The death certificate, when we finally acquired one a year or so ago, said that Adelaide (an error; her name was "Adeline") Emma Hoggart had died at the age of 46, and was buried on 17th February 1927. The cause of death was tuberculosis. She seems to have died on the 15th; the address given as her "abode" was "123 Beckett Street," which was and is the huge St James Infirmary in a grim part of north Leeds.
Two days from death to burial in the local churchyard-a quick procedure. A further 67 years passed before one of us even thought of enquiring about her whereabouts. Tom, the eldest of us three children, was by then recently dead. Tom was the only one of us who remembered the funeral, holding Molly and me by our hands, before we were rushed away to Grandma's on the other side of town, to working-class Hunslet.
Tom also vaguely remembered our father tossing him up and down. Father had died five or six years before our mother, but none of us knew his date of death. The three of us remembered our mother in the selective, highlighted way which memory imposes: gentle, soft-spoken, firm in controlling bad behaviour-and down, inescapably in low spirits. A consumptive combination. Her face had become heavily lined, of course. But the lines were ingrained, dark grey, from years of cold water washes. She could have boiled a kettle on the one gas ring but would not have felt able to afford it. She must have hated that.
What if neither of our parents had died? What sort of life would we all have had? What relationships? The Morels of Sons and Lovers always surface when I wonder about that: a more genteel mother; a father not of the rough working-class but very much a working-class NCO type. Tensions?
What had set firmly, before our mother died, was a typecasting of the three of us across the extended family: Tom quiet, serious, reliable, a model older brother; Molly rather frail and to be sheltered; me "a bit of a lad," which meant "something of a handful," but not ill-intentioned, not "a problem." These were the common family tags we carried until the generation ahead of us had died.
We never saw that bare little stone courtyard cottage in Potternewton again. The poverty-stricken widow and her kids had gone; it would revert to a landlord of whom we knew nothing. By the evening of that funeral day we reached our separate destinations: Molly and I to Hoggart relatives in Leeds; Tom to an aunt in Sheffield who had 11 children. A 12th "would not make much difference," but it was still a kindness. Our mother's relatives-the Longs from Liverpool, mid-middle-class shopkeepers and the like-made no offers.
Astonishing that, during all the years afterwards, not one of us asked for mother's death certificate so as to have details of where she was buried. Even more astonishing is that, as I have just now rediscovered, only ten years ago I wrote that I would not try to find out where she had died. "Probably St James," I said rather off-handedly. Now I find that almost inexplicable, even, perhaps, a matter for guilt; especially because the past has always been a preoccupation, insistently present to me, marked by the sense of decades passing like the chapters of a puzzling book turning over of their own accord. Why didn't one of us do something about finding out where the mother who had so suddenly left us had been put into the ground?
Going round and round the question since obtaining the death certificate, I can only conclude, though insecurely, that we were all suffering from what today would be called "trauma;" we were frozen within; lost.
It had been a very enclosed home since she had been widowed, striving to manage on ?1 a week from the City Guardians (public assistance). I thought I had been the one who found her dying on the clip-rug in front of the fireplace. Molly seems to remember that she had. One of us had taken over the memory from the other, absorbed it and adopted it. But from the moment we turned away from the grave we had blotted it out, or let it sink, for all those decades. Why had we taken more than 60 years to feel able to make that connection-even then, prompted by one of Molly's daughters? I can find no satisfactory answer, only that fashionable excuse of "trauma," which is a fancy way of saying "shock."
now that i had the death certificate, I determined to find the grave. This proved much more difficult than the first step-and a minor example of the ways of price-conscious, end-of-20th-century England. It was several weeks before the Records Office somewhere up in Yorkshire responded to the question: where in that graveyard, close to St James, is our mother buried? The staff couldn't easily say, because the records were not yet computerised. They could put someone to searching for the entry by hand, but I would have to pay that person by the hour. (One would have thought that an answer such as that would have stuck in the throat of the minor official who had to give it.)
I told the town clerk in Leeds that this response seemed not only dilatory but bureaucratically unfeeling. What if an old person living only on a pension had sought the information? The town clerk agreed and told the Records Office so; they reacted smartly. Well, smartly for them-in two or three more weeks. They said they had now discovered that no records had been kept of that particular cemetery. Perhaps the vicar of the church in question, St Michael's, had them.
The vicar was quick and helpful; he telephoned before eight on the morning he received my letter. He said that the city had taken over the graveyard some decades ago, when his church had been rebuilt a mile away; he had no records.
So that was why, with a friend, on a cold, grey and dank day, I sought out the graveyard in a Potternewton now tatty, run-down, drugs-and-prostitution-ridden. The front of the churchyard was almost hidden behind a facade of shops which mirrored the district; shops which knew the tastes and limits of their customers: mostly cut-price.
Inside, we found a desert, a desolation. There had been, near the front, a few fairly expensive graves-we used to play on some we called "potted meat," tan-coloured slabs. But the marble had long gone and only splinters remained. (Hardy's phlegmatic acceptance "Why should death rob life of fourpence?" as skilled urban theft.) The rest, for almost 100 yards back, were all broken flat stones and what once were uprights with inscriptions. A scatter of used syringes and used condoms; a few ragged trees wept over it all.
We looked as closely as we could but found no "Hoggart." Then my friend said what I had not the wit nor the wish to recognise. That area of dirty, damp and dog-shit spattered earth, a few yards wide and long, up against the far back wall, would be where they put the paupers. No markers-not even a simple marker for each plot, recording which half-dozen had gone into one hole. (The casual blind cruelties some local authorities could commit!)
On that bitter day, I was not near tears, but suffused with grief and hoping for the way to a sort of expiation-at the thought of that family, the children dispersed, the mother buried, all within two days, and no record at all. Somewhere in that few square yards of mucky mud she lay, and had lain for more than six decades, and I was only now paying some sort of due. As I stood, there came to me, unexpected and unsought, the image of a skeletal figure, deep down but facing upward; still connected, still belonging; after all those years.
Sometime later I heard about what seemed to be called "penny plots": spare land near the hospital used for pauper burials by agreement with the local authority. I do not know if that story is true and, even if it were, it would seem not to apply to our mother because her death certificate places her clearly in St Michael's. It was marginally less shocking.
This belated search for our mother, as I went into full old age, was one-perhaps the main-impulse which set off my interest in writing a book on old age. Thinking it over now, I realise how strong a force the empty end of that search had been in making me try to think straighter about the mosaic of interests, of likings and dislikings, which year after year go towards composing what we call a character.
