Month: November 2021

Not a cigar, a cigarette

When there’s a figure of torture seated on the mantelpiece day after day, it shapes your mind in ways that evade description. Like the crucifix from Holland, the one my mother must have packed in her belongings. Something she could not live without.  She needed to live without her parents and other members of her extended family. This crucifix provided certainty. A certainty that runs along the lines: there will always be suffering, and suffering brings with it the rewards of Heaven, if you live a good and unselfish life. 

I had wanted to write about the crucifix on my desk this morning but the more I looked at it, the more appalled I became as I slipped into my childhood mind, the one that daily endured the sight of this thin man stretched out on a cross. Two planks of wood, one shorter than the other. Someone has carved this figure out of wood and painted it with varnish. 

A man whose long arms are stretched into position. One of his arms once snapped and is reglued into its fixed position. One of his hands has worn away, still chipped, so that only the wrist remains stuck to the cross with a thumb nail. The cross rests on a semicircular centre piece in Bakelite which holds it steady. On the back someone has carved the letter and numbers: V498168, as if this piece is a job lot in a museum or has come from an auction room somewhere. 

I know nothing of its provenance or how it came into my parents’ possession, only that this crucifix has accompanied me throughout my childhood from the house into which I was born. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to take it with me from among my mother’s possessions after she died. 

None of my siblings who helped to clear out of my mother’s last bits and pieces soon after her death objected as I thought they might. Was I up to some sacrilegious no good? Or was it some sentimental longing to keep this souvenir from childhood. Why this souvenir, a figure of torture on a crucifix, a bearded man, his head lolling towards his shoulders, no longer able to hold it up? A loin cloth still in place around his hips but otherwise naked?

Two statues sat on the mantelpiece of my childhood, one of Christ crucified as I have described above, the other of his mother Mary, in brown porcelain, a crown on her head. The crown marks her royalty, a crown to mark Christ’s suffering. His was made of thorns.

Not that you can see this clearly, but I know from a childhood full of prayer and religious stories that the soldiers made Christ a crown of thorns by way of mockery. For the king of the Jews. I cannot empathise with the story anymore as it ceases to hold me in thrall as it might once have done. 

I cannot believe any of the religious folklore I grew into and beyond. But on my eighteenth birthday or thereabouts even before a time when eighteen was considered the age of entering adulthood, when we still celebrated 21 as the real coming of age, I saw inside the church and began to doubt that anything the nuns had taught us at school bore any relation to what I now considered truthful. As if scales fell from my eyes and I began to think of all the ritual and pageantry of the church as akin to the stories from the Magic Faraway tree, that tree in the woods which a small tribe of children climbed after mealtimes and beyond. The canopy of leaves in the centre. They enter a fantastical world of other people who are interested in these sweet children so far away from home. The Saucepan Man who rattles pots and pans, Mrs Moon-Face, Dame Washalot and Mr Watizisname, strange creatures but no less real to me then than Jesus Christ is now. The world of make believe and imagination.

Last night I dreamed I sat around the table of my childhood, no longer a child. My father was at the head, and I sat at the opposite end, my sisters and brothers flanked on either side. We talked about sexual behaviour, and I protested that it was akin to rape. 

I tried to explain this notion of rape culture to my family as I took a cigarette from my father’s Craven A filter tipped smokes and lit up. I smoked the cigarette from go to woe and did not enjoy the sensation on my lips, tongue and in my throat. Later in the dream I found myself lighting up another cigarette as my father watched. And again, I was repulsed. 

A question in my mind, why was I doing this? Was this my father in myself? 

It comes to me now as I think about Jesus Christ on the mantelpiece of my childhood home. My brothers nicknamed our father ‘JC’ after his first names, Jan Christiaan, a JC long suffering. 

Whenever my husband, who also struggles under the weight of a Catholic childhood mutters under his voice, half in jest, half as an expression of whatever frustration ails him: ‘My God My God, why hath thou forsaken me?’ I remind him that these are the words of Christ on the cross, dying to atone for the sins of all mankind. Is this what my husband imagines he is doing? Is this how my father saw his lot too. 

There on the crucifix of life, struggling to deal not only with his sins but also his own confused state of mind. For my father who broke the greatest taboo of all, who violated his children in much the way his own father once violated him.

Is this why the crucifix that sits beside me on display adds a layer to the confusion that is me?

The secrets that fill our minds by day are like ghosts who haunt our houses at night.

This is how I heard the story, twice removed, from a sister who disliked her mother as much as her mother disliked her. 

On the day of our mother’s first holy Communion, a special day in that family of devout Catholics, she went first to visit the priest in his confessional. Her first ever confession as a seven-year-old and a task she took on dutifully. 

First Communion day 1926

To this end, she had practised her list of sins, tiny misdemeanours: late to school because she had dawdled longer along the road than she should; an extra biscuit snatched from the biscuit tin when no one was looking; and failing to brush her teeth properly, even after she had promised her mother she would.

The thought of repeating these sins to the priest was satisfying. She knew once she spelled them out to him, one after the other, he’d set a penance of prayer, a Hail Mary pass, which she could go through later in the church and thereafter be absolved of all her sins, at least those she had confessed to, and her burden would be lightened. 

My mother disliked the burden of sin. It weighed heavily. She was the first born and a daughter. She was meant to set a good example to her many brothers. She was meant to behave in ways that made her shine as brightly, as bright as any saint in the firmament of saints above. Brighter than Joan of Arc on her horse with her shield and sword ready to fight for freedom; brighter than her namesake, Elisabeth of Hungary, who fed the poor against a cruel husband’s wishes; and brighter even that Maria Gemma Galgani, an Italian mystic who suffered from stigmata in her hands in the same place where the nails bore through Christ’s.

In my memory I mistook for this Maria Gemma for Maria Goretti, another Italian, the youngest saint to be canonised. This second Maria laid down her life to a man who made sexual advances and wanted to ravish her but she resisted. He stabbed her fourteen times for her refusal. 

My mother did not know what it meant to be ravished but it sounded like a serious sin, one of the worst and she was sure she would never be accused of such a sin.

Against the tiny failings of her temperament: wanting the biggest serve, her wish to read the newspaper first in the morning even ahead of her father. She could read if she snuck outside and collected the newspaper before her father stepped outside to greet the day. The sin of her secret dislike of her brother, the one immediately below her. The one who loved to play up at night when they were meant to be sleeping. He could get her into trouble because she was the oldest and should have been able to keep him quiet.

As the nuns taught at school. The person who chatted in class out of turn while the teacher spoke was no worse than the person who listened. Both should be punished. 

My mother thought this unfair. How could she help it that her brother liked to play games in the dark talking to himself as he pretended he was in a battle where he fought off the enemy? She could shush him. If she shushed too loud the nanny would hear. And if the nanny heard too often she would report it to her mother and then my mother would ….

The priest listened to my mother’s sins in the confessional, the rectangular box that stood in the corner of the church of St Bavo to the side away from prying eyes. The place where all sinners sat outside in silent rows to wait their turn to visit the priest and be absolved.

My mother’s knees itched against the hard wood kneeler, and she wanted to scratch at them, but she held her hands together in prayer position before the open grille. She could see the silhouette of the priest and caught the wetness of saliva on his lips the way it glinted in the thin light that sat above his head. So that neither of them was in complete darkness. She could not see him. Safe in the knowledge that she was just another little girl from her primary school unknown to this half-hidden priest to whom she could list her sins. 

Secret enough but safe sins that should not attract too much attention, to give rise to any further probing from the priest. And when she was done and sat in silence waiting for the absolution and pronouncement on how she might atone for her sins the priest took a deep breath.

‘What haven’t you told me?’ he asked.

My mother hesitated. This was not part of the script. What could he mean?

‘That’s all, Father,’ she said.

‘But your mother tells me that you didn’t tidy your room even after she’d asked you many times.’

And my mother stammered a ‘Yes. That, too’. 

The priest sighed, ‘Now I can absolve you. In the name of the father, of the son and the holy Ghost.’ He made a sign of the cross in front of his face. ‘Don’t keep your sins secret anymore.’

Then my mother slipped the latch on the confessional door, stepped out into the church and blinked back her tears.

She did not understand much about confession other than what the nuns had taught. She knew it was meant to be a private thing between you and the priest as God’s representative. Even though God could see all things, the priest could not, and she needed to tell the priest while God looked on. But not her mother. Her mother was not meant to be part of the story at all.

And so it was my mother’s trust in her mother trickled away, not quite to nothing, at least not yet but this became the first of many times my mother needed to keep secrets from her mother so as to protect herself from those ghosts, the ones that visited me as well after my mother grew up and had babies of her own, including me, the daughter to whom she gave her name, the one who like my mother was meant to be a saint, but secretly under the cover of darkness, was anything but.