Chapter Eleven

When I was at primary school, a missionary nun came to talk to us. Her name was Sister Hilda. She showed us films of children in Africa singing and studying Maths. She was there herself in most of the footage, wearing a long loose cotton dress and a navy-blue nun’s headdress with a wimple. She also wore thick-framed spectacles, and had long uneven teeth. She exactly fitted my idea of what a nun should be like.

Sometimes there was a man with her in the film as well, a monk dressed in a dark rough habit fastened with a cord. He had a long ascetic face. She called him ‘Father Anselm’. She explained that Father Anselm was the leader of the mission to which she belonged and that he was part of the active branch of his order. He and the other monks who shared his vocation went out to do good works, to help and educate people everywhere who needed them, at home as well as in places like Africa. There were other monks as well, who belonged to the same order and shared the same beliefs, except that they did not work or mix with people in the world outside their monastery. They devoted themselves exclusively to prayer. The active monks supported them in this, and even looked up to them as being more pious than they were themselves. They prayed all the time and barely spoke to anyone except God. She said that what they were doing was like stoking a furnace, sending up a continuous ‘funnel of prayer’ to Heaven on behalf of all the rest of us sinners.

I soon got bored with Sister Hilda, especially when she tried to teach us Maths in the way that she had taught the African children, but I was fascinated by the idea of the funnel of prayer. It appeared to be such a good way of sorting things out, without getting involved in any unpleasantness. Instead of confronting problems yourself directly, you could just keep on bombarding God with prayers until he intervened. Her visit to my school had been timely, because I was a shy, nervous child and I had a particular problem that I needed to solve.

Before I say any more, I should like to make it plain that I am not one of those moral degenerates who goes through life continually blaming their parents for their own shortcomings. My childhood was difficult – both my father and my mother had terrible defects – but I do believe that there comes a time in every person’s life when they should stop blaming their parents for who they have become and instead accept that they have enough freedom as adults to mould themselves. Philip Larkin may have been right about parents ‘fucking you up’, but even he broke free; and it has to be said that he did not have a mother like Tirzah. I wonder if he called his mother, Mother? Bryony and I almost invariably called ours Tirzah – though that was not her real name, but one invented by some old man that she knew long before we were born.

Tirzah has always been the big conundrum in my life. She achieved notoriety when I was a very young man by going to prison for killing my grandmother and my relationship with her both prior to this and afterwards was tricky. Yet I was – not exactly – proud of her, but always influenced by her; obsessed with her, even. And it could not be denied that she possessed a profound distinctiveness.

My father was quite different. He was a weak and treacherous little man who liked to keep in with the big bluff farmers for whom he worked and enjoyed boasting about his pitiful possessions to the neighbours. I understood why Tirzah hated him for this; and why she was sickened by his appalling manners. She despised him; and therefore Bryony and I despised him, too.

Like many weak men, my father indulged in a certain amount of casual violence. He would smack me across the face or legs and, although he rarely laid a finger on Bryony, he had still been known on occasion to strike her with the flat of his hand. Far worse were his rages. He would be completing some simple task – such as drying the dishes for my mother – when a chance remark would pitch him into an immediate frenzy. His face would darken and the veins stand out on his forehead, and he would shout a tirade of abuse at anyone within his range – sometimes at my mother, but if either of us was there he would deflect his anger from her and hurl it at us instead. His face became hideously jowly and ugly and he would spit involuntarily as the words came tumbling out. On one of the dish-drying occasions, he threw the tea-towel into the washing-up bowl and swept the cups and saucers that were draining into the sink, where some of them broke treacherously under the soap-suds. Sometimes my mother would retort; sometimes she just fixed him with the stare that told him she despised him. On other occasions she would cry, though when I was older I realised that it was a hard, dry kind of crying, designed perhaps to illustrate what a bastard he was, rather than springing from any real distress.

Usually these daytime outbursts seemed to me to be his fault. In the evenings, however, after Bryony and I had gone to bed, a different kind of row would take place. Although I could not hear every word, I often listened to these arguments as they welled up and ran their course and I could never understand why she precipitated them in the way that she did. They always followed the same pattern. First of all would come her voice, plaintive, nagging, reproaching him for something. He would either reply abruptly, evidently trying to change the subject, or – presumably either because he was in a good mood, or thought she had a point – adopt a wheedling tone and try to pacify her. Neither of these tactics would work. She would carry on, perhaps raising her original grievance again, but always dragging in more and more items to support her argument. She would draw on his past misdemeanours, his general character and his failure to provide the kind of house she would like to live in. Finally she would start on his relatives, especially the three whom we saw most frequently, who lived in the house in Westlode Street (my great-grandmother was still alive at the time of which I speak). This was always the point at which he snapped, and then they would both shout and scream, savaging each other with words until the early hours so that it was impossible for Bryony and me to sleep.

I was desperate to stop these arguments, not because I could not sleep, but because I did not know what was happening downstairs. With the daytime rows, terrible as they were, at least I was there, and I always believed that I had only to stick them out to make sure that nothing irrevocable occurred. In the evenings, I could no longer protect the status quo with my presence. They could have resorted to blows, or one of them might have walked out and made my world collapse, and I would not know and therefore would not be able to stop it. It was out of the question that I should venture downstairs to keep watch after I had been sent to bed, so I had to find another way of coping. Sister Hilda and her funnel of prayer seemed, quite literally, a Godsend.

For several nights I knelt on the floor beside my bed for hours, sending up my prayer funnel to God. I thought of all sorts of ways of asking for His help. I did not ask for it head-on: Sister Hilda had told us that you need to be careful what you ask for, and how you put it to God. So I did not say, ‘Please, God, make them stop because it is making me unhappy.’ I said things like, ‘Please, God, bring peace to this house; let us live in harmony with you and with each other; let us respect your ways.’

It did no good whatsoever. On the sixth night it was particularly cold – we had no heating in the bedrooms. I knelt on the lino in my pyjamas for three hours, for the first hour thinking that perhaps the praying was beginning to work at last, because all was quiet downstairs. Then the shouting started, and it went on and on and on. At first I tried to shut it out. I carried on praying, even saying my prayers out loud, my hands over my ears to drown out the other noise. I got colder and colder: my feet were so cold that I could not feel them, and the goosebumps stood out on my arms where the thin, too-small sleeves of my ancient pyjamas ended just below the elbow. It must have been midnight when I finally gave in and stumbled into bed, clasping my feet in my hands to try to warm them, despair in my heart. The shouting had not stopped. I do not know how long it took me to fall asleep. It seemed like aeons; but I know that when it finally happened, still the shouting had not stopped.

The next morning everyone came down for breakfast, at which I felt somewhat relieved. My mother was sallow and tight-lipped, my father red-eyed as if he had been weeping. I felt tired and sick. My anxiety was so great that I could do nothing; I could barely swallow my tea, certainly not think of eating cereal or the toast doorsteps that my mother had propped against the yellow and brown tea-cosy. Only Bryony seemed to have slept well. She sat at the table now, cheerful and rosy-cheeked, eating Sugar Puffs with the top of the milk. Although I was usually fond of Bryony, at this moment I hated her for her insensitivity.

My mother fixed me with a baleful look.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked dourly.

“Nothing,” I said. I looked away from her. “I think I’ll go to school early today – there’s some homework I need to finish.”

“You won’t go anywhere until you’ve had something to eat – will he?” she appealed to my father. He shook his head in half-hearted support of her, but he could not speak. Unlike her, he seemed still to be traumatised by last night’s row. The delivery boy passed the window with his newspaper and we listened as it fell to the floor in the hall, the letterbox lid clattering. My father slid away to retrieve it. Grimly, my mother poured out Cornflakes for me. My father returned to the room but not to the table. He stood with his back to the stove, holding the paper up in front of his face.

“What is the matter with you?” my mother repeated.

“There isn’t a God,” I said slowly, the tears welling.

I felt my father tense up behind his newspaper. I don’t think that he was a man of any strong beliefs or passions, but he had been brought up a Methodist by his grandmother, and he probably didn’t think to question the teachings that she had peddled.

My mother gave a short sarcastic bark – it was hardly a laugh.

“It’s taken you long enough to find that out,” she said. “I could have saved you the trouble. Now eat your breakfast. It’s too cold today for you to go out without any food inside you. I don’t want the welfare lady after me.”

Bryony appraised me in a superior way from behind her virtuous table manners. She was fond of me, too, but that did not stop her excelling at being the good girl when I was in trouble.

As I think about that day now, I am left with two problems, one rooted in the past, the other in the present. The past problem actually has nothing to do with God: it relates to my father. For not quite the first time, but certainly the first time I have articulated it with any clarity to myself, I wonder what my relationship with Ronald Atkins might have been like if it had not been influenced, first, by my mother, and then by what Uncle Colin had told me. Would I have liked him better? Would we have been companions, as other men seemed to be with the boys in their care, and gone to cricket matches together or built things?

The second decidedly has to do with God. It also concerns Peter. How can I live under the same roof with him – he is an ardent Catholic – without his finding out that I do not believe? And what will be the effect on him when he does?