Untold Stories by Alan Bennett Page B

could no more write plain Kathleen and Myra than I could have ever called them that to their faces. Moreover, shorn of their status such untitled creatures would not resemble the women I remember. No. Aunties it has to be.
    We did have one aunt, though, Aunt Eveline, and she was preserved from diminishment into Aunty by her age – she was Grandma Peel’s sister-in-law – by her demeanour, which was imposing, and by her build, which was stout. The word was hers, and it was dinned into my brother and me as children not only that we should never refer to Aunt Eveline in her presence as fat, which we would in any case have been unlikely to do, but – a much taller order – never even refer to anyone else in her presence as fat. This was particularly unfair because, had Aunt Eveline not thought of herself as fat, had fatness not been put on the agenda as it were, I’m sure it would never have occurred to us. She was just Aunt Eveline, her size (which was not exceptional) something we took for granted.
    In retrospect I see that Aunt Eveline’s problem was her large, undifferentiated bust, a bust that echoed the lid of the piano on which she was such an accomplished performer. It was this bust that until the brink of adolescence confused me about the female anatomy. Aunt Eveline’s breasts were so large as to make the cleavage between them resemble a deep, damp-looking canyon, a shaft going down into the recesses of the body like the entrance to Gaping Ghyll. I knew vaguely about the shaft at the other end of the body, but there can be few boys who thought as I did, at the age of eleven, that the female anatomy includes a kind of pectoral vagina. And that the naked woman at the front of Everybody’s Home Doctor , standing with her palms towards you ‘showing all she’d got’, displayed no trace of such an orifice, did not entirely dislodge the idea frommy mind. Aunt Eveline was wont to screen the entrance to this mysterious shaft with an embroidered frontal not unlike the linen antimacassars on the back of the three-piece suite in the sitting room, between the backs of the easy chairs and Aunt Eveline’s broad bust there not being much to choose.
    Aunt Eveline was ‘a lovely pianist’ and had beautiful handwriting, her name and address in Pellon Lane, Halifax, written on the covers of all the music in the piano stool. She had had a brief career playing the piano in the silent cinema, then, when the talkies came in, had turned corsetière, a profession often embraced by ample ladies who could simultaneously model the product they were marketing. She still had a connection with corsets in the early forties but by this time she had turned housekeeper, looking after a Mr Wilson, a rich Bradford widower and former chairman of the Bradford Dyers’ Association. Widower isn’t a designation men would readily apply to themselves these days, and housekeeping as a profession seems to have gone out too. In those days, though, housekeeping covered a multitude of sins, but not, I think, in Aunt Eveline’s case. Mr Wilson was well off and already had one fancy woman, whose doings and dresses would be scathingly described over high tea at Gilpin Place, together with the slights Aunt Eveline had suffered at this shameless creature’s hands and what Aunt Eveline (‘I was scrupulously polite’) had rejoindered. Even aged ten I knew Aunt Eveline’s hostility to this fancy woman owed less to outraged respectability than to Aunt Eveline’s desire to be in her shoes, though it was hard to see why as on the only occasion we were led into her employer’s presence (‘Mr Wilson, may I introduce my great-nephews’) I thought I had never seen anyone who looked more like a toad … or, as it might have occurred to me later, a character out of Priestley or John Braine. Oddly, his photo has ended up in the family archives, though Aunt Eveline’s main