Untold Stories (5 page)

There was no question that Mam's liking for these ancient
objets trouvés
was entirely genuine, though in acquiring them she was also laying claim to a sort of refinement which was genuine too; it was hard to say where it came from, women's magazines, possibly and in particular Beverley Nichols's column in
Woman's Own
. Some of it, though, was instinctive if not inbred. She knew, for instance, without having read it anywhere, that the old-fashioned kitchen range that we had was preferable, had more ‘character' than the tiled fireplaces everybody round about thought were the height of sophistication, and that the brass pot which held our fire irons was superior to the ceramic knight-in-armour wielding poker and tongs that stood sentinel on neighbouring hearthstones.

Desperate I think it now, and touching too, this faith she had in what constituted a better life. It couldn't be called a hobby, it was never systematic enough for that, though going through cupboards at home nowadays I'll still sometimes come across one of the many little notebooks she started, with wispy drawings of chair-backs labelled ‘Sheraton' or ‘Hepple-white', and lists of pottery marks she copied out of library books; then there are some blank pages and another list, ‘Bits of music I like': Chopin's Polonaise in A, Mendelssohn's
Italian Symphony, The Dream of
Olwen
, the spelling all over the place.

Nowadays when ‘bygones' are the stuff of half a dozen TV programmes, and nuggets of the more tuneful classics are trotted out to the banalities of disc jockeys who can scarcely pronounce the composers' names, such aspirations in a middle-aged working-class woman would not be particularly remarkable. But in Leeds in 1946 it was precocious if not eccentric, particularly since it hardly linked up with the way we lived, over a butcher's shop in a house with no hallway, the living room giving
straight onto the street where Mam's painfully collected gentilities were periodically overwhelmed by the stench of fat being rendered in the cellar. Nothing she bought was ever worth much, her Staffordshire ornaments were always cracked, the ‘Sheraton' chair an Edwardian reproduction and the turbanned Rockingham man smoking a pipe had lost his hand (a little mitten-like paw made of plasticine Mam's unconvincing prosthesis).

Still, her antiques, touching though they were in their inadequacy, were not an attempt to improve our social status. Though she herself would have said she liked ‘old stuff ' because it was ‘classy', this definition had nothing to do with class, ‘classy' in her vocabulary simply the opposite of ‘common'. That was the real nub of it. Because if there was one consideration that determined my parents' conduct and defined their position in the world it was not to be (or to be thought) common.

Common, like camp (with which it shares a frontier), is not easy to define. At its simplest meaning vulgar or ostentatious, it is a more subtle and various disparagement than that, or was in our family anyway, taking in such widely disparate manifestations as tattoos, red paint, yellow gloves and two-tone cardigans, all entries in a catalogue of disapproval that ranged through fake leopard-skin coats and dyed (blonde) hair to slacks, cocktail cabinets, the aforementioned ladies with Alsatian dogs and boys with cherries, and umpteen other embellishments, domestic and personal.

The opposite of ‘common' is not ‘uncommon'; indeed an element of uncommonness in the ostentatious sense is part of being common – the dyed blonde hair and leopard-skin coat of Miss Fairey, the chemist's assistant at Armley Moor Top, or twenty years later the white Jaguar in which Russell Harty's parents would roll up to visit him in Oxford. So flaunting it (whatever ‘it' was) and splashing money around were part of it. But so was having no aspirations at all or living in something approaching squalor while squandering money on gambling or drink; that was common too.

A dog could be common – a barbered poodle – but seldom a cat; colours like the red of paint (on a house) and purple (practically anywhere). ‘Them's common curtains,' Mam's frequent observation from
the top deck of a bus; it always had to be the top because Dad was a smoker and it served as a grandstand for a running commentary on the social scene. ‘Tangerine! I wouldn't have tangerine curtains if you paid me. And look at that camel-hair coat. Makes him look like a bookie.' Haircuts were a dangerous area: if Dad had his cut too short he was thought to look ‘right common'; cafés, too, particularly those doing too much fried stuff but omitting to serve toasted teacakes. These days shell suits would undoubtedly be condemned, as would walking down the street drinking from a can, and it would do as a definition of what's gone wrong with England in the last twenty years that it's got more common.

Such fastidious deprecations were invariably made privately and to each other, my parents too timid to think their views worth broadcasting or that they might be shared with anyone else, still less meet with general agreement; this reticence helping to reinforce the notion that we were a peculiar family and somehow set apart. Cheerful, rumbustious even within the security of the home, off their home ground they were shy and easily intimidated; there was an absence of swagger and they never, unlike my mother's self-confident sisters, ‘had a lot off'. So when they stigmatised ostentatious behaviour as common it reaffirmed their natural preference not to want to attract attention and to get by unnoticed; they knew what they took to be their place, and kept to it.

Wanting to go unnoticed was what Mam's depression was about. Pressed to define why it was she found the village intimidating, she said, ‘You don't understand. I'm the centrepiece here.' So it was hardly surprising that when Dad revealed that there had been something similar in the past it should have been on the eve of her wedding, an occasion when there could be no going unnoticed either: ‘I'm the centrepiece here', which is a bride's boast, was my mother's dread. Was this why there were no photographs?

What was agitating her, and maybe it agitated him too, as he was in many ways more shy even than her, was the ceremony itself and the churchful of people it would inevitably involve. Marriage is a kind of going public, and I could see, as Dad couldn't or wouldn't, that coming to
live in the village which had maybe brought on this second bout forty years later was a kind of going public too.

Not that the ceremony she was dreading was likely to be an elaborate one, as neither family can have had any money. A proper wedding, though, would have run to bridesmaids and they were there to hand in her two sisters, Kathleen and Myra, and this may well have been part of the trouble, as she had always felt overshadowed by them and something of a Cinderella. Unlike her they revelled in any kind of public show, edging into whatever limelight was going. Later in life they made far more of my brother's and my achievements than Mam and Dad did. When I got my degree at Oxford Dad wrote, ‘We haven't let on to your aunties yet that you're getting your cap and gown. You won't be wanting a lot of splother' – splother Dad's word for the preening and fuss invariably attendant on the presence of the aunties.

The splother attendant upon the wedding was harder to get round, and Mam's fear of the occasion persisted until there came a point, Dad told me, when they nearly broke off their engagement because neither of them could see a way of ever getting over this first necessary hurdle. Eventually Dad sought the advice of the local vicar.

These days this would mean a cosy, even chummy chat with counselling the keynote. And why not? But Leeds in those days was the proving ground for many a future dean or bishop, some of the grandest Anglican dynasties – Hollises, Bickersteths, Vaughans – ministering to the slums of Hunslet and Holbeck. St Bartholomew's was a great slum parish too, its huge black church set on a hill above Armley and Wortley, and though the slums around it have gone, or at any rate changed their character, its heavy spire still dominates the south-western approaches to Leeds. The vicar in 1928 was the Reverend H. Lovell Clarke, subsequently Archdeacon of Leeds, and it was to him rather than to one of his several curates that Dad went.

It must have been hard to explain: all brides are nervous, after all; why should this Lilian Peel require special treatment? Public school and Cambridge, the vicar is just the kind of figure (‘very better class') to make Dad
nervous and tongue-tied. What he has come along to ask is whether the vicar will marry them at seven-thirty in the morning, with no fuss, no congregation and in time for Dad to get to work at Lower Wortley Co-op by eight-fifteen. Lovell Clarke says that this is out of the question; the law does not permit him to marry anyone before eight in the morning. However, he has no objection to performing the ceremony beginning at eight o'clock, and surely if he is getting married the Co-op won't mind if he is half an hour late for work? Dad enquires: the Co-op does mind; he has to be at work by eight-fifteen.

There are occasions in life, often not in the least momentous, which nail one's colours to the mast. There was the morning, ten days before the end of my National Service, when a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield made me scrub out a urinal with my bare hands; another when a consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary discussed my naked body without reference to me with a class of smirking medical students; and though it occurred years before I was born, this moment in St Bartholomew's Vicarage when my father, baffled at every turn, tells Mr Lovell Clarke that he cannot get a quarter of an hour off work in order to get married is another. Logic, education, upbringing leave such moments unshifted and unforgotten. They are the self at its core.

My father, I suspect, gives up at this point but the vicar does not, and indeed comes up with a solution that is ingenious, even cheeky. To begin with the young couple will need a special licence from the Bishop of Ripon, dispensing with the need for the banns to be read, the vicar sensibly assuming that whatever plan he comes up with is better carried out quickly rather than waiting the three weeks that proclaiming the banns will involve. Then armed with the licence they are to present themselves at the church at seven-thirty the following morning, at which time the vicar will say the whole wedding service up to but not including the vows, thus complying with the law. On the stroke of eight the vows themselves can be said, the ring put on and this young butcher still have time to get to work by eight-fifteen. And on 28 September 1928 that is how it is done. Dad goes off to work, Mam goes home and in the evening, in lieu of a
honeymoon, they get tickets for the Theatre Royal to see
The Desert Song
.

That was why there was no photograph on top of the sideboard or in the dressing-table drawer. At eight o'clock on a sooty September morning it would have been too dark; besides, a photograph would have taken time and would in any case have probably come under Dad's definition of ‘splother'. But were I a poet I would write about those moments in that great empty church, the anxious groom in his working clothes with his tentative bride, and the urbane cleric, standing on the altar steps waiting for the clock to strike, the pause before the off. A former chaplain to nearby Armley Gaol, where prisoners used regularly to be hanged, Lovell Clarke must have waited many times for eight o'clock, the pause before a more terrible off. What he was like I have no idea, though I imagine him as a clergyman of the old school. But across seventy and more years, Herbert Lovell Clarke, I would like to shake your hand.

In every other circumstance a man who hung back, follower not leader, visiting his wife in hospital my father was always in the front rank. The second the visiting bell went he would hurry down the ward ahead of the rest of the pack, always with a carrier or a parcel containing the vest he had washed or some of the Creamline toffees Mam liked and a few marigolds from the garden. And though he might have come thirty miles he was always on the dot, no second of the permitted time let go to waste.

Ferrying him to the hospital at Lancaster those first few nights I found his insistent punctuality irritating, particularly as there seemed to me nothing to be punctual
for
, so much of the visit passed in silence with Dad just sitting by the bed holding Mam's hand. They seemed even in misery such a self-contained couple that I thought he would have been happier coming alone. Their absorption in each other was total and almost wordless, a kind of anxious courting, and feeling spare I'd leave them to it, and wandering about the hospital or trailing glumly round the perimeter I
reflected that to have a mother who is deranged is bad enough, but that wasn't really why I was there; I was there because, alone among my contemporaries, I had a father who couldn't drive.

He had made at least two attempts. Twenty years before, in the late forties when he had had his first shop, he had invested in a second-hand motorbike and sidecar; except that it wasn't a sidecar but a large coffin-like box which Dad, never happier than when he had a brush in his hand, straight away painted green. The theory was that Dad would go round on this dilapidated combination delivering orders to his customers in Far Headingley, Cookridge and West Park. And perhaps this did happen once or twice, though since delivering necessarily involved a good deal of stopping and starting, and starting was not the bike's strong point, this mode of transport never became a regular routine or superseded the push-bike with its basket (
W. Bennett, High Class Meat Purveyors
) pedalled laboriously up the suburban drives and crescents of north Leeds by ‘The Boy'.