(Aren’t we? Oh, I
thought we were. Well, I am anyway.)
But what on earth would you choose to go and watch, since
the options would be endless? The Battle of Waterloo, maybe? Jesus feeding the
five thousand? Julius Caesar’s assassination? Robert Maxwell falling off the
boat?
Tonight I made my decision. I’d want to go and spend a day
in the drawing room of Haworth Parsonage in 1846 where I could watch the Bronte
sisters at work and play. I’d so love to know what they really looked like and
how they talked. Does that sound boring? Not to me it doesn’t.
Ah, but then I envisaged a possible problem. Emily was a bit
of a strange one, and it occurred to me that she just might have been the sort
to possess the faculty of being able to see me. And that would completely alter
her perceptions, wouldn’t it? And then her whole future might change. She might
never have written Wuthering Heights,
so then she might be known as the Bronte sister nobody talks about. She might
never have gone to Branwell’s funeral because she was busy behind the bar of
the local pub that day and the nasty Victorian publican wouldn’t give her the time
off. And then she wouldn’t have caught the chill that brought her low and
contributed to the onset of TB (or so it is said.) And then she might have
lived to be ninety seven and died in obscurity as a lonely old spinster of whom
everybody said: ‘Did you know there was a third Bronte sister?’ Hey ho.
But then maybe – just maybe – if I went back in time, maybe
my doing so is already a matter of history and I just don’t know it yet. And
maybe Emily did see me, and maybe I was the inspiration for a character in Wuthering Heights (probably not
Heathcliff, possibly Edgar, most likely Joseph.) Because it’s at this point that
the whole question of time travel – and even time itself – gets hopelessly
complicated. And the beer beckons, and what the hell.
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