‘Faith is dead,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Its time is up. And faith being dead, if we are not to become automatons we must hang on to our superstitions as hard as we may.’ He looked up. ‘You’re quite right, Agnes. It isn’t proper to put them in a garage like old lumber, and I’ll not farm them out around the parish and have them left on street corners. We’ll keep them together. And somewhere we know where they are. We’ll bury them. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll bury them in the church grounds.’
‘Oh, dear God.’ Tears of fright and fury sprang into Agnes’s eyes. ‘Forgive me Father, but there’s something inexpressibly horrible about the idea.’
‘I shan’t have a service,’ Father Angwin said. ‘Just an interment.’
You could not say that in Fetherhoughton there was a bush telegraph, for in that place, scoured as it was by Siberian winds, you could not find a bush. Nevertheless, by the time the schoolchildren were released next day for their morning break, everyone had heard of the developments.
St Thomas Aquinas School had been, in their grandparents’ time, one long schoolroom; but the rowdyism and ill-behaviour of successive generations had rendered this hugger-mugger sort of education impossible, and now flimsy partitioning divided one age of children from the next. Of course, when the school had been founded, great girls and boys of twelve years old were recognized to have no more need of arithmetic and improving verses, and were launched on the world to begin their adult careers among the textile machines. But now civilization had advanced so far that fifteen-year-olds occupied the Top Class, towering over Mother Perpetua, who was the headmistress, and who was responsible for keeping this Top Class from the excesses of frustrated youth.
And yet it was not youth as we know it, because Youth, elsewhere, was in the process of being invented. A faint intimation of it reached Fetherhoughton; the boys of fifteen slicked their hair greasily over their knobbly foreheads, and sometimes, like people suffering from a nervous disease and beset by uncontrollable tics, they would make claws of their hands and strum them repetitiously across their bellies. Mother Perpetua called it ‘imitating skiffle groups’. It was a punishable offence.
These boys were undergrown youths, their faces burnt from kicking footballs into the moorland wind. They were vague and heedless, and their childhoods hung about them. The narrow backs of their necks showed it, and their comic papers, and their sudden indecorous bursts of high spirits – indecorous, because high spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.
But in the Big Girls there was no vestige of childhood left. The Big Girls wore cardigans, and at playtime they skulked together in a knot by the wall, their faces moody, spreading scandal. They clasped their arms across their chests, hands hugging woollen upper arms: podgy hands, and low-slung bosoms like their grandmothers. Their cheap clothes were often small for them, and it was this that gave them their indecent womanliness; it was a rule, in the outside world, that girls stopped growing at about this age, but if you had seen the big girls of Fetherhoughton you would say, they will never stop growing, they will devour the world. The schoolroom chairs creaked under their bottoms; from time to time, nodding forward, swaying, and raucous, rhythmic, terrible, they would laugh: hehr, hehr, hehr.
The girls had learnt nothing; or if they had, they had forgotten it, immediately and as a matter of policy. The school was a House of Detention to them. Many of them suffered poor sight, and had done from their early years; the school nurse came, with letters on cards, and tested their eyes, and the State gave them spectacles. But they would not wear them. ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ But no one will make passes at them anyway. The process by which they will eventually mate and reproduce is invisible and had better remain so. They may as well have their astigmatism corrected, for all the sexual success it will bring them.
While the big girls leant by the wall, and while the big boys with their footballs tacked across the square of asphalt, the juniors of Fetherhoughton, red in tooth and claw, occupied themselves in games of tag, in hopscotch and skipping games. Their games were played in a fever of intolerance, an agony to those who could not hop or skip; as for tag, it was their habit to pick on some poor child more than usually ragged, or stupid, or scrofulous, and to bawl out his name, and declare you had his ‘touch’ and must pass it on. Of those not caught up in these games, a number occupied themselves in jumping, time after time, from the low wall that divided the upper level of the playground from the lower; others started fights. The level of disorder, the incidence of injury, was so high, that Mother Perpetua was obliged to segregate the infant class from the rest of the school at playtime, and corral them in a cobbled, evil-smelling yard at the back of the building; it was here, under the shadow of a moss-covered wall some twenty feet in height, that the school had its privies. It will not do to call them lavatories, for there was no provision to wash. To wash would have been thought an affectation.
Above the school the ground banked steeply, towards the convent and the church; below, it fell away to the village. The dismal wooded slopes that flanked the carriage-drive were referred to by local people as ‘the terraces’. From the wall at the lower end of the playground, the children looked down on tree-tops; behind the school, above the towering wall that fenced the infants in, they could see the gnarled and homeless and jutting roots of other trees, thrust out from the hillside and growing into air. These terraces were lightless places, without footholds, and it was a peculiarity of their trees that they bore foliage only at the very top; so that below the green canopy there twisted a mile of black branches, like a witch’s knitting. Autumn came early; and underfoot, at every season of the year, there was a sunless mulch of dead leaves.
On this particular day, the playground was more than usually animated; the children surged into knots and unravelled themselves again, and streamed wailing across the asphalt, and banked up against the low dividing wall. ‘St Hippo’, they shouted, and ‘St Beehive’; they made their arms into the wings of bombers, and wheeled and dived, and made the snarling whining noise of engines and the crunch of impact and the whoosh of flames.
Mother Perpetua watched them from the school door. She watched for a minute or two, and then with a swift rustle passed back into the shadows, and re-emerged with her cane. She lifted her habit four inches, and thrust out her laced black shoes and strode; then she was amongst the children, arm uplifted, her great deep sleeve falling back to reveal underlayers of black wool. ‘In, in, in,’ cried Mother Perpetua, ‘get in with you, get in.’ Her cane rose and fell across the children’s fraying jerseys. Howling, they dispersed. A bell rang; mouths agape, they ran into little lines, and sniffled back into their classrooms. Mother Perpetua watched them in, until the playground was empty; a damp wind picked at her skirts. She tucked the cane under her arm, and marched out of the school gates, and up the road to see Father Angwin. As she passed the convent she scanned its windows for signs of life, but could see none; could see nothing to displease her.
Quite unable to grasp her name, the local people had always called her Mother Purpiture; the more irreverent schoolchildren called her Old Ma Purpit, and it was some years since Father Angwin himself had thought of her by any other name. Purpit was a stumpy woman, of middle years—it is not proper to speculate about the exact age of nuns. Her skin was pale and rather spongy, her nose of the fleshy sort; she had a hoarse flirtatious laugh, and with this laugh, a way of flicking a corner of her veil back over her left shoulder; she had tombstone teeth.
Miss Dempsey brought her in, doing the office of a maid, her hands clasped before her at about the bottom button of her twin-set. ‘Mother Purpiture,’ she announced, grave and respectful. Father Angwin was not reading his breviary, but he at once picked it up, defensively, from the table beside him. Agnes took a little pace back to admit the nun, and stood uneasily fingering her artificial pearls, her mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Will you be wanting tea?’ she exhaled; and let her eyes travel from side to side. Without an answer, she effaced herself; slid behind Mother Perpetua, and left the room backwards.
Perpetua took a gay little step,