Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  The canal in question is the Leeds–Liverpool and running parallel with it across the valley is the railway, which in 1925 would have been the LMS going up to Keighley and Skipton. In between the canal and the railway is the river, the Aire. Though neither river nor dale has the same picturesque associations as the Wharfe, say, or the Nidd, the Aire is Charles Kingsley’s river, the river in The Water Babies. Flowing clear out of Malham Cove, it is scarcely at Skipton ten miles away before it slows and thickens and starts to sidle its way through mud banks and the factories and tanneries of Keighley. Unswum and unfished, by the time it reaches Leeds it is as much a drain as it is a river, and at Kirkstall when I was a child it would sometimes steam as it slid through spears of blackened willow-herb past the soot-stained ruins of the abbey. It’s hard to imagine that this spot had once been as idyllic and lost to the world as Fountains or Rievaulx, or fancy the monks fetching their sheep down this same valley from Skipton and Malham, where the lands of Kirkstall adjoin those of Fountains.

  Rodley is beyond Kirkstall and on the way to Bingley. That trams came this far out of Leeds seems astonishing now, particularly as there is a long hill running down into Rodley, the haul up which must have been at the limit of the trams’ capabilities. Down this hill in his Sunday suit and hat came my grandfather.

  At Rodley today there is a marina of sorts and the lock has been done up and artful setts laid as part of some environmental scheme. A heritage trail begins or ends here and there are flower beds and whitened stones, much as there used to be outside the guardroom at Pontefract, where I started National Service, and that’s what this looks like a bit, and prompts the reflection that some of what passes for care for the environment is just bulling-up, picking up the litter, weeding the cobbles, painting the kerbs … a prissy sort of neatness that panders to a sergeant major’s feminine notion of what looks nice.

  I walk along the canal away from the lock. There is a pub, haunt of the narrow-boat fraternity, I imagine, or a nice little run-out from Leeds; a rusty dredger; a small gasometer, not these days the blot on the landscape it must once have been, preserved and painted now as part of the environmental scheme. A retired couple march past in matching anoraks, walking a Labrador.

  Here is a broad-planked swing bridge, for cattle to cross presumably. No boathouse, though, and I walk on, surprised at how far I have come from the lock and wondering at the persistence of Constable Goodison that Sunday afternoon, who didn’t know but only suspected and who might, as he must have kept telling himself, running down the towpath and scanning the water, just have been imagining things. People often sound depressed, after all; he’d probably walked it off.

  A train scuds past en route for Morecambe and another heading for Leeds: ‘Shipley-joining tickets?’ the conductor will be saying. Here the canal, the railway, the river and the road all run parallel, and just over the hill to the north is Leeds and Bradford Airport. It’s like one of those fanciful landscapes in the boys’ books of childhood in which one setting is made to comprehend transport in all its forms: a car, a train, a boat, a plane all going their separate ways as a man (giving the human scale) walks by the canal.

  Across the valley is the factory of Sandoz Chemicals, which laces the spring breeze with the scent of lavatories; but look the other way and it is all fields still, the tower of Calverley Church on the horizon and the woods dropping steeply to the canal. And now there is a raised mound, set back from the bank where there are some stones and a tangle of silver birch and sycamore. I trample about in the undergrowth and see that there are foundations here and that this must be the place, only what was once a boathouse is now just a copse, a sinister word nowadays, a setting for sexual assault, the site of shallow graves: a copse is where bodies are found. Aunty Kathleen was in a copse.

  On the other side of it and below the canal is the river, a better place to drown oneself perhaps as it’s away from the path and with none to see. But there is a bank to be negotiated, mud to be waded through and the water like sludge. The canal is more wholesome; an element of fastidiousness discernible even in self-destruction. Besides, the bank is steep and the water deep, and it’s likely Grandad Peel knew where he was coming. Fond of what was then called nature study, he must have taken the same tram-ride and walked this way before, past the boathouse and the water deep enough at the edge to take the boats. These days there would have been rowing on a Sunday but not then, nor many people about either, not straight after Sunday dinner. I imagine men in Sunday suits, dinner interrupted, running along the bank with boathooks. This, I think, is how one would begin it in a film: men in dark suits, running. But why should they run? He was past running for, given up as soon as he had stepped into the water, this man who could be mistaken for a tree stump.

  I stand looking at the black water and I wonder whether Grandma ever came to look. Probably not, which makes it worse that I am here, tracking down the place where someone I never knew and about whom I know nothing did away with himself, long before I was born. Have I nothing better to do? Or rather, have I nothing better to write about? I think of the notes he left, the neatly folded coat, the hat and stick … the little pile that marked his grave.

  Somebody is coming, a woman briskly walking her dog on a leash, and seeing her I am aware how odd and possibly threatening I must look, a middle-aged man standing staring into the water – and suddenly I am my grandfather. I turn and walk back, the dog straining towards me and growling as I pass.

  ‘Dad. Dad.’

  Mam calls down from her bedroom wanting me to go up and like a child she has to be sure she has my attention before she will deliver her message. Except that I cannot answer her, cannot even say ‘Yes?’ without confirming her assumption that I am my father. It’s a delusion that comes in patches, so that when it passes she is left with a sense of ancient horror.

  ‘We haven’t done anything wrong, have we? Neither of us has done anything wrong?’

  And the fear that something has happened ‘between us’ becomes another version of the shameful secret that the car waiting in the car park is on watch for, that the television is tuned to detect and the man hiding in the wardrobe ready to jump out and punish.

  Saigon is much in the news and her delusions now begin to include helicopters and ladders at the window. She calls upstairs one morning to say that there is a pigeon outside with a message. At the third time of asking I abandon my attempt to work and wearily go down, telling her that she’s imagining things. But there is a pigeon on the doorstep, a racer I suppose that has flown off course, and it does carry a message though it’s only the name of the owner. On another occasion she struggles to convince me that there are three huge birds in the garden. I ridicule this but finally go into the garden with ill grace, and of course there they are: three peacocks from the Hall.

  Liberal analysts, and in particular the followers of R. D. Laing, if there are still any such, would seize on these misunderstandings as demonstrating how families conspire to label one of their number deluded even when he or she is speaking the truth. Right about the racing pigeon and the peacocks, is she right, too, in thinking I want her out of the way?

  Because that’s how the descent into delusion always ends up, with Mam going yet again to hospital.

  ‘I think we’re on the hospital trail again,’ says the cleaning woman in Soldiering On: that was always how Dad used to put it and now I do the same.

  ‘You’ll kill me if you go on in this way,’ I say melodramatically, Mam having woken me up three times in the night. I am thinking of my father, and it takes some self-restraint not to say ‘You’ll kill me too’, though that is what I mean. Of course the only way she is killing me is, in the way of women with men, not letting me have my own way, nor allowing me to lead the relatively liberated life I’ve lately discovered in London. No chance of any of that at home.

  There are periods, though, almost of normality when we get along well enough and yet even then I can see, unreason apart, why it is she so easily co
nflates my father and myself, if only because I slip so naturally into what had been his retired routine: doing the shopping, much of the cooking and cleaning, and every afternoon taking her for a little run in the car.

  One theory advanced, a little too readily I thought, by various of Mam’s therapists over the years was that she had slipped into depression because when Dad retired she was deprived of her function in the household. This was to some extent true, as after Dad gave up work he did the baking and most of the cooking and cleaning so there was very little in the house for Mam to do. Her depressions, so the theory went, were called up to provide a reason for the sudden pointlessness of her life.

  This has always seemed to me a little glib as Dad had always helped in the house all their married life. They shared the housework as they shared everything else. Retirement may have accentuated this, but the pattern was as it had always been.

  On the draining board in the kitchen – which they still called the scullery – there would often be a pan of potatoes, peeled and ready for boiling, and a pan of sprouts and carrots likewise. Dad would have done them first thing that morning – or even the night before; with not enough to occupy his time jobs like this would get done earlier and earlier and long before they needed to be, one meal no sooner cleared than the next prepared.

  I have seen similar premature preparations in the homes of other retired couples and it speaks of lives emptied of occupation and proper activity, so that squalor and slatternliness seem almost cheerful by comparison.

  Two such pans would be a revealing shot in a documentary film. The two pans in the kitchen, the two people by the fire. Or one. Had he been alone, had Mam ‘gone first’, that would still have been Dad’s way, though he was not without interests, reading, gardening, playing his violin. But excepting always when he had his hands full with my mother there was always time to spare. Had he been fonder of male company or she of company of any sort things might have been different. But they were, as they had always been, inseparable, ‘your Dad and me’, ‘your Mam and me’ always the phrases most often on their lips. Joining the Women’s Institute when she came to the village, Mam would go off on their trips, but Dad would as often as not go too, utterly unembarrassed that he was the only man in the party.

  As her depressions became more frequent such outings must have seemed almost unimaginable, the only outings Dad was now required to make his daily trek to the hospital.

  Still, Mam’s hankerings for society were not quite extinguished and after his death, in periods of remission, the social yearnings to which she had always been prone would tend to return. They were faltering a little by this time and the cocktail party, a long-standing ambition, was now firmly off the agenda. But television gave her aspirations a fresh direction as, tapping into a new potential audience, it began to preach the delights of retirement and the rolling back of the frontiers of old age through a more active use of leisure.

  Trying to wean her off my company and making one of my many attempts to get her to stand on her own feet, I’d been to London for a couple of days, the first time she’d been alone in the house since my father died. When I came back I was encouraged when she said, ‘I’ve started going to classes.’

  ‘What in?’

  ‘Pottery.’

  ‘That’s good. Didn’t you once go to painting classes?’

  ‘Did I? Oh yes. Only then he said it was for beginners whereas when I got there I found most of them could do it right well, they weren’t beginners at all. I think that’s what it is with classes, people just go to show off what they can do.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be a way of rubbing shoulders.’

  And so for a while she went. ‘Clay Night’ she used to call it, and would come back as often as not with a Stone Age-type ashtray she had made … not that anybody in the house smoked.

  At such times normality seemed within reach. I even thought she might learn to drive, and gave her one disastrous lesson. I smile to think of it now, but why is it still so inconceivable, I ask myself. I certainly asked myself then, and I’m sure lectured her on the subject, how other people’s mothers learned to drive, went Old Tyme Dancing, did aerobics: a friend of mine’s mother, not much younger than Mam, was Lord Mayor of Blackburn; what was it about our family that we were disqualified from normal social life, and which kept Dad out of the pub, Mam out of the WI and me, I suppose, out of the Garrick? Clay Night or no Clay Night, it isn’t long before we are back sitting on the chair in the passage, lurking about the landing and never stirring out except to scuttle between the door and the car.

  ‘There are lights on in the wood. I think there are people there.’

  ‘It’s the Children’s Home.’

  ‘No, besides that.’

  ‘What do you want, Mam?’

  ‘To be hung. You won’t send me away, will you?’

  ‘No.’

  But as Laing and Co. might smugly note, ‘No’ meant ‘Yes’ and in due course she was back in hospital.

  I knew the doctor in charge as we had been at school together in Leeds. Slightly older than me, he had played Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest and I had played Cecily. Like me he had been very religious, and I wondered if he was as uneasy about his childhood self as I was about mine. Fortunately the subject didn’t come up. I was always nervous of discussing anything but the matter in hand with my mother’s various psychotherapists for fear they were taking notes on me too, and that whatever I said, however lightly, would be taken down and held in evidence against me; I was part of the equation.

  And perhaps I was, and perhaps Dad was too; maybe we had both helped to make her into this helpless, cringing creature, though how I would find hard to say. She has made me timid too, I thought, hedging round our childhoods with all sorts of TB-fuelled fears and prohibitions that hung about well into middle age. But that is a long road to go down; she is seventy; better to patch her up (more tablets) and sit it out.

  And in due course she begins to come round again, though whether this is thanks to the medication or the normal time span to these things I never know. Occasionally she will talk of Kathleen’s death, wondering how she could go ‘just like that. She was always such a bouncer. What was it exactly?’

  ‘Her heart,’ I would say, ‘or else pneumonia.’ But never, of course, the facts, so that now my secret matches hers, though that is not quite a secret any more and she will from time to time talk about her father and in particular of the Sunday when he died. But the reticence of forty years is hard to throw off, and she does not respond to questions and still feels that it is not a proper subject for conversation.

  There are many opportunities for that now as I live at home in the village. It is only for six or eight months, though to me it seems much longer. I am trying to write a play about some contemporaries who every summer rent a villa abroad – the sort of holiday I used to go on myself before being saddled with my mother. Someone is killed in an air crash, who is, I suppose, my friend Francis Hope, who died in the Paris air crash in 1974. It isn’t going well, so I don’t suppose that with my depression about the play I am any easier to live with than Mam and her depression about practically everything else. I finish the play and it’s turned down, a year’s work, as I see it, wasted.

  My brother and his wife, who are always more decent with my mother than I am, eventually shoulder the burden and Mam moves down to Bristol to live with them. There she stays, regularly hospitalised for depression, with even the periods in between tentative and precarious, never an unshadowed return to the cheerful, funny, affectionate woman she once had been.

  Company seems to suit her, or so another hospital psychotherapist suggests, and so she graduates easily from one sort of institution to another, moving directly from the mental hospital to a series of old people’s homes in Weston-super-Mare. In the home her memory begins to fail, and as it does so her depression lifts, leaving in its wake a vapid and generalised benevolence.

  ‘This is my friend,’ she
says of any of the residents who happen to be in the room, and as often as not plants a kiss on the slightly startled cheek.

  Going for a run in the car she is full of wonderment at the world, transformed as it is by her promiscuous magnanimity. ‘What a lovely council estate,’ she says of some grim new development. ‘What charming houses.’

  Except that now her language is beginning to go, and planted in front of a vast view over Somerset she laughs and says, ‘Oh, what a lovely … lot of about.’

  With my mother losing her memory I find myself wondering whether it can be put down to the ECT she has been given in the past, and so, therefore, if we are to some extent to blame. The stock answer to such questioning is that the memory loss associated with ECT is in the short term, particularly that period of confusion which follows immediately after the treatment, and that otherwise it has no measurable effect on the memory proper.

  I am not wholly convinced of this, if only because the proponents of ECT must nowadays feel themselves so blamed and beleaguered that they are forced into demanding from its opponents evidence of its ill effects that is hard and fast and, in the nature of things, impossible to provide. What causes loss of memory? Nobody can be certain. It might be ECT in Mam’s case, though her mother had begun to lose her memory at about the same age and would, no doubt, have lost it just as completely as her daughter had she not died in the interim. So both mother and daughter lost their memory; one had ECT, the other not.