My family were keen campers and many a wet weekend in the 1970s was spent shivering in a tent. Sometimes, these visits would be shared with our neighbours and a convoy of bashed up, smoke-filled cars would set off from Nottingham and head for the hills. One such trip was to the Yorkshire Moors where it was decided that we would try to find Top Withens; the house said to have inspired Wuthering Heights. The children in the party didn’t embrace the genuinely challenging walk, but the odyssey was worth it and Wuthering Heights captured all our imaginations. Remote, bleak, and somehow devastating, we were all struck by how small the house seemed. I hadn’t read the book at that point but my mum and her friend Marielaine’s enthusiasm for literature was contagious. They laughed with pleasure as they recalled the book and its spooky themes. I loved to see my parents with their friends. I loved to see them spark and delight as the drudgery of parenthood and work melted away and the joys of life bubbled through. I recall vividly being inside a sleeping bag listening to the laughter of Mum and Dad and their friends outside. That time lives on for me in a fuzzy memory of happy wildness but, as Catherine Earnshaw said: “There is no happiness.” In the 1980s I was a gothic punk. I left school at 16, dyed my hair blue and wore black. I looked more hardcore than I felt, with my spiky hair and thick makeup. I chose to wear armour – all traces of my true self disguised and ignored. Smack bang in the middle of teenage anguish, the gothic aesthetic was a way of appearing tough while being able to display my sorrow, reveal my grief and express my rage. Of course, I had very little to be angry about having been born into a loving family, but I did have my griefs. When I was 12, I lost my best friend (and daughter of Marielaine) to leukaemia. In that chapter of illness and tragedy, I lost not just my friend, but my protective cloak of youthful invulnerability. The world was now hostile and scary; I felt I was only one trip away from disaster and intolerable loss. I have a memory of sorrow and fear being tangled. I was scared of death. Simple as that. Not my own, I was scared of losing those I loved. And so, it was with this internal backdrop that I strutted into sixth form and discovered Wuthering Heights for myself. Until then, I had struggled in education, slipping through lessons without anything really touching the sides. I was easily distracted, often bored and waiting for my life to begin. Then came Wuthering Heights and everything changed. There was no avoiding the intoxicating pull of this book and I loved it with a passion. My blood stirred, my mind fizzed and my energy popped. This didn’t feel like work, this felt like jumping off a craggy cliff and flying. How could I resist a world filled with ghosts, betrayals and passions? I loved its drama and its intrigue but most I loved a story that spanned not only generations but life and death. I didn’t have a literal ghost knocking at my window, but I was haunted by memories that knocked at my soul. In my teenage mind, I was Heathcliff. I was misunderstood, angry and grieving – I wanted people to feel, see and understand my pain. Emily Brontë saw me. She felt death everywhere and understood loss as sharply as I felt my own. Life moved on, as it has a habit of doing, and Wuthering Heights, my grief and my dyed hair faded. I discovered theatre, dance, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Hanif Kureishi and a life filled with more joy and love than I could have dreamed of. Catherine Earnshaw was most definitely wrong. There is happiness! Wuthering Heights was consigned to my past and I thought no more about it until a few years ago. In 2016, I was horrified by scenes from the refugee camps at the Calais refugee camp and enraged by the negotiations about how many unaccompanied children the UK was willing to take while not actually taking any – something triggered in my brain. Wasn’t Heathcliff an unaccompanied child? Wasn’t he found on the Liverpool docks and taken in by Earnshaw? My instincts itching, I pulled out my old copy and started to read. This time, the book fell into a very different soul. No longer intoxicated by impossible passions and unresolved griefs, I saw a story not of romance but of brutality, cruelty and revenge. This was not a gothic romance, this was a tragedy; a tragedy of what might happen if, as individuals as well as a society, we allow cruelty to take hold. “Be careful what you seed,” my pen wrote, and it kept writing, giving new voice to my adult rage. I cut Nelly Dean, took the form of a Greek tragedy and created a chorus of The Moor. It is The Moor that tells the story of Wuthering Heights in my production. Singing and dancing as one, they warn us that: “A scatter of yellow stars might seem to welcome hope, but the adder slides beneath.” This production is epic, the characters superhuman; Catherine, Heathcliff and Hareton the Gods of Chaos, Revenge and Hope. As the story unfolds, The Moor incants: “And what of the rage that is planted? The hate and jealousy that has slipped into our watery beds? Oh, they grow alright. They are coming along nicely, thank you. In the warm wet earth And they grow. Be careful what you seed.” In the year ending June 2021 there have been 2,756 applications from unaccompanied children claiming asylum in the UK. Who knows how many others have vanished into dark corners of Europe and Britain, lost to traffickers and abusers. And yet, we continue to quibble over how many we might choose to welcome. We question how they come to our shores. Perhaps if we chose to seed compassion and kindness, we might have a fighting chance of nurturing a future filled with hope rather than fear. This production of Wuthering Heights is woven from the talent, passion, truth and experience of all who are contributing to the show. Rich with our humanity, it holds our own stories, our losses, hopes, fears and dreams. Made with love, this is a revenge tragedy for our time and one that warns how our actions today will affect the world for decades to come. Wuthering Heights is at Bristol Old Vic, 11 October–6 November. Then touring until 28 May.