by Alan Bennett
In these dismal back streets the aunties’ role is as exponents of a hard-won glamour that means wearing more lipstick then Mam ever wears, higher heels, having access to nylons, and if not, painting them on. They go to the second house at the pictures, which we never do, and the occasional dance at the Clock. They may even do things undreamed of with members of the armed forces and get airmail letters from distant parts to prove it. With their swept-up hair and peep-toe sling-backs, regularly consulting their powder compacts, repairing their lipstick and tapping out cigarettes, they are everything that mothers are not, agents of an approximate sophistication and a sooty, provincial chic that makes a sister like my mother who has managed ‘to get herself a man’ seem conventional and dull.
Renegades who do not subscribe to the grown-ups’ pact that censors gossip in front of children, they let fall criticism of other grown-ups that Mam and Dad are careful to avoid when we’re around. They even imply that parents themselves are not above criticism, and can be judged as other people are.
‘Your mother was always one to carry on’, ‘They’ve always been worriers, your Mam and Dad’ – judgements one didn’t want to hear or wasn’t ready to hear, parents still set apart and not subject to the shortcomings and disablements that diminished other people. Parents were the standard still.
Subversion could come in other forms, with an aunty picking up on a nephew or niece’s aspirations that are overlooked at home, taking them to the theatre, say, or to ‘A’ pictures and even pictures in French. Though an aunty’s own reading may not stretch much beyond Rebecca or the novels of Phyllis Bentley (read with a quarter of Quality Street to hand), it’s enough to license her to preach the charms of the literary life and the glamour of those that lead it and to stamp her as a different sort of woman. Russell Harty had just such an aunty, Aunty Alice, who played a large part in his education. Widowed and with no children, she had friends in the choral society and took him to concerts and, if only implicitly, advertised the charms of a different way of life than he got at home, where both his parents worked on the market and never let him forget it.
My own aunties were never quite like this. True, Aunty Myra used to see herself as sensitive and poetry-loving, but since my parents were fond of reading and always liked music Aunty Myra used slyly to hint that these preoccupations, which she led you to believe came naturally to her but had been ‘thwarted’, were in my mother’s case ‘put on’, casting Mam and Dad as parents who did not appreciate the potential of their own children. This must have been provoking to say the least but, as with the tedium attendant on Aunty Kathleen’s footwear narratives, my parents kept their thoughts to themselves, only sharing them with us when we were old enough to sympathise and make the aunties’ aspirations a family joke.
Both Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra have occasional boyfriends though none seem ever to be brought home, the only indication that something may be going on the frequency with which their names come up in conversation. There are stand-bys like Bill Walsh, a body-building young man who lives in the shadow of Armley Gaol and whose picture in a posing-pouch another that resides incongruously among the family photographs. He had been taken prisoner during the war and had been in a camp in Germany and, so Aunty Myra says, been put before a firing squad only for his name to be called out and him reprieved at the last moment.
‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘the Germans must have known your aunties were running short of stuff to talk about.’
This, though, was a comment made long afterwards, and while we are children Dad keeps his misgivings to himself … or to Mam and himself. What galls him, and I suppose her, is that compared with their dashing, venturesome selves the aunties cast Mam as the sister who is timid and conventional. To some extent she is, though one of the conventions (and the one that galls them) is of course marriage, which neither of them has yet attained. My mother sees their contact with us, and particularly with my brother, who, less bookish and more boyish than me, is more in their line, as a continuation of the sisters’ efforts to squash her, which had disfigured her childhood (and from which marriage had delivered her). But if my parents feel this they say nothing to my brother and me, the convention that adults and particularly adult relatives are not criticised in front of the children stronger than any resentment they are feeling. Besides, it is always unwise to let anything out in my presence as, show-off that I am, I am always ready to blab it out if I think it will bring me the limelight, however briefly. My aunties are less discreet than my parents, and I’m sure many an unconsidered remark about Mam when she was a girl or even Mam now is smugly reported back by me. During the war I often think how lucky I am to have been born in England and not to be living in an occupied country or even Germany itself. In fact it is my parents who are the lucky ones as I am the kind of child who, always attention-seeking, would quite happily betray them to the Gestapo if it meant getting centre stage.
For Aunty Myra the war comes as a godsend, and Mr Chamberlain has scarcely finished his broadcast when she is off like a pigeon from a coop. Enlisting in the WAAF, she is posted round the country to various enlistment and maintenance units so that we soon become familiar with the names of hitherto unheard-of places like Innsworth and Hednesford, Formby and Kidbrooke, until in 1943 she is posted to India, thus confirming her role as the adventurous one in the family.
One of the aunties’ favourite films was Now, Voyager (1942). Mam liked it too but would have liked it more if Charles Boyer had been in it rather than Paul Henreid. I must have seen it at the time, probably at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road, though without caring for it much or even remembering it except as a film Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra went on about. But seeing it again recently I began to understand, as perhaps even they didn’t, some of the reasons why it appealed to them, and I wrote about it in my diary.
Christmas Eve, 1996. Catch Now, Voyager on afternoon TV, watch part and record the rest. Bette Davis was always a favourite of Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra and this tale of a dowdy Boston spinster, Charlotte Vale, who finds herself on the high seas and falls into the arms of Paul Henreid seemed to them a promise of what life might hold in store. Perhaps my mother thought so too, though she was never as big a fan of Bette Davis as her sisters, and since she was married and had children she expected less of life.
For Aunty Myra the promise could be said to have come true, as it did for thousands of women who enlisted in the early forties. The first shot of Charlotte Vale is of her sensible-shoed feet and thick, stockinged legs coming hesitantly down the staircase of her tyrannical mother’s grand house in Boston. It’s echoed a little later in the film when we see another pair of legs, slim and silk-stockinged, stepping elegantly down a gangplank as the camera pans up to reveal a transformed Charlotte gazing from under a huge and glamorous hat, with what seems like poise but is actually shyness, at her fellow passengers on a cruise liner. Aunty Myra’s mother, Grandma Peel, was anything but tyrannical and Aunty Myra neither hesitant nor shy, but a year or so after she would have seen Now, Voyager she made the same transition herself and exchanged the dark shiny-wallpapered stairs at Gilpin Place for the gangway of a cruise liner, stepping down her own gangplank to set foot on tropical shores when she disembarked at Bombay – though less elegantly than Bette Davis, and probably lugging her own kitbag as an LAC in the WAAF.
Christmas Day, 1996. Wake early as I always do these days, and in the absence of a newspaper watch the rest of Now, Voyager, finding more resonances this time than I had remembered. The shipboard romance with Paul Henreid over, Charlotte Vale, the ex-Aunt Charlotte, returns to Boston and revisits the sanatorium where her benevolent psychiatrist, Dr Jaquith, played by Claude Rains, had helped her to find herself. Seeing a miserable-looking child there she befriends her, the child, of course, turning out to be Tina, the daughter of Durrance, her shipboard lover. Seeing the child as her own once-unloved self, Charlotte takes over her treatment, virtually adopting her, becoming her aunt, until in the final scene the ex-lovers
meet at a party at Charlotte’s grand Boston home and dedicate their (for the time being) separate futures to the welfare of the now-blossoming child, the film ending with the line:
‘And will you be happy, Charlotte?’
‘Oh, Jerry. Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’
This relationship between Charlotte Vale, the ex-aunt and the child,
Tina, mirrors the way Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra saw themselves, Miss Vale as Miss Peel, coming on as they both did as bolder and more fun-loving and at the same time more sensitive than their married sister, casting Mam and Dad as parents who did not appreciate their own children. This takes us back to Now, Voyager and the mysterious wife of Jerry Durrance who is spoken of but, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, remains an off-screen presence though she, presumably, would have her own story to tell, and one in which Charlotte Vale might be less kindly regarded.
Aunty Kathleen probably longs to kick over the traces like her sister, but she is nearly forty when the war starts and unmarried, and as the breadwinner has to stay at home to look after Grandma. Her war service takes her no further than Armley Baths and her St John Ambulance Brigade classes; still, it’s a uniform and that’s what matters. Mam doesn’t even get that far but then she has children and neither she nor Dad has any military ambitions, Dad only too relieved that his job as a butcher is a reserved occupation, thus making him immune from the call-up.
For a few years he is an air-raid warden, but raids on Leeds being relatively uncommon his duties are light: a short walk round the Hallidays to check the black-out and the rest of the evening spent playing billiards up at the wardens’ post. Mam half-heartedly knits some lurid squares to be made into blankets and we occasionally trail over to the Ministry of Pensions hospital in Chapel Allerton to visit slightly mystified wounded soldiers, but otherwise hostilities scarcely impinge. War, peace, it makes no difference, our family never quite joining in, let alone joining up, and the camaraderie passes us by as camaraderie generally did.
In one sense Aunty Kathleen’s membership of the Ambulance Brigade proves a disappointment to me. She is issued with a first-aid handbook which she seldom seems to consult and which with its black and silver lettering hangs about the sideboard at Gilpin Place for the rest of the war. Unlike other medical texts it proves to have little information about the relations between the sexes, not even the stylised nude drawing (the man with a loincloth) that formed the frontispiece of Everybody’s Home Doctor. Of course on that point, according to Aunty Kathleen’s as always over-detailed account, no instruction was needed. The sessions are held in Armley Baths, the big swimming bath boarded over for the duration and so available for functions. There is no thought in my mind that the bath will have been drained first and I imagine the water gleaming evilly in the darkness under the floor, as between the boards the sea did when we walked along Morecambe Pier to hear the concert party. Manfield’s or Armley Baths, Dad has no time for either, but there is no escape as, with her usual ‘If you follow me, Lilian’ and ‘As it went on to transpire’, Kathleen tells the tale of these first-aid sessions, now and again shrieking with laughter, the wounded who were not wounded laid out on the beds all the better it seemed to be saucy.
‘With all due respect,’ says Mr Turnbull in A Chip in the Sugar, ‘you’re not supposed to move a person until it’s been ascertained no bones are broken. I was in the St John Ambulance Brigade.’
‘Yes,’ said mother, ‘and who did you learn your bandaging on?’ And they both cracked out laughing.
That was what the war was like, in Armley anyway, peals of dirty laughter, middle-aged men in navy-blue battledress making jokes you didn’t understand with women who weren’t their wives, and nobody seeming to mind. For the duration: 1939, open brackets; 1945, close brackets.
There is not much new furniture to be bought just after the war, all of it bearing the obligatory Utility stamp of two stylised Cs; what they stand for I never know or even wonder. Though some Utility furniture is well designed (and now probably ranks as collectable), Aunty Kathleen picks out an armchair that has no pretensions to style or beauty; it is squat and square with cushioned seat and back, and arms broad enough to conceal cupboards, one of which is intended to serve as a cocktail cabinet and the other as a receptacle for newspapers and magazines. There is even a drawer to hold a cigarette box.
Excitedly anticipating Aunty Myra’s return from India in 1946, Kathleen demonstrates how Myra will be installed on this monstrous throne, which will slowly, to her demobbed surprise, yield up its secrets – the drawer filled with Craven A, the cupboard containing a bottle of milk stout (Grandma’s not running to cocktails), and the magazine compartment with its copy of Lilliput. Thus, ceremonially enthroned in front of the kitchen fire, LAC/2 Peel will know that she has come home.
‘What a common thing!’ Mam said as soon as we are safely out of the house, a cocktail cabinet, even if it only housed milk stout, always a focus for my mother’s contempt.
‘Stout in a chair arm,’ said Dad, ‘whose cockeyed idea was that?’
What Aunty Myra thinks is not recorded. Not much, I would guess, as she’s more taken up with her own gifts than anything given to her. Grandma, who has been quite happy with the old sossed-down chair this new Utility article has superseded, now takes it over as it’s quite low and handy for sitting in front of the kitchen range with the toasting fork, or reading the Evening Post while she waits for her bread to bake, and it is in this chair she sits in recollection all through my childhood.
Meanwhile Aunty Myra blitzes the family with presents. Returning from India on HMS Northway in 1946, she brings with her all the spoils of the East. Even her suitcases are souvenirs. (‘Natural pigskin, Walter. Hand stitched. I knocked him right down.’) There are shawls, tray-cloths and no end of embroidery. (‘All hand-done, Lilian. It’s so intricate they go blind doing it, apparently. Just sat there in the street.’) We are presented with a blood-red Buddha. (‘I don’t care if it is a God,’ said Mam when we get it home, ‘I am not having it on the sideboard with a belly-button that size.’) The Buddha is just the tip of the iceberg and Myra regales us with gifts, very few of which we want; there are paper knives for the letters we seldom get, grotesquely carved salad servers for the salad we seldom serve, table mats, napkin rings, yet more accoutrements of that civilised life we never manage to lead, and so doomed to be consigned in due course to the bottom of the wardrobe and eventual wuthering by Dad.
There are also, as Dad puts it, ‘cartloads of photographs’, all neatly pasted up and labelled in a clutch of albums that pose a new boredom hazard.
‘Don’t let’s get landed with the photographs,’ Dad would warn as we trail up from Tong Road, but since they are invariably on hand to flesh out some anecdote of her military career that Aunty Myra is anxious to recount there is seldom any escape.
We soon become familiar with the sights of Bombay, Calcutta and Dehra Dunn. Here is Aunty and colleagues outside the ‘WAAF-ery’ at the Astoria Hotel; Aunty in a sari on the balcony of the YMCA; Aunty at the Taj Mahal; and photos of the entire staff of 305 Maintenance Unit gathered for Kiplingesque occasions like ‘The Farewell to Wilson Barse’.
I am twelve when I first see these albums, which duly take their place, along with other family relics, in the sitting room dresser in which, while Grandma is dozing in the kitchen, I do my customary Saturday afternoon ‘rooting’. One of the albums in particular fascinates me (and even today it falls open at the place): it has a photo, postcard size, of two Australian soldiers, ‘Jordy’ and ‘Ossie’, standing in bush hats and bathing trunks against a background of palm trees. ‘Jordy’ is unremarkable, with a lascivious other-ranks sort of face. It is ‘Ossie’ who draws the eye, better-looking, with his arms folded and smiling, and with some reason, as he is weighed down, practically over-balanced, by what, even in the less than skimpy bathing trunks of the time, is a dick of enormous proportions, the bathing costume in effect just a hammock in which is lo
lling this colossal member. Underneath Aunty has written, roguishly:
‘Yes, girls! It’s all real!’
At some point, in deference I imagine to Grandma’s sensibilities (‘Nay, Myra’), this caption has been scratched out. Or perhaps it is an act of prudent censorship before aunty’s marriage a year or two later. This takes her back into the RAF as her husband is a regular aircraftman, and henceforth her life is spent shuttling between bases in Singapore and Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.
Stan, Myra’s husband, is ten years younger than she is, though to my adolescent eyes there doesn’t seem much difference between them. Shortly after they are married we go to Grandma’s for Christmas high tea. Meals at Gilpin Place are at the customary hour, dinner at noon, high tea around six, with a cup of tea and ‘something to finish off with’ around nine. Christmas, though, was harder to accommodate to this routine, though not at our house, where ‘Dad has to watch his stomach and it doesn’t do for him to wait’, so with us the turkey would go in the night before, the smell of Christmas morning that of the turkey already cooked and waiting to be put on the table prompt at twelve.
This particular Christmas arrangements at Grandma’s are in chaos. Our arrival is always deliberately timed to avoid the King’s Speech, as both Myra and Kathleen are fervent patriots. A (literally) standing joke at Christmas is how to avoid being in the room when Aunty Kath jumps to her feet at the first note of the National Anthem – a reverent stance, head bowed, hands clasped, which Dad has been imitating at home for weeks beforehand.
