A tale at tea time

Where's she gone?" I say to myself. I'm sitting at my desk in France, turning a pack of Yorkshire Gold in my hands – the tea is an essential component of this expatriate's survival kit.

I'm looking at the pictures that cover all sides of the pack, searching for that little old lady with a handbag who, I remember well, used to stand by the typically Yorkshire dry stone wall in front of the gate to the typically Yorkshire field with all those typically Yorkshire sheep in it. But I can't find her – she's disappeared, airbrushed from the picture in some Orwellian putsch. I make a mental note to ask my father about the old lady's ghastly fate. Maybe she's locked in a cupboard somewhere in the Taylors factory in Starbeck where I once worked, a missing person nobody misses.

For I remember when she was first introduced in the early 1970s – she looked no less drab then. It was my father, I think, who had commissioned an artist to come up with some images for the snazzy packaging for Taylors newly-created Yorkshire Tea brand. Images that would somehow distill all the no-nonsense, plain talking, spade-a-spade virtues of Yorkshire people, as well as more abstract notions of quality, reliability and thrift.

The artist came back with an idealised Yorkshire landscape – fields in a beautiful dale checkered with dry stone walls, a cricket match in progress, a wind-sculpted rocky outcrop, a ruined abbey... and sheep. Sheep everywhere. Surveying it all, the little old lady, who perhaps signified the quality and thrift part of the equation in the determined way she clutched on to her bag.

It's a strangely potent image, this composite Yorkshire, and it survives intact on the pack to this day. But I miss the presence of the old lady – the only distinguishable human form in the landscape who had a redoubtable air of Norah Battyness about her. And, after all, Yorkshire is known as much for its character as its landscape.

I know both well – born and raised in Harrogate, I went to Sedbergh, a boarding school that was in the dales in the very north of the Yorkshire at the time – Cumbria snatched it shortly after I left. A notoriously tough school (motto: Dura Virum Nutrix – A Hard Nurse of Men), every day we weren't re-enacting one of the soggier days of the Somme on the rugby field we were made to go on runs, whatever the weather. But the school's setting under the Howgill Fells was unbeatable, and while I hated the runs, I loved walking on the high ground. It's what I most miss about Yorkshire now that I live in France.

After university, I lived in London for a few years and went around the world for a year or so. I spent most of that time in the North West Frontier of Pakistan, staying with the father of Diana de Gunzburg, my co-author, who is a landowner there. The visit opened my eyes to the wildly romantic Indian subcontinent and the rich and complex relationship between the British and India.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? On returning to England, I trained up for the vacant position of coffee buyer at Taylors – a masterly suggestion on the part of my brother Jonathan, who must have seen the dangerous twinkle of wanderlust in my eye.

Exploring new coffee frontiers took me to all sorts of interesting countries, and I started writing articles about them. Increasingly fascinated by the East India Company, I was commissioned to write a book about it.

I needed to give it all my time and attention, so 13 years after I started there, I left Bettys and Taylors. The book was also published in the US and even in India, where it received good reviews. My most recent book was Black Gold: The Dark History of Coffee.

Writing history is one thing, writing fiction another.

It was Diana de Gunzburg – who was raised between her mother's native Yorkshire and her father's farm in the North West Frontier – who persuaded me that I should write a novel for what are now called Young Adults.

Inspiration came from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, about a sacred Indian diamond. Its last line poses a challenge we couldn't resist – "What will be the next adventure of the Moonstone. Who can tell?"

And the setting for The Moonstone Legacy? Yorkshire, of course. And, in an unconscious nod towards the Yorkshire Tea pack, we've created a composite made up of some of our favourite Yorkshire locations.

The book is set on a fictional estate based on the real Kepwick Hall estate in the Hambleton Hills.

Diana and I used to go walking there regularly with my dog when I lived in Myton-on-Swale, a tiny dead-end village at the meeting of the Swale and Ure. It's close to Thorpe Underwood, the setting of the boarding school where our 14-year-old heroine is sent by her wicked uncle to get her out of the way. The dramatic, sometimes impassable Strike's Wood near Bewerley in Nidderdale was one of my regular haunts when I lived in Harrogate and in the book it is transplanted to Kepwick, along with Greenhow Sike, a crystal-clear beck which rushes down through the woods from the moors.

Brimham Rocks are also cut and pasted into our composite picture. The real Kepwick village has no pub, so we've generously provided it with one stolen from Helperby – and a proper church and graveyard too, lifted from Fewston. But above all – literally – there is the brooding, bleak but beautiful real-life Arden Great Moor – moors being the defining feature of the Yorkshire psychic landscape as anyone who has wuthered well knows.

Of course, there is a liberal sprinkling of Yorkshire characters. Talking of characters, the pack of Yorkshire Gold catches my eye again, and I call my father to ask him about the missing old lady. The scale of the massacre is worse than I could possibly imagine. He has no idea what happened to her, but reminds me that there used to be an entire brass band on the pack too.

The Moonstone Legacy by Diana de Gunzburg and Tony Wild is published next month by Pushkin Press.

YP MAG 24/4/10