The Way of a Gardener. Des Kennedy
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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 in instilling fear of the dreadful things that would happen to disobedient children, not the least of them the ominous “You just wait ’til your father gets home!”
One time in a fit of childish rage I punched my fist through a pane of glass in the back door and spent the afternoon in terror awaiting the wrath of my dad upon his return from work. I remember him replacing and puttying the glass, but not that I suffered any punishment. Squabbling or bickering among us kids was not tolerated. In hindsight I find it remarkable how my mother succeeded in keeping four energetic boys under such firm control, employing instinctive skills that were at least as potent as the ministrations of any child psychologist or supernanny.
I don’t think that back in those days I was ever really conscious of being poor. The British class system, still clinging to its bigotries and privileges in the postwar years, remained reasonably efficient at isolating each stratum of society, so that comparisons were maintained within one’s class rather than with persons of superior or inferior social position. My mother prided herself on always having us kids look well dressed, clean, and tidy. “Oh, look at the tide mark on that neck!” she’d chide if a face wash had left a line between washed and unwashed skin. The other kids we knew in Woolton were more or less like us, although some were more obviously clothed in hand-me-downs, wiping dripping noses on their sleeves, sporting ridiculous haircuts done by their dads. One of our favorite games was playing “Wet Molly” in the brick-walled alleys behind our house. The Wet Molly was a water-soaked rag. Whoever was “it” had to take the Wet Molly and chase after the other kids until close enough to hit someone with the thrown rag. Whoever was hit would become “it” and take up the chase. Equipment costs for this game were extremely low.
Our house was heated, inadequately, only by a coal fire in a fireplace. In wintertime we huddled around the kitchen hearth and mostly lived within a few feet of its warmth. With neither radio nor television to entertain us, on winter nights we kids would be diverted by gazing at the blue, green, and orange genies dancing among glowing coals. On Christmas Day or the solemn occasion when the parish