A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  In Class Five, the nines to tens, the form teacher was a charming, fair-haired Mrs Hughes. Her class knew their religion so well I could hardly make up my mind which of them could repeat the catechism fastest. Eventually I decided that a dark-haired girl in the back row had pipped the rest at the post.

  When I asked her question 125, ‘Where will they go who die in mortal sin?’ she fairly rattled off the answer, ‘They who die in mortal sin will go to Hell for all eternity.’

  I signalled to her to come to the front for her reward. Mrs Hughes whispered to me, ‘That’s Esther, Father.’

  ‘Esther,’ I said, giving her a silver threepenny piece in her grubby little hand, ‘I hope you will always know your faith as well as you do today. And may it stand you in good stead throughout your life.’

  There was a stunned silence in the class. I thought the other children did not agree with my verdict or were jealous.

  When Esther had returned to her place nodding to right and left—with her tongue out, I suspected—Mrs Hughes whispered again, ‘Esther is Jewish, Father.’

  Out of the corner of my mouth, I whispered back, ‘Are there any other non-Catholics, Mrs Hughes?’

  ‘Only one, Father.’

  ‘Would you point to whoever it is?’

  Mrs Hughes gently stabbed herself with her finger. ‘I’m a Methodist,’ she said.

  During that Christmas term I grew to like Mrs Hughes’ class best of all. They were disciplined and yet alive and full of fun. The top class became so surly and disagreeable they refused to answer any of my questions even for sixpence. Not wanting to see them caned for a lack of interest in the religion of love, I was reduced to asking Mr Bullimore, the form teacher, to get them to write out their questions and put them in a box to which I alone had the key. I promised the children anonymity. Some of the questions were obscene, some merely abusive. Most were illiterate.

  One contribution read: ‘If its a free cuntry why do I have to go to school eh? and drink milk, call that a free cuntry eh?’ Another provided me with a piece of unwanted domestic information: ‘In our hous we call dad Mosis cos he gives us 10 comandments evry day befour brekfirst.’ Another was a plain affirmation: ‘I don’t like going to school bicause there’s nothing to do when you get there except learn lots of things I don’t wanner know. Another thing if they put old Bully on the telly I would switch him off before he came on.’

  Interestingly enough, only the obscene ones were signed. No doubt with someone else’s name.

  On the morning after Fr Duddleswell had been ‘burnt in more than effigy,’ I entered Mrs Hughes’ class hoping for a taste of sanity. The children were their usual enthusiastic selves. Before I could finish any of my November questions on death, judgement, Hell and Heaven, they were bouncing their bottoms on their benches with vibrating arms outstretched and calling ‘Please, Father, please, Father.’

  When I had adjudged Philip in the front row to be the winner, I asked them a few more unscripted questions. ‘I don’t suppose any boy or girl here has ever been to a funeral?’

  Philip, of course, had been to everything. ‘Please, Father. I went to a terrific funeral once.’

  ‘Really, Philip?’

  ‘Yes, Father. I saw these four dead men carrying a big box.’

  Johnny, a Jamaican lad, said in a loud drawl, ‘Souls don’t get buried, do they, Father?’

  ‘No, Johnny,’ I assured him, ‘souls go straight home to God. We only bury bodies.’

  Johnny looked shattered at that. ‘What do they do with the heads, then?’

  Up leaped Robert, his hand in the air. ‘Last year our granny came and died with us, Father.’ Before I could offer him my condolences, he added joyfully, ‘But Fr Duddleswell made sure she was dead before he planted her.’

  Lucy Mary had more melancholy tidings. ‘When Suzy my rabbit died and went to Heaven, Father,’ she murmured, ‘she left her carrot behind.’

  Even this news did not dampen the youngsters’ spirits for long. Mark said, ‘Please, Father, our grandma died and went to Heaven and everyone’s pleased but not grandma.’

  Frank, a fat boy in long trousers, turned the tables on me by asking, ‘My gran said when she gets to Heaven she’ll pray for us. What makes her so sure, Father?’ I said I could not answer that because I didn’t know his gran.

  ‘You must know her, Father,’ Frank insisted, ‘she wears glasses and brown shoes.’

  ‘Mrs Phipps, Father,’ said Sean breathlessly, ‘Mrs Phipps who lives next door is dead but Dad says there’s nothing else wrong with her.’

  I was about to tell him that many people die only of death but satisfied myself by assuring Sean his Dad would not have said what he did if it wasn’t true.

  Sean had an afterthought. ‘She’s moved now, Father.’

  To stem the tide a bit, I asked them what happens to people when they die. ‘In your own words, please, children.’ That was inviting trouble.

  Patricia, who looked like a little barn owl, spoke up for the rest of the class. ‘If their soul’s white they go to Heaven, if it’s black they go to Hell and if it’s got measles they go to Purgatory till it clears up.’

  I glanced at Mrs Hughes to enquire whether she was trying to undermine Catholic teaching on life after death. She shrugged her shoulders disclaiming any responsibility for these heterodox opinions.

  That was when I glimpsed Jimmy Baxter sitting at his desk to my right with tears running down his cheeks. It struck me that Jimmy, one of the brightest in the class, had not contributed anything that morning.

  Ken piped up from the back row next to Esther. ‘When my grandpa went to Heaven, Father, he was very, very old so I don’t s’ppose he’ll last there long, will he?’ I was too distracted by Jimmy’s tears to reply to that, or to correct Judy who called out, ‘Stupid! In Heaven everybody’s made of stainless steel, aren’t they, Father?’

  ‘Please, Father,’ shouted Dean, the terror of the class, ‘when you go to Hell can you take your dog with you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said, still looking at Jimmy Baxter out of the corner of my eye, ‘Why should dogs suffer?’

  ‘Mine likes it in front of the fire, Father.’

  Mrs Hughes called things to a halt by telling the children to get on with their sums. It gave me the chance to ask her what was the matter with Jimmy. She referred me to the Headmistress.

  Miss Bumple, of uncertain age, had been teaching long before systematic training had been devised for teachers. She was an amiable eccentric. Somewhere in her long campaign, she had been decorated with a cauliflower ear, the only one I had ever seen on a woman. She still wore an earring in it. Her mother had had her ears pierced when she was a baby and it wasn’t like Miss Bumple ‘to waste the holes’.

  Her eyebrows were white but her short cut hair was dyed an unnatural black. Fr Duddleswell had briefed me on her vocabulary which consisted basically of permutations of the one word ‘egregious’. ‘Egregious’ for Miss Bumple meant ‘normal’. ‘Highly egregious’ meant ‘entertaining’. ‘Exceedingly egregious’ meant ‘very funny’. ‘Excessively egregious’ meant ‘intolerable’, ‘beyond a joke’.

  For all her strangeness, Miss Bumple, according to Fr Duddleswell, was entirely trustworthy. Whatever you said to her in confidence went in one of her ears and was corked by the other.

  On this November 6th, the Head, dressed in her usual tweeds, was in her jumble sale of an office surrounded by cups and trophies that looked gold until closer inspection revealed them to be of tarnished silver.

  Taking a big pull on her cheroot, she rose to greet me. ‘Fr Boyd,’ she exhaled all over me with gusto, ‘delighted.’ When she spoke she tightened her cheek muscles and pursed her lips as if she were about to blow a trumpet. Her voice, with an East London edge to it, was both musical and compelling. She grabbed my hand and almost wrenched my arm out of its socket.

  I told her I was worried about Jimmy Baxter. ‘Dearie me,’ she said, ‘that is not exceedingly egregi
ous.’ Jimmy’s grandfather, Mr Bingley, had been poorly for some time and now was proper poorly. Jimmy was very attached to him. Since his dad had died, Jimmy had been brought up by his grandfather.

  When I offered to help, Miss Bumple surprised me by her insistence that I was no use in this instance. Jimmy was simply frightened that because his grandfather did not believe in God and never went to Church he would go to Hell when he died.

  ‘If, Fr Boyd, you tell children there is a Hell and that unrepentant sinners go there,’ trumpeted Miss Bumple, ‘they are bound to draw their own conclusions. Mr Bingley, you see, is a lapsed Catholic. This makes the matter’—she loosed a huge current of smoke—‘excessively egregious.’

  I returned to the presbytery in an unhappy frame of mind. Mrs Pring informed me that ‘the Rooster’ was in the garage. I found him lying on an old rug underneath his car. When I hailed him, he slid out and eyed me from the ground. He had on a Churchillian boiler-suit, his face and hands were covered in oil.

  Bingley, J.J., he told me, had once been a model Catholic. His misfortune was at the age of twenty-five to marry a girl who turned out to be a whore. She only cooked him a dozen dinners before she walked out in favour of a Russian sailor. After ten years, J.J. had divorced her and married again outside the Church. His second wife was a Catholic, too. It was the great sorrow of her life that she was barred from the sacraments. J.J. took a more truculent line. He repudiated the harshness of the Church’s teaching, renounced his faith in God and joined the ranks of the Friday meat-eaters. He even became a paid-up member of the Communist Party. Maureen, his wife, had insisted all the same in bringing up the two girls as Catholics. The elder of the two, Janice, was Jimmy’s mother.

  I remembered that Mr Bingley was a widower. ‘Hadn’t that made a difference?’

  ‘Only for the worse, Father Neil. I anointed Maureen and buried her meself. J.J. would not attend her funeral. It made him even more bitter to learn that now his woman was taken from him he was free to return to the Church. He would not. If his wife was deprived of the sacraments throughout their marriage, so would he be till his dying day. And I believe he is unshaken in his resolve. He is one sinner who will not repent.’

  When he saw my eagerness to help he let me go to the hospital with the warning not to be disappointed if I did not succeed. ‘J.J. is as deaf as the divil and as loggerheaded a fellow as you are ever likely to meet.’

  Jimmy’s mother was by her father’s bed at the end of a long ward. From a distance I could see them chatting. Mrs Baxter was tucking in the bedclothes and patting the pillow. When she caught sight of me, I thought I saw both pleasure and apprehension on her face.

  I introduced myself. Mr Bingley was high up in the bed with his long white hair trailing on the pillow. His skin was taut over his face as though it were covered with a white stocking. And he stared right through me.

  It was an unnerving experience. Nothing I said made any impression on him. Not a smile or the blink of an eyelid. As far as he was concerned I did not exist.

  I spoke to Mrs Baxter. ‘Would you leave us for a few moments, please?’ Mrs Baxter immediately rose up and went.

  ‘Mr Bingley,’ I said, stretching out my hand. ‘I’m Fr Boyd from St Jude’s.’

  He made no move to take my hand. Self-consciously, I withdrew it.

  ‘I’ve come because of your grandson,’ I began hesitantly. ‘Jimmy’s very worried about you. He’s crying during his lessons at school. I was wondering if I could help you. In any way at all. No?’

  The old man’s answer was less than No. He could have been carved out of granite. After a couple of minutes, I gave up, murmured ‘God bless you’ and joined Mrs Baxter in the corridor. She was crying. She knew her father hadn’t long left. Jimmy, she said, would never get over it if her father died without confessing his sins so he could go to Heaven with grandma.

  With nurses passing to and fro nearby, I explained as best I could that only God knows what goes on in a man’s heart. Someone could receive the sacraments and still be a bad man. Another could refuse the sacraments and still be humble and acceptable to God like the publican in Jesus’ lovely parable.

  It consoled her a little. ‘But how can I explain that to a nine-year-old, Father?’ she asked. ‘Jimmy keeps saying grandpa commits a mortal sin every Sunday and Holy day by not attending Mass and I say it’s not a new mortal sin each time, Jimmy.’ She looked up at me to enquire whether or not she was propounding heresy. ‘It’s not a lot of mortal sins, is it, Father?’ I didn’t reply. ‘Isn’t it just one? A big one, perhaps? But just one?’ She was pleading with me for a merciful reply.

  ‘Once is enough,’ I said hedging. I followed it with the only answer that would fit the situation, slightly modified from The Confessions of St Augustine. ‘It’s impossible for Mr Bingley to perish when his little grandson is crying for him.’

  Mrs Baxter said, ‘Father, even if God is good to my father and he goes to Heaven, you won’t be able to bury him with mum, will you?’ I was not sure what Fr Duddleswell would say to that. ‘It hurts, Father, the thought that dad won’t be buried by a priest and they’ll be separated in death after all their years together here.’

  ‘Why don’t you put that to your father, Mrs Baxter?’

  ‘I have. He says my mum is only dust and ashes now and there’ll be no separation because after death there’s nothing.’

  Fortunately, the ward sister was in her office. She confided to me that Mr Bingley was not expected to last more than a day or two. He could go any time. The drugs were very effective in taking away the pain and occasional whiffs of oxygen perked him up but there wasn’t any long term hope.

  I reported on my visit to Fr Duddleswell. He wasn’t surprised. ‘Do not blame yourself, Father Neil,’ he said, ‘for not getting a move out of him. You had about as much chance of success as a water-diviner in Hell.’

  He was visibly shaken, all the same, to learn that the end was near. He slipped out of his boiler suit and went to clean up. After that, I expected him to race off to the hospital but he made no move. He went into the church to pray. After a quick lunch, he did not take his siesta but returned to the church and stayed there until tea time on his knees. After tea, he proclaimed that at last he was spiritually ready ‘to have a go at J.J.’

  Jimmy was with his mother at Mr Bingley’s bedside. We were hesitant about breaking up a family group that would soon be dissolved by a sterner hand. I could not help admiring the old fellow for the strength of his convictions.

  Fr Duddleswell went into the ward and soon Jimmy and his mother kissed Mr Bingley and came to join me. From afar, we saw Fr Duddleswell earnestly talking to Mr Bingley who treated him as he had earlier treated me. I could feel mother and child next to me grow tense with disappointment at the total absence of response.

  Then Fr Duddleswell bent over and whispered something in Mr Bingley’s ear. From then on, it was like watching someone on the receiving end of one of Jesus’ instant miracles. The patient immediately sat up and spoke. Fr Duddleswell listened intently and bent over him again, at which Mr Bingley became quite voluble. We couldn’t make out what was being said but he and Fr Duddleswell were deep in conversation. Fr Duddleswell brought it to an end by raising his hand high above the patient’s head and bringing it down so sharply that had it landed it might have despatched him aloft straight away. We relaxed. It was only the first part of a huge blessing.

  The Baxters’ tears turned into tears of joy. Fr Duddleswell returned like a conquering hero. Jimmy spoke in secret to his mother and she gave him a silver threepenny piece which Jimmy fixed on Fr Duddleswell’s nose. He couldn’t keep it there and when it fell to the floor Jimmy pocketed it.

  ‘Better late than too late,’ said Fr Duddleswell warmly. ‘You can both be content, like. I have done everything for him in me power. You can safely leave the rest to the Almighty.’

  Mrs Baxter wanted to know if her father could now be buried in her mother’s grave. Fr Duddleswell to
ld her to ask Jimmy, and Jimmy said of course he could because he was a Catholic again.

  On the way home, Fr Duddleswell said buoyantly, ‘Nil desperandum, Father Neil, Never give up, like.’

  His long vigil before the Blessed Sacrament had paid off. I confessed I thought there was no chance of the old chap repenting. I had never seen anyone so hardened against the grace of God.

  Fr Duddleswell recalled a phrase from a curious French writer Charles Péguy, a Catholic who could not bring himself to believe in Hell. ‘“The appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”, Father Neil. An apt description of the case in question, would you not say?’

  I said I presumed he would return later and clean up, so to speak, by giving Mr Bingley Extreme Unction, Viaticum and the Papal Blessing.

  ‘To be perfectly honest with you, Father Neil, ’twas not entirely as it seemed.’ What had caused Mr Bingley to sit up was Fr Duddleswell whispering in his ear, ‘J.J., you have been a bloody fool all your life and you will be a bloody fool to the bitter end.’

  I was astonished. God’s mercy must be appallingly strange if abuse can bring a lost sheep back to the fold when kindness fails. ‘What did he actually say to that, Father?’

  ‘He cast dreadful aspersions on the honour of me mother, Father Neil. Then ’twas’—my parish priest was blushing—‘then ’twas I bent down again and … I bit his ear, God forgive me.’

  ‘But at what point did he repent, Father?’

  ‘Did not St Peter, the Prince of the Apostles himself sever Malchus’ ear completely in the Garden?’

  ‘With a sword,’ I said, ‘not his teeth. But when did he repent?’

  ‘Did I ever say to you he repented, now? Did he not swear at me and I at him? And did he not threaten to do unspeakable things to me if I did not sling me hook? That was when I nearly brought me fist crashing down on his head. Only the appalling strangeness of God’s mercy sweetened me fury and transformed me blow into a benediction.’