HOLTBY: The Land of Green Ginger, 1927

The Yorkshire of The Land of Green Ginger

1 = Kingsport (Kingston upon Hull)

2 = Letherwicke (East Witton)

The Land of Green Ginger opens with an eight year old girl's glimpse of 'the Promised Land' in the form of a street in Hull with a magical name: 'The Land of Green Ginger' (The Land of Green Ginger, London, Virago, 1984, Chap 1.3, p 20). To her adult companions the street is nothing more than a small, dirty offshoot of 'Friarsgate, Kingsport' and young Joanna Burton is prevented from exploring the lane by her aunts. 'Kingsport' is Hull, 'Friarsgate' could be Silver Street or Manor Street, but 'The Land of Green Ginger' has not had its name changed, except by an addition of 'The':

Hull old town: Land of Green Ginger

'Land of Green Ginger; is no longer an obscure street or name but part of Hull's tourist trail.

The street name is picked out in white on bright blue and as similarly coloured plaque commemorates the association with Holtby.

The next time Joanna glimpses the street is as an adult. She travels up Friarsgate behind a horse-drawn hearse that is held up by a 'motor lorry' before turning 'into the dark by-road called The Land of Green Ginger. (Chap 13.3 p 265). The 'by-road' is no longer associated with life and adventure but with death and loss. The apparently timeless world of funerals is interrupted by the restless modern commercial world. Horses are 'obstructed' by lorries.

Despite this ominous symbolism the book refuses to end in disillusionment. The last chapter, like the first, is called 'The Adventurer's Child' as Joanna leads her children to a new life, reviving and sharing the dreams of adventure and exploration that sustained her childhood and adolescence. She can only do so, however, if she escapes The Land of Green Ginger, Yorkshire and indeed Britain. She doesn't even sail from Hull. Her vessel departs from Tilbury, though, ironically, the ship is named Richmond Castle after a Yorkshire landmark.

Pennine Yorkshire

The Land of Green Ginger presents the most dystopian view of Yorkshire of any of Holtby's novels. Yorkshire becomes a place where tradition and poverty can stifle female identity and aspiration. In Anderby Wold, the personal strength and dominance of the female characters has disguised their economic dependence until the end of the book. In The Land of Green Ginger the heroine Joanna Burton has no similar psychological or economic strength. She finds herself on a farm which has none of the advantages of Anderby Wold. As Holtby makes clear, the book is set in a different time and place to the pre-war Anderby Wold. Joanna has to cope with a geological truth; the soils of the Pennine uplands are not as fertile as those as the Wolds, and an economic truth; the prices for agricultural goods has sunk after the Great War. Her personal life is complicated by the fact that her husband's evasiveness about his health and his refusal to face reality has been intensified by his experience of the First World War. The only pre-war constant is the way a woman's reputation is at the mercy of village gossip that constrains a woman's personal and economic freedom.

The Village

The rural part of the story is set in Scatterthwaite farm 'two and a half miles from Letherwick in Lindersdale' (Chap 3.3 p 49). Marion Shaw quotes Holtby as saying Letherwick was 'built like East Witton in Wensleydale' (Shaw, The Clear Stream, p 13 ), East Witton being the village her mother Alice came from. It is a distinctive village based on a long village green, where the village pumps were situated and where, in the Middle Ages, the livestock belonging to the village could be gathered at night to protect it from thieves.

East Witton: looking west up the village green.

One of the village's original sources of water is marked by the rock on the left that has a tap in it.

The Farm

A mile and a half south of East Witton at the end of Sowden Beck Road is Sowden Beck Farm.

Sowden Beck Farm and Sowden Beck Road

It is situated on the edge of the moors, a place dominated, according to The Land of Green Ginger, by 'the grim menace of poverty' and 'the hostility of the land' (chap 4.1, p 56). Winifred intends her description of Scatterthwaite to be typical as much as specific: 'Like many other farms in the North Riding of Yorkshire it had a house built of grey stone, with a steep roof of dark slate.' It has a 'narrow strip of garden'. It is surrounded by 'three fields' but beyond 'rolled mile after mile of the dark lowering moors.' (Chap 3.3, p 49) .

Sowden Beck Farm

Sowden Beck Farm shows a similar layout. It is tucked into what shelter it can find in the rolling landscape, it is heavily built against wind and rain. Winifred's description of the effect of rainfall: 'The garden was musical with running water. Into the hollow of Scatterthwaite a hundred runnels and rivulets gurgled and splashed and galloped.' (Chap 15.1, p 294) would be matched at Sowden Beck. The course oft he beck (stream) follows the dip in the land shown on the left. It crosses the track in a ford, the footbridge in the lower right of the picture, accommodates walkers.

It would be tempting under such circumstances to treat such a landscape as primal, dominated by elemental forces that help humans shake off the restrictions of civilization. The cover of the Virago edition reinforces such ideas by using Mary Toms picture Bodie, where a woman in a green dress lies sensuously back in a green field whilst another woman hangs up washing on a line between two trees. There is a Lawrencean moment after the rainfall described above: 'The earth lay open to the strong male passion of the rain; locked in dark ecstasy the elements met, and when their deep embrace had ended, in due time the land would bear the fruit of this communion.' (Chap 15.1, p 294). This is, however, merely a moment, half a paragraph amidst 311 pages in which Joanna spends more time hanging out washing and working than she does lying down. Her fertility, far from being a blessing is more of a curse. Scatterthwaite barely offers a living for two children, but as the book ends Joanna is expecting a third. It becomes another reason to leave.

Landscape, War and Economics

More radically Winifred points out that, far from being isolated from the economic and political pressures that created the First World War, this landscape is being transformed by them.

The local lord, Sir Wentworth Marshall, is represented as comic in his enthusiasms that range from 'Fascist rural electricity' and 'Czech farm schools' to 'Danish co-operative agriculture' (Chap 15.2, p 295) , but his forestation schemes are supported by the government. As Sir Wentworth explains, the Great War saw an unprecedented demand on timber: 'cutting down trees for pit-props and dug-out props' (Chap 4.2, p 63) and the government is keen to rebuild England's stocks: 'Got a promise from the Government that I could build again what they made me destroy.' (Chap 4.2, p 63). The most dramatic testament to this undertaking in modern Yorkshire is Dalby Forest, a forest larger than Leeds, planted on the side of the North York Moors near Pickering after the First World War: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/content/articles/2007/10/01/nob_dalby_forest_feature.shtml

As the emphasis was on swiftness of growth and economic exploitation, rather than preserving local ecology, most of these woods were swift-growing pine woods that allow little else to grow within their shade. As such trees are alien to Yorkshire, Sir Wentworth brings over 'Finns to show us how to plant larches' (Chap 4.2, p 63). Among these Finns is Paul Szermai, whose violent hatred of Bolsheviks and cynicism about mankind, counterpoints the vague idealism of Joanna's husband Teddy, with his hopes for the League of Nations. The kind of arguments Winifred Holtby undertook in public about the prospects for world peace are echoed in the small world of Scatterthwaite Farm but reach a more pessimistic conclusion about humanity, in all its senses, than Winifred ever espoused as a peace campaigner.

The new forests are being planted by what Szermai describes as 'fools and poltroons' who 'would get drunk before their grandmothers and cut each other's throats for a few kronen'.' (Chap. 6.3, p 100-1) . The local Yorkshire folk are not as violent, but they are prepared to shun, isolate and drive from the community anyone who they believe falls below their puritanical moral standards. By the end the Finnish worker's camp is a burnt ruin and the fire, raging in a dry May, has damaged nature itself: 'the stain of the fire spread across the side of the Fell.' (Chap 14.3, p 283). In the aftermath Joanna finds she cannot struggle on in the face of local prejudice; Chapter 14 is simply called 'The Hostile Valley'.

Pine plantations however were rapidly established in the Dales as an important economic resources and quick-growing windbreaks to shelter farms and prevent winds carrying off exposed topsoil. There is a good example planted beside Sowden Beck Road.

Witton Fell Wood:

Young pine woodland at the south east end of the wood.

Witton Fell Wood and Sowden Beck Road:

Mature trees at the north east end.

As the picture on the right shows, mature larches and pines crowd closely together, filling the spaces that other trees can occupy. To increase bio-diversity many of these woods are being thinned out and re-planted with deciduous native trees. This process is going along the western side of Witton Fell Wood.

The Moors

Above the farm is what Joanna refers to as 'the moor' or 'the fells'. From the point of view of a farm stocked, as Joanna's is, with pigs, dairy cows sheep and poultry, the moor is a waste, offering little grazing except for the sheep.

Witton Moor

August: Heather starts to bloom.

East Plantation and Lane

The line between lower grazing land and high moor is marked by a plantation belt.

Joanna regards the moor ('Mallow Fell') as imprisoning her farm within a 'dark circle of heather' (Chap 14.1, p 268). She is disturbed even by its smell: 'faint, acrid and harshly disquieting,' (Chap 11.3, p 235). The distinctive smell of the moors is produced by the damp, peaty soil that supports heather, course grass and common rush, glimpsed in the top photograph on the rim of the drainage ditch. Sheep can find some grazing here but not cows or pigs and Joanna is charged for letting her sheep graze on the fells (Chap 14.1. 267). Under these circumstances she can only occasionally appreciate how the wild beauty of the moors could appeal to her fascination with exotic scenes: 'The bell-heather was in blossom, and when her feet touched them, the flowers rang with a soft, shrill music,' (Chap 14.3, p 283). For those who own such moors, the main money comes not from grazing rent but from shooting parties. Witton Moor is a landscape of shooting-boxes radiating from a shooting box that crowns the height of Tranmire Hill.

Shooting Box, Tranmire Hill

The shooting box is visible only as a low bump on the skyline; like the grouse butts (gun positions) is is designed to fit into not stand out from the landscape.

The Land of Green Ginger creates an Ibsonean contrast between the wild, uninhabitable moors and the self-contained community below. In chapter 14 Joanna descends from Scatterthwaite farm that is poised between bare moor and fertile lowlands to enter 'The Hostile Valley', centred on the small community of Letherwick:

The first sight of East Witton from Sowden Beck Road As Sowden Beck Road comes to an end

is of a scatter of grey roofs lost amidst the sweep of it joins with the back end of the village and

Wensleydale. enters 'the Hostile Valley'.

Letherwick is symbolically and literally self-regarding. If the village is based closely on East Witton, all the houses face towards each other across the village green, as the map below shows:

East Witton Map

A = Methodist chapel, B = Church of England Church

(St John the Evangelist)

The only people in the book who can resist the network of village prejudice and rumour that eventually drives Joanna out are Sir Wentworth Marshall, and the village curate, Mr Boyse. Sir Wentworth has the wealth and status to ignore the village and lives outside in Lindersdale Hall, possibly based on Danby Hall, that lies north east of East Witton over the River Ure. If Letherwick church is situated in the same place as East Witton's church, the church stands at a small remove from the village, left behind as the village settlement moved west up the village green ('B' on the map). By contrast the Methodist chapel ('A' on the map) stands amidst the houses of the village.

Mr Boyce, the curate, is both a part of and apart from the village. He lives in the village: 'She turned the pony down a rough track across the village green and stopped before a pleasant cottage,' (Chap 14.2, p273) but his rector takes no interest in the village: he 'had absobed himself completely in tracing Phoenician settlements on the Cornish coast,' (Chap 9.1.170). The Christianity he espouses cannot solve the spiritual, moral or economic needs of the Burtons. At first he appears a figure used to satirize conformity, a comic curate in the tradition of Jane Austen and the Brontes, but Joanna unleashes unsuspected depths in him and he is used to confront the question of the relevance of Christianity to a Twentieth Century, preoccupied, like Sir Wentworth, with 'Fascist rural electricity, Czech farm schools, and Danish co-operative agriculture'. (Chap 14.2. 295)

East Witton Methodist Chapel Facing the village green

Chickens grazing on the village green

'she enjoyed discussing Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons with old Harding at the chicken food stores.' (Chap 14.2, p 273)

An alternative ending to The Land of Green Ginger; Mr Boyce brings Joanna's chickens into the village....