A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  Helen had lived in presbyteries until she married Bill Phipps, a solicitor. ‘He had to give a good account of himself to Uncle Charlie, I can tell you,’ she laughed. ‘Uncle Charlie even pressurized him into becoming a Catholic. He didn’t want any mixed marriage for “our Helen”, he used to say, and for once Mum agreed with him.’

  I felt sufficiently at ease with Helen to ask why her mother and Fr Duddleswell were always at one another’s throats.

  ‘That’s only a way of showing affection without competing with my father,’ Helen replied.

  I shrugged to show I didn’t understand.

  ‘You see, Father, mum only lived with my dad for a few weeks after they were married and she’s lived with Uncle Charlie for twenty years. They do clash, I know, but only like a pair of knitting needles.’

  It sounded to me more like an enigma than an explanation and a bit sad if the only way a priest and a woman can express affection for one another is by abuse. But just then Mrs Pring returned.

  ‘A real puzzle,’ she said.

  ‘He has no temperature and he’s not vomiting, and yet he feels terribly sick and dizzy. It’s either biliousness or food poisoning.’

  At the Clinton Hotel, he had eaten pork fillet whereas I had chosen lamb cutlets. The pork might have been off but that was unlikely in view of the Hotel’s high standard of catering and the speed with which Fr Duddleswell had succumbed after lunch. Only time would tell what was really wrong with him.

  For the next few days, I was Fr Duddleswell’s constant companion. I assisted him at Mass. I made sure he didn’t drop the chalice and I distributed Holy Communion for him.

  ‘’Tis a strange thing, Father Neil,’ he said. ‘Me head turns round faster when I am lying down than when I am standing up.’ He was sleeping well enough provided he was propped up in bed, and his appetite was normal.

  Mrs Pring decided that this time Fr Duddleswell wasn’t having us on and insisted that Dr Daley come and give him a thorough examination. This was arranged for 8 p.m.

  ‘How are you, Charles?’ Dr Daley asked as he removed his trilby and put his bag containing stethoscope and spare bottle of whiskey on the desk.

  ‘Less than middlin’, Donal.’

  ‘Describe your symptoms to me fully, Charles, in one word.’

  ‘Dizziness.’

  ‘That is the penalty surely of trying to follow your own thoughts, Charles.’

  ‘Not at all, Donal,’ Fr Duddleswell said, sinking down dismally into a chair. ‘I must have been wearing down me health unbeknowns.’

  ‘I know how it is,’ Dr Daley said, stroking his not inconsiderable paunch. ‘Going to ruin is silent work.’

  ‘I reckon,’ Fr Duddleswell said, taking a dim view, ‘I’m dying.’

  ‘Why are you doing that, Charles, when there is no need for it at all?’

  Fr Duddleswell, seeming not to hear, moaned on, ‘I am soon for the long road out of here.’

  Dr Daley, never above a bit of gentle leg-pulling on his own account, patted his patient’s bald head to get his attention. ‘Dear, dear, dear, is that a fact? Then you are the sturdiest dying man I ever came across.’

  ‘All the same, there is no health in me.’

  ‘Isn’t it a strange world we live in,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘It’s always the saints of God who are taken first.’ A shake of his head. ‘What with you one of the Holy Innocents and all.’

  For the first time Fr Duddleswell looked worried. ‘You agree with me, then, that the Almighty God is coming for me?’

  ‘The day God comes for yourself, Charles, He’d better bring a crane and a ten-ton truck.’

  As Dr Daley removed the patient’s spectacles and shone a torch in his eyes, Fr Duddleswell said, ‘Listen till I tell you. This whirring and stirring and spinning inside of me skull makes me feel I am one of the outgoing.’

  ‘Then happy for you, Charles.’

  ‘Kindly let me be the judge of what will make me happy. Last evening, I fell head-first on a stone floor and cracked it.’

  ‘God, Charles, and whatever happened to your head?’

  ‘I nearly died on the spot, Donal.’

  ‘Bless you for trying, anyway.’ The Doctor took out his tape measure. ‘I will size up your poor dear head for you while I’m about it, Charles.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘For your halo, what else?’

  ‘Donal, I am quite in earnest.’

  Dr Daley was not. In a sing-song voice, he recited, ‘“We are but pilgrims on earth with no abiding city. Life is but an apprenticeship for death. Dying is the least worry of a sincere, believing Christian.”’ He turned the torch to Fr Duddleswell’s ears. ‘I am quoting from your beautiful sermons to us over the years, Charles.’

  ‘I wish you to stop consoling me with pious platitudes and restore me to health.’

  ‘God, Charles, don’t you want to go to Heaven?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Bedad, begorra and bijabbers, as Barry Fitzgerald would say, not knowing any better.’

  ‘Donal, your diagnosis, if you please.’

  ‘Before that, my old Buddy, a drink to take the pain away.’

  Fr Duddleswell straightened up. ‘If I am to say me Nunc dimittis I can take the verdict like a man without a drink.’

  ‘It’s myself who needs the strengthener.’

  ‘Your eyes are inside-out and your head is over your shoulder already.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You are swaying, Donal, like a big bird on a little bough.’

  ‘I am steady as the American dollar and if not’—the Doctor closed his bag—‘what value can you put on my diagnosis?’

  Fr Duddleswell turned to me hastily before Dr Daley could depart without delivering. ‘Get him a drink from the cupboard there, Father Neil.’

  As I obeyed and handed Fr Duddleswell the bottle, Dr Daley, as if surprised, said, ‘Kind of you to offer, Charles.’ More seriously, ‘You’ll live—and I’ll send you a wreath if I’m wrong.’

  ‘And provide a donkey cart to take me to me last resting place, I suppose.’

  Noticing Fr Duddleswell’s parsimonious pouring, Dr Daley exclaimed, ‘Here is me suddenly attacked by the dry rot and there is yourself counting the drops, Charles. I wonder if——’

  ‘No more, Donal,’ Fr Duddleswell snapped.

  ‘There y’see, Charles,’ Dr Daley said with a great grin, ‘your reflexes are in perfect condition.’ Without removing his cigarette from his mouth, he downed his drink in one.

  ‘What is the matter with me, Donal?’

  ‘Labyrinthitis.’

  ‘It sounds as though I had a horned Minotaur prowling up and down inside me head.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with your head that turning it back to front like your collar wouldn’t cure.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Dr Daley explained that labyrinthitis is a virus infection of the inner ear, the mechanism that controls equilibrium. ‘In a word,’ he concluded, ‘and not to put too fine a point on it, you, dear Charles, are completely unbalanced.’

  ‘You are sure, Donal?’

  ‘I am not. Dogma is your business, Charles. I’m but a poor relation in the guessing game. But to make sure, here’s five shillings.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘For you to say a Holy Mass for yourself.’

  Fr Duddleswell pushed his hand aside to enquire how long the dizziness would last.

  ‘Who can tell. It’s not so easy to heal the sick as it is to forgive sins. But it usually clears up in ten days or so. In the meanwhile, stay upright as much as possible. Don’t drink or drive till I give you the all-clear and get yourself a walking stick. It’ll lengthen the odds on you falling over arsy-varsy.’

  ‘Sorry, Doctor,’ I said, not sure if I had heard correctly.

  ‘I apologize, Father Neil,’ Dr Daley said, ‘for using an obscure medical term. In layman’s language, I do not want our beloved P.P. pirouetting in the street like a drunk
en ballerina and falling bang on his bum.’

  The Doctor prescribed tablets and promised to arrange for X-rays at the Sussex, one of the finest teaching hospitals in London, to check his findings. ‘And one last thing, Charles.’

  ‘What is that?’

  Dr Daley took Fr Duddleswell’s hand, patted it fondly and looked him in the eye. ‘Goodbye, Charles.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “goodbye”?’

  Dr Daley, who had put on his hat and walked to the door, turned back. ‘I meant simply that I’m leaving.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Fr Duddleswell said angrily, ‘you are intimating someone else is leaving. Come back here this minute. I want you to leave decently, without saying goodbye.’

  ‘God, Charles, aren’t you mesmerized by your own mortality today?’

  ‘Au revoir, Donal?’ Fr Duddleswell said pitifully.

  ‘Dear friend, if it makes you feel any safer, Au revoir.’

  I followed Dr Daley into the hall. ‘Doctor,’ I whispered, ‘it’s not something more serious, is it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A tumour on the brain.’

  ‘I assure you that nothing has grown inside that adorable little head of his since he was seven years old.’

  ‘Then why,’ I asked suspiciously, ‘does he need a hospital check?’

  ‘Because, Father Neil, as you well know, that little black chessman in there won’t let me examine him properly. He’s too shy to even bare his chest to me.’ He stroked my arm. ‘Pity our poor Charles if ever he gets a splinter in his backside. He’ll have to carry it like his cross till the end of his days.’

  ‘Thanks, Doctor,’ I said. ‘Then I can tell Mrs Pring he’ll be with us for a bit yet.’

  ‘Heaven is still a good while off for that fine fellow. Tell Mrs Pring he’ll outlast an iron kettle. Besides,’—he winked at me—‘if I let him die premature, who would supply me in the after-years with the liquor?’

  ‘A sobering thought,’ I said.

  Three days later, Fr Duddleswell and I took a taxi to the Sussex. First, he was examined by Mr Taylor, a specialist who wore a kind of miner’s lamp in the centre of his forehead. Fr Duddleswell complained that he was as non-committal as a canon lawyer. After that, a nurse escorted us to a room where another white coated gentleman made Fr Duddleswell lie on a bed and directed warm water from a nozzle into his ear.

  Fr Duddleswell immediately noticed that pasted on the ceiling was ‘a lewd photograph’. True enough, smiling down on us from on high was a picture of a young woman in a low cut dress. Fr Duddleswell interrupted proceedings to demand an explanation for the strange location of such filth in a National Health Hospital.

  The doctor said that injecting water into his ear would cause his head to spin and the picture would revolve wildly. His job was to time with a stop-watch how long it takes the patient to recover normal vision.

  ‘Never,’ returned Fr Duddleswell, ‘while that hussy in impuris naturalibus is leering down at me.’ He closed his eyes firmly until they sent for a workman with a ladder to replace the pin-up with a picture of a Beefeater on duty outside the Tower of London.

  Fr Duddleswell could only manage water in one ear. When the Beefeater finally came back into focus, he felt violently sick. ‘Me stomach’s bid goodbye to its cage,’ he said, looking not white but green about the gills.

  When he had recovered, I supported him downstairs to the X-ray room. ‘Take your clothes off, please, sir,’ said a West Indian nurse.

  ‘I have not the slightest intention of peeling meself like a spud beneath the public gaze,’ retorted Fr Duddleswell, waving his stick at her. ‘’Tis an X-ray I am here for, not a Turkish bath.’

  According to the nurse, he only had to take off his spectacles, his upper garments as far as his vest and to step out of his shoes.

  Mumbling something about Soho and striptease, and being seen in ‘the altogether’ and not feeling like a human being at all without his clerical collar, he complied.

  A doctor appeared and pointed to a kind of operating table. ‘Help your old dad up there,’ he said to me. ‘Oh, and by the way, get rid of that lucky charm he’s wearing round his neck.’

  Fr Duddleswell kissed his miraculous medal passionately before handing it to me for safe custody.

  Once on the horizontal, he was strapped down to prevent him moving his head while being X-rayed. Just before the pictures were taken he summoned me to him and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Tell me truly, Father Neil, d’you reckon I will make a tolerable Frankenstein?’

  As he was putting his clothes back on I realized something else was wrong with him. Not only was he unsteady on his feet, he was wriggling violently from side to side like a snake sloughing off its skin.

  ‘What’s the matter, Father?’

  ‘’Tis the ultimate tragedy, Father Neil,’ he confided. ‘Me bloody collar stud has slipped down me back.’

  I encouraged him to keep wriggling and the stud was bound to reappear at the bottom of a trouser leg. After three minutes of contortions it was clear I’d been too optimistic.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘that the cursèd thing is stranded inside me Long Johns.’

  I looked at him in surprise. The weather was still far too mild to justify him taking to his winter woollies.

  ‘I was not aiming under any circumstances, you follow Father Neil? to parade up and down this hospital like Adam before the Fall.’

  There was nothing for it but to locate the stud and work it downwards. I fingered it as far as his left calf, after which it would not budge. I asked the coloured nurse if she could lend me a pair of surgical scissors. The only pair she had were the size of garden shears. I snipped a hole in the Long Johns and Fr Duddleswell was happy again. ‘Me curate has just removed a worrying little abscess, nurse,’ he explained.

  As we were leaving, the nurse took me aside and advised me to go straight home and put the ‘poor old chap’ to bed with a hot water bottle and a couple of aspirins.

  ‘See here, Father Neil,’ the poor old chap said to me the next morning, ‘me beauty of person has declined far enough. You will have to do it.’ When I asked what, he replied that his imitation of Boris Karloff had gone far enough. Because he distrusted the shakiness of his hand he was now sporting a five-day growth and ‘’tis against diocesan regulations to show a chin as tufted as a billy goat’s.’

  I offered to shave him with my electric razor but he professed abhorrence of such new fangled gadgetry. He would much rather use sand-paper, or a nail file.

  He drew me to the bathroom and opened up the cabinet where he stored his shaving gear. Out came a long, black handled cut-throat razor, lethal looking.

  ‘I can’t, Father,’ I stammered, ‘I’m maladroit, you know that.’

  ‘’Tis a scrubbish, mean man, so y’are, Father Neil.’ I acknowledged it. ‘A soft, wet potato.’ No description, I said, ever suited me better.

  Mrs Pring overheard us and volunteered for the job. The equipment was set up in her kitchen. A Toby jug for the soap mix was on the table and the leather strap hung from a hook on the door. ‘Keep stropping that razor, lad,’ Fr Duddleswell urged, ‘unless ’tis sharp, ’twill cut me to ribbons.’

  Mrs Pring sat him down on a straight backed dining room chair and draped a towel round his neck so that he looked like a criminal in the stocks. ‘I’ll never have a better opportunity,’ she giggled. She removed his spectacles and asked him if he wished to be blindfolded. ‘Any last requests, Fr D? Burial? Cremation?’ Then she lathered him to his eyes.

  I handed her the razor. She rubbed the edge lightly against her left index finger.

  ‘If I survive this, Father Neil,’ he confided, ‘I promise to publish me thanks to St Jude in The News Of The World.’ He looked up to Heaven. ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord,’ he prayed.

  Mrs Pring made a scything movement in the air and expressed satisfaction that now Father Neil had given her the tools, she would fin
ish the job.

  ‘He was led,’ intoned Fr Duddleswell, ‘like a lamb to the slaughter.’

  ‘And,’ took up Mrs Pring, ‘he opened not his mouth.’

  ‘Neither will I, woman, provided you do not wave that thing around like a crazy Samurai.’

  ‘Close it,’ she warned, pointing the razor at his frothing mouth, and he obliged by closing his eyes, too.

  For two minutes not a sound from Fr Duddleswell, only the crunch and scrape of the razor on his beard. ‘Not so much of your lip, please, Samson,’ rejoiced Mrs Pring, as she wiped the razor clean on a piece of tissue paper.

  He only yelled once when she very slightly grazed his chin. ‘Oh,’ cried Mrs Pring, ‘he’s haemorrhaging. Father Neil, go fast and fetch Dr Daley to patch up his pimple.’

  Her last great moment came as she was finishing off his upper lip. ‘Alo-ong came a blackbird,’ she sang ‘and’—zip—‘pe-ecked off his nose.’

  Fr Duddleswell rose unsteadily and walked off without a word. ‘One thing, Father Neil,’ Mrs Pring said to me with a wink which had more worry than humour in it, ‘there’s proof that you can get blood out of a stone.’

  Mrs Pring did not take her day off that week. It showed how anxious she was about him. She gave me an envelope containing a ten shilling note ‘for a Mass for Fr D’ and she confessed to saying not just the rosary, but the trimmings as well for his recovery.

  That evening I heard Fr Duddleswell groaning in his bedroom and went to see what was wrong.

  ‘Is not the divil fully bent on mocking me?’ he said. ‘You will never believe this, lad, but now I have the bloody toothache. Am I not stricken enough without fresh pains in me kneeders and grinders?’

  Mrs Pring’s hearing was very acute. She was at his side in an instant.

  He turned a swollen cheek to me. ‘Am I all the while to have that bold woman on sentry duty at me door, Father Neil, staring at me with both ears?’

  Mrs Pring declared she would call the dentist first thing in the morning and fix an appointment.

  ‘If I am to die, Mrs Pring,’ he said, upright against the pillow, ‘what is the purpose of me suffering first in the dentist’s chair?’