It was not quite as sudden as that, as a week intervened between his first attack and the second. I went up straight away to find him in Intensive Care, tired but said to be on the mend. Habeas Corpus had only half a dozen performances left so I was going back to London to finish the run, and also to resume my suddenly eventful existence, at least for as long as I was allowed to. On my way I called at the hospital to say goodbye and to tell him that I’d see him in a week’s time. He was propped up in bed, his pyjama jacket open, the electrodes that monitored his heart attached to his chest. I don’t think he ever sunbathed in his life or even wore an open-necked shirt and the line of his collar was sharp, his worn red face and neck like a helmet above the creamy whiteness of his chest.
We never kissed much in our family; I kissed my mother often but I don’t ever recall kissing my father since I was a boy. Even when we were children Dad would make a joke of kissing, pulling a face and sticking his cheek out to indicate the exact spot on which this distasteful task had to be carried out. Seeing him less often than I did, my brother would shake hands, but I can’t recall ever doing that either. Which is not to say that we were remote from each other, and indeed I felt much closer to him grown up than I ever did as a child when, smart and a show-off, I often felt myself an embarrassment and not the child he would have wanted.
So I sat for a while at his bedside and then stood up to say goodbye. And uniquely in my adulthood, kissed him on the cheek. Seeing the kiss coming he shifted slightly, and I saw a look of distant alarm in his eyes, on account not just of the kiss but of what it portended. I was kissing him, he clearly thought, because I did not expect to see him again. He knew it for what it was and so did I, because somebody had once done the same to me.* It was the kiss of death.
If I could wipe away that kiss and the memory of it I would do, though trusting in the doctor’s prognosis I had no thought that Dad was likely to die. I fear what made me kiss him was again the fashionable nonsense about families being healthier for touching and showing affection, the same modish stuff that had made me ask him if he touched my mother. And it was something similar that made me ask after his death if I might see his body. It was death as the last taboo, death as much a part of life as birth, all the up-to-the-minute Sunday papers stuff. Less forgivably there was some notion that being a writer demanded an unflinching eye, to look on death part of the job. Besides, I was forty and the death of the father was one of the great formative experiences; I had a duty to make the most of it.
He had died on the Saturday morning when I was already on the train north, so when I saw his body on the Monday at Airedale Hospital he had been dead two days. The mortuary was somewhere at the back of the hospital; not a facility I suppose they wanted to make a show of, it was near the boiler room and the back doors of the kitchens. I was put into a curtained room (called the viewing room) where Dad lay under a terrible purple pall. There were two attendants, one of whom pulled back the shroud. It was a shocking sight. His face had shrunk and his teeth no longer fitted so that his mouth was set in a snarl, a look about as uncharacteristic of him as I could ever have imagined. It was the first time in his life (except that it wasn’t in his life) that he can have looked fierce. I noticed that the attendants were looking at me, more interested in my reactions than in the corpse which to them must have been commonplace. Noting that at seventy-one he still had scarcely a grey hair, I nodded and they wheeled him out.
Back in London for a couple of days I mentioned my father’s death to Miss Shepherd, the tramp on the street who, a few months before, had moved her van into my garden. She did not trouble to express any sympathy, never altogether crediting the misfortune of anyone but herself. Nor in this case.
‘Yes. I knew he must have died. I saw him a few days ago. He was hovering over the convent at the top of the street. I think it was to warn you against the dangers of Communism.’
This vision was only slightly more implausible than its purported purpose. I could think of many reasons why my father might have been hovering around at the top of the street (‘Try and be more patient with your Mam’ for instance) but the Red Menace would have come very low down on the list.
My father’s was not the only corpse I was to see that summer of 1974. Within a month I came across another body and in circumstances where even the terrible purple pall that covered my father would not have been unwelcome. But to tell that tale means going back to the forties and catching up on my aunties.
There were three aunties on my mother’s side of the family, the Peels, which was the side of the family we saw most of. There were three aunties on my father’s side too, the wives of his three Bennett brothers, but we saw much less of them. This was because, the Gimmer’s fireside hardly being a welcoming one, no sooner had Dad started courting Mam than he was drawn into the far friendlier family of his fiancée. And this was the pattern for the rest of their lives, with us seeing far more of the Peels than we ever did of the Bennetts.
No one could have been less like the conventional mother-in-law than Grandma Peel and she was, for my father, very much the mother he had never had. Tall, dignified and straightforward, she was in every sense a big woman who had come through the tragedies of her life unembittered and with her sense of humour intact; she had seen two bankruptcies, her family reduced from relative affluence to abject poverty, the death of her only son in the trenches, and the never-spoken-of suicide of her husband which left her with three daughters to bring up on very little, and yet she remained a funny, self-sufficient, lively woman. Dad would never hear a word against her, so that when as a child I heard comedians making stock mother-in-law jokes I was mystified: who were these carping, cantankerous, fault-finding creatures, the bane of their sons-in-law’s lives? I’d never come across one.
My mother’s sisters were Kathleen and Lemira, both resident at Gilpin Place: Kathleen the oldest, Lemira the youngest, my mother, Lilian, the one in the middle. (‘That was the trouble,’ she used to say of her childhood, ‘I got it from both sides.’) Writing about them, I feel a twinge of snobbish regret that they were invariably called ‘Aunty’ and never ‘Aunt’. Aunts, after all, are women to be taken seriously; they are, at the very least, middle class and come equipped with a long literary pedigree; aunties, on the other hand, have no lineage or standing at all. However you look at it, an aunty is an aunt cosified; even a literary dreadnought like Lady Bracknell would lose half her firepower were she Aunty Augusta. So the seriousness of a narrative like this in which my mother’s sisters figure pretty continuously seems, as I say snobbishly, cheapened by calling them aunties. Best to forget the relationship altogether then; except that, brought up never to call grown-ups by anything so naked as their name, I could no more write plain Kathleen and Myra than I could have ever called them that to their faces. Moreover, shorn of their status such untitled creatures would not resemble the women I remember. No. Aunties it has to be.
We did have one aunt, though, Aunt Eveline, and she was preserved from diminishment into Aunty by her age – she was Grandma Peel’s sister-in-law – by her demeanour, which was imposing, and by her build, which was stout. The word was hers, and it was dinned into my brother and me as children not only that we should never refer to Aunt Eveline in her presence as fat, which we would in any case have been unlikely to do, but – a much taller order – never even refer to anyone else in her presence as fat. This was particularly unfair because, had Aunt Eveline not thought of herself as fat, had fatness not been put on the agenda as it were, I’m sure it would never have occurred to us. She was just Aunt Eveline, her size (which was not exceptional) something we took for granted.
In retrospect I see that Aunt Eveline’s problem was her large, undifferentiated bust, a bust that echoed the lid of the piano on which she was such an accomplished performer. It was this bust that until the brink of adolescence confused me about the female anatomy. Aunt Eveline’s breasts were so large as to make the cleavage between them resemble a deep, damp-looking canyon,
a shaft going down into the recesses of the body like the entrance to Gaping Ghyll. I knew vaguely about the shaft at the other end of the body, but there can be few boys who thought as I did, at the age of eleven, that the female anatomy includes a kind of pectoral vagina. And that the naked woman at the front of Everybody’s Home Doctor, standing with her palms towards you ‘showing all she’d got’, displayed no trace of such an orifice, did not entirely dislodge the idea from my mind. Aunt Eveline was wont to screen the entrance to this mysterious shaft with an embroidered frontal not unlike the linen antimacassars on the back of the three-piece suite in the sitting room, between the backs of the easy chairs and Aunt Eveline’s broad bust there not being much to choose.
Aunt Eveline was ‘a lovely pianist’ and had beautiful handwriting, her name and address in Pellon Lane, Halifax, written on the covers of all the music in the piano stool. She had had a brief career playing the piano in the silent cinema, then, when the talkies came in, had turned corsetière, a profession often embraced by ample ladies who could simultaneously model the product they were marketing. She still had a connection with corsets in the early forties but by this time she had turned housekeeper, looking after a Mr Wilson, a rich Bradford widower and former chairman of the Bradford Dyers’ Association. Widower isn’t a designation men would readily apply to themselves these days, and housekeeping as a profession seems to have gone out too. In those days, though, housekeeping covered a multitude of sins, but not, I think, in Aunt Eveline’s case. Mr Wilson was well off and already had one fancy woman, whose doings and dresses would be scathingly described over high tea at Gilpin Place, together with the slights Aunt Eveline had suffered at this shameless creature’s hands and what Aunt Eveline (‘I was scrupulously polite’) had rejoindered. Even aged ten I knew Aunt Eveline’s hostility to this fancy woman owed less to outraged respectability than to Aunt Eveline’s desire to be in her shoes, though it was hard to see why as on the only occasion we were led into her employer’s presence (‘Mr Wilson, may I introduce my great-nephews’) I thought I had never seen anyone who looked more like a toad … or, as it might have occurred to me later, a character out of Priestley or John Braine. Oddly, his photo has ended up in the family archives, though Aunt Eveline’s main bequest to us when she died in 1956 was her piano and the sheet music that came with it.
While Grandma is alive family Sunday evenings at Gilpin Place follow a settled routine, with the four of us coming over to Wortley from Headingley (Number 1 tram to City Square, Number 12 to Fourteenth Avenue), where we would have high tea and then go to church at St Mary’s. Dad would see his brother George, who sang in the choir, and afterwards they would adjourn to the sitting room at Gilpin Place.
There were always flowers in the sitting room, bought at Sleights, the greengrocer’s at the corner of Green Lane and Tong Road; huge chrysanthemums (sixpence a bloom), carnations (threepence a spray) arranged in glass celery vases, and anemones in one of Grandma’s many lustre jugs.
The chrysanthemums often had as backing another flower, which I never knew had a name and didn’t much care for because it smelled to me of decay. I went to France first at the age of twenty and suddenly, hitchhiking near Cahors, I caught a whiff of it from a nearby field and realised it must be mimosa, for some a scent that means the Côte d’Azur but for me redolent of the front room of a sooty Leeds back-to-back.
The sitting room would also smell of smoke as the fire would have been lit by transferring a load of hot coals from the kitchen, a dramatic and dangerous proceeding, the children told to keep back as Grandma bore through the smoking shovel with one of the aunties following in her wake to retrieve any stray coals.
‘Now then, Walter,’ Aunt Eveline would say. ‘What shall we give them?’ though the truth was they were performing more for their own pleasure than for ours, particularly as the performance curtailed conversation. While Aunt Eveline was playing talking was out, a severe deprivation for Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra, who could only keep up an appearance of musical appreciation for so long before retreating to the kitchen to get on with their gabbing.
There was no self-consciousness about these musical evenings, and no sense that they were the last throes of a tradition that radio had dented but which within ten years television would put paid to altogether. Dad liked playing, Uncle George loved singing and Aunt Eveline, who seldom got a chance to play in company, came over from Bradford specially for the treat. As a child, of course, I found it all very boring, though it endowed me with a comprehensive knowledge of the works of Ivor Novello, Vivian Ellis and Gilbert and Sullivan, not to mention Edwardian favourites like Albert Ketèlbey. I have only to hear ‘I can give you the starlight, Love unchanging and true’ or ‘Fly home little heart’ and I am back in the sitting room in 1949, crammed into the corner of the sofa, with Dad and his fiddle on one side of the piano, Uncle George and his beaming brick-red face on the other and in between Aunt Eveline’s unmentionable bottom overflowing from the piano stool. Uncle George had his special party pieces, generally kicking off with ‘Bless this House’, which always found favour and which might sometimes provoke a few tears. Then there would be ‘Did you not see my lady, go down the garden singing?’ with no notion in any of our minds that this was by Handel and therefore a cut above ‘In a Monastery Garden’, say. There would be selections from Edward German, with Ivor Novello’s ‘Rose of England’ another solo spot for Uncle George, and then Aunt Eveline would finish off with a medley from HMS Pinafore and perhaps a hymn or two. She would rise, flushed, from the piano stool and we’d all have a cup of tea and a bit of cake before she took herself off to Bradford and another week’s housekeeping.
The aunties resident at Gilpin Place, Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra, were both what they were pleased to call career girls, which is to say shop assistants – Kathleen in Manfield’s shoe shop on Commercial Street, Myra at White’s Ladies’ Mantles just across the road in Briggate. Kathleen was always said to be, said herself to be, the manageress of Manfield’s, though I suspect this wasn’t an official title but simply meant that she was the longest-serving of the women assistants. Longest-suffering too, as in those days buying shoes involved more what nowadays would be called interaction, the stock not laid out on racks for all to see and try on but secreted in banks of floor-to-ceiling boxes which were often accessible only on ladders, the assistants up and down them as nimble as sailors on the rigging. Customers, whatever their class, were deferentially treated (‘Madam takes a broad fitting? Certainly’) and off they would go up the ladder again.
It’s a sign of my age that shoe shops seem nowadays to be staffed by sluts, indifferent, unhelpful and with none of that matronly dignity with which the selling of shoes and the buying of clothes were in those days conducted. It is a small loss, though buying shoes in a provincial town in Italy a few years ago I noted that none of the assistants was under forty, and all happy and helpful, and it made me remember Manfield’s and realise such ladies are a loss, and that in some of what the papers call ‘sections of the economy’ the right age for a particular job (not that retailers will ever acknowledge it) is often middle age.
The personnel and politics of Manfield’s are well known to us as after work Aunty Kathleen will often come up to Halliday Place and give us her regular bulletin on what has been happening at the shop, recounting the events of her day in Proustian detail. She has a characteristic way of talking, which has been developed as an almost Darwinian response to people’s reluctance to listen to the lengthy and often formless narratives she likes to embark on. These are therefore punctuated by phrases like ‘If you see what I mean, Lilian’, ‘If you follow me, Walter’ or ‘As it subsequently transpired’, little verbal tags and tugs just to make sure the person she is talking to is still trotting at the heels of the interminable saga of what she said to the customer and what the customer said to her and what her friend, Miss Moore, said about it all afterwards. And when, after an evening dominated by these narratives, the door finally closes on
her Dad blurts out, ‘I wouldn’t care, but you’re no further on when she’s done.’
‘Yes, but Dad,’ Mam chips in, ‘she’s very good-hearted.’ Which indeed she was, but she was a marathon talker.
Unmarried though they are, Kathleen and Myra are hardly maiden aunts, literally or figuratively, and strait-laced is the last thing they want to seem. Less pretty than Mam, the aunties are in my brother’s and my eyes much more glamorous, seeing themselves as dashing, adventuresome creatures, good sports and always on for what they see as a lark. They wear scent and camiknickers and have the occasional drink, which we are allowed to taste or are given a shandy instead. They even smoke if the occasion requires it and revel in the small sophistications of the single life. They see themselves as women of the world with Bette Davis as their model, over-polite sarcasm and a talent for putting someone in their place skills of which they are both proud. They are big fans of the Duke of Windsor, Aunty Myra in particular giving the impression that, if things hadn’t worked out well with Mrs Simpson, HRH could have done worse than marry her.
In those days aunties, particularly of the unmarried sort (and perhaps only if they are unmarried), serve in the family set-up as ladies of misrule. Untrammelled by domestic responsibilities with no husband whose line they have to toe, they are (or fancy themselves) freer spirits than their wifely sisters to whom, in turn, they are slightly suspect, blamed for ‘putting ideas into the children’s heads’ or ‘getting them all excited’. These sisters of subversion give their nephews and nieces forbidden foods, dismissing as ‘fuss’ well-founded parental prohibitions: ‘Our Alan can’t do with oatcakes, he comes out in heat spots’ or ‘They don’t have fish and chips at night, it keeps them awake’.