Untold Stories by Alan Bennett Page A

imagined. It was the first time in his life (except that it wasn’t in his life) that he can have looked fierce. I noticed that the attendants were looking at me, more interested in my reactions than in the corpse which to them must have been commonplace. Noting that at seventy-one he still had scarcely a grey hair, I nodded and they wheeled him out.
    Back in London for a couple of days I mentioned my father’s death to Miss Shepherd, the tramp on the street who, a few months before, had moved her van into my garden. She did not trouble to express any sympathy, never altogether crediting the misfortune of anyone but herself. Nor in this case.
    â€˜Yes. I knew he must have died. I saw him a few days ago. He was hovering over the convent at the top of the street. I think it was to warn you against the dangers of Communism.’
    This vision was only slightly more implausible than its purported purpose. I could think of many reasons why my father might have been hovering around at the top of the street (‘Try and be more patient with your Mam’ for instance) but the Red Menace would have come very low down on the list.

    My father’s was not the only corpse I was to see that summer of 1974. Within a month I came across another body and in circumstances where even the terrible purple pall that covered my father would not have been unwelcome. But to tell that tale means going back to the forties and catching up on my aunties.
    There were three aunties on my mother’s side of the family, the Peels, which was the side of the family we saw most of. There were three aunties on my father’s side too, the wives of his three Bennett brothers, but we saw much less of them. This was because, the Gimmer’s fireside hardly being a welcoming one, no sooner had Dad started courting Mam than he was drawn into the far friendlier family of his fiancée. And this was the pattern for the rest of their lives, with us seeing far more of the Peels than we ever did of the Bennetts.
    No one could have been less like the conventional mother-in-law than Grandma Peel and she was, for my father, very much the mother he had never had. Tall, dignified and straightforward, she was in every sense a big woman who had come through the tragedies of her life unembittered and with her sense of humour intact; she had seen two bankruptcies, her family reduced from relative affluence to abject poverty, the death of her only son in the trenches, and the never-spoken-of suicide of her husband which left her with three daughters to bring up on very little, and yet she remained a funny, self-sufficient, lively woman. Dad would never hear a word against her, so that when as a child I heard comedians making stock mother-in-law jokes I was mystified: who were these carping, cantankerous, fault-finding creatures, the bane of their sons-in-law’s lives? I’d never come across one.
    My mother’s sisters were Kathleen and Lemira, both resident at Gilpin Place: Kathleen the oldest, Lemira the youngest, my mother, Lilian, the one in the middle. (‘That was the trouble,’ she used to say of her childhood, ‘I got it from both sides.’) Writing about them, I feel a twinge of snobbish regret that they were invariably called ‘Aunty’ and never ‘Aunt’. Aunts, after all, are women to be taken seriously; they are, at the very least, middle class and come equipped with a long literary pedigree; aunties, onthe other hand, have no lineage or standing at all. However you look at it, an aunty is an aunt cosified; even a literary dreadnought like Lady Bracknell would lose half her firepower were she Aunty Augusta. So the seriousness of a narrative like this in which my mother’s sisters figure pretty continuously seems, as I say snobbishly, cheapened by calling them aunties. Best to forget the relationship altogether then; except that, brought up never to call grown-ups by anything so naked as their name, I