David's short book "Tales from the Plots" has now gone to the printers - it will be available in conjunction with the Slug Society's exhibition at the Brewer Arts Centre in Kendal in July and August.
It will also be available through this blogsite once Robert puts the PayPal button on!
We are also working on a new volume based on our experiences of lecturing in Further and Higher Education - this should be available later this year
IN THE MEANTIME HER IS THE LATEST ROBERT ELDON -
ONE ARCHBISHOP, FOURTEEN NUNS AND A MINIBUS
An Anglican Canon died and found himself standing at the
Pearly Gates. Having given his name to St Peter, he was warmly welcomed in and
a passing angel was delegated to show him round. They had been walking for perhaps
half-an-hour when they came to a large high wall, which encircled a small
enclosure. A large sign on the wall said “Tost na h-oidhc!”
‘What’s the wall for, and what does that writing mean?’
asked the Canon.
‘The writing means ‘Be Silent!’ It’s Gaelic, and inside the
enclosure are the ministers of the Wee Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland,
Presbytery of Lewis.’
‘But why do you keep them walled in like that?’ asked the
Canon, ‘Surely they’re not dangerous in any way.’
‘No, it’s for their own peace of mind,’ said the angel. ‘In
life they believed they were the only ones who would ever get here and it so
upsets them if they see other souls!’
I speak as one who was once condemned from the pulpit of the
Wee Free in Benbecula for attending morning service in an anorak. It didn’t
seem odd. After all, my own dear grandmother had her own very firm ideas about
appropriate dress in church, particularly when applied to the clergy, but more
of that later.
This piece is largely about my lifetime’s experience with the
clergy or at least with the ‘religious’ as Sister Ursula, a nun with whom I
once taught at a provincial university, called them.
Once when introducing her colleagues at an induction session
for a group of Catholic students Sister Ursula had pointed to herself and a
young nun beside her, and said ‘I’m afraid I must tell you that we’re what you
call ‘religious’!’ Then she paused ‘But we’re not sure about Sister Mary.’
Sister Mary was a Manx woman of indeterminate age, who ruled
the Administration section in my department. She decided to take me under her
wing when I joined and to protect me against what she saw as the malign
influence of the evil sisterhood of feminists who she believed were taking over
the institution.
Sister Mary was very free with her advice. On being told of
the appointment of a new parish priest she asked if he drank. ‘It’s best to have a parish priest who drinks,
that or the gambling. They’re the only things keep their hands off the little
boys!’
‘Really Sister!’ said the departmental secretary, ‘what an
evil thing to say!’
‘So report me to the old bitch,’ said Sister Mary, the “old
bitch” being her customary name for the Mother Superior at the Convent where
the nuns lodged.
Ah, Sister Mary, in the words of the Jake Thackery song ‘a
bloody funny nun you were!”
Anyway, to move on, for Sister Mary is a diversion, albeit
as Michelin guides are wont to say “one worth a detour”. She isn’t even one of the 14 nuns referred to
in the title and besides this piece is mainly about priests. I tried to find a
suitable collective noun for priests – there’s a superfluity of nuns, even a
dignity of canons, but apart from convocation and college nothing for
priests. So I’ve chosen the title you’ve
got.
I’ll start at the top. I once had an encounter with an
Archbishop in a gents’ lavatory. Before anyone becomes worried this is not a
confession story which might lead to evidence being placed before Operation
Yewtree or its ilk or even the making of a film starring Judi Dench. Sorry to
disappoint you all.
No, it was back in the University mentioned earlier.
At the time we were very short of lecture room space and the
rooms were in use for about 14 hours a day, so much of my teaching was done to
mature part-time students in the evenings. As I passed through the foyer on my
way to my lecture theatre one evening I noticed a largish group had gathered
and on enquiring found that there was a meeting of the University Senate that
evening.
Needing a pee, I headed into the gent’s toilets. The toilets
off the foyer had an odd layout. Although the end room itself with the sinks,
urinals and cubicles, was brightly lit, there was a long, narrow unlit corridor leading to the room. As I started along the corridor I found myself faced with an
apparition silhouetted in the far doorway. His vestments trailed to the floor
making it look like he was floating just above the ground. With his mitre on
his head and his crozier in his hand the Archbishop looked like a gold-plated
Dalek about to invade earth. He should have shouted ‘exterminate’ but he just
smiled and I stepped back into the foyer and let him out. He went off to the
Senate and I went to teach Basic Business Finance, each to his own.
Grandmother would never have gone for golden vestments, she believed
in austerity in religion (she’d have got on well in the Presbytery of Lewis,
except they don’t allow women, which might have been an obstacle.) Plain black
was in her view the only correct attire for the clergy. I remember a young
vicar arriving at our church and taking the service wearing a white surplice
over his black cassock. ‘Popery!’ cried Gran.
Summoning a convenient daughter to push her wheelchair to the front of
the church, she faced the clergyman. ‘My grandfather didn’t build this church for
you to swan about like a prancing Jessie,’ she informed him.
Forty years later I went to that priest's retirement service. In his
speech he remarked how in his early years in the parish he’d been terrorised by
an elderly woman parishioner. ‘Every home visit was an ordeal,’ he said, ‘she’d
quiz me on scripture and on interpretation. She’d heard every bit of malicious
gossip about my shortcomings and behaviour and she’d demand that I account for
them. I still break out in a cold sweat to this day to think of it!’
Gran would have been so pleased to hear that. I imagined the vicar going up to heaven when
his time came. He’d be stood before St
Peter waiting to know his fate, when they’d be approached by a woman all in
black, six feet tall, with iron grey hair pulled back in a bun. ‘Well I’m
satisfied,’ says the saint, ‘but I’ll just have to check with Mrs White before
you can come in. She has a few points she wishes to clarify!’
Gran had little time for the workings of the Catholic
Church. When young I assumed that this was for reasons of doctrine, but I later
learned it was more a reaction to the doings of my Catholic Grandfather, Jimmy.
I never met Jimmy, I always assumed he’d died before I was born, but in actual
fact he was living with a new woman and family in a nearby town. I must have
driven past his house a dozen times.
Gran herself had passed on before the events I’m about to
recount. It was perhaps for the best. What she’d have thought of me working
with a Catholic Diocese in the North of England I don’t know.
We were engaged in the forward planning of primary and
secondary schools provision in a newly created borough. Part of this work
involved forecasting the numbers of pupils who would opt for a Catholic-based
education rather than a go to a ‘state’ school. To do this accurately required
a major data collection exercise from baptismal records and school rolls across
the parishes within the Borough. To gain access to those records we had to
visit every parish priest individually and arrange the data collection exercise
with him. This meant that over a fairly short period I met a large number of
priests. I must admit that during this time I came to agree with the late Pete
McCarthy’s remark about the Catholic Church of his childhood. ‘I could
understand the Catholic bit, it was where Rome came in I couldn’t get. Everyone
seemed to be Irish!’
Generally the priests could be divided into three groups,
young priests who were mainly based out on the large Council estates to the
south of the Borough, older priests in the traditional areas along the river,
and a small group of “unclassifiables”.
The young priests were a pretty uniform bunch, you’d turn up
at their house, sit in a dimly lit front room on shabby second-hand furniture,
probably donated by a parishioner, and drink bad instant coffee while listening
to a catechism of statements about Catholic education policies which you were
sure had been sent them by the Diocese. There was always a side table in the
room on which a large photograph of the priest standing with a proud mother on
the day of his ordination took centre stage. These pictures had usually been
taken by the local photographer in some small town in Ireland.
They were often morose, earnest young men, rather like
Father Stone in the “Father Ted” programme, I felt a bit sad for them. I never
met a Father Dougal or a Father Ted on those visits or maybe I’d have been the
one to write those stories, I can dream can’t I?
But I did come close to a few Father Jacks, and this is
where we come to the old fellers in the heartlands. Memory is an unreliable
thing but I seem to see an endless stream of elderly men, all of whom could
have been played by Barry Fitzgerald in a 1930s movie, sitting in comfy
presbyteries, being brought endless tea and cakes by middle aged ladies.
Their opening remark was invariably, ‘And are you a Catholic
yourself?’ This was usually followed, unless the meeting was very early in the
morning, by ‘Will you take a glass with me?’
They didn’t spout the Diocesan line, having more than enough
lines of their own. I remember one old priest saying ‘All them
buggers is on the pill, they think I don’t know….. but I do, and I’ll catch
them!’ Another popular joke was ‘have you heard that the Vatican’s approved a
birth control pill for Catholic women at last? It’s six foot round and weighs
ten stone and they roll it against the bedroom door so their husband can’t get
in.’ None of them, though, ever told me the tale of the fourteen nuns in the
minibus.
Anyway the exercise went along nicely, and a team assembled at the Town Hall to analyse the findings and present them to Council and Archbishop. I
was working with Father Simon, a tall gaunt man, who had all the warmth,
charisma and passion of the born tax accountant. He was of course a Jesuit.
The results were clear, but some of the findings a little
uncomfortable. Part of the exercise had been a major opinion poll amongst
parents in the Borough and it turned out that only 70% of Catholic parents were
likely to opt for a Catholic secondary school and the percentage was even less
for primaries. Many held that factors such as proximity to home and not having
to cross major roads were more important, and that’s before we got to
‘subjective’ opinions about the quality of the education provided, these being
the days before Ofsted. I remember Diane Morgan talking of the occasion when her
parents had to choose her secondary school. There were two options, the first
had a terrible reputation for teenage pregnancies, the second was across a
dangerous road and there’d been many casualties. Diane was sent to the former,
‘Better knocked up than knocked down!’ being her parents’ stance.
‘The Archbishop won’t accept this!’ said Father Simon as we
surveyed the results. And so we wrestled with conscience and professional
integrity as to whether to tell the unvarnished truth or find some way to spin
the data.
One day, whether seeking divine guidance and simply
to get out of the office, the two of us went on a trip to Durham Cathedral. As we
stood in the nave under those vast vaulted ceilings, Father Simon turned to me.
‘Whenever I stand here,’ he said, ‘I give thanks to God.’
‘That’s good,’ I replied, ‘for anything in particular?’
‘Yes, that we don’t have to pay for the maintenance
anymore!’
I said he was a born accountant.
In the end we, as my Gran would have put it, “told the truth
and shamed the devil”. The result was predictable, my contract was terminated and
Father Simon was transferred to be an Assistant Priest in a small rural parish
on the north-east coast of Scotland.
I remember telling this tale to Martin, an ex-priest I got
to know some years later, who’d left the priesthood, married and re-trained as a Social Worker. Judith,
his wife, was a local woman with a keen interest in local church history and a
number of stories that she was very willing to share. She’d carefully compiled
the records of young women who’d been brought over from Ireland to be
housekeepers, you could hear the inverted commas in her voice, to the local
parish priests during the 19th century. The vast majority of these women had
left some months later, under what might be called a cloud and did not seem to
have been able to return to their families in Ireland. Judith had no doubt as
to the reasons for these departures nor about who was responsible.
Anyway, Martin and I were sat having a pint (Guinness
inevitably) in a pub one lunchtime and he remarked on the fact that I was,
unusually for me, wearing a suit and tie. I explained that I had in fact had to
spend all morning in meetings with local councillors and that I’d had to buy
suit, tie and white shirt especially for the occasion on my last trip to Dublin, the suit and shirt from
Penny’s and the tie from Cleary’s on O’Connell Street. This lead to joint
reminiscences about days and nights out in Dublin City, and it was then that I
first heard the story of the fourteen nuns and the minibus.
Unfortunately it’s far too rude to repeat here, so I’ll just
have to leave it.
