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‘You don’t understand. I’m the centrepiece here.’ So it was hardly surprising that when Dad revealed that there had been something similar in the past it should have been on the eve of her wedding, an occasion when there could be no going unnoticed either: ‘I’m the centrepiece here’, which is a bride’s boast, was my mother’s dread. Was this why there were no photographs?
    What was agitating her, and maybe it agitated him too, as he was in many ways more shy even than her, was the ceremony itself and the churchful of people it would inevitably involve. Marriage is a kind of going public, and I could see, as Dad couldn’t or wouldn’t, that coming tolive in the village which had maybe brought on this second bout forty years later was a kind of going public too.
    Not that the ceremony she was dreading was likely to be an elaborate one, as neither family can have had any money. A proper wedding, though, would have run to bridesmaids and they were there to hand in her two sisters, Kathleen and Myra, and this may well have been part of the trouble, as she had always felt overshadowed by them and something of a Cinderella. Unlike her they revelled in any kind of public show, edging into whatever limelight was going. Later in life they made far more of my brother’s and my achievements than Mam and Dad did. When I got my degree at Oxford Dad wrote, ‘We haven’t let on to your aunties yet that you’re getting your cap and gown. You won’t be wanting a lot of splother’ – splother Dad’s word for the preening and fuss invariably attendant on the presence of the aunties.
    The splother attendant upon the wedding was harder to get round, and Mam’s fear of the occasion persisted until there came a point, Dad told me, when they nearly broke off their engagement because neither of them could see a way of ever getting over this first necessary hurdle. Eventually Dad sought the advice of the local vicar.
    These days this would mean a cosy, even chummy chat with counselling the keynote. And why not? But Leeds in those days was the proving ground for many a future dean or bishop, some of the grandest Anglican dynasties – Hollises, Bickersteths, Vaughans – ministering to the slums of Hunslet and Holbeck. St Bartholomew’s was a great slum parish too, its huge black church set on a hill above Armley and Wortley, and though the slums around it have gone, or at any rate changed their character, its heavy spire still dominates the south-western approaches to Leeds. The vicar in 1928 was the Reverend H. Lovell Clarke, subsequently Archdeacon of Leeds, and it was to him rather than to one of his several curates that Dad went.
    It must have been hard to explain: all brides are nervous, after all; why should this Lilian Peel require special treatment? Public school and Cambridge, the vicar is just the kind of figure (‘very better class’) to make Dadnervous and tongue-tied. What he has come along to ask is whether the vicar will marry them at seven-thirty in the morning, with no fuss, no congregation and in time for Dad to get to work at Lower Wortley Co-op by eight-fifteen. Lovell Clarke says that this is out of the question; the law does not permit him to marry anyone before eight in the morning. However, he has no objection to performing the ceremony beginning at eight o’clock, and surely if he is getting married the Co-op won’t mind if he is half an hour late for work? Dad enquires: the Co-op does mind; he has to be at work by eight-fifteen.
    There are occasions in life, often not in the least momentous, which nail one’s colours to the mast. There was the morning, ten days before the end of my National Service, when a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield made me scrub out a urinal with my bare hands; another when a consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary discussed my naked body without reference to me with a class