A family tragedy

I thought very carefully before posting this. It’s here because, firstly, I found it upsetting at the time having known some of those involved. Secondly, the story has warnings for us all as to what we are capable of when things become too much to bear. I have omitted details that might identify those concerned other than to people who already know.

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Leaving home can be a testing rite of passage. This is true even in cocooned university or college environments where there are organised social activities and lots of others in the same boat. But it can be relentless when you’re on your own.

My first few months were particularly difficult and depressing, marooned in an unfamiliar city, struggling to understand the uncertainties of a new job where nearly everyone at work was older or with very different lives, and expected to begin a demanding, time-consuming correspondence course in a new and alien subject. There was also something strange about where I lived, a pervasive sense of shame hinted at in surreptitious glances, hushed whispers and neighbours watching behind twitching curtains as I entered and left the house. It was some months before I found out why, and some years before the truly dreadful story reached its terrible and tragic conclusion.

We had placed an advertisement in the Yorkshire Post, “Trainee accountant requires lodgings in Leeds, Monday to Friday, bed breakfast and evening meal,” and quickly received a reply from a widow with a vacant room. She lived in King George Avenue, a couple of miles North of the city centre, where Chapeltown Road and Harehills Lane merge to become Harrogate Road. It looked comfortable when we went to look, and so one Sunday afternoon in September, 1968, my dad took me in the car and left me there. 

Although King George Avenue lies at the end of the notorious Chapeltown Road, by the time you get there you are in Chapel Allerton, a green and pleasant suburb where substantial family homes nest in well-established, tree-filled gardens. It looks much the same today, an agreeable place to live. Near the entrance to the avenue, twin stone arches with wrought iron gates mark the gatehouse of Chapel Allerton hospital, then the ‘Artificial Limb Centre’. The weathered remnants of its sign are still on the wall next to the right hand arch today, almost legible in the Google Street View image of June 2008. Just into the avenue, the leafy Gledhow Park Drive leads off on the right. My landlady never tired of telling me how, not so many years before, they had become accustomed to seeing the young actress Diana Rigg pass by, whose parents lived in the Drive.

My landlady lived with her youngest daughter Helen, a lovely, gentle, long-haired Jewish girl some five or six years years older than me. Three older children had married and left home. There was also another lodger in the house, a girl who had a room upstairs, but I hardly ever saw any of them. My own room was downstairs where the house had been extended to make it wider. There was a door at one end out to the hall and front door, and a door at the other end through which the landlady brought my breakfast and evening meal from the kitchen. There was a bed, a table and dining chair, an armchair and a built in cubicle containing a washbasin and toilet, and that was it. I came in from work, had my meal, and was then left undisturbed until next morning.

It sounds ideally suited to getting on with the accountancy correspondence course I was supposed to be working through, and so it should have been, but I couldn’t apply myself to it at all. After leaving for work before 8.00 a.m. and not getting back until 6.30 p.m. it was hard to study with much enthusiasm (the office hours were 8.45 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., with an hour and a quarter for lunch, making 37½ hours per week). I tended to fall into an exhausted torpor worsened by boredom and loneliness. At £6 per week, the rent was more than I earned, so I had to be subsidised by my parents and couldn’t afford to go out. I can’t emphasise enough how much I looked forward to the 17.35 train home every Friday, and how much I dreaded the early Monday morning train back.

After some weeks, when they had got to know me a little better, I was invited to watch television with the landlady and her daughter at agreed times, such as ‘Top of the Pops’ on Thursdays. They asked me about my family and talked a little about theirs, and I began to feel more at home and started to like them, but the feeling remained that they had something to hide. They spoke in Yiddish whispers as if not wanting “the goyim” to hear their “tsuris” (the gentiles to know their troubles), and the evening meal became increasingly slapdash and hastily prepared. From meat, potato and a vegetable at first, it was now beans or eggs on toast. One night I went back to a tin of Heinz spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce for my tea. One week I got tinned meals every night. I might have starved but for being able to get something more substantial during the day – a least a good sandwich or a proper pub lunch on expenses when working out of the office.

I began to look for somewhere else to live, and one of the seniors at work put me in touch with an elderly couple at Kirkstall who were looking for a new lodger. I arranged to go there from the beginning of the new year and was surprised by my parents’ reaction: they seemed keen for me to move as soon as possible. After I’d left King George Avenue they told me why.

They had noticed a report in the newspaper that a thirty-three year old man of King George Avenue, an unemployed company director with the same surname as my landlady, had been found guilty of incitement to murder. It transpired he was in fact my landlady’s eldest son and his awful story had been unfolding for over a year.

The previous year, after six years of marriage, his wife had divorced him and gained custody of their only child, a son then aged four. The divorce mainly seems to have been due to his obsessive and unstable personality. He had been worried about the health of his father, who had died, and about his business where he worked excessively long hours, often seven days a week. There was also a mutual dislike between him and his father-in-law. After the divorce he became gripped with hatred for his ex-wife and her parents, and the man she later married, and made disturbing and graphically violent threats towards them: his ex-wife was a model and he wanted acid thrown in her face to ruin her looks; he wanted his father-in-law’s tongue torn out so he would never speak again. His obsession culminated in a breakdown and treatment as an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital. 

In December, after leaving hospital, he snatched his son from outside his ex-wife’s home and attempted to take him to Eire, presumably because this would have been beyond the jurisdiction of the custody order, but was apprehended in a taxi in Northern Ireland, three miles from the border, and jailed for two months for contempt of court.

While in prison, he attempted to find someone to murder his ex-wife for money. He put a proposal to a man he thought could arrange it, but the man was actually an undercover police officer. When after his release he tried to put the plan into operation, he was arrested again. He was convicted of incitement to murder by attempting to employ two men he thought were London gangsters to kill his ex-wife and her parents, and her male friend, and given a further three-year prison sentence. It would have been longer had the judge not taken into account his mental state and medical opinion that he was no longer dangerous.

My parents had decided it best not to mention any of this while I was still at King George Avenue, and as I rarely read the newspaper in those days I had missed it completely. The week I got tinned things every night for tea was the week of the trial. There is little wonder my landlady and daughter were so preoccupied.

Four years later, long after I had moved on, there was a most terrible and tragic sequel to this story. After serving his sentence, my ex-landlady’s son enrolled as a mature student in sociology at Leeds University. Now, I have experience of this and can tell you that becoming a mature student is not something you should undertake without being mentally and emotionally robust enough to handle it. Mature students have high and sometimes unrealistic expectations of themselves. They take their studies very seriously. They stretch the limits of their mental powers. But students also have long free hours for deep thought and reflection – that’s what being a student is all about. If you have any hidden demons they will jump out and come for you. I have seen this so many times in different forms and in different degrees of severity. The case of my ex-landlady’s son was the worst imaginable

One Sunday at the end of January, he and his son spent the day together under access conditions which allowed contact once per month in the presence of a chaperone - severely restricted in light of previous events. They had played darts and football and then driven to a golf club to the North of Leeds at Shadwell. They had all enjoyed the day tremendously. My ex-landlady’s son then tricked the chaperone into leaving them briefly by telling him he was urgently needed on the telephone inside the golf club, and drove off with his son. At first it was thought to be a further abduction attempt, but it was far worse. He parked nearby in a quiet country lane, shot his son three times, and then turned the gun on himself. Their bodies and a shotgun were found in the car around tea time. His last wish was to be laid to rest with his son but perhaps understandably he was buried alone. He was thirty-eight.

Police later found he had left a tape recording at home speaking of his anguish at being allowed access to his son only once per month. The inquests returned a verdicts of murder and suicide, with indications that the tragedy had been carefully planned. This was long after I had moved on, but when I read about it I thought of the house in King George Avenue, and my landlady, and her daughter, and her son’s poor ex-wife, and could not begin to imagine what they must be going through. 

POSTSCRIPT
Around the time I left King George Avenue I remembered an odd incident which I have always wondered whether it had any bearing on where I was staying. On my very first morning at work, I caught the bus along Chapeltown Road into town, and was walking along the Headrow a little unsure of my bearings when a voice behind asked “On our way to work then are we?” I was surprised to see someone I knew vaguely from my home town wearing a police cadet uniform. I could not remember his name and didn’t get chance to ask because the whole of our fairly brief conversation was taken up by his questions – where was I working, when had I started, where was I living, how long had I been there, how had I found it, and so on. I’ve often wondered since whether it was just coincidence or was I being checked out. I did remember his name later but never saw him again.  

Crossbar Excursions

Tasker Dunham on his dad's bicycle crossbar seat

These days, sooner or later, we would have caught the attention of some over-zealous police officer and been fined either for dangerous cycling or for carrying two people on an improperly adapted bike. When there are reports of people being pulled over for carrying children on purpose-built cargo bikes which look like wheelbarrows with pedals, my dad’s primitive crossbar seat would never have made the grade. Not to mention the absence of cycle helmets. No one had ever heard of them then. They would have been ridiculous.

 

Simple no-frills bicycle crossbar seats for children are a bit like effective garden sprays, oil-based paints, wood preserver tablets and non-crepuscular light bulbs – you can’t get them any more. You can buy elaborate crossbar chairs costing an eye-watering hundred pounds or more, with moulded plastic seats, an integral back, a safety belt and bucket-style foot wells, and there are cheaper ones at around twenty pounds, but even they have a back frame and safety strap. What you can't find is a basic crossbar seat like my dad used to have. The health and safety people have made sure of that.

My dad's Heath-Robinson contraption was little more than a padded seat-shaped piece of wood fixed to the crossbar by a pipe-clamp, with a metal bar on the down tube to act as a foot rest. It certainly wasn’t BS EN 14344 compliant, if indeed such a standard had existed in those days, but I sat on it quite safe and happy, hands on the handlebars, fully aware I must not under any circumstances take my feet off the footrests and put them near the front wheel. My main concern, as I saw it, was not to get my fingers nipped by the brake rods which, before cable brakes became ubiquitous, had pincer-like stoppers in front of the handlebars.

“We’re just off out for a blow,” my dad would tell my mother, and away we went. Sometimes it was a couple of miles to a village pub which had seats outside at the back where he brought his pint of beer and some lemonade for me. Next door over a fence were some allotments. He told me how one of them had once been his dad’s, and how they used to grow their own vegetables and work it together as a family on Sunday afternoons and summer evenings before the war. It sounded fun. I wished we had an allotment ourselves.

Sometimes we went to the river bank to watch the ships coming up and going away on the tide. He told me his grandpa used to be a captain, and how sometimes as a boy he went on the train to Hull to join his grandpa’s ship to sail back on the bridge up river to Goole. How wonderful to be able to go on the bridge of a ship with your grandpa as the captain.

On other days we went to the docks to see ships being manoeuvred in or out of the locks, which involved thunderous horns, splashing anchors, creaking fenders, taut ropes, urgent bells and vital shouts. He explained the signals the ships gave to warn other shipping of their intentions: one long blow of the horn for going ahead; three longs for going astern; one long and four shorts for swinging round on the anchor. I was always terrified of the violent turbulence in the water as the locks filled and emptied. You can get hardly anywhere near there now - metal security fencing bars your way.

Further around the river bank were the remains of an old First World War shipyard, where ships had been built for only a few years, but the old decaying jetties and overgrown slipways could still clearly be seen and explored.

There was a place next to the railway line where we watched long trains of coal wagons slowly limp past, or the express ‘fish train’ on its way non-stop to the London markets leaving in its wake a distinctive, lingering, smoky wet fishiness. The luxurious Yorkshire Pullman would pass through with cream and umber coaches all bearing names, with shaded table lamps next to curtained windows. It made a fine contrast to the grubby two-coached local ‘push and pull’ and the shunters from the docks. My dad could identify all the different locomotives: the ‘Austerity’ WD 2-8-0s pulling goods trains, the K3 2-6-0s and B1 4-6-0s on passenger trains, the local 0-4-4 tank engine and the 0-4-0 ‘pugs’. Favourite for us both were the D49 4-4-0s named after counties. He also knew the locomotive headlamp codes – the arrangement of the oil lamps on the front of the engine – which indicated the kind of train it was. A stopping passenger train would have just one central lamp at the top, an express passenger two lamps above the buffers, and the Royal Train, not that we ever saw it, had a unique four lamp headcode.

Another destination was the town cemetery where my dad changed the flowers on his mother’s grave and conducted me on tours of the other family resting places. Great Granddad and Great Grandma Dunham’s white marble plot shone out almost alone where most of its neighbours had either fallen down or never had a headstone in the first place. Even after all this time I could still take you to them all.

Occasionally, we called to see some of the just about still living relatives on the way to wherever we were heading. One lived with his wife in a house by the river, and they always made us cheerfully welcome with orange juice and home made cakes or biscuits.

Another frequent visit was to my dad’s grandpa, the captain, who could often be found on a bench in the garden, a red ensign hoisted to the top of his immaculate white painted flag pole. He had a long radio aerial strung from the top of the pole to the house so he could pick up communications between ships at sea. He had been a hard man at sea, and although now he was more cantankerous than hard, he showed no sympathy when I got my head stuck through the bars at the back of his bench.

One of my dad’s uncles had been a bank manager and lived with his daughter and son-in-law in a large and ostentatiously-named house with fine furnishings. There were no grandchildren, and they obviously disliked having any other dirty children in the house. Even at a young age, I sensed they considered themselves our social superiors.

Another great aunt ruled her household from her armchair like a tyrant, forbidding her retired husband from remaining at home during the day, refusing to countenance “old men sitting around in the house”. He wasn’t bothered. He could sometimes be found in the garden having a crafty smoke and mocking his father-in-law’s red ensign visible a few houses away across the snicket – he always referred to him as ‘old Hindenburg’. Meanwhile, my great aunt did sit around the house with swollen legs while her unmarried son went out to earn the money, and her daughter, whose marriage had broken down under tragic circumstances, cleaned and shopped in skivvying servitude until driven to an early death from heart failure. The house had an oppressive, opprobrious atmosphere, and I was always glad when visiting was over and I could climb back on to my dad’s crossbar and escape.

The sprawling weed-strewn sand pit at the local park, 1954

But our best destination was the local park which, in the days before their removal was necessitated by broken glass, dog dirt and other consequences of negligence, indifference and gratuitous vandalism, had a sprawling, weed-strewn sand pit and sizeable yachting lake. I preferred bucket and spade in the sand, but my dad undoubtedly took me there to sail our toy yacht on the ‘park pond’ as he called it. That was his playtime as much as  mine. He would set the sails, push it off from one side of the lake, and then walk round to collect it at the other. Sometimes it would stay in the middle for ages, blown first one way, then the other, and then become becalmed in the doldrums.

One day the pond had been drained for cleaning leaving only a couple of inches of water. I took off my shoes and socks for a paddle, slipped flat on my back, and we had to go straight home. On another occasion when the water was low, we set a clockwork launch to cross, but it sank in the middle. My dad waded in to get it, the water splish sploshing over the tops of his boots. Back home, he left it on the mantlepiece to dry. The next day, when he was at work, my mother was startled to see a tiny frog watching her from the cabin of the boat. It frightened her so much she had to run for a neighbour to deal with it.

Eventually I learned to ride my own two-wheeler and followed behind, my place on the crossbar seat taken by my brother. It was never the same again.