Day Four

I don’t run much in the summer. I know that lots of runners prefer it when the days are longer, brighter and warmer, but I seem to get less active, not more. Maybe it’s a hang over from school days when the summer stretched before you in hazy never ending weeks where all you had to do was lie about on the grass and eat ice creams and occasionally go on a family holiday. When school work was forgotten and you could read book after book and climb a tree if you felt like it and it was too warm to get to sleep at night. Summers are for being lazy. When the mornings start to have that nip in the air and the kids go back to school, something sparks up in my brain, and that’s when thoughts of running and writing enter my head.

Earlier this summer I did a bit of running with Izzy, but not much, and we haven’t run for a few weeks now. We decided we’d go running this morning. It’s a work day and a school day, so I set the alarm for five thirty, dragged myself out of bed fifteen minutes later and called Izzy. She couldn’t find her kit. She was very sleepy. I think maybe the sound of torrential rain outside put her off as well. She decided to start running on Thursday and went back to bed. I toyed with the idea of doing the same, but I was already in my running clothes and had my shoes on, and Bet was waiting at the door, so I thought I may as well just go.

Not far it has to be said. We have a plan which gradually increases in miles, and today was right at the beginning of the short end of that. And for the first  half mile of rain and cold I was thinking bed would have been a much better idea. But by then we were at the canal and I’d got so wet that anymore wouldn’t make any difference. There was a glimmer of daylight though the rain and I could almost see where I was putting my feet on the towpath. I began to enjoy leaping over the puddles.

When you run along the canal early in the morning there are rows of ducks lined up along the edge of the path next to the water sleeping. One of Bet’s favourite things is to run at them and make them all fall into the water one after the other. You can almost see her laughing. The ducks swim in circles and look at us resentfully, but by then we’ve run past.

We only ran to Stubbing Wharf and back. I got back completely soaked, out of breath from the hill, but invigorated.

Later the rain stopped and the sun came out and it was a lovely day. I’d gone to work with a coat and an umbrella, wearing a jumper which I couldn’t take off because I hadn’t enough on underneath, and I was too hot. I looked out of the office window and thought about the festival walkers on the Wuthering Heights walk. They were going to the Bronte Falls and Top Withens. Now that it has stopped raining and the sky was blue I wished that I was with them.

I’ve been to Top Withens in snow and ice in midwinter and in hot sunshine on a summers day. It’s always bleak up there. Always a wind blowing even if it’s calm and serene down by the Falls. It’s supposed to be the site of Wuthering Heights, the house in Emily Bronte’s novel, and is a place of literary pilgrimage - it’s so popular with Japanese tourists that the signposts up there on the moors are bilingual. I don’t know what Lockwood would have thought of that.

Some people say it can’t be the same house. Their reasoning is to do with the layout of the rooms which you can still see in the ruins. They read the book carefully and say the rooms were set out in a different way. This seems a strange thing to me. Wuthering Heights is fiction. It’s a made up story. If Emily thought Top Withens was a good place to base her fictional house, would she really feel the need to stick to the same floor plan? The point of Top Withens to me is the wildness, the exposure, the moor which could inspire such passion.

I went up there earlier this year with Poppy, Johnny, Wilf and Bet. We’d misread the day when we left home and found that we weren’t wearing enough warm things. I donated my jumper to Wilf who was shivering which left me in a t-shirt and a raincoat which the wind shook and rattled and poked it’s cold fingers through. When we walked up from the Falls and crested the hill in front of Top Withens it was like facing an onslaught.

Poppy was studying Wuthering Heights and it was fresh in her mind. One of her favourite quotations seems to sum the whole book up really.

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. Cathy

When I was younger I was impatient with Cathy for choosing Linton when she could have had the wild and passionate Heathcliff. But in the cloughs by the streams below the house there are delicate ferns growing out of cracks in the rocks, and there are rowan trees clinging on to the steep sides, quivering with bright leaves in spring, laden with red berries later in the year. There is tenderness in the tiny violets which hide beneath the waterfalls, the moss which lines the stream beds. The foliage in the woods is beautiful and appealing. Why wouldn’t you choose this over the hard and forgiving rock.

The real power is in the water though, even the bedrock is no match for that in the end. When the streams are in full spate the land cannot withstand it. There have been landslides over the years which have changed the shape of the land so that Emily wouldn’t recognise it if she went there now. The feel may be the same, but she wouldn’t find the footpaths she knew. The water is never still, you cannot hold it in your hand. It can be pretty tumbling along in the sunshine or it can be terrifying and irresistable. No matter what barriers you put up, it will always find it’s way through. Maybe if Emily had written a character who was like water, then everything Cathy thought was true might have been swept away.