Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper

by Gordon Burn

  Mick took an instant dislike to Sonia, who was exactly three weeks older than himself, and the feeling, it soon became clear, was entirely mutual. An incident that took place on one of her earliest visits helped set the seal on what was always to be an uneasy relationship, no matter how badly Peter wanted them to get on.

  ‘She said to me mother one day, an’ she’d only been in house on three or four visits then, she says: “Will you make me a cup of tea, without any sugar, please?” We all looked round, like. Is she talking to me? I thought, Bloody hell, what a pillock. Any other lass’d probably say, “D’you mind if I put the kettle on. I’m a bit dry?” But it was: “Will you get up and make me cup of tea?” Sort of, Now! She were really highly strung.’

  At the heart of the problem – and it was a feeling that Mick shared to a greater or lesser extent with all the rest of his family – was that Sonia seemed to radiate disapproval. People tended to feel inhibited by her presence in a room. ‘If I’d had a few whiskies an’ pints an’ that an’ started to tell a few jokes and act a bit silly, like you do, she couldn’t fuckin’ understand it, how I were like that.’ Cause she’d still be dead sober, an’ our Peter wouldn’t have had much. I don’t think she liked people drinking alcohol. Unless she made it an’ it were home-made wine or summat. Her father did, and she’d have a drop of that at home. But she certainly thought she was well above everybody else. That’s what I couldn’t stand.’

  Although he toned down his behaviour slightly in the early days of their courtship to spare Peter’s blushes, John Sutcliffe wasn’t the type to let a visitor – certainly not a sixteen-year-old female one – cramp his style. Sunday, which is when Sonia was normally there, was the one day in the week that he liked to indulge himself. After working four thirteen-hour shifts on four consecutive nights, at the end of which he’d fall into bed and sleep for twenty-four hours, he felt he ought to be able to let his hair down. On Saturdays, he’d enjoy a game of football or cricket and eat very little in order to make the most of his ‘big drink night’. Then on Sunday, after choir duty at St Wilfrid’s and another couple of hours in the pub, he’d really ‘set out a stall’.

  ‘This should be enough to keep the Biafran army on the march for a month,’ he’d say, attacking a small hillock of meat and vegetables and gravy with a fortress of Yorkshire pudding on the top that at the Szurmas’ would have been made to serve four. What Sonia, and even Mrs Sutcliffe, who’d cooked it, didn’t know, was that the ‘beef’ with ‘such a lovely colour to it’ was, more often than not, grade-A horsemeat that a friend of John’s who bred Yorkshire terriers had got him from the pet shop.

  ‘Never eat owt me dad gives you,’ Carl would warn people, only half-jokingly, after seeing his father scoop a dead pigeon up off the road and drop it into the pot. But John was always eager to share the passion for ‘esoteric’ foods, mainly offal, that he had inherited from his grandfather. ‘If you can drink water, you can eat tripe. It’s only like solid water: it doesn’t taste of anything,’ are the words that would often accompany the pleasurable squelch of best ‘honeycomb’ being chewed. ‘You’ve to put salt and vinegar on to mek it taste of owt, but then it tastes beautiful.’

  It irked him that Kathleen wouldn’t try it simply because she didn’t like the way it looked, and that their sons had followed suit. ‘I know Peter were never very fond. You couldn’t sit him down to a plate of cow-heel or chicklins or owt. But the girls when they were young, they used to lean more towards me than lads did, so they’d have a bash. Lads used to cling to their mother a lot, and I think Peter led the way there, because he was a right mother’s boy from the word go.’

  As a young man, Peter had a natural refinement that his father’s more rugged manners threw into sharp relief; he was obviously never going to drink tea out of a pint-pot the way his father habitually did, or keep a ‘jerry’ with a spot of Dettol in it under the bed to save making trips to the bathroom through the night.

  If anything, he grew increasingly fastidious as he grew older, and was particularly sensitive about a sweaty foot problem that in later years would lead to him wearing clogs and ‘Dr Scholl’ sandals and washing his own socks. At home, he’d leave his socks tucked into his shoes outside on the window-sill when he went to bed, which was a habit that became so ingrained he even remembered to do it on his honeymoon: there was some puzzlement, and not a little amusement, among those who didn’t know about the ‘problem’ when a pair of men’s shoes appeared outside an upstairs window at Maureen’s house in Cambridge where Peter and Sonia were staying en route to Paris. To Peter, though, who never gave up searching for ways to minimise the smell, it was too embarrassing to be a joke.

  The irony was that he still monopolised the bathroom and continued to shut himself up in it even if he’d brought Sonia home. It wasn’t unusual for him to install Sonia in the front room with his mother the minute they arrived, and then disappear upstairs for anything up to an hour. Being women, it was assumed they must have a lot in common but, even with Mrs Sutcliffe, who was well known all over the estate for her sympathetic ear and her warmth and, perhaps her most unusual quality in the midst of the prevailing chaos, her repose, Sonia never really opened up. ‘I am not a gushing person,’ she would later say in the sort of tart understatement for which she had become renowned.

  Whether or not Peter left her downstairs for a cosy chat, though, depended to a great extent on the whereabouts of his father, whose blandishments Sonia had shown herself to be particularly immune to from day one. John Sutcliffe always had more to say for himself than the rest of the household put together, but was particularly voluble in the company of anybody who had ‘had an education’, quoting Shakespeare and Aeschylus and pieces of wisdom gleaned ‘from a professor in Reader’s Digest’, like whispering into the hood over its beak being the best way to get a budgie to talk. Sonia was no more diverted by any of this than she was by his dramatic monologues or his harmonica playing; she was aware of his earlier theatrical ambitions and was in no doubt that he had missed his vocation. But it was physical contact that she was always most anxious to avoid.

  John Sutcliffe made no secret of the fact that he liked women, and he missed no opportunity to get to grips with them, plain or pretty, young or old. On odd occasions there had been some slight unpleasantness when one of his daughters’ friends or a girl that one of Peter’s pals had brought back to Cornwall Road felt that he’d overstepped the mark – Shelia Norton, for instance, who lived next-door-but-one to the Sutcliffes, had objected to his attentions at the time she was going out with Laurie Ashton. But within the family it was regarded as more or less harmless, a peccadillo, even something of a joke.

  ‘He’s like that wi’ girls. He mauls ’em,’ Carl would still be able to say good-humouredly of his father fifteen years later. ‘If he’s in pub an’ any woman comes anywhere near, he’ll always grab hold an’ touch them, pretending to be joking and messing around. Our Mick used to say you daren’t leave your girlfriend in room with ’im. When I used to bring my girlfriend back and he used to touch her, I used to say, “Gerroff! Look, but don’t touch!” He’s a crazy guy.’

  For these reasons, perhaps, Sonia never used to leave Peter’s side while she was at ‘Corny’ Road. If they were in the living-room, the two of them would make a point of sitting with their chairs hard against the wall, well behind everybody else, and as far away from the fire as they could get, ‘as if they were scared they would melt’. Usually though you would find them in what had been Grandma Coonan’s and, more recently, Anne and her new husband’s bedroom, now returned to its intended use as a ‘dinette’. They would sit for hours locked in intense, but inaudible conversation there or in the kitchen, although Carl and Jane did walk in on them once undressing in the bedroom upstairs.

  The search for privacy frequently took Sonia and Peter out of doors and up to the ‘moor-top’ directly above Ferncliffe Estate, where they spent hours strolling among the craggy black rocks bearded with heather that, many
years earlier, had been quarried and reconstituted as the mills and chapels and handsome villas spread out vertiginously below. Seen from here, the newer buildings, mainly council-built, that encircle the old town like a soiled collar, look pale and insubstantial, as if the westerly wind that rushes down the valley might one day just pluck them and brush them away.

  At the Szurmas’ the problem wasn’t the noise so much as the resounding lack of it that was daunting; their reaction nevertheless was the same. They sought refuge in an old graveyard where Peter broke his ankle once pretending to be a ‘ghost’: he’d jumped over a wall where he was going to hide and leap out at Sonia and give her a fright, but instead of the four feet that he had been expecting, realised too late that it was at least a twenty-foot drop.

  Arnside, with its picturesqueness and health and crafts shops and boarding houses full of ladies reading Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton novels, was somewhere else that, even after they were married, they used to go to often. They also became regular callers on a couple who in those early days filled most of the requirements for what, it seemed to those who didn’t fill the bill, they were coming to think of as ‘their’ kind of people.

  Arthur Bisby, his wife Anne and their two daughters lived in a neat semi-detached house in a tree-lined street in Crossflatts. He was an ex-turner who had done well for himself as an ‘insurance man’ – he’d had Mrs Sutcliffe on his books for years and started insuring Peter after he learned to drive; she did the choreography for Bingley Amateur Operatic Society and was the leading light in an ‘action’ group campaigning against environmental pollution in the area around where they lived.

  The Bisbys were among the few people who didn’t find Peter at all tense; on the contrary, he’d arrive around teatime on a Sunday, make himself comfortable and sometimes would still be there at midnight, long after his hosts had run out of things to say. He was particularly fond of the children, with whom he seemed ‘on the same wave-length’ although, as far as Sonia was concerned, they might as well not have been there. She was difficult and reserved but seemed devoted to Peter with whom, it was as obvious to the Bisbys as to everybody else who knew them, she clearly saw a comfortable future stretching out many years ahead.

  By summer 1969, they had been going out with each other for two years and Sonia was just coming to the end of her A-level course at Bradford Tech. Soon she would embark on the teacher training that her father had had earmarked for her since she was a child, and then when she had qualified they could be married and set up house on their own. That was always the plan. With no prior warning, however, and with few people other than themselves conscious of the fact, their relationship was suddenly on the rocks.

  Mick Sutcliffe was working in a trench with a pickaxe one day that year, widening the main road on the southern perimeter of Bingley, when a white sportscar with a flamboyant young couple in it caught his eye. ‘There were a scarf blowin’ off of bird in passenger seat, a sort of silk job blowin’ over top, an’ I just fuckin’ realised who it were when she got level. It were her.’

  ‘I don’t like sayin’ owt,’ he said to Peter as soon as he got in, grinning from ear to ear, ‘but I don’t like her anyway so I’m goin’ to tell you: Sonia were in a fuckin’ sportscar with a feller this afternoon, coming down Cottingley Bridge. Likely they’d been to Morecambe for the day.’ He continued in this vein for some time, ‘niggling’ his brother, until something about the look on Peter’s face told him he had better stop. It was an episode that was never mentioned again.

  10

  I remember Miss Brontë telling me it was a saying round about Haworth, ‘Keep a stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it and keep it seven years longer, that it may be ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near.’

  Mrs Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë

  A darkening of the eye, in which the iris became drained of any hint of colour, was the only sight that Peter was upset or angry. He rarely lost his temper with anybody, ever: he never betrayed his feelings about anything. At work the morning after Mick had dealt him what had actually been a devastating blow, nobody detected any change in his always affable self. The only way in which he deviated from his regular pattern at the Water Board, where he had been working as a general labourer since his dismissal at Bingley cemetery, was that he packed up early, leaving one of the other men to ‘cover’ for him.

  The image of Sonia riding in a car with somebody else had started to obsess Peter; each detail, as Mick had described it, had instantly become etched in his mind. The time couldn’t come fast enough for him to discover for himself whether it was true or not. It seemed inconceivable to him that it could be. And yet as soon as he saw her he knew that it was.

  He was waiting for Sonia when she came out of the technical college, and was in a position to see the shocked expression on her face. She immediately turned away, instead of walking towards him, but he was at her shoulder in seconds and they argued all the way to her home.

  What Peter was desperate to know was if Sonia was sleeping with the owner of the sportscar, who, she had admitted, was an Italian. And in the course of the row he had sneeringly suggested going to a chemist and buying some Durex to make it easier for her. In the end he simply walked off in what he would later describe as ‘an angry and resentful frame of mind’. He started driving back to Bradford.

  *

  That there were prostitutes plying their trade in Bradford, and that their favourite ‘patch’ was barely half a mile away from the Royal Standard, was hardly news to somebody who had grown to be on such intimate terms with the Manningham–Lumb Lane area as Peter: in his regular forays away from the pubs in which Eric and Laurie were drinking up their courage, he had been able to acquaint himself with the derelict properties, dingy corners and narrow, litter-strewn ‘ginnels’ where the girls conducted their business, as well as with their working methods. By and large, these had remained unchanged for generations.

  ‘Bradford’s Great Curse – the monster evil which is a dark and ugly blot on our social and moral life … this seething whirlpool of immorality’ was something which had much exercised pamphleteers at the turn of the century, when it was estimated that there were sixty brothels and 170 ‘notorious’ prostitutes operating in the city. While, in the 1930s, a contemporary observer noted the irony of the fact that, in Bradford, ‘the process of turning oneself into a street-walker should still be called “going gay”, for anything less gay, anything more monotonous, dull, dreary, senseless, sordid, than the whole way of life, the surroundings, habits, manners, outlook of these women … can hardly be imagined. They nearly always look what they are – gross, greedy and stupid.’

  Throughout the second half of the last century and the first quarter of this, Manningham enjoyed a reputation for being the most fashionable area in the city. Manningham Lane, the main route to the North, was a sedate thoroughfare flanked by golden, classically proportioned terraces that housed the managers, accountants and other white-collar workers attached to the mills whose massive black chimneys dominated the landscape. By the late 1960s, when ‘the Lane’ became the haunt of Peter Sutcliffe and his gravedigging friends, vestiges of that earlier elegance remained, but evidence of the squalor that the fine terraces now served to conceal was increasingly seeping through their façades.

  Junk shops, ‘private’ (that is, sex) shops, betting offices, minicab and take-away curry places, drinking clubs and cobbled-together ‘caffs’ were the public face of what, even then, was starting to be recognised as one of the worst inner-city slums in the country. Lumb Lane runs parallel with Manningham Lane for just over a mile from the city centre, and the streets between and beyond them along that short stretch have accommodated succeeding waves of immigrants: the Irish up to the beginning of World War II; Eastern Europeans after it; and Asians (and, to a lesser extent, West Indians) from the mid-1950s on.

  By the late sixties, slum clearance had demolished half the Lumb Lane area, but the demolition was taking place in
such an apparently random, haphazard fashion that single shops and houses, or maybe small clusters of buildings, would inexplicably be left standing, like old teeth in a gaping mouth. Customers following the ‘Toilet’ signs in the Lahore (always pronounced ‘Lawhooer’) restaurant, for example, would find themselves stumbling across a piece of waste ground where half a dozen cats were fighting each other over a hen’s head. At the corner, two or three prostitutes would stand silhouetted in the dark, indifferent to the fact that the building which had once afforded them a degree of discretion and shelter was now gone.

  Up to the end of the 1950s, most industrial towns in the West Riding had been able to boast small ‘prostitute’ populations of their own, made up almost entirely of mill-girls, earning a bit of much needed extra money on the side. In Bingley, the King’s Head was their regular haunt, although Treaclecock Alley, a damp, permanently blacked-out culvert running under the railway, was where most transactions took place. Twenty years later, a woman of indeterminate age known as ‘Mucky Mary’ would be the sole survivor of her breed, and Mick Sutcliffe would be rumoured to be ‘the only man brave enough to take her on’.

  At weekends, the always steady traffic of serious ‘punters’ kerb-crawling along Lumb Lane would be swelled by carloads of boozy youths from the surrounding suburbs and small towns like Bingley who were in equal measure fascinated and repelled by what they saw, but only ever admitted to being there for one reason: ‘the laugh’.