by Alan Bennett
Though I do not speak up for them, it must have been then that Aunty Myra’s photograph albums are given over to me on the assumption that, since I am the educated one, I should keep the family record, or a censored version of it as Grandad Peel’s suicide is not yet out in the open. Still, there in the album is Ossie, lazily grinning on his tropical beach, the great sag of his dick as astonishing now as it had been when I was a boy, the page still scuffed where Aunty Myra had expunged her first roguish caption.
This sharing-out is a bizarre occasion, a kind of Christmas with endless presents to open, Mam and Aunty Kathleen by turns shrieking with laughter and then in floods of tears. Neither of them wants for much now; both have tea towels and sheets to last them all their days with tray cloths and napkins in their own bottom drawers that they are never going to use either. And more than the funeral itself or the bitter cold that grips the bungalow, it is this redundancy of possessions that makes them think of death.
Conscious that I have done Aunty Myra an injustice but knowing, too, that I would do exactly the same again, I try and write about her in my diary:
She was a great maker of lists/inventories/lists of friends/lists of expenses/shopping lists/records of meter readings/contents of cases. It was a habit acquired in the Equipment Wing of RAF Innsworth, ticking off kit on lists on clipboards; lists of property which grew with every posting as she moved with her husband from station to station, and quarters to quarters. What is yours is what is signed for, and what is signed for must one day be accounted for, so a list must be made. And a check list in case the first list is lost. These are my possessions. I own these. I have these signatures.
On the day of her husband’s death, she signed for his property: for the watch that still ticked on the dead wrist, the ring loose on the finger, the pyjamas in which he lay.
And when he was dead two years, and she was in a bungalow on the outskirts of nowhere in particular, she was still making lists: guy ropes for a life that didn’t have much point, evidence of what she had and therefore what she was, and a sign that she was not settled there either, that soon she would up sticks and off. We found the lists, the packing cases still unopened: tea sets from Hong Kong, Pyrex won in raffles in a sergeants’ mess in Kowloon in 1947, the sewing of amahs, the pictures of houseboys, her husband’s uniform, his best BD and belt, all piled up in the back room of a bungalow on the outskirts of Lytham St Annes.
Aunty Kathleen holds up a pair of her husband’s pyjama bottoms.
‘See, Lilian,’ she giggles, ‘look at his little legs.’ They are in the front bedroom at Morecambe while in the kitchen Bill, the husband in question, fills Dad in on the ins and outs of sanitary engineering in Western Australia.
It is Christmas Day early in the seventies, and Mam and Dad and me have driven over from home to the cheerless bungalow in Bare for Christmas dinner, a last faint echo of those communal gatherings twenty-odd years before. But now there is no Aunt Eveline to play the piano or Uncle George to sing, just this oddly married couple, half-strangers to one another still, a marriage of mutual convenience meant to keep one another company in their declining years.
With her regular gifts of shoe-trees Aunty Kath had hitherto held the record for boring Christmas presents, but Bill shows he is no slouch in this department either when he presents me with the history of some agricultural college in New South Wales (second volume only).
‘You did history, Alan. This should interest you.’ He has served in the First War and we spend much of Christmas afternoon leafing through the pages while he points out the names of the sons and grandsons of men in ‘his mob’ who have done time studying agriculture.
Quite what he is doing in England is not plain as he seldom misses an opportunity of running it down, along with blacks, Jews and, when Mam and Aunty Kathleen are out of the room, women generally. Dad, who has never enrolled in the sex war, lapses into Somerset Maugham mode, his face a picture of boredom and misery until the time comes when we can make our farewells and thankfully head off home in the Mini. Mam now tells us about the pyjama incident and becomes helpless with laughter, the mitigating ‘But she’s very good-hearted’ which is always tacked onto any gossip involving Aunty Kathleen hard to employ where her husband is concerned, as good-hearted Bill plainly isn’t.
Considering Morecambe is only three-quarters of an hour away from the village, Mam and Dad see the old newly marrieds relatively seldom as they are often abroad on trips, life in the bungalow by the railway enlivened by a visit to Switzerland, for instance, and a lengthy Pacific cruise culminating in a visit to Australia to meet her husband’s family. It is tacitly assumed that this must be a prelude to them upping sticks and settling down there, but nothing is said. Instead, they come back and resume their life at Bare, slightly to Dad’s dismay as it inevitably means more slides with Bill in his flowered shorts, Aunty Kathleen in a sarong; one way and another we’d been looking at pictures like this for nearly thirty years.
Scarcely, though, are they back from this odyssey when something begins to happen in Aunty Kathleen’s head. She has always been intensely sociable, still with many friends in Leeds, and much of her time, home or away, is spent in keeping up with what she calls ‘her correspondence’ – scores of letters regularly fired off to friends and acquaintances, few of them of course known to her hubby, whom she may even press into running her over to Leeds to see them.
‘I’ve half a dozen people who’re always begging me to pop in,’ says Miss Prothero, ‘one of them a chiropodist.’ A character in an early play, hers is the unmistakable voice of Aunty Kath.
At some point, though, after their return from Australia her address book goes missing and with it half her life. Without this roster of names and addresses she is cut adrift. Mam doesn’t think the address book has been lost at all and that Bill, in an effort to loosen her grip on the past and make sure she settles first in Morecambe, and eventually Australia, has himself deliberately mislaid this handbook to sociability.
True or not the effect is disastrous. Out of touch with her convoy of friends and acquaintances, she begins to drift aimlessly. Her discourse becomes wayward and Bill, who has several times remarked to Dad on how all the sisters could gab, now finds that her utterance accelerates, becomes garbled and impossible to follow. It doesn’t take much of this before he commits her to a mental hospital, which is Lancaster Moor again. Indeed she is briefly in the same ward as Mam had been on her first admission a few years before, and there comes a time when Mam is in the psychiatric wing at Airedale Hospital and her sister in a similar wing at Lancaster.
Misconceiving where my father’s loyalties lie, the little Australian makes no attempt at fellow-feeling, attributing both their misfortunes to the Peel family. Unsurprisingly Dad will have none of it; Mam’s plight is not the same as her sister’s, and that he might be thought to have anything in common with his coarse conceited brother-in-law is not even a joke.
Insofar as her condition is diagnosed at all, Kathleen is said to be suffering from arteriosclerosis of the brain: in a word, dementia. The catchall term nowadays is Alzheimer’s but that didn’t have quite the same currency in the early seventies, or its current high profile. Insofar as it was futile to tell Aunty Kathleen anything and expect her to remember it for more than a moment, her condition was like that of an Alzheimer’s patient, but the manner of her deterioration is not so simple as a mere forgetting. Not for her a listless, dull-eyed wordless decline; with her it is all rush, gabble, celerity.
She had always been a talker but now her dementia unleashes torrents of speech, monologues of continuous anecdote and dizzying complexity, one train of thought switching to another without signal or pause, rattling across points and through junctions at a rate no listener can follow.
Her speech, so imitable in the past, becomes impossible to reproduce, though now taking myself seriously as a writer and praised for ‘an ear for dialogue’ I dutifully try, making notes of these flights of speech as best I can, then
when I get home trying to set them down but without success. Embarking on one story, she switches almost instantly to another and then another, and while her sentences still retain grammatical form they have no sequence or sense. Words pour out of her as they always have and with the same vivacity and hunger for your attention. But to listen to they are utterly bewildering, following the sense like trying to track a particular ripple in a pelting torrent of talk.
Still, despite this formless spate of loquacity she remains recognisably herself, discernible in the flood those immutable gentilities and components of her talk which have always characterised her (and been such a joke). ‘If you follow me, Lilian …’, ‘As it transpired, Walter …’, ‘Ready to wend my way, if you take my meaning …’ So that now, with no story to tell (or half a dozen), she must needs still tell it as genteelly as she has ever done but at five times the speed, her old worn politenesses detached from any narrative but still whole and hers, bobbing about in a ceaseless flood of unmeaning; demented, as she herself might have said, but very nicely spoken.
And as with her speech, so it is with her behaviour. Surrounded by the senile and by the wrecks of women as hopelessly, though differently, demented as she is, she still clings to the notion that she is somehow different and superior. Corseted in her immutable gentilities she still contrives to make something special out of her situation and her role in it.
‘He’ll always give me a smile,’ she says of an impassive nurse who is handing out the tea. ‘I’m his favourite.’
‘This is my chair. They’ll always put me here because this corner’s that bit more select.’
Her life has been made meaningful by frail, fabricated connections, and now, when the proper connections in her brain are beginning to break down, it is this flimsy tissue of social niceties that still holds firm.
In this demented barracks she remains genteel, in circumstances where gentility is hardly appropriate: a man is wetting himself; a woman is howling.
‘I’ll just have a meander down,’ says Aunty, stepping round the widening pool of piss. ‘They’ve stood me in good stead, these shoes.’
The setting for this headlong fall from sense is the long-stay wing of the hospital: it’s a nineteenth-century building, a fairly spectacular one at that, and in any other circumstances one might take pleasure in it as an example of the picturesque, in particular the vast Gothic hall which, with its few scattered figures, could be out of an Ackermann print. But the scattered figures are shaking with dementia or sunk in stupor and depression; it is Gothic, but the Gothic, too, of horror, madness and despair.
Of these surroundings Kathleen seems unaware, though her eyes sometimes fill with tears in a distress that cannot settle on its object, and should a nurse come by it is straight away replaced by the beaming smile, refined voice and all the trappings of the old Miss Peel. But the grimness of the institution, the plight of the patients and Kathleen’s immunity to sense make her a distressing person to visit, and Dad is naturally reluctant to take Mam lest she sees her sister’s condition as in any way reflecting her own. But when Mam is well enough and freed from her depression they go over to Lancaster regularly and conscientiously, and probably see more of Kathleen mad than they had lately seen of her sane.
She was never so touching as now when her brain is beginning to unravel.
‘Give us a kiss, love,’ she says when I am going. ‘That’s one thing I do like.’ Then, as a nurse passes, ‘Hello! Do you know my mother-in-law?’ She smiles her toothy smiles as if this were just a slip of the tongue. ‘No. I mean my father.’ And she gives me another kiss.
Now, though, it is the summer of 1974. Mam is in and out of Airedale Hospital, Dad driving daily backwards and forwards in the loving routine that eventually, early in August, kills him.
It is perhaps because I am now forty, and am unappealingly conscious that the death of a father is one of the great unrepeatables and ought, if I am a proper writer, to be recorded, that about this time I begin to keep a more systematic diary, through which much of the rest of Aunty Kathleen’s story can be told.
Sunday, 1 September 1974, Yorkshire. Drive down to Airedale to see Mam. For a while we sit outside in the hot sheltered sunshine, then go indoors and talk to another patient, Mary, who has been in hospital with Mam once before. Mam is more rational, slow and a bit distanced but collected, though able to talk more easily to Mary than to me. I drive back home and the telephone is going just as I am putting the key in the door and it’s Gordon, who’s ringing to say he’s on his way north.
What has happened is that Aunty Kathleen has disappeared from Lancaster Moor, walking out of the ward in her summer frock last Wednesday afternoon and not having been seen since. The police begin looking on Thursday but find no trace of her. Now Gordon feels he must come up to search for her himself, and also to talk to her husband to see whether he can throw any light on her disappearance. He thinks he ought to visit her old haunts and suggests to me possible places where she might be, friends she might have gone to in Leeds, Morecambe and even Scarborough. This is someone who is incapable of keeping her mind or her discourse in one channel for more than ten seconds together, so I get slightly cross at these suggestions and try and persuade him not to come. I think I’ve succeeded and it’s a relief when I can get the phone down, have a bath and go up to Dubb Syke for my supper.
When I get back around midnight it’s to find Gordon waiting. There have been no further developments, except that the police seem to have been half-hearted in their searching, saying that with three mental hospitals in Lancaster disappearances are relatively common. I feel guilty that I have no feelings about it, but my case is that if Aunty Kathleen has had the wit to get any distance or to find someone to stay with then she should be left alone. Besides, if she is dead then she is probably better off. And if she is half-dead of exposure or whatever I am not sure that I would want to authorise desperate resuscitation measures to bring her round and put her back in that dismal fortress of a hospital. But in the night I hear the rain tippling down and think of her lying under a bush somewhere, bewildered as a child.
Monday, 2 September 1974. I work in the morning, then drive over to Lancaster to meet Gordon, who has been walking round fields and barns and a cemetery but found nothing. He has shown Aunty’s photograph to bus conductors, as someone thinks she may have been seen on a bus. He has been to the hospital and talked to the orderlies, who do not think she can have gone far as she got into a panic if she thought she was going on a journey. One of the more lucid patients thinks she may have seen her getting into a Mini, and this raises the question whether Bill, who has a Mini, may have abducted her. When told of her disappearance he has said to the police, ‘She will be found in water.’
This suggests that he had been told of the drowning of her father; the fact that such a recent recruit to the family should have been so readily told a secret that had been kept from us for forty years making me slightly resentful.
The thought, though, that her husband might have something to do with her disappearance is chilling, the more so since it’s known he is anxious to get back to Australia but does not have the money to do so and (though this is unverified) does not have the disposal of what money Kathleen may have left; not much, I imagine, but maybe just enough. The police are not interested in any of this; to them it is just another disappearance.
Exhausted we drive back over the Pennines to Airedale to see Mam who is more rational than yesterday, discussing a little what is to happen when she comes out of hospital. Tomorrow Gordon goes to see Bill. A policewoman called at the bungalow and found on his door a notice saying ‘Knock at your peril’. He had mentioned his Australian plans but then shut up about them quickly.
Unrecorded in my diary are the details of Gordon’s visit to the bungalow in Bare, where he had in effect to ask Aunty Kathleen’s husband whether he had done away with his wife. This is, to say the least, a difficult assignment and I could see no way of accomplishing it. But my brot
her, always more conscientious than I am, and anxious to do the right thing even when it might not be the right thing to do, feels he must make the attempt.
He gets nowhere of course but at least comes away convinced that Bill no more knows the whereabouts of Aunty Kathleen than we do. There is, though, a certain shiftiness about him, perhaps because, with his wife irretrievably demented, he may have decided to give her up as a bad job and decamp to Australia. But that is a different thing.
We enquire again whether she has been seen at the bus station, another dutiful but futile exercise; she can no longer have known what a bus was, let alone where it might be stationed. Capable of catching a bus she would not have been in hospital in the first place.
Tuesday, 3 September 1974. First we search on the other side of the road where the hospital borders the prison, two total institutions that blend seamlessly into one another with no evidence from the atmosphere or the architecture which is prison, which is hospital. We look in a long dyke bordering a rubbish dump, high in nettles. There are broken bits of surgical equipment, lavatory pans and big juicy evil-looking blackberries and the tall mulleins that grow in our own garden. We follow the filthy stream that runs along the bottom and come to furnace rooms and a smoking dump. A furnace man speaks out of the depths of a hut. Then there are nurses in clean rooms by a smooth lawn. We come back, Gordon saying that we would give it up soon but could we walk down the cinder track by Aunty’s ward which leads eventually to the river? I think it pointless and am cross and ill-tempered because I want my lunch and it all seems so useless; in such surroundings she could be two feet away and we would not see her. But we go on looking and it’s about half past one that we find her.
