When I was a 14-year-old back in 1975 my life was dull and quiet. The routine of my girls’ grammar school was enlivened only by the weekly cricket club disco. Summer holidays were in a caravan in the Lake District or North Wales. I’d been abroad once to Majorca. Clothes were expensive and thus few, but mainly bell-bottomed. We had a tv (I think we might have just gone to colour then) and the three day week was only just over. I remember being blown away by the radical first episode of Starsky and Hutch! We had a phone of course but hardly ever used it. There was a constant but vague Soviet nuclear threat and a more real IRA bomb threat. The very idea of a woman prime minister seemed laughably impossible.
I didn’t own many books. I had progressed from the small mobile library to the appalling school library. It never occurred to me to ask the librarian (was there one?) for advice. There was no teenage section of the library. There was no such thing as Young Adult literature. I was desperate for something more but I hadn’t got a clue what it was, and that applied to more than books: travel, friends, tv, film, music, politics… life.
I won the Upper 4 Progress Prize at school that year and was awarded the book of my choice: Wuthering Heights. I fell in love with Heathcliff and with the moors and that one without the other would be impossibly empty and pointless. But then I put the book on my bookshelf and got on with my GCSEs and Margaret Thatcher came to power and I lived in London for a while then came back up north, became an accountant, travelled the world, and worked hard to pay off the mortgage. I got married and I had a child, turned earth mother and kept chickens. I hardly had time to read.
And then out of the blue in 2010 I sat at my desk. I’d never written any fiction since that GCSE English exam, but I had an idea for a story about witches. Eventually the story turned into Half Bad about a mysterious, barely literate boy who is an abused, beaten outsider. He swears and curses, spits and kicks. He’s dirty. He seethes. He runs away to the wild mountains of Wales to escape the confusion of people he doesn’t understand. His real home is anywhere wild, away from other people. He loves a girl he know he can never have and she’s one of the few who show him kindness.
In Half Bad I referenced Wuthering Heights but never gave much thought to if or how I’d been influenced by it, though I always knew that Heathcliff was my ultimate hero. I’ve only been to Haworth once, and was shocked at how bleak and cold it was and this added to my awe for Emily Bronte, who lived a short, quiet life and yet who could write with such passion. I realise now that Wuthering Heights has seeped into my blood, my bones, into my upbringing. It is the basis on which I build my world and Heathcliff’s spirit roams through it all.
In Half Bad Nathan is only happy when he’s scrambling over the Welsh mountains, and in the sequel, Half Wild, he begins to realise the power the earth holds. I’m writing the third book of the trilogy at the moment and this link between my hero and the earth grows further.
heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.
he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!
Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
