by Gordon Burn
‘If he had a funny situation to relate or a funny story to tell, he used to get so wrapped up in the telling of it that I don’t think he really cared whether we enjoyed listening to it or not. He used to get so excited and laugh at his own jokes. All the time. He’d have to stop and have a really good laugh, and he perhaps lost his way a little bit now and again so that it would take him twenty minutes to tell a tale it would take anybody else mebbe five minutes to tell.
‘To us, that was him. But she’d just look at him when he was getting over-excited and say “Peter!” And he’d immediately calm down. She could bring him down just like that. Just by the way she’d look at him. Just like a schoolteacher telling a naughty boy in the class to behave by saying his name out loud in front of everybody. She could do that with him, quite effectively.’
Peter didn’t drop his old friends entirely after he started ‘going serious’ with Sonia. He still went out for a ‘run’ on the bike occasionally with Eric, or down to Bingley Working Men’s Club where a group played in the concert room on Wednesdays, his ‘night off’. The back room of the Granby on Sunday nights was another regular haunt of Eric and Laurie and some of the old crowd, and sometimes Sonia would even put in an appearance with him. She tolerated the Cuban-heel boots and ‘Wyatt Earp’ ribbon-ties that he wore, much as she tolerated the company, but she drew the line at the green finger-tip ‘drape’ coat that Peter had had made to measure without her consultation, and forbade him to appear in it in public. In the end he gave it away.
Slowly, she began to re-educate him in his tastes, weaning him away from taproom rock’n’roll and on to the light classics. They went to see Marianne, Sonia’s sister, give platform recitals at the piano, and took in the occasional opera and ballet. If his family generally were nonplussed by this ‘going up in the world’, Mick was openly disgusted. ‘You mean you go an’ sit for hours listening to her playin’ fuckin’ concertos an’ stuff like that?’ he’d ask, incredulous. ‘To me, it’d send me crackers, like.’
Painting was going to be Sonia’s main subject at the Rachel MacMillan Teachers’ Training College in Deptford in southeast London, and her clothes, in the few months before she was due to embark on the three-year course, became – at least as far as Jane and Maureen were concerned – definitely ‘arty’: she was wearing long ‘traipsing’ skirts and thick-knit patterned tights long before they were ‘in’ in Bingley. In London, though, like everything Sonia said or attempted, they were considered unremarkable. She abandoned painting in favour of pottery within a few weeks of arriving at the college in the autumn of 1970, but the impressions that she made academically and extramurally were equally negligible.
Virtually her only social contacts were with her sister and with Peter, who conscientiously drove down to see her every weekend: as soon as he finished work on a Friday, he was into his car and away, arriving home again early on Monday morning, a few hours before he was due to clock in at the start of another week. Because Sonia was in a hall of residence with a strict curfew on male visitors, he slept in the car or in a tent pitched in the grounds for the first few months and then, at the age of twenty-five, made the major decision to strike out on his own for the first time.
He installed himself in a bedsit in the Deptford area and was able to survive on what he earned from doing bits of motorcar maintenance and joinery, but in the end he wasn’t away from home long enough for his absence to be noticed: within just a few weeks he was back living at ‘Corny’ Road, retailing his experiences of living in ‘the smoke’ and working on the production line at Baird’s TV in Bradford, alongside his old friend Trevor Birdsall.
*
In March 1972, Andrea, Trevor’s three-year-old sister, went into a Leeds hospital for a ‘hole in the heart’ operation. It was a rare enough case with sufficient ‘human interest’ for it to be featured prominently in the local press and on television, and, while she was recuperating, Peter was one of her more frequent and attentive visitors. It was a role that he was increasingly being called on to play with Sonia, whose physical and emotional isolation in London had started to manifest itself in progressively confused and erratic behaviour. Although still detached and uncommunicative in class, in private she had become prone to unprovoked outbursts of rage and agitation that would eventually be identified as symptoms of her schizophrenia. Peter, on occasion, was forced to contain her physically by pinning her arms to her sides, but, as well as being unpredictable and violent, she also seemed to be wasting away.
In the interval between two of his visits, in the middle of her second year at the college, she shed around a stone and, the following week, back in Bingley, he received a telegram from Sonia which said simply: ‘Meet me at King’s Cross station’, day and time unspecified. Believing that she was ‘still her father’s responsibility’, he took the telegram round to Mr Szurma, who made a dash for the next train.
Convinced that ‘all the machinery was stopping and the world was coming to an end,’ Sonia had wandered out into the street at night in her pyjamas, where she had been apprehended and later admitted to a Bexley hospital. The next time Peter saw her was after her transfer to the Linfield Mount psychiatric hospital in Bradford, and he was dismayed.
He thought she looked grey and ‘terrible’; she thought he was an aeroplane. Among her other delusions was that she was ‘the second Christ’ – she could ‘see’ the stigmata on her hands. She was also restless and shrill and insistent that she wanted ‘a bigger teddy-bear’. Her parents suggested that, once she was discharged and back living at home with them, it would be best if he didn’t see her for a while.
He didn’t see her for several weeks, and when he eventually did it didn’t strike him that progress was being made. Far from being emaciated, Sonia had now taken on a bland and bloated look from ‘the tablets’ that she had been prescribed. She was lethargic and almost devoid of personality, it seemed to him. He felt he hardly knew her any more.
His determination to get reacquainted, however, combined with an unusual gentleness and patience, impressed the Szurmas, who up to then had proved politely resistant to their would-be son-in-law’s shy and occasionally queasy charm.
He was determined to ‘pull her through’, he told Mr and Mrs Szurma, as he had told members of his own family, who only knew that Sonia had suffered some sort of breakdown brought on by ‘over-studying’.
She was well enough to go to Trevor Birdsall’s wedding with Peter later in 1972, and they would occasionally go out drinking in pubs in Bradford or Halifax with Trevor and Melissa, who also worked at Baird’s TV. But a few months after coming out of hospital, Sonia suffered a relapse: this time, part of the pattern of her generally disturbed and frenetic behaviour included tearing her clothes off in public or at odd times at home, such as in the middle of a meal. By the time she reappeared at Cornwall Road her condition had improved, but her rehabilitation was still far from complete.
She had become inseparable from the pop music annual that her father had taken away from her when she was younger. And one night, Jane Sutcliffe, who was still only fifteen and nervous of Sonia’s unpredictable behaviour, was given a glimpse of the, to her, incomprehensible chaos of her mind. ‘One night she came round and Pete went straight off to the bathroom as usual and left her with me. I were just sitting quiet, reading, when Sonia stood up an’ did a little twirl in front of the settee. “Guess who I am today?” she said. She were just wearing a little summer cotton frock, a shawl an’ these silver sandals. “Cinderella,” she said. I thought, “Oh, bloody hell …”’
Nothing was ever said to Peter, though. Nobody at Cornwall Road ever broached the subject, or enquired into the details of what Jane’s father called Sonia’s ‘queer do’. Peter, as always, kept his own counsel.
13
The atmosphere at Cornwall Road in the wake of the Bankfield Hotel affair was inevitably strained. John Sutcliffe was subject to abrupt changes of mood, and the family tended to keep out of his way as far as possible. M
aureen was courting the soldier whom she would soon marry; Carl and Jane were growing up and making their own friends; and Peter spent most of his time when he was in the house ‘playing’ with his Bullworker upstairs in the bedroom.
They had never known their parents to show each other affection and it was embarrassing now to see their father reach for their mother’s hand or slip an arm around her shoulder while watching television. It wasn’t ‘natural’, and Kathleen seemed to share their discomfort, aware that at any minute he was likely to return to the subject of her ‘unfaithfulness’ to him; to Jane, her mother always looked ‘dead embarrassed’.
John had been unable to stop himself brooding on the supposed infidelity, and repeatedly found himself raking over the recent past for ‘clues’ that should have alerted him. There was the evening, for instance, when he had left for work a couple of hours later than usual in order to watch a Buster Crabbe film on television, only to have it interrupted by a caller who turned out to be Albert, the policeman. In retrospect, he had seemed confused and had ‘snapped together a quick excuse’ that was never convincing, about coming to see Mick about some gun … Kathleen, he now believed, had looked despondent when he told her he was moving to the new late shift after working constant nights for six years, when he could have expected her to look pleased …
It got so that, whenever she wasn’t in the house, he was suspicious about what she was doing. ‘Did your mother meet any men?’ he wanted to know when Carl came home after being away with her for a week in Arnside. And the more she pleaded with him to forget the whole thing, that he was blowing it up out of all proportion, the more inconsolable he became.
‘I were so up-tight and upset about it all I couldn’t even be me normal self. She just kept saying, “Oh don’t let it worry you so much; when all’s said and done it’s nothing.” Nothing! My wife having an affair with another feller for three years without my knowing… So I had to do something to persuade her that it was something. It had got to the point where I simply couldn’t stand the sight of her any more. There had to be a break.’
*
The houses on the north side of Cornwall Road backed directly on to the houses on The Oval, so that their inhabitants lived under conditions of enforced intimacy with each other: the fences between gardens had for the most part disappeared, and the gardens’ individual identities with them – they had disintegrated into a single greasy patch littered with the husks of gas cookers and refrigerators and the skeletons of prams.
The Sutcliffes’ nearest neighbour on The Oval was a woman who hadn’t let the fact that she was deaf and dumb preclude her from building up a firm friendship with Kathleen: they communicated in a kind of improvised sign language which, as often as not, consisted of Mrs Broughton indicating that she would like to borrow something of which she had ‘run short’. The mother of four children, Wendy was not a ‘good manager’: this was reflected both in her own appearance and in her house, which was never a candidate for the compliment, much prized locally, that it was so clean you could eat your dinner off the floor.
It was only in 1972, though, after her husband left her to go and live with another woman in Bradford, that John Sutcliffe started ‘bothering with’ Wendy Broughton. He wanted, he told her, ‘to do the same to Kath as she had done to him’. Ironically, it was Kathleen, he later claimed, who was responsible for bringing them together.
‘I took the wife down to the Fisherman one night and Wendy was in, and it were the wife who more or less introduced me to her. Her husband had just blown and she were at a bit of a loose end, I think, so she asked her to come and sit at our table. But there was something on the television at that time that wife were watching which started about nine o’clock, so after we’d been there about an hour she went home to watch this programme, leaving me an’ Wendy just sat there.
‘That was the first time I’d really spoken to her, and I was at a complete loss. But we sat and we gesticulated at each other as best we could. I sort of made meself agreeable to her. And then suddenly, after that night, I found that she started to come into the pub regularly, and if I was there by meself she used to make a beeline for me. I used to sort of get landed with her.’
He was experiencing similar ‘difficulties’ with Annie Rhodes, the woman with the crooked spine whom his father had befriended, but in whose company he was frequently seen. It was Wendy though who staked the greater claim to his attentions and who precipitated the break-up with his wife.
Maureen had married for the second time in 1973 and moved with her new husband to Cambridge where his regiment, the Royal Engineers, was stationed. Returning home later that year on a visit, she witnessed a scene that left her dumbfounded.
‘I were just on me way up to bed when me mother, who was usually the most placid person, came out of the kitchen screaming and shouting and belled me dad one. She pinned him up against piano and belled him. I were just speechless. I didn’t know what to think. And our Jane said, “It’s him,” she said. “He’s been up to Wendy Broughton’s.”
‘I just laughed. I said, “Don’t be so stupid.” And Jane said, “It’s true. It’s been going on for months.” But nobody had told me. They never told me anything, because we tend in our family to, not exactly sweep things under the carpet, but to believe that: just ignore it and it’ll go away. It just seemed so ridiculous, the whole thing. It were pathetic.’
Maureen was in the advanced stages of pregnancy at the time. Before the baby had been born, her father had moved out of Cornwall Road and in with Mrs Broughton, who, by early 1974, was living a quarter of a mile away in a council maisonette on the edge of Ferncliffe Estate. To Carl, it seemed a real cause for celebration. ‘I thought it were brilliant when he went. I nearly got flags out. I were right happy. It were only me mum that were miserable.’
Peter, however, as perhaps only Mick realised, was miserable, too. ‘He got a bit sick when me father was knockin’ Wendy Broughton off. He used to play hell about that to me. It were too near doorstep, that was the trouble. It were impossible for me mother not to know what was going off, an’ our lad didn’t like seeing her get upset over it.’
Peter went round to Mrs Broughton’s and made representations on behalf of his mother, but without much effect. His father told him that he was only ‘getting my own back’, which is what he also told Jane on the day in April 1974 when she called to let him know that Maureen had given birth to Damien, his first grandson. The result was a stand-up row, in the course of which Jane said she thought that if that was the case then he’d taken a bloody long time about it – four years, to be precise.
The sniping continued back and forth for eleven weeks, at the end of which the main parties involved agreed to sit down and talk. It was decided, largely because of the financial mess Kathleen had got herself into in his absence, that he would return home, John would later claim.
‘Although I were paying her money every week, she was getting into so much debt in one way or another during that traumatic time that it was obvious to me she’d been taught her lesson. So I went back and all her financial difficulties were straightened up within a fortnight.’
The neighbours, whose confusion was already considerable, eventually gave up trying to disentangle the web of relationships that, even after this episode, continued to exist between the two households. When Wendy and her children were temporarily forced out of their home by fire in 1976, many people living on Cornwall Road were astonished to see Johnny, one of the three Broughton boys, being taken in by Kathleen. ‘He wasn’t getting fed properly. His mother never cooked him a decent meal, so he’s living with us for a few weeks,’ she blithely explained.
It seemed to support John Sutcliffe’s contention that the separation had served to clear the air. ‘We were able to put the past behind us then and live quite happily together. It eased my feelings towards her because I pretty well knew that she was on the level after that. I knew that she would never do it again.’
The day her fath
er moved back home, though, Jane moved out. Mick’s wife had left him, and Jane and her boyfriend moved in with Mick on Queensway until they were married in October 1974, two months after Peter and Sonia. Carl, the youngest, and Peter, the oldest of Kathleen’s six children, were the last ones to go.
14
Sonia was in and out of circulation throughout 1972 and ’73, depending on her ‘nerves’, which meant that Peter was left to his own devices much of the time. His unhappy experiences involving the £10 note and subsequent brush with the law had done nothing to dent his curiosity about Bradford’s red-light district and its inhabitants; if anything, his fascination with ‘the Lane’ seemed intensified as a result.
No night out with Trevor was now complete without the frisson of a special detour to take in the barely lit, pitted streets around Manningham. ‘What about two pound?’ he’d say when the woman his car had been tailing quoted him £3 as her price for ‘doing business’. ‘Is that all you’re worth?’ he’d shoot back when she accepted his offer, and drive home with a grin on his face.
This pastime came to an end, however, when he started work as a furnace operator at Anderton Circlips Ltd, on the canal in Bingley, in April 1973. Working nights, as he would for the next two years, had several distinct advantages for a dedicated saver and ‘planner’, the most important being that he made more money and had less opportunity to spend it. In the process, though, Peter became an even shadowier presence within his family, going to bed when they were getting up, leaving the house as they were arriving home, and spending most weekends with Sonia.
Naturally reserved and cautious though they were, the Szurmas had had any doubts they may have harboured about Peter irresistibly eroded by his unselfish, and obviously sincere, commitment to nursing their daughter back to health. His readiness to forgo the livelier pleasures of the pub and ‘disco’ in order to sit indoors playing chess for hours with Sonia’s father, or go for long quiet walks on the moors, convinced them of the seriousness of his intentions, and established beyond any doubt in their minds that he was ‘steady’.