The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

limb unit there. Barbara recalls that when he was lying in hospital, ‘He said to his mother, “I don’t want to have it off because I won’t be able to dance.” His mother said, “Winston, forget dancing. If you don’t have the leg off, you won’t live.” Gangrene was travelling so rapidly that it had got to the knee. That was why it was taken off very high up. And so he couldn’t dance, but he did go swimming. You can swim with one leg and two arms. He went swimming in Armley Baths.’

      One can only speculate on the impact the loss would have had on one so sociable, though Barbara marks him out as pragmatic: ‘I think I take after my father in that way. He didn’t really give a damn what people thought, it was take it or leave me.’ Yet, however brave Winston was, losing a leg would have been a huge thing; it would have taken tremendous determination to lead a normal life. Barbara agreed: ‘He had to prove himself constantly, I think. I didn’t know that when I was growing up.’

      The artificial leg he was given was the best available and made of holed aluminium, which according to the specialist at Chapel Allerton would have been light and possibly easy enough to manoeuvre to allow Winston to engage in his favourite pastime, though perhaps not the jitterbug, which was sweeping the country in the years leading up to the war. Some years before rock ’n’ roll, the jitterbug involved the disgraceful practice of leaving hold of your partner and improvising fairly frantic steps on your own. In Act of Will, when Audra meets Vincent at a dance, it is the less demanding waltz that brings them together:

       Audra had almost given up hope that he would make an appearance again when he came barrelling through the door, looking slightly flushed and out of breath, and stood at the far side of the hall, glancing about. At the exact moment that the band leader announced the last waltz he spotted her. His eyes lit up, and he walked directly across the floor to her and, with a faint smile, he asked her if she would care to dance.

       Gripped by a sudden internal shaking, unable to speak, Audra nodded and rose.

       He was taller than she had realised, at least five feet nine, perhaps six feet, with long legs; lean and slenderly built though he was, he had broad shoulders. There was an easy, natural way about him that communicated itself to her instantly, and he moved with great confidence and panache. He led her on to the floor, took her in his arms masterfully, and swept her away as the band struck up ‘The Blue Danube’.

       During the course of the dance he made several casual remarks, but Audra, tongue-tied, remained mute, knowing she was unable to respond coherently. He said, at one moment, ‘What’s up then, cat got your tongue?’

       She managed to whisper, ‘No.’

      Barbara’s parents married on 14th August 1929. Winston was living at 26 Webster Row, Wortley, at the time, and described himself on their marriage certificate as a general labourer, while Freda, of 1 Winker Green, Armley, described herself as a domestic servant even though she had been working as a nurse. ‘I don’t actually know where they met,’ admitted Barbara. ‘Probably at a dance. If my father couldn’t really dance any more because of the leg, perhaps he went just to listen to the music. I actually do think he met her at a dance; they used to have church dances and church-hall dances.’

      Although Barbara adored her father, when she was a child there was little openly expressed of the love they shared. ‘He didn’t verbalise it perhaps in the way that Mummy did,’ but the depth of it was expressed in a touching scene one day, which had to do with his artificial leg, symbol of the man’s vulnerability.

      It had been snowing and Barbara was walking with her father in Tower Lane when he fell and couldn’t get up because of the slippery snow. ‘He was down on his back, and there was nobody around, and he told me what to do. He said, “Go and find some stones and pile them up in the snow, near my foot.” He was able to wedge his artificial leg against the stones in order to lever himself up. I got him sitting up, I couldn’t lift him. I was six or seven years old. But he managed to heave himself to his feet eventually.’

      But at least she had helped him, as she had always longed to do, and now he realised what a practical, efficient doer of a little girl he had fathered. The leg brought him close to her again when he died in 1981. ‘My mother said, “Your father wanted his leg taken back to the hospital.” So my Uncle Don drove me there with it, and three spare legs, and when I handed them over I just broke down in floods of tears. It was like giving away part of him and myself. I was very close to Mummy, but I was close to my father in a different way.’

      After Barbara was born in 1933, however, relations between Winston and Freda were not all they might be. I knew that Barbara’s mother Freda didn’t always see eye to eye with Grandma Taylor. In Act of Will tension between wife and mother-in-law is created by Vincent being the favourite son – Grandma Crowther is forever undermining her daughter-in-law’s position. In reality as in the fiction, Winston, I learned, was Esther Taylor’s favourite, and Barbara recalls her father going ‘maybe every day to see his mother. Why do I think my mother always used to say, “I know where you’ve been, you’ve been to . . .”?’

      ‘Did it used to annoy Freda, his going to see his mother every day?’ I asked.

      ‘Probably. I should imagine it would. Don’t you think it would?’

      I thought it would be perfectly natural, particularly given the proximity of the houses. Extended families were supposed to be the great boon of working-class life, and Freda with her small child would surely have warmed to such support. Wortley, Farsley and Armley – Freda was surrounded by the entire Taylor family and she had been otherwise alone, having been brought up in Ripon.

      Barbara’s mother was not by nature big on company however, so perhaps she didn’t find it easy to ‘fit in’ to this extended family scene, which at first must have seemed quite overpowering. She was ‘a very sweet, rather retiring, quiet woman’ in Barbara’s words, ‘rather reserved, shy, but with an iron will’. Freda told Barbara little about her past, only that her parents had brought her up in Ripon and that her father had died. ‘Her mother Edith then married a man called Simpson. There were three daughters, Freda, Edith and Mary, and two sons, Frederick and Norman. I don’t know, to tell you the honest truth, but as far as I remember there was only one Simpson, Norman Simpson.’

      I would discover that Freda always had a particularly strong desire to return to the tiny city where she was brought up: ‘My mother always wanted to be in Ripon,’ Barbara recalled. ‘All the time.’

      ‘You mean, some time after you were born, when you were eight, nine or ten?’ I asked.

      ‘No, much younger, I went back as a baby.’ Freda took Barbara back to Ripon from when she was a baby and constantly throughout her childhood. Was this a kind of escape? I wondered. Was marriage into the Taylor family so difficult an adjustment? It seemed unlikely, given that Barbara made Winston out to be such a catch and Freda as a woman who, in spite of her reserve, could fight her own corner with Esther.

      In the novels we are given a number of reasons for a marriage hitting hard times. In Act of Will Audra is criticised by her mother-in-law for failing to see that her desire to go out to work is flouting the working man’s code, which says that if a wife works, her husband loses his dignity. This is odd, as the mills of Armley and Leeds were filled with working wives, and pretty soon we discover that the real problem is that Audra comes from a better class background. She has fallen on hard times, but – she the lady, he the working man – it can never work, the mother-in-law says.

      There may have been similar strife for Freda and Winston. There is speculation that Freda had come, or may have had the impression that she had come, from better stock than Winston. We know that mother-in-law Esther Taylor sounded warnings to Freda that giving Barbara ideas above her station would lead only to trouble. Her counterpart in Act of Will does the same. In the North of England there was a nasty word for girls with big ideas – ‘upstart’. Barbara notes in the novel, ‘the lower classes are just as bad as the aristocracy when it comes to that sort of thing. Snobs, too, in their own way.’

      In Everything to Gain,