by Alan Bennett
The wood runs from the cinder track to the edge of the motorway. I get over the wall into the wood a little way up the field, which has been newly sown with some winter crop. Gordon is ahead of me somewhere but I lose him when I get over the wall and start blundering about the wood. Someone has been here already as I can see the bracken and brambles trampled down, the police probably with their dogs, searching. Looking back on it now it seems as if I knew I must go to the end of the wood last, and only search by the wall at the finish. So I work along the hedge that borders the next field where I see now that Gordon is. Then I turn up towards the end of the wood where there seems to be a break in the wall which must lead up to the verge of the M6. The wood is full of terrible noise, the din of lorries passing, the traffic thundering ceaselessly by shaking the trees. I go towards the break in the wall and then I see her.
I see her legs. One red sandal off. Her summer frock. Her bright white hair, and if I look closely I think there is the yellow flesh of her face. She is lying face downwards, one arm stretched out. I stand there doing nothing with a mixture of feelings. Revulsion at this dead thing, which I do not want to look at closely. Exultation that I have found her and, shockingly, pleasure that it is me who has found her who had thought the whole search futile. But there is wonder, too, at the providence that has led us to this spot among the drenched undergrowth, the whole place heaving with noise, nature and not nature.
I go back through the wood a little and shout ‘Gordon, Gordon’ again and again. I must have shouted it twenty times until once the call happens to come in a break in the traffic, and he comes across from the field. He bends over her, touches the body as I have failed to do and says ‘Such a little thing’, and he puts his hand over his face. He says he thinks her nose has been bleeding. I see her outstretched arm, mushroom white, the flesh shrunk away from the bone, and still wonder how it is we have managed to come upon her and that it is solved and over. She has been there six days.
Then, all afternoon, we wait in the ward while the police are fetched who comb the wood for her other shoe, then fetch the body up to the mortuary. The coroner’s assistant, a Scots policeman, comes and takes a statement from me as the one who discovered the body. Then we sit in the attendants’ room off the old ladies’ ward where Aunty has been this last year, odd bits of conversation filtering through.
‘Are you my friend, Kitty?’ says one of the nurses to an old girl who is braying with her spoon on the tray that fastens her in. ‘Nay, Kitty. I thought you were my friend so why are you banging?’
Old ladies make endlessly for the door, only to be turned back. A woman walks about outside, one hand on her head, the other clasped to her cheek. From time to time nurses come in and talk, one saying how, though it had never happened before, Mr Blackburn, the charge nurse, had said it would happen if they could not lock the doors … as they can’t under the current Mental Health Act, so half their time is spent fielding these lost and wandering creatures who are trying to reach the outside world or, like Aunty Kathleen, ‘just having a meander down’. Mr Blackburn and his wife had searched and searched and now, having lost her, the atmosphere on the ward is terrible.
In the statement I give my profession as Company Director. There will be a post-mortem this evening and an inquest next week. We drive home, where I have a cold bath, then go off ten minutes later down to Airedale, where Mam is sleepy and slow but rational, talking of her life when she gets better. If she gets better, she says, and her eyes fill with tears.
Gordon is still concerned that the police did not begin searching until Thursday, a whole day after she disappeared and even then only looked half-heartedly. I am more philosophical about it, or lazier, Gordon seeing it as a situation which can be corrected if only it is pointed out whereas I see it as a reflection of the value we place on the old and think it useless to raise the matter.
A life varies in social importance. We set most value on the life of a child. Had a child been missing, the whole of the police force plus dozens of volunteers would have been systematically combing the waste ground where we wandered so aimlessly this morning. They would have covered the area in wide sweeps from the hospital and in due course she would have been discovered, perhaps still alive; certainly she would have been found had she been a child, which in many senses she was, except that her life was behind not before her. Had she been a teenager they would probably not have looked, unless there was suspicion of foul play, and maybe if there had been any thought of foul play with Aunty Kathleen that would have fetched the police out too, though no willing volunteers such as turn out to look for someone young. Aunty Kathleen’s life was at its lowest point of social valuation. She was seventy-three. She was senile. She was demented, and she was of no class or economic importance. When she was found concern centred not on her fate but on how it reflected on the staff of the hospital and the efficiency of the police force. Even in death she was of marginal importance as a person.
There is, too, under it all, the unspoken recognition that if such pathetic creatures escape – or ‘wander off’, since escape implies intention and she was long since incapable of that – then the death that they die, of exposure, hypothermia or heart failure, is better than the one they would otherwise have died: sitting vacantly in a chair year after year, fed by hand, soiling themselves, waiting without thought or feeling until the decay of the body catches up with the decay of the mind and they can cross the finishing line together. No, to die at the foot of a wall by the verge of the motorway is a better death than that.
Thursday, 12 September 1974. I drive over slowly to Lancaster Moor on a warm, misty day. So nervous of being late I had booked an alarm call for eight a.m. though the inquest is not until ten-thirty. Hanging over me for more than a week, I have almost come to think of it as a trial. I imagine the row, the hospital reprimanded for carelessness, the police for not conducting a rigorous search and the press wanting to know what I feel about it all.
We sit in a small room in the main building above the bowling green and the dreadful roaring motorway. Stand on the terrace of the hospital and you can see the trees in question. The copse even has a name, it is mentioned in evidence. Stockabank Wood.
Present are Nurse Blackburn, Bill – Aunty Kathleen’s husband – and me, plus reporters, who do not seem like reporters at all, one a woman in thick glasses looking like a crafts instructor, the other an insurance agent.
It is not the coroner, but his deputy – and by the looks of him his grandfather, an old man in a bulky overcoat, sharp white stubble, glasses … and a manner reminiscent of Miles Malleson. He takes each witness through their statement, with very few questions asked. The pathologist, who looks as if he himself has died from exposure several days before, describes the post-mortem in a bored, blurred monotone … the lesions on the skin, the weight of the brain slightly lighter than average, the thickening of the arteries, several gallstones, many gastric ulcers. ‘Would these be painful?’ ‘Not necessarily.’ Heart in good condition; some emphysema. Death due to exposure aggravated by senile dementia.
The coroner records a verdict of misadventure almost before the words are out of the pathologist’s mouth. Simpson, the coroner’s officer, mutters to the two press about not mentioning my name, there is some handshaking and expressions of sympathy and I come away in the misty sunshine relieved and, for the first time in many weeks, happy. I have coffee in Lancaster, shop and drive back home. In the afternoon I blackberry up Crummock and a man passing up the lane says, ‘I bet you’re often mistaken for a television personality.’
Unrecorded is how all this week Mam has slowly been getting better, talking a little and taking a more measured view of what her life is to be. I arrive at the hospital at seven and she is already sitting in her blue raincoat and hat ready for our walk along the corridor for a cup of tea. On Tuesday I told her about Aunty Kathleen and how she had died in her sleep. She weeps a little … just as, coming into the house on Sunday, she wept remembering Dad. But it
passes. And at least she weeps.
My anxiety that there should be no fuss and the word I had with the coroner’s clerk which led him to take the reporters on one side were less to do with my own situation than with my mother’s. In 1974 the tabloids were not so hungry for sensation as they are now, though even today ‘Playwright Finds Aunt’s Body’ wouldn’t be much of a circulation booster. What was bothering me was not the Mirror or the Sun but the local paper, the Lancaster Guardian, an old-fashioned weekly publication where inquests were a staple item, a whole page devoted exclusively to the proceedings of the coroner’s court. The paper was read in the village, sold in the village shop, and though there was nothing to be ashamed of in my aunty’s death or in the manner of her dying, my mother was about to come back home from the hospital and with the stigma of recurrent mental illness try to face life there alone. The last thing I wanted, or she would have wanted, was for it to be known that her sister too had ended up mentally deranged, dying tragically as a result. What kind of family was this, I imagined people saying, where two sisters were mentally unstable. No, the less said about Aunty Kathleen’s death the better.
Vague as Mam was about recent events, including even Dad’s death, it was not difficult to evade her questions about Kathleen. I told her that she had died in her sleep, and even the few relatives we had left in Leeds were not told the whole story. ‘It’s funny Kathleen going like that,’ Mam would sometimes say. ‘Because she was always a strong woman.’
It perhaps will seem strange and even hypocritical that my precautions against the circumstances of Aunty Kathleen’s death becoming known did not then recall to me the similar precautions that had covered up the suicide of my grandfather and which I had found so shocking. That it did not was perhaps because I saw it not as my own shame or any reflection of prejudices that I held but as a necessary precaution to protect my mother against the prejudices of others. But perhaps that was how my grandmother had reasoned fifty years before? At any rate, the similarity (and the symmetry) never occurred to me at the time, and even had it done so I would not have acted differently. As it is I am so fearful of the news coming out I do not look in the Lancaster Guardian to see if the discovery of the body is reported or if there is a later account of the proceedings at the inquest, and if friends in the village see such reports no one ever mentions it to me.
Aunty Myra’s cremation had been at Lytham St Annes; Aunty Kathleen’s is at Morecambe, one as featureless as the other. Kathleen’s husband then presumably takes himself off to Australia and is, I imagine, long since dead, as are all the Peels, though my mother perhaps because disencumbered of all her memories lives on into her nineties.
My mother never learns the true circumstances of her sister’s death. My brother and I do not tell her, and even before her memory begins to slip away she seldom enquires. Whether Kathleen’s disappearance and discovery were reported at the time I never know, and it’s not until twenty years later when I am beginning to find out more of the circumstances of my grandfather’s death that I eventually look in the archives of the Lancaster Guardian for what reports there had been.
The Lancaster Guardian is an old-fashioned newspaper with a splendidly parochial attitude to what constitutes news. ‘Smelly Sow led to Rolling Pin Attack’ is one item; ‘Man Steals two Skirts Off Line’ another. The paper for 6 September 1974 reports the finding of Aunty Kathleen’s body under the heading:
FOUND DEAD
The body of a patient who had been at Lancaster Moor Hospital for the last six months was found in a small wood about a mile from the hospital at 2 p.m. on Tuesday September 3rd. She was Mrs Kathleen Elizabeth Roach (73) formerly of 26 Ruskin Drive, Bare, Morecambe. She was reported missing on Wednesday of last week and police with dogs have been searching since then. It is understood that the body was found by people walking in the wood. The coroner has been informed.
I look for the report of the inquest in the following week’s paper. It is not even mentioned.
In 1985 I go over to Ypres in Belgium to search for the grave of Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed there in 1917.* I am fifty-one, which is about the age most people get interested in their origins, family history one of those enlivening occupations that these days take up the slack of early retirement. The sense that my own departure is not as distant as it has always seemed adds some mild urgency to the quest, but having found this grave, and having written about it, even then I don’t go on to try and find out about the only remaining mystery in my family’s history, the death of my grandfather.
However, in 1988 I make a documentary, Dinner at Noon, at the Crown Hotel in Harrogate. Without originally intending it to be autobiographical it turns out to be so, with reminiscences of some of the holidays we had had as children and my feelings about our failings as a family. It’s perhaps in consequence of this that, stuck in Leeds one afternoon with a couple of hours to wait for a train, I go up to the Registrar’s Office and get a copy of my grandfather’s death certificate and now, furnished with the exact date of his death, 26 April 1925, I walk along the Headrow to the City Reference Library to see whether I can find out more.
It’s a library I have known since I was a boy, when I used to go there in the evenings to do my homework and where I would often see sad old men consulting back numbers of the local papers, done up in a great swatch like a sagging piano accordion. Now it’s my turn. However, expecting to be lumbered thus, I’m relieved to find that all the back numbers of newspapers are now on microfilm and so take my place in front of a screen, much as I used to do at a slightly later date but in the same library, on vacations from Oxford when I was reading the Memoranda Rolls of the medieval Exchequer. Now it is the death of my grandfather and I find it in the Armley and Wortley News, dated 1 May 1925, the item headed:
NEW WORTLEY MAN DROWNED AT CALVERLEY
Strange Conversation with Friendly Constable
The tragic story of how a policeman, after having been in conversation with a friend who was depressed, noticed the strangeness of the latter’s action and followed him only to find that he was dead, was told at an inquest at Calverley on Tuesday on William Peel (55) of 35 Bruce Street, New Wortley, who was found drowned in the canal at Calverley on Sunday.
Mary Ann Peel, wife of the deceased man, said that her husband was formerly a clothing shop manager. In October he became out of work and recently he acquired an empty shop in which to start on his own as a gentleman’s outfitter. He had opened this shop last Tuesday and had been somewhat depressed, wondering if he would be a success. On Sunday last he left home just after noon. He did not say where he was going. Police Constable Goodison said that on Sunday last he boarded a Rodley tramcar in company with Peel. He inquired how the new shop in Wellington Road was getting along. Peel seemed rather depressed about it. When Goodison was leaving the tram at Cockshott Lane, Peel’s parting words were, ‘Goodbye old chap. I hope you make better headway than I have done.’
Constable Goodison left the car and was walking towards his home when, after thinking about what had been said, decided to go back and follow Peel.
‘I caught the first available tram to Rodley terminus,’ said Goodison. ‘I made inquiries there, but failed to find any trace of him. I then searched along the canal bank in the direction of Calverley and when near the University boathouse I saw what appeared to be a stump in the water.’
He judged it to be the body of a man and went to obtain a boat hook. At 3.30 along with two other constables he recovered the body, which he at once identified as that of Mr Peel.
Mr Peel’s hat, coat and stick were found on the canal bank, and three letters addressed to his wife, friends and relations were found in the coat pocket. In one of the letters was the passage ‘I am going to Rodley by tram this afternoon, and my intention is to find a watery grave in the canal between Rodley and Apperley Bridge.’
A verdict that the deceased man drowned himself while suffering from depression was recorded.
(Interred
New Wortley Cemetery.)
Some of the saddest circumstances were not reported at the inquest. When her father had gone out on his last errand Mam was not in the house as she and Dad had gone on a tram-ride themselves, out into the country, courting, but before he left the house that Sunday morning her father had kissed his wife and tried to kiss the other two daughters, but Kathleen would have none of it and as he was going out she said, ‘Yes, go out … and come back a man,’ words that she must have recalled without ever being able to call them back when later that day she had to identify him. But I hear in those words, too, harsh and melodramatic as they are, an echo of that same pent-up rage and frustration that my mother’s depression came to induce in me.
Though I now know the precise location of the drowning, near the university boathouse, it’s another year at least before I take myself along to look at the place – these involuntary intermissions such a feature of the unravelling of this mystery they call for an explanation. Hardly due to pressure of work or any conscious disinclination, these delays, I see now, are to do with appeasing the dead (the dead being my father as well as my grandfather) and shame at indulging a curiosity I still find unseemly.
My father would not have approved of it nor, I’m pretty sure, would my grandmother. As for my mother, she is by this time no longer in a state of mind where approval or disapproval means very much. How can she disapprove of a son whom she seldom recognises or have feelings about the death of a father she no longer recalls?
Still, while there is no doubt in my own mind that I will go and look at the place, and in due course write it up, these misgivings are enough to reinforce my reluctance. So that knowing I need to locate the spot on the canal that is near the university boathouse, when I find on the OS map for Rodley that there is no trace of a boathouse I am almost relieved, and put it off for another year. I have actually never heard of the university having a boat club, and whether it has one now I doubt. But in 1925 Leeds University is still young, the boat club perhaps a bid to hike what had hitherto been just the Yorkshire College up the scale a bit, rowing, after all, what proper university students do. So eventually I do the sensible thing and look up an older map, and finding that there is (or was) a boathouse after all, with no more excuse drive down to Leeds to find it.
