For a period, under the influence of a prayer campaign in our parish by Father Cooney, now our parish priest, Mum instituted the daily recitation of the Rosary. The slogan was: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ With my father sitting in his armchair by the fire, present in body but hardly in spirit, and the rest of us on our knees, we prayed five ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary every evening after supper. For a time Dad came to church with us. He half-sat-half-knelt in the pew, breathing deeply and bathed in sweat with the discomfort the posture caused his leg. The experiment did not last.
There were nights when we children huddled together upstairs as our parents brawled in the living room with crockery and kitchen pans, accompanied by the sound of smacks, grunts and curses. There were mealtimes when a bowl of stew or a custard tart would go flying through the air to explode on the opposite wall. No small matter for seven hungry people, and with nothing going spare. After a big fight they would refuse to speak for days and weeks on end, save for tight-lipped requests for basics: ‘Pass the salt…please.’ It usually ended with my father buying flowers, and promising a trip to the Odeon at Gant’s Hill, cajoling Mum back to normal communication before the next set-to commenced.
Over the years, Mum’s contempt for Dad had infected our regard for him. Yet I found it hard to dislike him. He often made us laugh with the peculiar literalness of his humour. In the height of the summer season, when he was working outside from dawn till dusk, he would limp in wearily for his supper saying: ‘Cor blimey, I’m as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger.’ When we were seated, eager for breakfast, five sets of hungry eyes, he would produce like a conjuror a tiny beef-stock cube, placing it in the middle of the table: ‘Here we are, kids. How about a square meal?’ One day I knocked down a tin of pennies and halfpennies we kept on the mantelpiece. He picked me up and rolled me about in the coppers: ‘Here we go, Jack: now you’re rolling in money!’
He had a comic sense of mischief which often stoked Mum’s anger. One afternoon I was bouncing a ball against the back of the house when the bathroom window opened and Mum hollered out: ‘Sid! Sid!’ Dad was in the garage, but he heard her clearly enough and came bounding along. I followed him into the house.
Mum had been trying to clean up Gyp in the bathroom and the dog refused to get out of the tub.
‘Sid!’ she called out to Dad, now stationed at the bottom of the stairs: ‘Lift this bloody thing out of the bath, will you!’ Instead, Dad gave me a wink and made a shrill whistle with his fingers. Gyp came out of the tub like a rocket, flew down the stairs and into the living room where he shook gallons of filthy water over the walls and furniture. Mum’s execrations followed Dad as he retreated giggling up the yard path towards the field. By nightfall Gyp had been consigned to a stray dogs’ home.
THE END OF my delinquency and the growth of my devout life followed a trauma that I was unable to confide in anyone, least of all Dad. From about the age of ten I was in the habit of stealing money from Mum’s purse to take the tube up to central London. I would take the tram, clattering along the Victoria Embankment. I would find my way from the Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of London, to the dark magnificence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral with its ancient rancid smells. I liked to walk from the Protestant Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station, marvelling at the huge apartment buildings, and the grand façade of the Army and Navy department store. By the age of eleven I had found the museums at Kensington, and I would wander there on Saturdays.
One afternoon on my way back to South Kensington a man walked in step with me along the tunnel that leads from the museum district to the underground station. He was in early middle age, well-groomed and dressed in a tweed suit. He had fair hair and a pleasant fresh complexion. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I had seen boys with fathers like him in the museums. He asked me if I would like to earn some money, showing me five shillings in the form of two newly minted half-crowns resting in the palm of his hand. It crossed my mind that the money would buy me many more trips into central London, but even as I gazed at the coins I was frightened. The tunnel was now empty of pedestrians; we were alone. I started to walk quickly ahead, but he kept pace with me. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he was murmuring. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
Saying that he was not going to hurt me made me all the more frightened. When he held me painfully by the shoulder, I was terrified of what he might do if I refused to cooperate with him.
In a cubicle of the deserted public toilets at South Kensington the man forced me into a deed for which I had neither words nor understanding. I was conscious only of the dirty cracked tiles, the evil smell, and the noise of flushing urinals. In my child’s terror of the man and what he was doing to me, I seemed to understand so clearly what I had somehow always known: that this I, this soul of mine, was a stranger in my body, a stranger in the world.
When he had finished doing things to me, he made me do things to him. Then he stood over me, telling me never to tell anybody. ‘Don’t let me see your ugly little face around here again!’ he kept saying. ‘Look at me!’ he said. But I could not look at him; I stood frozen, blind. He smacked me hard around the head, and I cried again. ‘That’s nothing to what you’ll get if you tell,’ he said. Then he made off. I had forgotten about the five shillings, and so had he.
Some time after this I had an experience in the night which seemed like a waking dream or a deeply buried memory. I was standing, dressed in nothing but a short vest, in an attic room high up in a bombed-out building where the stairs had collapsed. It was a summer’s evening and I was gazing through a dormer window over rooftops and chimneys. In the far distance I could see a church tower touched by the evening sun. The sight of the church tower filled me with sadness. I could hear a sound of sighing and wailing across the rooftops like the old air-raid sirens of the war. There was a presence in the waves of sound, like an ageless dark being, and it gathered strength and purpose in a series of sickening, irresistible pulses. I was about to be engulfed by a monotonous rhythm that intended taking me to itself for ever. This I knew was the only reality, the ultimate and inescapable truth without end. As it ebbed away, like a mighty ocean of darkness, I understood that its departure was only temporary. Finally, inevitably, it would return. This and only this was real. It was a presence greater than my sense of the entire world, and it lay in wait for everyone.
After this I began to listen with greater concentration to the words of Father Cooney as he gravely recited the prayer to Michael the Archangel at the end of Mass. He spoke of the Evil One as he who ‘wanders through the world for the ruin of souls’. I began to understand the Evil One as a dark power that threatens to devour every soul in the world. What extraordinary words they seemed. How they filled me with dread especially in the night: ‘He who wanders through the world for the ruin of souls.’ Ruin.
AT MY MOTHER’S suggestion I responded to a call from Father Cooney for altar servers. Following an evening’s instruction in the rituals, and several mornings serving Father Cooney’s Mass, I found that I had an inclination for being on the sanctuary. I discovered an unexpected satisfaction in the dance of the rituals and rhythm of the recitations. The murmured words of the Latin echoing to the church rafters, the bell chimes, the devout movements by candlelight in the cool of dawn filled me with wonder. Lighting candles before the statue of the Virgin, reverently making the sign of the Cross with Holy Water on entering and leaving church, carrying rosary beads on my person at all times, genuflecting with reverence, crossing my forehead, lips and heart