North and South

 My mother's family came from West Yorkshire, a particular part of the country that was in old England the kingdom of Elmet. The father of my children — my first husband — was also descended from that part of the country, through his father's line. So my children's DNA is almost entirely from that particular place; they are quiet people, but very uncompromising.

There is also a smattering of Scandinavia in our genes, inherited from my father. He came from Scarborough, which was overrun with Viking Norsemen — and he could easily have been mistaken for a Norwegian in his appearance. The Norsemen, as you may know from English history, were not big on gentle and yielding temperament.

That area, the kingdom of Elmet, has its own particular genetic heritage; settled, not mixed, not created through diversity. 

I feel as though I know those people all the way back to the Dark Ages. They are in my soul, in my bones, in my blood. That's why I love so much the writing of Sally Wainwright — her stories are all of the people of that little patch of earth, and they have such a resonance for me. She writes about my people, and in her stories I find and recognise myself.

But my mother, dogged by poverty, not very educated and brought up in a small Yorkshire village, intelligent, perceptive, practical and with a stubborn rooted instinct for survival, was socially ambitious, upwardly mobile. She shed her Yorkshire accent, she studied the ways of the wealthy, and she relocated to the most elegant and refined part of south-eastern England. Everything we had and everywhere we lived was calculated to advance our path through the world. She bent her purposes to that. She was determined to do well, and she did — astonishingly so.

You can take the woman out of Yorkshire, but you can't take Yorkshire out of the woman. 

Not having much money, we went to what was free — church on Sunday and the village fair in the summer, walks in the countryside — and I socialised with schoolfriends, but things you had to pay for were beyond us for the most part. This was not exactly isolating, because back in the 1970s when I was a teenager, you could do a lot that didn't cost any money. But it did mean that the only holidays we had were with my mother's family in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It created a kind of insularity that made us more and more like ourselves; a little outpost of the kingdom of Elmet cut adrift and marooned in the Home Counties.

Though my mother had learned to speak BBC English, she never shook off the harder to eliminate idiom and emphasis of the Yorkshire structures and rhythms of speech — she didn't even realise it was there. And she had an unobtrusive natural steely determination, an invincible sense of purpose. My father likewise — a quiet man, he didn't argue for the most part, he usually held his peace; but every argument he did have, he won. 

I have only one sibling, a sister; and she has a personality like a blowtorch; bright and fierce and I advise you to not get in her way.

I am similar.

And now I live on the very south coast of England, surrounded by southern people.

I avoid social groups much of the time, because I am not easy company; but recently I have been part of a church house group. I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Today we were there, and I inadvisedly expressed my opinion on something that was under discussion.

One of the ladies in the group, a woman with a likeable personality and gentle, winning manner, responded to my observations. Her demeanour is pleasant and friendly, but it was clear to me we saw life differently. She began by saying, "I understand your fury and your anger" — and I had to stop her right there. "I am not furious," I said, "and I am not angry."

I have developed a habit of countering such observations because my husband —not the father of my children but the man I am married to now — over the years we have been married has often commented in a conversation, "I know you are angry" or "I can see how angry you are"; but I'm not (usually).

He is a southerner, with a habit of mild and diplomatic expression — the inflections, the vocabulary, the little ways, it's so different in the south of England. Nobody who comes from the north ever thinks I'm angry. And for sure, on those occasions when I am actually angry, there's no doubt about it.

There is a hard, definite, emphatic quality to the speech of the north, and a dry, sarcastic humour. It's in me. It's how I am. But it doesn't mean I'm angry. It's just a trace of the kingdom of Elmet resurfacing from the Dark Ages, oddly out of place amid the pleasantry and diplomacy of middle-class southern England. 

In all truth, it's a good thing I stay at home most of the time. I'm okay in a pulpit or chairing a meeting, but as a clergyman once observed, my mode of expression could scorch you at thirty paces. That was the same man who said I was born to rattle the cage of Methodism. He, too, was a southern-born soul. And I wasn't angry with him either, just sharing my point of view . . .