Why we should all strive to 'Be More Brontë' - Christa Ackroyd
Have you ever played that game “What would you say to your younger self if you knew then what you know now ?”
I have many times and my answer is usually stick at it. This thing called life is never easy.
But never in my wildest dreams would I have dared to predict what life could become. And still is. It would have seemed too boastful and definitely far too optimistic.
I am reminded of something my father told me: “You can but try, but always try your hardest” when what seemed an impossible wish became a reality.
And all because I also remembered another great life lesson he instilled upon me “you can but ask.”
For years growing up I carried the self doubt all adopted people do as to who I was and where I came from. I cringed when asked, less frequently now, at which university I had studied, because I didn’t.
I went straight into journalism aged 18. I was often mortified at the response to where do you come from and the reaction, usually negative, when I said Bradford. Not now, not ever.
Because all those events, all those decisions, that unhappy accident of birth that was to lead to the happiest of childhoods brought me to where I am today.
And that is fiercely proud of my roots, my city, and full of love and admiration for those who took all my insecurities and turned them into positive, life enhancing experiences, many of which I could never have believed possible.
This week everything collided. The past, the present and the future. I cannot tell you how many tears I have shed. Tears of gratitude, tears of remembrance and tears of joy.
Forgive me if you have heard the story before, but it is worth repeating because as a ten year old I was at my most insecure. Everyone at school had stories about their birth. They knew the time they were born and at which hospital. I had absolutely no idea.
They looked like their brothers and sisters or their mum and dad. I did not. (Although in years to come I would take on so many mannerisms of my father that strangers who didn’t know I was adopted would comment how alike we were).
Like many troubled children I adopted the role of class clown. Despite all their words of encouragement that I had been chosen, that it didn’t matter where I had come from it was where I was going that was important, I was quickly going nowhere.
And then dad got it. He always did. My abiding passion was reading. I read anything and everything long after lights out with my little torch under the bedclothes. My parents knew of course and just let me be.
Books and the places they took me too were my salvation. Reading took me up the Faraway Tree to the poshest of posh environs with Enid Blyton and her tales of boarding schools and lashings upon lashings of ginger beer.
I was transported to Narnia and aboard the Dawn Treader with CS Lewis’s Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
But it was Jane Eyre that pierced my soul.
From the death of Helen Burns at the orphanage to the terrifying scenes of the mad woman in the attic and the speech by the strong willed governess to her would-be bigamous husband as she stood before him declaring herself as his equal, that was the book that changed everything.
Forget the happy ending, it was how Jane got there that mattered.
And so it was I came to stand outside the little house in Thornton, where the author was born, with my father. I knew of Haworth and that too was to become an almost obsessive haunt. But like so many I hadn’t ever considered the Brontës were not born there or even that they were Bradford girls. But dad did.
As a police sergeant at the time his patch took him far and wide cycling out of the city to clock in at the various police boxes which brought him to Thornton and passed the tiny insignificant little terrace no different from thousands scattered throughout the city save for an old iron plaque on the wall declaring it to be the birthplace of Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane and Anne.
Standing outside, you couldn’t go in as it had many guises from butchers shop to private house, he told me never to be ashamed of my birth, because it was in my power to do whatever I wanted with my life, but not to ever waste it.
He told me to always remember these girls, whose books had been translated into so many languages and kept in every library in every city in the world had faced their own problems. Their mother had died.
They were women born in a man’s world who were told they couldn’t and shouldn’t be ambitious enough to seek their place as authors. And yet they did.
And if life is full of circles as I believe it is, this week one was completed for me.
As many as you will have seen Her Majesty, The Queen came to open the Brontë Birthplace now in public ownership for the first time in more than two centuries.
When I wrote asking her to come I did so telling my story and how if it was life changing for me it could and would be life changing for so many other young children, while always remembering what my father had taught me just ask the question because if you don’t you will never know the answer.
That the answer was yes will live with me forever. Of course it was a huge thrill to show Her Majesty the fireplace in the downstairs room besides which the Brontë children were born.
But it was in the scullery where Bradford school children showed her their work and spoke of what it had taught them that the visit achieved everything I had always thought possible for the humble home when I joined with other likeminded individuals to save it for Bradford and the nation.
When I coined the phrase Be More Brontë as the linchpin of our education programme and all young people will ever need in life - self belief, bravery, tenacity and hard work - never in my wildest dreams did I think the first person to write it on a postcard would be the Queen.
But then in championing literature and literacy of course she understood. Reading, stories from the past, a kind word, praise where praise is due and above all a belief in the possibility of dreams and imagination is all anyone ever really needs to get through.
Books can show you the way. But it is also up to each and everyone of us as adults to make sure we nurture those dreams in others, no matter how unrealistic they may seem.
The children who met the Queen that day, including my own grandchildren, will never forget how they felt as they shook her hand.
Nor I the day the ten year old Christa was urged by my father to realise my potential and never look back, to realise there is no such word as can’t. Trust me my dad and my mum were both on my shoulder the day the Queen came to see a little house.
May we all remember our dreams. May we all help others realise their own. And may we all Be More Brontë in living life, whatever it throws at us, to the full.