by Neil Boyd
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Father in a Fix
Neil Boyd
FOR THE ONE
IN WHOSE HONOUR
I THREW SNOWBALLS
AT THE MOON
Contents
ONE New Year’s Resolutions
TWO My First Fix of the Year
THREE The Birds and the Bees
FOUR Porgy and Bess
FIVE A Pig in Court
SIX A Back to Front Wedding
SEVEN Is the Corpse a Catholic?
EIGHT All at Sea
NINE The Pious Prisoner
TEN The Dinner Party
ELEVEN Fathers and Sons
TWELVE Fiddler under the Roof
THIRTEEN The Day of the Shamrock
About the Author
One
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
New Year’s eve. The lights were already out in the presbytery of St. Jude’s.
Stretched out on my bed, my hands behind my head, I was reflecting on how momentous a year 1950 had been.
Six years of seminary life had been crowned by a summer ordination; and then St. Jude’s in West London. I thought back to the pangs of my first confession, first sermon, first baptism, first reception of a convert. Six months had passed and, though I had aged ten years, I could scarcely kid myself I was an old pro yet.
On the floor above was our housekeeper, dear, kind, belligerent, white-haired Mrs. Pring. In the last hour before midnight I hoped she was sipping her crème de menthe or pink gin. She deserved it.
Strange and somehow reassuring that the pious Catholic was out of step with the world around. Next door, for instance, the noise of the New Year’s party came to me in waves of music and laughter. But Mrs. Pring, wanting to receive Holy Communion on January 1st, would lower her glass at the very moment the revellers in Billy Buzzle’s house raised theirs to toast the new year in.
‘He’s as lean as Lent,’ I had heard Mrs. Pring say of me, ‘and he pads around this house quiet as a giraffe.’ I admired the terseness and accuracy of her description as I looked down the long promontory of my blanketed body. Six feet from eye to toe and it looked all of six miles.
A window clunked open and a roar with a brogue to it: ‘Will you God-forsaken heathens quit that infernal racket and let a Christian sleep.’ That was the third time in less than twenty minutes. I doubt if next door they heard or cared about my revered parish priest.
Mrs. Pring had sketched Fr. Duddleswell, too, with a few strokes of the pen. ‘The inside of his head,’ she said, ‘must be shaped like a french horn.’ And another time: ‘That man could sit on a pot-scourer and slide up the banister rail.’
But Mrs. Pring had acquired her virtuosity with words only through twenty years of apprenticeship under the master of conscientious abuse. ‘That woman,’ he said to me once, scratching his sparsely covered dome, his blue eyes blazing behind his round spectacles, ‘that woman could put a tank out of action with a knife and fork.’
‘You’ve got the measure of her, Father,’ I had replied to boost his unflagging self-confidence.
‘’Tis true what you say, Father Neil, but ’tis very discouraging, all the same. Arguing with herself is like fighting a doughnut. I always end up in a terrible mess even when I win.’
How could anyone give off so many sparks and seem so harmless, even innocent? I never ceased to wonder at it. As Mrs. Pring observed in a more pacific mood, ‘In spite of his gall-stone face, he is that generous he would burn his harp to warm your toes.’
Another clunk. ‘Will you God-forsaken heathens …’
Tonight Fr. Duddleswell was as jumpy as a grasshopper. He had been like it since Christmas. He had even gone for me. When, in one slight particular, I had dared to question his infallibility he had rounded on me with, ‘If I died and rose again, you foreign buck, would you believe a word I say? You would not.’
Another time he called me ‘Nathanael, an Israelite in whom there is no guile’—and meant it as an insult.
As for the doggess of the house, she was taken to task for the incompetence of her cleaning and cooking as well as for the noise from her propeller (her tongue). ‘That blarney-tongued woman,’ he said, ‘could blast a tree just by talking to it.’
Mrs. Pring received it well as if it were part of a post-Christmas pattern she was used to. Whenever Fr. Duddleswell appeared, she slipped away murmuring, ‘Here comes the Great Depression’. And once, taking me aside, she said, ‘Wear your crash helmet for the last few days of the year, Father Neil.’
A barn owl cried eerily from the garden as if it too found the noise of merrymaking distasteful. Rain lashed against the window-pane. A white Christmas had turned to slush in the south, although the north of the country was still snowbound.
I momentarily took my hand out of the rag-bag of memories to pray about my New Year’s resolution. My advice to myself was brief: ‘Wise up.’ It was imperative that I shake off some of my naivety and become more a man of the world. That’s why I had decided to fork out threepence a day on The Times, read Cardinal Newman and Dostoievsky, and make a study of Impressionist paintings.
I looked at my watch. A few minutes to midnight. A distant bell rang out prematurely, a few fireworks went off. I switched on my radio at a low level to hear the chimes of Big Ben heralding the New Year. There was a commentary on the scene in Trafalgar Square. The Christmas tree, Norway’s annual gift to London, was illuminated as were the fountains. The war was still fresh enough in our minds for us to appreciate the lights.
Fr. Duddleswell had one more Wagnerian outburst before the midnight chimes, after which he was silent. The voices of the revellers in Trafalgar Square mingled discordantly in my ears with those in Billy Buzzle’s house as they boozily sang Auld Lang Syne.
In the Square, heavy rail fell and everybody scattered for shelter. Funny people, the English, I reflected. If a bomb falls, they stroll leisurely together to find out what’s wrong. A shower of rain and they race off panic-stricken in all directions.
I sat up in bed and raised an imaginary glass full of imaginary wine. ‘To 1951,’ I said. ‘God bless us all.’ And I drained it to the imaginary dregs.
January 1st, the Feast of our Lord’s Circumcision, was a holy-day of obligation. I celebrated the first two Masses at seven and seven-thirty. At each of them, I preached a two-minute sermon on honesty in money matters.
The sermon was inspired by a local grocer, Tony Marlowe, who told me that shop-lifting had reached epidemic proportions. ‘I’m losing so much stock,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of employing a lad just to keep an eye on the customers.’
My preaching had an unexpected result. After the seven-thirty Mass, Mrs. Murray, an elderly widow with the popping eyes of a thyroid sufferer, came into the sacristy. Red-faced, she admitted that she had stolen some stockings and would like, in the spirit of the new year, to give them back.
‘Would you help me, Father?’
‘Of course, Mrs. Murray,’ I said, doing my best to conceal my surprise.
Mrs. Murray was an excellent Catholic and very rich as well, a case of money marrying money. Why should she need to steal stockings? With the slight light-headedness that comes from wine on an empty stomach, I thought, What a rum old world this is.
Mrs. Murray wasn’t asking me to hear her confession so I asked what she wanted me to do.
‘Father, I wouldn’t have to admit publicly that I stole them, would I?’
‘Not at all, Mrs. Murray. No one is obliged to incriminate himself. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll drop in on you first chance I get and take the
m off your hands.’
‘Would you do that for me, Father?’ Her big brown eyes were glistening with appreciation.
I nodded. ‘Are there a lot, Mrs. Murray?’
‘A couple of pairs, Father.’
I smiled reassuringly. ‘No bother.’
She took a five pound note from her purse. ‘Would you say a Mass for me, Father?’
‘Of course.’
‘Pray, Father, that God will forgive me and that 1951 will see a new Margaret Murray.’
Almost half a year’s subscription to The Times, I calculated, as the lady left.
Later, I listened to Fr. Duddleswell preaching. His New Year’s theme was keeping control of the tongue.
‘You cannot unsay words,’ he mourned. ‘Words once spoken will not obligingly pop back down your throat. ’Tis like the toothpaste. Once out of the tube you cannot squeeze any of the stuff back in again.
‘The Apostle James tells us the tongue is a wild beast no man can tame. ’Tis a fire, a tiny spark from which will set a forest ablaze. That is the way of it, talk begets talk.
‘So, me dear people, let every one be swift to hear but slow to speak, and slow to anger. For the Apostle James promises, “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man.” The same is true of women, naturally. So let them stop telling tales taller than policemen and whispering snakes in one another’s ears!’
Fr. Duddleswell spoke so passionately, he was clearly addressing himself first of all. It wasn’t hard to guess his New Year’s resolution. His wild outbursts since Christmas were all accounted for. A last fling before he relapsed into a holy silence.
Even as he descended the pulpit he was put to the test. Francis Martin, a three-and-a-half-year-old who lived across the road, having eluded his parents, wandered over to the crib. He picked up the baby Jesus to cuddle him and, splash, there was a mess of multicoloured plaster on the floor.
‘Daddy,’ Francis cried, as Don his father advanced menacingly towards him, ‘Jesus died early this year.’
Fr. Duddleswell went back to the pulpit to say that the child had unwittingly delivered a symbolic sermon of his own. ‘What,’ he challenged, ‘would Christmas be like without Christ?’
The father was spared embarrassment, though not costs, and the child escaped a smack.
For a few days, until a replacement could be found, we had to make do with the Infant Jesus of Prague, who, in rich vestments and with a bejewelled crown perched on his head, didn’t seem altogether at home in the hay.
The same forgiving spirit characterized Fr. Duddleswell’s second Mass that morning. We had discovered earlier that a window at the back of the church had been broken by a flying beer bottle.
‘One of the Billy Buzzle’s guests last night,’ I suggested.
‘Father Neil,’ he had remonstrated, ‘Judge not and you will not be judged, you wicked young feller.’
Now through that same broken window one of Billy’s pigeons flew in. It perched on the baldachino above Fr. Duddleswell’s head as he celebrated Mass and made a clatter as if it had wings of wood.
Fr. Duddleswell proceeded unperturbed. In the pulpit he turned the visitation to advantage by telling the tale of Mohammed stuffing his ear with grain. A white dove perched on his shoulder and pecked at the grain so that his followers were convinced the Holy Ghost was speaking personally in the Prophet’s ear.
‘What is the Holy Ghost whispering in our ears this New Year’s day, me dear people? That we should get a grip on our tongues and judge even the heathen more generously than heretofore.’
I felt properly put in my place.
Dr. Daley, Fr. Duddleswell’s lovable, bibulous friend, was not slow in taking advantage of the truce.
‘A thousand blessings on you, Donal,’ Fr. Duddleswell said after Mass, ‘come and join us in me study for a cup of tay.’
‘Dear, dear, dear, Charles,’ the Doctor groaned. ‘You preach about kindness in speech and no sooner are you down from the altar than you are insulting me like I was a Protestant. I have come for a New Year’s alms, don’t you know?’
‘No liquor from me today, Donal, or any day. You are pretty well softened by the drink already, as far as I can see, with your head over your shoulder like a plaice.’
‘You refuse me blankly?’
‘I do.’
‘What a dry, disobliging man you are for one so full of sweet charity, you would even buy the flame-licked devil an ice cream.’
‘’Tis for your own good I am mean, Donal.’
‘Dear, dear, dear. You are an old Molly and no mistake. You speak in church like the white dove of peace and here you are dropping on me like a greedy gannet.’
Fr. Duddleswell took his hand. ‘I do apologize for the form me kindness has to take, me dear old friend.’
‘Accepted, but do not throw the evil eye at me while you’re saying it.’
‘God bless you, then, Donal.’
‘Here is myself,’ Dr. Daley said sadly, ‘solemnly purposed this year to fight against man’s oldest enemy …’
‘The devil?’I said.
‘Thirst, Father Neil.’
‘But, Donal, could you hot keep away from the mischief at least until the evenings?’
The Doctor frowned amusedly. ‘You know the old saying, Charles, a man without his dinner makes two for supper.’
Fr. Duddleswell nodded in acquiescence. ‘Very well, I will pour you a little slip of a drink since ’tis the new year. But you are incorrigible, all the same.’
‘Clever of you, Charles, without any medical qualifications, to confirm my own expert diagnosis.’
As Fr. Duddleswell poured, the Doctor was muttering happily, ‘God, doesn’t the stuff make your teeth water.’ He raised his glass to me. ‘You over there, here’s to you, Father Neil. May you live long enough to comb your silver locks.’
‘Thanks, Doctor. In this house, that’ll be in about two weeks time.’
The Doctor drained his glass. ‘Now I come to look at the pair of you soberly,’ he said, ‘I can see you are not looking as grand as you did last year.’
‘There was a heathen hooley and a half till the early hours next door,’ Fr. Duddleswell sighed. ‘I’m at the end of me whistle.’
‘If you die now, Charles, our loss is Heaven’s gain to be sure. I can just see it, the Almighty on His golden throne pointing a finger at you and saying, “Come, Charles Clement Duddleswell, come home to Myself. Pick up that harp there and brighten the place up for us.”
‘Donal.’
‘And all the choirs of angels and archangels tapping their wings in rhythm with your playing.’ He saw Fr. Duddleswell was not pleased, though his New Year’s resolution prevented him saying so. ‘You do want to be with God, Charles?’
‘I am in no tearing hurry.’
‘You are right, Charles. God knows you have important things here to do.’ And he held out his glass for a refill. ‘Why die, say I, when there’s sage upon the hill?’ He raised his glass to toast the donor. ‘May you see nothing worse in life, Charles, than your holy self.’ His glass emptied, he made for the door.
‘A happy New Year to you, Donal.’
‘And to both you Fathers.’ The Doctor paused, his hand on the door knob. ‘If you see your next door neighbour, Charles, will you give him a message from me?’
‘I will.’
‘Tell him a big thank you for entertaining me so royally last night.’
Soon after the midday Angelus, I was in my study when I saw Fr. Duddleswell in the garden. His face was like that of one recently bereaved.
Languidly he cast his bread upon the waters of the rain-drenched lawn until he was surrounded by pecking sparrows, starlings, thrushes, blackbirds and, of course, Billy Buzzle’s pigeons. He was doing his best to be at one with all living things.
He called across the fence to his arch-foe:
‘A very happy New Year even to you, Mr. Buzzle.’
A roseate Billy emerged unsteady on his pi
ns from his kitchen and stretched out a hairy hand. ‘And to you, Father O’Duddleswell.’ Billy’s black labrador, Pontius, also put up a muddy paw and my parish priest took that, too. ‘How’s tricks, Father?’
‘I am merry as a rope’s end, Mr. Buzzle.’
‘Hope our little get-together didn’t disturb your slumbers last night.’
Fr. Duddleswell caressed the hamster-like pouch under his left eye. ‘I was tucked up in bed so warm and well, so does it matter, Mr. Buzzle? Besides, a celebration like that, God be praised, happens but once a year.’
‘It’s nice to know,’ Billy said, ‘that the second half of the twentieth century has just begun.’
I had read my Times that morning. I could see the drift of Billy’s argument and knew he was out to rile his adversary.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Fr. Duddleswell said politely.
‘Today, January 1st 1951, sees the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, don’t it?’
‘It does? And it did not begin a year ago today?’ His motto was, Quick to hear and slow to speak.
Billy adjusted his stiff white cuffs. He looked a bit upset that the Third World War wasn’t already breaking out over the fence.
‘It’s a common mistake of the ignorant,’ he said, stirring things up. ‘They forget there is no year nought. So 100 A.D. belongs to the first century.’
‘And 1900 belongs to the nineteenth century,’ Fr. Duddleswell took up.
‘Right,’ Billy Buzzle said gloatingly.
‘Then the twentieth century did not begin on January 1st 1900 but on January 1st 1901?’
‘And, Father O’Duddleswell, as I was just at pains to point out—’
‘We have only just begun the second half of the twentieth century.’
‘Correct,’ Billy said, but by now the light of battle was dim in his eye.
‘Mr. Buzzle, may I shake your hand again.’ Billy allowed it. ‘I am most grateful to you for taking the trouble to explain such a conspicuously simple matter to one as dull-witted as meself.’
He left Billy standing there wondering how he had been drubbed as he wandered back to the house shaking his head sadly at the unexpected depths of his own ignorance.
