The Valley (30 page)

The police officer hands her a handwritten list of questions, and then leaves. Margaret locks the front door and goes to comfort Gary and David, who are sitting on the settee in a state of confusion, wondering where their dad is, and when he will be coming home again.

32 Passing Over

Highgate and Storthes Hall Hospital, Huddersfield, 1962–64

In her seventies, hair coloured a piebald black and grey with a comb-through dye, a turned ankle necessitating heavy black support shoes, Annie Parkin finds the dead bothering her far less frequently than they used to. Walter comes now and again, to buck her up or give her advice when she needs it, and she can still get hold of the odd passed relative for people, but since meeting Mr Edwards she has felt their presence dwindling.

One night when she is giving a sitting in Elland, she looks out at the audience and feels a sort of tiredness go through her, from her toes to her head to her poisoned thumb. The people still come, young and old, and the interest remains the same – stronger, if anything, since everyone got televisions. But for reasons she cannot explain, she is losing interest. She is glad when the sitting ends, and as she puts on her coat and the organisers clear away the chairs in the hall, she feels inside that she has had enough. She takes no further bookings, drifts away from the people on the circuit and dedicates her time to Mr Edwards and the bookies. More and more the scents of flowers come to her, signs that someone she knows has died. On some days she smells them from the moment she wakes up until she falls asleep again at night.

When she wants to visit Mr Edwards she travels down the Pennine valleys by bus to stay at Winnie’s, sleeping with Pauline in the big bed that used to be Roy’s. The usual arrangement is that Annie will put on a smart skirt and jumper, Mr Edwards will call at Number 34 and they will sit together watching television, sipping at gills of beer that he has bought from the beer-off. Mr Edwards always asks after Annie’s children and grandchildren, and chats to Winnie about Roy’s children, Lynda’s schooling, the plans for Pauline’s wedding. Winnie notices, and remarks to Pauline, that Mr Edwards says very little about his own relations, but puts this down to a male aversion to discussing family. It becomes suspicious only when, one evening in the autumn of 1962, he visits Annie at her cellar room in Elland to tell her he is breaking off their friendship. Offering no explanation other than that he has ‘been thinking about it’ and doesn’t ‘reckon it’s right’, he says goodbye to her on the pavement, and walks down the street towards the bus stop without looking back.

‘I think he’s found another woman,’ she tells Winnie, and Winnie wonders if he is not a widower at all, and if the other woman is a wife who has found a piebald hair on his suit collar.

The want of explanation and the abruptness of Mr Edwards’s departure disorientate Annie, draining her of her wit and energy, and leaving her depressed. A broken heart is Winnie’s diagnosis, but the doctors who see her that autumn, after Winnie and Olive decide their thin and insomniac mother needs medical help, choose dementia.

Seeing her in the hospital in Halifax, with Winnie and Olive present, a doctor identifies her illness by asking questions. What is today’s date? Who is the Queen? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? The doctor’s manner is perfunctory, and he does not appear to consider the possibility that a sad, recently jilted seventy-one-year-old woman may have lost track of the date and Harold Macmillan’s name. Annie had not had the right to vote until she was thirty-eight: thirty-three years later, ill and tired, she finds herself unable to name the leader of the country and is declared mad. The sisters and Sonny accept the judgement meekly. Muv is without doubt unwell, and doctors have an unequalled authority, the more so since the National Health Service revealed to their generation the number and complexity of their medical conditions. It is Mr Edwards who the family blames, his name cursed by Winnie in the Austin 7 all the way back to Highgate Lane.

On 27 November 1962, an ambulance conveys Annie Parkin from her room to Storthes Hall Hospital for the mentally ill, a rambling former Edwardian pauper asylum near Huddersfield. The hospital stands in woodland behind black iron gates, its forty-six ward buildings still overcrowded with patients moved there in the last war when other institutions were requisitioned for troops. Its reputation as a lunatic lock-up extends across the West Riding, and in the Dearne it is a backings insult: when someone acts strangely, or is thought to be stupid, people say that’s where they’ll end up. For Winnie, her mam’s admission to one of its wards is, if not quite an embarrassment, certainly too painful to discuss with the neighbours. When she visits and finds her mam allowed to walk around freely, and talking easily with the nurses, it is little consolation – though had she asked a nurse, she might well have been told that her mam was like hundreds of elderly women sent to them by doctors: undeniably depressed, vague, and easily confused, but no more likely to be suffering from lunacy than from anaemia or despair at a bereavement. One way or another, love was always sending women doolally, but men would not tolerate it in the old. Those with visiting sons and daughters could hope to get well and be discharged. Others, through drugs and apathy, could sink into that torpor that was the nightgowned no-woman’s-land between madness and real life.

*

While Annie is being settled into Storthes Hall, Winnie is being pulled up and down Highgate Lane by other family matters. First there is Millie, whose health is now declining rapidly. The sweet shop is comfortably profitable, being the shop that people call at to buy treats on their way to the cinema, but two years after taking it on Millie had fallen ill and the doctors had discovered cancer in her bowel. They had operated on her but now she has to spend most of her time in bed, Winnie nursing her while Anne, the youngest of Millie’s children, runs the shop.

Besides tending to Millie, Winnie also has Pauline’s marriage to arrange. Pauline did not accept Gordon’s marriage proposal on that Saturday evening after the dance, but asked for time to think about it. Gordon came back the next day to ask Harry’s permission (Harry requested livestock as a dowry: Gordon, naturally serious and literal, asked how many cows he had in mind), and on Monday night they had gone to the cinema and Pauline had said yes. The next week they joined the early Christmas shoppers in Doncaster to find a ring and a building society that would give them a mortgage on a house. So that she can save for her wedding Pauline asks her mam if she can pay board rather than handing over all her wages: Winnie says this is a bloody cheek, but then relents and compromises by increasing Pauline’s spending money to ten shillings a week.

Amid all this Winnie is sustained by a new job, and a new friend. Jane Seels, the woman who had advised her about Pauline’s studies, stops Winnie in a Highgate shop one morning and asks if she could help her clean the farmhouse: Jane is pregnant with her first child, and there is the farm to help with and soon there will be the baby, and she can’t see how she is going to cope. Winnie collects her spare pinny and cleaning brushes from home, and goes directly to the house to begin work. This initiates an arrangement that will continue for the next thirty years, and a close friendship that will last for the rest of Winnie’s life. It is to Jane, and only her, that Winnie discloses the affair with Alf, and her enduring belief that one day he will come back to take her away.

*

Dreading the idea of being on show, Gordon and Pauline say they would like a wedding ceremony early in the day, with as few guests as possible, but neither dare even tell their fathers, who both want a generously sized party. When the Cuban missile crisis escalates in the autumn, they think they may have to postpone it anyway, because there will be another war. For a while President Kennedy and the missiles are all anyone talks about; at the shops, the pits, the factories and coking plants and bus depots it is the same, the young worried about having to fight, and the old avowing the need for another war to sort out the Russians. Pauline and Gordon barely mention the wedding, even in their own homes, until the crisis is over and Kennedy appears to have won.

Annie is discharged from Storthes Hall in January 1963, during a blizzard that leaves the asylum sill-deep in snow, and well in time for the wedding which takes place at St Peter’s Church in Barnburgh on a wet Easter Monday in 1963. For presents, Harry gives them the Austin 7 and Winnie gives Pauline a bottle of the French perfume that Miss Marjorie used to wear. On the day Winnie looks poised in a new moss-green outfit with a tan cloche hat, while Harry, in a new light suit, is more nervous than his daughter. Having organised a coach to take people from Highgate to the church, he spends the morning fretting that it and the wedding cars will be late. In the sitting room and kitchen he keeps taking off his suit jacket, checking himself in the mirror, then putting it back on.

‘It’s me that’s supposed to be agitated!’ says Pauline.

‘I’m not flaming agitated! Does this jacket look better on or off?’

‘Off. I can’t believe after all you’ve done on t’ stage you’re bothered about giving me away in Barnburgh church, Dad.’

‘I’m not bothered about it! Shut up,’ he says, and stomps outside to the lav. This is the first time in her life that he has shouted at her. She looks in the mirror: veil down, armour on.

At the reception in the Green Lane Social Club, Barnburgh, the function room is divided down the middle between hushed and ponderous Bensons and chattering, roisterous Hollingworths. Pauline and Gordon move between both until half past four when they escape to catch the train to London, from where they will fly to Guernsey for their honeymoon. The taxi driver who picks them up at King’s Cross drives recklessly and speaks in an accent they cannot understand. That’s probably what London’s like, they agree, fast and incomprehensible. Gordon says he’d like to have a proper look around. Pauline looks at him in surprise and says it’s funny what you find out about people once you’ve married them.

*

Once Pauline has left home, Winnie brings Millie up from Bolton-upon-Dearne to live with them at Number 34. Harry collects her in his new car, a white Rover, and sets her up in a bed beside the window in the front room. From this position Millie can see all her old neighbours on the lane going back and forth to their shifts or the shops, and wave at them, or even converse through an opened window.

At times in the summer of 1963, she seems to be rallying, and begins threatening to get out of bed to dance around the front room with Harry. But this good news is offset by a letter from Olive saying that Muv has slipped back into her previous vagueness and kind of speech that has only a loose relation to anyone else’s idea of reality. Her claims that Walter will soon be coming to fetch her are at least understand­able, but not so her visions of her sisters and mother, or her old home in Shirebrook. ‘I told them not to come any more, Mam,’ she tells Olive. ‘I told them. And they’ve not been near since!’

In July, Annie is re-admitted to Storthes Hall. Once a week Winnie, wishing Mr Edwards a long fall down a pitshaft, is driven to the hospital by Harry. On her second visit, towards the end of the month, the nurse who comes to escort her to the ward says that Annie is now well enough to be allowed out of the locked ward into the landings and corridors. The wards are two-storey stone buildings set in the hall’s landscaped gardens. Inside, the wide corridors are tiled, and two-flight stone staircases connect the floors. As Winnie comes through the doors to her mam’s ward, Annie is standing at the top of the staircase, two-tone hair brushed, smart skirt and jumper on, waiting.

‘That’s my daughter!’ she tells a nurse when she hears Winnie’s voice. ‘It’s our Winnie come to see me!’ Beaming, she shuffles forward to the first step and misplaces her foot. Her ankle gives, and her body topples over and down the stone stairs, so that as Winnie ascends the lower flight, she sees her mother’s body tumbling towards her like a dropped marionette. Winnie cries out and watches as the nurses arrange her limbs and take her pulse. She is unconscious. A nurse rushes off to bring two men who lift Annie onto a trolley and wheel her away. Winnie and Harry are led to a small room with wooden armchairs and a table, and they wait there sipping at unwanted tea until the nurse brings a doctor. He has not been able to save her mother, he says. Annie had not regained consciousness and died as a result of the brain haemorrhage sustained when she fell.

It is a death that, with a few modifications, could have come from one of Winnie’s novels: a doting mother dying almost in the arms of her daughter on a grand stone staircase, tragedy yet again rushing upon and overtaking love. The experience is shocking to Winnie, though in the future she will find it easier to relate the details of her mother’s death than those of her father’s thirty years earlier. She never mentions her own feelings about the fall to anyone in the family either later or at the time, though she will say that the little gypsy girl came to comfort her.

At Storthes Hall, once she has taken in the news, Winnie swallows hard, sets her tearless face against misfortune, and tells Harry to drive to Olive’s house where she will explain what has happened. Later, back at home, she sits down to tell Millie about their mother’s death and begins organising the funeral. The family buries Annie’s body in the cemetery in Bolton-upon-Dearne on 27 July 1963, lowering her into a wet, black grave beside the remains of Walter Parkin.

*

In a novel Winnie might now be given time to reflect and meditate on the loss of her mother but, to her occasional regret, she does not live in a novel and in real life her sister’s health is seriously deteriorating. Through August and September, laid beside the front-room window and waving to the people outside, Millie shrinks down to six stone. It is as if she is dissolving into the air. The doctor prescribes more morphine and Winnie, May and Sonny administer it until Millie experiences painless lucidity only as rare moments between drowsiness, pain and sleep. Her speech is laboured.