by Ray Connolly
‘Well, well, well. That must be a very nice state to be in,’ the old priest was warming to his job.
Mary racked her brain. Father Vincent was obviously enjoying her discomfort. He was an eccentric, impatient chap who disapproved of every change made in the Church, and the world in general, since he had taken holy orders. ‘Perhaps the odd venial sin, the occasional jealous thought or careless word, but no proper sins,’ Mary insisted.
This time there was a long pause, as though the priest were weighing up his next course of action, whether to get back to his book or remind this forgetful penitent of the whole range of sins for which Holy Mother Church had once been able to demand forgiveness. He chose the latter course of action. ‘I see,’ he mused quietly, ‘and what about sins against holy purity?’
Again Mary found herself smiling. It was longer than she could remember since she had found herself in the confessional box discussing the severity of sins concerning sex. ‘No, Father,’ she replied quite firmly.
‘You know, of course, that impurity of thought can be as grievous a sin as the very acts themselves should one encourage it by reading lewd books or watching pornographic films and plays.’ Father Vincent could be a terrier when he chose.
‘Perhaps the odd fleeting desire, Father, nothing more,’ came back Mary.
Her tone was obviously final because at this point the priest gave up. ‘Well, for your penance say three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and three Glory Be To The Fathers, ask forgiveness for all the sins of your past life, even those you can’t remember, and might I suggest that you pray also that God restores the gift of memory to you before your next confession. Now make a good act of contrition.’
‘Oh my God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins, I detest them above all things, because they deserve thy dreadful punishment, because they have crucified my loving saviour Jesus Christ …’ Mary mouthed the words of contrition thoughtlessly as she had done so often as a child. Poor Cathy was coming in next. She wished now she had never mentioned confession.
From the far side of the grille the old priest solemnly intoned the words of absolution. ‘I absolve you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,’ he said. Across the churchyard the music grew louder.
‘If you don’t want you don’t have to get into trouble, just leave my woman alone,’ sang Father Michael into the microphone, his left knee trembling in rhythm, his dark hair slicked back across his forehead and a black leather jacket adding an element of theatrical menace to his priest’s vest and collar. These were the moments of his life when his youth was reborn within him. Up on stage, singing and playing the music he had always loved, he was no longer a small town parish priest, but the star he had once dreamed of becoming. Behind him his group played ferociously, resplendent in the red shirts they had all bought for their Friday evening trip into fantasy, while below a couple of hundred local citizens danced and sang along as the songs brought back memories for some and forged new ones for others. From the floor Father Michael and his four friends might have looked like the most unlikely of rock groups, but there was no denying the talent of the priest, nor the enthusiasm of the rest of the band. For each of them Friday evening was an exercise in what might have been. Those who heard them were privileged to be able to participate in dreams too private to be articulated.
The idea for the Friday evening dances had come to the priest about a year earlier, following his successes as a one-man band. The parish had been nearly five hundred pounds short in funds needed to put a new damp course in the church and he had hit upon the idea of holding the weekly dance as a money-raising exercise. At least that was the way he had explained it to Father Vincent. In the beginning the older priest had rejected the idea outright, saying that if anything was going to put the final nail in the coffin of Catholicism it would be pop singing priests, scornfully citing the trendy, but doomed, attempts of the Church of England to lure the young across their portals. But Father Michael had begun a campaign of attrition, quietly explaining that the building would not damp-proof itself, and that if the Church wanted to become the centre of the community once again then it must renew its traditional role as provider of entertainment. Father Vincent had remained unconvinced. But when Pope John Paul II had visited Britain in the summer of 1982, and had been greeted everywhere by Catholics and Protestants like a superstar, the older priest had decided that resistance to the modern world was useless and given Father Michael permission for a trial dance on the strict understanding that if the damp-proof funds were not forthcoming the whole ridiculous, undignified project should be scrapped.
Considering that to be as much of a blessing as he was ever likely to receive from his colleague Father Michael had set about finding his equipment and putting his band together. He already knew of a suitable drummer in Cyril, a local plumber, who, on being called to the priests’ house one winter to repair a burst water pipe, had fallen into conversation with Father Michael who had assisted him. Plumbing was not, he wanted the priest (and probably every other customer) to know, his first calling in life. As a boy he had harboured dreams of being a famous drumming star like Gene Krupa, and had even been good enough to audition for Ray McVay’s Mecca danceband at one time. But he had not got the job and his father’s advice that plumbing was a good trade to fall back on, had led him to temporarily shelve his notions of fame in favour of security. ‘That was in 1969,’ he had told the priest sadly. ‘I still practise, and I sometimes go for auditions just for the fun of it, but Judy and the girls have got used to a way of life now. If I was going to make it as a drummer I should have stayed in London, and not got married. Judy even makes me keep my kit in the garage.’
At first Cyril had been disappointed when he heard what kind of music Father Michael wanted him to play with the band. He had always considered rock and roll the most primitive, predictable kind of drumming, but a few stabs at Bo Diddley under the priest’s appreciative eye had started an attraction for the music which he would not once have believed possible. True Bo Diddley was highly predictable, but Father Michael was so flattering about his efforts that the plumber almost felt he was playing percussion with the London Symphony Orchestra. Encouragement and the infection of enthusiasm were the qualities the priest had in abundance. To him it seemed inconceivable that any intelligent person under forty did not share his taste in music, and he would listen to no arguments. Cyril’s friend Nigel, a joiner from Woodstock, was recruited as bass player, and was soon joined by two rival guitarists, one a teacher and the other a bank clerk, Malcolm and Roger, when an advertisement was placed in the Bickerston Advertiser. The guitarists were a good ten years younger than Father Michael and had not yet forsaken completely the pipedream that the future might yet promise some kind of adventure, although both had taken straight jobs until success came their way.
Altogether they made a good band within the limiting demands set by the music. Although Malcolm and Roger occasionally quarrelled as to who should play rhythm guitar and who lead, they both added a more than workman like line in back-up vocals, and recently in his desire to outshine his rival Malcolm had augmented the basic guitar sound by bringing along a harmonica he had learned to play some years earlier when going through a teenage fixation on Bob Dylan. To cynics the band might have looked like five trapped men locked on to railway lines heading straight for middle age: but to the musicians it was the night of the week when dreams could be enjoyed, egos pampered, and where youth shone around them again with its chimera of endless possibilities. For Father Michael it was the time for cherished, happy memories.
From his position at the side of the stage, where with his unamplified schoolboy’s guitar he would ape the gestures of the priest, Paul surveyed the people of Bickerston who danced and drank and talked below him on the floor. The Friday dances were, by Bickerston standards, a large success, and well before the £500 had been raised for the damp course Catholics and non-Catholics from quite a wide area of central Oxfordshire were m
aking weekly pilgrimages to the little parish hall. And, although he disliked the style of music intensely, Father Vincent had, without pressure, agreed to allow the dances to continue indefinitely, so long as all the proceeds went to worthy causes. ‘They say the Devil has all the best tunes,’ Paul had once overheard him remark to Bert the caretaker, ‘but young Father Michael there seems to have cornered the market in the worst.’
How tolerant Father Michael was to put up with the continuous carping of the older priest, Paul thought as he watched him play. What a perfect man on whom to model himself.
As though sensing he was at the centre of Paul’s thoughts Father Michael turned to the boy just before he finished his song and winked broadly, a reassuring comic gesture which suggested a happy confidence in his singing and playing.
‘Thank you, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the priest as the applause subsided. ‘You’re very kind. And now to all those latecomers let me say welcome to the 706 Union, Bickerston’s own ferris wheel of fifties happiness on this very special night.’ Another round of applause tried to punctuate his speech, but Father Michael kept on talking. ‘And, you know, tonight is rather special because tonight with your help we may reach the thousand pound mark in the Mother Theresa of Calcutta fund for the poor. Just fifty-eight pounds and sixty-three pence to go as the Mystery Train sets off, so if you haven’t yet bought your raffle tickets, don’t delay, because it’s a wonderful cause. And, as always, as well as the raffle we have lots of surprises, dances, competitions and fabulous genuine fifties prizes in store.
‘But now back to the music, on this the twenty-fourth anniversary of the most infamous air flight in the history of rock and roll. So here for the three who played their last gig at Clear Lake, Iowa on that snowy snowy night is a song by the Legend himself…’ And turning to Cyril he briskly counted the group in to ‘Peggy Sue’. Cyril liked that one. It gave him a chance to show what a Gene Krupa drummer could do to rock and roll.
‘Peggy Sue’ was too fast for Paul to play so, turning his guitar around so that the strings faced his body, he drummed his fingers on the back in time with Cyril’s drumming. On the floor a woman of about forty was jiving with her daughter, spinning around so that her skirt flew up and revealed the tops of her legs. Paul was glad his mother always wore jeans to the 706 and that she rarely danced. He wouldn’t have liked to have seen people looking at her legs the way some of the men looked at this woman. On stage he saw Father Michael notice the woman, too, although he could not tell whether the priest’s look was one of disapproval or amusement.
Standing in a corner by herself was Suzie, Cathy’s school friend. Secretly Paul liked Suzie, although he pretended to treat her with the disdain small boys always reserve for sisters’ friends. Suzie was everything that Paul was not: confident, aggressive and totally outrageous. Mary had once worried about Suzie’s influence on Cathy, but being unable to break the friendship she had more recently decided to encourage it in the belief that Cathy’s innate sensible qualities might turn out to be the more dominant factor in the relationship.
When Suzie caught Paul looking at her she smiled broadly. Embarrassed, he looked away. He was sure she guessed his secret, but was reasonably confident that she would not betray him to his sister. Whenever she came round to the house she would tease him about Father Michael but it was never done with any spite. Had he not decided to become a priest Suzie was the sort of girl he would have liked as a girlfriend, Paul would tell himself when she was especially nice to him.
Suzie did not actually like rock and roll music particularly, but the 706 Union was better than homework or television, which were the two Friday night alternatives, and her parents liked her there so that they could keep an eye on her.
‘I thought Cathy was coming tonight?’ called Suzie’s mother, Carol, as she made her way back from the Ladies towards the corner table where her husband sat with their friends.
Suzie arched an angular shoulder simultaneously turning her mouth down at the sides in an expression which was intended to convey disapproval of anything and everything her mother might choose to say to her. At sixteen she was discovering that mothers invariably stated the obvious. ‘She is coming tonight,’ she replied with an affected yawn of boredom. And pulling herself upright strode with exaggerated nonchalance across the hall and out into the lobby, just in time to meet Cathy.
‘God, you look great. Doesn’t she look great, Mum?’ said Cathy. Mary looked at Suzie in dismay. She was wearing the tiniest dress she had seen since the sixties, a yellow, size twelve mini on a size fourteen girl. Into her long red hair, which was now worn permanently up Suzie had tucked what looked like a collection of peacocks’ feathers, while her ankles were swathed in pea green leg warmers over pink tights.
Mary chose not to answer the question: ‘Are your parents here, Suzie?’ she asked with what she hoped was the appropriate amount of smile.
‘They’re inside fossilizing,’ said Suzie.
‘How very uncomfortable for them,’ replied Mary, and moving past the girls went through into the hall.
‘Where’ve you been, you’re late?’ said Suzie, not at all put out by Mary’s obvious disapproval.
‘You won’t believe it. Confession. It was my mum’s idea.’
‘Mothers can be really weird, can’t they?’ said Suzie, looking darkly into the corner where Mary now sat with her parents. ‘Perhaps she had something really wicked to confess.’
Cathy shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. She never gets the chance.’
In the corner Mary watched the two girls progress across the floor, grateful that Cathy’s own little adolescent rebellion had not yet turned into the reign of terror now being visited on her parents by Suzie.
‘Well, Mary, how are you this week?’ John, Suzie’s father, a child psychologist with the local education authority, and a man for whom no pretension was too absurd, grinned a greeting. ‘We were beginning to wonder where you were … our own little 706 totem, Earth Angel herself.’
Encouraged by John’s silliness, the other man at the table, Ian from the Revive Forty-Five, added his compliment. ‘To know her is to love her,’ he said, then more practically, ‘What are you drinking?’
Mary said she would like a glass of white wine and soda, and after collecting the other orders Ian went off to the bar accompanied by John leaving Mary with the two wives. Carol was thin and angular, a one-time flowerchild who was now an ardent feminist, while Brenda, Ian’s wife, was a plump, contented lady, whose happiest moments had been riding pillion on the back of Ian’s motorbike twenty-five years earlier, and who spent her days now in the packing department of a biscuit factory.
From the stage Paul watched his mother struggle to find things to say to her two companions, none of whom had anything in common other than that they happened to know each other, while from another corner Cathy and Suzie, propped against one wall like a couple of lean-to supports, watched Father Michael and the band.
‘He’s like a little shadow, isn’t he, your brother,’ commented Suzie, as Paul moved closer across the stage to stand alongside Father Michael while the first of the night’s raffle tickets was being selected.
‘He hero worships him,’ said Cathy.
‘I don’t blame him, he is gorgeous,’ Suzie sighed.
‘Yes, but he’s a priest.’
Suzie groaned: ‘What a waste.’
8
March 1962
‘What d’you mean, you don’t believe it?’ Michael was sitting in the teacher’s chair at the head of the classroom. In front of him James moved around at a measured pace, in the way of a teacher. It was mid-morning, and the two boys were sharing an unsupervised study period. Normally there were three of them, but on this particular day the third boy had gone to Cambridge for an interview.
‘I don’t. That’s all. I don’t believe she was a virgin.’ James strutted before him with a slight pomposity. He enjoyed being at the head of a classroom, al
beit an empty one.
‘But why not?’ asked Michael.
‘Why? Because it’s unbelievable, that’s why. She couldn’t have been a virgin. It’s impossible.’ James was enjoying goading his friend.
‘You know your trouble,’ said Michael. ‘You’re a cynic, like your pal Wordsworth.’
This struck James as odd. ‘Wordsworth wasn’t a cynic, he was a romantic,’ he said in astonishment. Anyone studying A-level English should have known that. ‘Sometimes I wonder how you got into the sixth form.’
Michael laughed. James had a very deadpan way of being gently insulting. Perhaps he had misunderstood what he had read, he thought, but pressed on to make his point anyway. ‘Well, he must have been a cynical romantic because I read somewhere that at one point when he was a boy he thought everything was an extension of his own imagination. So on the way home from school he used to jump up and down behind hedges in the Lake District trying to see the field before his imagination put the sheep there.’
James looked sceptical. He had heard about Wordsworth’s habit of hugging trees, but this was new to him. ‘Wordsworth?’ he queried.
Michael was almost sure. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think so. It was a bit like trying to open the fridge door before the little light came on, in a philosophical sense, of course,’ he added.
James grimaced: ‘Wordsworth didn’t have a fridge. Nor do we come to think of it. Anyway if he thought all that he must have been a raving lunatic not a cynic or even a romantic, like Joseph was if he believed Mary was a virgin.’
Michael went silent for a moment. Then quite softly he said: ‘It’s an article of faith.’
That was enough for James. He knew that Michael’s Catholicism had become more deep rooted with adolescence but he had never suspected him of being an unquestioning believer before. He couldn’t even remember how the conversation had ever got around to the Immaculacy of the Conception now, but it was time Michael learned just where he stood. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘so I’m an unarticled infidel. I just don’t believe it. Can you imagine, Mary sitting there shelling the peas when Joseph comes home, and saying ‘Oh, by the way, Joseph, you’ll never believe this but while you were out hammering and sawing today this angel of the Lord called to see me, and guess what, well one thing led to another, and to cut a long story short I’m in the family way …’