Friday, 19th April 2019, The day an ‘Inchworm’ came a-calling…
On my return from Yorkshire earlier this year, I was surprised to find something strangely fascinating clinging to my cat’s coat, it was an Inchworm——no less; it measured about two inches tip-to-toe! In the moment, I didn’t recognise the creature’s caterpillar-ish form, but after a little on-line research I discovered its identity.
‘The Inchworm’ gets its name from its loop-like movement——it literally moves along an inch at a time. Coming hot on the heels of a particularly unhelpful Haworth experience earlier that same week – suddenly the incomer on the cat’s back – became my unlikely hero——a spiritual animal, symbolic of the inexorable progress of the ‘Lost’ portrait of Emily Brontë – as it inches ever nearer the Light——in spite of what the ‘powers that be’ would have to the contrary. What do they actually KNOW?!!!
The Haworth visit is hardly worthy of a mention other than in relation to the timely appearance of my spiritual motivator, ‘The Inchworm’.
Imagine my absolute delight yesterday morning – Saturday, 3rd. August 2019, when I discovered another Inchworm clinging to my favourite ‘Earth’ T-shirt’…
Yesterday’s ‘second coming’ – was doubly auspicious – with the arrival of a very special edition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ posted through my door. —— All the way from Aberdeenshire, ‘coincidentally’ William Robertson Nicoll’s birth place…
‘I’m picking up good vibrations, Emily’s giving me the excitations…’
This version of the ‘Bonnet Portrait’ of Emily Bronte – goes to show that long after Clement Shorter ‘s best efforts to write-off the ‘Bonnet’ in 1896 – ‘Longman Publishing Company’ – had their own idea about the portrait. This marigold-coloured edition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ dates to 1968. It’s a gem!
The following passage from A.C. Ward’s introduction resonates with my Haworth experience, in that my knowledge of Charlotte’s portrait of Emily is intuitive——I just KNOW that it is the ‘lost’ portrait seen by William Robertson Nicoll, in 1879.
“Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights had nothing like the immediate success of her sister’s novels, and a Preface which Charlotte wrote in 1850 failed to show any real understanding of Emily. This is not surprising, for Emily belonged to a different order of humanity from Charlotte, and they represent two opposite classes of writers: Charlotte the class which depends mainly upon the experience and knowledge it has acquired; Emily the class, a very much smaller one, which creates out of intuitive knowledge…”
The eyes have it. I think Charlotte’s understanding of her sister, Emily – flowed through her drawing pencil much more knowingly than it did her writing pen.
P.S.
Delighted to find a school library ink stamp on page 21 for ‘Harold Cartwright Girls’ Grammar School, Solihull——now Alderbrook Comprehensive School since 1974 – after Cartwright Grammar and Harold Malley Boys’ amalgamated to become one school——explains why readers’ notes in the margins of this now quite rare Longman edition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ – are in several different hands! Love a book with provenance!
Measuring the marigolds
Could it be, you stop and see
How beautiful they are
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two
Measuring the marigolds
You and your arithmetic
Will probably go far
Measuring the marigolds
Seems to me you’d stop and see
How beautiful they are.
