South Riding Read online

  Sarah Burton’s arrival on the scene disturbs the precarious balance of this complex society. She’s a local working-class girl made good, who has returned to Yorkshire to apply for the post of headmistress of the local girls’ grammar school. Years younger than the other candidates, she stands out in other ways too: she’s sexually attractive, a gifted and inspiring teacher, fiercely ambitious, opinionated, politically sophisticated, combative, a socialist, a feminist and a pacifist. The governors find her slightly alarming, but appoint her, because she’s clearly much more talented than the opposition. Astell warms to her progressive ideas, and Mrs. Beddows welcomes her as a local lass who wants to put something back into the community. Robert Carne immediately and instinctively loathes her and everything she stands for.

  The reader will of course immediately start to imagine a happy ending for the fiery young heroine and the ‘big heavy handsome unhappy-looking man’, but this isn’t Pride and Prejudice, and Winifred Holtby isn’t looking for happy endings, at least of the simpler sort. She had experienced a good deal of disappointment and frustration in her own life, as well as dazzling success.

  It’s a remarkable life. Winifred Holtby was born just before the turn of the century, the daughter of a prosperous farmer in the East Riding of Yorkshire. She went to school in Scarborough, where she experienced the German bombardment of the town from battleships in the North Sea. Seventeen people were killed and a great deal of damage was done. Winifred wrote vividly about it for the school magazine: ‘Over the town hung a mantle of heavy smoke, yellow, unreal, which made the place look like a dream city, far, far away. Only the road was real, and the tight pain that caught us across our breast – it was not fear but something inexplicable that hurt, and yet in some strange way was not wholly unpleasant. Someone was down; with a bang they fell full length on the road and lay winded; then someone picked her up and they ran together . . .’

  Her talent as a writer was recognised early and encouraged both by her teachers and her parents: her mother published a book of her poems when she was still at school. She won a scholarship to Somerville College in Oxford, and spent the interval between school and college terms as a probationer nurse in London. It was round about this time, in 1916, that ‘Bill’, a childhood friend, but several years older than Winifred, came home wounded from the war and declared his passionate love for her. She was too immature and unsure of herself to accept his love, and ‘Bill’ returned to the front feeling bitter and rejected. Later she realised that she was, after all, in love with him; but although he remained in her life, their relationship was never satisfactory or fulfilling. He was wounded for a second time, but it seems that he suffered more psychologically, becoming detached and disillusioned and unable to commit to anything.

  Winifred went up to Somerville, but by the end of her first year felt ‘unbearably marooned in this half-dead, war-time city of elderly dons, women students, and wounded men on crutches’. She applied to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in France, and spent a year there, in rather less danger than she had experienced in Scarborough, though she saw plenty of suffering. She returned to Somerville in 1919, and it was here that she met Vera Brittain (famous for her autobiography Testament of Youth), who was to share most aspects of her life until she died.

  Still not greatly impressed by Oxford, Vera and Winifred certainly stimulated each other. It was a kind of folie à deux, but in a good way, and after leaving college they determined to conquer the literary world together, writing novels, journalism, and taking prominent roles in the Women’s Movement nationally and internationally. Winifred travelled all over Europe, and went on a lecture tour to South Africa at the age of 27. By her thirties, she was suffering bouts of ill health, and she died tragically young at 37, soon after finishing South Riding. Vera Brittain wrote a fascinating and moving account of her life in Testament of Friendship.

  Adapting South Riding for television has been a fascinating challenge. When Stan Barstow adapted it in the 70s (with Dorothy Tutin in the lead), he had thirteen 50-minute episodes to play with – we had only three hours in which to tell a complex story. Inevitably, some characters and plotlines had to go, and readers coming to the book after watching the adaptation will find many new things to marvel at. But I hope we’ve been successful in capturing the essence of the novel, and in introducing Winifred Holtby to a new generation of readers.

  Andrew Davies

  Prefatory Letters to Alderman Mrs. Holtby

  MY DEAR MOTHER,

  Because you are a county alderman and because this book concerns a county council, I feel that I owe you a certain explanation and apology.

  I admit that it was through listening to your descriptions of your work that the drama of English local government first captured my imagination. What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic and impersonal resolutions passed in a county council were daily revolutionising the lives of those men and women whom they affected. The complex tangle of motives prompting public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on private lives appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern of the English landscape.

  What I have tried to do in South Riding is to trace that pattern. I have laid my scene in the South East part of Yorkshire, because that is the district which I happen to know best; but the South Riding is not the East Riding; Snaith, Astell and Carne are not your colleagues; the incidents of the schools, housing estates and committees are not described from your experience. I have drawn my material from sources unknown to you. You had no idea that this was the novel I was writing. Alderman Mrs. Beddows is not Alderman Mrs. Holtby. Though I confess I have borrowed a few sayings for her from your racy tongue, and when I described Sarah’s vision of her in the final paragraph, it was you upon whom, in that moment, my thoughts were resting.

  It may seem to you that in my pattern I have laid greater emphasis upon human affliction than you might consider typical or necessary. But when I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies—poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting, and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature — we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

  Therefore I dedicate this story, such as it is, to you, who have fought so valiant a fight for human happiness. I am conscious of the defects, the clumsiness and limitations of my novel. At least let me record one perfect thing; the proud delight which it has meant to me to be the daughter of Alice Holtby.

  “Take what you want,” said God. “Take it—and pay for it.”

  Old Spanish Proverb

  Quoted in “This Was My World” by Viscountess Rhondda

  Prologue in a Press Gallery

  “The quarterly session of the South Riding County Council was held yesterday in Flintonbridge County Hall. Alderman General the Honourable Sir Ronald Tarkington, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., took the chair. The meeting adjourned for one minute’s silence in respectful memory of the late Alderman Farrow; then the Cold Harbour Division proceeded to the election of his successor. . . .”

  Extract from the ‘Kingsport Chronicle’ June, 1932

  Prologue in a Press Gallery

  YOUNG LOVELL BROWN, taking his place for the first time in the Press Gallery of the South Riding County Hall at Flintonbridge, was prepared to be impressed by everything. A romantic and inexperienced young man, he yet knew that local government has considerable importance in its effect on human life. He peered down into the greenish gloom and saw a sombre octagonal room, lit from three lofty leaded windows, beyond which tall chestnut trees screened the dim wet June day. He saw below him bald heads, grey heads, brown heads, black hea
ds, above oddly foreshortened bodies, moving like fish in an aquarium tank. He saw the semi-circle of desks facing the chairman’s panoplied throne; he saw the stuffed horsehair seats, the blotting paper, the quill pens, the bundles of printed documents on the clerk’s table, the polished fire dogs in the empty grates, the frosted glass tulips shading the unignited gas jets, the gleaming inkwells.

  His heart beat, and his eyes dilated. Here, he told himself, was the source of reputations, of sanatoria, bridges, feuds, scandals, of remedies for broken ambitions or foot and mouth disease, of bans on sex novels in public libraries, of educational scholarships, blighted hopes and drainage systems. Local government was an epitome of national government. Here was World Tragedy in embryo. Here gallant Labour, with nothing to lose but its chains, would fight entrenched and armoured Capital. Here the progressive, greedy and immoral towns would exploit the pure, honest, elemental and unprogressive country. Here Corruption could be studied and exposed, oppression denounced, and lethargy indicted.

  Lovell Brown knew himself to be on the eve of an initiation. To-day would open a new chapter in British journalism. “Do you remember when Brown started those articles of his on Local Government?” people would say fifty years hence. “By jove! That was an eye-opener. That was something new.”

  Syd Mail, Lovell’s predecessor on the Kingsport Chronicle, had come with him to put him wise during his first visit to the Council. Mail had been promoted to the Combine’s Sheffield paper. Mail was a man of the world. He sprawled sideways on the hard bench running through the little enclosed Reporter’s Gallery, known as the Horse Box, and muttered information to his colleague and pupil with the inaudible fluency of an experienced convict.

  “That’s Carne of Maythorpe—big chap in tweeds just come in. He’ll be next Alderman, they say, instead of Farrow, but don’t you believe it. That’s Snaith—grey suit, horn-rimmed spectacles, by the chairman’s desk. He’ll have had something to say about Carne.”

  Lovell saw Carne, a big heavy handsome unhappy-looking man. Under a thatch of thick black hair his white face was not unlike that on photographs of Mussolini, except for its finedrawn sensitive mouth with down-turned corners. He bore little resemblance to Lovell’s notion of a sporting farmer, which was what, by a county-wide reputation, Carne was known to be.

  Alderman Snaith, supposed to be the richest member of the Council, a dapper grey little mouse of a man, was more like the secret subtle capitalist of tradition.

  “There’s Alderman East just come in,” muttered Syd Mail. “Vice-chairman. Eighty-four. Deaf as a post.”

  Snaith detached himself from a gossiping group and made for the vice-chairman.

  “Are they friends—East and Snaith?” asked Lovell.

  “Friends? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Snaith’s any man’s friend, except when it suits him. He’s clever. Sharp as a sack of monkeys and knows how to make himself indispensable to authority. A dark horse. Ah! There’s Mrs. Beddows.”

  “Oh, I know her!” cried Lovell with enthusiasm, then blushed to realise that he had been overheard.

  Alderman Mrs. Beddows halted, looked up at the gallery, recognised him and gave a smiling gesture of salutation. She was a plump sturdy little woman, whose rounded features looked as though they had been battered blunt by wear and weather in sixty years or more of hard experience. But so cheerful, so lively, so frank was the intelligence which beamed benevolently from her bright spaniel-coloured eyes, that sometimes she looked as young as the girl she still, in her secret dreams, felt herself to be. Her clothes were a compromise between her spiritual and chronological ages. She wore to-day a dignified and beautifully designed black gown of heavy dull material; but she had crowned this by a velvet toque plastered with purple pansies. She carried a large bag embroidered with raffia work and had pinned on to her rounded bosom the first crimson rose out of her husband’s garden. Actually, she was seventy-two years old, a farmer’s daughter, and had lived in the South Riding all her life.

  She was talking about clothes now, in a clear carrying Yorkshire voice, unaffectedly accented.

  “Now there’s the nice young man I saw at the Lord Mayor’s reception!” she cried, waving to the embarrassed Lovell. “I told him that if he wrote in his paper again: ‘Alderman Mrs. Beddows looked well in her usual navy,’ I’d have him sacked. It’s not navy anyway. It’s black crepe. Chloe brought it from Paris. Lovely material, isn’t it? But he said he didn’t do the dresses, so I had to chase all over the building hunting for Gloriana or whatever that young woman calls herself, to see she got it right. I always send Chloe the bits out of the papers with my dresses in them. Then she can’t say I never wear anything but my old red velvet, not that I really fancy all these blacks she buys me. I like a bit of colour myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.”

  “I see you’ve got off with Mrs. B. already,” said the fat man from the Yorkshire Record, wriggling his massive thighs over the narrow plank of the bench. “Good for you, Brown.”

  “Heard her latest?” asked Mail. “The travelling secretary of a birth control society called to ask for her support as Alderman. Mrs. B. replied ‘I’ve had five children already, and I was seventy-two last birthday. Aren’t you a bit late in the day for me? Try Councillor Saxon.’ ”

  Smothered guffaws shook the bench, for Councillor Saxon, after fifty-two years of childless married life, had suddenly lost heart and virtue to a blonde in a tobacconist’s kiosk on Kingsport Station and found himself at seventy-four the proud but embarrassed father of a son. The whole South Riding, apart from Mrs. Saxon, appeared aware of his achievement. Most of the South Riding, whatever its outward disapproval, was delighted. It enjoyed all unusual feats of procreation.

  Lovell did not yet know that more than half the anecdotes repeated about Mrs. Beddows were apocryphal. She was a portent; she was a mascot; she was the first woman alderman in the South Riding and therefore she must be a character. If she did not utter witticisms, they must be invented for her. Her naturally racy tongue was credited with malice and ribaldry quite foreign to a nature fundamentally decorous, comfortable and kind. She enjoyed her popularity, however, and appreciated its power, and though she was frequently shocked by the repartee accredited to her, did little to contradict it, and, half-consciously, played up to its inventors.

  Lovell had not made up his mind whether he should become a worshipper or iconoclast. This was a day of momentous decisions. He stared and blushed. He was determined to accept nothing, not even Mrs. Beddows’ popularity, without question.

  But his speculations were cut short by the entry of the Chairman. Alderman General the Honourable Sir Ronald Tarkington, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., of Lissell Grange was a fine figure of a man and a fine man for any figure. His chairmanship of the South Riding County Council was the most successful in its history. The fact that his speeches were almost wholly inaudible in no way detracted from their popularity, for never in his life had he uttered an unexpected sentiment, and what he said could be noted down before he spoke it almost as easily as afterwards. A soldier, a Yorkshireman, a sportsman and a gentleman, believing quite sincerely in the divine right of landowners to govern their own country, his diligence, honesty and knowledge of the intricacies of procedure made him a trusted and invaluable administrator. His unfeigned pleasure in killing the correct animals at their orthodox seasons made him an affectionately respected neighbour. Few doubted that he was the right person to guide the deliberations of those whose business it was to decide whether necessitous children should be provided with meals at school, whether the county librarian should be paid mileage allowance for his car, or whether ex-gratia payments should be made to Leet of Kyle Hillock in compensation for damage done by flooding.

  Lovell Brown had made up his mind about him all right. Landowners were wicked, selfish and retrogressive. Their political influence was a remnant of Feudalism. Russia knew how to deal with th
em.

  But the chairman’s entry imposed some order upon the Councillors. Their groups dispersed and filled the semi-circle of seats.

  Sir Ronald rose and mumbled. He drew the Councillors to their feet.

  “Prayers?” breathed Lovell.

  “Farrow,” muttered Mail sideways. “Dead.”

  They stood.

  Perhaps, thought Lovell, the ghost of the dead alderman hovered above the virgin fields of rose-pink blotting-paper, the quill pens, the horsehair, the sporting tweeds, the gents’ lightweight suitings, the bored, amused, restless or sorrowful thoughts of the mourners. Farrow had been a quiet little man, his public interest largely confined to the disposal of rural refuse, but he must, thought Lovell, have had some private life. Generously his imagination bestowed upon Farrow a gipsy mistress, three illegitimate children, a conscience racked by knowledge of secret pilfering from the parish funds, and a blighted ambition as an amateur actor. After all, people don’t just live and die as elementary school children, ratepayers and alderman, he reasoned. Even he, at twenty-two, had had Experiences. . . .

  The silence was over. The Councillors sat down. The ghost of Alderman Farrow passed, officially, out of the Hall for ever. The Cold Harbour Division proceeded to consider the nomination of his successor. The alderman is dead; long live the alderman.

  “It’s a foregone conclusion surely,” said the Yorkshire Record man, as seven or eight Councillors pushed their way out against their colleagues’ knees and made for a door.

  “That so? Who?” asked Mail, the cynic. Too clever by half, thought Lovell.