Untold Stories by Alan Bennett Page A

actually shyness, at her fellow passengers on a cruise liner. Aunty Myra’s mother, Grandma Peel, was anything but tyrannical and Aunty Myra neither hesitant nor shy, but a year or so after she would have seen Now, Voyager she made the same transition herself and exchanged the dark shiny-wallpapered stairs at Gilpin Place for the gangway of a cruise liner, stepping down her own gangplank to set foot on tropical shores when she disembarked at Bombay – though less elegantly than Bette Davis, and probably lugging her own kitbag as an LAC in the WAAF.
    Christmas Day, 1996 . Wake early as I always do these days, and in the absence of a newspaper watch the rest of Now, Voyager , finding more resonances this time than I had remembered. The shipboard romancewith Paul Henreid over, Charlotte Vale, the ex-Aunt Charlotte, returns to Boston and revisits the sanatorium where her benevolent psychiatrist, Dr Jaquith, played by Claude Rains, had helped her to find herself. Seeing a miserable-looking child there she befriends her, the child, of course, turning out to be Tina, the daughter of Durrance, her shipboard lover. Seeing the child as her own once-unloved self, Charlotte takes over her treatment, virtually adopting her, becoming her aunt, until in the final scene the ex-lovers meet at a party at Charlotte’s grand Boston home and dedicate their (for the time being) separate futures to the welfare of the now-blossoming child, the film ending with the line:
    â€˜And will you be happy, Charlotte?’
    â€˜Oh, Jerry. Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’
    This relationship between Charlotte Vale, the ex-aunt and the child,
    Tina, mirrors the way Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra saw themselves, Miss Vale as Miss Peel, coming on as they both did as bolder and more fun-loving and at the same time more sensitive than their married sister, casting Mam and Dad as parents who did not appreciate their own children. This takes us back to Now, Voyager and the mysterious wife of Jerry Durrance who is spoken of but, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, remains an off-screen presence though she, presumably, would have her own story to tell, and one in which Charlotte Vale might be less kindly regarded.
    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.
    For a few years he is an air-raid warden, but raids on Leeds being relatively uncommon his duties are light: a short walk round the Hallidays tocheck the black-out and the rest of the evening spent playing billiards up at the wardens’ post. Mam half-heartedly knits some lurid squares to be made into blankets and we occasionally trail over to the Ministry of Pensions hospital in Chapel Allerton to visit slightly mystified wounded soldiers, but otherwise hostilities scarcely impinge. War, peace, it makes no difference, our family never quite joining in, let alone joining up, and the camaraderie passes us by as camaraderie generally did.
    In one sense Aunty Kathleen’s membership of the Ambulance Brigade proves a disappointment to me. She is issued with a first-aid handbook which she seldom seems to consult and which with its black and silver lettering hangs about the sideboard at Gilpin Place for the rest of the war. Unlike other medical texts it proves to have little information about the relations between the sexes, not even the stylised nude drawing (the man with a loincloth) that formed the frontispiece of Everybody’s Home