Untold Stories (20 page)

In the unechoing interior of the chapel soft music plays and grief too is muted, kept modest by the blond wood and oatmeal walls, the setting soft enough to make something so raw as grief seem out of place. It's harder to weep when there's a fitted carpet; at the altar (or furnace) end more blond wood, a table flanked by fins of some tawny-coloured hardwood set in a curved wall covered in blueish-greenish material, softly lit from below. No one lingers in these wings or makes an entrance through them, the priest
presiding from a lectern or reading desk on the front of which is a (detachable) cross. A little more spectacular and it could be the setting for a TV game show. Above it all is a chandelier with many sprays of shaded lights which will dim when the coffin begins its journey.

Before that, though, there will be the faint dribble of a hymn, which is for the most part unsung by the men and only falteringly by the women. The deceased is unknown to the vicar, who in turn is a stranger to the mourners, the only participant on intimate terms with all concerned, the corpse included, being the undertaker. Unsolemn, hygienic and somehow retail, the service is so scant as to be scarcely a ceremony at all, and is not so much simple as inadequate. These clipboard send-offs have no swell to them, no tide, there is no launching for the soul, flung like Excalibur over the dark waters. How few lives now end full-throated to hymns soaring or bells pealing from the tower. How few escape a pinched suburban send-off, the last of a life, some half-known relatives strolling thankfully back to the car. Behind the boundary of dead rattling beech careful flower beds shelter from the wind, the pruned stumps of roses protruding from a bed of wood-chips.

My mother's funeral is all this, and her sisters' too; gruesome occasions, shamefaced even and followed by an unconvivial meal. Drink would help but our family has never been good at that, tea the most we ever run to with the best cups put out. Still, Mam's life does have a nice postscript when
en secondes funèbres
she is brought together with my father and her ashes put in his grave.

This takes place in the graveyard in the village where the vicar, the bluff straightforward bearded Mr Dalby, digs the little hole himself and puts together a makeshift service. Consolation is inappropriate as no one is grieving and, the prayers over, we are uncertain what to do. We stand there with the wind threshing the sycamores, wondering if that is all there is and if we can go now.

It ought to be me or my brother who takes charge, but after a moment or two's awkward waiting with wonderful inappropriateness it is my friend Anne, unrelated and now entirely unconnected with the family,
who picks up some earth and throws it into the casket, whereupon we all follow suit.

‘Well,' I can imagine my mother saying, as she did when excusing some lapse or discounting the gossip, ‘well, she's right enough.'

Now we stroll back up to the village where she had come in such despair and anguish of mind twenty-five years before. I still live here with my partner, as the phrase is, who is fonder of the house and the village even than I am. He is thirty years younger than me and what the village makes of this I do not know and now at last I do not care. That, at least, my parents' lives have taught me.

The church in our village is not one that Philip Larkin would have thought worth stopping for and I fancy he wouldn't even have bothered to take off his cycle clips. Rebuilt in the early nineteenth century, it's neither frowsty nor much-accoutred but barn it certainly is, a space that on the few occasions I've seen it full never seems so and even a large congregation in full voice sounds thin and inadequate.

I think of this church often these days as it will be where my funeral will doubtless be held and hymn-singing, though I seldom do it nowadays, has always been for me a great pleasure. But not in our village church and I feel sorry for the congregation that has to sing me out.

Nor, I'm afraid, is there much to divert the eye, with few monuments to muse on, no glass to speak of, no screen, just a plainness and lack of ornament that in a small church might be appealing but in a place the size of this seem frigid and bare.

There are, it's true, glimpses through the clear glass of the trees in the churchyard outside, and the churchyard is altogether pleasanter than the church it surrounds. Painted once by John Piper for Osbert Sitwell (his series of paintings of the village now at Renishaw), the churchyard is backed by trees with the beck on one side and a waterfall behind, and it looks over some cottages across the lane and down to the village below.
Not a bad place to end up, I think, except that I shan't, as the graveyard is full and burials nowadays are in the overflow cemetery on the other side of the bypass (built
circa
1970) and en route for the station. To reach this graveyard means walking down to the end of the village and then, since the A65 is the main road to the Lake District and traffic incessant, taking the underpass put in specifically for cows and schoolchildren living south of the village. The tunnel also carries the beck which, if in spate, tends to flood the gate at the other end and so means wet feet.

None of which matters if coming by car (or hearse), though mourners should be prepared for a long wait at the bypass and an unhearselike scoot across when there's a rare break in the traffic. On the left as you go down the road is one of Coultherd's fields, which if it's a weekend will have its quota of caravans and the occasional camper.

The cemetery is small and surrounded by trees, sycamore mostly and horse chestnut but not the preferred beech. When we first came to the village in 1966 there was still a chapel of rest here, but that has gone, though a patch of red and buff tiles still marks the spot, some of which we bought from the parish and now form our kitchen floor. The only other building is a dilapidated shed in the south-eastern corner which also shelters the water butt.

The graves are in rows, some of them unmarked and very few of them with kerbs and plots, the graveyard largely laid to grass. My father's grave and my mother's ashes are on what is currently the last row on the eastern edge. He died in August 1974 aged seventy-one, and my mother nearly twenty years later when she was ninety-one. His neighbours in death are folks he may have known to say ‘Good morning' to, most of the people buried here on those sort of terms, some of them families like Cross and Kay and Nelson who have been in the village for generations.

When I ordered the gravestone for my father I made some effort not to have one of the shiny marble jobs with gilt letters that most people seem to go in for. I wanted it plain, as plain as one of the war graves in France. And so it is, though not looking quite like that, as stained by damp and with too much in the way of lettering and so rather crowded.

On the grave is a kitchen storage jar which we use for flowers, anything more elaborate likely to be stolen. The flowers I periodically put there are from the garden, which Dad would have liked, though in the summer when the grass grows the place is a sea of dog daisies which he would have liked more, the whole graveyard a haven for wild flowers. One in particular grows here and is a favourite of mine, the water avens (
Geum rivale
), which Richard Mabey describes as having ‘cup-shaped flowers, flushed with purple, pink and dull orange', which for some reason suggests strawberries though the strawberry flower is white. He also says it's ‘a glamorous and secretive species', and in the cemetery it grows round the water butt where I fill the storage jar.

Filling the jar at the water butt reminds me of a similar watering place, a tap and an iron trough in New Wortley Cemetery down Tong Road, where I used to go with my grandmother as a child to tend that unmarked grass-covered tump that was my grandfather's grave. Because it was unmarked I was never certain of its precise location, and finding my way back there from the cistern, both hands gripped round a brimming vase, was never easy. Grandma is a tall woman, but she is likely to be bent down over the grave and invisible behind the gravestones. I dodge in and out among the graves, holding the heavy vase, trying to find a way through this sepulchral maze. I think I am lost and will never find it but then that is what I always think and suddenly, rounding an angel, I come upon Grandma on her knees snipping at the grass with her kitchen scissors.

The anemones she has bought at Sleights, the greengrocer on the corner of Green Lane, are put in the vase and we thread our way out, walking back hand in hand down the main avenue towards the cemetery gates with the battlements of Armley Gaol looming up behind us.

Sometimes as I'm standing by their grave I try and get a picture of my parents, Dad in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, Mam in her blue coat and shiny straw hat. I even try and say a word or two in prayer, though what and to what I'd find it hard to say.

‘Now then' is about all it amounts to. Or ‘Very good, very good', which is what old men say when a transaction is completed.

I sit at my desk in Form 4A, at thirteen just into long trousers, and noting, as he stumbles through some French translation, that since last week Ackroyd's voice seems to have broken. Stones across the aisle is growing out of his blazer, his head down on the desk, chin resting on one thick-wristed hand, the other out of sight somewhere beneath his desk. Stuart Jennings has shaved, I see, the faint moustache he has had for a month or two now gone, and even Simpson, nearly a year younger than me, is starting to fill out and, silhouetted against the window onto Otley Road, I note how thick his eyelashes have become.

The chief burden of my youth (and I do feel it as a burden) is that I take a long time growing up, and on that score feel myself set apart, stigmatised even. Boys matured later then than they do now, but none as late as I seem doomed to do when even at sixteen I am still a boy in a classroom
of young men. They complain about acne; I long for it. They shave; I have no need to. In those days at the onset of puberty boys abandoned their fringe and ‘put their hair back', a process which means enduring a few weeks of mockery while they look like hedgehogs before settling down to floppy adulthood. This hurdle, too, I fail to take, my hair at sixteen still the fringe it has always been and which it has remained ever since. So whereas my friends are no sooner out of the school gates before they thrust their school caps, the badge of boyhood, into their pockets, I don't bother. Why should I? I still look like a boy.

That I am going to lag behind other boys in growing up I have known since I was twelve, when it begins to happen for others in my class but not for me. And it is when I'm still immured in my impregnable boyhood that I begin to watch.

No matron ever charts the growth rate of her charges as sedulously as I do: half naked in PT, crucified twice weekly on the wall bars, I scrutinise the armpits of my classmates on the look-out for the first tell-tale graze of hair. I know the line of each neck, detecting the first bulge of an incipient Adam's apple even before its owner, and noting glumly not only that Hollis has respectable armpits but that a thin column of hair is now beginning to climb towards his navel.

Had Leeds Modern School been imbued with as much public school spirit as the headmaster fondly hoped, we would all have been herded into the showers after gym or games, thus rendering this furtive charting of my fellows' incipient manhood redundant: one glance at their pelvic regions would have told all. Fortunately, though, whether we take a shower is optional; after gym there is never the time and since I generally sidestep games the problem does not arise. But with, as it were, nothing to show throughout most of my adolescence, I live in fear of having to take my clothes off, managing somehow to avoid it during the whole of my schooldays and, more surprisingly, the entire two years I spend in the army. Occasionally I read of women who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were able to serve as soldiers without their sex ever being discovered. It's no surprise to me, who, through school,
National Service and university, am never caught with my pants down.

This elongated boyhood goes on, it seems to me, for years; furtive and ridden with guilt, a less carefree boy it would be hard to find. Not that I have much to be guilty about: it's true I discover wanking at the age of thirteen but in all my time at school I never touch or am touched by a single one of my schoolfellows, though in a provincial grammar school this is not unusual. It's also that, for all the prurient surveillance which I keep on my classmates, what action there is generally manages to escape my notice.

The best-looking boy in 4 A is Ken Thomson, a greengrocer's son from Kirkstall. He is a sleepy kind of boy who sits in the second row of the class by the window, his back to the wall, surveying the class with a forgiving smile. He is an athlete and a good swimmer, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist and a body so perfect that in gym or the baths I find it hard to look at him. He is my age but unlike me is long past puberty. His nickname is Tommo. I have no nickname as there has never been any need for one.

Another boy in the class is Briggs, who is poor, quite shabby and not always very clean. With a cheeky face, wild hair and thin as a whippet, he, too, is good at games and nippy on the wing but with none of Tommo's slow Roman grace.

We are getting changed after swimming in the school baths. This is always hectic and hurried because Mr King, the PT master, invariably keeps us in the baths longer than he should and afterwards rampages up and down the aisles banging the doors of the cubicles and shouting at us to get a move on as the bell has long since gone. I am changing in a cubicle opposite Thomson, who is sharing with Briggs, and fearful of the displeasure of Mr King, who doesn't like me as I can only just swim and can't dive at all, I have dutifully hurried up, and so I'm almost dressed when I look over to the opposite cubicle where I can see that neither Thomson nor Briggs has even got his shirt on.

‘Are you not ready yet?' I say, smugly. ‘I'm dressed.' The two boys, who seem to be busy with something below the level of the cubicle door, look up
slightly startled but also with a smile of both pity and contempt, and I can still feel the contempt fifty years later. They obviously know something I don't. At which point Mr King starts driving the class out, ready or not, and Thomson and Briggs hurry into their clothes and join the line-up outside, shirts hanging out and still half-dressed, and so get bollocked by Mr King, but only half-heartedly as they're both good swimmers.

It's only when we get back to the classroom that I realise that what they were looking at below the level of the door was each other, and what they were doing was tossing off, something which I've only just discovered how to do, and feel far from easy about, and needless to say mention to no one.

Why I remember so vividly an incident that I don't altogether understand at the time, I'm not sure. True, it makes me feel ‘out of it', but plenty of things do that … chiefest, of course, that I am still a boy when most of the class are virtually men. But what puzzles me and makes a lasting impression is the disparity between the boys, one flawlessly handsome, the other nice enough but skinny and a bit of a runt. Sex, it seemed, didn't require equality between the participants or even parity of charm, just as in this case a cheerful and seemingly guiltless collaboration in its mischief.

This wasn't a lesson I was ever going to take to heart, or at any rate not until it was almost too late. Looking at old photographs of my school class then, I see that we all look untroubled and even happy, but I am filled with pity for myself, and at how little I know and how long it is going to take me to learn it. Thomson and Briggs know it already, and one component of that unforgotten look they give me across the wet corridor is that they share a secret I have not yet discovered, namely that there is no shame in this mischief, only pleasure, and that not to know this, as I plainly do not, is to be a fool.

There are plenty of boys in the class … Gedge, Stones, Maine … who, seeing it happening, would either have shouted encouragement or nipped across to have a look, even take part. But I am not that kind of boy. Or I am, but I can't let on. I think of their wet hair, the chlorine on the cold flesh, one body skinny and hard, the other smooth and classically propor
tioned. Both now in their seventies and this episode, so vivid for me still, by them buried or forgotten.

Two years after this incident nothing much has happened. I am still a boy, my anatomical clock seemingly stopped. Were it not for the prospect of National Service I might be easier in my mind about being so slow to grow, but my looming nightmare is that I shall still be in my unfledged state when, aged eighteen, I go for my army medical, so my last years at school turn into a race between puberty and the call-up. I know of no way of hastening the process, but I try. Somewhere I have read that it is the thyroid gland that controls growth and that one of its constituents is iodine. So I disinter our ancient bottle of iodine from the back of the bathroom cupboard; it is brown and ridged (and therefore poison) but I put it to my nose and deeply inhale, and even venture to lick the fatal cork.

That I do not achieve maturity until I am well past sixteen, though it blights my boyhood, I now regard as a blessing, this protracted pregnancy of puberty constituting an education more enduring and exclusive than any I receive courtesy of Leeds Modern School. It is an education in contraries: whereas in class and in anything to do with books I am always one of the leaders, in matters of the body I am among the last, the lessons in this parallel instruction written on the flesh. Or not written, that is the trouble. It is in those years from thirteen to seventeen that the conviction takes hold that, full membership having been denied me so long, I will never thereafter be a proper member of the human race, and will always to some extent be set apart. I am such a late starter it seems to me there is hardly any point in joining, still less catching up.

Thus it is that, though not ungregarious by nature, I have never since been a joiner, have avoided clubs and societies, and particularly those where women are not included; the absence of women, it seems to me, always bringing out the worst in men. Unfortunately until well into my twenties I regard sex as a club too, and one to which I have no hope of belonging. This begins at school, where sex seems an extension of organised games: the boys who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. So being excused games was also being excused life. There is always talk,
of course, but skinny, fearful and prudish, I take no part in these discussions, partly because I haven't yet acquired the proper equipment, but also because I am ‘religious' and ‘not that kind of boy', and so am thought to disapprove. I think I disapprove, too, though I am careful to overhear what is being said, while not always appreciating what my classmates get up to. Innocent yet prurient, I am an unattractive youth.

In the plays that I have written characters often recur who are, in some respect or other, maimed: a boy with a club foot; a girl who, as they used to say, is not all there; a young man with mysterious eczema, and another who inflicts on himself a tattoo. They are individuals who are in various ways stigmatised. Having suffered nothing that could properly be regarded as a stigma (though the need to write sometimes seems so), that such characters so often smuggle themselves into my writing I put down to this period in my boyhood when I felt marked out. Marked out, because still unmarked.

I am conscious that to someone genuinely stigmatised – disfigured or crippled, say – such fictionalisations will seem both fanciful and exploitative, projected as they are from the experience of a boyhood protracted, which though it did not seem so when I was going through it was actually both brief and not uncommon. Still, a writer has to use whatever is to hand in the way of experience; he or she is in the business of making mountains out of molehills. I am not sure if the metaphor should come from vaccination or homeopathy, but it takes only a pinch of an experience to inform the imagination and body forth the whole.

So I have never regretted that time or the wretchedness that came from being a late developer. While looking in the mirror is not in itself an inducement to reflection, what we find there can be the beginning of wisdom. A boy sees acne, a girl small breasts, and another breasts that are too large; a small dick may look like an affliction but an over-large one may be an embarrassment too. We are self-stigmatised, our supposed shortcomings just one of the several educations of the heart.

As with many long-awaited occurrences, when puberty actually does arrive I hardly notice. I am seventeen, having a reluctant holiday with my
mother, reluctant because I feel this is my father's job, not mine, but as usual he is unable to get away from the shop and I am her only available companion. And companion is exactly what I feel like; one of those downtrodden spinsterly attendants one saw then, but less often now, trailing after their employers at Harrogate or the seaside, buffers against loneliness. Actually almost anyone would be better company than me, who's sullen, moody and embarrassed at being too old to be on holiday with his mother. Which I am, though I don't look it.

It's Whitsuntide and we are staying in a suburban boarding house in Whitby. In the days after I'd found out about wanking I used to rush home from school at dinner time, get one in before the meal and then another before I went back to school. Those hectic, rapturous and guilt-laden times are long since gone, and my religious fervour has in any case put a brake on the self-abuse, sex and devotion thought to be more incompatible in 1951 than they are today. My body still seems to be on hold. There has been no progress on the pubic hair front that I can see, and on the watched-pot principle I've stopped checking.

It's early afternoon and my mother is waiting downstairs to go out so it's a far from ideal moment, but with nothing better to do and less out of desire than curiosity to see if anything's happened I lie on the bed in the boarding house back bedroom and pull myself off.

It's hardly the unstoppable gusher I might have hoped for but this time at least there is something. I'm going to be all right.

I don't know it at the time but there is an appropriateness in my first coming in the setting of a boarding-house bedroom; it had been in a boarding house that I was conceived sometime over the August Bank Holiday of 1933 at Morecambe or Filey. Not Whitby, though; that would be too neat.