The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

rest.’

      From an early age he gave the impression of a man awaiting his moment, of a ‘depth of will’ as yet untapped but equal to any challenge that truly merited his time. And when the moment came, when the dream promised to become the man, he recognised it, gave up his subordinate role without second thought, seized it and won it, not with sleight of hand, subterfuge or trickery, but with valour, the occasion the defeat of the King’s troops in the city of St Albans in 1455.

      His role had been as back-up to the dukes of York and Salisbury against forces raised by Somerset from a full quarter of the nobility of England. They had approached the city making clear their intention to rescue the King from the clutches of Margaret of Anjou, beautiful and feisty niece of Charles VII of France and now wife of King Henry and the divisive force in the land. When battle commenced in the narrow lanes that led up to Holywell, York and Salisbury found themselves in serious difficulties and it was then that Warwick took it upon himself to lead his men forward on the run, dashing across domestic gardens and through private houses to attack Somerset’s men from the rear. From the moment his archers burst into St Peter’s Street shouting ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ his reputation flew. With ‘Somerset’s host broken,’ as Kendall describes, ‘Warwick, York and Salisbury approached the peaked King, standing alone and bewildered in the doorway of a house, his neck bleeding from an arrow graze. Down on their knees they went, beseeching Henry the Sixth for his grace and swearing they never meant to harm him. Helplessly, he nodded his head. The battle was over.’

      There is in Kendall’s Warwick the same unifying robustness to which the nation rises when the England rugby team presses its game to the end, seizing the Webb Ellis trophy against a background of fans clad in the livery of St George. What Kendall is identifying is what attracts Barbara to Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher: the character that won us an Empire and coloured what is understood to be our very Englishness.

      It is a spirit often given to excess, bigotry, even fanaticism, so that Barbara can say defensively and with evident contradiction: ‘There was no bigotry in our family. The only thing my father said was, “Nobody listens to Enoch Powell.”’ But there is no hint of fanaticism in Barbara’s ideals. It is not in her character to support it, and through husband Bob, a German Jew, dispossessed by the Nazis as a boy, Barbara is alert to the danger more than most. She would probably avoid politics altogether if she could, and draws any political sting in the novels by introducing a crucial element of compassion in her heroic notion of power.

      In the young Warwick, Barbara found the epitome of the person of substance for whom integrity is all. In her novels, power is ‘the most potent of weapons’, and it only corrupts ‘when those with power will do anything to hold on to that power. Sometimes,’ she tells us in full agreement with the Warwick legend, ‘it can even be ennobling.’

      The character of Warwick that got through to Barbara encompassed more than soldier values. The fierce loyalties of those times were, in young Warwick’s case, not forged in greed, nor were they all about holding on to, or wresting, power from an opponent for its own sake. Long before he fell out with his protégé Edward and, embittered, took sides against him; long before he ‘sold what he was for what he thought he ought to be’, as Kendall put it, his purpose really was to defend the values which true Englishmen held as good.

      Freda made sure that Barbara picked up on this heroic aspect. As a child, her mother ‘instilled in her a sense of honour, duty and purpose’, the need for ‘integrity in the face of incredible pressure and opposition’ and ‘not only an honesty with those people who occupied her life, but with herself’. These noble values arise in Act of Will and A Woman of Substance, but they first found impetus in Freda’s expeditions into Wensleydale; they are what Barbara always understood to be the values of the landscape of her birth. The seed took root when Freda led her by the hand up the hill through Middleham into the old castle keep, even if she was unable to articulate and bring it to flower until she sat down many years later to write A Woman of Substance.

      In the novel, Paul McGill recognises the woman of substance in Emma with reference to Henry VI – ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’. The heroic values Barbara garnered in her childhood as a result of Freda’s influence – the sense of honour, duty and purpose – ensures a strong moral code. ‘Emma has such a lot of inner strength,’ as Barbara says, ‘physical and mental strength, but also an understanding heart. She is tough, but tough is not hard,’ an allusion that brings us from Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, who once said, ‘I love tough broads but I can’t stand hard dames.’

      Emma is tireless, obsessive, ruthlessly determined and dispassionate. She has a ‘contained and regal’ posture, there is an imperiousness about her, but she is also ‘fastidious, honest, and quietly reserved’. She wears a characteristically inscrutable expression and cannot abide timidity where it indicates fear of failing, which she says has ‘stopped more people achieving their goals than I care to think about.’ She is physically strong and has a large capacity for hard work. ‘Moderation is a vastly overrated virtue,’ she believes, ‘particularly when applied to work.’ Emma is ‘tough and resilient, an indomitable woman’, with ‘strength of will’ and ‘nerves of steel’. To her PA, Gaye Sloane, she is ‘as indestructible as the coldest steel’.

      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