Untold Stories (11 page)

For a few years he is an air-raid warden, but raids on Leeds being relatively uncommon his duties are light: a short walk round the Hallidays to
check the black-out and the rest of the evening spent playing billiards up at the wardens' post. Mam half-heartedly knits some lurid squares to be made into blankets and we occasionally trail over to the Ministry of Pensions hospital in Chapel Allerton to visit slightly mystified wounded soldiers, but otherwise hostilities scarcely impinge. War, peace, it makes no difference, our family never quite joining in, let alone joining up, and the camaraderie passes us by as camaraderie generally did.

In one sense Aunty Kathleen's membership of the Ambulance Brigade proves a disappointment to me. She is issued with a first-aid handbook which she seldom seems to consult and which with its black and silver lettering hangs about the sideboard at Gilpin Place for the rest of the war. Unlike other medical texts it proves to have little information about the relations between the sexes, not even the stylised nude drawing (the man with a loincloth) that formed the frontispiece of
Everybody's Home Doctor
. Of course on that point, according to Aunty Kathleen's as always over-detailed account, no instruction was needed. The sessions are held in Armley Baths, the big swimming bath boarded over for the duration and so available for functions. There is no thought in my mind that the bath will have been drained first and I imagine the water gleaming evilly in the darkness under the floor, as between the boards the sea did when we walked along Morecambe Pier to hear the concert party. Manfield's or Armley Baths, Dad has no time for either, but there is no escape as, with her usual ‘If you follow me, Lilian' and ‘As it went on to transpire', Kathleen tells the tale of these first-aid sessions, now and again shrieking with laughter, the wounded who were not wounded laid out on the beds all the better it seemed to be saucy.

‘With all due respect,' says Mr Turnbull in
A Chip in the Sugar
, ‘you're not supposed to move a person until it's been ascertained no bones are broken. I was in the St John Ambulance Brigade.'

‘Yes,' said mother, ‘and who did you learn your bandaging on?' And they both cracked out laughing.

That was what the war was like, in Armley anyway, peals of dirty laughter, middle-aged men in navy-blue battledress making jokes you didn't
understand with women who weren't their wives, and nobody seeming to mind. For the duration: 1939, open brackets; 1945, close brackets.

There is not much new furniture to be bought just after the war, all of it bearing the obligatory Utility stamp of two stylised Cs; what they stand for I never know or even wonder. Though some Utility furniture is well designed (and now probably ranks as collectable), Aunty Kathleen picks out an armchair that has no pretensions to style or beauty; it is squat and square with cushioned seat and back, and arms broad enough to conceal cupboards, one of which is intended to serve as a cocktail cabinet and the other as a receptacle for newspapers and magazines. There is even a drawer to hold a cigarette box.

Excitedly anticipating Aunty Myra's return from India in 1946, Kathleen demonstrates how Myra will be installed on this monstrous throne, which will slowly, to her demobbed surprise, yield up its secrets – the drawer filled with Craven A, the cupboard containing a bottle of milk stout (Grandma's not running to cocktails), and the magazine compartment with its copy of
Lilliput
. Thus, ceremonially enthroned in front of the kitchen fire, LAC/2 Peel will know that she has come home.

‘What a common thing!' Mam said as soon as we are safely out of the house, a cocktail cabinet, even if it only housed milk stout, always a focus for my mother's contempt.

‘Stout in a chair arm,' said Dad, ‘whose cockeyed idea was that?'

What Aunty Myra thinks is not recorded. Not much, I would guess, as she's more taken up with her own gifts than anything given to her. Grandma, who has been quite happy with the old sossed-down chair this new Utility article has superseded, now takes it over as it's quite low and handy for sitting in front of the kitchen range with the toasting fork, or reading the
Evening Post
while she waits for her bread to bake, and it is in this chair she sits in recollection all through my childhood.

Meanwhile Aunty Myra blitzes the family with presents. Returning from India on HMS
Northway
in 1946, she brings with her all the spoils of the East. Even her suitcases are souvenirs. (‘Natural pigskin, Walter. Hand stitched. I knocked him right down.') There are shawls, tray-cloths and no end of embroidery. (‘All hand-done, Lilian. It's so intricate they go blind doing it, apparently. Just sat there in the street.') We are presented with a blood-red Buddha. (‘I don't care if it is a God,' said Mam when we get it home, ‘I am not having it on the sideboard with a belly-button that size.') The Buddha is just the tip of the iceberg and Myra regales us with gifts, very few of which we want; there are paper knives for the letters we seldom get, grotesquely carved salad servers for the salad we seldom serve, table mats, napkin rings, yet more accoutrements of that civilised life we never manage to lead, and so doomed to be consigned in due course to the bottom of the wardrobe and eventual wuthering by Dad.

There are also, as Dad puts it, ‘cartloads of photographs', all neatly pasted up and labelled in a clutch of albums that pose a new boredom hazard.

‘Don't let's get landed with the photographs,' Dad would warn as we trail up from Tong Road, but since they are invariably on hand to flesh out some anecdote of her military career that Aunty Myra is anxious to recount there is seldom any escape.

We soon become familiar with the sights of Bombay, Calcutta and Dehra Dunn. Here is Aunty and colleagues outside the ‘WAAF-ery' at the Astoria Hotel; Aunty in a sari on the balcony of the YMCA; Aunty at the Taj Mahal; and photos of the entire staff of 305 Maintenance Unit gathered for Kiplingesque occasions like ‘The Farewell to Wilson Barse'.

I am twelve when I first see these albums, which duly take their place, along with other family relics, in the sitting room dresser in which, while Grandma is dozing in the kitchen, I do my customary Saturday afternoon ‘rooting'. One of the albums in particular fascinates me (and even today it falls open at the place): it has a photo, postcard size, of two Australian soldiers, ‘Jordy' and ‘Ossie', standing in bush hats and bathing trunks against a background of palm trees. ‘Jordy' is unremarkable,
with a lascivious other-ranks sort of face. It is ‘Ossie' who draws the eye, better-looking, with his arms folded and smiling, and with some reason, as he is weighed down, practically over-balanced, by what, even in the less than skimpy bathing trunks of the time, is a dick of enormous proportions, the bathing costume in effect just a hammock in which is lolling this colossal member. Underneath Aunty has written, roguishly:

‘Yes, girls! It's all real!'

At some point, in deference I imagine to Grandma's sensibilities (‘Nay, Myra'), this caption has been scratched out. Or perhaps it is an act of prudent censorship before aunty's marriage a year or two later. This takes her back into the RAF as her husband is a regular aircraftman, and henceforth her life is spent shuttling between bases in Singapore and Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.

Stan, Myra's husband, is ten years younger than she is, though to my adolescent eyes there doesn't seem much difference between them. Shortly after they are married we go to Grandma's for Christmas high tea. Meals at Gilpin Place are at the customary hour, dinner at noon, high tea around six, with a cup of tea and ‘something to finish off with' around nine. Christmas, though, was harder to accommodate to this routine, though not at our house, where ‘Dad has to watch his stomach and it doesn't do for him to wait', so with us the turkey would go in the night before, the smell of Christmas morning that of the turkey already cooked and waiting to be put on the table prompt at twelve.

This particular Christmas arrangements at Grandma's are in chaos. Our arrival is always deliberately timed to avoid the King's Speech, as both Myra and Kathleen are fervent patriots. A (literally) standing joke at Christmas is how to avoid being in the room when Aunty Kath jumps to her feet at the first note of the National Anthem – a reverent stance, head bowed, hands clasped, which Dad has been imitating at home for weeks beforehand.

The King's Speech is always a bit of a cliffhanger on account of his stutter, the conversation afterwards generally on the lines of ‘How well he does, considering …' Having sidestepped all that, we arrive this year
around four to find Grandma and Aunty Kath still clearing up after Christmas dinner, which has had to be put back because the newly-weds have been so late getting up. They have now retired upstairs again ‘for a nap' so that high tea at six seems unlikely. It is scheduled for seven, but seven comes and then eight and still the middle-aged lovers have not come down. Aunt Eveline has gone through her entire repertoire twice, starting with ‘Glamorous Night' and ending with ‘Bless This House'. Dad dutifully accompanies her, with Mam urging him in view of his duodenal to ‘have a biting-on', i.e. a snack.

I am thirteen or fourteen at this time but the significance of this elongated siesta is lost on me, as I keep asking why someone can't just go upstairs and wake them up.

‘Nay, Alan,' Dad says with withering contempt, though had I shown any awareness of what was going on that would probably have earned his contempt too, sex with Dad always a difficult area. My brother presumably knows, but he has the sense to say nothing. Grandma is embarrassed by the whole business and it's only Aunty Kathleen, always having taken a vicarious pleasure in her younger sister's life, who plainly finds it highly exciting.

When, around nine, the two of them do eventually come downstairs it's not at all shamefacedly, though the meal has to be eaten hurriedly and with some strain, because no sooner is it over than we have to rush to catch the last tram from City Square back up to Headingley, with the ageing lovers, still famished for sex, going straight back upstairs.

As we grow up Aunty Myra in particular tries to stake more of a claim in both of us. That Gordon has chosen to go into the RAF for his National Service and, as Mam puts it, ‘passed for a pilot' puts him firmly in Aunty Myra's territory, enabling her to have long discussions about RAF billets and postings in a jargon from which we are naturally excluded. ‘Well,' says Mam resignedly, ‘she was always a big Gordon fan.'

Even with me, ‘the clever one', she tends to lasso my accomplishments to her, ‘You get your brains from me' the crudest form of it, a claim never made for themselves by Mam or Dad, who didn't know where my brains came from and didn't much care either.

‘Look, Walt,' said Aunty Myra, standing with Dad at the barrier in City Square waiting for a tram, ‘just look at that girl with a wealth of auburn hair,' the ‘wealth' and the ‘auburn' both designed to impress Dad with the sensitivity of her observation and the breadth of her vocabulary, whereas all it did was depress him with the folly of her social pretension. But the phrase lives on and becomes another family joke.

In retrospect these disparagements seem petty and mean-minded, the aunties' splashy behaviour an occasion for fun and reminiscence now as it became a family joke then. For Dad, though, these disparagements are defensive, the response of a mild and unassertive man who feels such self-advertisement calls many of his innate assumptions into question. These are his wife's sisters, after all, but his wife is not like this, nor, if he can help it, are his children going to be. Showing off as a child, I often made him cringe, and though he never says it he probably thinks that that is my aunties ‘coming out' in me and that Aunty Myra is right, I do take after them.

As I grow older I come to judge them myself from much the same standpoint as Mam and Dad, as embarrassed as Dad was by their pretensions, as mindful as Mam that it was the pair of them (‘Well, you get it from both sides') who had made her so timid.

Still, as I see now, pretension takes pluck and both the aunties took on the world as Mam and Dad never quite did, somewhere finding the confidence to sail through life without being put down.

‘Well, they have a lot off,' Mam would say.

So, despite the outside lav and the sheaf of newspapers hung behind the lav door, the bucket under the sink for the tea leaves and slops and (when caught short) pee, and the drizzle of soot from the railway notwithstanding, they yet contrived to think themselves a cut above the rest, their street a better street, their house a better house. (‘Well, it's the end house, that's the difference.')

And so, hieratically vested in their cherished garments (‘my little green costume', ‘my fawn swagger coat', ‘my Persian lamb with the fur bootees') and tricked out in bangles and brooches, bright lipstick and saucy little hats, smiling, as they fondly thought, vivaciously they would step out
along those mean gas-smelling streets to catch a tram en route for the pictures at the Assembly Rooms or a dance at the Clock, making a little drama out of a trip to Harehills or a scene in the queue at the Crown. Generally genteel but vulgar if need be, they were sentimental, and with pluck and cheek besides, which if not quite virtues are not unconnected with courage.

Hung up in the back bedroom at Gilpin Place, Aunty Kathleen's shop assistant's black frock is slack and shiny, the pads under the arms stained and smelling of long-dead 4711. She is well into her forties now, cheerful, toothy but not, it is thought, likely to ‘get off'. And how can she ‘get off', since she has to look after Grandma? But in Manfield's ‘on the floor', she still seems a commanding figure, the call ‘Miss Peel!' implying a dignity and a rank, the ‘Miss' giving her a status that ‘Mrs' never quite gives to Mam.

As we grow older and begin to make our way, my brother and I both start to figure more in her conversation. Roundhay ladies wanting court shoes find themselves given an unsought bulletin on ‘my nephew in Canada, a pilot in the RAF … does that feel easier, madam? … My other nephew's just won a scholarship to Oxford … Madam has a narrow foot, I'll see if we have something smaller.'

In another respect, too, I do my aunties an injustice. Starved though their lives are of drama, and ready on the thinnest excuse to see themselves in an interesting or tragic light, neither of them at any point indulges this taste for the theatrical by referring even obliquely to the biggest drama that can ever have happened to them, the suicide of their father. There is never the smallest hint of a secret sadness or of a tale that might be told. Loving mystery, in this regard they forgo it entirely. Their father died of a heart attack, here on the kitchen floor, and the conversation does not miss a beat. Though now I see this subterfuge as futile, mistaken, and the lie needless, there is no denying they carry it off superbly; the performances are impeccable. For Grandma and for my parents this is to be expected: to them reticence is second nature. For the aunties, though, not to tell the tale must always have been a sacrifice, and it's a
measure of the disgrace attaching to the act that dwelling on it is thought to bring not sympathy but shame. And I see that, in this at least, we have been a united family.

With Myra and husband Stan back on the outskirts of Empire, life returns to its old ways. And there are musical evenings still at Gilpin Place, and Aunt Eveline comes over from Bradford, though now she plays medleys from
Bless the Bride
and
Oklahoma!
and Uncle George sings ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning' as well as ‘Bless This House'.

But Grandma is not well, and sitting in the kitchen in the chair that had been bought against Aunty Myra's return she finds the cushion soaked in blood.

Dr Slaney is summoned, the Wolseley parked outside, and he and Aunty Kathleen in her best ‘Miss Peel' manner have a hushed conversation in the sitting room. Briefly in hospital, Grandma comes home to the front bedroom at Gilpin Place, where the commode has been brought down from the attic and a fire lit in the tiny grate. She does not read or have the wireless on, but just lies there through the darkening days in that slum bedroom in Wortley, as behind the house the trains are shunted into Holbeck sidings and she waits for what is to come.

Grandma's death in 1950 takes us up to the grave in new Wortley Cemetery where, with St Bartholomew's on one side and Armley Gaol on the other, Grandad Peel had been buried. The grave is unmarked and has always been hard to find, the simple grass-covered mound so plain it seems almost prehistoric (‘tump' would describe it), this raised mound the inverted shape of the long zinc baths some houses in Wortley still had hanging outside their back doors.