Untold Stories by Alan Bennett Page B

Doctor . Of course on that point, according to Aunty Kathleen’s as always over-detailed account, no instruction was needed. The sessions are held in Armley Baths, the big swimming bath boarded over for the duration and so available for functions. There is no thought in my mind that the bath will have been drained first and I imagine the water gleaming evilly in the darkness under the floor, as between the boards the sea did when we walked along Morecambe Pier to hear the concert party. Manfield’s or Armley Baths, Dad has no time for either, but there is no escape as, with her usual ‘If you follow me, Lilian’ and ‘As it went on to transpire’, Kathleen tells the tale of these first-aid sessions, now and again shrieking with laughter, the wounded who were not wounded laid out on the beds all the better it seemed to be saucy.
    â€˜With all due respect,’ says Mr Turnbull in A Chip in the Sugar , ‘you’re not supposed to move a person until it’s been ascertained no bones are broken. I was in the St John Ambulance Brigade.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said mother, ‘and who did you learn your bandaging on?’ And they both cracked out laughing.
    That was what the war was like, in Armley anyway, peals of dirty laughter, middle-aged men in navy-blue battledress making jokes you didn’tunderstand with women who weren’t their wives, and nobody seeming to mind. For the duration: 1939, open brackets; 1945, close brackets.

There is not much new furniture to be bought just after the war, all of it bearing the obligatory Utility stamp of two stylised Cs; what they stand for I never know or even wonder. Though some Utility furniture is well designed (and now probably ranks as collectable), Aunty Kathleen picks out an armchair that has no pretensions to style or beauty; it is squat and square with cushioned seat and back, and arms broad enough to conceal cupboards, one of which is intended to serve as a cocktail cabinet and the other as a receptacle for newspapers and magazines. There is even a drawer to hold a cigarette box.
    Excitedly anticipating Aunty Myra’s return from India in 1946, Kathleen demonstrates how Myra will be installed on this monstrous throne, which will slowly, to her demobbed surprise, yield up its secrets – the drawer filled with Craven A, the cupboard containing a bottle of milk stout (Grandma’s not running to cocktails), and the magazine compartment with its copy of Lilliput . Thus, ceremonially enthroned in front of the kitchen fire, LAC/2 Peel will know that she has come home.
    â€˜What a common thing!’ Mam said as soon as we are safely out of the house, a cocktail cabinet, even if it only housed milk stout, always a focus for my mother’s contempt.
    â€˜Stout in a chair arm,’ said Dad, ‘whose cockeyed idea was that?’
    What Aunty Myra thinks is not recorded. Not much, I would guess, as she’s more taken up with her own gifts than anything given to her. Grandma, who has been quite happy with the old sossed-down chair this new Utility article has superseded, now takes it over as it’s quite low and handy for sitting in front of the kitchen range with the toasting fork, or reading the Evening Post while she waits for her bread to bake, and it is in this chair she sits in recollection all through my childhood.
    Meanwhile Aunty Myra blitzes the family with presents. Returning from India on HMS Northway in 1946, she brings with her all the spoils of the East. Even her suitcases are souvenirs. (‘Natural pigskin, Walter. Hand stitched. I knocked him right down.’) There are shawls, tray-cloths and no end of embroidery. (‘All hand-done, Lilian. It’s so intricate they go blind doing it, apparently. Just sat there in the street.’) We are presented with a blood-red Buddha. (‘I don’t care if it is a God,’ said Mam when we get it home, ‘I am not having it on the sideboard with