A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

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  A Father Before Christmas

  Neil Boyd

  FOR

  M and F and D

  WITH LOVE

  Contents

  I My First Baptism

  II Femme Fatale

  III Fr Duddleswell is Drunk in Charge

  IV The November Blues

  V Hell and High Water

  VI One Sinner Who Will Not Repent

  VII My First Miracle

  VIII A Thief in the Parish

  IX The Heart of a Curate

  X Sex Bows its Lovely Head

  XI The Season of Good Will

  About the Author

  I My First Baptism

  ‘That uproarious wretch, that blighted black-eyed potato of a woman.’ Fr Charles Duddleswell, my parish priest, was performing on the landing.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said, poking my head round my study door.

  ‘Me keys,’ he snapped, his blue eyes frothing behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘Can I find me keys? Indeed I cannot. Mrs Pring has filched them from me dresser and neither she nor the blessèd St. Anthony has any idea where she has deposited them.’

  I took one look at him and said, ‘You’ve tried your pockets, Father?’

  ‘Is it an idiot you think I …?’ He was busy scratching the smooth outer skin of his cassock like an itchy monkey. ‘In me pockets?’ he asked now only half in scorn. ‘Me pockets, you say?’ His hand had settled around a bulky something in his bottom left pocket. He slowly brought the keys into the light of day. ‘That accursed daughter of Eve,’ he muttered, ‘has she not hidden ’em in the recesses of me very own pocket?’ He suddenly yelled down the staircase. ‘Mrs Pring!’

  Unhurriedly our plump, white-haired Mrs Pring appeared at the foot of the stairs, clasping a broom like a crosier. ‘You’ve found them, then,’ she said, ‘I’ll get the choir to sing the Te Deum in thanksgiving.’

  ‘’Twas not meself that found them,’ came thundering back at her, ‘but Father Neil.’

  ‘And where did he find them?’

  ‘Does it at all matter where he found them, woman, seeing as he found them?’

  Mrs Pring suggested none too politely that they had never gone missing and saucily offered him a safety pin, ‘Seeing,’ she said, ‘as you’ve no belt nor braces.’

  ‘God blast you, woman,’ he cried, ‘I will not have you coming at me with a full udder of incivility. Now, I am asking you, could Father Neil have found them if they were never lost? Father Neil,’ he bellowed in my direction, ‘would you be so kind as to tell this lady, who is astray of her wits, that you …’

  But I retreated into my study to let them sort out for themselves who was to blame for losing Fr Duddleswell’s enormous bunch of keys in his cassock pocket.

  I settled down again and opened my breviary but I was in no mood for praying. I preferred that October morning to reflect on my career thus far at St Jude’s.

  Four crowded months had passed since I first presented myself at the presbytery door, to be greeted by Mrs Pring and the uncertain sound of Gilbert and Sullivan coming from Fr Duddleswell’s hand-cranked gramophone. I was at that time, I recalled with a smile, as green and helpless as a pea from the pod.

  Two incidents stuck in my mind. The first was when I asked Mary Herlihy, a newly wed, how she was keeping. ‘Very well, Father,’ she said, ‘apart from the sickness in the mornin’s.’ Without thinking, I said, ‘Is it something you ate, Mrs Herlihy?’

  The second incident was when I brought a meeting of the Catholic Women’s Guild to a premature close by beginning my address with ‘Ladies and gentlemen’. When I told Mrs Pring, she consoled me with, ‘Never you mind, Father Neil. I’ve seen the members of that Guild and I think that’s a very good description.’

  By now, I was used to hearing confessions and no longer feared I would forget the formula of absolution in the middle. Preaching, while not a pleasure, had ceased to be a torment. I enjoyed taking Holy Communion to the elderly and the bed-ridden and they were always genuinely pleased to see me.

  It wasn’t so bad visiting people in their homes once I was inside. There was always a moment just before I knocked or rang when the devil put it into my heart to wonder whether I should call again some other day. I was particularly daunted by three old tenement buildings, known locally as Stonehenge, in the middle of my patch. They had no lights and no lifts. Most of the stone steps were chipped or broken and they smelled of carbolic or worse. Often there were no numbers on the doors. I had to take pot luck, whisper ‘Come Holy Ghost’, and hope to God I had come to the right place.

  It never mattered. Non-Catholics were invariably polite to ‘the cloth’ and keen to redirect me to where lapsed Caholics were hiding out. Sometimes I was sure they were zealous in helping me find my lost sheep out of spite, and I admit I was relieved whenever I received no answer. The Lord could not accuse me of not trying even if the results of my labours were negative.

  Continuing the habit of years I exchanged letters with my mother every couple of weeks. The family were well. My salary was only £40 a year—Fr Duddleswell paid me for the first quarter in half-crowns—but this was supplemented by Mass stipends which, at five shillings a time and sometimes more, brought in another £2 a week.

  There were other sources of income too. At St Jude’s there had recently been several weddings, a funeral and a dozen baptisms. Fr Duddleswell had officiated at all of them but he had shared out the proceeds, called stole-fees. He did not mention how he divided them but my portion was so generous I never doubted that he gave me half.

  Board and lodging were free so I was able for the first time in my life to send the occasional postal order to my younger brothers and sisters who were still at school. I missed them, especially on Bank Holidays when there was nothing for me to do and nowhere to go.

  There were other gains besides my new-found affluence. I had my very own radio. Though it was an old three valve model and crackled as if it were permanently on short-wave, it did enable me to listen to the news and find out what was happening in the world. In the seminary, I was not allowed a newspaper or magazine, except The Catholic Herald. I had read only half a dozen novels in my life. Their contents were far too trivial and worldly for one with his sights on eternal things.

  My greatest gain at St Jude’s was living alongside Fr Duddleswell and Mrs Pring.

  My parish priest, portly, bespectacled, balding—‘the mice of the years have been nibbling away at me thatch’, was how he put it—was a chauvinistic, maddening, leg-puller of a man. Yet for all his whimsies and occasional outbursts of irritation, the people of St Jude’s revered him. They knew he had their best interests at heart. As his friend who became mine, Dr Daley, said, ‘Our Charles wasn’t born biased to sainthood, that’s true, and he’s about as easy to read as a dice without dots. But he’s a lusty lover of God for all that and a good man truly.’

  Fr Duddleswell, who claimed to be as old and whiskered as a bog mist, taught me the value of discretion. ‘Open wide your heart, Father Neil,’ was his advice, ‘but fasten down the shutters of your mind. Should you turn your head inside-out in front of the good people where is the use? ’Twill only worry and confuse them and have they not enough complications in their lives already, like? Finally,’ a knowing wink, ‘remember that what a priest says travels.’

  As for Mrs Pring, she was a staunch ally who showed in a hundred quiet ways that she cared for us.

  ‘The two great mysteries of Christianity are the Holy Trinity and what goes on in Fr D’s h
ead,’ she said, blowing a strand of white hair out of her eyes. ‘He’s very devious, Father Neil. He never uses a nail when he can use a screw.’

  When I laughed, Mrs Pring insisted, ‘It’s true. Even his prayers go up to Heaven like this,’ and she made an ascending spiral with her fingers. ‘Another thing, if you want anything from that man ask him early. He’s like a mushroom. He gets worse as the day wears on.’

  With two such experts at invective living side by side there were bound to be rows at St Jude’s. These seldom involved me and the intensity of them, I sensed, was in some strange way an index of their mutual regard.

  I was even developing a fondness for urban life. After years of being surrounded by rolling hills, trees, tractors and grazing cows, the town, particularly our district of Fairwater, had not initially appealed to me. It was by comparison noisy, dusty and congested. Greys predominated instead of greens. The wide sweep of the sky was foreshortened and broken up by T.V. aerials and chimney pots. But I was now able to find my way around. I knew the names of the streets and was beginning to recognize some of the faces of those who walked them. In spite of the coolness creeping into the October air, and the premature yellowing of the leaves on the city trees, I was content.

  Ahead of me stretched the calmest months of the Church’s year. No Lenten fast. No long Holy Week services. Only Advent as we prepared for the Coming of the Lord. Then Christmas itself, the season of peace and goodwill.

  There was a rap on my door.

  ‘May the divil tear you from the hearse in front of all the funeral.’ Fr Duddleswell was not addressing me; he was concluding his conversation with Mrs Pring over the disappearance of his keys.

  Flushed with what he took for victory, he laughed: ‘I have had quite enough of her babblement. That female would quarrel with her own two shins.’

  He settled down to tell me how pleased he was to see me ‘coming out like a flower’. To broaden the scope of my apostolate, he had arranged a christening for me on the following Sunday.

  ‘Jimmy and Jeannie Dobbs are the parents, Father Neil. Good practising Catholics. Ditto the godparents. Nothing could be easier. And by the by, Father Neil, one important consideration.’

  ‘Yes, Father?’

  ‘Do not be so foolish as to leave your keys unchaperoned in this house. There is a lady tolerated here who has a propensity to conceal ’em in places no reasonable creature would pretend to look.’ His eye had a lost, far-away look. ‘Have I not just purchased her a new vacuum cleaner for the one she lost, and she plays a trick on me like that?’ He shook his head in secret despair. ‘Ah, but it conflaberates me marvellously to see her standing idly by, swallowing herself with a yawn.’

  Soon after he had gone, conflaberated, I could hear him exclaiming, ‘Will you stop acting the maggot, woman, and start fisting that broom around yon filthy floor.’ And Mrs Pring’s stout reply: ‘I’ll put your request on the long finger, Fr D.’

  I took my commission as a sign of Fr Duddleswell’s growing confidence in me. I opened up my Roman Ritual to remind myself of my duties.

  ‘Nothing could be easier,’ he had said, and on the face of it he was right. But my experience of christening was limited to pouring water over the head of a doll under the somnolent eye of the Professor of Moral Theology in my last year at the seminary.

  Canon Flynn had taught us that baptism is not valid if anything is used but water for washing. I remembered his emphasis on that phrase. ‘Not liquids made up of water,’ he said, ‘which people do not normally use for washing. Not tea, therefore, nor coffee, neither beer nor lemonade.’

  I took it for granted that Fr Duddleswell did not allow such beverages in his font.

  As Sunday afternoon approached, my chief concern was to pronounce the baptismal formula while actually pouring water over the head. Simultaneity of words and action was essential for validity. I kept wishing I’d had more time to practise on that doll.

  One thing I was determined to do was to read the formula from the book. According to Canon Flynn, it was only too easy after a while to repeat in Latin the confessional form, I absolve you instead of the baptismal form, I baptize you.

  After Sunday lunch, Fr Duddleswell said, ‘Make sure you put all the details in the book; names of the child, parents and godparents. And enter them legibly, Father Neil, not like Dr Daley writing out a prescription for mumps.’

  These seemed matters of small consequence in the light of other disasters I could think of.

  In the event, the christening was a relaxed family affair. Paul John Dobbs, three weeks old, was blue-eyed and as bald as a new lamb of the Flock should be. I read the vital words ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost’ while pouring over him a liquid no Devil’s Advocate would dare suggest was anything but Adam’s ale. The baby did not cry at any stage of the ceremony, not even when I put the salt of wisdom on his tongue or poured autumnal water on his shiny head.

  Afterwards, I filled in the baptism register, legibly, in capitals. As I closed the book, Mr Pickles, the godfather, coughed nervously and greased my palm with a pound note. I congratulated myself on the fact that everything had passed off better than I could have wished. And it was with a light heart that I accepted an invitation to the christening party at 1 Pimms Road, close by the railway junction.

  The reception was as uncomplicated as the baptism itself. There was tea, cucumber sandwiches and trifle. The new Christian was lying asleep in his cradle next to the settee. When after half an hour he awoke, Mrs Dobbs, a sturdy north country girl and former teacher, picked him up. She dipped her fingers in a square shaped jar and started rubbing his head.

  That was when my worries began.

  I edged my way over to where Mrs Dobbs was sitting. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked as casually as I could.

  ‘Rubbing his scalp, Father. A trick my mother taught me.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Vaseline. My mother swears it strengthens the roots.’

  I did not want to know what Vaseline was supposed to do because of my fear at what it had already done. Vaseline was waterproof. What if the baptismal water had not touched the baby’s head at all? Trembling, I said, ‘Do you do that often, Mrs Dobbs?’

  ‘Three times a day at least, Father.’

  ‘This morning, too?’

  She nodded, tickled by my interest in the number of times she rubbed her child’s head with Vaseline. I swigged my tea, blindly shook a circle of hands, and said goodbye.

  ‘Please come again soon, won’t you, Father,’ said Mrs Dobbs. It was an invitation for which I had reason subsequently to be grateful.

  I walked the sound proof Sunday afternoon streets wrestling with the overwhelming problem posed by that Vaseline. I was beginning to understand how Canon Flynn’s national reputation as a moralist had been won. He had warned us repeatedly that many mothers saturate their babies’ heads with creams, oils, lotions.

  ‘Take care,’ he had said, ‘that the water flows over the child’s scalp. Not merely the hair. Hair is composed of dead cells and is only doubtfully identifiable with the living child. See to it that there’s no protective coating of cream on his head otherwise’—one of his rare jokes—‘it might protect him from becoming a Christian.’

  The sacrament of baptism, I reflected, is a sign of washing. Unless the water flows and washes the body, there is no sacramental sign and thus no cleansing of the soul. God has a right, I have to admit, to lay down certain requirements for salvation. His demands are not harsh but his ministers, especially after six years of preparation, have their part to play. What if I have sent away a pagan instead of a Christian from the font?

  Madly, I switched from self-pity to self-loathing and back. My mother used to say that when a baby cries at a christening it is only the devil going out of him. An old wives’ tale. Still, how I wished Paul had screamed blue murder at the font.

  Surely God was not so arbitrary or cruel as to deprive a child of the
grace of baptism simply because a fond mother had spread a film of Vaseline on his head? Yet I had heard of a child being killed on a level-crossing while his mother was pushing him to church to be christened. No Catholic theologian, as far as I knew, had ever suggested that the poor little mite could get to Heaven. The consensus was that the child was borne to Limbo care of British Railways. Why, then, had the Church discarded the earliest and by far the safest method of baptism—by immersion?

  ‘Mighty pleased I am to see you taking the air, Father Neil.’

  It was Fr Duddleswell on a late afternoon stroll after his siesta. He was sporting the kind of floppy, broad-brimmed hat that artists wear. Would he be able to read the guilt written in capitals on my face?

  ‘Hope I did not interrupt your meditation, like?’

  I shook my head and agreed to walk with him to the Embankment. Soon, with our backs to the line of trees, we were leaning on the black wall overlooking the rust-coloured waters of the Thames. Beyond, on the south side, were wharves and cranes and tall chimneys spewing out grey smoke. I brought the conversation round to baptism by handing over the stole-fee for the christening. To accept any part of it would have been to add crookedness to incompetence.

  ‘How did it go this afternoon, Father Neil?’ Before I could answer, he said, ‘And tell me, now, did you write all the details clearly in the register?’

  I assured him of that. It set his mind at rest. How trivial the concerns and quiet the soul of the seasoned campaigner.

  ‘Funny thing, Father,’ I began.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Baptism. Making a Christian with a few words and less than half a pint of water.’

  ‘Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost,’ he replied, quoting Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. ‘John’s Gospel, Chapter three, verse five. Our Blessed Lord’s disciples must all have been baptized, saving His Holy Mother naturally who was conceived without original sin.’

  I put it to him that other Christians are not as careful as Catholics in administering the sacrament.