by Alan Bennett
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 almo
st 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.
There is no stone, the only certain identification the withered remains of the flowers taken on our previous visit. This we know was Grandad’s grave but that it is the grave of a suicide neither my brother nor I know, though that presumably is why it is unmarked. Putting flowers on it and occasionally on the more elaborate, marble-kerbed pebbled patch belonging to Grandad Bennett is one of the ways of passing Saturday afternoons, which we always spend at Grandma’s. One of us threads our way across the cemetery with a jam jar, fills it at the cistern by the wall and bears it brimming back for the vase Mam has brought for the anemones. Sometimes we cut the grass with a pair of inadequate scissors.
Now the grave is open, the sides covered in the same green raffia matting Sleights the greengrocer’s have in their window. The coffin being lowered into the hole has up to an hour ago been in the sitting room at Gilpin Place, and with the lid off so the mourners could be taken through by the aunties. (‘Would you like to see her?’) Dad, predictably, has refused but I am taken in, Kathleen and Myra stroking and kissing Grandma’s impassive face. (‘Doesn’t she look beautiful, Alan?’) I have never seen a dead person before, and though I’ve loved Grandma and liked her I find myself unable to cry or even be moved particularly, just feeling that with the quilted surround and the wimpled face she’d somehow found her way into a chocolate box.
Pretension, though, persists to the end, because as the coffin goes down one sees on the lid that Grandma is said to have died ‘in her eightieth year’. This is strictly true as she was seventy-nine, but it doesn’t escape what these days would be called Dad’s shit-detector.
Nearly thirty years later I find myself filming just outside the gates of the cemetery, the location chosen without reference to me and entirely by chance because it provides a useful cul-de-sac with no passing traffic. In the lunch break I go looking for Grandma’s (and Grandad’s) grave. But the cemetery has long since been filled up and subsequently landscaped. There are lawns and seats and down-and-outs sleeping on them, together with rubbish and condoms and all the adornments of urban rurality. There are some graves, artfully disposed as features in the landscaping, but there is no grave of ours. Hard to find when I was a boy, now it has gone completely. Still overlooking the cemetery, though, are the black battlements of Armley Gaol. People are no longer buried in the cemetery, which is now a park; but the gaol is ever a gaol and men are still being buried there.
Regularly posted to the Far East, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Aunty Myra resumes with delight the life she has tasted briefly during the war. Though husband Stan is only a warrant officer, now in the twilight of Empire they are entitled to amahs and houseboys and a standard of life way beyond anything they can ever have dreamed of down Tong Road. There are mess dances under the tropic night, beach parties on palm-fringed sands, trips up country and out to the islands, all the time waited on hand and foot by servants who, she is at pains to emphasise, adore her. These postings produce more sheaves of photographs, Aunty M. arm in arm with the devoted servants, beaming on balconies overlooking Hong Kong harbour or days out at Kowloon with Aunty holding armfuls of doubtful Chinese children, a resigned mother looking on.
Because it is children that she has always wanted and never had, believing herself more suited to their upbringing than my mother can ever be and wont to lay claim to a special understanding of their needs, though never grasping how much I certainly want to be left to myself, the fierceness of her regard, the ardour of her attention always making me cringe as a child.
In the intervals of service abroad this lately married couple are posted round England to what is even then only the scattered remnants of the defence establishment. They are stationed at Hednesford, Manston, Padgate or West Malling, airfields where one seldom sees a plane apart from the ceremonial Spitfire marooned among flower beds by the guardhouse, a reminder of the great days when all that stood between the nation and its doom was the RAF.
Now the graceful trees of what was once a grand estate shelter Nissen huts and mean system-built houses where the paths are edged with whitewashed stones and the flowers look ready to stand by their beds. It’s a suburb that’s not quite a suburb, but billets and married quarters and an environment I feel faintly threatening from the days of my National Service, as if I could still be put to weed these beds and bull the kerbs as once I’d had to do in the army.
In a succession of these allotted accommodations Aunty Myra sets out the souvenirs of their tours overseas – an inlaid chest from Bombay, a nest of tables from Madras; there are bowls from Malaya, linen from Singapore and a painted scroll from Hong Kong. ‘The writing means a blessing on this house. They do it while you wait. The boy who did it was crippled but he had a lovely face. Mind you, they’re so poor they often cripple them themselves to make them more appealing.’ Then Stan, her warrant officer husband, parks me in one of the bamboo armchairs and plies me with earnest questions about what I am doing at Oxford and what I am going to do with my medieval history afterwards. What use is it?
Stan being ten years younger than his wife, she naturally expects him to outlive her. But in 1964 he is flown home from Malaya suffering from inoperable cancer. He is taken first to the RAF Chest Unit which is part of the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers at Midhurst, a palatial mansion down a long drive flush with rhododendrons, with views across the manicured lawns to Chichester and the South Downs.
‘It’s a tip-top place,’ said Aunty Myra. ‘The surgeon looking after him is one of the first in the country,’ and she gives me a long dramatised account of how this individual, an Air Vice-Marshal, had actually taken her by the arm and called her Mrs Rogerson before going on to explain the hopelessness of the situation.
My aunties were always like this, adducing a special status and reputation for any doctor assigned to them. ‘Refined-looking fellow, has a big house at Alwoodley, his wife wears one of them sheepskin coats’ is a version of it that’s crept into one or two of my plays, though I don’t suppose that on most occasions it is as purely snobbish as I make it appear. Perhaps Aunty Myra feels that attached to her often fanciful ascriptions of excellence and accomplishment is some shred of hope, as being a top man meant that he could defy the coming doom. (In Leeds it would have come out as ‘You couldn’t do better if he were in the Brotherton Wing’.) But the special smile, the squeeze of the arm, the recognition, so Aunty Myra sees it, of her natural breeding were also part of a desire to be different, to be marked out above the common ruck and to have a tale to tell.
But if in Aunty’s eyes the top surgeon’s concern singles her out, there is a high price to be paid for the touch of the Air Vice-Marshal’s hand; it puts paid to hope, else why would he touch her at all? It also put paid to the rhododendrons, the lawns and that terrace which must once have had a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain. In its stead comes a poky Unit hospital in RAF Uxbridge, where, in more pain and discomfort than he need have had, Stan lengthily dies, the customary reluctance of hospitals to prescribe painkillers compounded in military establishments, I imagine, because part of their patients’ profession is to be brave.
Deplorable though the place is as a hospital, I am interested in the camp because Uxbridge was where T. E. Lawrence, under the name of Shaw, had enlisted as an aircraftman in the early twenties, an account of which he gives in The Mint. This is 1964 but the corrugated-iron huts look scarcely to have changed, and as I wander about the camp in the intervals of sitting baffled by my uncle’s bed there is a touch of ‘And did those feet’ about it. T. E. Lawrence figures in Forty Years On, and I see that literature is of as much moment to me as life, so that the death of this recently acquired and only occasionally encountered uncle doesn’t really signify. Driving along the M40 today I still glance along the ridge to the tower of Uxbridge Church, in the shadow of which some of life’s bleaker momen
ts were spent. Though not as bleak as his, I hear a reproving voice. But I scarcely know him, with his red face and crinkly receding hair, and as an ex-National Serviceman I’m suspicious of ‘a regular’, even in something so innocuous and relatively wanting in bull as an RAF Maintenance Unit.
Stan having died on active service, he is entitled to a full military funeral and this, at Aunty’s wish, he is duly given. It is thus that I find myself at the crematorium at Ruislip walking behind the RAF band (though trying not to be seen to march or even keep time) and led by an officer with a drawn sword between ranks of airmen presenting arms. It seems a bit excessive if, strictly speaking, appropriate, and I am ashamed by the ceremony and its insincerities to the extent that, far from being a comfort, I can scarcely be civil. I see the whole ceremony, much as Dad does, as a lot of splother, cringing at how unreluctantly Aunty is ready to take the limelight, a lone figure in black standing behind the coffin as the band plays.
‘Bad acting’ I think it, and grief no excuse, the more it shows the less it means my philosophy then, though I suppose I have come to appreciate how often a husband’s funeral is the last chance most wives get to cut even a sombre dash or take the stage alone, and that they are not to be blamed if they get their teeth into it. This is her curtain call too. But though I hope I would feel less harshly towards Myra now than I did then, she was a woman who repelled sympathy. I have never come across grief that is transmuted so readily into anger, with no hint of resignation or philosophy. Though naïvely I am somehow expecting it to be all resignation. Try as I do to be more tolerant and understanding, I find myself tested by posthumous extravagances, of which the military funeral is one, the scattering of the ashes another.
Why I am chosen to accompany my aunty on this errand is something of a mystery. It’s probably because at this date I’m the only one of the immediate family who can drive. Glum, unsympathetic and critical of the histrionic strain that runs through her grief, I make an unsatisfactory and unconsoling companion. ‘She’s putting it on,’ I keep thinking, unmitigated by the thought that perhaps she’s entitled to do so.