by Gordon Burn
Ivy Sutcliffe exercised an equally tight control over the wage packet brought home by her husband, Arthur. The move to Gilstead had coincided with a downturn in the textile industry that saw Arthur Sutcliffe in a new job. He’d go back into textiles much later in life, in his fifties, but for twenty years he’d work for the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Bingley, as the door-to-door collector for their credit club.
Unlike his wife, who’d be remembered as ‘fat’ and ‘slobby’, Arthur Sutcliffe was a dapper little man with a love of dancing which, together with the miles he was obliged to walk (later cycle) every day, kept him looking fit and healthy.
He was a member of the choir at St Wilfrid’s, Gilstead, and when his oldest son, John, started accompanying him at the age of seven, it set the seal on what was to be a lifelong friendship. Mrs Sutcliffe was a notable non-attender at St Wilfrid’s, and she started turning up less and less at the popular Saturday night dances at the Princess Hall. Her husband, however, was always there as, indeed, he had to be, in his semi-official capacity.
Princess Hall was a swimming baths during the summer, but in the winter months the pool was boarded over for dancing to the likes of Bert Bentley and his Astorians. As a steward it was Arthur Sutcliffe’s job to see that the floor was completely cleared between numbers, a task he performed with great efficiency and, as many of those present couldn’t help noticing, not a little relish.
John Sutcliffe, though, who had inherited his love of ballroom dancing, was always pleased to have him pointed out as his father.
And there would be plenty of other occasions on which he’d be proud to say that he was Arthur Sutcliffe’s lad. One of them was the day they padded up and walked out on to a cricket pitch together for the first time.
‘Our mill’s getting a team up to play Harrison’s printers. Will you mek one in wi’ us, we’re a bit short-handed?’ Arthur said to John Sutcliffe one day, which surprised him because, by then, his father was already well into his fifties. But of course he agreed, and he was never to forget it.
‘It were one of these twenty-over-aside games, where you hit out at almost everything: I mean, I laid about me and got forty-odd – I was caught on the boundary. But not me dad. He didn’t show a lot of shots but, purely from memory, hit everything in the middle of the bat, right correctly, so the ball just dropped dead on the wicket in front of him. “Coom on!” he’d say, and we were off like hell, snatching singles. We played quite a few games that year with that mill side of his, and we had some right good times.’
It was the kind of relationship John Sutcliffe had always imagined having with his own sons, should he be lucky enough ever to have any.
2
John Sutcliffes first thought when he heard his wife was pregnant was that he hoped it would be a boy: he knew it was the done thing to put on a big act about not caring about what a babys sex might be, but he did care and it never occurred to him to pretend that he didnt. It might not matter all that much to a woman what she gets, he argued, but, deep down, every man wants his first to be a son: They pretend to be delighted when its a girl, but theyd have been much more delighted if it had been a boy, the first one. Its the sort of thing that fellers do.
John Sutcliffe had finally married Kathleen Coonan in March 1945, a year before finishing his wartime service in the Merchant Navy, while he was home on a months leave. He was twenty-three, she was two years older, and they had been engaged since the very early days of the war. When it actually came down to tying the knot, however, he would always tell himself afterwards that it had been a very close-run thing: the home-town girl and Bingley versus an itinerant theatrical career.
Hed had a not particularly hectic war, stationed for the most part in Gibraltar, where he was one of the backbones of a garrison concert party which performed for and broadcast to the troops, usually in support of professional entertainers who had been sent out by ENSA: he was particularly impressed by Sir John Gielgud, who arrived wearing a dinner jacket one time to deliver well-known speeches from Shakespeare.
For his own part, John Sutcliffe prided himself on being a good all-rounder: he could do a bit of singing, or play the harmonica a bit if they wanted it, or recite monologues Albert and the Lion, Nelson Gets His Eye Back, that sort of thing.
It was enough to bring him to the attention of ENSAs permanent organiser on the island, who suggested that he might be able to get Sutcliffe a start on the boards should he ever think about taking it up professionally. He did think about it but decided that, all things considered, his responsibilities lay elsewhere. He had a girl at home whod spent years waiting for him faithfully, and it wouldnt have been fair to suddenly kick the whole job into touch.
Apart from the fact that he had a wife of just over a year whom he had never lived with but who was already seven months pregnant, John Sutcliffe picked up the strings of his life pretty much as he had left them, when he came home from the navy for good in April 1946.
His first job when he left school at fourteen had been in a joinery, but hed given that up after only a few weeks because something else had come his way that he really wanted. Hed started as an apprentice at the Co-Op bakery in Bingley and had stayed there quite happily until his call-up five years later. And, now that the war was over, he walked straight back into his old job.
He was also lucky when it came to finding somewhere to live. Unlike most young couples who were having to fall back on the goodwill of in-laws and parents, he was able to rent a little place for not much money from a man in the office at work.
It was a stone cottage built into the hillside on Ferncliffe Road, one of the steepest inclines out of Bingley town centre and the western boundary of what only ten years earlier had been allotments and hen-runs but was now the nucleus of a sprawling council estate.
Every penny John Sutcliffe had earned during his years in the Merchant Navy had gone straight to his mother; and his mother being what she was, hed neither received, nor expected, anything not a chair or a secondhand carpet in return. With the little they had, though, and with help from the Coonans, Kathleens family, they did everything they could to make the place habitable in the two months before the baby was born.
On the morning of Saturday, 2 June 1946, Mr Winston Churchill opened the victory celebrations at Woodford in Essex with the exhortation that It is a poor heart that never rejoices. And 200 miles away in Bingley in the West Riding, Kathleen Sutcliffe went into labour at 10.00 a.m.
Although shed wanted to, she had decided, on the advice of her doctor, not to have her first baby at home. And, by the time John Sutcliffe got back from phoning for a taxi, he found her with her coat buttoned and her case packed, ready to go.
Norman Rays, which is how everybody still thought of Bingley and Shipley Maternity Hospital even though Mr Ray, a former owner, had long gone, was still in the early throes of nationalisation in the summer of 1946; and an unpleasant atmosphere, underscored by reams of unreasonable rules and restrictions, was the matrons way of communicating her displeasure to the patients.
John Sutcliffe very quickly got the message that his presence would not be required and, having seen his wife installed safely in a bed, wandered off to look for some way of occupying his time. Normally on a Saturday he would have been playing cricket, but hed felt obliged to scratch from that. So, back in Bingley, he threw himself into helping his fathers youngest brother, Harry, strip the walls in the back room of his greengrocers shop.
He stopped to call the hospital at 4.00, when there was no news, and once more at 7.00, when there was still nothing. When he rang again at 10.30, though, he was told that he was the father of a son who had been born about two hours earlier: visiting would be allowed the following afternoon.
It was a short walk from the telephone box up at Gilstead that he was standing in to Rylands Avenue where his parents still lived. They seemed mildly diverted by the news of their first grandchild but really more interested in what was on the wireless; no celebratory drink was forthco
ming because they kept no drink in the house. John Sutcliffe decided he might as well stay the night.
He was the only visitor at Norman Rays on the Sunday afternoon because he had arranged it that way: hed told Kathleens mother and her sister, Mary, that they could go in and see her on their own in the evening.
He had been advised that the baby was small, only five pounds, but he was still unprepared for the scrap of life that he was only allowed to look at through a glass screen. This wasnt because his son was in danger or in any way ill, but just another of the matrons rules: no father was allowed to so much as touch his baby in the first few days, and babies were only taken to their mothers for feeding.
Peter Sutcliffe would be ten or eleven days old before his father picked him up; and when he did, set against his own big hands and powerful forearms, he seemed even tinier. There was a saying, though: Theyve got all the world to grow in, and John Sutcliffe was encouraged by the doctors to believe it. He was also reassured on the pronounced egg-shape that characterised the lefthand side of his sons skull: it would even out to nothing in time, they said, but Mr Sutcliffe kept an eye on it over the years and it never seemed to; it just disappeared gradually under Peters coarse second-growth hair.
Kathleen Sutcliffe, meanwhile, a conscientious Catholic who had given him the name Peter, and had it formally registered while still at Norman Rays, under another hospital rule (her husband had contributed William, his own second name), was exercised by only one thing: shed felt perfectly fit within a couple of days of the babys delivery, yet her confinement seemed to be never-ending.
She had been in the hospital fifteen days when the Sunday finally rolled round for her husband to collect her. Instead of going straight home, though, the taxi dropped them first at the terraced house where Kathleens mother lived with her older daughter, behind Dubb Lane Mills in the centre of Bingley. An aunt and uncle and two or three cousins lived in the next street over from where Kathleen herself had been brought up, and they were all there waiting to greet the new addition to the family. The baby, not unnaturally, was the cause of many loud and sustained expressions of concern and a lot of faffing and fussing that John Sutcliffe put down to it being a mainly female company. Women, he thought, watching them all dancing attendance on his son.
*
With her abundant black hair and striking good looks, Kathleen Coonan was thought of as something of a catch locally: she had been able to take her pick of the young men queueing up to partner her at the dances that were then almost a nightly event in the church and village halls and mechanics institutes all over the district.
She was in munitions, working at a bullet factory, when she started courting John Sutcliffe from Gilstead, and they made a handsome couple. They became engaged in 1941 before he left to join the Merchant Navy, and were married four years later.
It was a white wedding, conducted by a formidable old priest called Father Hawkswell at St Josephs, Bingley. There was a reception at Bingley St Johns Ambulance Hall, to which Arthur Sutcliffe, the grooms father, had become attached in a voluntary, but smartly uniformed, capacity. And there was even time for a weeks honeymoon in a boarding house in Morecambe which coincided with the armistice being declared and the slow return to normality.
Id be a wealthy woman today if my grandfather hadnt killed himself, a mature Kathleen Sutcliffe, wearied by the constant struggle to feed a growing family or by the prospect of another nights office-cleaning, would sometimes tell her children. And her mother, who spent the last years of her life living with them, would once again reminisce about the posh pony-and-traps they used to go to church in when she was a girl growing up in Devon.
All that had disappeared with the crash of the porcelain and ironmongery business which her father had painstakingly built up in Dawlish. Hed ended up on the road as a travelling salesman and, in these reduced circumstances, had somehow found himself with his wife and children in the attractive and thriving woollen town of Bingley. Here, having made modest provision for his family, he very soon did away with himself in the canal that ran conveniently close to their new home.
Perhaps as a result of the upheavals and traumas that thrust her prematurely into adulthood, Lottie, his eldest daughter, remained unmarried long enough for her to be written off as an old maid. She was thirty when she married Thomas Coonan, a Connemara man whose route to Bingley had been as unpredictable as her own.
Coonan, a textile worker, was a staunch Roman Catholic, and his wife became an enthusiastic and lifelong convert. Their three children would all be educated at St Josephs, the catholic school in Bingley, but, unhappily, Coonan didnt live long enough to see it: he died after theyd been married for only seven years.
Nevertheless, with the Church as a support, Mrs Coonan dedicated herself to bringing the children up singlehandedly with, it was generally recognised, creditable results. The two girls in particular, Kathleen and Mary, always gave the impression of being quiet and refined, good Catholics who attended mass regularly and were always well turned-out.
Pressure had been intermittently brought to bear on John Sutcliffe in the months and years leading up to his marriage to embrace the Roman Catholic faith, and the subject would go on being brought up regularly in the first few years of his life with Kathleen. But the suggestion was always firmly resisted, even mildly resented. He was C. of E. Hed been born C. of E. and he intended to stay that way: it was beyond him why one Church should always be after stealing converts from another.
A religion that totally banned contraception, however, very quickly made its presence felt in his life: following his first spell of leave after the wedding, his wife had written to say that she was pregnant.
3
Within a few months of Peter being born in June 1946, Kathleen Sutcliffe discovered that she was expecting a second baby. It was news which, given his often-stated intention of having a large family, should have delighted her husband.
John Sutcliffe was always a great advocate of the old-fashioned virtues of family life, regardless of the fact that, as he liked to point out, in his case his wifes religious convictions made such an old-fashioned family almost inevitable. To me, to live a life and not have children, hed say, would mean that that life had been nothing. After all, arent children and a family worth more than money? I mean, there must be very, very wealthy folk who cant have any family whod willingly forgo all the wealth theyve got just to have a family an actual family of their own.
Any pleasure he felt at the news of the new arrival, however, was seriously qualified by the state of his own health. Thanks to his sporting pursuits and a naturally sturdy constitution, John Sutcliffe had hardly known a days real illness in his life. But within weeks of coming home from the war and setting up house with Kathleen in the cottage on Ferncliffe, his health started to deteriorate alarmingly. Even casual acquaintances commented on the change.
In the eight months from his demob in April 1946 to the end of the year, his weight dropped from over fourteen stone to just nine stone six and there seemed to be no way of calling a halt. The pounds were dropping off him visibly; hed come home from work so weak he could hardly stand; in the morning it was as though he was putting on another mans clothes. And what made it all the more worrying was that nobody, including his own doctor and the doctors at the hospital, could give him any clue as to why it was.
Finally, in desperation, he gave up his job. And, miraculously, it worked. Hed worked in the bakery with no apparent ill effects for five years before the war, but now, as soon as he left, his skeletal frame once again started to flesh out. By the time their second son was born in September 1947, he was back up to around twelve and a half stone.
Just as his sickly self had seemed to find its echo in Peter, who at fifteen months still looked at least six months younger, so his renewed sense of well-being seemed to be reflected back at him from Thomas Arthur, named after his two grandfathers. The new baby was plump in all the places the first one was hollow; he was as pink as the first
one had been rickety and pale.
And then, as mysteriously as Peter Sutcliffe had hung on and survived, Thomas Arthur Sutcliffe was dead. Born at home, as all the succeeding Sutcliffe children would be, hed started refusing food when he was three days old and had finally been rushed to hospital in a taxi by his father. Three hours later a policeman was sent round to tell them that he had died. The undertaker took a small coffin to the hospital the following day and the baby was buried without ceremony in a common grave.
By the time Peter was brought home from his grandmother Coonans where hed been staying, it was all over. His mother was pregnant within four months with his sister, Anne, but for the time being he had her all to himself again. It seemed to John Sutcliffe impossible that they could but, in the following months, mother and son seemed to grow even closer. It was a relationship that, as it developed, increasingly unsettled him.
Everybody was always very gentle with Peter because he was so much on the weak and weedy side and always so sensitive; and, at least in the first eighteen months, this included his father, who of course understood that it wasnt the lads fault that hed been born that way out. It used to amuse him at first, some of the queer ways he had of going on such as the habit he developed of shuffling round the house on his bottom with one leg stuck out in front of him and the other dragging underneath. He was a good talker but, because of his tiny little ankles which hardly seemed up to bearing the weight, very slow to walk.
Thinking that they might get him on his feet, John Sutcliffe went out and bought Peter a pair of lace-up leather boots, specially reinforced over the instep and ankles, when he was about a year and a half. And they seemed to do the trick. Instead of shuffling, his mother encouraged him to toddle round the house with her, holding on to her skirts. The trouble was, once he was walking, he wouldnt let go.
