Untold Stories Read Online Free PDF

andPateley Bridge; VE night outside Guildford Town Hall, sitting on my Uncle George’s shoulders, marvelling at floodlights, which I’d never seen before. And Grandma Peel sitting in her chair at Gilpin Place in 1949, beginning to bleed from the womb, and as Aunty Kathleen cleans her up joking grimly, ‘Nay, lass, I’m seventy-nine but I think I must be starting again.’
    Still, if I knew little of my mother’s family I knew even less about my father’s, not that there seemed much to know. My father was not a typical butcher – thin, anxious, dogged all his life by stomach ulcers and a temperament ill-suited to the job. The youngest of four brothers, he had lost his mother at the age of five, when his father, faced with bringing up four sons, had hurriedly remarried. This second wife was a narrow, vicious woman, a stepmother out of a fairy story; she was pious, chapel-going and a hypocrite who beat the youngest boys, Walter and George, and then told lies about them to her new husband so that when he came home from work he gave them the strap again. Whereas the elder boys were old enough to escape the house and too big to beat, Dad and his brother George (‘our butt’ as he always called him) bore the brunt of her frustrated rage. It was she who put him to butchering at the age of eleven, an offence for which he never forgave her but which earned her her nickname. To this day I don’t know what she was really called, and I have never troubled to find out, but she was always referred to by all the Bennetts as the Gimmer, a gimmer a sheep that has no lambs and a nickname Dad must have brought home from the slaughterhouse in Oldfield Lane, where he was condemned to work. I can only just remember her, a figure in shiny black satin seemingly out of the depths of the nineteenth century but who must have died in the early forties. Shortly before her death she immortalised herself in the family by saying to my nine-year-old brother, Gordon, ‘Get off that stool, you, or I’ll kick you off.’ Her funeral was an occasion of undiluted joy, sheer hysteria breaking out among the mourners when her coffin went down into the grave and Mam slipped and nearly went after it.
    Grandad Bennett was as bald as an egg. He had worked at the gasworksin Wellington Road, the stench of which pervaded the acres of sooty red-brick streets around Armley Gaol. He had been in an explosion which perhaps literally or as the result of shock blew away all his hair, a cruel fate in our family, where the men all have thick and often un-greying hair. His second wife’s piety must have infected him because in his old age he took to marching behind the Salvation Army band, his gleaming head jeered at by the unfeeling youths of Lower Wortley.
    At some point when he was still a boy Dad took it into his head to learn the violin. Why he chose an instrument that in its initial stages is so unrewarding I don’t know; it’s one of the many questions I never got round to asking him. He got no help at home, where he could only practise in the freezing parlour, the Gimmer too mean even to let him have any light so that he had to manage with what there was from the gas lamp in the street outside. Whether he was born with perfect pitch I don’t know but in later life he would play along to the hymns on the wireless, telling you the notes of the tune he was accompanying as easily as if he was spelling a word. In happier circumstances he would have been a professional violinist but there was never any hope of that and a butcher he remained, working firstly for the Co-op, before in 1946 buying a shop of his own, which he had to give up ten years later through ill health, then buying a smaller one and the same thing happening. With no money to speak of and the job having given him precious little satisfaction, he was never so happy as when in 1966 he was able to give up butchering for good.
    Happy, that is, until