A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  I doubted Fr Duddleswell had invited me into his study to admire Mrs Pring’s handiwork, and I was right.

  ‘Father Neil,’ he said, ‘there is a shortage of you as there is a glut of me.’

  I blinked, then stared.

  ‘You are beginning to look, lad, as if you were me cheese ration for the week.’

  I sighed voicelessly. It encouraged him to say more emphatically:

  ‘We cannot have you and me doing a Laurel and Hardy on the parish, you follow? No two ways about it,’ he went on in a biblical vein, ‘you must increase and I must decrease. The lady housekeeper suggests to me that, alas, poor brother, you need Bovril. In brief, you may be heading for a breakdown.’

  So that was what he was wriggling towards. I insisted I had never felt better in my life.

  ‘Breakdowns in people, as in motor cars, Father Neil, can be very sudden, like. And when an Englishman goes to pieces, ’tis my experience he does so with panache, like a sliced loaf.’

  Mrs Pring had reported to him that in a few days time it was my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The day after that was my twenty-fourth birthday. ‘A friend’s eye is the best mirror, as they say, Father Neil, and I don’t know but that you need a holiday. So go home, now, and spend a couple of days in helping your dear ones celebrate.’

  Celebrations were not the outstanding feature of our home. We lived happily in Hertfordshire, in the town of Clover Hill, thirty miles north of London, My father was a greengrocer. To the locals, BOYDS was the ‘corner shop’, which a tall, thin, cloth-capped gentleman, slightly deaf and with a grey brush moustache kept open at all hours.

  He had not ever altered in my memory, my father. His habit was to sit sideways at table, invariably with his cap on. He preferred eating with a spoon. He even managed bacon and eggs with a spoon.

  He was gruff and of few words. He sometimes shouted at his six children, of whom I was the eldest, but he never laid a finger on us either in anger, or affection. I admired him. More than that, I loved that silent, stubborn man.

  Old corduroy trousers under a brown overall. In winter, a sack round his middle and khaki woollen mittens from which protruded raw fingers with nails permanently broken and packed with dirt from shovelling potatoes.

  My father never had an assistant in his shop, which was really the converted front room of our house. He couldn’t afford an assistant, he said, not with eight mouths to feed. At five o’clock most mornings, rain or shine, he would be off to market or a nearby farm in his old Austin van. Often at night he would be working in the dark ‘out the back’, shelling peas. He had a talent for buying up sackfuls of peas with sticky pods which no one else wanted, shelling the peas into a bucket and selling them by the pint. The thumb of his right hand, I recall, was nearly always swollen.

  We were not exactly the potato-less poor, but economies were his speciality, a kind of art form. He never smoked or drank or drove the van except on business. He never went to the cinema or read a book, and he only turned on the radio for the news, a habit he picked up during the war. Our holidays were walks to a lovely wooded park three miles away on Dad’s half-days, where we picnicked when the weather was fine. Our clothes were second hand and hand-ons. It was a case of first up, best dressed. Dad made us use the paper wrapped round oranges for toilet paper.

  On Friday nights, Dad took out his orders on a black three-wheeled carrier bike. For an hour or two, one of the children was made to mind the shop and see that no customers duped him into letting them have food on tick when Dad had blacklisted them for not paying their bills.

  My father never tried to teach us anything, though he had learned a lot since he finished his schooling at thirteen. If a fuse blew or a tyre punctured or a window was smashed, it was he who mended it—and in secret. He had the unassailable pride of the uneducated man. His children might attend the grammar school and the convent—intellectuals, he called us—but in his house he did all the ‘fixing’. He was the boss.

  In fact, he was nothing of the sort. It was my mother who made all the major decisions about our schooling and our religion, and about my being sent away to the junior seminary. An inexhaustible fund of affection, she was what our seminary professors called one of the simple faithful. Her faith was as unquestioning as a child’s. It was her faith that saw me through the difficult times in the major seminary, especially the first two years. That was when I studied philosophy which was as intelligible to me as Chinese.

  My mother was fond of calling to mind her own childhood. Her father was often without work and her mother had to stand at a wash-tub in a laundry from eight in the morning till eight at night for a shilling a day. ‘Yet,’ my mother said, ‘we were happier in those days. Mind you, I wouldn’t want them to return.’ That was a paradox I could never resolve, for we were happy, too, though we had little enough of the things of the world.

  I used to spend my Christmas and summer vacations at home. I was specially close to the youngest of the family, my two sisters, Meg and Jenny. After I was ordained, Mum wanted brother Bob, my junior by two years and a trainee accountant, to give up his attic bedroom to me. She said I needed a quiet room at the top where I could be alone to pray and to say my Office. I preferred to share with Bob, and at nights we talked into the early hours about the past, present and future.

  Mum would now ask me to say Grace before and after meals. One look from her made the boss take off his cap, revealing a rare display of white hairs.

  The silver wedding anniversary fell on a Sunday. I presided at a solemn sung Mass in the parish church at 11 o’clock. My parents had a special prie-dieu and chair on the sanctuary. Both were in new clothes, bought off the peg. Mother had a trim red hat. Father wore a three piece suit and a new pair of mittens.

  When I turned round after the Gospel to read a blessing over them, it was those mittens that made me choke. Not mother’s love for us, their joint protection of us, but those mittens and everything they stood for: the lack of opportunity in his life, the long, unbroken, indistinguishable hours, his endurance of ice and cold and grime and dirt without a murmur for us. I blew my nose hard and got a grip on myself. I managed to hold out. Just.

  Although I was tired when I returned to St Jude’s after our celebration, I was full of joy and gratitude at belonging to such a close knit family.

  The parish was in a state of chaos.

  ‘It all began yesterday with the washed Chinese carpet.’ Fr Duddleswell pointed grimly to the bare boards in front of the Lady Altar. Lord Mitchin, our richest parishioner, had donated it together with a Persian rug on the sanctuary which had also been stolen. ‘Worth £300 the pair, I’d say, Father Neil. I do not know what we are going to do.’

  He had called in the police but they were not interested in petty theft. They could not be expected, in any case, to put a round-the-clock watch on every church in the district.

  Fr Duddleswell complained that he was not getting the protection he was entitled to as a ratepayer. The first suggestion from the police was that he should lock up the church, outside of services.

  ‘But, Father Neil, we do not want a one-day-a-week church, do we, now? The good people of the parish would not be able to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Think of the Indulgences they would lose.’

  The police next proposed that we should take out anything that was movable: carpets, statues, candlesticks, vases, the lot. ‘They have no appreciation of the fact that we are Catholics, Father Neil. Can our folk be expected to pray without the customary aids to devotion? Indeed they cannot.’ He refused to turn his beautiful church into a bare Protestant meeting hall. ‘Who do these bobbies think they are, Father Neil, Henry VIII?’

  It appeared the police had no idea who the thief was. It could be a tramp, a gang of kids, a regular criminal. ‘In other words, they have about as many clues to our thief’s identity,’ he said, ‘as to that of Jack the Ripper. We can but pray that the thief, whoever he is, turns his attentions elsewhere.’

>   But the anonymous thief retained his preference for St Jude’s. Next day, he struck again. He walked off with a pair of silver candlesticks from the Sacred Heart Altar.

  ‘Where is it going to end?’ moaned Fr Duddleswell, when after lunch we witnessed the results of the latest depredations.

  ‘He is in and out in the time it takes to scratch your ear.’

  He knelt down before the life size statue of the Sacred Heart, saying, ‘Let us say a prayer for the criminal, Father Neil.’ And he proceeded to gabble, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace … pray for us sinners … at the hour of our death, Amen.’ All this before my knees could touch the floor.

  I made a token sign of the cross to show willing. ‘What’s next, Father?’ I asked.

  ‘Doubtless, soon he will be breaking into the boxes.’

  This prophecy, too, was fulfilled. That very evening. There were a number of boxes at the back of the church to receive the offerings of the faithful. Boxes for the Poor, the Holy Souls, Catholic Newspapers, Candles, Peter’s Pence and Catholic Truth Society pamphlets. The thief showed the catholicity of his tastes. ‘He has prised the lid off every one,’ roared Fr Duddleswell, boiling with indignation.

  I examined the locks and lids and suggested that the thief had used a screwdriver.

  Fr Duddleswell said, ‘We are dealing with a blasphemer, a regular John Bull, are we not, Father Neil? Not only does he rob the poor and the Holy Father himself, he even breaks open boxes containing money meant for the Holy Souls. And that is a dark problem on its own.’

  I asked him what he meant.

  ‘If the thief stole five shillings from the Holy Souls’ Box,’ he explained, ‘that is the price of a Mass stipend and we ought to say a Mass for the donors’ intentions.’

  I agreed. It would be terrible if a Holy Soul remained one minute longer in the cleansing fires of purgatory than was strictly necessary because the Mass he was entitled to had not been celebrated. ‘I’ll offer a Requiem tomorrow, Father.’

  ‘Ah, there, your heart is in the right place, Father Neil. I would offer the same meself but for the fact that I have already promised Janet Murphy to say Mass in the morning for her cat. She is having an operation. A hysterectomy. And she will be lonely, you follow?’

  Finding this information highly ambiguous, I said I quite understood he couldn’t disappoint Mrs Murphy or her cat.

  A locksmith was called in. For £3 he mended the boxes and put a heavy padlock on each. ‘That’s the best I can do, sirs,’ he said, already hinting that his best might not be good enough.

  And so it proved. The thief’s screwdriver managed once more to prise open the boxes without touching the padlocks. This time he had also broken the lock on the baptistery and stolen the casket with the small silver phials of holy oils used for baptisms and anointing the dying.

  Fr Duddleswell was crestfallen. It would cost him another £3 to replace the oil stocks and then he’d have to go to the Cathedral to beg for a refill. ‘Pray to the Holy Mother,’ he counselled me, ‘that no one decides to die on us, Father Neil, before a fresh supply of holy oil arrives.’

  If that were to happen, I could see myself offering another free Mass for the repose of a brand new Holy Soul.

  ‘God help us, Father Neil, but this thief is a thorn in me eye. He is spoiling me sweet repose and putting the whole of the parish through the mincer.’ He decided to draw up a rota of watchers to keep an eye on things, ‘as we did during the war, like.’

  We were to ask for volunteers on Sunday but in the meantime we would have to take turns ourselves.

  ‘Just you and me?’ I asked, wondering whether I could survive vigils of several hours at a stretch. And Sunday was five days away.

  ‘Mrs Pring will be only too glad to help, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘She has a nose sharper than a briar and more eyes than a fisherman’s net. Besides,’ he added loudly, ‘she would far sooner park her bum on a bench than lick this house with a broom.’

  Out in the hall, Mrs Pring started up a kind of boating chant. ‘Hewing and drawing, cooking and frying, rubbing and scrubbing, washing and drying.’

  Fr Duddleswell muttered, ‘The voice of the turtle is heard in our land. By the law of averages she was bound sooner or later to blunder into poesie.’

  After Mrs Pring had sung her song a few times, she moaned, ‘I’m just a beast of burden, I am. A beast of burden.’

  ‘Well, Father Neil,’ Fr Duddleswell confided to me, ‘she is not Balaam’s ass that spoke but once, that’s for sure.’

  No sooner was Fr Duddleswell’s scheme put into operation than I realized its futility. For security reasons, he kept the door leading from the sacristy to the church permanently locked and barred. Whenever a watcher started to open it from the sacristy side, a thief would have half a minute to make his getaway. Another thing, the watcher had to sit or kneel in the benches in front of the boxes so that any prospective thief would see immediately if anyone was on guard.

  It was very embarrassing having to turn round whenever a worshipper dropped into church. The faithful resent being spied on by the clergy at their devotions.

  Once I tried sitting in the dark of my confessional. Mrs Betty Ryder, President of the Legion of Mary, spied me. She came in and poured out her very fluid soul. After a forty-minute drenching, I chose to sit a couple of rows from the back relying on my ears to warn me if anything out of the ordinary happened.

  On Wednesday I ate a big lunch and Fr Duddleswell left me to mind the shop while he took his siesta. I must have dozed off because when he came to relieve me at 3.30, red eyed from sleep, not only had the Poor Box been broken into but all the candles had been pinched.

  ‘He must be an indigent eskimo,’ observed Fr Duddleswell, when he had made an inventory of our losses, ‘but what the mischief came over you? Are you suddenly blind as a nut?’

  I apologized profusely. The thief had been in my grasp and I had let him go.

  ‘Forget it, lad,’ he said kindly. ‘Cannot have you walking around with a face grim as Holyhead.’

  He scratched his forehead and acknowledged the improbability of the thief being so stupid as to return that day. He was wrong. The rest of the boxes were emptied before supper.

  ‘Father Neil, when the bait is worth more than the fish, ’tis time to stop fishing.’ After that, he refused to have the boxes mended any more.

  I determined to make amends for my unplanned siesta. After supper, I called on Archie Lee, who, as ever, was delighted to see me. From a clothes line by the fireplace hung my pair of pyjamas.

  ‘Sorry Peregrine’s out, Father. ’E’s gone to Bedford to see ’is old auntie. She’s been taken ill.’ Anxious not to be caught out in a lie, he told me this was a code for Perry being at the Races. Perry’s gambling was the reason he was always skint. He kept back one fiver to wrap round pieces of newspaper and stuffed the lot in his wallet to make himself look plush. ‘Sometimes,’ complained Archie, ‘Perry goes to the gee-gees and leaves me working in a shop all bleedin’ day.’

  I told Archie I had come to see him.

  ‘Another ‘orspital job, Father?’ said Archie eagerly, rolling up his pyjamas and hiding them under his pillow.

  I explained what had been going on in church and said I wanted his help in finding out who the culprit was.

  He smiled. ‘No trouble there, Father.’

  ‘Not you and Peregrine?’ Archie was shocked at the suggestion after he had proved his honesty in so many ways. ‘But,’ I said after an apology, ‘I thought you said you knew.’

  ‘Right,’ said Archie. ‘I’m surprised the fuzz don’t. Most like, they do but they ain’t lettin’ on.’ He explained that every thief is a sort of craftsman with his own little trade marks. ‘The marks in this case,’ he said, ‘is clear as ’is autograph. ’Cept the bloke in question can’t write.’

  ‘Will you tell me who he is?’

  ‘I might,’ said Archie cannily, ‘and then I might not.’

  ‘I can’t r
aise much cash this time, Archie. That hospital job cleaned me out.’

  ‘It ain’t the bread, Father, I just don’t wanner grass on one of me old mates. It don’t do to shop one of yer own kind.’

  I said I fully understood his sense of honour.

  ‘Right, right,’ reflected Archie, who approved of that way of putting it. ‘Also, this bloke is one of us.’

  ‘A con man?’

  ‘You’ve been and gawn an’ done it again,’ Archie said reproachfully. ‘I mean ’e’s an ’oly Roman, like you an’ me.’

  ‘That makes it worse.’

  ‘That makes it better—for ’im, I mean,’ said Archie. ‘’E knows ’is way round the church, where all the goodies is, when the boxes is fattest with the lolly an’ that type of thin’.’

  When I assured him we didn’t want to have the thief arrested, Archie relaxed. I knew that when Fr Duddleswell heard the thief was a Catholic, he would want to save him for himself, redeem him, reform him.

  ‘’E’ll never manage that, Father.’

  ‘Well, at least stop him.’

  ‘Even that’ll take some doing,’ said Archie. ‘This gaffer’s been pilfering from churches since ’e were six.’ It had started when he went to Sunday school. The boxes were crammed after the morning Masses and the habit developed from there. ‘Went from strength to strength, see?’ I nodded. ‘’E don’t mean no ’arm by it. Knows no different. ’Ow else would ’e eat, tell me that?’

  ‘Either he goes out of business or we do,’ I said.

  ‘Bad as that, is it?’

  ‘If I promise we won’t “shop” him, Archie, or disclose who put us on to him, will you tell me who he is … for old time’s sake?’ I was so excited at the prospect of finding the culprit I was not above a bit of blackmail. Archie hesitated. ‘I give you my word that he’ll come to no harm, Archie, and we’ll do our best to see he gets a chance in life. Like you,’ I added.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Archie. ‘If only ’e’d go straight like me and Perry. ’E’s never ’ad our chance, ’as ’e? And ’e’s about as bright in the ’ead as a star by day.’