Untold Stories (14 page)

In the bungalow that November afternoon, huddled in their coats against the cold that had killed their sister, Mam and Aunty Kathleen divide her possessions between them. Many of them are in tea chests from Singapore that have not been opened since she and her dying husband came back two years before. There are sheaves of tablecloths, bundles of napkins, sets of sheets and pillowcases, all of them stored up against the day when she and Stan would cease their globetrotting and settle down. Most of the linen has never been used, the cutlery still in its tissue paper. At one point Mam speaks up for a set of steak knives with bone handles, evidence that she is still dreaming of her own life being transformed and that she might one day branch out. They are still in their tissue paper twenty-five years later when she herself dies.

There are few family heirlooms. Mam gets Grandma's yew Windsor chair, which she has always wanted and which she partly credits with setting her off liking ‘nice things'. I bag two pairs of steel shears that had been used to cut lino and oilcloth in Grandpa Peel's hardware shop in
Union Street, West Vale; fine, sensible objects shaped to fit the hand so that they are a physical pleasure to use, and come in handy for cutting paper. Back in 1966 I want them because they have a history which is also my history; but also because they are the kind of thing a writer has on his table. And they are on my table now as I write, the tools of my trade as they were the tools of my great grandfather's. Cut, cut, cut.

Though I do not speak up for them, it must have been then that Aunty Myra's photograph albums are given over to me on the assumption that, since I am the educated one, I should keep the family record, or a censored version of it as Grandad Peel's suicide is not yet out in the open. Still, there in the album is Ossie, lazily grinning on his tropical beach, the great sag of his dick as astonishing now as it had been when I was a boy, the page still scuffed where Aunty Myra had expunged her first roguish caption.

This sharing-out is a bizarre occasion, a kind of Christmas with endless presents to open, Mam and Aunty Kathleen by turns shrieking with laughter and then in floods of tears. Neither of them wants for much now; both have tea towels and sheets to last them all their days with tray cloths and napkins in their own bottom drawers that they are never going to use either. And more than the funeral itself or the bitter cold that grips the bungalow, it is this redundancy of possessions that makes them think of death.

Conscious that I have done Aunty Myra an injustice but knowing, too, that I would do exactly the same again, I try and write about her in my diary:

Aunty Kathleen holds up a pair of her husband's pyjama bottoms.

‘See, Lilian,' she giggles, ‘look at his little legs.' They are in the front bedroom at Morecambe while in the kitchen Bill, the husband in question, fills Dad in on the ins and outs of sanitary engineering in Western Australia.

It is Christmas Day early in the seventies, and Mam and Dad and me have driven over from home to the cheerless bungalow in Bare for Christmas dinner, a last faint echo of those communal gatherings twenty-odd years before. But now there is no Aunt Eveline to play the piano or Uncle George to sing, just this oddly married couple, half-strangers to one another still, a marriage of mutual convenience meant to keep one another company in their declining years.

With her regular gifts of shoe-trees Aunty Kath had hitherto held the record for boring Christmas presents, but Bill shows he is no slouch in this department either when he presents me with the history of some agricultural college in New South Wales (second volume only).

‘You did history, Alan. This should interest you.' He has served in the First War and we spend much of Christmas afternoon leafing through the pages while he points out the names of the sons and grandsons of men in ‘his mob' who have done time studying agriculture.

Quite what he is doing in England is not plain as he seldom misses an opportunity of running it down, along with blacks, Jews and, when Mam and Aunty Kathleen are out of the room, women generally. Dad, who has never enrolled in the sex war, lapses into Somerset Maugham mode, his face a picture of boredom and misery until the time comes when we can make our farewells and thankfully head off home in the Mini. Mam now tells us about the pyjama incident and becomes helpless with laughter, the mitigating ‘But she's very good-hearted' which is always tacked onto any gossip involving Aunty Kathleen hard to employ where her husband is concerned, as good-hearted Bill plainly isn't.

Considering Morecambe is only three-quarters of an hour away from the village, Mam and Dad see the old newly marrieds relatively seldom as they are often abroad on trips, life in the bungalow by the railway enlivened by a visit to Switzerland, for instance, and a lengthy Pacific cruise culminating in a visit to Australia to meet her husband's family. It is tacitly assumed that this must be a prelude to them upping sticks and settling down there, but nothing is said. Instead, they come back and resume their life at Bare, slightly to Dad's dismay as it inevitably means more slides with Bill in his flowered shorts, Aunty Kathleen in a sarong; one way and another we'd been looking at pictures like this for nearly thirty years.

Scarcely, though, are they back from this odyssey when something begins to happen in Aunty Kathleen's head. She has always been intensely sociable, still with many friends in Leeds, and much of her time, home or away, is spent in keeping up with what she calls ‘her correspondence' – scores of letters regularly fired off to friends and acquaintances, few of them of course known to her hubby, whom she may even press into running her over to Leeds to see them.

‘I've half a dozen people who're always begging me to pop in,' says
Miss Prothero, ‘one of them a chiropodist.' A character in an early play, hers is the unmistakable voice of Aunty Kath.

At some point, though, after their return from Australia her address book goes missing and with it half her life. Without this roster of names and addresses she is cut adrift. Mam doesn't think the address book has been lost at all and that Bill, in an effort to loosen her grip on the past and make sure she settles first in Morecambe, and eventually Australia, has himself deliberately mislaid this handbook to sociability.

True or not the effect is disastrous. Out of touch with her convoy of friends and acquaintances, she begins to drift aimlessly. Her discourse becomes wayward and Bill, who has several times remarked to Dad on how all the sisters could gab, now finds that her utterance accelerates, becomes garbled and impossible to follow. It doesn't take much of this before he commits her to a mental hospital, which is Lancaster Moor again. Indeed she is briefly in the same ward as Mam had been on her first admission a few years before, and there comes a time when Mam is in the psychiatric wing at Airedale Hospital and her sister in a similar wing at Lancaster.

Misconceiving where my father's loyalties lie, the little Australian makes no attempt at fellow-feeling, attributing both their misfortunes to the Peel family. Unsurprisingly Dad will have none of it; Mam's plight is not the same as her sister's, and that he might be thought to have anything in common with his coarse conceited brother-in-law is not even a joke.

Insofar as her condition is diagnosed at all, Kathleen is said to be suffering from arteriosclerosis of the brain: in a word, dementia. The catchall term nowadays is Alzheimer's but that didn't have quite the same currency in the early seventies, or its current high profile. Insofar as it was futile to tell Aunty Kathleen anything and expect her to remember it for more than a moment, her condition was like that of an Alzheimer's patient, but the manner of her deterioration is not so simple as a mere forgetting. Not for her a listless, dull-eyed wordless decline; with her it is all rush, gabble, celerity.

She had always been a talker but now her dementia unleashes torrents of speech, monologues of continuous anecdote and dizzying complexity,
one train of thought switching to another without signal or pause, rattling across points and through junctions at a rate no listener can follow.

Her speech, so imitable in the past, becomes impossible to reproduce, though now taking myself seriously as a writer and praised for ‘an ear for dialogue' I dutifully try, making notes of these flights of speech as best I can, then when I get home trying to set them down but without success. Embarking on one story, she switches almost instantly to another and then another, and while her sentences still retain grammatical form they have no sequence or sense. Words pour out of her as they always have and with the same vivacity and hunger for your attention. But to listen to they are utterly bewildering, following the sense like trying to track a particular ripple in a pelting torrent of talk.

Still, despite this formless spate of loquacity she remains recognisably herself, discernible in the flood those immutable gentilities and components of her talk which have always characterised her (and been such a joke). ‘If you follow me, Lilian …', ‘As it transpired, Walter …', ‘Ready to wend my way, if you take my meaning …' So that now, with no story to tell (or half a dozen), she must needs still tell it as genteelly as she has ever done but at five times the speed, her old worn politenesses detached from any narrative but still whole and hers, bobbing about in a ceaseless flood of unmeaning; demented, as she herself might have said, but very nicely spoken.

And as with her speech, so it is with her behaviour. Surrounded by the senile and by the wrecks of women as hopelessly, though differently, demented as she is, she still clings to the notion that she is somehow different and superior. Corseted in her immutable gentilities she still contrives to make something special out of her situation and her role in it.

‘He'll always give me a smile,' she says of an impassive nurse who is handing out the tea. ‘I'm his favourite.'

‘This is my chair. They'll always put me here because this corner's that bit more select.'

Her life has been made meaningful by frail, fabricated connections, and now, when the proper connections in her brain are beginning to break down, it is this flimsy tissue of social niceties that still holds firm.

In this demented barracks she remains genteel, in circumstances where gentility is hardly appropriate: a man is wetting himself; a woman is howling.

‘I'll just have a meander down,' says Aunty, stepping round the widening pool of piss. ‘They've stood me in good stead, these shoes.'

The setting for this headlong fall from sense is the long-stay wing of the hospital: it's a nineteenth-century building, a fairly spectacular one at that, and in any other circumstances one might take pleasure in it as an example of the picturesque, in particular the vast Gothic hall which, with its few scattered figures, could be out of an Ackermann print. But the scattered figures are shaking with dementia or sunk in stupor and depression; it is Gothic, but the Gothic, too, of horror, madness and despair.

Of these surroundings Kathleen seems unaware, though her eyes sometimes fill with tears in a distress that cannot settle on its object, and should a nurse come by it is straight away replaced by the beaming smile, refined voice and all the trappings of the old Miss Peel. But the grimness of the institution, the plight of the patients and Kathleen's immunity to sense make her a distressing person to visit, and Dad is naturally reluctant to take Mam lest she sees her sister's condition as in any way reflecting her own. But when Mam is well enough and freed from her depression they go over to Lancaster regularly and conscientiously, and probably see more of Kathleen mad than they had lately seen of her sane.