A Mystery

The Choir Girls

‘It fell upon a simmer nicht

When the leaves were fair and green

That Willie met his gay ladie

Intil the wood alane.’

[“Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter”]

My mother’s scrap book of that year during which the war broke out is still something I treasure.

She was just nineteen, excited at the prospect of her engagement and forthcoming marriage at the end of the year. Some people keep a diary for their entire adult life; or they collect information about all sorts of things- columns of Bridge hands, Royal events, gardening tips. Neither before nor subsequently did my mother keep such a scrap book. I guess ordinary life kept her too busy.

It was only when I was going through her effects after the funeral that I came across the scrap book. She had lived alone, once I’d left home, in that small cottage a couple of miles outside Otley. She had been retired from her position lecturing in music at the University of Leeds for a dozen years or so before her death. All that was valuable in the cottage- old music manuscripts and books and the more antique furniture she had collected over the years- I donated to various libraries or museums. I moved in my modern and more functional furniture and belongings, giving up my flat in the city so that I could live in the countryside. Much of my journalistic and writing work I could do at home once I’d completed whatever research might be necessary.

I found the scrap book tucked away underneath various articles of clothing in a drawer in her bedroom. The scrap book had seen a lot of use and I could imagine my mother sitting in her favourite chair- the one item of furniture I retained- turning the pages as she recalled those events from 1939. Here and there on some of the pages -or on the cut out newspaper articles themselves- in her clear, upright handwriting she had made annotations. The type of ink and writing style made me realise that these notations had been made over a number of years and not just at the time. Occasionally she enlarged on what the paragraph described.

At that time she was living off the Kirkstall Road and had just started to attend the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama where she was studying music. Marriage, the war and my birth interrupted that; but once the war had ended, despite being a war widow with a five year old child to look after, she completed her studies. She rapidly climbed the ladder of success and accomplishment in her field of expertise. I had been proud of her, as she had been of me when my talent for writing brought me success as a journalist first for the local papers and then a large national one.

Many of the cuttings she had kept came from local newspapers such as the Craven Herald, Leeds Mercury and Malton Messenger. There were only a few from the larger national papers. There was something musical about the scrap book as well, that is about the way it presented life and events over that year. I doubt that she had been consciously orchestrating the articles; it seems more likely that her inner musicality gradually emerged through the selection she had been making.

I recall how from my earliest remembered years we would suddenly start having a conversation in song. That’s how I learnt to speak- and to count- by singing the words before I would say them. For me it was much more fun as a child to be learning by singing about it, although I did not have my mother’s musical gift. Even now as I sit here writing this I seem to hear her voice singing softly as the bees buzz about in the garden among the flowers and the sun shines on the lawn. If I forget something- a fact, a piece of information, or a name- I can retrieve it eventually by humming or singing some nonsense tune with nonsense words. Suddenly, like a train emerging from a tunnel and reaching a station, up will pop the forgotten thing.

*

Browsing through the pages of that scrap book I tried to develop an impression of my mother as she had been then.

What had decided her to snip this or that article from a paper? There was no common thread, at least as far as I could see. Some of the clippings were clearly about music. There were notices to do with the Northern Philharmonic Orchestra and performances it was giving in Leeds Town Hall- a pianoforte recital of Chopin by Leff Pouishnoff, the Ukrainian virtuoso, in February; and Malcolm Sargent conducting programmes of a Bach Passacaglia arranged by Respighi, Haydn’s ‘Military’ Symphony No. 100, Richard Strauss’ ‘Don Juan’, Ravel’s ‘Mother Goose Suite’ and Borodin’s ‘Second Symphony’. I wondered if these were concerts she had attended or had wished to attend. Other cuttings were to do with things like the weather- January had been notably wet and the autumn had been an Indian summer-or meetings about the formation of the Otley Little Theatre, which met in the Recreation Hall. There was the announcement of a lecture being given by ‘Grey Owl’. There was nothing about the increasing international tension or about Mr Chamberlain and Herr Hitler and the approaching war. The impression of this little bit of the kingdom those newspaper snippets gave was of some untroubled land in which vicars opened fêtes and trains ran to strict timetables and the daily weather was of much concern. There were a few photographs but not of famous or important people. There were no films stars, no crowned heads, and no foreign dignitaries. There were people- ordinary people- in rather disorganised groups with anonymous buildings behind them. There were people shaking hands, a station master waving a flag and a farmer with a herd of cattle by a five-bar gate.

Perhaps, I thought, these were people she knew then, or friends she may have visited and dined with. It was all very ordinary, very commonplace, and yet also very mysterious. Why on earth would my mother have begun to collect such apparently random and meaningless (at least to me) articles of local news? It was hardly a record of her life then. There was no cutting about her engagement at Easter, a notice which I knew had appeared in ‘The Otley Observer’ because she had mentioned that to me. There was no photograph of her on the arm of my father in his RAF uniform as they emerged from All Saints Parish Church, passing under the raised swords of a guard of honour of his colleagues. There was no announcement of her acceptance, along with several other young men and women, into the music school. There was no announcement of my father’s death while based at Church Fenton.

I wondered if there was any link at all between those articles apart from the fact that they seem to have taken my mother’s fancy at the time. I knew that she was not the kind of person who would do things on a whim. She would not decide ‘Oh that looks nice (or interesting)’ and for that reason preserve it. Clearly these seemingly disparate and unrelated articles had meant something to her, not just when she was a nineteen year old but throughout her lifetime. Why else preserve the well-worn scrap book?

*

It was the series of cuttings about the three missing choir girls which most fascinated me. They were the last cuttings in the book, just as neatly displayed as all the others. There were several blank pages at the end of the book after those cuttings. I wondered why my mother had stopped collecting cuttings at that point. Was it because the war broke out at the beginning of September and that such a momentous event pushed from her mind all thoughts of ephemera and such an idle pastime? Had she simply lost interest in what she was doing? I found those last empty pages as evocative and puzzling as the preceding ones with their seemingly unrelated contents.

I have always enjoyed a good ‘mystery’. My mother would often set me little puzzles as a way of encouraging me to learn about something. Perhaps that habit- my curiosity and willingness to keep on digging until I had uncovered whatever it was that was hidden- helped me to become a journalist. In any event I found myself intrigued not just by the scrap book but also by the articles about the three missing choir girls. Because there were several articles I was able to piece together the story such as it was.

During the summer holidays the choir from Hummabbey Girls’ Boarding School near Harrogate- chaperoned and conducted by their music teacher Miss Frogett- had undertaken a tour of various towns in Airedale and Wharfedale. The first cutting included a large photograph of the group standing beside a dorsal-fin bodied Harrington Leyland Tiger bus which took them from venue to venue. Two dozen young faces smiled at the photographer. They were described as wearing dark navy blazers with the gold school badge on the breast pocket. They had on pale blue and white check cotton dresses, with white ‘Peter Pan’ collars and short sleeves with white cuffs. They all wore creamy panama hats with a blue headband. Three of the girls wore theirs at jaunty angles, perhaps tipped mischievously the instant before the cameraman took the shot. Beneath the photograph were listed the girls’ names and beside three of them- Cecilia Blake, Johanna Kittle and Sara Wick (the girls whose hats were tipped) - I could see my mother had made dots. Were those, I wondered, the girls who had vanished?

At either end of the double line of girls were two adults: Miss Frogett dressed in sensible tweed skirt and jacket with a fashionable bucket style hat on her head; and a be-suited gentleman named in the under-caption as Lord Beaugarth, sponsor of the tour and a distant cousin to the monarch.

Their itinerary (detailed in that cutting) took in All Saints Parish Church, Ilkley; Holy Trinity Church, Skipton; Temple Street Methodist Church, Keighley; Haworth Masonic Lodge; and the Church of All Saints, Bingley. The concerts began on various evenings at 7pm and lasted ninety minutes. There would be coffee and light refreshments afterwards.

The choirs’ repertoire was said to include many familiar choral songs- ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’ by J.S.Bach, ‘The Miller’s Maid’ by Brahms, ‘La Fée aux Chansons’ by Fauré, ‘Gloria’ by Vivaldi and ‘Litanies à la Vierge Noir’ by Poulenc- as well as Yorkshire ballads and more popular songs such as ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Do I love you?’

A second article gave a review of the first performance and the date of the next one. It was after the fourth performance in Haworth that the three girls went missing. The party had been staying that night in a Victorian guest house in the village. It was only in the morning that the girls were found to be missing. Their beds had not been slept in. The final performance of the choir was cancelled.

At first it was thought that the girls were playing some silly prank but within a week the police had become involved and the tone of the brief articles about their disappearance changed. The grounds of the nearby Scalebor Park Mental Hospital in Burley-in-Wharfedale, which was supervised by Dr James Valentine (who recently had succeeded Dr Gilmour the original Medical Supervisor from 1902), were thoroughly searched. Various local people were questioned but what emerged was that nobody had seen those girls after the performance in the Masonic Lodge. The final cutting was no more than a couple of sentences, saying that the police were ‘no further forward’ in their search for the missing girls.

*

As a journalist I was curious about the affair. Over a period of months I checked through the archives of the local papers to see if there was any conclusion to the matter. No bodies had ever been found and there was no further mention of it after that last cutting from October. The phoney war had started and there were many other newsworthy items to mention.

My further research found that Miss Frogett was about the only person involved either still alive or still resident in the area. In fact she was a long-term resident of Scalebor, having suffered a major breakdown following the tragedy. I arranged to visit her to see if she could recall anything further about that period. I had no great hopes, given the passage of so much time.

The hospital stood in Moor Lane opposite the railway station. Now part of the NHS it had originally catered for two hundred and ten thirty shillings a week fee paying patients and was the last of five built by the then West Riding County Council. It was a mixture of the eight warded original honey coloured stone buildings and 1960s modern red brick extensions. Built to what is called the ‘compact arrow’ style it had a light and airy feel to it, though it also reeked of that malaise we label ‘madness’. Even the shadows seemed to be infected with this.

Miss Frogett received me in her room. She seldom left it, I was told, living in fear of the outside world. The one attempt to discharge her into the community had failed miserably and the likelihood was that she would die in hospital. She was now in her eighties and, despite the grey hair, severely drawn into a bun at the back of her head, and her slight stoop, I was able to recognise the young woman I had seen in that photograph. She still retained her interest and skill at music, playing Bartok’s Concerto No. 2 on the violin to a small gathering of fellow patients each week.

I was pleased to see that she seemed mentally alert and regarded me with interested eyes, the way an owl might be considering another form of wildlife to gauge whether or not it was edible.

She thought I was a nephew and castigated me for the long time between visits. Then she asked me if I had any chewing gum.

I tried to explain who I was and why I was visiting but she prattled on.

She said the chewing gum would block out the voices and it was the only thing that did. It seemed clear to me that she was in another world. I was about to give up, say my goodbyes and leave her when she said:

-You’re Maria’s boy.

My mother’s name was Mary. I waited.

-I saw Bogart. It was him but mustn’t say. Shh!

She looked slyly at me. I shook my head, baffled at the nonsense. I got up and thanked her for her kindness in receiving me. I was almost at the door when she seized my arm at the elbow. Despite her frailty her grip was strong.

-Please believe me, she whispered. Nobody believes me.

For a moment as she was saying that her eyes seemed to be as sane and sober as any I’ve stared into. But then she let go of my arm, her eyes seemed to fill with that sly madness again and she returned to her chair by the tall window.

Once back home I found myself wondering how she had known my mother; that is if indeed she had. Maria was a common name and she had initially thought I was her nephew. From what the nurses had told me she had no living relatives, so that must have been fantasy. She had been so in earnest when she pleaded with me to believe her that for that second I had been willing to believe that she was sane. But what was I to believe? She’d mentioned the name Bogart- did she mean ‘Humphrey Bogart’ or the Boggle? Whichever it might be it was craziness, that is unless...but that too was craziness.

It was a few days later I received news from the hospital that Miss Frogett and garrotted herself with the strings from her violin.

© R.L.Paige 2011