Untold Stories (16 page)

My anxiety that there should be no fuss and the word I had with the coroner's clerk which led him to take the reporters on one side were less to do with my own situation than with my mother's. In 1974 the tabloids were not so hungry for sensation as they are now, though even today ‘Playwright Finds Aunt's Body' wouldn't be much of a circulation booster. What was bothering me was not the
Mirror
or the Sun but the local paper, the
Lancaster Guardian
, an old-fashioned weekly publication where inquests were a staple item, a whole page devoted exclusively to the proceedings of the coroner's court. The paper was read in the village, sold in the village shop, and though there was nothing to be ashamed of in my aunty's death or in the manner of her dying, my mother was about to come back home from the hospital and with the stigma of recurrent mental illness try to face life there alone. The last thing I wanted, or she would have wanted, was for it to be known that her sister too had ended up mentally deranged, dying tragically as a result. What kind of family was this, I imagined people saying, where two sisters were mentally unstable. No, the less said about Aunty Kathleen's death the better.

Vague as Mam was about recent events, including even Dad's death, it was not difficult to evade her questions about Kathleen. I told her that she had died in her sleep, and even the few relatives we had left in Leeds were not told the whole story. ‘It's funny Kathleen going like that,' Mam would sometimes say. ‘Because she was always a strong woman.'

It perhaps will seem strange and even hypocritical that my precautions against the circumstances of Aunty Kathleen's death becoming known did not then recall to me the similar precautions that had covered up the suicide of my grandfather and which I had found so shocking. That it did not was perhaps because I saw it not as my own shame or any reflection of prejudices that I held but as a necessary precaution to protect my mother against the prejudices of others. But perhaps that was how my grandmother had reasoned fifty years before? At any rate, the similarity (and the symmetry) never occurred to me at the time, and even had it done so I would not have acted differently. As it is I am so fearful of the news coming out I do not look in the
Lancaster Guardian
to see if the discovery of
the body is reported or if there is a later account of the proceedings at the inquest, and if friends in the village see such reports no one ever mentions it to me.

Aunty Myra's cremation had been at Lytham St Annes; Aunty Kathleen's is at Morecambe, one as featureless as the other. Kathleen's husband then presumably takes himself off to Australia and is, I imagine, long since dead, as are all the Peels, though my mother perhaps because disencumbered of all her memories lives on into her nineties.

My mother never learns the true circumstances of her sister's death. My brother and I do not tell her, and even before her memory begins to slip away she seldom enquires. Whether Kathleen's disappearance and discovery were reported at the time I never know, and it's not until twenty years later when I am beginning to find out more of the circumstances of my grandfather's death that I eventually look in the archives of the
Lancaster Guardian
for what reports there had been.

The
Lancaster Guardian
is an old-fashioned newspaper with a splendidly parochial attitude to what constitutes news. ‘Smelly Sow led to Rolling Pin Attack' is one item; ‘Man Steals two Skirts Off Line' another. The paper for 6 September 1974 reports the finding of Aunty Kathleen's body under the heading:

I look for the report of the inquest in the following week's paper. It is not even mentioned.

In 1985 I go over to Ypres in Belgium to search for the grave of Uncle Clarence, my mother's brother killed there in 1917.
*
I am fifty-one, which is about the age most people get interested in their origins, family history one of those enlivening occupations that these days take up the slack of early retirement. The sense that my own departure is not as distant as it has always seemed adds some mild urgency to the quest, but having found this grave, and having written about it, even then I don't go on to try and find out about the only remaining mystery in my family's history, the death of my grandfather.

However, in 1988 I make a documentary,
Dinner at Noon
, at the Crown Hotel in Harrogate. Without originally intending it to be autobiographical it turns out to be so, with reminiscences of some of the holidays we had had as children and my feelings about our failings as a family. It's perhaps in consequence of this that, stuck in Leeds one afternoon with a couple of hours to wait for a train, I go up to the Registrar's Office and get a copy of my grandfather's death certificate and now, furnished with the exact date of his death, 26 April 1925, I walk along the Headrow to the City Reference Library to see whether I can find out more.

It's a library I have known since I was a boy, when I used to go there in the evenings to do my homework and where I would often see sad old men consulting back numbers of the local papers, done up in a great swatch like a sagging piano accordion. Now it's my turn. However, expecting to be lumbered thus, I'm relieved to find that all the back numbers of newspapers are now on microfilm and so take my place in front of a screen, much as I used to do at a slightly later date but in the same library, on vacations from Oxford when I was reading the Memoranda Rolls of the medieval Exchequer. Now it is the death of my grandfather and I find it in the
Armley and Wortley News
, dated 1 May 1925, the item headed:

Some of the saddest circumstances were not reported at the inquest. When her father had gone out on his last errand Mam was not in the house as she and Dad had gone on a tram-ride themselves, out into the country, courting, but before he left the house that Sunday morning her father had
kissed his wife and tried to kiss the other two daughters, but Kathleen would have none of it and as he was going out she said, ‘Yes, go out … and come back a man,' words that she must have recalled without ever being able to call them back when later that day she had to identify him. But I hear in those words, too, harsh and melodramatic as they are, an echo of that same pent-up rage and frustration that my mother's depression came to induce in me.

Though I now know the precise location of the drowning, near the university boathouse, it's another year at least before I take myself along to look at the place – these involuntary intermissions such a feature of the unravelling of this mystery they call for an explanation. Hardly due to pressure of work or any conscious disinclination, these delays, I see now, are to do with appeasing the dead (the dead being my father as well as my grandfather) and shame at indulging a curiosity I still find unseemly.

My father would not have approved of it nor, I'm pretty sure, would my grandmother. As for my mother, she is by this time no longer in a state of mind where approval or disapproval means very much. How can she disapprove of a son whom she seldom recognises or have feelings about the death of a father she no longer recalls?

Still, while there is no doubt in my own mind that I will go and look at the place, and in due course write it up, these misgivings are enough to reinforce my reluctance. So that knowing I need to locate the spot on the canal that is near the university boathouse, when I find on the OS map for Rodley that there is no trace of a boathouse I am almost relieved, and put it off for another year. I have actually never heard of the university having a boat club, and whether it has one now I doubt. But in 1925 Leeds University is still young, the boat club perhaps a bid to hike what had hitherto been just the Yorkshire College up the scale a bit, rowing, after all, what proper university students do. So eventually I do the sensible thing and look up an older map, and finding that there is (or was) a boathouse after all, with no more excuse drive down to Leeds to find it.

The canal in question is the Leeds–Liverpool and running parallel with it across the valley is the railway, which in 1925 would have been the LMS going up to Keighley and Skipton. In between the canal and the
railway is the river, the Aire. Though neither river nor dale has the same picturesque associations as the Wharfe, say, or the Nidd, the Aire is Charles Kingsley's river, the river in
The Water Babies
. Flowing clear out of Malham Cove, it is scarcely at Skipton ten miles away before it slows and thickens and starts to sidle its way through mud banks and the factories and tanneries of Keighley. Unswum and unfished, by the time it reaches Leeds it is as much a drain as it is a river, and at Kirkstall when I was a child it would sometimes steam as it slid through spears of blackened willow-herb past the soot-stained ruins of the abbey. It's hard to imagine that this spot had once been as idyllic and lost to the world as Fountains or Rievaulx, or fancy the monks fetching their sheep down this same valley from Skipton and Malham, where the lands of Kirkstall adjoin those of Fountains.

Rodley is beyond Kirkstall and on the way to Bingley. That trams came this far out of Leeds seems astonishing now, particularly as there is a long hill running down into Rodley, the haul up which must have been at the limit of the trams' capabilities. Down this hill in his Sunday suit and hat came my grandfather.

At Rodley today there is a marina of sorts and the lock has been done up and artful setts laid as part of some environmental scheme. A heritage trail begins or ends here and there are flower beds and whitened stones, much as there used to be outside the guardroom at Pontefract, where I started National Service, and that's what this looks like a bit, and prompts the reflection that some of what passes for care for the environment is just bulling-up, picking up the litter, weeding the cobbles, painting the kerbs … a prissy sort of neatness that panders to a sergeant major's feminine notion of what looks nice.

I walk along the canal away from the lock. There is a pub, haunt of the narrow-boat fraternity, I imagine, or a nice little run-out from Leeds; a rusty dredger; a small gasometer, not these days the blot on the landscape it must once have been, preserved and painted now as part of the environmental scheme. A retired couple march past in matching anoraks, walking a Labrador.