not then mid heartless crowds
To spend a thankless life
In seeking after others' weal
With anxious toil and strife.  

'Sad wanderer, weep those blissful times
That never may return!'
The lovely floweret seemed to say,
And thus it made me mourn.

Badby Bluebell Woods - all photos by Harriet

The Bluebell by Emily Brontë

The Bluebell is the sweetest flower
That waves in summer air:
Its blossoms have the mightiest power
To soothe my spirit's care.

There is a spell in purple heath
Too wildly, sadly dear;
The violet has a fragrant breath,
But fragrance will not cheer,

The trees are bare, the sun is cold,
And seldom, seldom seen;
The heavens have lost their zone of gold,
And earth her robe of green.

And ice upon the glancing stream
Has cast its sombre shade;
And distant hills and valleys seem
In frozen mist arrayed.

The Bluebell cannot charm me now,
The heath has lost its bloom;
The violets in the glen below,
They yield no sweet perfume.

But, though I mourn the sweet Bluebell,
'Tis better far away;
I know how fast my tears would swell
To see it smile to-day.

For, oh! when chill the sunbeams fall
Adown that dreary sky,
And gild yon dank and darkened wall
With transient brilliancy;

How do I weep, how do I pine
For the time of flowers to come,
And turn me from that fading shine,
To mourn the fields of home!