Letter to Erp 3

Dear Erp:

As usual I have been busy with nothing much to show for my industry. I am always up early, about 6am but generally boot up and spend a couple of hours reading the news before breakfast. So there you are, eight ante meridien before I even eat. This morning I made bread. This is an every weekend task, done while I listen to a radio programme which consists of elderly songs, most of which I know so I can sing along and kick out my little feet while kneading. I haven't forgotten about posting a photo on my blog, but have to wait for my daughter to arrive this week and show me what to do. I am not sure I have the thingy on the computer which takes the thingy from the digital camera so need her to show me.

I think I was telling you about my Catholic schooling but did not manage to finish as I had a visitor. Where did I get up to? I think it was about Standard One, as it was called in those days, where the seven years olds went, and this was quite important. Seven was the end of babyhood in a Catholic school. Seven was the attainment of the age of reason, we were told, the age at which we knew the difference between right and wrong, and we agreed, as it seemed to us that we did know the difference. This was the year in which we made our First Confession and celebrated our First Communion. I had difficulty with confession. Finding enough sins was a problem, so I usually ended up confessing to returning library books late or fighting with my sisters. Neither was true.

We girls dressed up in white dresses and veils, white shoes and socks, to make a First Communion, and afterwards there was a feast. Just as well. We had been fasting since 6pm the night before (not even a glass of water) and after the main even it was getting on for 11am. I took religion very seriously up until I was about sixteen. I believed everything I was told. I really quite enjoyed going to the Basilica and enjoyed being pious and pure but I had a nervous condition about going to hell (which we had described to us in detail by each teacher we had), and it led me to have nightmares from which I awoke screaming, although the tense situation at home could have contributed. My father was a drunkard and subject to uncontrollable rages from which we often had to run out of the house. As I was the eldest, my stupid mother would often confide to me her fears of what he would do, and this, combined with hell, at times became unbearable.

After dear old Sister Hoffbar I can remember only three nuns who taught me. Sister Borgia (yes, indeed, believe it or not), Sister Ambrose, and Sister Gertrude. Fine women every one of them, and also the women who sowed the seeds of feminism in my soul. I would stand in front of god and argue that these women genuinely loved children and had not a scrap of envy (no matter what men say) for women who married. They had made a choice and to my eyes they never regretted it.

The priests, now there was a different story. There were four in St Mary's parish, all Irishmen. One of them, Father Keyes, who was a young man when I left school, is still tottering down to the hospital to give Extreme Unction to the dying. Father Gaffey was a wild one, eventually sent back to Ireland for re-programming. Father Mee was a fat, dark haired and dark eyed little man who made no impression on me at all, but Father McCarthy was a priest who was of equal value to the nuns. He drove a Volkswagon van and on most occasions this was full of 11, 12 and 13 year old girls as we tore away for an afternoon of tennis or to netball at another school. This man spent most of his free time as a coach for tennis and netball for the whole girls' school. His behaviour with the girls was beyond reproach. Father McCarthy was a stocky, sandy haired, sportsman type, no drinking or smoking, just mad about sports, sort of stern in his manner (I never heard him laugh and his smile was brief), a moral man who gave real hellfire and brimstone sermons where he turned almost purple with rage in the pulpit. Then he would turn up for tennis or netball coaching and we girls would run to meet him so pleased to see him and he seemed pleased to see us as well. As a coach he never criticised and only praised, he had no favourites, and he worked as we did, running up and down the court as referee, and swinging the tennis racquet although he would have been pushing fifty at that time. I have a pretty good serve and backhand thanks to him.

Now the funny thing is, this very good, this excellent man, was given a trip to Japan as the Catholic Church sometimes does to reward its hard working members. While he was there, Father McCarthy was involved in a traffic accident in which he received head injuries. The head injuries affected his behaviour and he was, as they say 'never the same again'. He became bad tempered, critical and unapproachable and died an unhappy and angry man.

Why do you do these sorts of things god?

Father Gaffey, who smoked, drank, and gambled on the horses, and who liked women too much is also dead but was not really missed by anyone except perhaps Sister Ambrose, who, poor woman, blushed bright red whenever he came into the classroom and we horrible girls sniggered and had no pity for her. Sister Ambrose had three classes in one room for two years. It was really too much for her. When her father died she spent short periods during the day for about three days in the stationery room crying. Us horrible girls got annoyed about that. She showed her feet of clay and we didn't like it, but only because we had thought she was perfect.

By the time I was in my last year at Primary School I was twelve years of age and in Standard 6. I was a clever girl and had been designated for the teaching profession. In those days streaming was usual, with the dumb girls going into Home Economics, where they spent a lot of time doing art, crafts, cooking, dressmaking, and a minimum of lower level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the factories and shops and eventually, for marriage. Commercial was the middle stream and the girls did shorthand, typing, book keeping, and middle level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the office and eventually, for marriage. Academic was the top stream and the girls did languages, maths and science. Thus we were prepared for teaching and eventually for the Dominican Order. Unfortunately, towards the end of the year it appeared there was trouble at home. My father's drinking had reached epic proportions, my mother had got somehow into debt, she left the city taking the two younger girls and I was put with people I had never met before, to stay and complete the end of year scholarship examinations. The man of the house where I had been dumped told his wife (in front of me) to get rid of me. I went to another family. I would not do the exams but sat at the desk staring at the papers. I was eventually put on an aeroplane (a DC3) for a seven hour flight to Gisborne. I vomited all the way and eventually had to be carried off as I could not walk. I was totally deaf for three days after the flight. I stayed with four different families for the five weeks we were there. At one I had tonsillitis, at another I had sunstroke. Later I had septicaemia. During the six weeks school holidays I had stayed with six different families. When we returned home I was in a health decline which eventually led to being bedridden for three months and which ruined my education.

I was one of those children who generally do not survive a working class upbringing. I had pneumonia when I was 8 years of age because I was a child who needed warmth and comfort at night and my grandmother had been taken away. By the time I was twelve I had dysmenorrhoea from a lack of calcium, nightmares, bitten fingernails, and was descending into a state of nervousness which has remained with me all my life. I could hardly be taken anywhere as I got motion sickness. (Not that this stopped my parents, who would push me into the back of the car and carry me into the house and put me on the bed to recover when we got home.)

My father died in 1992. The minister called to gather information about his life for his sermon. I could not think of one good thing to say so stayed quiet. So did my mother and my then husband. "Surely," expostulated the minister, "the man can't have been so bad that nobody can think of one good thing to say about him!" Well, maybe the minister was asking the wrong people. I don't know. All I can say is that men need to consider such things as it is a terrible indictment on one to have those nearest you feel only relief at your death.

Snippets 2

Kingsley William Amis (1922-1995)
(One of the 'Angry Young Men' Amis was a working class only child smart enough to get a university education.)

However bright, the Lefty as defined by Amis was moved primarily not by ideas but by feelings and emotions. He or she typically started out as a young person who had an 'unfocussed dissatisfaction with the way things are', that is, with the way authority in the shape of employers or parents seemed to stand in the way his or her freedom just for the sake of being obstructive.
In stage two of the Lefty's development, the young man finds himself not getting on very far in a competitive world and when he asks himself why, he finds a blissfully satisfying answer. Which is that it's not his fault for being lazy or stupid or anything else - it's all the fault of the system that holds him back. So from now on the system must be opposed.
Amis knew all about his version of the Lefty from having been one himself.
...soon after his novel The Anti-Death League was published in 1966, Amis described its theme as being that 'what causes most unhappiness and feelings of revolt is the inescapable condition of human life...'
He had used to think, Amis went on, 'that human beings could be made significantly happier by transforming their outward lives'. Now he thought differently. 'Their real enemies are not
capitalism but death, not landlords but cancer, not warmingering but the power to kill people.'
p 281

In November it was the Observer's turn to be berated for implying that the Isralis had carried out the massacres of the Palestinians in Beirut and quoting two sources to back their case - 'Yassar Arafat and the PLO's man in New York.' The next year Amis invented a name for this kind of thinking: seditious neutrality'.
p 345
(from Kingsley Amis a Biography by Eric Jacobs)

Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grevious bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during long intervals at Convent Garden, convinces me that the theatre is safer than sport. p 21 Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer