Bless Me Again, Father

by Neil Boyd

  ‘The bottom of the bill, I suppose, Manny.’

  The Rabbi nodded thoughtfully. ‘Where will it end?’

  ‘Does Momma know?’

  ‘Lionel sent her a small bottle of champagne to mark the occasion.’

  ‘How did she take it, Manny?’

  I answered for him. ‘She made straight for the oven.’

  ‘You guessed,’ the Rabbi said, grinning. ‘There was our Rachel kneeling beside her like a Christian and feeding her a glass of champagne. She drank it, would you believe? And asked for a second glass.’

  I handed them their brandy. Then, raising my glass, I said, ‘May I give you a toast?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Of course, lad.’

  ‘To Lionel and Josie.’

  I drank to my own toast. Afterwards, seeing the two of them with their glasses aloft, frozen, I put my glass down and tilted theirs from beneath.

  They smiled at each other, said, ‘To Lionel and Josie,’ and drank the toast.

  For about an hour and a half we chatted about religion and local affairs. We were showing the Rabbi to the door when two fire engines hurtled past the house, their bells clanging. On the skyline was an orange glow.

  As if by an instinct that was ages long, the Rabbi said, ‘It’s our hall. Could it be our hall?’

  ‘Let us go after the engines,’ Fr Duddleswell said. ‘We may be of some use, anyhow.’

  We followed the Rabbi’s car. The fire was definitely in the direction of Preston Road. Long before we drew up, we knew that it was the Jewish hall that was burning.

  The building was an inferno. Flames and smoke were belching out of every window. On the walls were three swastikas daubed in white paint. A fourth was unfinished; the vandals must have been disturbed because it was left in the shape of a cross.

  Rabbi Rosen was already out of his car, stepping over the fire hoses, his hands raised above his head. Moses beseeching God to be merciful to his people.

  There was no hope of saving the building. The flames lit up the night. Even from forty feet away the heat was unbearable.

  Crowds were gathering, jamming the roadway, making it hard foe additional fire engines to reach the scene.

  ‘Go home, lad,’ Fr Duddleswell said to me. ‘There is nothing to be done here.’

  ‘I want to stay, Father.’

  ‘Do as I say. This place will burn and smoulder all night.’ He was speaking from his war-time experience. ‘One of us must be fresh in the morning.’

  As I turned to walk home, I saw him go up and put his arm round the Rabbi’s shoulder.

  Next morning at seven, I returned to Preston Road. The two men were still side by side. The building was completely gutted. On the charred walls, the swastikas stood out in the early light.

  Just before he left, I heard the chief fire officer say to one of his men, ‘A petrol bomb. No doubt about it.’

  About fifty Jewish people had gathered, most of them old, some of the women with black shawls over their shoulders. I picked out our old Polish friend, Rabbi Epstein, in his long gaberdine coat and broad-brimmed hat. He had survived the Holocaust. He had seen it all before.

  By seven thirty, about two hundred Catholics had collected. As a gesture of sympathy, Fr Duddleswell had set up an altar for an open-air Mass at the top of the flight of steps leading to the burned-out hall.

  ‘Our prayers will be with you this morning, Manny,’ I heard him say.

  ‘We have lost a building,’ the Rabbi said. ‘But this time, not a man, a woman or a child has gone up in smoke. Praised be the name of the Lord for ever. And let the whole earth be filled with His glory.’

  A Jew nearby added, ‘Amen and amen. We will help you build it again, Manny.’

  The Rabbi squeezed his arm in gratitude. ‘May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you.’

  Before he left, he addressed himself to the little groups of Jewish folk who had gathered at the foot of the steps.

  They were dazed. Such things were not possible. Not in Fairwater, not in this quiet part of London. Not again.

  Rabbi Rosen spoke to them in a voice of thunder. His words sounded to me at one and the same time like the lines of a great poem and a massive piece of religious impudence.

  Not till long afterwards, did I realize he was quoting the prophet Isaiah.

  Our holy and beautiful house

  in which our fathers praised Thee

  has been burnt to the ground

  and all our pleasant places have become ruins.

  Wilt Thou restrain Thyself at these things, O Lord?

  Wilt Thou keep silent and go on afflicting us

  like this?

  16 Golden Wedding

  ‘The salt of the earth.’ That was Fr Duddleswell’s verdict on the Shields family. I, for one, did not disagree with him.

  Will and Mary were in their seventies. He had worked most of his life as an interior decorator. With the ends of his trousers tucked in his socks, he still managed to get around on his bicycle. Mary, having borne ten children, six of whom survived, was enjoying a well-earned retirement.

  I often ran into members of their family on my visits. Vera, their eldest, was married to a vet, Gordon Papworth, and had six children. Altogether, Will and Mary must have had a dozen grandchildren living nearby and their house always seemed to be alive with the sound of little ones.

  Listening to the conversations between the generations, I was amazed at how much history is handed on without effort and mostly without anyone realizing it.

  Will would tell the grandchildren of the long-ago days when Fairwater was still open fields. The roads were of mud or sand.

  ‘Didn’t the cars and buses get stuck, Gramps?’

  ‘There weren’t any buses and cars in those days.’

  He found it hard to convince them he was telling the truth.

  Trees were tall in those days, he said. Not like those little sycamore trees that you see everywhere today. No, they were oak, elm, chestnut, that caught the early morning mists and thick fogs of old London.

  Mary would reminisce about the bad old days when Grandad was unemployed and she had to work at the wash-tub in the laundry from eight in the morning till eight at night. The wage was a shilling a day.

  ‘Of course, my dears,’ Mary would say to the wide-eyed grandchildren surrounding her, ‘the master let me out to feed the new baby at dinner time.’

  Will, his grey moustaches bristling, nudged me, saying, ‘She ‘ad to go without ’erself, Father. And she ‘ad to be in work the day after the babe was born.’

  The Poor Relief man frequently cropped up in conversation. They remembered the first time he called, unannounced.

  Noticing a decorated cloth on the table, he refused them any money until they either sold or pawned it. When the same official returned, he found all the rooms as bare as a monk’s cell.

  ‘We learned fast, Father,’ was Will’s comment on that.

  Vera told me how all the family in her day walked to school without shoes, even in winter. Sometimes, they had high blacks boots supplied by the Poor Relief. The boots made them ashamed; they had holes punched in the sides so that no one could pawn them.

  The photograph album was their family Bible. It was always being leafed through to amuse the little ones. It showed first, in sepia, Will and Mary in their early twenties. He, lithe, with black curly hair and Mary, a few years younger, dark, beautiful and inclined to be bulky. She was to grow to sixteen stones in her prime.

  Hard to believe. When I knew her, she was a thin frail old lady. But there were the pictures to prove it. Mary in a long black dress sailing majestically, high-breastedly, by her husband’s side with three children in train and a big Alsatian, Rex, on a lead. Enormous glass earrings dangled from her large lobes, which, fired by the sun, shone like chandeliers.

  Will and Mary were home-loving people. Vera it was who told me of their one and only summer vacation. At their children’s insistence,
they booked for a week’s holiday at Southend-on-Sea.

  Due to nerves perhaps or a chill caught on the journey, Will went down on arrival with ‘a funny tummy.’ He spent the whole night in the unlighted, outside toilet of the grey boarding house where they had reserved a room. Next morning, without breakfasting, without even walking along the promenade or the pier, they packed their borrowed suitcase, paid what was owing and caught the first train back to town.

  Never again did either of them speak of going on holiday, and they both agreed that Southend-on-Sea was the worst place they had ever been to.

  ‘Will and Mary, God love them, never got over the death of their youngest boy, Father Neil.’

  Fr Duddleswell knew the entire history of the Shields family. He was able to tell me in detail of how young Jimmy had been killed at Dunkirk.

  When Will received the telegram from the War Office, he went at once to the public library to find out exactly where Dunkirk was. He had little idea of geography outside a three-mile radius of his home.

  ‘France was across the sea, y’understand,’ Fr Duddleswell told me, ‘and his Jimmy was dead in France. This is why he asked the lady in the library for a French map. He did not want an English map but a French map printed in France about France.’

  ‘What did he learn?’

  ‘Ah, the poor soul poured over the book for five hours, so I hear. After three and a half he found “Dunkerque”, French spelling, you follow? He thought this was the place where Jimmy was dead but he went on scanning the map until he had exhausted all other possibilities.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he knew anything about indices,’ I said.

  Fr Duddleswell smiled at the suggestion. ‘I think it struck him as strange and sad that his Jimmy should be lying abroad in a country where the map-makers couldn’t even spell the names of the towns and villages.’

  ‘Why didn’t he check with someone in the library?’

  ‘You have to understand these folk, Father Neil. Peasants they may be but they are as proud as Spanish bulls. After the visits they received from the Poor Relief man in the past, they do not like asking for favours. Not from anyone.’

  I nodded without saying a word.

  ‘I was at their place, lad, when Will came back from the library that day. Vera had brought me the bad news. I found dear old Mary sitting quiet and patient as a mushroom by the black stove in her kitchen. Will could not tell her anything about this Dunkirk because ’twas a French map, he said. But one thing he knew: Dunkirk was by the sea-side. As soon as Mary heard the word “sea-side”, she said, “Like Southend, Will.” And they both sobbed a big hole in their hearts.’

  Will honoured me on the day he showed me the picture of Jimmy’s grave. He kept it not in the album but by his bedside.

  On the stones to the right and left of Jimmy’s were traditional inscriptions: I am the Resurrection and the Life and Who plucked this flower? I, said the Master. And the gardener was silent.

  The tombstone of Lance-Bombardier James Shields of the Royal Artillery read: We miss you, Jimmy. Love from Mum, Dad and the Children.

  ‘It took us all night to work those words out,’ Will said.

  ‘They’re very nice, Mr Shields.’

  ‘Yes, well, they would have let us write some more,’ Will said, ‘but there wasn’t nothing else we wanted.’

  A truly parsimonious people.

  Mary took to rearing plants in one of the empty bedrooms. Even during my stay at St Jude’s, she had become noticeably thinner, frailer. Her hair went from silver to yellow, and Vera came every two weeks to put it in curlers. The veins on the back of her hands sometimes punctured and bled a little. She had a permanent sore on the big toe of her left foot. Dr Daley was convinced that she had diabetes and put her on a diet. But Mary would never let him examine her just in case he said she was ill. She put up with the pain stoically as she had put up with everything else in her long life-time.

  Their children had all married happily. Except for Jimmy, ‘Gawd bless ’im.’ That, I knew, was a wound like the sore on Mary’s toe: incurable.

  One day I was visiting the Shields when Mary pointed out to me that Will was becoming restless. Usually as busy as a cobbler, he now had nothing to occupy his mind.

  ‘I know what you need, Will,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Git yourself a dawg.’

  ‘Rex was dawg enough for me, love. All me life, one woman and one dawg.’

  ‘And I say, you need a dawg, and a dawg you will have.’

  ‘Won’t,’ Fred said.

  ‘I’m right, ain’t I, Father?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘There,’ Mary cried, ‘Father agrees with me. Go and see Gordon. ‘E’ll fix you up in no time. Then I’ll ’ave a bit of peace around ’ere.’

  Rex the Second brought no peace. He was, of course, an Alsatian. Though young, he had a tremendous appetite and grew too fast. He did not like the confinement of the smoke-filled kitchen where an old woollen blanket served as a bed. He was happiest when accompanying his master on his walks.

  Mary frequently scolded the dog when I was there. She told me she was afraid Rex would drag Will under a bus. Apart from that, she was too weak herself to control him within the house.

  Yet there was another side to things, she admitted. With Rex came flooding back memories of her courtship and early marriage in an old mission hall that was the first St Jude’s.

  She sat by the stove, ruminating aloud on the years so far away and yet nearer than yesterday. The days of the ‘’orse and cart’, she called them, when the lads used to follow after the horses and gather up their droppings in galvanized buckets for manure.

  Faces, events, even names she could recall as if someone had just whispered them in her ear. ‘I remember Sadie Williamson ’o used to sit next to me in the infants’ class. Sadie’s brother, Ted, what a rascal ’e was, Gawd bless ’is little ’eart. People always said ’e’d grow up to be no good but they was wrong.’

  ‘What happened to him, Mrs Shields?’

  ‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘A bigger boy put a snowball down the back of ’is shirt, it was a new shirt, too, the first ’e’d ’ad. It was winter time. And poor Ted died. ‘Is ’eart stopped and they couldn’t start it up again. ‘E were only six.’

  Mary remembered the walks by the side of the brook when it froze over in the cold weather, the visits to the country fairs which so delighted Will and whose high piped music lifted her own spirits up to joy. She spoke unashamedly of her love for her husband and how much ‘I’d miss ’im if ’e went.’

  Will would come in from doing a small service for a neighbour and they would have a fierce argument that was only words, the poor folk’s way of knowing they existed, while Rex strained at the leash.

  ‘Mind’ow you go,’ Mary called.

  ‘Won’t be long, love,’ Will said, as the dog tugged him towards the door.

  ‘That dawg’ll be the death of you, mark my words.’

  Will merely laughed aloud and slammed the front door after him. Through the window, we saw master and dog bounding away towards Fairwater Park.

  Will and Mary had been married almost fifty years. Preparations for the golden wedding were in evidence on every side. Since I was a constant visitor, even I was roped in to play a part.

  ‘We’re having a celebration card for mum and dad,’ Vera said. ‘Do you think you could write a few lines of verse to go on it?’

  I had lately written a few stanzas for the parish magazine. Hence my literary fame. After a great deal of sweat, I produced a few modest lines, To Mary.’ Vera was kind enough to say she thought they would do all right.

  On the great day, Fr Duddleswell offered a Mass at which the entire Shields family turned up, including sons and daughters who had emigrated to far-away places like Devon and Liverpool.

  Afterwards, there was a meal at the Shield’s own home, masterminded by Vera.

  It was a marvel how so many people could be c
ontained within those four walls. Old and young were there. There was one baby with the crust of birth still on his head and Mary’s greatest friend, Ada Whiggs, a hairless, toothless old lady with a permanent smile and arthritis that made her fingers look like toes.

  Fr Duddleswell brought his fiddle along and as a special treat played an Irish jig which Dr Daley danced to in a space of about two square feet.

  During the performance, two stray cats appeared at the window, looked in for a moment and ran away. Rex cowered under his blanket.

  When the music ended, the Doctor took a glass out of his pocket. ‘See,’ he said, ‘I have come prepared.’

  ‘You highwayman,’ Fr Duddleswell called out, above the din. Have I not told you before, never build the stye before you have the pigs?’

  But Will was on hand with a bottle, knowing the Doctor’s ‘little weakness which we love ’im for’.

  ‘God’s help is nearer than the ear to the head,’ the Doctor murmured piously. To which Will said, ‘Amen.’

  All the time that food was being served, the grandchildren, twenty in all, were draining the beer glasses and making cigarettes out of the butts left by their elders in the ashtrays.

  With the meal over, presentations began.

  First, a floral tribute to Will and Mary on their Golden Wedding anniversary: fifty yellow roses in the shape of ‘50’.

  Next, Fr Duddleswell, as the Pope’s plenipotentiary, gave them a special papal blessing, beautifully inscribed on a scroll by one of our own nuns.

  Mary received a fourteen-carat gold ring to replace the bronze one she wore which, once too tight for her, was now in danger of slipping off her finger whenever she swept the floor.

  The old couple were toasted: ‘To mum and dad. May they ’ave many more wonderful years together.’

  Will replied to that by raising his own glass. ‘You know ’o to,’ he said. And everybody raised their glasses and drank ‘To our Jimmy, God rest ’im.’

  Finally, I was asked to read my poem, ‘To Mary’. The third and last verse of it went:

  He will grow old and you will grow old

  He will love you and you love him.