I hated ham, and this excuse for meat tasted like cardboard. The fat lined the roof of my mouth and I could feel bits of gristle on my tongue. I chewed and chewed but I just couldn’t swallow the revolting bullet of food.
‘Do you like school?’ asked the nun.
‘Oh yes, Sister,’ I replied, spitting out bits of ham and lettuce.
Christine tapped my ankle under the table.
‘And at what are you good?’ asked the nun.
‘Pardon, Sister?’
‘What do you like doing at school?’
‘Well, I like stories,’ I told her.
‘Really?’
‘He enjoys reading and writing,’ Christine interrupted, ‘and he plays the piano.’
‘That’s very good,’ said the nun, dabbing her mouth with the napkin. ‘Jesus liked stories too. And do you take after your sister? She’s our brightest star in art.’
‘I like drawing, Sister,’ I replied, pushing a lump of fatty meat to the side of my mouth, ‘but I’m not very good.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘No really, I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I do like drawing but I’m not very good.’
The nun popped a piece of ham into her mouth and chewed slowly. There was a long and embarrassing silence. ‘And do you say your prayers?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘And go to Mass?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘And Confession?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘And do you serve on the altar?’ she asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘Sister,’ Christine hissed.
‘Pardon, Sister?’ I repeated. It was strange calling this woman ‘Sister’. She looked more like a mother.
‘Do you assist the priest at Mass?’
‘You mean an altar boy, Sister?’
She nodded.
‘No, I’m not an altar boy,’ I told her.
‘And you attend a Catholic school?’
‘No, I go to Broom Valley.’
‘A non-Catholic school.’ She arched an eyebrow.
I wondered how long this quizzing was going to go on for. I’d seen war films at the cinema where the Gestapo interrogated English prisoners. Sister Monica would have been really good at that. I am sure if she had asked me I would have told her anything.
There was a long pause. She continued with the meal, occasionally dabbing her mouth with a small lace handkerchief. ‘And do you think you might have a vocation?’ she asked suddenly.
‘We go to Blackpool,’ I said, my mouth still full of the fatty wodge.
Sister Monica’s smile was now pained and ironic. ‘A vocation, not a vacation.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Sister,’ prompted Christine prodding me in the side.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Sister.’
‘To become a priest?’ asked the nun.
The thought had never entered my head. Be a priest like Father Hammond? Not a chance. I wanted to be a soldier or a policeman or a fighter pilot.
‘No, Sister,’ I said, and then as an afterthought I added, ‘I think you have to be really brainy to be a priest. I don’t think I’m clever enough.’
The answer obviously impressed her. She rested her knife and fork on the plate and fixed me with the small black eyes.
‘Humility is one of the qualities of the priest,’ said the nun. ‘Many young men have thought themselves unworthy but have become very great priests. If you work hard and say your prayers and attend Mass regularly, you may get the calling.’
‘The calling?’ I repeated.
‘God might call you to become one of his priests,’ said the nun. ‘A great privilege, the greatest honour – to administer the blessed sacraments.’
I had this picture of God, a large, white-haired figure, popping up from behind a cloud and calling down to me. ‘Pssst! Pssst!’ he would hiss. ‘You down there.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, the boy with the hair sticking up, the runny nose and the scuffed shoes. Do you want to be a priest?’
‘No, thank you very much,’ I would reply, ‘but thank you all the same for asking.’
I could see my sister was not very pleased with me as we made our way to the bus, but I still got my little brass cannon.
Having trained as a teacher in Liverpool, Christine returned to teach at Notre Dame and subsequently became Head of the Art Department. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been approached over the years by her former pupils, who tell me what an amazing teacher she was.
My sister is a talented artist, and as a teenager she would spend hours sketching, drawing, painting delicate watercolours, producing the most vivid oil paintings. Dad bought her a cabin (which she euphemistically called ‘the chalet’) which he erected at the end of the garden behind the garage, and Christine would spend hours in her studio on her art. Should I come anywhere near, to peer through the window and see what she was up to, she would tell me in no uncertain terms to go away. I have vivid memories of Christine’s chalet. It was a colourful, interesting place and I loved it when I was invited (on rare occasions) into her private haven. In the centre was a large paint-spattered easel, behind which was a long trestle table with every bit covered in tide-marked jam jars, crumpled rags, discoloured and stiff, clusters of bottles filled with white spirit, turpentine substitute and honey-coloured linseed oil. There were pottery jars full of long-stemmed brushes, boxes of charcoal, tins of watercolours and little silver tubes of oil paint, their necks crusted with the most exotically named colours – magenta, scarlet, violet, coral, viridian, ultramarine.
Every conceivable wall space was covered with posters, prints, portraits, sketches, paintings and photographs. It was a riot of shape and colour. From the ceiling dangled multi-coloured mobiles – squares, circles, diamonds and triangles. The windowsills were crammed with plants, some of which had given up the ghost weeks before, feathers in jars, clay figures, carved boxes, animal skulls, shells, fragments of pottery and glass and all manner of strange objects and artefacts. The bookshelf was entirely covered with a clutter of dog-eared folders and files, sketchbooks, teaching texts, thick dictionaries and numerous art history books.
Sometimes on a wet Sunday afternoon Christine would try to show me how to sketch and paint, but, sadly, it was clear I had little of her talent.
17
Michael is my eldest brother and, as younger brothers often do, I looked up to him. Although nothing was ever said, I always had the feeling that he was our father’s favourite. He was more like Dad than any of us, I guess. Michael has always been gregarious, good-humoured and extremely good company, and no one can tell a joke as well as he. When he speaks, the whole room listens. He was also extremely practical, like our father. While I had my nose in a book and Alec, my other brother, played his guitar and Christine painted, Michael would be making models, taking things apart, fiddling in the engine of the car with Dad, activities which held no fascination at all for me. Michael could make and mend anything. I would spend a couple of frustrated hours trying to fix my train set and then my brother would come along and it would be working in no time. The zip would stick on my jacket and try as I might I couldn’t move it, then Michael would fiddle with it and it would work even better than before. I would be struggling over my maths O level, and he would sit with me for five minutes and I would soon grasp the concept. He was fascinated with machines and gadgets. At seventeen he built his own motorbike, and at twenty a small sports car which he drove around Rotherham, usually with a girl next to him on the front seat.
My other brother, Alec, was the proud owner of a bicycle, which he had saved up to buy and purchased second-hand through Exchange & Mart magazine. He had painstakingly re-enamelled the machine in bright purple paint and had painted ‘gran turismo’ in silver lettering on the crossbar. He polished and oiled the bike each week, and had fixed these large chrome cow-horn handlebars on the front. The machine was i
n fixed gear with a naked chain, which meant that the pedals turned automatically as the bicycle moved and the rider had little control apart from the brakes. I was not allowed to use it.
One Saturday I saw Alec set off for town and a few minutes later I was up at the top of Richard Road on his prized gran turismo. As I cycled down the steep hill the bicycle gathered speed. I applied the brakes but to no avail. There was a screech, a shudder and the smell of burning rubber as the brake pads attempted to grip the wheel casings. The pedals rotated alarmingly and I hung on for dear life as I careered down the hill. At the very bottom of Richard Road was the busy main Broom Valley Road, and thoughts ran through my mind that I would end up under the Cowrakes Lane bus if I didn’t do something. I turned the cow-horn handlebars, collided with a gas lamp and was thrown up in the air, ending up flat on my back. The world turned round above me. With a raging pain in my head and with something wet dribbling down my forehead, I managed to wheel the bike with the buckled wheel and twisted handlebars back up the hill and arrived at the back door.
‘I’ve fallen off Alec’s bike,’ I managed to tell my mother before everything went black.
I came round to find myself seated in a chair in the living room with a damp towel around my head and my mother holding my hand.
‘Thank God,’ she said.
Then I heard Alec’s voice. ‘Is he going to die?’
My mother assured him I was not. He then informed her angrily that I had buckled a wheel on his bike and bent the handlebars and that I would have to pay to have them fixed.
When Doctor Johnson arrived I was propped up in bed in a pair of clean pyjamas, a fresh towel wrapped round my head. He examined the wound, now matted with dried blood, lifted an eyelid and peered into my eyes, took my pulse and declared that my brain was pretty well intact and it was too late for stitches and the cut would heal itself. Then he passed the towel to my mother and said, ‘He can dispense with the turban.’ Later that day Mrs Rogers, a neighbour, arrived with a jar of cow’s-foot jelly and an egg custard, both of which remained uneaten.
Alec loved animals, and until he left home at the age of twenty to emigrate to Ireland, he kept a whole menagerie of creatures. He had the usual pets youngsters like to keep – rabbits, tortoises, hamsters, mice and budgerigars – but he also kept a ferret in a small hutch and a grass snake in a glass tank. Then he became fascinated with birds of prey. It started when he discovered two baby owls that had fallen out of a nest. He brought them home, reared them and released them. Then he found a young kestrel, which he trained to hunt, like the fictional Billy Casper in Barry Hine’s classic A Kestrel for a Knave. Alec would take the kestrel, which gripped on to the large leather gauntlet he wore, up Moorgate Road to Boston Park, where he would let the bird fly free. It would wheel and flutter in the air until my brother swung the coloured lure (a bunch of feathers with a lump of meat attached to a long string) above his head and the bird would return to his gloved fist. It was thrilling to watch. Once the kestrel, high in an empty sky, hovered and then plummeted downwards. The next minute a small bird fell tumbling to the ground in a flurry of beating wings. The kestrel sheered away and then dropped to the ground on to its prey. It wasn’t long before the bird, having had the taste of freedom, took off and never returned. Alec spent hours in Boston Park looking for it, but without success.
My father was immensely tolerant of Alec’s pets, even following the time when the ferret escaped and was discovered in Mrs Evans’s kitchen baring its needle-like teeth, but he was very wary of the falcon after the ‘incident’. Alec brought home a peregrine falcon which he had bought from somebody at the Art School where he was studying. The peregrine was a much larger bird than the kestrel and far less predictable. It would sit on its perch in the back garden, a beautiful and powerful creature with huge shining black eyes, curved beak and sharp talons. Children in the street would call just to look at it. One memorable day Alec removed the little leather hood with the bright plume on top from the bird’s head and began to fiddle with the jesses (the short leather straps that fastened around each leg of the hawk) just as Dad emerged from the garage. The bird took off and landed on Dad, digging its claws into his bald head. At Doncaster Gate Hospital the young doctor looked perplexed.
‘A bird?’ he said. ‘You say a bird did this? What sort of bird?’
‘Well, it wasn’t a budgie,’ Dad told him, irritated.
‘Budgie!’ the doctor exclaimed, preparing a tetanus injection.
‘It was a falcon,’ Dad told him. ‘A falcon landed on me.’
‘Whatever for?’ asked the doctor.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘Perhaps it wanted to carry me off to its nest to feed me to its chicks.’
When Alec moved to Ireland he continued his interest in falconry and appeared, as the king’s falconer, in the film Alfred the Great, starring David Hemmings as the eponymous hero, which was being filmed near Galway.
Most parents, I guess, would dissuade a youngster from keeping such creatures but my parents never seemed to mind. When Alec arrived home one day with a liver and white puppy with doleful eyes and floppy ears they merely took it in their stride, telling him that Dan (the name given to the dog) was his responsibility. Neighbours had dogs, little snappy terriers, fat slobbering labradors, fearsome alsatians and frisky mongrels, but Dan was different. He grew to be an elegant, gentle-natured creature, a pure-bred German pointer. There were no threatening rumbles or sharp yapping, no growls or show of sharp teeth. He was such an amiable beast we all grew to love him. At the park few dogs could keep up with him. He would bound off into the distance but return immediately at the call of his name. He would snuffle in bushes and then on scenting game he would freeze. His tail would shoot up, his nose would dip to the floor and he would raise one paw and ‘point’.
Once, on a trip to Bridlington in my sister’s VW Beetle car, we stopped in a lay-by for Dan to stretch his legs. The man in the car parked behind enquired what breed he was.
‘He’s a German pointer,’ I told him.
‘And you’re in the Volkswagen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bloody patriotic, aren’t you,’ he said.
There was one occasion when I saw my mother at her formidable and angry best. A policeman arrived at the back door. I was in the living room but could hear the conversation.
‘Does an Alec Phinn live here?’ he asked my mother.
‘Yes,’ she told him.
‘I’d like a word with him.’
‘What about?’ she asked.
‘We have reason to believe that he was involved in the theft of some sweets from the corner shop on Gerard Road.’
‘Says who?’ asked my mother.
‘If I could have a word with him,’ said the policeman.
‘Not until you tell me who’s made this accusation.’
‘Are you the boy’s mother?’
‘I am.’
‘The owner of the sweet shop thinks your son might have been involved.’
‘Thinks?’ repeated my mother.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she see my son take some sweets?’
‘No, but –’
‘Did somebody else see him take some sweets?’
‘Not exactly,’ said the policeman, ‘but another boy said he thought it might be your son.’
‘So some boy says he thinks that it may have been my son and you have wasted your time coming all the way up here on information which cannot be adequately substantiated, on the word of another boy who thinks it might be my son, on a rumour?’
‘Madam,’ said the policeman, ‘may I have a word with your son?’
‘No, you may not,’ said my mother. ‘He is not a thief and I strongly resent the implication that he is. I should have thought that the police had better things to do than waste their time on tittle-tattle. Good morning.’
The policeman departed.
My mother put on her coat. I could tell she was really angry. ‘I’m going
down to the corner shop,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’
I wished I could have been a fly on the wall when she gave the shop owner a piece of her mind.
On another occasion, a sunny afternoon as I was helping my father paint the garage door, two soldiers strutted up the drive.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the man with the three stripes on his arm.
‘Morning,’ said Dad.
‘Does an Alec Phinn live here?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Yes, he does,’ said Dad.
‘I believe he is interested in joining the army.’
My father put down his paintbrush and smiled. ‘I very much doubt it,’ he said.
‘We have a completed application form,’ said the sergeant.
‘I think it’s somebody’s idea of a joke,’ said my father.
‘May we have a word with him?’
‘Be my guest,’ Dad said, ‘he’s in the back garden.’ Then he added, ‘Watch your uniforms on the gate. It’s just been painted.’
On the lawn at the back of the house stood my brother with his falcon on his arm. Alec was a student at the Rotherham Art School, and like most art students at the time was dressed in rather colourful and individual clothes: a brightly flowered shirt, tight jeans and cowboy boots and with his hair shoulder length.
The soldiers stared at him for a moment, then at each other and without a word retraced their steps.
‘Good morning,’ they said, and marched off down the path.
My two brothers are both very musical. Michael has a fine tenor voice and Alec, who went on to become a professional musician, could play any instrument with strings on it. Neither had any formal lessons – they were just possessed of a natural musical talent.
During Mass at St Bede’s one Sunday, my mother began to weep. At the Communion, the soloist in the choir sang ‘Panis Angelicus’ in a beautiful clear tenor voice. After the service the curate, Father Daly, stood at the door of the church shaking hands with his parishioners.
‘You must be very proud of your son, Mrs Phinn,’ he said.
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