The Bronte Tour

Step off the road. Here’s where we start the tour Top Withens lies up there: the Heathcliff moor Beyond the side wall of the parsonage Wind takes your skin off there, when storms rage And there’s the Black Bull Inn where Branwell drank Took Laud’num on the sly, the drooling skank He sat upon the Temperance Committee A butt for village gossip. Nothing pretty About his sorry tale. It’s best forgot He blamed his fall on love, and died a sot. But you- and you-and you- where did you meet Your partners? In a tavern? On a street? This pavement’s narrow…let those dodgers pass They haven’t paid to join my master class Oops! Pardon me! I’ll switch my phone off now! Look folks, it’s my friends Ron and Sal from Slough He once taught geography at Heptonstall You want to see them jive at the Hunt Ball! A short aside. Come into this allotment The Mecca of the veg. A grand assortment Of characters you meet each village show A Yorkshire man could make a desert grow Our Swedes and cauliflowers are judged dynamic And every single one of them’s organic. Our Haworth brass band has won stacks of prizes I’ve loads more facts like these, tasty surprises The Brontës published their own poetry 1,000 copies. Just sold two or three D’you hear that sooty rook on the church wall Beside the outside lavs? Your skin will crawl When I tell you what Haworth’s drains were like Cholera, typhoid, seeped from every dyke 4,000 bodies packed in like sardines In graves with corpse-juice oozing from the seams And stinking houses! Mill workers crammed in Like runner beans inside one damaged tin. And now we’re in the church. Please take a pew What’s that? You’ve been short changed? Learned nothing new? Where’s Charlotte’s grave, that writer you so honour? My dear, the best’s to come. You’re sitting on her.