Father in a Fix Read online

  ‘Something like. Miss Bumple advised we bring in a local nurse or midwife.’

  I said I saw the wisdom of that but he disagreed.

  ‘’Tis not just a question of describing the ins and outs and roundabouts of the anatomy, you follow? You must inculcate sound Catholic attitudes to sex.’

  ‘You must?’ I was suddenly suspicious of the second person singular.

  He never used the thin end of a wedge. ‘No, Father Neil, you.’

  That was when I rebelled and did my Lucifer-like ‘I-will-not-serve’ piece. To no avail, as I have hinted already.

  ‘You admitted the project was very interesting to you, Father Neil. You really should have the courage of your convictions. I will accompany you to the pet shop before you give your first lesson to the tribe’ of darlin’ little savages.’

  He pleged himself not to put me in for a job without providing the necessary tools.

  He went to his bookcase and, having blown the dust off, handed over a couple of Catholic Truth Society pamphlets: Sex And The Catholic and The Pope’s Teaching on Marriage And Procreation.

  ‘The latest?’ I enquired, noticing they were dogeared and jaundiced.

  ‘Some things do not change, thank the dear Lord,’ he replied sternly.

  He also promised me two animals from the petshop as a kind of classroom visual aid to interpersonal relationships.

  In my study, I leafed eagerly through the pamphlets. I knew as much about the human anatomy as about mediaeval weaponry. Afterwards, the equation was about the same. The pamphlets, full of pious phrases, lacked pictures or any precise information.

  The Penny Catechism let me down, too. Under ‘Virtues and Vices’ it listed lust and the sin of Sodom but it didn’t elaborate. The commandment against adultery forbade ‘whatever is contrary to holy purity in looks, words or actions’. Immodest plays and dances came into this category ‘and it is sinful to look at them’. Likewise ‘immodest songs, books and pictures because they are most dangerous to the soul and lead to mortal sin.’ Not much help there with the nines and tens.

  Since The Catholic Dictionary jumped in cowardly fashion from ‘The Seven Gifts of The Holy Ghost’ to ‘Sexagesima’ I went to the library to borrow A Manual Of Practical Medicine. The gumchewing girl at the desk laconically told me it was a reference book and couldn’t be taken out except by thieves.

  I carried the tome back to a corner and secretly copied diagrams and mugged up terms like ‘vas deferens’—which at least sounded polite—and ‘Fallopian tubes’. I learned things that quite shook me, so I could scarcely imagine how I was going to put them over to God’s darlin’ little ones.

  ‘Of course,’ I consoled myself, ‘sex and cycles and puberty are all very well. My job is to concentrate on sound Catholic—what was Fr. Duddleswell’s word?—pl—attitudes.’

  ‘Is that a hamster, Father Neil?’

  I glanced sickly at the fur, the claws, the large cheek-pouches of the creature in the cage. ‘I think so Father.’

  ‘I will buy him for you, Father Neil. And the other in the next cage.’

  The second rodent was lying under straw. Only its nose and whiskers were visible.

  ‘Father,’ I whispered, so the assistant couldn’t overhear, ‘how do you know which is male and female?’

  ‘I do not,’ he whispered back, ‘but I am certainly not asking an assistant about the sex of hamsters. He will think us cranky or worse. Besides, I am not buying them to perform for you.’

  He put on his determined look, pointed at the two rodents and said, ‘I’ll take a pair of ’em. Put the big one in with the little critter hiding in the straw.’

  ‘Sure you want them both in the same cage?’ the assistant asked.

  ‘I do,’ Fr. Duddleswell answered. ‘I am no prude.’

  ‘Amen, Reverend,’ and the assistant did as he was told.

  Fr. Duddleswell escorted me to the school that Monday morning carrying the cage.

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ I said pointedly at the gates.

  ‘Thank you, Father Neil.’ Instead of turning to go home like a gentleman, he marched ahead of me to Mrs. Hughes’ class.

  This was caddishness of a high order. First he insisted I give sex-instructions to the children and now he intended sitting in and witnessing my humiliation. Having Mrs. Hughes, a pretty young married woman present was already torture enough.

  With Fr. Duddleswell and Mrs. Hughes seated on the side, I took my place behind the desk. ‘Catechism question number 228, “Are we bound to obey the Church?”’ It was best to establish from the start who was in charge.

  Thirty feverish arms were raised in the air.

  ‘Yes, Philip.’

  Philip in the front row stood up and chanted, ‘We are bound to obey the Church, because Christ has said to the pastors of the Church, “He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that”’—a hesitation—‘“disgorges you, disgorges Me.”’

  ‘Not disgorges, Philip,’ I said. ‘Anyone else?’

  Fat Frank proposed, ‘Disguises, Father. He that disguises you, disguises Me.’

  Jimmy Baxter set the rest right. ‘He that despises you, despises Me.’

  We continued working through the commandments of the Church as slowly as I could reasonably allow. At the end, I judged that two children had tied for first place in the speed with which they parroted the answers: Jimmy Baxter and Patricia, a girl with big glasses perched on a thorn of a nose.

  I called them out to the front—anything to delay matters for a few moments more—and tossed a silver threepenny piece high in the air to decide the winner: heads for Jimmy, tails for Patricia.

  I heard Fr. Duddleswell’s chair creak and glanced across to see him clasping the cage and tensing himself in expectation of delights to come.

  It was fatal taking my eye off the coin. As I lifted my head, the threepenny piece dropped into my open mouth. It barely touched the tip of my tonsils en route down my gullet. Instinctively, I swallowed like an ostrich and knew the coin was not recoverable for a day or two.

  There was a few seconds’ silence and then pandemonium in class. ‘Where’s it gone?’ ‘Fr. Boyd’s a magician.’ ‘Was it heads or tails?’ Patricia’s mournful cry, ‘He’s eaten my threepenny piece.’ Wittiest was Dean’s, ‘Cripes, he’s put his mouth where his money is.’

  Fr. Duddleswell came across, handed me the cage and three pennies. ‘So you do not choke altogether, Father Neil.’

  Jimmy won the next toss and returned to his place. Patricia broke down saying she was sure the coin had come down tails. Mrs. Hughes embraced and soothed her, and I turned with relief to Adam and Eve.

  In the beginning of time, I told the children, God made the first man. But because Adam was lonely, God put him to sleep, took one of his ribs and made a woman out of it. Afterwards, Adam wasn’t lonely any more. He had someone like himself to talk to: Eve, his wife.

  I realized with the first question, that the threepenny piece was the nicest thing I was likely to swallow all week.

  ‘This Eve, Father, was she Adam’s daughter?’ There was a look of spite on Patricia’s face as if she was determined to make me pay for consuming her reward.

  ‘No, Patricia.’

  ‘Brother and sister, then?’

  ‘No, Patricia.’

  ‘They must’ve been. They had the same father, didn’t they?’

  ‘God, you mean?’ I said. ‘Yes. But they didn’t have the same mother.’

  ‘That’s naughty, isn’t it, Father,’ Patricia persisted, ‘having the same father and not the same mother?’

  I explained that Adam and Eve didn’t have any mother but Patricia looked really pleased with herself for opening the flood-gates.

  Fat Frank asked, ‘Was Adam and Eve a Catholic, Father?’ and Robert said, ‘Was they married, Father?’

  I hedged. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘What manner’s that?’ Patricia asked.

  ‘In church, Father?’ Robert wanted
to know.

  ‘No, Robert.’

  Dean, a lad always in trouble with the police and destined to cause me troubles of my own that week, put in, ‘The bride wore white fig leaves, didn’t she, Father?’

  ‘Dean!’ I snapped and looked angrily at him as he stood there with his socks down to his ankles, his shorts down to his shins and his greasy hair shooting off in all directions.

  Dean, undeterred, said, ‘My mum says when she got hitched, she put a gold ring on my dad’s nose.’

  ‘Dean!’

  ‘My old man tells a story about Adam putting his arm round Eve and she slaps his face and he says, “Why you do that, Evie? I was only tickling my rib.”’

  Mrs. Hughes now had Dean by the arm and was marching him to the corner where he was left to stand facing the wall for the remainder of the lesson. From time to time, he looked over his shoulder and muttered, ‘Boring. Ain’t it boring?’

  Patricia, meanly referring back to a catechism question we had been through together not long before, said, ‘The Church says it’s a mortal sin to marry within degrees of kindred and not in front of a priest.’

  ‘Patricia, there weren’t any priests in those days,’ I said as kindly as I could. I wish I had given her threepence as a consolation prize. ‘Adam and Eve weren’t related. It would only be a sin for them to marry if they were brother and sister.’

  Patricia smiled crookedly. ‘Ah, so it was their children who committed mortal sins by marrying each other, then.’

  I looked up at the ceiling but no answer to the conundrum was written there. It had never occurred to me before that if Adam and Eve were the first and only parents of the human race, there must have been quite a bit of incest early on.

  ‘See these hamsters,’ I said.

  ‘Do you like being alone, Father?’ Barbara, an Indian girl with big brown almond eyes was genuinely concerned about me. ‘Even Tarzan had a mate.’

  ‘I’m not alone,’ I said, really thrown by this time. ‘I live with …’

  I stopped when I saw that Fr. Duddleswell, his head in his hands, was rocking to and fro.

  ‘See these hamsters, children.’ I was feeling desperate. ‘Male and female. They are company for one another. It’s not good for hamsters to be alone. They love one another and from their love proceed little baby hamsters. God said to all living things, “Multiply and fill the earth”.’

  No sound in the class. Even Patricia relented, sensing that things were not going well for me.

  ‘So, children,’ I concluded. ‘Thank you for your very intelligent questions.’

  I went over to Dean and touched his shoulder, convinced he must be subdued by now. ‘Back to your place, Dean.’

  ‘Did you ever hear the one about Adam, Father—?’

  ‘No thank you, Dean.’

  ‘When he finds Evie squatting under a tree?’

  ‘No, Dean.’ I was really quite interested but I didn’t dare show it. ‘Children,’ I said, ‘keep an eye on the hamsters for me. Feed and water them. And I’ll see you tomorrow, God willing.’

  We recited a Hail Mary together and I left in company with Fr. Duddleswell.

  ‘Well, Father,’ I sighed on the way home, ‘what do you think of that?’

  ‘I now know why our blessed Lord said, Suffer little children to come unto me.’ A bit farther on: ‘Father Neil, you owe me threepence.’

  I acknowledged the debt.

  ‘Not the coin you mislaid, mind. I do not want any of your filthy lucre.’

  ‘Where is the other hamster, Mrs. Hughes?’

  Fr. Duddleswell, in his mercy, had decided to let me go it alone. I was feeling in a more confident mood as I gestured to the solitary rodent nibbling away in his cage.

  Mrs. Hughes took my arm and whispered, ‘It wasn’t a hamster, Father. The one under the straw must have been a mouse.’

  ‘Must have been?’

  ‘The hamster ate it, Father.’

  So much for the noble themes of yesterday: ‘The end of loneliness’, and ‘Multiply and fill the earth.’

  After completing the catechism session quickly, I addressed the class:

  ‘Now, children, you are not going to be little boys and girls all your life. You will grow up—’

  Johnny, a Jamaican lad, interrupted me. ‘When I grow up, Father, I wanna be a bully.’

  ‘I want to be a snake or a policeman,’ an unrepentant Dean called out.

  ‘Tell me why, Dean,’ I said wearily. ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘So I can frighten the pants off my dad.’

  Jimmy Baxter, Dean’s best friend, said, ‘Don’t take any notice of him, Father, he has to show off because he’s no good at anything else.’

  Mary Fitzgerald, a thin angular girl, rose to her feet like a snake that has swallowed a plate of bones. ‘When I grow up, Father, my mummy wants me to be very, very holy.’

  ‘A saint, Mary.’

  She shook her head. ‘Much, much holier than that.’

  ‘What could be holier than a saint?’ I said.

  ‘When I grow up, my mummy wants me to be the virgin Mary.’

  I grabbed the reins again. ‘When you grow up, children, you will be men and women. You won’t want to be alone all your life. You will get married. You will become mummies and daddies yourselves.’

  ‘I like cuddling my mum,’ Dean volunteered, ’cos she wears cushions in front.’

  ‘You will become mummies and daddies,’ I repeated.

  Lucy Mary told me, ‘My mummy’s gone to the dentist to have a baby out.’

  I started to explain that women don’t have babies at the dentist’s when Dean again intervened with, ‘Babies should tell us where they come from ’cos they’d been there, ain’t they?’

  Burt said, ‘My mum carried me around for years in her pouch and then a sergeant in the hospital put a zipper in it and let me out.’

  Debbie stood up. ‘My dad told me that I started life as tiny seed, Father, so I’m quite lucky I didn’t grow into a tree or something.’

  Now Sean was on his feet. ‘D’you know what, Father? When our baby cries, mum sticks him quick inside her shirt.’

  Rebecca capped that. ‘Our mum feeds baby with milk from her elbows.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I sighed.

  ‘Course, dad has to use a bottle,’ Rebecca admitted.

  ‘As soon as our Dicky was born,’ Dean, in a devilish mood, called out, ‘we ’ad to take ’im to church.’

  ‘Good,’ I muttered, but thought it a dubious blessing that another of Dean’s family might plague me in years to come.

  ‘It wasn’t good, Father,’ Dean insisted. ‘Old Father Duddleswell tried to drown ’im.’

  There were cries of ‘idiot’ and ‘wicked’ before a rich, slightly accented voice put in, ‘I see a babe born.’

  The speaker was a gypsy. He was called ‘Ross’ but nobody knew if this was his first or second name.

  Ross was small with skin the colour of a raisin. He had entered the school after Christmas and this was the first time he had opened his mouth in my presence.

  ‘Pardon, Ross,’ I said, as an interested silence settled on the class.

  ‘I see a babe born. Once I do.’

  He had the edge on me. ‘You did?’ I gulped.

  ‘One summer it happens. Under a tree.’

  ‘Under a tree.’ It came from thirty throats like the sighing of the wind.

  All eyes turned to Ross in his corner seat:

  ‘What was it like?’ ‘All babies look the same, silly.’ ‘No, I mean, what was it like?’

  Another silence.

  ‘It hurts,’ Ross said.

  ‘Ah,’ came from the class.

  ‘And after, the babe don’t breathe.’

  The children held their breath.

  ‘The babe is white all over. ‘Cept for a little black face.’

  ‘Ah,’ sighed the class.

  ‘His whole head is black an’ clenched like a man’s fist. They slap hard an�
�� hardest. And the babe don’t breathe.’

  ‘Ah,’ the class contributed again in deepest sympathy.

  ‘When it don’t breathe for like an hour, someone says, It won’t breathe never, no, never. So the dad lays his mite in a box. Like a match.’

  ‘Like a match.’

  ‘They don’t tell the ma. They say, “He’s a nice un, your little un. A boy an’ all”.’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘But he’s not a boy or gal. He’s a dead.’

  ‘Didn’t they tell the baby’s mum?’ Patricia asked him.

  ‘Afterward, they do. They says, God comes and takes your little un. But,’ Ross shook his curly head, ‘I am watching an’ He don’t come.’

  ‘What did the baby’s mummy say,’ Lucy Mary asked, ‘when she heard?’

  ‘God bless God for His kindness, she says.’

  ‘And you, Ross,’ I put it to him, ‘what did you think?’

  For some inexplicable reason, Ross stood up at this point. Perhaps to convey the significance of what he had to say. Certainly, it gave him tremendous dignity. The little fellow looked to me then like a tall pine tree topping a hill.

  ‘I tells God, I hopes one day, You is white all over with a black face.’

  ‘Sit down, Ross,’ I said gently. ‘And thank you.’

  It was nearly time for the break. I prayed with the children and joined Mrs. Hughes in the staff room for a cup of tea.

  Mrs. Hughes, pretty with short black boyish hair and dark eyes, wasn’t a Catholic but we seemed to hit it off together.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ I said.

  According to Mrs. Hughes, Ross was a genuine Romany. A local education officer had called at the caravan site where some gypsies were camping during the winter months. He told Ross’s mother the boy had to go to school.

  ‘He seems too old for your class,’ I suggested.

  ‘As soon as he began speaking today, I realized that. His mother—she’s a widow, by the way—doesn’t know exactly how old he is. The education people went by his size. That’s why he ended up in my class.’

  ‘What age would you say he is?’

  ‘About twelve or thirteen. One thing I’m sure of. He hates school. What he said wasn’t nice—’

  ‘It was beautiful.’

  ‘You know what I mean. A young lad shouldn’t have to witness such things. But I was about to say, you are the first person who has got him to speak in class.’