The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

with their eyes. And when they had finished they all three agreed that these were the best strawberries they had ever eaten . . .

      The dole, or unemployment benefit, was £1 a week in 1930, thirty shillings for man, woman and child. Barbara’s father may also have received some sort of disability allowance, for he had lost a leg. A day’s work might bring Freda in five shillings, say eighteen shillings a week, cash in hand. That’s only 90p in the British decimalised economy, an old shilling being the current 5p piece, but its value was many times greater. In 1930, best butter cost a shilling a pound, bacon threepence for flank, fourpence-halfpenny for side, fivepence or sixpence for ham, two dozen eggs (small) were a shilling, margarine was fourpence a pound, and one pound of steak and rabbit was a shilling. It was quite possible to live on the Taylor income.

      Indeed, there was money over to maintain Barbara’s ‘ironed look from top to toe, in ankle socks, patent leather shoes and starched dresses’. Her parents, she tells us, were well dressed, too. Of course, it was easier to be well dressed in those days. Men wore suits to work whether they were working class or middle class, and few changes of clothing were actually required; women for their part were adept at making do. There is no doubt also that there was the usual Yorkshire care with money in the Taylor household, which Barbara will tell you she has to this day. Certainly, when she was a child there was money left over for her father’s beer, a flutter on the horses and even for summer holidays, taken at the east coast resort of Bridlington, the seaside holiday being a pastime whose popularity was on the increase, while foreign travel remained an elite pursuit for the very rich.

      Another apparent anachronism of the depressed 1930s is that it was also the decade of the mass communication and leisure revolution, which facilitated industries that would be Barbara’s playground as an adult. British cinema began as a working-class pastime, films offering escapism, excitement and a new focus for hero worship more palatable than the aristocracy, as well as a warm, dark haven for courting couples. The first talkie arrived in Britain in 1929. By 1934 there was an average weekly cinema attendance of 18.5 million (more than a third of the population), and more than 20 million people had a radio in the home.

      Sales of newspapers also burgeoned, with door-to-door salesmen offering free gifts for those who registered as readers – it was rumoured that a family could be clothed from head to foot for the price of reading the Daily Express for eight weeks. In 1937 the typical popular daily employed five times as many canvassers as editorial staff. It is interesting that Barbara is wont to say in interview, ‘I’d read the whole of Dickens by the time I was twelve,’ because complete sets of Dickens were a typical ‘attraction’ offered to prospective readers – perhaps to Daily Mirror readers in particular, for ‘When I was a child,’ Barbara once said, ‘we had the Mirror in our house and I have always been fond of it.’

      Literacy increased throughout the country at this time, partly due to the expansion of the popular press, the sterling work of libraries and the coming of the paperback book. Allen Lane founded the Penguin Press in 1936 and Victor Gollancz set up the Left Book Club in the same year. Literature, as well as books not classifiable as such, was now available to the masses: 85.7 million books were loaned by libraries in 1924, but in 1939 the figure had risen to 247.3 million.

      Freda took full advantage. ‘She was a great reader and force-fed books to me. I went to the library as a child. My mother used to take me and plonk me down somewhere while she got her books.’

      Armley Library in Town Street was purpose-built in 1902 at a cost of £5,121.14s. It is five minutes’ walk from the family’s first house in Tower Lane and even less from Greenock Terrace, to which the Taylors repaired during the war. Libraries in the North of England are often supreme examples of Victorian architecture, like other corporation buildings an excuse to shout about the industrial wealth of a city. Though Armley’s is relatively small, there is something celebratory about its trim, and the steps leading up to the original entrance give, in miniature, the feeling of grandeur you find in Leeds or Manchester libraries, for example. What’s more, the architect, one Percy F. Robinson, incorporated a patented water-cooled air-conditioning system in the design. ‘It was a beautiful building,’ Barbara agreed when I told her that I was having difficulty getting access to local archives because it was now closed. ‘Don’t tell me they are destroying it!’ she exclaimed in alarm. It was closed in fact for renovation, and today there is a pricey-looking plaque commemorating Barbara’s reopening of it in November 2003.

      ‘My mother exposed me to a lot of things,’ Barbara continued. ‘She once said, “I want you to have a better life than I’ve had.” She showed me – she taught me to look, she taught me to read when I was very young. She felt education was very important. She would take me to the Theatre Royal in Leeds to see, yes, the pantomime, but also anything she thought might be suitable. For instance, I remember her taking me to see Sadlers Wells when it came to the Grand Theatre in Leeds. I remember it very well because Svetlana Beriosova was the dancer and I was a young girl, fifteen maybe. I loved the theatre and I would have probably been an actress if not a writer. I remember all the plays I was in, the Sunday School plays: I was a fairy – I have a photograph of myself! – and a witch! And then I was in the Leeds Amateur Dramatics Society, but only ever as a walk-on maid. We did a lot of open-air plays at Temple Newsam, mostly Shakespeare. I have a picture somewhere of me in an Elizabethan gown as one of the maids of honour.’ The involvement of Barbara and some of her school-friends in these plays was organised by Arthur Cox, a head teacher in the Leeds education system, whose wife was a teacher at Northcote School, which Barbara attended from 1945. A friend at the time, June Exelby, remembers: ‘We used to go and be extras in things like Midsummer Night’s Dream – as fairies and things like that. Barbara used to particularly enjoy it. I can’t remember whether she was any good at it.’

      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,