by Gordon Burn
Although it occurred to Laurie that Peter didn’t ‘over-enjoy’ this kind of primitive noise, preferring ‘softer’, more melodic music, he was happy as usual to tag along: he tapped his feet appreciatively, cultivated more or less the right ‘look’ and took the money on the door when it was his turn. What he did seem to like was being able to say he knew Dave Lee of the Dave Lee Sound, a Shipley boy to whom he helped deliver a battered piano on the back of a coal wagon once, and members of the various other semi-professional outfits who turned up to play.
But his main qualification for inclusion continued to be his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, motorcars and bikes, and a genuine rocker’s addiction to speed. Given the choice between a pub and a bikers’ ‘caff’, he’d invariably choose somewhere like the Tomato Dip where the conversation could be relied on to follow reassuringly predictable lines. Peter and Eric, who was his usual companion on these jaunts, could talk effortlessly, and endlessly, about revs and cylinders and cams, in an environment heavy with the smell of cooking-fat and exhaust fumes, whereas social encounters in general tended to make them clam up. Small-talk was not their forte, as anybody attempting to engage them in it quickly found out. Peter would lurch from taciturnity to over-excitement, sweating heavily and tripping over his words, while Eric expressed himself in a broad and soporific Yorkshire drawl.
Occasionally, and always on the strength of half a dozen pints of bitter, Eric would saunter up and ask the barmaid to ‘Gimme a Luger-an’-lime’, wild-West fashion. And on one occasion, having deviated from their normal route, he persuaded Peter to join him in ‘taking off a couple of Yanks’: they stood at the bar talking in heavily affected American accents which, Peter led Eric to believe, had the whole pub taken in.
Taking a rise out of ‘Robbo’ which, especially in mixed company, is something Peter frequently did, didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t like him; on the contrary, he found him undemanding company and a good foil, as the letters which he wrote to him in prison showed. It was when Eric was away serving one of his periodic sentences that Peter’s dependence on him always became most pronounced.
Eric spent the first part of 1967 in Armley jail, which meant that, on weekends at the Royal Standard, Peter was left to fend for himself. What made it worse was that, by this point, most of his acquaintances were courting, and that included Laurie Ashton. For some months, Laurie had been going out with a girl called Cath, always known as ‘Lupin’ because of her slight build, and Cath had taken her place in ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’ along with Christine, her friend. The difficulty was that, although Christine was attractive and unattached and theoretically ‘available’, she resisted all attempts to pair her off with Peter.
In fact, shortly after Laurie and Cath had taken up with each other, Christine had accepted a few drinks from Laurie’s shy friend, but she’d caught the last bus home with Cath to Heckmondwike, and Cath had drawn her own conclusions from that: whenever Christine found somebody she ‘fancied’, she tended to spend the night in some old rolling stock in a siding not far from the Standard, even though this inevitably brought her parents down to the pub searching for her the following night.
The truth was that there was something about Peter that Christine found eerie; she couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about him that seemed to her not quite right. And, unfortunately, Cath agreed. He had never done or said anything to make her dislike him, but she always took care to make sure that the ‘buffet’ she was sitting on wasn’t next to his.
From a distance, Peter struck most women as an attractive proposition; and many men were openly envious of his dark and broody good looks. Close to, however, as Cath discovered she wasn’t alone in noticing, the collective features became most overpowering and, as they competed with each other for attention, seemed to assume independent existences of their own. The eye had difficulty reconciling them into a single picture and so tended to concentrate on them individually instead.
Cath knew from Laurie how long Peter spent in the bathroom before coming out at night, and both his hair and his beard were testimony to this obsessive preening: piled up in ‘right knitty little curls like a Jamaican’s’, his hair looked strangely square-shaped, like a dense black hedge on his head; while the black beard that was sometimes strapped to the sideburns and sometimes not was always ‘trimmed up like a masterpiece’, regardless.
His teeth were even and spade-shaped but failed to meet at the front where there was a fleshy gap that he plugged with his tongue. And his eyes, which were the first thing everybody noticed, were bulbous and bloodshot and ‘near-on-black’. Trying to keep track of their movements when conducting a conversation with him could make you dizzy, because they darted about so much, sneaking glances at everything in the room except your face.
Cath tried explaining all of this to Laurie, but he couldn’t see it and it seemed to her you had to be a woman to understand. It also irritated her the way Peter was so polite and over-solicitous and even blushed on her behalf. The fact of the matter was that, as a mill-girl with twelve brothers and sisters, she wasn’t unused to blue humour and salty language and was perfectly capable of – quite enjoyed, in fact – giving as good as she got. In this she was as typical of the girls who went to the Royal Standard as the girl who Peter appeared with out of the blue one night was not.
*
It was clear from the minute they saw her that Sonia didn’t – and, more importantly, had no wish to – fit in. At sixteen, she was below the legal minimum age for drinking, but she certainly wasn’t alone in that; what made her different was the way she hadn’t gone to town with lipstick and mascara and chalky eye-shadow to disguise the fact that she was still at school. Every aspect of her appearance, in fact, suggested a girl who had been brought up in the Czechoslovakia that her parents had fled twenty years earlier, rather than one who had grown up just a few bus-stops away from the pub.
Her clothes, compared to the rather daring minis and stilettos that all the girls in Peter’s crowd were wearing, looked lumpy and old-fashioned in a way that suggested that they were probably home-made. She was short and quite tubby and wore her hair ‘in a sort of longish Afro’ that, unlike Cath’s and the other girls’ elaborate beehives, didn’t demand regular repair; the way she refused to stand and gossip in front of the mirror in the Ladies’ at the Standard didn’t win Sonia many friends, but then making friends of the regulars in ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’ didn’t seem to be one of her priorities.
She was as unamused by their conversation as by the tricks they got up to, such as igniting lighter-fuel on their breath and filing half-penny pieces down into ‘shillings’ to keep the jukebox fed. Like Peter, she was a curious combination of shyness and hauteur and very quickly succeeded in opening up a physical distance between him and his erstwhile friends. They started perching together on the platform that supported the juke-box rather than at the tables with the rest and, by the time Eric was released from Armley, they had taken to sitting off in a far corner by themselves.
They would be among the first in when the doors of the Standard were opened in the evening, and were cosily ensconced in the near-total darkness by the time the others arrived. The bond between them was now fortified by the barrier that they’d erected and both seemed to suggest that Peter and Sonia had found ‘the real thing’. On at least one occasion the manager of the Standard felt obliged to remind them they were in public when all the signs were that they were getting carried away.
‘You don’t get a courtship like that, kissing and cuddling all the time,’ Eric Robinson says. ‘We just used to come in an’ say, “’Ey up, they’re at it again” and it seemed to go on all night long. They seemed to feel they were on their own.’
To Cath, soon to become Mrs Laurie Ashton, the Royal Standard represented the best days of her life; she was conscious, even as she lived it, that her time would never be so much her own again. For Sonia, though, it was merely an interlude, and all the good times lay ahead. �
��The girlfriend will end up getting a right good job when she comes out of college,’ Peter would say to Laurie. ‘She’s going to end up with a real job.’ But Laurie wasn’t in the least envious. It seemed to him that Peter could be getting in ‘above his head’.
Sonia Szurma was born three years after her parents arrived in Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1947. Christened ‘Oksana’, she was officially renamed as she approached school age and her parents started to readjust – or resign themselves to – their new life.
Bohdan Szurma, who described himself on his daughter’s birth certificate as ‘woolcomb box minder’, one of the dreariest, poorest-paid jobs in the mill, was a former physical education teacher who claimed descent from an aristocratic Ukrainian family. It was a descent, however, which Sonia’s future father-in-law, for one, would always remain loudly sceptical about.
‘He’s supposed to be able to speak seven languages fluently. Well all I can say is, one of them isn’t English. But you know what these communist countries are like,’ John Sutcliffe would tell his friends. ‘They give themselves a degree or some other fancy title if they think they deserve it. All I know is that he’s never held a job down so long as I’ve known him. He came over here and saw what you could get and jumped on the bandwagon of the Welfare State.’
Although Mr Szurma upgraded his occupation to ‘yarn tester’ in later life, he never went out to work after the late 1950s because of ill health. His wife’s job as a nursing auxiliary in a local private hospital was the family’s main source of income, and he concentrated all his energies into helping Sonia and her older sister, Marianne, make their way in the world.
The council house in Clayton, a quiet, semi-rural suburb in the south of Bradford to which the Szurmas moved from the transit camp near York which had been their first home, became a small monument to Bohdan Szurma’s austere, almost ascetic approach to life. Literature, chess and classical music were offered as substitutes for television, which wasn’t allowed in the house. Most meals were taken from the same pot of goulash which was made on Sundays and stood on the stove all week, while the stove itself, a spotless but ancient mottled enamel model, was for more than twenty years, and even in the coldest winters, the main source of heat.
The kitchen, although cramped and spartanly furnished, was where the family spent most of their evenings and where visitors (a rare occurrence) were entertained. It was where Peter’s parents on their only visit drank home-made wine (‘an instant job – nice colour to it, but it wouldn’t make you turn a hair; make you go to the toilet, that’s all’) and sat elbow-to-elbow eating their pink ‘chewy soup’. Sonia’s father, meanwhile, paced restlessly backwards and forwards in an adjoining, equally spartan room.
The Szurmas were on friendly but formal terms with their neighbours, who were kept at a distance, and Mr Szurma lived virtually a recluse’s life. He rarely ventured further than the local shops and the Ukrainian Association, and he expected his daughters, who were discouraged from bringing friends home, to do the same. Marianne and Sonia were sometimes seen playing tennis in front of Tanton Crescent with their father dressed rather formally in white shorts, but most nights found them, again under paternal supervision, poring over their books.
Marianne responded well to the pressure to succeed, sailed effortlessly through school and became a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music. Sonia, though, was by comparison an underachiever and therefore a constant source of disappointment to her father. Although she did well enough in the 11-Plus to get to Grange, the girls’ grammar school near Clayton, she consistently failed to make the top stream and felt she was condemned to struggle in her ‘brilliant’ sister’s shadow all her life.
So frustrated was Mr Szurma by what he considered Sonia’s poor performance that he regularly checked her attendance record with her teachers and always took particular care to confirm that she was where she said she was whenever there was a school trip. During the breakdown that she was to suffer some years later, Sonia became inseparable from an old pop music annual that seemed to have become for her the symbol of her insular and in many ways deprived early years: she had saved for weeks to buy the book out of her pocket-money, only to have it immediately confiscated by her father for being cheap and frivolous and unsuitable in every way.
By the time Sonia was sixteen the independent streak that he had probably always suspected had begun to surface. But a discotheque at a pub in the centre of Bradford still isn’t somewhere that Bohdan Szurma would have expected to find his youngest daughter on St Valentine’s night, 1967, four months before she was due to take her CSE examinations. And it wouldn’t be until the exams were over, and the six passes that she needed in order to progress to the technical college secured, that Sonia would take the bold step of introducing her father to the polite, dark-eyed young man with whom she was so clearly enthralled. Within just a few weeks of meeting her, however, Peter took Sonia back to Bingley to show her off.
*
For all Peter’s timidity and sensitivity as a boy, his aversion to sports and his close attachment to his mother, it never occurred to John Sutcliffe that Peter – or any son of his – could turn out to be less than 100-per-cent ‘normal’ (or a ‘puff’, ‘bum boy’ or ‘bender’ as homosexuals are invariably called in Bingley). ‘All my boys are boys, and all my girls are girls, and there’s nothing in between with any of them,’ he says firmly. ‘Peter was just a quiet little lad, that’s all. He didn’t have any sort of … affectations. None at all. He had no affectations whatsoever.’
Nevertheless, relief was one of the emotions that Mrs Sutcliffe at least experienced when, without any prior warning, Peter came in one Sunday afternoon and quite simply said, ‘Mum, this is Sonia.’ The ‘Hello’ that Sonia permitted herself on that occasion was virtually the only word she addressed to anybody other than Peter, and on future visits she was hardly more forthcoming. But they put it down to the strangeness of her surroundings, and to her youth, and took it for granted that time was all she needed to unbend.
‘She’s just a quiet, shy girl who probably doesn’t like expressing herself in front of other people,’ Peter’s father reassured his mother, who kept an open house, like everybody in Cornwall Road, and was used to people just ‘mucking in’. The fact that Sonia was capable of expressing herself – and he took it on trust that she must be able to if she was planning to become a teacher – seemed to John Sutcliffe a distinct improvement over most of those whom Peter had previously chosen to call his friends.
‘Basically, I don’t know where he found a lot of them, but they didn’t seem to have achieved the same level of education as he had. He could talk much better than they could. He wasn’t a speaker of BBC English or anything like that, but at least he had no difficulty in making himself understood. Eric Robinson and people like that, they had very great difficulty stringing two words together, never mind speaking an intelligent sentence.
‘Peter had the mental capacity to do better than a lot of the stick-in-the-muds he was knocking about with, and he probably knew that. A lot of them would stick with what they were doing for the rest of their lives, and just do it. But he wasn’t content. He had a goal in his mind. He was going to do better. There was never any doubt in Peter’s mind that he was going to get on, but there’s no disgrace in that. Everybody should think that way.’
As the father of six children who wouldn’t be able to muster a ‘paper’ qualification between them, John Sutcliffe started off well disposed towards the girl who, if Peter’s proprietary, slightly overweening attitude was anything to go by, was destined to become his daughter-in-law. But as the expected breakthrough with Sonia failed to happen, Peter’s father, in common with the rest of the family, started to find his patience running out. ‘How the devil is that girl going to make a school teacher? How is she going to do it?’ he’d wonder in exasperation at the end of another day in which Sonia would have done nothing but sit and twiddle her thumbs. ‘She just doesn’t have any conversation.’
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br /> She didn’t seem to want to talk, and when she did it was in a whisper, so that, half the time, you couldn’t hear what she was saying. What they had been prepared to overlook as shyness after several months started to look like arrogance; the popular interpretation of the sullen reserve which Sonia so effortlessly maintained was that she was sitting in judgement on them.
After the discipline and quiet of her own home, 57 Cornwall Road must have seemed like a bazaar. Through back and front doors, and even windows, there flowed a constant traffic of children and animals and neighbours and noise that continued long after it was dark. But by 1967, the overcrowding was marginally less than it might have been because, after six months living at Cornwall Road with her new husband, Anne, Peter’s oldest sister, had recently moved out into a place of her own. Jane, the youngest of the girls, was ten; and Maureen, the closest in age to Sonia, a precocious fourteen. When, within two years, Maureen had her first baby, it emphasized the gulf which existed between them.
Unlike Peter, who bombarded her with baby-talk and wet-nursed Rachel ‘like a woman’, Sonia made her lack of interest plain; persuaded to hold the baby on one occasion, she simply opened her arms and dropped it when it started to cry, letting it fall heavily into a pram, which hardly endeared her to its mother.
Twelve years later Maureen would still feel that she had never got to know Sonia – or, rather, that Sonia had ‘never taken the trouble’ to get to know her. ‘When they stayed with me in Cambridge on the way to their honeymoon, she turned to me and said, “You’ve got a lovely home. You’re a lovely cook,” like she was right surprised or something. I think she had me written off as some kind of gad-about right from the start.’
Maureen’s first impression of Sonia was of ‘a right quiet prim little miss; ever so serious’. To Mick, though, she was simply ‘a robber’s dog’. That first night, when he’d come home full of talk about the ‘buer’ he’d picked up, Peter had gone to great lengths to emphasise the coup he’d pulled off by snatching Sonia from under the noses of his friends. ‘They were all after chatting her up,’ he’d said. But Mick found it hard to believe it could be the same girl sitting in their front room. Putting it crudely, he thought she ‘looked like a fuckin’ horse.’
