Untold Stories (10 page)

The aunties resident at Gilpin Place, Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra, were both what they were pleased to call career girls, which is to say shop assistants – Kathleen in Manfield's shoe shop on Commercial Street, Myra at White's Ladies' Mantles just across the road in Briggate. Kathleen was always said to be, said herself to be, the manageress of Manfield's, though I suspect this wasn't an official title but simply meant that she was the longest-serving of the women assistants. Longest-suffering too, as in those days buying shoes involved more what nowadays would be called interaction, the stock not laid out on racks for all to see and try on but secreted in banks of floor-to-ceiling boxes which were often accessible only on ladders, the assistants up and down them as nimble as sailors on the rigging. Customers, whatever their class, were deferentially treated (‘Madam takes a broad fitting? Certainly') and off they would go up the ladder again.

It's a sign of my age that shoe shops seem nowadays to be staffed by sluts, indifferent, unhelpful and with none of that matronly dignity with which the selling of shoes and the buying of clothes were in those days
conducted. It is a small loss, though buying shoes in a provincial town in Italy a few years ago I noted that none of the assistants was under forty, and all happy and helpful, and it made me remember Manfield's and realise such ladies are a loss, and that in some of what the papers call ‘sections of the economy' the right age for a particular job (not that retailers will ever acknowledge it) is often middle age.

The personnel and politics of Manfield's are well known to us as after work Aunty Kathleen will often come up to Halliday Place and give us her regular bulletin on what has been happening at the shop, recounting the events of her day in Proustian detail. She has a characteristic way of talking, which has been developed as an almost Darwinian response to people's reluctance to listen to the lengthy and often formless narratives she likes to embark on. These are therefore punctuated by phrases like ‘If you see what I mean, Lilian', ‘If you follow me, Walter' or ‘As it subsequently transpired', little verbal tags and tugs just to make sure the person she is talking to is still trotting at the heels of the interminable saga of what she said to the customer and what the customer said to her and what her friend, Miss Moore, said about it all afterwards. And when, after an evening dominated by these narratives, the door finally closes on her Dad blurts out, ‘I wouldn't care, but you're no further on when she's done.'

‘Yes, but Dad,' Mam chips in, ‘she's very good-hearted.' Which indeed she was, but she was a marathon talker.

Unmarried though they are, Kathleen and Myra are hardly maiden aunts, literally or figuratively, and strait-laced is the last thing they want to seem. Less pretty than Mam, the aunties are in my brother's and my eyes much more glamorous, seeing themselves as dashing, adventuresome creatures, good sports and always on for what they see as a lark. They wear scent and camiknickers and have the occasional drink, which we are allowed to taste or are given a shandy instead. They even smoke if the occasion requires it and revel in the small sophistications of the single life. They see themselves as women of the world with Bette Davis as their model, over-polite sarcasm and a talent for putting someone in their place skills of which they are both proud. They are big fans of the Duke of
Windsor, Aunty Myra in particular giving the impression that, if things hadn't worked out well with Mrs Simpson, HRH could have done worse than marry her.

In those days aunties, particularly of the unmarried sort (and perhaps only if they are unmarried), serve in the family set-up as ladies of misrule. Untrammelled by domestic responsibilities with no husband whose line they have to toe, they are (or fancy themselves) freer spirits than their wifely sisters to whom, in turn, they are slightly suspect, blamed for ‘putting ideas into the children's heads' or ‘getting them all excited'. These sisters of subversion give their nephews and nieces forbidden foods, dismissing as ‘fuss' well-founded parental prohibitions: ‘Our Alan can't do with oatcakes, he comes out in heat spots' or ‘They don't have fish and chips at night, it keeps them awake'.

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.

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.