This morning I awoke to the sound of Kate Bush on the radio, singing Wuthering Heights. 

It had not been a good night, as both boys at separate stages had climbed into our bed and their father and I were just too tired to forbid it. {I hate forbidding it anyway; there's something I find so endearing about that rush of little feet on the landing, then that clamber onto the bed followed by a forced snuggle under the chin and the instant light snoring that comes from feeling secure in your parent's arms. If they're teenagers and still doing it, then I might worry.} But it meant that while the boys were happy their dad and I were pushed into the far corners of the bed, each with a pair of small feet on our heads and I believe, at one point, even a toe embedded in my ear ...

So, to wake to the tinkling piano and bewailing lyrics of that song was magical...   I was four when I first heard it, and the memory isn't even mine, it's my mother's. {The first Kate Bush song I remember is Wow. I recall flinging my arms in frantic circles, trying to copy her video.} We were in London on a day trip, back in the time when you could drive to places like the Natural History Museum and park outside, and while sat in the car, waiting in traffic, Wuthering Heights got its first playing on BBC Radio One. Before us was one of London's big red buses and stuck on its back, right in front of our eyes, was a huge poster of the lady herself. So ... we heard Wuthering Heights for the first time in a stuffy car {miles from the moors!} with Kate's large dark eyes looking down on us. I think it must have felt like a burgeoning love affair for my parents ... a love affair I probably nearly ruined when her music became the soundtrack to my life some ten years later, on constant play and rewind.

I remember that aged fifteen I hung around the moors beyond Haworth with my best friend, both of us hoping our own Heathcliff would pass by and recognise us for his own true-loves, but all we met with were 60-year-old walkers with their trousers tucked into their socks, and a lone sheep or two. Oh, and rocks. Lots of rocks. {Such is the fickleness of youth that less than a year later I could be found in the nearest graveyard, hoping Lestat might drop by that night ...}

The radio talked about the various depictions of both Wuthering Heights and its anti-hero Heathcliff, and wondered which was the best. As with many stories translated onto film, the "best" can surely only be in the reader's imagination ..? There are fantastic attempts, wonderfully done, to illustrate for us what is already there, for the story to me feels as much in the landscape as the grass and the wind and the trees that grow bent and twisted. The 1939 film with Laurence Olivier is often spoken of in revered tones and said to be the ultimate version. He was certainly the handsomest Heathcliff, in my small opinion. If I were Cathy I would have eaten heather and slept on stones just to bear his beautiful offspring. But alas! - then there would be no story.  {This is often the case with me; If I had been Bathsheba I would have starved with Gabriel Oak; Mr Darcy is aloof and haughty say you? Not so, sirrah! For there is much virtue in a man who says little. Plus I've always preferred men a little grumpy. Be Rhett Butler's mistress and forget Ashley? - oh, ok, then ...  Marry Gilbert Blythe? - well, why not ...?}

I still read the story at least once a year. I still adore it. As a young girl the drama of such an intense love that could defy death was very appealing. But for a long time now Hareton and Catherine have been my heroes, for their ability to adapt, survive and forgive are more compelling to me now than any demonstrations of self-destruction, no matter how romantic may be their roots. I think it's one of the reasons I love Jane Eyre more and more as I grow older, and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall too. Which shows how three very small, very quiet, very gentle women of the stern Victorian Age had an unerring ability to tap into what emotionally drives people to not just survive, but flourish. And how their tales live beyond the society they were familiar with and ring with truth in a world that they would barely recognise now.

The boys aren't too keen on The Kick Inside so it hardly gets played in the house these days. But I think, when they're asleep tonight {In their own beds this time, please!} then I might take a moment to sit with this song and really listen to it, every wonderful word, as I did when I was fifteen and madly in love with Heathcliff and Cathy. I may even do the dance. I'm sure I still remember it ...