church. On Sunday mornings the village resonated with the ringing of bells from its four churches.
But there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere on our street, nor any flowers. Trees could be glimpsed only in the distance. Expelled from a green and pleasant place, we’d come to a crowded neighborhood of bricks and stone. Through our small domestic drama, my family was re-enacting the industrialization of Olde England, moving from pastoral to urban life, for Woolton had already by then been swallowed up as a part of greater Liverpool.
I think a sense of my father’s failure hung in the air after our move to the village. Surely it was his stubbornness and pride that had brought us down to this. I wonder now what he felt at the time, and what my mother felt. A more melancholy character, my mother endured life’s blows with a resignation that was equal parts stoic and ironic. “The exilic condition comes naturally to a certain kind of Irishman,” wrote Anthony Burgess in his preface to Modern Irish Short Stories, and I suspect that my father, having experienced exile at a young age, was less fazed by our changed circumstances. No doubt anxious to prove himself a more worthy provider than my mother’s family had judged him, he got a job working on the Liverpool buses, first as conductor and later as driver, and we settled into life as village folk. (Twenty years after our expulsion from Knowle Park I would suffer an uncannily similar experience when I was ejected from the monastic life I’d chosen. Like my father, I tangled with religious authority and paid a heavy price. I think of it now as a family specialty, getting up the snoot of religious tyrants and being pitched out onto the street for our efforts.)
But our familial piety wasn’t the least bit dampened in the process and, as I reached school-going age, I became a churchgoing marvel. I can still picture myself rising every morning in a little upstairs bedroom of that row house, dressing quickly and setting out on foot down Allerton Road with my brother Ger while the village still lay hushed in the secrets of morning. Reverently we’d enter Saint Anne’s Catholic Church with our little black missals in hand for attentively following the saying of Mass. The highlight was to rise together from the pew where we knelt and make our way up the aisle to kneel at the communion rail to await the approach of the priest murmuring in Latin as he lifted from a golden chalice and placed on each of our tongues the sacred wafer, the Body of Christ. As we had fasted all night and morning, this was our first nourishment of the day.
An old photo, taken on the afternoon of my First Holy Communion, shows me dressed in a white shirt and short pants, white shoes and socks, my hands joined as in prayer in front of my breast, smiling thinly like an earnest young angel. I’m still astonished by the innocence and purity of the image.
After Mass we’d walk back home for a bowl of hot porridge cooked by our mum, with creamy milk from the bottles delivered every morning by the milkman, and sugar sprinkled on top. Then Ger and I would catch the double-decker bus that would carry us down Menlove Avenue to Saint Anthony of Padua School in Mossley Hill. There we learned our catechism from the good nuns:
“Who made me?”
“God made me.”
“Why did God make me?”
“God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”
That was the lesson we learned first: Postponement is the prerequisite for Paradise. Knowing, loving, and serving God are the purposes of this life. Happiness will follow death. Meanwhile we are walking through a vale of tears. This belief system was drilled into us so relentlessly, both at home and in school, we accepted it without question. Just as we accepted that the Protestant kids we passed on the way to our school, and they on their way to theirs, would never be allowed to enter into Heaven. Which was how we could justify having snowball fights with them on the rare occasions upon which it snowed. We disliked and distrusted Protestants on principle—I remember once being taken to a Protestant Christmas party by a kindly lady, and being terrified throughout that the Protestants would surely do something vile and sinful before the party was over. Jews were thoroughly despised; one gentleman who operated a jewelry shop in Woolton Village was invariably referred to as “the old Jew boy.” No other ethnicities were ever seen in the village. In many ways we Catholics occupied a parallel universe to the one all around us. We had a sense of ourselves as the elect, bound together as God’s chosen people, indifferent to the cares of this tarnished world and yearning toward the glory of the hereafter.
On Sunday morning our family would go to Mass en masse, my parents and we boys kneeling chronologically side by side in a pew. The lavishly embroidered vestments of the priest, the exalted singing of the choir and rumble of the pipe organ, the heady scent of incense and guttering of multiple candles—High Mass was by far the closest thing we knew to spectacle.
Fear and guilt, those twin pillars of Irish Catholicism, underpinned our cosmology. Fear of the future, of falling from grace, was bred like superstition into our young bones. Expect the worst, always. I learned from my mother to fear the bailiffs, coldhearted men who’d put your possessions out on the street if you were evicted for failing to pay the rent. Or, even more fearfully, the Black Maria, the sinister prison van that would haul you away to jail for whatever transgressions you’d committed. More terrifying still, we learned that you could identify the Devil when disguised as a man by looking to see if he had cloven feet. At seven or eight years old I was glancing furtively at the feet of old men I passed on the street, convinced that one of them might well be the Devil in disguise. As well I learned to be alert for any sign of a great crucifix that would spread across the sky, tremendous and ominous, indicating that the end of the world was at hand.
Against these terrors we clung to our faith. We kids mastered the memorization of “Our Father who art in Heaven . . .” and “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” and “Glory be to the Father . . . ,” each repeated mantralike in the saying of the Holy Rosary. And we learned that each of us had a guardian angel, a spiritual companion who hovered close by, ready to protect us from evil. I didn’t dare disbelieve this, but nor did I ever think of my guardian angel as actually there. I never spoke to it, called it by name, or thought of it as a companion.
ONE OF MY most vivid childhood memories is of the fear and anxiety that filled our house in Woolton Village while my mother was giving birth to her fourth and last child. She lay in labor in a bed specially installed in the front parlor. A midwife was in attendance, and eventually a doctor was called in. We kids were banned from the room, mystified by what was going on, but aware of our dad’s distress and an awful apprehension of disaster. The labor was long and difficult—a breech birth, I think—and the baby eventually was pulled into the world by forceps. For the following days Mother lay weak and exhausted, and it was uncertain whether she would recover from the ordeal. But she did, and we kids had a new little brother named Vincent. What nobody realized at the time was that he’d been born almost completely deaf.
Our mother suspected early on that his hearing was impaired, but she was told by the family doctor—a seedy-looking and incompetent old gent, in my memory—that his hearing was normal and that he was “acting out,” choosing for some peculiar reason of his own to ignore sounds. In working-class Britain the pronouncement of a doctor was almost as sacred as the word of a priest and not to be questioned. But for years thereafter there remained alive within our family a suspicion, deficient only in any shred of evidence, that the old quack’s incompetence with his forceps might have played a role in damaging the emerging baby’s ears.
My brothers and I were all impeccably obedient little kids. Disobeying, defying, or talking back to our parents wasn’t even considered. The prevailing ethos of the times—that children should be seen, not heard—was reinforced in our case with an absolute religious stricture that one’s parents must be obeyed unquestioningly. Our mother was largely responsible for maintaining discipline, and she managed to do so without raising her voice and only very rarely administering a frustrated slap on the bottom. She was, however, masterful
