Bless Me Again, Father

by Neil Boyd

  Fr Strood’s picture was challengingly different. He looked forward to the time when Mass and the sacraments, like appeals for money, would be in a language people could understand; when priests would celebrate facing the people, like Jesus at the Last Supper. Amongst other things, he suggested the possibility of having a married clergy again as in the first ten centuries of the Church’s life. The curates amongst us approved of that.

  The older priests who weren’t actually dreaming thought they were. Fr Ronan Shea, who had a reputation for being a great hand with the bottle, had slipped out to the local during lunch-time to patch up his thirst. He was the first to voice his disapproval.

  ‘Mad,’ he said loudly, stamping out of the chapel. ‘Your man’s mad.’

  Afterwards, everyone agreed that, even when drunk, Ronan recognized heresy when he heard it.

  At the stand-up tea, I noticed that Fr Strood was being cold-shouldered in a very obvious way. I panicked when, from the other side of the room, he seemed to recognize me.

  I frenziedly button-holed a fellow curate. ‘Interesting idea, Tom, about priests marrying.’

  Before Tom could reply, I felt this vice-like grip on my arm.

  ‘Hi, there.’

  I slowly turned round to confront this sturdy American in his silky soutane. Approaching forty, he had a spiky crew-cut, small ears and round eyes that twinkled with bonhomie.

  ‘Haven’t we met before, Neil?’

  I could hardly deny it when he knew my name.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Frank, you remember?’

  He put a steel hoop of an arm round my neck and drew me aside for a quiet word. It was unnecessary. The crowd slipped away wherever he went. There wasn’t a curate in sight.

  ‘You’re just the guy I’ve been looking for.’

  He was writing a dissertation on ‘Pastoral Care in Britain’ and he wanted to stay in a busy parish for a couple of weeks to see how things were done over here.

  I did the only sensible thing: I passed the buck. I led him to Fr Duddleswell who was discussing with two of his card-partners, Canon Mahoney and Fr ‘Nelson’ Kavanagh, the demerits of the talk they had heard. Fortunately, they were so incensed they didn’t see us coming.

  Fr Strood repeated his request to Fr Duddleswell. Seeing him in two minds, he said, ‘It’s okay, Father. I’m loaded.’

  ‘Be careful you do not shoot yourself.’

  Fr Strood beamed back at a man who did not seem to understand plain English. ‘I mean I’m willing to pay my way, Father, if you happen to have a spare room. How about three pounds a week?’

  ‘You’ve got yourself a deal,’ Fr Duddleswell said, with a sly wink in the direction of Canon Mahoney.

  Frank Strood and I became firm friends from the start. He was expansive, optimistic, generous and a good listener.

  Mrs Pring declared herself tickled pink by him. Fr Duddleswell himself took to him in a vacillating sort of way.

  Both Frank and Fr Duddleswell complained to me privately that the other lacked a sense of humour.

  ‘All the same, he’s a nice quaint old guy,’ Frank decided.

  ‘Lucky for him he has no sense of humour,’ Fr Duddleswell said to me.

  ‘Why’s that, Father?’

  ‘He would never stop laughing at himself.’

  He did not object to Frank visiting the parish and hearing confessions but he forbade him to preach.

  I put in a word for Frank. He’s a clever man, Father. ‘He’s got three degrees.’

  Fr Duddleswell wasn’t budging. ‘They are American degrees, lad. Over there, they give ’em away with a packet of cornflakes.’

  ‘You don’t understand him, Father. He’s not a revolutionary, he’s a very sensitive person.’

  ‘There’s not a sheep under every sheepskin,’ he retorted.

  ‘He preaches well.’

  ‘Indeed, he preaches the wonderful English.’

  ‘I mean he’s got some interesting and original ideas.’

  ‘Ah, me pet, me fosterling, me little dear. His arguments stand up no better than an empty sack.’

  After that, I gave up. Frank was as out of favour as any Protestant.

  However, Frank was enthusiastic at the level of pastoral care on the continent of Europe.

  ‘I’m just back from Brussels and Paris,’ he said, one day at lunch.

  Fr Duddleswell, eager to shave the bristles off the pig, immediately began to sing: ‘How’re you going to keep them down on the farm After they’ve seen Paree?’

  Still bouyant, in spite of the music-hall turn, Frank said there were plenty of things going on in those places. The liturgy was alive, with everybody taking part. Priests were experimenting with team ministries. The laity were as committed to spreading the Gospel as the clergy.

  ‘Brussels and Paris, you say,’ Fr Duddleswell mused, stroking his chin.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you remember, Father Neil, how those places capitulated during the war? Hardly a blow struck, and they laid down their arms.’

  ‘Not good,’ Frank had to admit.

  ‘’Tis not for me to say it but this was long before America stopped dithering and decided at last it was more dangerous for them not to fight the Nazis. And I must admit to you, after Dunkirk in 1940, we did feel rather alone, with nothing but the Channel between us and disaster.’

  ‘I read about that,’ Frank said.

  ‘Delighted I am to hear it, Father. I tell you, may I never sin, they were hard days. Rationing, bombardment, sleepless nights and worried days, husbands at war, children evacuated. Did you know the government took our railings, our dustbins, our very church bell for the war effort?’

  ‘Must’ve been tough,’ said Frank, who at that moment was wanting to talk about the future not the past.

  ‘I am glad you think so, Father. Imagine, if you can, a whole nation at war. Five years of it. Death all round. Dust in the air at all times from bombed-out buildings. By the way, did you have much bombing in New Jersey, Father?’

  Pulling Frank’s leg became a way of live. Fr Duddleswell’s point of view was, ‘A real nice feller, the Yank, Father Neil. I mean that. The trouble is, y’see, he has never suffered. That is why he is a little touched in the head with all his modernistic ideas. The old Greek was right who said, Wisdom is only learned by suffering it.’

  ‘At St Jude’s,’ I said, put off by his self-righteousness, ‘wisdom of that sort abounds.’

  Everybody contributed to Frank’s education.

  Dr Daley once took me aside to tell me, ‘Father Frank is a regular “gintleman”. Never was worn so fair a thing as politeness.’ But even the Doctor was not above a bit of leg-pulling.

  ‘I remember,’ he said, ‘it must have been in 1940. We were playing poker in the next parish. The P.P. was … God, I know his name as well as the glass in my hand.’

  He stretched it out towards me since I had the bottle at the time and I filled it for him.

  ‘A dash of water, Doctor?’

  ‘Not even a dot, Father Neil. His name, now.’

  ‘Tuohy,’ Fr Duddleswell said. ‘Dermot Tuohy.’

  ‘Correct. Anyway, the game was that exciting we did not hear the siren. And didn’t an incendiary bomb crash right through the roof?’

  ‘Did you get a red sand bucket and tip the sand on the bloody thing, Donal?’ Fr Duddleswell was asking for Frank’s benefit.

  ‘Not at first, Charles. We finished off the poker hand, then we picked the bomb up in a bucket and took it outside.’

  ‘Gee,’ was Frank’s only reaction to that.

  Once Billy Buzzle was summoned to entertain the troops. He had been an A.R.P—an Air Raid-Precautionary—warden during the war. In his broad cockney accent, Billy described how his pigeons knew enemy airplanes were coming long before the siren sounded.

  ‘But the funniest thing that happened to me during the war was in May 1941. I was having a break in Scotland, see, and I was playing a r
ound of golf up there to take my mind off neighbours and things.’

  ‘I didn’t know you played,’ I said.

  ‘I did in those days,’ Billy insisted. ‘And don’t interrupt me, young ‘un. Where was I?’

  ‘On the golf links.’

  ‘Right. No sand in the bunkers, of course. It’d all been shovelled out for sandbags. I was playing with the club secretary and a retired infantry major.’

  Frank nodded to show interest.

  ‘The old army geezer had a First War army rifle in his bag. Well, we’d nearly finished the round, when out of the clouds came this ruddy German parachutist. The major took out his rifle and guess what happened next?’

  ‘What, sir?’ Frank asked, as was expected of him.

  ‘The club secretary straightaway disqualified him.’

  ‘Was there a reason for that, sir?’

  ‘He counted the rifle as a club and he said the major had broken the rules by having one too many. The major protested. “Bloody unfair,” he said. “The bloody thing isn’t bloody loaded.” He was annoyed, naturally, because at the time he was three up with four to play.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘Without so much of the swearing, if you’d be so kind,’ Fr Duddleswell said.

  ‘Me and the club secretary finished off the round, then we went looking for Gerry. He was hiding in the rough. We coaxed him out, took him to the nineteenth hole and bought him a drink.’

  Frank showed himself impressed by British hospitality. ‘Did he come quietly, sir?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Billy shook his head in a nonchalant way. ‘Said his name was Hess or something like that.’

  One supper, Frank’s politeness was really put to the test. Fr Duddleswell, in an impish mood, was claiming that the war had destroyed the class system in England.

  ‘How was that, Father?’

  ‘It began with the evacuees. Cockney kids were billeted, y’see, with titled ladies who invited them into their parlour for tea and crumpets.’

  ‘Isn’t that something?’ Frank said.

  ‘Several children from St Jude’s here joined the county set in the local hunt and the pheasant shoots.’

  ‘Stirring stuff,’ I said, nudging Frank’s foot under the table.

  ‘Then there was the time that Winston Churchill came to the parish.’

  At the mention of the great man, Frank’s ears shot up. Mine, too. It was the end of October ’51, and Churchill’s conservative government had recently been returned to power.

  ‘The bombing the night before had been terrible fierce and I was out visiting me parish when Winnie’s car passed me on the street. There he was as large as life with his boiler suit, hat, walking stick, cigar and big fat smile.’

  ‘I didn’t know this, Father,’ I said.

  ‘His chauffeuse stopped the car because, y’see, one or two of the buildings had collapsed, blocking the road. The P.M. leaned out of the window and know what he said?’

  ‘What?’ Frank and I asked together.

  ‘I will never forget it to me dying day. The P.M. looked me straight in the eye and said, “Good morning, Padre. Nice day.”’

  Mrs Pring came in to remove the dishes. She confirmed that Churchill had passed through the parish one morning of the Blitz.

  ‘I call to mind only too well,’ Fr Duddleswell growled, ‘your own contribution to the war effort, Mrs Pring. I nearly gave you your walking papers for it.’

  Mrs Pring smiled a proud British smile.

  ‘’Twas when that feller Beaverbrook appealed for scrap metal in July 1940—’

  ‘And I gave away all our pots and pans.’

  ‘Ah,’ Fr Duddleswell said, ‘herself is about as useful as a bell without a clapper.’

  After the meal, Frank and I chatted with Mrs Pring in her kitchen. She was in a sombre mood. Mention of the war had brought back bitter memories.

  She talked of the times when German bombers flew over the city like flocks of noisy black migrating birds.

  ‘One night, Fathers,’ she said, ‘it was ten years ago, May 1941, if my memory serves me correct, five hundred bombers flew over. In the space of a few hours, fifteen hundred people were killed.’

  Frank reacted sympathetically. ‘Did the parish catch any of it?’

  Mrs Pring nodded sadly. ‘Father D was always a mischievous man but not till that night did I ever see him angry, really angry, I mean.’

  ‘And he’s been the same ever since,’ I said, only half amused.

  That night he dragged five little boys out of a school not far from here. All dead. I tell you, if cursing and swearing could have hit a Heinkel he would have brought a hundred down that night.’

  ‘Terrible, Mrs P.’

  ‘Helen and me were down in the shelter. This was before Helen joined the A.T.S. We slept through most of it. At seven, Father D came home. His face was black, his forehead had big blisters of sweat on it and his hands were cut to pieces. And the language.’

  Fr Duddleswell, I remembered, had said to me once that in his view only two wars in history have been completely justified. ‘Yes?’ I had said. ‘Indeed, lad. The one against Oliver Cromwell. The second against that bloody little Corporal.’

  Mrs Pring said to Frank, ‘We always listened to your President’s fireside chats, Father. He was next in popularity to Churchill during the war. When that fine gentleman went to God, Fr Duddleswell gave him the biggest Requiem this parish has seen since the last Pope died.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Frank said.

  ‘And when the war was over—you’ll never believe this, Father Neil—Father D led the Conga all down the High Street.’

  Frank Strood, finding few pastoral interests at St Jude’s, took me on tours of London. He knew the city far better than I. Most afternoons we ended up in a private cinema in Wardour Street, a turning off Oxford Street. Frank had a couple of passes.

  When in New York, he ran a Saturday-morning cinema club for teachers. He previewed many of the big films and often arranged for a director to come and talk to the teachers about his work. Frank claimed to know every important director in the business. I believed him.

  We saw films dating from long before my time. Silent films starring Clara Bow, quite the most thrilling woman I ever saw. Films with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo who sparkled in silent love scenes more passionate than any I had ever seen or am likely to see. We saw the first talkies and I was staggered to find that neither directors nor actors had any idea how to cope with speech on the screen.

  Top of our list were the Warner movies with the greatest star of them all, the original tough guy himself, James Cagney. The first time I heard Frank’s voice was when he called out to me to enter his room. ‘Jimmy Cagney,’ I had thought, ‘in a friendly mood.’

  One day we had watched a film with Buster Keaton, my favourite comic actor. The lights went up. Who was sitting there in front of us but Harold Lloyd? Frank greeted him like a long-lost brother and I shook the great man’s hand. Afterwards, all I could remember was his warm, husky voice.

  After each movie session, we took the underground train to Marble Arch and walked along Park Lane to the Dorchester. Frank, the most gregarious man I ever met, knew and was known by everyone. We were ushered into the Dorchester by a tall, elegant gentleman with slicked down hair, dressed in tails and white tie. He conducted us to a corner table, sheltered by a sort of miniature palm tree. We were served lemon tea in a silver tea-pot and sandwiches daintier than even the Convent’s.

  Most amazingly of all, it didn’t seem to cost Frank a cent.

  Frank and I had grown so fond of one another, I suggested to him that he come clean and tell me what he really thought of St Jude’s.

  ‘Okay, Neil, but hold on to your hat.’

  In his view, as far as pastoral work went, the parish was a wash-out. We kept no reliable records, we had no parochial organizations except those suited to the last century. We had no planned giving, no counselling, no scientific projects of
any sort.

  Apart from this, Fr Duddleswell’s theology and, by implication, mine, was mediaeval. In brief, a rum old place lost in a Celtic twilight.

  ‘Has he ever spoken of retirement, Neil?’

  ‘For others,’ I said.

  At supper, I made Frank say it again for Fr Duddleswell’s benefit. He obliged, setting out his opinions in a humble way.

  Afterwards, Fr Duddleswell’s head was steaming like a boiled potato. He said, ‘So you reckon we are has-beens, Father?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Joe Kennedy, that smart feller with big teeth, he reckoned we were finished. You’d think that someone of Irish origins with nine lovely kiddies would know better.’

  ‘Listen to me, Father.’

  Frank, tired of being the butt of the market, was switching to the attack. He spoke in rapid, staccato tones like Jimmy Cagney under pressure.

  ‘The war’s been over six years now. This place is still strewn with bomb sites that haven’t been touched. The bomb craters are choked with water whenever it rains. Old buildings are buttressed by wooden beams. Your people are living in pre-fabricated buildings that are already turning into tomorrow’s slums. The whole town is a disgrace and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Fr Duddleswell’s cool voice indicated that for him, too, the gloves were off.

  ‘We could rebuild New York in the time it takes you British to patch up one street.’

  ‘Do you realize, Father, that nearly a million houses were damaged or destroyed during the war, two in every seven?’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘I will. The country was and is broke. The government could offer only fifty pounds for repairs in 1945 and not much more since. For two long years, I remind you again, the entire price for upholding liberty in the world was paid by us.’

  ‘What about lease-land?’

  ‘There wasn’t much lease-land from de Valera, Father,’ I put in. I was annoyed, like many Englishmen, by Ireland’s refusal to let us use her ports during the war. Nor did I like the pictures of jack-booted German soldiers parading up and down the streets of Dublin.