The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford. Piers Dudgeon

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СКАЧАТЬ her back into the past.’ (A Woman of Substance)

      ‘My father used to walk up here sometimes and go for a drink at the Traveller’s Rest,’ Barbara says, breaking the silence. I had already noted the pub on Hill Top Road. Walking as far as we could up Tower Lane would bring us round to it. Later, Doreen Armitage would recall sitting up there ‘with me father and me Uncle Fred; we used to sit there on a Sunday morning.’ Barbara said she used to sit there with Winston: ‘We were probably waiting for the pub to open, I should think! I used to come here with my father, and we would sit outside and my mother would have a shandy. He liked to go out for his pint, you know, and have his bet . . . Ripon, York, Doncaster races. He bred in me a love of horses and racing.’

      Barbara’s father, Winston Taylor, was born on 13th June 1900 at 6 Wilton Place, Armley, the first child of Alfred and Esther Taylor. ‘Daddy was called after Winston Churchill, who had just escaped from the Boer War.’ On Barbara’s admission, Winston is Vincent Crowther in Act of Will, the firstborn of Alfred and Eliza Crowther. He is also Emma Harte’s brother, Winston, in A Woman of Substance. ‘The fictional Winston Harte looked like him, thought like him, and had many of his characteristics,’ Barbara told me.

      I also learn that she based Emma Harte’s father, ‘Big Jack Harte’, who, as a Seaforth Highlander, fought the Boers in 1900 and ‘could kill a man with one blow from his massive fist’, on Winston’s father, big Alfred Taylor, ‘because a certain ingredient of physical strength was required in the character of Emma’, the woman of substance she was concocting.

      ‘I loved my grandfather. He was in my mind when I created Jack Harte. He had a moustache, all lovely and furry white, and white hair. Big man, big moustache. He used to hold me on his knee, give me peppermints and tell me stories about when he was a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders. He loved me and I loved him.’

      Grandpa Alfred Crowther in Act of Will also serves as a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders, and in A Woman of Substance Emma’s first husband, Joe Lowther, and Blackie O’Neill join the regiment in the First World War.

      The real-life Alfred Taylor, who occasioned these many references in Barbara’s fiction, is described as a forgeman on his son Winston’s birth certificate and as a cartman on Winston and Freda’s marriage certificate. Barbara remembers him as the latter, as the Co-op drayman – the man who looked after the horses and drove the cart carrying stores for the Armley link in Britain’s first supermarket chain.

      The senior Taylors lived five minutes away from Tower Lane in Edinburgh Grove, off Town Street. ‘The house was a Victorian terraced house with a series of front steps, but also a set of side steps leading down to the cellar kitchen. It was a through-house, not a back-to-back, but I can’t remember if there were doors on both sides. They then moved to 5 St Ives Mount, two streets closer. This was also a Victorian terraced house with front steps down to the cellar kitchen, where you’d always see my grandmother baking. Both were tall houses as I recall.

      ‘I also liked my grandmother, Esther Taylor. Her maiden name was Spence. She was very sweet and not quite Alfred Crowther’s wife in Act of Will. Eliza Crowther is always the voice of doom, saying, “Happiness, that’s for them that can afford it.” My real grandmother was full of other sayings like, “A stitch in time saves nine”, “You’d better watch your p’s and q’s”, though I do remember her baking like Mrs Crowther – bacon-and-egg pies (we’d call them quiche Lorraine today), also apple pie, and sheep’shead broth and lamb stews. On Saturday morning I used to go for her to the Co-op, but we didn’t call it the Co-op, it was called the Cworp – Armley dialect, I suppose. You could buy everything at the Cworp. It had a meat department, vegetables, groceries, cleaning products . . . She loved me. I think I was her favourite.’

      All was as Barbara remembered of her grandparents’ houses, and she went on to tell me about the rest of the Taylor brood. ‘Winston had a sister called Laura, who lived in Farsley, was married and had a child. She was my favourite aunt. She died of lung cancer during the war, when I was about seven; she died at home and it was a horrible death. I remember going to see her. She was a very heavy smoker. After Laura died, her husband went to live with his family with their little boy, but died not long after. Laura Spencer in A Woman of Substance was based on my Aunt Laura, except our family were not Catholic. She was sweet and gentle and so good.

      ‘Then there was Olive, married to Harry Ogle. He had a motorbike and sidecar. He was in the RAF during the war. They never had children. And Aunt Margery, always called Madge . . . she was beautiful.’

      Aunt Margery, I was to learn, had the ‘uncommon widow’s peak above the proud brow’ that was Emma Harte’s and granddaughter Paula’s in A Woman of Substance, and Vincent’s in Act of Will. It did not belong to Barbara, as I had imagined.

      ‘Madge lived in Lower Wortley. She was married, but didn’t have children either. I remember I was her bridesmaid when I was six. Olive was another favourite aunt. Everybody loved Olive. She managed a confectioner’s shop, Jowett’s at Hyde Park Corner – in Leeds, not London! – and I used to go and see her there. She used to let me serve a customer now and then. She lived in this house at twenty-one Cecil Grove, just the other side of the Stanningley Road, by Armley Park.

      ‘We would go on picnics together. She always took her knitting. On one occasion, so the story goes, I nearly drowned. Olive suddenly looked up and said to Uncle Harry, “Where’s Barbara?” They couldn’t see me. Then, far out in the river, they saw my dress caught on a dead branch, they saw me actually bob up and go under the water again and I was flailing around because I couldn’t swim. But the branch had hooked into my dress and was holding me up. Today I have a terrible fear of the sea where I can’t put my feet on the bottom. I panic, which I think must go back to that. They got me out in the end, soaked and crying, and dried the dress in the sun, but you know the English sun! They took me home to their house and Auntie Olive ironed the dress and got me back home looking like the starched child that I was.

      ‘So, Daddy had three sisters, and they spoiled me to death, of course, because two of them didn’t have children. Their brothers were Winston – my father – Jack, Bill, and Don, the youngest, who sadly died just recently. He and his wife, Jean, my one surviving aunt, had a daughter, Vivienne, my only cousin.

      ‘Jack and Bill Taylor lived at home with my grandmother and never married. I didn’t know them very well. Jack was in the army during the war, I think, and Bill was in minesweepers off the coast of Russia and places like that. Afterwards they came home and lived with my grandma, and then when she died they continued to live in that house – two bachelors, very straight, but very dour. I used to go and see my grandmother, and they would be sitting in their chairs and nobody spoke. I hated it. I wasn’t scared of them, I paid not a blind bit of notice because my focus was somewhere else.

      Barbara says she owes her good looks to her father, and that ‘he was very good-looking, dark-haired, green-eyed. My father in particular was always very well dressed and very well groomed, and even today I can’t stand ungroomed men. Any man that I ever went out with before I knew my husband was always good-looking, always well dressed and well groomed. I loved my father. He would have charmed you.’ In Act of Will, Vincent, Winston’s fictional persona, boasts an almost feminine beauty, though ‘there never was any question about his virility’. Barbara describes him in fact and fiction as a natural star, charismatic, one who drew others (especially women) to him by force of personality, dashing looks and more than his fair share of beguiling charm . . . plus he had ‘the gift of the gab’.

      Family legend boosted his reputation further with the adventurous story that at fourteen he ran away to sea and signed up in the Royal Navy, forging his father’s signature on the application form. Barbara gives the story to Emma Harte’s brother Winston in A Woman of Substance. СКАЧАТЬ