A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  I should not have come. There was always the risk of this detestable chumminess.

  ‘Safe period,’ Dr Spinks mocked. ‘I heard your Church was against sex before marriage but denying it to a randy fellow after marriage is bloody ridiculous. Encourages infidelity.’ Then without respite, ‘And why should a celibate presume to instruct me on sex? It’s as lunatic as allowing only orphans to be Marriage Counsellors.’

  I was about to push his face in when the key turned in the lock. Sarah rushed in from the kitchen crying, ‘Oh, no!’

  A young woman was at the head of eight or nine dishevelled youngsters. All were loaded down with tins, bottles and French loaves.

  ‘Debbie,’ said Sarah, wringing her hands, ‘you told me you were at Jane’s for the evening.’

  ‘We were, Sarah darling, but her parents returned unexpectedly from Sunderland. Puritans the pair of them. They even lock up the beds while they’re away.’

  Sarah introduced me to her flatmate. ‘Debbie Shackles, Fr Boyd.’

  ‘He’s cute,’ said Debbie, pursing her lips in a lewd fashion. ‘Shake.’

  A tousle-haired lad, looking like a pearly king in a black leather jacket sewn with silver buttons, caught sight of me. ‘Sarah,’ he rejoiced, ‘you didn’t tell us you were having a fancy-dress.’

  Someone put on a jazz record and several started to bob and weave. Johnny, the lad who imagined I was all dressed up, pointed to where a girl had parked herself on the floor and was gazing blankly like a guru into space. ‘Rebecca Sacks, Reverend. She’s high.’

  ‘I’m Roman Catholic,’ I said.

  ‘Care for a puff?’ Johnny asked, after exhaling meticulously.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Sticking to cigarettes, eh? Wasn’t it one of your guys who said, opium is the religion of the people?’

  I went across to Rebecca and tried to shake her hand. It felt broken. ‘Fr Boyd,’ I said.

  ‘Tweet-tweet.’ She flapped her arms pathetically.

  ‘My!’ yelled Johnny from across the room. ‘You’ve really made a hit with Becky, man. Stay with it and she’s a regular communicant.’

  Sarah took my arm and steered me towards the door. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this.’

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ I shouted above the din.

  As she let me out, Sarah was saying, ‘You will come again, won’t you, Father? If you talk to Jeremy long enough, he’s bound to come round to our way of thinking.’

  I was still licking my wounds next morning when the phone rang. A raucous voice: ‘Jack Hately, here. My wife needs to be anointed. Come quick, Father.’

  The phone went dead before I could ask the caller for his address. I rushed down to Fr Duddleswell’s study. He wasn’t there. I raced to the kitchen to ask Mrs Pring if she could identify the caller.

  Calmly, without raising her eyes from her ironing, she said, ‘The Hatelys? Yes. They’re on Fr D’s side of the parish.’ Mrs Hately had been seriously ill for years and Fr Duddleswell anointed her every month to be on the safe side.

  ‘I’d better go along all the same, Mrs P.’

  ‘Wouldn’t if I were you. Fr D’ll be back within the hour and he’ll go himself.’

  ‘You’re not me,’ I retorted, ‘and I’m going.’

  ‘When the old cock crows, the young one learns,’ said Mrs Pring with a toss of her head. ‘Suit yourself. 3 Springfield Road.’

  I cycled there at speed. Effects of bombing were still to be seen in the battered buildings and vacant housing lots.

  Number 3 was now the end house. Hardly a house. It was a basement, its outer wall buttressed by wooden beams sunk in the ground.

  I knocked three or four times, louder and louder, until a woman’s voice cried out, ‘Jack, a visitor, a visitor!’ and an old chap beyond the biblical span hobbled to the door. He had a loud, hollow voice. ‘Is Fr Duddles away? You’ll have to do, then.’

  Behind him, propped up on a large, brass bed was his wife, her yellowy-white hair splayed across a discoloured pillow. Desolation. Water dripping into a pitted zinc basin, shelves in disarray, greasy gas cooker, an ancient iron bath-tub, the pervasive smell of an old person’s untended sick room.

  ‘You the new curate?’ Mrs Hately enquired hoarsely. ‘I can see all the girls falling for you.’ She was a flirt. ‘You’re easy on the eye. Much nicer’n my Jack.’ I looked at Jack and marvelled at the minuteness of the compliment. ‘I keep telling Jack, I do so admire men with thick wavy hair.’

  Her bald-headed Jack nodded and smiled inanely. Only a deaf man could have absorbed so many insults without protest.

  I asked Mrs Hately about her health. ‘Haven’t been well for centuries,’ she replied.

  ‘There, there,’ boomed Jack in what was meant to be a soothing tone.

  ‘First my arthritis, Father, and now’—indicating the faulty organ—‘my heart.’

  ‘There, there, me darlin’.’

  I took out the holy oils. ‘Fr Duddles,’ she said, ‘anointed me last week.’

  ‘There, there,’ sounded the drum.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Jack, won’t you?’ she yelled at him. He smiled until he saw her grimacing. ‘The anointing don’t help me none,’ she croaked. ‘I’m a condemned building. Jack’s done it. He’ll be the death of me.’ Jack smiled slyly and toothlessly from the far side of the room. ‘The Church is taking my Jack away from me.’

  What did she mean? What possible use would the Church find for dear old Jack?

  ‘He’s just longing for me to drain away and die, Father. So’s he can return to the bosom of Holy Mother Church.’

  Jack or Mrs Hately or both must have been married before. That made their present marriage invalid in the Church’s eyes. If Mrs Hately died, Jack would be free to return to the sacraments.

  I jumped to Jack’s defence but she was not listening. ‘Been together more’n forty years,’ she moaned, ‘and now he wants rid of me. The cold, damp sod for me, the warm bosom of Holy Mother Church for him.’ She had evidently played this part before.

  Jack stepped across to me and exploded in my ear. ‘Care for a nice cup of tea, Father?’ My gesture of acceptance could not have been demonstrative enough. ‘P’raps another time, then,’ he said.

  The scene was so dismal, so Dickensian, I couldn’t wait to get out. ‘You’re not in any pain, Mrs Hately?’ I said, preparing to leave.

  ‘Never in anything else.’ After a gesture of disgust in Jack’s direction, she turned her face to the black and peeling wall.

  ‘There, there,’ cried Jack. He sat quite still, the tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘There, there, me love, me precious.’ Her back was iced against him. ‘I’m never going to leave you, me dearest, never.’

  I moved nearer to his wife to give her my blessing. There was no thawing of the little iceberg in the bed, so I blessed her from behind. With a large, scaly fist, Jack signed himself.

  When I left the room that was a house, he was still crying and a deaf old woman was resolutely turned towards the wall.

  ‘Mrs Pring informs me that you went to the Hatelys, Father Neil.’ I was at my desk preparing Sunday’s sermon. Fr Duddleswell said, ‘You were not to know, lad.’

  ‘That they are living in sin?’

  He looked startled and wanted to know what I meant. I said I had worked it out that there must have been a previous marriage and divorce, as in the case of Mr Bingley.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ sighed Fr Duddleswell, sinking into a chair. ‘Steel yourself, lad, while I tell you the whole unsavoury tale.’ I was in no mood for the facts of life. ‘You see,’ he said, secretively, ‘not to put too fine a point on it, Jack Hately is a priest.’

  It was my turn to look startled.

  ‘Now do not take it too hard, Father Neil. These things happen, if you’re still with me.’ He outlined the story.

  Jack Hately, now eighty-three, left the priesthood in his late thirties and married Betty, ‘his partner,’
in the Register Office. There had been two children. The first appeared ‘far too soon’ after they married. Both had emigrated to Australia.

  Jack had been faithful to Betty according to his lights. He had worked hard as a postman and was not long retired when a land mine during the war sliced off the top two storeys of his house. They had lived in the basement ever since.

  Old Jack never went to church. He probably couldn’t see the point because he and Betty were excommunicated and he was bitter as well. When an Indian Bishop came to St Jude’s to appeal for money, Fr Duddleswell took him to see the Hatelys. He couldn’t converse with Jack who was already deafer than a pillar-box, but as he was leaving, the Bishop knelt down. Jack gathered he was asking him for his blessing. ‘Well, strike a light, Father Neil. Old Jack had not seen the inside of a church for more than forty years and here was a coffee-coloured Bishop kneeling at his feet, begging his blessing.’

  Jack started going to Mass again. He couldn’t receive Holy Communion, of course. Mrs Hately could because she was in danger of death and Catholics are entitled to lots of things in danger of death. Then eighteen months ago Jack came to the presbytery to say he wanted to apply to Rome to have his excommunication lifted. This explained Mrs Hately’s fear that the Church was going to take Jack away from her. She was doubly upset at the moment because Fr Duddleswell had received word from Bishop’s House that Rome had at last replied to Jack’s appeal.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Fr Duddleswell, ‘I am off to see the Vicar General to hear what Rome has decreed.’

  As soon as he returned from Bishop’s House next day at 11.30, he called for a cup of coffee, ‘the strongest the handle will take, Mrs Pring, if you please.’

  ‘You look down in the mouth,’ said Mrs Pring.

  ‘Indeed,’ Fr Duddleswell agreed. ‘When I heard Rome’s findings me heart sank.’

  ‘Stones do,’ she said.

  After that, he took a large white envelope from his briefcase and drew out of it a Latin document footed by a big red seal. The gist of it was that the excommunication could be lifted provided Jack and Betty swore solemnly to live henceforward as brother and sister.

  Fr Duddleswell slapped the document like a naughty child.

  ‘According to this, Father Neil, should there be one sexual lapse on Jack’s part, he will re-incur all past censures and we will have to start the long judicial process all over again.’

  ‘That’s inhuman,’ I gasped.

  ‘But very wise, very worldly wise, would you not say, Father Neil? Mother Church realizes only too well that the flesh is weak.’

  I protested. ‘Father, Jack’s eighty-three. His flesh is far too feeble to be weak.’ But I had to admit that at his age and with his wife a permanent invalid, their living together as brother and sister was not too harsh an imposition.

  Fr Duddleswell guessed that what would upset Betty Hately most was a condition laid down by the Vicar General. To ensure that Rome’s terms were carried out to the letter, he personally decreed that Jack and Betty had to sleep in separate rooms. ‘When I told him, Father Neil, that they only have one room, he insisted that at least Jack and Betty should have separate beds.’

  ‘Poor old sods,’ I said.

  Fr Duddleswell did not reprimand me but he said quietly and firmly as if to silence insubordination, ‘Jack is a priest, you follow, Father Neil? He may die soon and the V.G. wishes him to die in his own bed not in hers.’

  I did not accompany Fr Duddleswell when he briefed the Hatelys on Rome’s decision. He came back, not too dispirited, to report that the old lady had sung her usual lament and started once more to outstare the wall. She had cheered up, though, when she learned that Jack was not about to leave home, after all.

  ‘Now, Father Neil, there is the little matter of a pair of single beds.’

  At Franklin’s Store, Fr Duddleswell went into a huddle with the manager of the bedding department. It was a slack period and the manager agreed to two divan beds being delivered immediately.

  We were at 3 Springfield Road half an hour later when the van arrived. The delivery men screwed on the legs and, to my surprise, joined the divans together to make one double bed.

  Fr Duddleswell winked at me. ‘Father Neil,’ he joked, ‘in me seminary days we used to say: beware of bulls and canon lawyers. They have minds like razors, you see, as sharp and as narrow. Better to let ’em have their own way, don’t y’think?’

  Jack Hately was delighted to have the best of both worlds: to sleep next to his wife and yet have a bed of his own. He lay down on it, sat on it, and bumped up and down on it.

  As we were leaving, Fr Duddleswell slipped Jack a fiver which he pocketed out of sight of his arthritic mate. Then we drove off.

  On the homeward journey, I said I thought it would be more merciful of the Church to dispense priests like Jack from the vow of celibacy if they wish to marry.

  To my surprise, Fr Duddleswell was vehemently opposed to the idea. ‘Merciful?’ he exclaimed. ‘Merciful? To whom, Father Neil? Tell me that, now. Is not the Church’s first concern for the majority of priests who do not give up their Latin to run off with women? And are not those who stay confirmed in their vow by the Church’s firmness in never granting dispensations?’ He whistled through clenched teeth. ‘Priests who are tempted to wed in the Register Office are mightily dissuaded by the knowledge that they will never be able to marry in the sight of God or offer a woman the blessing of a Christian home.’

  It seemed to me that Jack must have felt as lonely as a sparrow on a roof top when he teamed up with Betty. ‘What about special cases?’ I asked.

  ‘Father Neil, believe you me, all cases are special. The strength of our Church lies in the fact that her rules are bent for nobody. She will no more allow a divorced barmaid to remarry than King Henry VIII. She will no more dispense a priest one year in the ministry than one who is middle-aged with a dozen illegitimate children to his discredit. Everybody, priest and layman alike, knows exactly where he stands.’

  He went on to give me a sharp lesson on the value of celibacy. In the seminary, we had learned that priests do not marry so that, freed from domestic ties, they can look after their people day and night. Fr Duddleswell had an altogether broader vision.

  For him, a priest is ‘no tin cock on a church steeple.’ The whole system of Catholicism, its ethic, its creed and its discipline, rests on priestly celibacy. It is celibacy that gives the priest moral authority to teach unpalatable truths. He may be out of touch in many things but none of his congregation ever doubts that he has freely made an enormous sacrifice for their sake. He has the right to hand on the tough Catholic teaching on birth-control, abortion, divorce and homosexuality because he is a sign of Jesus lonely and crucified in their midst. ‘In the priest, Father Neil, sex bows its lovely head to something lovelier: self-sacrifice.’

  I had had recent experience of what he meant.

  ‘Furthermore, Father Neil,’ he said peering through the windscreen as if he were gazing at some impossibly hideous futuristic vision, ‘should the Church ever relax her discipline on celibacy, the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down. Even bishops will be found making exceptions in special cases to birth-control and divorce. The good sisters, seeing the laxity of the clergy, will themselves leave their convents like flocks of migrating birds. And in the end, we will have Catholics advocating euthanasia for babies born handicapped and for old people who are incurably ill or a burden on the community.’ He was silent for a few moments before adding, ‘Merciful, he says. Merciful.’

  We had reached the garage gates. I prepared to jump out and open up for him but he touched my arm. ‘One more thing to further your education, lad.’ I looked at him wondering what next. ‘The Vicar General said that Bishop O’Reilly wants me to persuade Betty to retire to an old folks’ home. She will be well looked after there and he will foot all the bills.’

  ‘And old Jack?’ I said, shocked at the prospect for one so near the grave.

 
He leaned his forearms on the wheel. ‘The Bishop would like him to go into the Dogs’ House.’ This was the clergy’s name for the Monastery of St Michael’s, a kind of reformatory for naughty priests. ‘The Bishop’s idea, Father Neil, is that Jack should end his days there. After a few months, Rome might be prevailed on to let the Prodigal say Mass again. That way, he could die with dignity.’

  However impressive the principle of celibacy, this was too much for my stomach. ‘Father,’ I burst out angrily, ‘Mrs Hately’s old and infirm and in constant pain. I think Jack has a duty to stay with her as long as she lives.’

  ‘Whatever the Bishop says?’

  I didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, whatever the Bishop says.’

  Fr Duddleswell looked at me with wrath all over his face. ‘Young man,’ he snapped, ‘have you no regard for the wishes of your Superior and father in God? Get out with you and open that gate.’ I rose but before I could slam the door on him, he leaned over and said, ‘I tell you this, Father Neil. If old Jack should ever leave his Missis after all these years, I will knock his bloody block off.’

  XI The Season of Good Will

  Fr Duddleswell told me at breakfast of his decision to invite the Rev. Percival Probble, the Anglican Vicar, and ‘his good lady’ to tea.

  ‘He is convinced, you see, that at the summer swimming gala he saved me from a watery grave.’ I could not deny it. ‘I have no wish to disabuse him and so injure his self-esteem.’

  Mrs Pring put the dishes down with a clatter which showed what she thought of serving a clergyman’s wife at our table.

  Fr Duddleswell was looking for support. ‘If you are mine be mine with all your heart. So what do you think, lad?’

  Honesty compelled me to say that Mrs Pring’s opinion should be taken into consideration. What I meant was that she was, in a sense, our good lady and she never ate with us.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Fr Duddleswell, ‘that makes a slender majority of one to two in me favour.’ He obviously did not count votes, he weighed them. When Mrs Pring walked off in a huff, he said, ‘That will muffle her clapper for a while.’