Walking to Haworth, Mother’s Brown Shoes

Walking to Haworth, Mother’s Brown Shoes Eamonn Wall (bio) i have taken a morning train out from Leeds to Keighley. My plan is to walk the four miles from the station to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. It is an overcast Sunday in early June, chilly with light rain forecast for the afternoon. The route I take skirts Keighley (I will walk through the town center on my return). The businesses I pass are closed; inside the homes I walk by residents are preparing or anticipating lunch. Front gardens are neatly landscaped, doors freshly painted; the higher I climb toward Haworth the larger the houses bloom. The wind begins to blow, drops of rain fall, I add a layer of clothing. My wife always says that one needs to wear three layers of clothing on any summer visit to Ireland or Scotland; I will tell her to add Yorkshire to this list. It is 2022. Last year, as the pandemic bit harder, I reread many of the Brontë novels as well as books written about the family. In part I was interested in tracing something of the family’s Irishness. One wintry morning while walking in Deer Creek Park in St. Louis, my mind strayed back to Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, one of my favorite books. Gaskell’s work is not just an account of Charlotte’s life; it is also a history of her family and a recounting of the times and places that advanced a shared artistic development. Haworth parsonage is a focal point of the narrative—the town and home most closely associated with their lives and work. Central figures in Gaskell’s book are Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), the clergyman father who was born and raised in Ireland, and his four children who survived into adulthood: Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), Branwell Brontë (1817–1848), Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848), and Anne Brontë (1820–1849). Returning to the novels, I realized how much the experience of reading them has guided the narrative of my life—the books read, returned to, and taught through five decades. And Gaskell’s book reintroduced [End Page 5] me to John Greenwood, the man who sold stationery to the Brontës, a figure who has always fascinated me. Never distant on my daily walks were thoughts of my mother, Nancy Wall, who had recently passed away in Ireland. I was grieving. The COVID-19 travel restrictions had separated us for a year; fortunate to be fully vaccinated, I was able to sit with her for a few hours before she passed in March 2021. Only ten people could enter St. Aidan’s Cathedral for her funeral Mass, a member of the Gardaí standing outside to enforce regulations if needed. That morning in the park, as a light snow dropped onto the creek and grass, I pledged to return to Haworth. I would walk uphill from the station to the parsonage. Such a journey, I imagined, would realign my mind, salve my heart, and right the world. ________ John Greenwood provided Gaskell with useful information for her biography; she found him helpful and friendly. In her work he cuts a romantic and enabling figure. I liked him from the moment I met him. Recalling the sisters, he noted: “They used to buy a great deal of writing paper, and I used to wonder whatever they did with so much. I sometimes thought they contributed to the Magazines. When I was out of stock, I was always afraid of their coming; they seemed so distressed about it, if I had none. I have walked to Halifax (a distance of 10 miles) many a time, for half a ream of paper, for fear of being without it when they came.” Juliet Barker, in her history of the Brontës, describes Greenwood as a “self-important busybody,” a man who “took it upon himself to inform Charlotte’s famous friends of her death” in April 1855. Barker is offended by Green-wood’s eagerness: he should not have presumed to take this initiative; he should have known his place. Greenwood was a former woolcomber who sold stationery in Haworth, an ordinary man...

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