Untold Stories (4 page)

As we drove home Dad told me that as soon as the interview started he realised the true facts of Mam's father's death were likely to come out, and it was this that had made him want to put his hand on my knee, lest the suicide be a shock. It had been a shock, but the shocking thing was not the act itself so much as the way it had been concealed and misrepresented for more than forty years.

Truth to tell I found the suicide intriguing too (and felt ashamed a little that I did so). Like a child who longs to be an orphan, or at least not the offspring of his humdrum parents, I was excited by this man who had drowned and had his drowning buried; it made my family more interesting. In 1966 I had just begun to write but had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin. This perked things up a bit.

In fairness to myself I had never known my grandfather, nor under
standably in the circumstances had he been much talked about. ‘He was a lovely feller' was Mam's description of him, her stock phrase for men she liked; his only son, her brother Clarence, was a ‘lovely feller' too, killed at Ypres in 1917, and when his time came my father would also be a ‘lovely feller'. ‘Your Grandad Peel', as he was known to distinguish him from ‘Your Grandad Bennett', occurred in some of the family photographs I used to find in the dresser drawer at Grandma's where I went rooting as a child. He was a stocky man with thick dark hair and a moustache, not fierce-looking as some of the men in old photographs were but with no clue as to what he was like. Mam had said he was keen on ‘nature study' and knew about trees and flowers; he went on walks.

The drowning, though, straight away shed light on an incident early in her depression which at the time I'd thought almost a joke. Dad had gone out and Mam and I were alone in the house. Motioning me into the passage where we would not be overheard, she whispered that she had done something terrible. I was having none of it, but she got hold of my arm and pulled me up the stairs and pointed to the bathroom but would not go in. There were six inches of water in the bath.

My mother's family, the Peels, had once been well-to-do, owning mills in Halifax, and were descendants, so Mam's sister Myra claimed, of Sir Robert Peel. The youngest of the three sisters, Aunty Myra was the keeper of the family flame, determined that if her present did not amount to much, a sales assistant in White's Ladies' Mantles Shop in Briggate, now living in a back-to-back in Wortley, then the past could be called in to compensate. When my brother was christened, Aunty Myra wanted him given Peel as a middle name, and there was a muttered row at the font when Dad, who thought one name sufficient and two pretentious, would have none of it. He didn't have much time for the Sir Robert Peel business either, or for any attempt to put it on or talk posh, which Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra both went in for. But even my mother, who took his line, thought that the family had come down in the world, saying that there had been two branches of the Peels in Halifax, both with mills, and that at the time of the Boer War the run on cloth for uniforms had tempted their
branch of the family, her grandfather possibly, to invest in new machinery. With the end of the war came a slump and with it bankruptcy, the other less enterprising branch of the family going on to further prosperity. Certainly every Christmas on the mantelpiece of the back-to-back in Gilpin Place there would be a grand card from some country Peels, whom I took to be the gentry they had become and we might have been. But it may all have been romance; in private life Beatrice Lillie was Lady Peel and my aunties even adduced her as a distant connection.

The mill gone, my grandparents then bought a hardware shop in West Vale outside Halifax but that too went bankrupt, through sheer kindheartedness my mother said, and letting too much stuff out on credit. There is a picture of the shop in the sheaf of crumpled photographs and newspaper clippings that passes for our family album, the shop assistants lined up on the steps flanked by those Karnak columns of linoleum that enfiladed every hardware store even in my own childhood, and peeping through the door my mother's blurred ten-year-old face.

The shame of this second bankruptcy drove the family to Leeds, where they lived in Wortley, Grandad Peel now managing a gents' outfitters in Wellington Road. The three sisters, Kathleen, Lilian and Lemira, and their elder brother Clarence all went to Green Lane School, its gaunt hulk one of the few buildings undemolished among the new houses dinky as houses in Monopoly that nowadays cover the slopes below Armley Gaol; the school, the gaol and St Bartholomew's Church all that is left of a thriving neighbourhood, the pillars of a sometime community.

All this I sort of knew in 1966 but without ever enquiring into the details, our family history a series of vivid scenes of uncertain chronology and mostly connected with Mam's side of the family. There was Uncle Clarence's death at Ypres and the telegraph boy riding his bike along Bruce Street in 1917, with women stood fearfully on their doorsteps to see which door he would knock at. There was Mam, working upstairs at Stylo Shoes in Briggate in 1926, watching mounted police charge the strikers. There was the outbreak of war, the actual declaration catching us on a tram going down to Vicar Lane bus station to get a bus to safety and
Pateley Bridge; VE night outside Guildford Town Hall, sitting on my Uncle George's shoulders, marvelling at floodlights, which I'd never seen before. And Grandma Peel sitting in her chair at Gilpin Place in 1949, beginning to bleed from the womb, and as Aunty Kathleen cleans her up joking grimly, ‘Nay, lass, I'm seventy-nine but I think I must be starting again.'

Still, if I knew little of my mother's family I knew even less about my father's, not that there seemed much to know. My father was not a typical butcher – thin, anxious, dogged all his life by stomach ulcers and a temperament ill-suited to the job. The youngest of four brothers, he had lost his mother at the age of five, when his father, faced with bringing up four sons, had hurriedly remarried. This second wife was a narrow, vicious woman, a stepmother out of a fairy story; she was pious, chapel-going and a hypocrite who beat the youngest boys, Walter and George, and then told lies about them to her new husband so that when he came home from work he gave them the strap again. Whereas the elder boys were old enough to escape the house and too big to beat, Dad and his brother George (‘our butt' as he always called him) bore the brunt of her frustrated rage. It was she who put him to butchering at the age of eleven, an offence for which he never forgave her but which earned her her nickname. To this day I don't know what she was really called, and I have never troubled to find out, but she was always referred to by all the Bennetts as the Gimmer, a gimmer a sheep that has no lambs and a nickname Dad must have brought home from the slaughterhouse in Oldfield Lane, where he was condemned to work. I can only just remember her, a figure in shiny black satin seemingly out of the depths of the nineteenth century but who must have died in the early forties. Shortly before her death she immortalised herself in the family by saying to my nine-year-old brother, Gordon, ‘Get off that stool, you, or I'll kick you off.' Her funeral was an occasion of undiluted joy, sheer hysteria breaking out among the mourners when her coffin went down into the grave and Mam slipped and nearly went after it.

Grandad Bennett was as bald as an egg. He had worked at the gasworks
in Wellington Road, the stench of which pervaded the acres of sooty red-brick streets around Armley Gaol. He had been in an explosion which perhaps literally or as the result of shock blew away all his hair, a cruel fate in our family, where the men all have thick and often un-greying hair. His second wife's piety must have infected him because in his old age he took to marching behind the Salvation Army band, his gleaming head jeered at by the unfeeling youths of Lower Wortley.

At some point when he was still a boy Dad took it into his head to learn the violin. Why he chose an instrument that in its initial stages is so unrewarding I don't know; it's one of the many questions I never got round to asking him. He got no help at home, where he could only practise in the freezing parlour, the Gimmer too mean even to let him have any light so that he had to manage with what there was from the gas lamp in the street outside. Whether he was born with perfect pitch I don't know but in later life he would play along to the hymns on the wireless, telling you the notes of the tune he was accompanying as easily as if he was spelling a word. In happier circumstances he would have been a professional violinist but there was never any hope of that and a butcher he remained, working firstly for the Co-op, before in 1946 buying a shop of his own, which he had to give up ten years later through ill health, then buying a smaller one and the same thing happening. With no money to speak of and the job having given him precious little satisfaction, he was never so happy as when in 1966 he was able to give up butchering for good.

Happy, that is, until ‘this business with your Mam'. Driving backwards and forwards to Lancaster, I had never spent so much time with my father as then, and though there was no other revelation as startling as that to do with Grandad Peel, he talked more freely than he'd ever done about Mam and their life together, the car a kind of confessional. I was doing the driving and it helped that road safety precluded much eye contact, my own occasional embarrassment betrayed by abrupt bursts of speed as I suddenly put my foot down as if to get away as fast as I could from the past he was talking about.

The suicide, though, he could not be persuaded to discuss. Having let
on to the fact, he still seemed to want to keep it hidden and would not be questioned about it, sensing perhaps that my interest in it was as drama and only one stage up from gossip. As a child I was clever and knew it, and when I showed off, as I often did, Dad would not trouble to hide his distaste. I detected a whiff of that still; he was probably wishing he'd kept his mouth shut and never mentioned the tragedy at all.

I did ask about his other revelation, ‘the similar do' he had told Mr Parr that Mam had had just before they were married. Had that been to do with the suicide, I asked, as it must have been around the same time? Not really, said Dad. He thought it was more to do with their wedding.

It had never occurred to me as a child that there were no photographs of my parents' wedding. Along with the cut-glass fruit bowl, the stand of cork table mats and the lady leashing in her Alsatian, a wedding photograph was a component of the sideboard of every house of every friend or relative that I had been into. Typical was the wedding photograph of Uncle George and Aunty Flo, taken around 1925. Uncle George is in a suit, wing collar and spats, Aunty Flo in a white wedding-dress and veil, the folds of her dress carefully arranged to cascade down the sooty steps of St Mary of Bethany, Tong Road, where Uncle George sings in the choir, and watched off-camera by their respective families, the Rostrons and the Bennetts, and also by anybody who happens to be waiting this Saturday morning at the tram stop at the bottom of Fourteenth Avenue.

The absence of a similar photograph from our sideboard had never struck me. And if it was not on the sideboard nor was it in the top right-hand dressing-table drawer in Mam and Dad's bedroom where, along with a pot of wintergreen ointment and an old scent spray and the tuning fork for Dad's violin, the family photographic archive was kept. It was a slender collection, fitting easily into two or three tattered Kodak wallets and consisting chiefly of snaps of holidays at Morecambe or Filey: Mam stroking a baby donkey on the sands somewhere, Dad in a bathing costume holding Gordon up to the camera, the pair of us, me a baby, Gordon three, sitting on Grandma's knee on the wall at Gilpin Place. But no wedding.

The natural assumption by an imaginative child, particularly if he was
a romancer as I was, would be that he was illegitimate or at any rate not his parents' child. Both possibilities had occurred to me, but I had seen their marriage certificate (also kept in the dressing-table drawer) and this disposed of the first possibility while a look in the mirror put paid to the second. There, depressingly, was the same pink face and long chin that all the Bennetts had. Grandma would sometimes take me with her when she went bowling at the Recreation Ground, her friends (black cloche hats, long duster coats) would look at me in the pushchair and say, ‘Oh yes, Poll. He's a right Bennett.' It was never something I much wanted to be, until a year or two ago, unexpectedly coming across my cousin Geoff in a hotel car park in Wetherby, I saw both his father, Uncle George, in his face and my father too, and the grin neither of them was ever able quite to suppress, and I was not unhappy that I looked a bit like that too.

Had I given any thought to the missing photographs I would probably have taken this to be just another instance of our family never managing to be like other families, of which there were far more urgent and contentious instances than a mere unrecorded ceremony. There was never being allowed to wear an open-necked shirt, for instance, for fear we caught TB; there was never going without a cap lest we got sunstroke; never having a drink of cold water and it always having to be ‘aired', and not being allowed to share a lemonade bottle with other boys (TB again); after Wolf Cubs most of my friends would have two-pennyworth of chips, but we weren't supposed to as they kept us awake, Mam even smelling our breath for vinegar just in case. Our family was no better or worse off than our neighbours but in all sorts of ways, that were no less weighty for being trivial, we never managed to be quite the same.

On the other hand, had there been a photograph of Mam and Dad's wedding it was likely to have been an early casualty of Mam's precocious interest in antiques, which led to a gradual purge of items like the fruit bowl, the table mats and the woodpecker calendar. Wedding presents though these items often were, the forties saw them gradually relegated to the attic to be replaced by her first tentative acquisitions from junk shops: a brass candlestick she bought in Ripon for 8s. 6d.; a green glass
doorstop; a chipped lustre jug. To her credit she had never gone in for the lady and the Alsatian dog or (worse) the little boy holding a smockful of cherries who often kept her company. Both these items were unhesitatingly dubbed as ‘common' by my mother, and she would be mortified today to see them on bric-à-brac stalls enjoying equal status with the lustre and the candlesticks, one as much sought after as the other, collectables all.