by Gordon Burn
Peter, imbued with a religion which associated women with the dangers and degradations of the flesh, had, on odd occasions, been a party to the catcalls and abuse. But he had never approached a woman while he was on his own. And then, the night of the row over the Italian with Sonia, he found himself ‘attracted’ to a girl soliciting on Manningham Lane.
*
The idea, as he was to explain it some years later, was to ‘level the score’ with Sonia, whose relationship with the man whose existence he had been unaware of only twenty-four hours earlier was, so he now believed, more intimate than her relationship with him. He reached over and opened the front nearside door of the Morris 1000 and, having confirmed that she was ‘doing business’, invited the woman in.
‘I thought I would have intercourse with the prostitute, but I changed my mind when it got to the stage where we had got to do it,’ he later claimed. ‘We were on the way to her place and were talking and I realised what a coarse and vulgar person she was. We were practically there and I realised I didn’t want anything to do with her.
‘Before getting out of the car I was trying to wriggle out of the situation, but I felt stupid as well. We went into the house and when she got into the bedroom she started taking her clothes off. She had told me it was five pound and I had earlier given her a ten-pound note. She had told me that when we got to her place she was going to change it. She didn’t want to call it off and said we could get the note changed at the garage where I had picked her up.
‘We went back to the garage by car and she went inside and there were two chaps in there. I don’t know whether she did this regularly, but she wouldn’t come back out. One of the men came banging on the car roof when I refused to go away, and the other one escorted her away. There wasn’t much I could do about it, but I was a bit annoyed and drove off.’
His ‘annoyance’ at being ‘duped and cheated’ soon flared up into something more intense. ‘It wasn’t just the money. It was the fact that I felt annoyed because I wanted to resolve the situation with Sonia and hadn’t done. It made me feel worse than ever … even more depressed … I felt outraged and humiliated and embarrassed. I felt a hatred for (the prostitute) and her kind.’
His depression deepened next morning when he finally reported for work: during his absence the previous afternoon there had been a ‘disaster’, in the course of which several of his workmates had almost drowned. Hauled before the director of the water works later in the day, he was left in no doubt that the accident was seen to be his fault, and he was summarily demoted for leaving his post. It was a setback that he contrived to keep secret from his family, who were to notice no difference in his behaviour over the coming difficult months.
He saw Sonia as usual the following Sunday, only to learn that she was still seeing the other man – was seeing him two or three times a week, in fact, whereas she was only seeing him once. Inevitably, they spent the whole time arguing, which is all they seemed to do whenever they saw each other for a long time.
Shortly after the ten-pound-note affair, Peter recognised the woman who had ‘duped’ him drinking with another ‘obvious’ prostitute in one of Lumb Lane’s many well-known prostitutes’ pubs. ‘I went and approached the one I had been with three weeks previously and told her that I hadn’t forgotten about the incident and that she could put things right so that there would be no hard feelings. I was giving her the opportunity to put things right and give back the payment I had made to her. She thought this was a huge joke and, as luck would have it, she knew everybody else in the place and went round telling them … Before I knew what was happening, most of the people were having a good laugh.’
After this, he said, his mind was ‘in a turmoil’: he developed ‘a general loathing for any prostitute’. He felt himself being pushed ‘over the brink’.
*
Peter was twenty-three in 1969; Eric and Laurie were two or three years older and engagements and marriages were beginning to break ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’ up. On his ‘nights off’ from Sonia – that is, any night except Saturday – Peter still sometimes put in an appearance at the discos at the Royal Standard but, unknown to his old crowd, he had lately taken to hanging around other pubs where music wasn’t the main attraction, usually with a new friend in tow.
Trevor Birdsall was so self-effacing and shy as to make Peter seem socially adept. If people noticed anything at all about Trevor it was usually his hair, and if they didn’t notice, Peter would grab the first opportunity to point out to them that Trevor was wearing a wig. ‘It turns red in the summer and goes frizzy,’ he’d add quickly, laughing his fluting laugh, before Trevor got back from the bar.
Trevor also had a heart condition, as a result of which he’d led a rather sheltered life and, even as an adult, still tended to be rather fussed over by his mother. Being to a greater or lesser extent ‘mother’s boys’, in fact, is something that Keith Sugden would retrospectively identify as the characteristic linking most of Peter’s friends, not excluding himself. ‘Trevor Birdsall, Eric Robinson Richard Varley, Patrick Slater, me an’ Pete – we were all more or less dominated by our mothers. It seems as if he were drawn to people with something missing in their make-up like that.’
Trevor, though, seemed particularly ‘cissified’. He played guitar, and Keith ‘jammed’ with him a couple of times in a room above the Hornby Dublo shop that Mr Birdsall ran in Lumb Lane, but their association didn’t survive beyond the first weeks. ‘I don’t like weak character. Weak people. I don’t like people who let other people walk all over them. An’ Trevor were weak. Peter, though, wasn’t weak at all. If anything, just the opposite. He’d play daft, but you felt he was laughing inwardly all the time.’
After his youngest brother was viciously beaten about the head with a stick coming out of a nightclub in the mid-1970s, Peter was to offer him some fraternal advice: ‘Always carry a sock in your pocket,’ he told Carl, ‘and all you need is a stone or some other solid object to turn it into an effective weapon.’
A spare sock is something that Peter, in his usual fastidious fashion, always made sure he had on him after he decided he had been made to look a ‘laughing-stock’ for the second time by the prostitute whose features he was now always on the look-out for in his apparently aimless excursions around Bradford’s ‘redlight’ area.
Sometime between a week and a month after approaching the woman in the pub and asking for his money back, he was sitting with Trevor in Trevor’s mini-van in St Paul’s Road, near Manningham Park. They had completed what was becoming their regular circuit of the Lumb Lane pubs and were ‘parked up’, eating fish and chips out of the paper when Peter suddenly disappeared. When he came back ten minutes later he was agitated and out of breath and abruptly instructed Trevor to drive off.
Once they were headed in the direction of Bingley Peter confessed that he had followed an ‘old cow’ along St Paul’s Road to a house, where he had hit her on the back of the head with a stone. He produced a sock from his pocket and dropped the piece of brick that was in it out of the window. He also mumbled something about some money which Trevor didn’t understand.
Next day Peter received a visit from the police. The injured woman, who bore no resemblance to the prostitute against whom he believed he had a grievance, had noted the number of Trevor’s van. He admitted striking her, but only with his hand, and got off with ‘a lecture’; for her own reasons she had decided not to press charges. ‘I explained everything, and everything’s all right,’ he reassured Trevor, who was soon back in Lumb Lane with him, listening to his boasts about ‘shagging’ prostitutes and not paying, meekly following his instructions to look at a passing woman’s ‘big knockers’.
On the night of 29 September 1969, however, a further month later, Peter went out alone and was arrested in the garden of a house in the Manningham area after his car had been spotted by a policeman with its lights on and the engine turning over. He was discovered hunched behind a privet hedge with a hammer and later c
harged with ‘going equipped for theft’, an offence which eventually brought a fine of £25.
Although, given what his motive had actually been, he was pleased to plead guilty to such a comparatively minor charge in court, at home he continued to protest his innocence. His father knew he had trouble with one of the hubcaps on his Morris because, driving through Harrogate with him just a few weeks earlier, it had flown off and had had to be tapped back on again with the hammer that Peter always carried in the car for that purpose. That was what had happened on the night of the arrest: the hubcap had come off; he was walking round the car with the hammer still in his hand after reseating it, and as he was opening the door on the driver’s side this policeman had walked across the road and wanted to know what he was doing, he explained earnestly, and neither of his parents saw any reason to disbelieve him. Besides which, Peter had got very good at dissembling. He was, in Mick’s words, ‘a right genuine sort of a liar’.
‘You can usually tell if somebody’s lying, but he could tell me summat, our lad, an’ it’d go straight in. He wouldn’t let his face slip at all. Nothing. You wouldn’t think owt about it.’
11
The influence of women in the Sutcliffe household was pronounced. As well as Anne, Maureen and Jane, who all appeared uncomplicated, assertive and noticeably well-adjusted compared to the boys, there was their mother and their mother’s mother, who had moved in with them at Manor Road when Peter was six and continued to live with them at Cornwall Road until her death in 1964, twelve years later.
Gran’ma Coonan’s sister, Reenee, lived in one of the old people’s ‘bungalows’ further along Cornwall Road and was always popping in; and her only daughter, Mary, who had settled in Rotherham with her family, was a regular visitor. The Sutcliffes, on the other hand – John’s parents, his two brothers and a sister – although all still living in the area, rarely darkened the door.
It was an estrangement that most people traced back to Ivy Sutcliffe, an unpopular woman who, in her later years, took a grim satisfaction in deliberately alienating everybody who might have been close – husband, children and grandchildren alike: John Sutcliffe would only learn of his mother’s death, in a Bingley old people’s home in 1982, several days after the funeral. ‘Gra’ma Sutcliffe was a beast,’ was Jane’s epitaph. ‘Some people are born sour. She were born sour.’
Lottie Coonan, though, earned a permanent place in the affections of the grandchildren whom she had helped to bring up, and was genuinely mourned. Carl, who was just four at the time, sneaked one of the neighbour’s children in to have a look at his grandmother laid out in the front room in her open coffin; and Mick, who was then fourteen, served as altar boy at the Requiem Mass, which helped his father to see him in a new light. ‘He was a dabhand at it. He really looked the part. I’m not a Catholic myself, but I was quite proud of him, the way he carried it off.
The seriousness of the job … I’ve seen all my lads do the incense-swinging bit and there’s nothing any of them have got to learn about religion. Any one of them could walk into any Catholic cathedral in the world and follow the service.’
Eighty when she died, Mrs Coonan had been receiving communion at home every week for many years, and Kathleen usually took the sacraments with her. Although the demands of bringing up six children and running a house meant that she never got to church more than three or four times a year, Kathleen had never faltered in her faith and, with her mother, was seen as a perfect example of what the ‘good’ Catholic woman should be: ‘big-hearted’, ‘hardworking’, ‘uncomplaining’ and ‘loving’, she would be remembered by her neighbours as a ‘devoted’ wife and mother, the single criticism being that she was always ‘too soft’ with her children. His mother was certainly Mick’s chief ally, both against the police and against his father, who was kept in the dark much of the time about what was going on. ‘She were a right sort of an honest person, me mother. Right gullible. You could tell her owt an’ she’d believe you without wanting to delve into what were goin’ on. Like, police were allus coming round wi’ one thing an’ another, even when I hadn’t done owt. If they were lookin’ for somebody for summat, they’d come an’ see me. An’ she were one of them, she’d stick up for you, me mother, even though she might call you a bloody fool after they’d gone.’
Kathleen had a particularly close relationship with her sons. It was Kathleen whom John Sutcliffe had always blamed, of course, for Peter growing up the way he did, ‘tied to his mother’s apron strings’. But then he saw the process being repeated with Carl.
Although, unlike his oldest brother, Carl wasn’t physically weak – he would, in fact, reach six feet by the time he was twelve – he was as shy and sensitive and as attached to his mother as Peter had been fifteen years before.
John Sutcliffe spent almost the whole of the 1960s, the decade when Carl was growing up, working nights. Carl, meanwhile, spent most of that time watching television from his mother’s lap and resented being sent to bed early by his father when he was around at the weekends. Like the rest of the family (although Maureen, possibly his favourite, would only admit to holding him ‘in awe’), Carl was afraid of his father, whose moods could be unpredictable, and for many years would even admit to ‘hating’ him.
‘We were all frightened to death of me dad. He were like a monster. He were never in house, but when he was he ruled the roost. When he came in drunk we’d all sit there in fear; you didn’t move. Whatever was on television, no matter how many were watching, was straight off and switched over to what he wanted to see, which were usually sport. If cricket come on, that were it. He used to sort of edge up to telly and sit right in front of it. Nobody dare say owt.
‘Oh Christ, he had a foul temper. I seen Maureen get a beating off him when she was about fifteen, an’ he once beat me black and blue when I were a kid. I threw an orange pip at Pete an’ missed an’ he just got up and beat hell out of me. I used to get up in a morning and go out to avoid him. I wouldn’t go near him. I used to dread him completely.
‘Me an’ Jane, when we were right little, we used to bath together, an’ he’d just put this chrome towel-rail on wall – he didn’t do right many jobs in house, but one of them he had done was that. Anyway, as Jane were getting out of bath she slipped an’ grabbed hold of it to save herself and pulled it off. And we were that terrified, we wouldn’t come out of bathroom, even though it were an accident. An’ he went berserk.
‘I hated him. I really did. I even considered killing him. I were goin’ to tek nuts off his push-bike wheels once. I unscrewed them all one night an’ med everything loose. I thought, He’ll go down that hill to work tonight an’ … crash!’
One aspect of his father’s behaviour that used to leave Carl feeling particularly confused was the different, conflicting personalities he seemed to assume: it was as though he kept one face for use in the house and another, much pleasanter one, for when he went out.
‘One thing he did used to do, he used to put a bar of chocolate in us pockets before we went to school. He’d put a Milky Way in all the duffle-coat pockets hanging on the hooks when he came in in the morning. What I really hated about him, though, were fact that he were really good to other kids in street – he were always right nice to neighbours’ kids; he’d give them money for sweets or owt. Whereas I can never remember him buying me a present in all me life when I were little. He bought me an Action Man when I were about eight, but that were the only present he ever bought. Me mum had to buy everything we got.’
Money had always been scarce at Cornwall Road and, after half a lifetime’s practice, Kathleen had become expert at making a little go a long way. There was a limit, however, even to her ingenuity, and on one occasion she was discovered scratching about in a coalhouse belonging to one of her neighbours. The neighbour, who realised that she must have been desperate, said nothing. Other times she would live in fear of the Electricity Board coming to cut them off before she had had time to scrape together whatever was owing, althou
gh Mick once or twice paid the bill without saying anything and then encouraged his mother to spend the money on herself.
It wasn’t something she was used to doing, and she never acquired the habit. A visit to the hairdresser every other Thursday was Kathleen’s only indulgence, even after she started going out of the house to work. Mrs Coonan was housebound for the last years of her life, so Kathleen had her mother to look after as well as the younger children. But, from the mid-1960s onwards, she had a series of domestic and office cleaning jobs which, although poorly paid, helped to lift the financial burden. For a number of years she was employed at Bingley Teachers Training College, where the work, pushing heavy industrial equipment, was arduous and the hours anti-social – 5.00 p.m.–8.00 p.m. on week-nights, 7.00 a.m.–12.00 noon on Saturdays and Sundays. But, even though she was ailing much of this time, none of the women she worked with ever saw her looking less than pleasant, or heard her complain. The consensus was that she had plenty to complain about.
John Sutcliffe was almost as much a stranger to his wife as he was to his children, who would grow up feeling that they didn’t know him any better than they would have known a lodger. The two of them were occasionally spotted together on Saturday nights, but Kathleen was never a drinker, and got bored sitting in pubs. Their paths mainly crossed at the breakfast-and dinner-tables where, having cooked the meal, she would serve him up and then clear away his food, and bring him his tea in the pint-pot that nobody else was allowed near.
When he wasn’t working John was invariably following one of the sporting or recreational pursuits on which his reputation in Bingley rested. He played football for the town well into his forties, was in demand as a cricketer well into his fifties, and cut no less of a figure in middle age than he had as a young man. His tastes ran to hounds-tooth checks and paisley cravats and frothing handkerchiefs in his breast pockets, and to well-cut, formal suits on the occasions when he was singing with the Musical Union or out dancing. He loved dancing, which was another of his talents, and was invariably well-mannered and ‘gallant’ in a rather old-fashioned, self-conscious and (to some) self-congratulatory way.
