Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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noticed a curtain twitch next door: the new neighbours. For a moment he thought it was old Mrs Nesbit but Mrs Nesbit no longer lived next door – she’d gone first to live with her daughter and then on to the big sheltered accommodation in the sky. They hadn’t really got to know the new lot: they kept themselves to themselves. They’d let the garden go.
He decided not to go into the house. Mrs Donelly wouldn’t be back from her meeting for another half an hour or so. He didn’t want to be in an empty house on Christmas Eve.
So he walked on, down to the end of the road, and turned left.
The Church of the Cross and the Passion is a big, ugly, modern building with an untended patch of scrubland out back and a social club with a car park with a wire fence and empty kegs piled up outside. It would have had a nice view of the People’s Park, if you could see out of any of the windows, but the stained glass gets in the way.
Inside the church Mr Donelly sat down at a pew near the altar rail, where the crib was all set up, and there they were, the Holy Family, in that celebrated post-partum pose.
Mr Donelly has lived all his life in our town. He was taught at the Assumption junior school – a tiny little Victorian building down Cromac Street, off High Street, with outside toilets and two demountables, a building which has only added graffiti since Mr Donelly attended. He was taught at the school that Jesus was born in a stable at the inn, and that oxen and asses dropped to their knees in worship, and that there were Three Wise Men, and shepherds – the traditional Christmas story with all the trimmings. His teacher at the Assumption was a nun called Sister Hughes and he loved her, as all the children loved her – a dear old lady telling wonderful stories to boys and girls who didn’t yet know the difference between fantasy and belief. Sister Hughes was a good person, a woman who knitted at break times and lunchtimes, making ecumenical woolly hats, mostly, for our town’s famous ecumenical charity, the Mission to Seamen, a charity founded by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Thomas MacGeagh, and a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Barre, known locally as the Two Toms, who in 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic, had decided to found a charity which would minister to seamen of many denominations and faiths and of none, and which would demonstrate to them God’s care and love at a time when He Himself seemed to be absent from the high seas.*
Our town is thirty miles from the sea, far enough for us to think of ourselves as landlocked, but close enough for seagulls to make it into the dump for scavenging, and for most of us to enjoy at least one day trip in the summer. Sister Hughes had died mid-hat, when Mr Donelly was eight years old, and he was terribly upset. You might ask, what is death to an eight-year-old – what can he possibly understand about it? Well, death is presumably exactly the same for an eight-year-old as it is for the rest of us, nothing more and nothing less: it’s a complete shock.
One of the other big shocks in Mr Donelly’s life was later to be told at secondary school that it wasn’t a stable at all and it may not even have been an inn, and that there is, in fact, no record of any oxen and asses dropping to their knees, and that the Three Wise Men were astrologers, and that the whole Nativity thing was put about by St Francis to lure ignorant and simple people into the Church. Mr Donelly had attended St Gall’s secondary school – a stone’s throw from his parents’ house on the Georgetown Road, a slum area, really, now demolished and the rubble used for infill on the ring road. His teacher of religious instruction at the school was a former priest, a bitter man called Conroy, who was married with a child and who had a mind like a cat’s, and who treated the boys like idiots. If Mr Donelly had ever wanted to date the beginnings of his confusion about the person of God and the mediating role of the priesthood then he could have identified Mr Conroy’s classes: first lesson on a Monday and last lesson on Fridays, back in the 1950s. Mr Conroy’s classes had begun the long slow withdrawing of Mr Donelly’s own personal sea of faith, which seemed to have left him washed up here and now, staring at the crib, looking hard at the figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
He looked hard at Joseph. Mr Donelly had always felt sorry for Joseph. He could identify with Joseph. Joseph was a minor player in the gospel story – he hardly got a look in at Christmas. Joseph’s beard and gown were all chipped, showing the white plaster underneath – he looked unkempt and uncared for. He had blank eyes and a doleful countenance. Mr Donelly tried to imagine what it would be like being Joseph – he must have had a pretty difficult time of it, when you think about it, human nature being what it is, probably having to put up with a lot of snide remarks and ribbing about Mary and the Spirit of God down a back alley. Mr Donelly read a book once, years ago, one of the only books he’d ever read, which had rather put him off – The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, or Chariots of the Gods, or The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, one of those books which he’d picked up at a church jumble sale – which claimed that Jesus was fathered by a Roman legionary called Pipus, or Titus, or Bob, or something. Mr Donelly didn’t want to believe it then and he doesn’t want to believe it now, and he hopes for Joseph’s sake that he never had to hear such ugly rumours and instinctively he leans forward over the crib – checking over his shoulder to make sure no one is watching – and he covers Joseph’s ears, pinching his plaster head between forefinger and thumb. Joseph’s head is tiny.
Then Mr Donelly gazes up at the altar over the top of Joseph’s head and he imagines all the relics tucked away in there. He imagines all the visitors starting to turn up at the inn and pestering poor old Joseph – nutters, most of them, no doubt, and all of them looking for souvenirs.
He looks at the Baby Jesus in the manger – the centrepiece, as it were, the Nativity’s cut-crystal vase on the sideboard. Jesus’s face has been touched up so many times with pink paint that his features are flaking and unrecognisable. And then he looks at Mary, who’s in good condition, hardly a mark on her, although her robes are a little faded, and Mr Donelly suddenly remembers all the other stories he was taught by Sister Hughes at school, about rosemary acquiring its fragrance after Mary supposedly hung out the Christ Child’s clothes on a rosemary bush and all the stuff about the Holy Babe being rocked in His cradle by angels while Mary got on with her needlework. It was all just folklore, of course, but still, staring at the pathetic figurines and remembering the stories, shaking with cold in the vast dry spaces of the church, Mr Donelly can understand why it’s all lasted, the whole Nativity thing, why it’s outdone all the pagan myths and all the other competing mumbo-jumbo. It’s because of the newborn Babe, and because of the poverty of the Holy Family and the slaughter of the Innocents, and all the supposed business in the stable, and the figure of Mary. It is the perfect image of warmth and shelter from what we know to be the cruelty and hatred and sheer indifference of the world, the same now as it was then. If nothing else, the Nativity was a nice idea.*
Mr Donelly is not a man much given to self-reflection and he hasn’t allowed himself to worry too much about the future. But right now he wishes his children were here with him for Christmas. He wonders how many more Christmases they’ll all have together. He sits there for a long time, and for the first time in a long time, like all the children of our town at Christmas, Mr Donelly found himself praying.
Mrs Donelly had long ago given up on prayer and she had just two wishes now before she died: she would have liked to have seen her daughter Jackie married; and she’d have liked to prevent Frank Gilbey from destroying any more of the town. The first of these wishes had yet to be fulfilled. But in the second she might just have succeeded.
As chairman of the Planning Committee it was Mrs Donelly’s responsibility to examine all planning applications and she had taken great pleasure this evening in being able to turn down an application by Frank Gilbey for a change of use for the Quality Hotel, one of his companies’ recent acquisitions. In her opinion, and in the opinion of her committee, and even in the opinion of the town centre manager, the weak-jawed and usually pusillanimous Alan Burnside, a man with pure clear jelly for a spine and cream-thickened porridge for brains, the town did not need more luxury apartment blocks. What it needed was a meeting place and town centre space accessible to the public, where the public would want to gather as a community. What it needed, in other words, was what it had with the old Quality Hotel.