Father Neil's Monkeyshines Page 13

  “He told me not to tell you.”

  “This is how wars start, isn’t it?” I mused. “No one gives way. People get hurt like this.”

  “Only me,” Barney said, drying himself.

  “It’s not true. If you get injured, those poor coppers will feel responsible.” I softened to add, “Sorry, anyway, Barney.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “I ain’t budging.”

  An hour later than planned, Liz made her entrance. She was leaning like a shaky ladder on the arm of Tom, her eldest.

  “Sho shorry,” she said. “I got waylaid by a man friend, didn’t I?”

  Her slurred speech and eye-blinding breath left me in no doubt that we could expect no support from the irresistible Liz.

  Support came from an unexpected source.

  “Mind me asking you something, Gramps?” It was Tom speaking. “What’re you doing all this for?”

  “For you, lad,” Barney said. “I’m holding on to this place for you.”

  Tom turned his nose up. “Why should I want it? It’s too titchy.”

  “Not want it.” Barney was staggered.

  “The lav’s outside and you ain’t got no bathroom,” said Tom, in a welcome display of bad manners. “Anyways, all our pals live back in the Buildings.”

  Grateful to him, I helped him turn his mum around like an ocean-going liner in a storm and waved them good-bye.

  “So,” said Barney, deflated. “I were all along wasting my time.”

  Sorry as I was, I was relieved that he had seen the light at last.

  Barney and I were sharing a pot of tea and discussing our next move when, glancing through the window, I saw an unwelcome visitor jauntily heading our way.

  I cursed inwardly. Just as things were improving.

  I used the last few moments to outline the benefits of the Buildings to kids like Tom. Modern kitchen. Nice place to invite their friends to. A recreation center and—

  “I don’t suppose you can offer a wayfarer a cup o’ tay, Barney.”

  I did my best to update Father D, told him what Tom had said and that Barney was reconsidering his position.

  Father D was deaf to all this.

  “I never felt more at home anywhere in me life, Barney,” as he settled himself into an old armchair. “They don’t make cozy places like this anymore. Here you can do what you like without anyone bothering you or banging on the wall like in a flat. No wonder you put up such a fierce brave fight to keep a place like this.”

  Barney perked up. “Thanks a mill, Father,” he said.

  “As me dear father used to say, and his father and grandfather before him, ‘May you live as long as you want and never want as long as you live.’ And how is life with you at present, Barney?”

  “If I’m honest, like a big balloon, Father, with nearly all the air escaped.”

  Father Duddleswell sipped his tea as if the Ritz never provided a tastier cuppa.

  “Ah,” he sighed, “you have had a grand life here, and no mistake.”

  “One man’s life don’t add up to much, do it?” Barney said simply.

  “But the lives of lots of men,” Father D said, “living one after the other in the same place, that is history.”

  Barney blinked as if he had just understood something smashing.

  “I always wanted to know what ’istory was.”

  “History, Barney, is who you are and all who went before you were.”

  I tried to direct the conversation into safer channels but I wasn’t allowed to get a word in. Until …

  “It’s given splendid service, this house, Barney. But remember the scriptures: Everything is passing away, we have not here an abiding city.”

  Father D shook his head, and for a second I thought he was going to contradict me. But, no.

  “When you get to heaven, Barney, you do realize there will be an exact copy—” He waved his hand airily over the room.

  “Will there?” Barney sounded dazed.

  “Certainly, me old pal. Didn’t Jesus say, In my Father’s house there are many rooms?”

  “Did he say that?”

  “You tell him, Father Neil. Did he or did he not?”

  “He did,” I said.

  “So, Barney, d’you reckon this room won’t be awaiting you when you reach your journey’s end?”

  “No,” said Barney, “it has to be.”

  “The Man Above kept the blueprint when he made this place and he will build you an exact copy in the hereafter. You won’t notice the slightest difference. Best of all, no barbarians will be able to demolish it.”

  It sounded to me more like hell than heaven. But not to Barney.

  “My dog’s getting on,” he said. “Do it apply to Hairy Harry, too?”

  “With God, Barney, nothing is lost. He is where all happy memories are kept fresh and green.”

  He was overdoing the lyricism for my liking, but Barney seemed to be swallowing it.

  “God,” he went on, “is the repository of all our joys.”

  “I dunno what that last bit means,” Barney admitted, “but it sounds jolly good. Thanks, Father.”

  I was grateful to Father D for softening the blow.

  Looking on Barney now that the battle was over, I was full of emotion. He had taken his cap off. The gray sparse hair, the jug ears, the bowed shoulders combined to give him a defeated air. When he stood up, his old bowlegs were like the eye of a needle a good-sized camel could squeeze through.

  If he’d been rich and titled, the authorities would have taken his house apart, brick by brick, and rebuilt it somewhere else on a green hill. But Barney Tubman was a nobody; he didn’t count. He could be sacrificed without scruple to the common good at the stroke of an official’s pen. It hurt me to see his indomitable spirit broken.

  “Let’s go, Father,” I urged. “It’s over.”

  “Not yet, lad. We are not finished yet.”

  He sprang to his feet as if his belligerence had revived, his old Irish hatred of the powers that be, especially landlords.

  “Barney,” he said, “I am with you all the way.”

  “Come on, Father,” I said, grabbing his arm, “we’re off.”

  “Do not manhandle me, boy,” he hissed, before rounding on Barney with a roar.

  “You cannot disgrace all your forebears by giving in to them.”

  “Dead right, Father.”

  “You cannot give them that satisfaction, Barney, you cannot. I give you me solemn word I will not let them damn bullies tear your place apart.”

  I left the house in a fury. What a mischievous, cracked, self-contradictory old chap he was. I had softened Barney up over a long period by quiet diplomacy and Father D, after backing me at first, was spoiling all my efforts at the critical moment. Couldn’t he see that Barney would be more not less broken in the end?

  I waited outside, spoiling for a fight. Half an hour passed and still he hadn’t come out. That was probably for the best. I might have fisted him in the eye, my fist was volunteering.

  I bet he was hatching a futile last-minute scheme to thwart the authorities. He seemed not to care that Barney would suffer, not he.

  Poor old Barney Tubman to have such a preposterous pal!

  At St. Jude’s, I locked myself in my room.

  Father D came home eventually and tried my door.

  “Leave it to me, will you, lad? Everything is coming up roses.”

  I did not answer. I was too upset to do anything except say my breviary. The wrath of the psalms and their curses were never more in tune with my soul.

  I didn’t go down to supper, even though Mrs. Pring pleaded with me through the door to act my age.

  That night, I dreamed the nicest dream I’d had in years. I was in the local swimming baths drown
ing Father Duddleswell. Hairy Harry plunged in and helped me hold him underwater while his little glasses floated away.

  “Get up, you hedgehog.” Father D was banging on my door and yelling at me.

  My first thought was I had overslept and was late for mass.

  “’Tis five o’clock, Father Neil. Stir yourself if you want to watch the fun.”

  I dressed hurriedly, sensing there was madness afoot.

  In the hallway, he said, “Follow.”

  It was a golden summer’s morning with a heat haze about the roofs of the houses. I needed no telling where we were headed.

  Barney’s street, or what was left of it, seemed like a huge deserted arena in the early light. The diggers were silent, the dust motes in the air motionless. I saw a photographer and, yes, there were Liz and her Three Little Sins. Liz, at this unaccustomed hour, looked as if she needed hoeing.

  At a nod from Father Duddleswell, a young man climbed into a bulldozer and started the engine. A crazy idea came to me: Father D had betrayed Barney with his honeyed words. He was having the house demolished with Barney still asleep inside.

  Then out of the house stepped Barney with his dog on a lead. He blinked in the direction of the rising sun. He seemed mighty pleased with himself.

  “’Morning, Fathers,” he said as he handed Hairy Harry over to me.

  He signaled the driver to step down from the bulldozer. Father D blessed it with holy water, then helped Barney into the driving seat.

  “There, Barney, I reckon you still know how to handle one of these.”

  Barney nodded as he took over the controls.

  “I promised you, did I not?” Father D yelled above the rumble of the engine, “that the bowler-hatted brigade would never be allowed to demolish your gorgeous place.”

  The house had evidently been emptied of all furniture and belongings in the night. Apart from one thing the council would have to pay for.

  Barney yelled back, “A pity about those books, though.”

  With an increased roar of the engine, Barney drove forward and back, forward and back.

  In minutes, the house was a heap of rubble. It was so slight an edifice, how had it endured so long? With the power of love, I suppose.

  Bulbs flashed as the photographer made a permanent record of Barney’s little triumph over officialdom.

  His daughter and grandsons, Father Duddleswell and I cheered lustily. The dog barked. And even above the din of the bulldozer and falling masonry, I could hear Barney’s fantastic laugh, back in full throttle.

  I was gazing with delight at the sun-drenched scene when Father Duddleswell nudged me in the ribs.

  “A man has his pride,” he said.

  7. A Welsh Dragon

  One Sunday at mass, our congregation saw something as shocking as a corpse climbing out of the coffin at his funeral.

  It was the height of a hot summer. The dustbin men were on strike. Garbage piled up in the streets for scavengers, from dogs to rats to foxes, to feed off. The entire town was buzzing and the stench was getting to be unbearable.

  Father Duddleswell was in the crow’s nest, six feet above contradiction, preaching about the trade union mentality that was wrecking the country and holding the community to ransom.

  He harked back to World Wars I and II, when miners “treacherously went on strike while our lads in the forces were fighting the Hun.”

  Suddenly from the choir loft came a throbbing organ-like voice with a broad Welsh accent:

  “You should stick to your prayers which you know of, Father.”

  My parish priest froze mid-sentence. Normally, even our housekeeper, Mrs. Pring, had to wait till breakfast to voice any complaint she had against him.

  Will Evans, our new choirmaster, was not so tolerant.

  With brown curly hair, a splotch of a nose, and a red tie like a giant tongue, he looked down on the pulpit from the loft and almost crooned:

  “You address us, Father, as brothers and sisters like a good trade unionist and then proceed to slander those as cannot answer back.”

  He pointed an accusing finger. “I won’t ’ave you calling our refuse collectors dustmen, you ’ear me? You say they are acting against the people. ’Ow much do they get paid, then?”

  Father D shook his head weakly, not having the foggiest.

  “And ’ow many hours a week do they put in on the dirty disagreeable job they do on our be’alf ? Own up. You do not know, do you?”

  Another shake of the head from Father D, who was looking like a toddler peering over his cot for Mummy to come and rescue him.

  In the organ loft, Will’s teenage son and daughter put their hands over their eyes. His bright-eyed buxom wife, Gwen, a contralto, tried to make him sit down but he was as hard to turn around as an ocean liner.

  “Those striking miners you spoke of. ’As it ever crossed your mind, Father, they are troglodytes who do not see the sun, nor glimpse a green tree for months at a time?”

  Father Duddleswell shook his head.

  “I see my father and grandfather among the crowd return from work in winter soot-black, indistinguishable from the night, and cannot give their nippers a kiss because their lips are coated with grime. How often I heard when I was little my dadi coughing for hours in ’is sleep.”

  There was a throb in his voice as he went on.

  “He died of silicosis when ’e was thirty-four years old and earned the usual tribute of those days. There was a house-to-house collection for the widow and orphans. They gave all they had, which was little enough. Crowds lined the streets for his coffin, men doffed their caps, the women bowed.”

  By now, most of the congregation were in tears.

  “Some boys went down the mines when they was thirteen and ’ardly left, if they was lucky, till they was sixty-five. Many were burned, blinded, and maimed, their lungs coated with vile black dust. Tens of thousands, yes thousands, died or swallowed poisonous gas, or a roof collapsed, burying them under a ton of coal. All for less than the average wage of an assistant in a tea shop. An absolute bloody pittance.”

  He thrice beat his breast loud as a drum.

  “Begging pardon for swearing in front of the kiddies and Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. You talk about injustice to the community, Father. What about the injustice to them?”

  A ripple of applause spread among the pews, with two young nuns joining in till they were silenced by a glacial look from their superior, Mother Stephen.

  Meanwhile, Father Duddleswell went limp as if he’d been filleted.

  The grand voice continued: “For a Christian and a priest not to be siding with the downtrodden is a disgrace, I tell you. The Carpenter of Nazareth would be the first to say, Giv’ em the money, boyos.”

  Father D’s face was chalk-white and crumbly like the cliffs of Dover. He was so shaken, I walked on to the sanctuary to intone the Creed to get him started.

  Once more, Will’s voice rang out but this time chanting the glorious ageless Latin of the mass.

  That morning, Father Duddleswell was in a bigger hurry than usual to finish the mass. Prayers melted like candy floss in his mouth.

  On their way out, many parishioners shook my hands warmly, saying it was worth coming for. As one put it, “That was entertainment, that was.”

  Mother Stephen waited until her sisters were out of earshot before whispering to Father D in the porch, “Thank you, Father. I now feel much closer to God.”

  As Gwen Evans came down from the organ loft, I said, Bore da (Good morning), one of a number of Welsh phrases she’d taught me.

  That surprising Sunday morning, Gwen said, “I’m ashamed of my man, Father. In future, I’ll see he shuts his mouth tight as a Welsh pub on the Sabbath.”

  “Please don’t,” I whispered back. “A few more interruptions like that and our mass attendances will
rocket. I can see the collection plates overflowing with five-pound notes.”

  In the presbytery, Father Duddleswell took a different view. When I arrived in his study, the apple-shiny faces of him and Doc Daley showed they had already taken a few inches of the brown out of the bottle.

  “Misfortune is very loyal to you, Charles,” said Dr. Daley as he held out his glass for another helping.

  “True for you, Donal, it never leaves me side.”

  “But I can’t deny I was proud of you this morning,” said the doc, fondly eying his empty glass. “Thank you. Might I thank you for a little more? Ah, you are kind as a Saint Bernard and a bit better looking.”

  “Proud of me, you said, Donal?”

  “For standing there like a Christian martyr of old and silently taking it on the chin.”

  “That blighted blasphemer.” Father Duddleswell spat it out like a fish bone. “That Welsh dragon.”

  “Ah, Charles, sometimes when I say my prayers at night, I think to myself, My dear old chum thinks himself a violent man when he is a man of peace.”

  “You think so, Donal?”

  “Indeed. In my experience, you go to war with a peashooter and shed less blood than an autumn leaf falling from a tree.”

  “Donal, you think too highly of me. I was raging inside. Raging. The wonder was I didn’t climb up to the loft and throw that Welshman over the top.”

  “I thought at first, Charles, it was the Angel Gabriel speaking to you from up there. And they say there is nothing new under the sun. I tell you for free, Charles, the people’s eyes could not have popped so far out of their heads had you removed your saintly trousers in full view.”

  “He treated me, a consecrated priest, with disrespect, Donal.”

  “Agreed. It was atrocious the way he looked at you like a snooty angler tossing a tiddler back into the sea.”

  “But I am a kindly man, Donal. Do you know my favorite saying in the Gospel?”

  “Knowing you as well as I do, I could make an educated guess.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “Your favorite Gospel saying, now. Would it be, ‘Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass Go. Do not—’”