The sources of the aesthetic preferences of the Bloor and Drabble families intrigue me. They were formed in industrial South Yorkshire, a region not best known for its natural beauty or its artistic discrimination. The images of high art would have reached them through calendar art, jigsaw art, biscuit tin art, tea caddy art. The Brontës, intellectually isolated in their small moorland parish, were well acquainted with high art through periodicals, prints, engravings and Bewick's woodcuts, but I do not think my ancestors had access to this kind of material. The Brontës lived in a bleak and unspoiled landscape, which they perceived and dignified as romantic, whereas the Bloors and the Drabbles lived in a debased and despoiled landscape, amidst the decor and mass-produced artefacts of the machine age, which were directed at a popular taste without much education or aspiration. Some of these artefacts are, to us, attractive and have now become collectors' items. Many of them were in themselves freely adapted reproductions of earlier works by Romney, Reynolds, Landseer, Lancret, George Morland, and other popular and easily sentimentalized artists. Some of these artefacts are now reproduced, a century and a half later, as newly manufactured specimens of Victoriana, to be sold in shops with names like Past Times. But they are not art. They are nostalgic kitsch.
The Bloors, it is true, were sightseers, interested in natural wonders – waterfalls, rocks, boulders, mountains, minerals, caves – and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in stately homes, with their artificially contrived waterfalls, rocks, boulders, mountains, minerals and caves. But it would never have occurred to them or to anyone they knew to buy a painting. They might perhaps think to embroider a painting; one of the great-aunts embroidered in fine unfading silks a bluebell wood, which hung in its pale wooden frame on a wall at Bryn. And Grandma Bloor once won a watercolour of a harbour scene at a whist drive. But they did not think that the world of art galleries or paintings had anything to do with them.
Hanging in the kitchen at Bryn was a large framed reproduction of a work by the children's illustrator, Margaret Tarrant. It showed an elf instructing a circle of small woodland animals – a mouse, a blackbird, a squirrel, perhaps a frog. I think there was a blackboard involved in this Goody Two-Shoes scene, on which the elf was inscribing a lesson. It belonged to Auntie Phyl, not Grandma, and I took it to be a tribute to her profession as an infants' teacher. I liked this work of art, and I used to enjoy discussing with Auntie Phyl the relative merits of Margaret Tempest, creator of Little Grey Rabbit as we knew her, and Margaret Tarrant, who specialized in wild flowers and fairies. We liked them both. I remember trying to get my mother to agree with me that The Woodland Class was a fine work of art, but she would not. She knew what she didn't like, and she didn't like elves. I suspected she was in the right, as she usually was. I recognized that in her eyes elves were as bad as crinolines or horse brasses. But I was quite tenacious and stood up for Margaret Tarrant. I liked that painting, and I wasn't going to say I didn't. And my mother wasn't going to say that she did.
Auntie Phyl's taste in clothes and furnishings was of its time, and stayed in that time. Furniture didn't require choice; chairs, tables, beds, wardrobes were inherited and lasted for generations, so you never had to buy new ones. She had some cheerful crockery that I now know to have been Art Deco, and she favoured 1920s chinoiserie, likings that went back to her college days. I also associate her with Chinese lanterns (Physalis alkekengi, known to some but not to us as winter cherry), which grew in Bryn's garden and stood gathered in a vase in her sitting room. (I could never persuade these charming plants to grow for me, though I did succeed with Bryn's Solomon's seal.) But it was generally considered that the artistic taste of my parents was superior to hers. So I was shocked and impressed when she took against a new armchair that my father had bought. I remember it fairly clearly: it was a large Parker Knoll upholstered in strawberry crushed velvet and had some fancy golden fringing attached to its parts. He was very proud of it, and it was comfortable, as Parker Knoll chairs are. (I have invested in several, including an electronically operated recliner more suitable to a care home than a study. Small children love going for rides in it.) My father's new chair was uncharacteristically showy, even opulent. Auntie Phyl confided to me one day, 'I don't really like it.' She was scornful about it, her face wearing a look of Bloor disapproval. I was intrigued by this declaration of independence, all the more because I secretly agreed with her. It was a bit vulgar, that chair. Not like my father.