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I want to be remembered. More then anything I want to be remembered when I am gone. When the memories of those who knew me are forgotten, I want to be remembered. That’s what I thought to myself as I stood in a thin cold drizzle, looking down upon a patch of grass in between two gravestones. “Is this it?” I asked. My Mum shrugged, pressing her lips together. “I guess it is,” she said. We both laughed and with my chin buried into the top of my coat and my hands deep in my pockets, I also sighed. Our tour of the Sheffield cemeteries was becoming increasingly predictable; tangible pieces of my history slipping from my grip as we trudged from one unmarked grave to the next. The one clear insight to be gleaned was that for my ancestors, squeezed behind the two-up-two-down yellow brick terraces of Sheffield’s industrial birth, death easily dispensed itself amongst them but was too costly to mark with anything more then formalities, their lives vanishing beneath the soil. A couple of years later, following the road out of Haworth, I was on a different sort of pilgrimage. On the far side of a small gravelled car park I found the gate that would take me out onto the moor, along one of the old pack trails indicated with a signpost, the very one that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte would have taken to one of their favourite spots, my steps aligning with the footprints they’d left behind. The wind whipped around me and I took great big lungfuls of it, hugging my wool cardigan close. I imagined myself hitching up long skirts too and how it would catch on tufty crops of heather and the spiral fingered ferns along the side of the trail. I let the petty argument I’d had with my sister spur me along faster, heart beating high in my chest, witnessing the wind ruffle the landscape around me ochre to gold, lilac to purple, like a hand running over rough velvet. Here at last I had found the spirits I was looking for. Because I too had grown up with that un-ignorable compulsion to write and had sat for hours with my sister as children writing and illustrating a world and people we invented, so that I felt a kind of spiritual connection to those three Bronte sisters. Nearing the stream they once visited frequently, that tumbled over a craggy bed of rock, spanned by a little stone bridge and surrounded by boulders and heather, I felt as if I was being inhabited by them and their stories. Then I rounded the bend in the path and stopped. There before me stood the bridge and stream. The idea for a brilliant novel was running about somewhere behind me, just waiting to harness the excess of inspiration welling up from the inside. The clouds above were contemplating rain. On the bridge, smiles like sunbeams bursting from their faces, a couple stood taking a selfie and behind them at a respectful distance (because, England) someone else was queueing to get onto the bridge. Maybe the signpost at the start of the trail, the one written in both English and Japanese, should have been my clue, but it was incredibly apparent that I wasn’t the only one with a spiritual connection to the Bronte sisters; these were women remembered by millions. My heart dropped out of my chest. I took my photos but it’s always harder to pretend you’re the fourth Bronte when there are a bunch of other people round you doing the same thing. The past fell away from me and once again I understood how hard it was to reach out and touch it. At the burial ground of my ancestors I fervently wished to outrun their fate; here, I wondered how much the places where they had once stood and the things they had once touched could keep them alive. Could Charlotte and Emily and Anne be conjured in a photograph of their favourite stream? or were they still beyond my grasping hands? Is this what it meant to say I want to be remembered?