Falla August

WUTHERING

Back in the spring, I taught an Arvon course. I’ve done a few now, usually at the Arvon Foundation’s centre at Moniack Mhor, near Inverness. Arvon creative writing sessions take a standard format: sixteen customers come for a residential week and are helped (or not) by two tutors who are professional writers. The students do the cooking, while the tutors hold workshops and individual sessions. It can be great fun.

Sometimes I have taught ‘Writing from Life’, and the students tend to be people ‘of a certain age’ who have issues that they wish to write out; frequently, this turns out to be a rocky relationship with their parents, decades ago. This can be stressful for the tutors; sometimes, the student doesn’t really know what they want to say, which makes it difficult to write well. A lot of grief can come to the surface. But there can be surprises too; one young man – eastern European, and very gay – stomped about in a temper half his week, smoking and muttering that he didn’t know what he was doing here, since he wrote in Russian anyway. But suddenly he began scribbling, and on the last evening read out an extraordinary account of a gay orgy in a country where homosexuality does not officially exist.

The recent course was quite different. This was in Yorkshire, at Lumb Bank, a house once owned by Ted Hughes. The students were 14-year-olds and came from a school in Glasgow, on an estate with a dismal reputation. I was told that they were “bright but culturally deprived”.

Before the course, I felt decidedly apprehensive: How well would I relate to these young people? My co-tutor was a delightful Irish poet. Leanne O’Sullivan is twenty-five, slim and ebulliant and pretty in an wonderfully Irish way, with a mane of wavy golden hair, a wrinkling freckled nose and green eyes. She comes from a big farming family in County Cork, and she writes about sex and bulimia. Before reaching Yorkshire, I was convinced that I was doomed: the Glasgow kids would immediately empathise with Leanne. The girls would identify with her, while the boys wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at night for thinking about her. What time would they have for an old fool like Falla? Some of my anxiety must have reached Leanne, as she sent me cheerful emails telling me to stop worrying.

In the event, the Glasgow kids could not have been nicer. Some came from thoroughly dysfunctional families but, as far as we were concerned, they were polite, they were fun, they were interested. They did all the cooking. Leanne taught them poetry, I taught stories. The notion of doing nothing but write for a week they found weird, but by the Friday they had produced an anthology of stories and poems and held a ‘launch’ at which they all performed. There were nights when they didn’t sleep, but that’s because they were giggling.

The whole ambience must have been strange to them. The Arvon house at Lumb Bank is full of handwritten poems by famous names, framed and on the wall, together with dozens of signed photographs; I slept in a room with a Fife friend, Kathleen Jamie, smiling down at me. In the dining room, there’s a huge and rugged photo of Ted Hughes. In the village just up the lane, Sylvia Plath is buried in the churchyard. I don’t think the kids had heard of either Hughes or Plath, but the atmosphere began to touch them.

As it did me. The house sits on a steep hillside, with a deep valley dressed in oak and beech trees below. It must have been a mill-owner’s home, and there is industrial archeology on all sides: ruined mill pools, chimney stacks and canals. It takes little imagination to visualise gangs of malnourished mill workers in wooden clogs heading for their fourteen-hour shift, trudging up and down the steep paths on paved lanes (taking them a decent distance away from the owner’s door).

Not far away, over the moor, is the Brontë parsonage at Howarth. Again, I don’t think the kids had heard of any Brontë but, on my morning off, I decided to walk there. It is about fifteen kilometres over the hills, so I set out at 6.30 a.m. with a flask and sandwiches, thinking to get a bus or taxi back at lunchtime.

But I got wuthered off the heights. By mid-morning, I was climbing up a steep muddy track into cloud with horizontal rain coming at my face, and I gave up. Not, however, before I had passed a house that looked the perfect model for Cathy and Heathcliff’s home. It was a substantial farm once: solid, two-storey, with massive lintels and mullions and many outhouses. But the roof had collapsed, and the rain had darkened the stone to near black. The empty windows stared out at the rain scouring the moors. It was difficult to imagine any warmth or love in such a house.

When I got back, the kids were unimpressed by my account. Leanne led them up to the graveyard and read them a Plath poem at the graveside. What notion they’d gained of the literary life, I don’t know, but we felt quite emotional, sending them back to Glasgow.