Introducing the Donellys, God, The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, some memories of cinemas long gone and many other attempted poignancies
There hasn’t been snow here for Christmas since 1975, which seems like yesterday to some of us, but which is already ancient history to others – around about the time of the Punic Wars, in fact, to many of the children at Central School, for whom modern history begins at the end of the twentieth century and the advent of wide-screen TV and mobile phone text messaging. Gerry Malone, who teaches history at Central – who taught most of us in town our history, in fact – has to be careful not to assume that the students know too much. He cannot assume, for example, that they know anything about the Punic Wars, or that Hitler was a Nazi even, or that mobile phone text messaging was not a means of communication available to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Gerry likes to quote Santayana to his students – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – but he knows that actually it’s the opposite that’s true. Those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it – again and again and again. It is the history teacher’s burden.
People have been feverishly praying for snow at Christmas in our town for nearly thirty years, but God seems to have better things to do with His time than to attend to our prayers, although exactly what it is He’s been getting up to recently it’s difficult to see: since writing the Bible, He seems to have been on some kind of extended sabbatical. World peace, for example, does not seem to be too high on His list of priorities and, unless you count the weekly healing services at the People’s Fellowship, His work, at least around our town, seems to have come to an abrupt end.
Gerry also likes to quote Nietzsche to his students and .he always writes up the name on the whiteboard first – the middle ‘z’ always tends to throw them. ‘Nietzsche,’ he explains, ‘rhymes with teacher.’ And then, ‘God,’ he tells his class, to audible gasps, ‘God, according to Nietzsche’ – and here he always pauses, with an omniscient smile – ‘Is Dead.’
Well. I don’t know. Maybe Gerry’s being too harsh. Maybe someone just needs to text Him, to remind Him that we’re all still here. W T F R U?*
The sleet and the cold have certainly not slowed up the Donellys, who are old friends and neighbours of the Quinns, and who live up by the ring road and who, like the rest of the town, have been busy making their Christmas preparations.
It’s going to be a very special Christmas for the Donellys this year, snow or no snow – their first Christmas without any of the children, a kind of rite of passage and a relief in many ways, a return to a prelapsarian state, a time long before Mr Donelly’s pot belly and his cardies, and the advent of Mrs Donelly’s flat-soled shoes. This Christmas, if they wanted, Mr and Mrs Donelly could walk around all day naked, barefoot and freed from toil, the pain of childbirth but a distant memory, and freed also from the prying eyes of their offspring, so they could eat turkey sandwiches from morning till night, au naturel, on sliced white bread, with lots of salt and with butter, as God intended them to be.*
The Donellys’ youngest son, Mark, their baby, lives in America now, where he works for a firm of hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturers. He is married to Molly, has two lovely children, Nathan (five) and Ruth (three), and can’t afford the fare home. Jackie, meanwhile, the Donellys’ daughter, is in north London, a nurse, no boyfriend at the moment and knocking on a bit, but not without her suitors, so Mr and Mrs Donelly aren’t too worried. She is working shifts this Christmas and can’t get back either. Michael – Mickey – still lives in town, obviously, but this year he and Brona are going to her parents’ for Christmas: her parents live in Huddersfield. When Mickey told his parents that he and Brona and the children wouldn’t be around for Christmas Mr and Mrs Donelly both said fine, that’s great, although they didn’t really mean it. Mr and Mrs Donelly get to see their grandchildren all year round, so it’s really only fair to let the other lot have a go, but Christmas is Christmas.
‘It’s supposed to be a family time,’ said Mrs Donelly to Mr Donelly. Mr Donelly pointed out that Brona’s family in Huddersfield were family: they were Brona’s family.
‘But they’re in Huddersfield,’ insisted Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s not the same.’
The Donellys’ eldest boy, Tim, is travelling the world. He’s thirty-one and should know better but he’s working in a bar in Sydney at the moment, apparently, Sydney, Australia, if you can imagine that, and the Donellys are expecting a call on Christmas Day. Tim’s said he’s planning a barbie on the beach and a game of mixed volleyball with some workmates for Christmas Day, and Mr Donelly really cannot imagine what that might be like, although Mrs Donelly watches a number of Australian soaps on TV and he’s sat through them with her a couple of times, and he certainly likes the look of the lifestyle over there. It looks a bit more free and easy. More to do outside. No sleet. If he were forty years younger he might even have considered emigrating. But it’s too late for that now.
Mr Donelly had offered to help his wife with the Christmas shopping this year – the first time ever – and she took him at his word and she gave him a list, and so he was down to Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, our last greengrocer, the only one remaining, by ten o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, looking for cheap nuts and tangerines, and then he was on to M & S up in Bloom’s after that, cursing Mrs Donelly’s handwriting all the way. After forty years of marriage she still can’t seem to shape her vowels properly – they’re too rounded, like the handwriting of a little girl, and you can’t tell the difference between an ‘a’ and an ‘o’. Oranges look like aronges and apples look like opples. Mind you, his is no better: he’d have made a good doctor, according to Mrs Donelly, who used to work as a receptionist at the Health Centre down by the People’s Park, so she should know. Mr Donelly was not a doctor, though: he’d been a warehouseman, up at Bloom’s, until he’d retired. He used to be a compositor, years ago, but the bottom fell out of the market.
It’ll be a quiet Christmas for them without the children, but they’re still planning to have a few people round on Boxing Day – the Quinns, with Davey, their celebrated returnee, Mrs Skingle and her son Steve, the scaffolder, who earns a packet, according to Mr Donelly, and Mrs Donelly’s cousin Barbara, who is all alone – so Mr Donelly has stocked up, as instructed, on twenty-four Cocktail Pizza Squares (‘A fun selection of eight tomato & cheese, eight ham & cheese, and eight mushroom & cheese’), twelve Vol-au-Vents (‘Four creamy chicken & mushroom, four ham & cheese, and four succulent prawn’), some mini quiche (Traditional, Mediterranean and Vegetarian), some ‘small succulent’ pork cocktail sausages, ‘fully cooked and ready to serve’, needless to say, twelve Chicken Tikka Bites (‘Lightly grilled pieces of chicken in a traditional Indian-style marinade of spices, coriander and garlic’), some hand-cooked crisps, and six Chocolate Tartlets (‘Chocolate pastry tarts filled with white or milk chocolate mousse, decorated with chocolate curls’). A veritable feast. Mrs Donelly used to do the Boxing Day buffet herself when the children were younger, but she doesn’t have the time these days and since it’s going to be just the two of them she’s even skimping on their usual Christmas dinner: instead of the big bird, the roast potatoes and the mound of sprouts, Mr Donelly has picked up a Small Turkey Breast Joint (‘For 2–3, Butter Roasted’), a pack of baby new potatoes (‘hand-picked’), some mangetout (from Kenya), and a miniature ‘Luxury’ Christmas pudding (‘packed with plump, sun-ripened vine fruits’). It’s the Christmas of the future: their first Christmas alone.
After the shopping Mr Donelly managed to squeeze in a quick pint at the Castle Arms, laden down with his shopping bags, much to the amusement of Little Mickey Matchett and Harry Lamb the Odd Job Man, and Big Dessie, who were all in gearing up for Christmas themselves, and who have never actually been into a supermarket unless accompanied by their wives, and only then to push the trolley.
‘All set, then?’ Mr Donelly asked Big Dessie, proud of his labours.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Dessie, mid-pint. ‘That’s all the wife’s department.’
Billy and Harry nodded in agreement with Dessie. It was hard to believe a big man like Joey Donelly doing the shopping for his wife on Christmas Eve. Times certainly were changing.
Mr Donelly spent the afternoon at home on a chair, putting up decorations: he wouldn’t have bothered if it was down to himself, but Mrs Donelly had insisted. He didn’t put up as many as usual, though: it hardly seemed worth it without the children there, and he’d never liked those paper lanterns Mrs Donelly’s mother had given them when they were first married and which had remained their central festive decorative feature, their theme, as it were, for over thirty years. They were pink, originally, the lanterns, but they’d browned slightly with age, like raw meat left too long out of the fridge. He put them back in the cardboard box in the loft. He was trying to keep everything a bit more low-key.
Christmas Day itself shouldn’t be too bad. It’d probably be pretty much the same as usual. Mrs Donelly would go to church and Mr Donelly would prefer to skip it. They’d have their lunch and maybe watch Morecambe and Wise on UK Gold. They used to play cards in the old days, and Monopoly, but they haven’t bothered with any of that for years, not since the children were little, although Mrs Donelly still liked to play a few hands of patience, for old times’ sake.
Boxing Day’ll be the big day – it used to be a really big deal, years ago. They used to have everyone round, the parents and the grandparents, when they were alive, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, dead now a lot of them, or just too old, and yet at one time all of them living and breathing and in the here and now, and all piling their plates up high, and roaring their way through the afternoon and long and late into the evening, everyone laughing at everything, slowly filling up, up and away on the bottled beer and Mrs Donelly’s hand-made party food. Eaten, drunken, but not forgotten, the ghosts of Christmas past.
In fact, in the old days the Donelly household was full not just at Christmas but all year round, with family and friends and family of friends popping in, drinking tea and talking, but now the children had grown up and moved out and moved on, and the party was over and the house was quiet, and Mr and Mrs Donelly had been busy these past few years trying to remake their lives. They had discovered to their surprise that remaking their lives was not something they could do very quickly or easily, and it was not something they could do within their own four walls, so the small home that had once housed at least six and was never empty was now too big and housed only two who were hardly ever there. When you want space, it seems, you can’t have it, and when you’ve got it you don’t need it.
This was an irony not lost on Mrs Donelly, who was a religious woman and who could therefore appreciate irony and paradox. It always helped, she had found, in church as in life, if you could take a joke: Jesus, for example, as far as Mrs Donelly could tell, had spent most of His time on earth telling people jokes and winding them up. There was nothing wrong, she’d decided, with the teachings of the Catholic Church – after a period of doubt in her late forties, which had coincided with her going on to HRT – just as long as you took them with a pinch of salt. And as the mother of four, having grown accustomed to constant demands and frustrations and irritations, Mrs Donelly’s pinch of salt was maybe a little larger than most – more like a palm of salt, in fact. She had found that if you ignored a problem for long enough it usually went away – usually, but not always.
Mrs Donelly did sometimes stay in just to enjoy the peace and quiet in the house: she’d been known to wash her hair and have a bath and draw the curtains and put on her towelling dressing gown at two o’clock on a midweek afternoon, and lie on the sofa in the front room watching television, eating Rich Tea biscuits like there was no tomorrow. But that was an exception: she usually preferred to keep active. There was all her council work, for starters, which took up most evenings and quite some time during the day.
Mrs Donelly was never going to be the best councillor the town had ever seen, but she cares about our town and she is honest, and these are rare qualities, particularly among our elected representatives. If she were really honest, Mrs Donelly would have to admit that she had become a councillor partly because of the prestige – in her own mind, if not others’. She sometimes found herself saying out loud, as she sat in her little old Austin Allegro outside the town hall, waiting to go in to chair a committee, ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’
And who would have thought it? Mrs Donelly had left Central at fifteen without even completing her leaving certificate. She didn’t have a certificate to her name, actually, apart from something awarded for attendance at the Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, which she attended for a brief period when her family were flush and she was fourteen, and which is still going – under the guidance of the mighty Dot McLaughlin, sister of the famous tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, and ninety-five this year and still a size eight – up at the top of High Street, over what’s now the Poundstretcher and which was once Storey’s, ‘Gifts, Novelties, Travel Goods, Jewellery and Coal’, a shop which reverberated for years to the sound of Dot McLaughlin calling out ‘Heel, Toe, Heel, Toe’ and Miss Buchanan banging out a polonaise on the piano.
Mrs Donelly’s achievements may not have been certificated, but they were many: she had prepared three meals a day for a family of six for over twenty years, and continued to do the same for herself and Mr Donelly to the present and into the foreseeable future. She knew how to darn socks. She could sew, and had made curtains and bedspreads, and at one time had even made the clothes for the children. She paid the bills and balanced the budget. She had taken up and given up smoking, and she had seen every film made starring Paul Newman. When she was eight years old she’d read out a poem on the BBC, with Uncle Mac, on Children’s Hour. She was a good wife and mother – a good person and adventurous in her way. (A few years ago she had even bought, but never worn, some revealing underwear from a catalogue from one of Frank Gilbey’s lingerie shops, a catalogue which some of the younger girls had been passing around at the Health Centre. The garments remained in her bedside drawer, however. She was worried Mr Donelly might take a heart attack.) Above all, to her greatest satisfaction, she had become a councillor, elected in 1999, standing as an Independent, with a large – 1026 – majority, so even now, in her retirement, she was busy.
On Mondays there were council meetings, and she liked to get her shopping done and clean the house, and then things really picked up on a Tuesday with more meetings and Aqua-Aerobics and a visit to her mother – Veronica, ninety and double incontinent, but her mind still as sharp as a razor – in the sheltered accommodation off Gilbey’s roundabout on the ring road. Wednesdays there weren’t usually any meetings so she might change her books at the library and meet her friend Greta for coffee in Scarpetti’s. Thursdays she had her Italian conversation class with Francesca Scarpetti at the Institute, a class Mrs Donelly had been attending now on and off for about five years, with no discernible improvement in her accent or any increase in vocabulary, and despite the fact that, like most of the class, she had never been and had no intention of ever going to Italy. People attended the class mostly to meet old friends and to listen to Francesca speaking Italian: it sounded so romantic, even when she was only asking the price of a pizza. When she opened her mouth and those sweet words came out, for a moment time seemed to stop, and you’d forget about your troubles and about our small town, and you could imagine you were somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better, with someone else, and possibly not even yourself. At the end of each course the class would all drive up to the city and go to an Italian restaurant, where Francesca insisted they order in Italian, and they would sit around drinking red wine and laughing, and they might as well have been in some piazza in Rome, or in a villa overlooking fields of sunflowers. The course was well worth the money, just for that one night. It was worth it just to be able to speak Italian to the waiters, unembarrassed, with no husbands around, to have the waiters lean forward, smiling at your accent, and have them nod and say si, si, signorina, and va bene, and desidera?
On Fridays she had to miss council meetings because she took Emma and Amber for the day, her son Mickey’s two girls, aged just three and eighteen months, while his wife Brona went to the Institute, where she is training to be a beautician. Brona was always very well turned-out, and the children were too, and Mrs Donelly was proud to push the little ones round town, although she did not really approve of Brona’s spending so much on the children’s clothes – hers had always made do with second-hand and hand-me-downs – and she also wished that Brona would lay off a little on the tanning. Brona visited Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop once every six weeks for what Lorraine called the ‘St. Tropez’, the kind of tan usually only available on the Riviera in high season, but available in our town all year round. The St. Tropez is a full body treatment that involves exfoliation, body moisturisation, application of the cream and body buffing. It costs £45 for a half-body and £80 for the whole, and Mickey had been so appalled after the first time, when Brona had returned looking like someone had picked her up by the legs and dipped her in chocolate that he’d agreed to pay the extra for the full monty. The colour can be customised and Lorraine had got it about right after the first few treatments. Brona has explained to Mrs Donelly several times that the effect of the St. Tropez was more realistic – and thus more expensive – because it contained a special green pigment, which avoided the orange tinge of some cheaper, inferior tanning applications, and Mrs Donelly did not have the heart to disagree, or to tell Brona otherwise.
On Saturdays Mrs Donelly always made it to the club with Mr Donelly for a few drinks and sometimes a meal, and on Sunday nights she liked to go to the cinema with her old friend Pat, just like they had done when they were teenagers, growing up in town together, before the children had got in the way and they’d missed about twenty-five years of films between them. Fortunately it wasn’t too difficult to pick it up again.
In the old days, of course, they’d have gone to one of the three cinemas in the centre of town, the Salamanca, the Tontine, or the Troxy, and then they’d have visited a coffee bar afterwards, maybe the old ABC Espresso Bar on Bridge Street, which boasted the town’s first Gaggia espresso machine and offered not only coffee but also Ferrarelle mineral water and Hill’s Gingerette and West Indian Lime Juice. In the ABC they’d have then removed their coats to show off their tight-fitting pink cashmere jumpers to boys with quiffs wearing skinny ties, who would be listening to Frank Sinatra and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on the jukebox. Now they wore mostly pastels and leisurewear, and went to the multiplex on the ring road – the Salamanca, the Tontine and the Troxy all having been demolished and replaced with a Supa Valu supermarket (the Salamanca), a car park which has recently, controversially, become Pay and Display (the Tontine), despite a campaign in the Impartial Recorder, and forty starter homes in a development called the Troxies (the Troxy).*
It was the destruction of the cinemas, those sacred places, that really made Mrs Donelly sit up and take notice, and begin to take an interest in local politics. She was too late to save the cinemas and too late, probably, to save the town. By the time she was elected, the ring road had already been built and Bloom’s was under construction. Too late, Mrs Donelly realised that the town she loved was being torn apart and destroyed, and that behind its destruction was the man she had once loved: Frank Gilbey.
Mrs Donelly and Frank Gilbey had been a courting couple, years ago. They were the couple that everyone talked about and everyone wanted to be. They used to go to the big dances at the Quality Hotel and Morelli’s, the dance hall at the top of High Street, which burnt down the year that man walked on the moon and which is now Roy’s Discount Designer Clothing Warehouse. Even in those days there was something special about Frank: he had a bigger quiff than the other boys and his drainpipe trousers were tighter.
From a distance – a short distance, naturally, in our town – Mrs Donelly had watched Frank Gilbey’s inexorable rise, with his lovely wife, her old friend Irene, alongside him, and there were times, of course, when she wished it could have been her: the foreign cruises, the trips to America, their famous weekend city breaks, the beautiful clothes. She’d been into the church, once, when Frank’s and Irene’s daughter Lorraine had married the bad Scotsman, and the flowers! The flowers alone must have cost nearly £1000. The town had never seen the like. Mrs Donelly sat at the back and imagined herself as the mother of the bride, dressed smartly, though not in the coral pink chosen by Irene, she thought. The two-inch heels were a mistake, also, for the larger lady.
It would never have worked, though, Mrs Donelly and Frank. They were incompatible, not least because she was a Catholic and back then it still mattered. Frank was a Protestant, which is probably what she liked about him: his was definitely a Protestant quiff and Protestant trousers.
Mrs Donelly saw a lot of him still, around town, although less so as the years went by and their paths diverged – hers into her little job at the Health Centre, and the children and holidays in a caravan by the sea, and his into property management and his homes in several counties and abroad.
She didn’t exactly become a councillor because Frank Gilbey was a councillor, but it did give her pleasure to feel herself his equal and adversary, and she enjoyed seeing him at meetings and in committees.
Frank Gilbey, of course, had other reasons for becoming involved in local politics: sentiment was not an issue for Big Frank Gilbey. Frank always described the town hall to Mrs Gilbey as ‘the best club in town’ and certainly it was more exclusive than the golf club, although it consisted largely of the same people. The difference was that in the golf club all you got to do was play golf: in the council you got to wield power. Sometimes Mrs Donelly and Frank got to sit on the same committees and wield power together, which was more fun than playing eighteen holes and a long way from necking in the back of the Troxy.
These days, at the multiplex Pat and Mrs Donelly would buy their tickets from a machine, Pat would buy a tub of salted popcorn and never eat it all, and they’d sit close to the screen and watch the film, and then they would drive home again to their husbands, who preferred TV, or the pub. Some of the actors had changed on the big screen since the old days, and there was a lot more of what Mrs Donelly called ‘sexy talk’, which covered talk about both sex and violence, but the stories were pretty much the same as they had been back in the 1950s and 1960s.*
Mrs Donelly wondered sometimes if being in the cinema was a bit like what it was going to be like being dead – watching other people’s lives unfold and everything always working out for the best. She hoped so.
It was in the cinema that she’d first discovered the lump, a few months ago. She knew what it was straightaway. She was reaching across to get a handful of Pat’s popcorn and it was the angle of the reach that did it – her right arm stretching across to the left, hand outstretched. She wished she hadn’t now. She’d rather not have known. She wished she’d never reached for the popcorn. She’d never really approved of Pat’s popcorn anyway: she thought cinema popcorn was a waste of money. For years she’d been trying to persuade Pat to make her own at home and take it to the pictures in some Tupperware hidden in her handbag. But Pat said the popcorn was all part of the fun: Pat did not believe in stinting, even though she was a Protestant. Unlike Mrs Donelly, Pat was not the kind of person who set out on an adventure with a wrap of sandwiches. Pat was the kind of person who believed that on life’s journey you could always find a little place that would happily do some sandwiches for you. Mrs Donelly, having been on holiday several times to the Isle of Man with four children, knew this not to be the case, but she didn’t say anything.
Mrs Donelly had not told Pat about the lump. She was starting the chemo the week after Christmas. They’d decided not to tell anyone. They weren’t going to tell the children for a bit. They didn’t want to spoil Christmas.
While Mrs Donelly was at her emergency council committee meeting, Mr Donelly was out in the Christmas Eve sleet, walking the dog. He walks with her for about two hours every day, come rain or shine. After raising four children, Mr Donelly does not view a dog as a burden: on the contrary, he says, a dog, after children, is a pleasure. It’s a breeze. The worst a dog can do is bite and shit, and not usually at the same time, and a dog never asks you for money, and also you don’t have to wipe a dog’s arse, although the council would’ve liked you to: any attempt to get dog owners to poop-scoop in the People’s Park or to keep a dog on a leash was viewed with scorn by Mr Donelly. He regarded councillors as meddlers, on the whole, apart from his wife, of course, who was simply well-meaning. The whole point of having a dog, according to Mr Donelly, was that you could let it run around and shit anywhere: in a town where even the slightest misdemeanour could find you on the inside pages of the Impartial Recorder, dogs represented the wild side, the acceptable face of the animal in man, the beast inside, your only opportunity to act like a lord of misrule and to demonstrate to the rest of the world exactly what you thought of it: rubbish. Allowing your dog to cock its leg on a few council flowers was a means of self-expression for Mr Donelly, and clearly better than running amok around town mooning at police officers, breaking windows, fighting, scratching cars, stealing lawnmowers and bicycles, and weeing in shop doorways, which is what most of the town seemed to prefer to do these days to let off steam. Why the council couldn’t have focused more of their attention on that, rather than persecuting innocent dog owners, he did not know.*
Mr Donelly had several times explained to his friend Davey Quinn – Davey Senior – his theory of the therapeutic effects of dog owning and he had even gone so far as to suggest giving pets to hardened criminals in prisons, in order to assist them in their rehabilitation. Davey Senior hadn’t owned a pet since he was a child growing up on the Georgetown Road, when he’d won a goldfish at the town fair, and on his return from the fair his brother Dennis – son number six to Davey’s number seven – had promptly flushed the fish down the outside toilet. When Davey Senior had protested, Dennis had fought with him and forced his head into the toilet bowl, to allow little Davey to try to save the poor fish, a fish which Davey had decided to call Lucky. Even now, fifty years later, when he drove past the sewage plant up past the ring road Davey found himself wondering about the fate of that fish: he wondered if maybe it had made it out into open seas.* Davey’s brother Dennis had eventually ended up in prison and he remained altogether a bad lot, and Davey had therefore a rather pessimistic view about the relationship between man and beasts: he believed that Mr Donelly’s rehabilitation scheme was probably unworkable. But a pet was still an unequivocal good, according to Mr Donelly, and a doddle.
‘She’s easier to keep than your mother,’ he liked to joke, sometimes, to his children.
She’s called Rusty, the dog – Mrs Donelly is Mary – and she’s sixteen and her eyesight’s gone, more or less, so Mr Donelly lets her watch TV with him in the evenings, with the Ceefax subtitles on, and he gives her a hot-water bottle in winter. She’s part of the family, part Airedale and part Irish Terrier, which is a cute combination, and a few years ago she won a rosette in our town dog show, in the category The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, and rightly so. Her expression is, in fact, much kinder than a lot of the people in our town, so she may not just be The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, she may, in fact, be in possession of our town’s Kindliest Expression, full stop – quite an achievement for a mongrel. Mrs Donelly wonders sometimes if Mr Donelly loves that dog more than he loves his own children. It’s possible.
When he arrived back home from their customary walk – down to Bridge Street and Main Street, past the Quality Hotel, then up High Street and into the People’s Park – Mr Donelly settled the dog into its basket in the corner of the garage, a basket tucked in underneath all the jars and the tins and the tools and the wood offcuts of a lifetime, which might come in handy one day, squeezed in tight between a workbench that used to be the Donelly kitchen table, and Mr Donelly’s little Honda 50 with its grey and white trim and its seat bound with masking tape. Mr Donelly hasn’t been out on the Honda for nearly two years, since he’d taken a tumble on Gilbey’s roundabout. ‘The Nicest Things,’ they used to say, ‘Happen on a Honda,’ which may have been true thirty or forty years ago, but now there was so much traffic, even on the ring road, you were lucky if you made it unscathed up to the DIY stores or the Plough and the Stars, and then made it back home again safely.
‘I’m not identifying your body when you fall off that thing again and end up dead in hospital, all squashed,’ said Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s time to hang up your helmet, mister.’ You didn’t argue with Mrs Donelly.
The helmet hung on a nail over the dog basket.
Saying goodnight to the dog and locking up the garage, Mr Donelly made his way towards the house, his childless, empty house. He squeezed past the wheelie bin with its stick-on number – another ridiculous council regulation, as if anyone would want to steal it – and past the pile of flagstones that he’d borrowed, or requisitioned, in an act of defiance, from the council when they’d been doing the road-widening scheme at the bottom of Main Street, and he peered in at his kitchen window. The kitchen was spotless, as always, the way Mrs Donelly liked to leave it, almost as if no one lived there. The blue washing-up bowl was upended on the drainer, next to the sink, a residue of water and suds on the stainless steel the only sign of recent human activity.
He then went round to the front of the house, to put the car up on the drive. The headlights lit up the windows – new windows, bay windows, which were uPVC and which he’d put in himself when they bought the place from the council. He hasn’t yet made good around the brickwork, but the windows look OK: they fit the hole. There’s a carriage lamp, and a few shrubs in pots but apart from that the place looks pretty much the same as when they’d moved in as a young family thirty years ago. He can still remember the day as if it were yesterday: their first house after all the flats. He remembered Mrs Donelly marching up and down the stairs with Tim and Jackie – they were babies then – laughing and singing. Their own staircase: that was something.
He locked up the car and went to look through the front window, at his own front room, where hardly anything had changed in all that time: there were the same old ornaments on the windowsill and on the mantelpiece over the gas fire: a small mahogany elephant; a crystal vase; a miniature teapot; a Smurf; the ‘May Our Lady Watch Over Your Marriage’ imitation-mahogany-veneer plaque with a very attractive-looking BVM in gilt relief on the wall; the same three-piece suite, too big for the room; the same imitation Christmas tree.
He 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.
Frank had already heard rumours from friends on the committee that this was going to be the decision, so he wasn’t shocked, and he’d already spoken to his partners, to Bob Savory and to the people who needed to know, and he had instructed his solicitor, Martin Phillips, to begin preparing the appeal, but on Christmas Eve, as Mr Donelly knelt up from his prayers and Mrs Donelly got into her Austin Allegro and looked up into the sky, and thanked her lucky stars, it felt to her, for a moment, like victory, if not a miracle.
It would have been nice if I could tell you now that there’d been some snow, just to finish things off, but I cannot tell a lie, and God and the weather are not always answerable to our needs and desires, and I’m afraid sometimes sleet is as good as it gets. There was sleet.
* Bobbie Dylan at the People’s Fellowship has been encouraging Francie McGinn to do some discussions with Can Teen, the young people’s group, on the question of whether texting can be Christian – a question that has troubled thinkers, in one way or another, as Barry McClean would be able to tell you, for many years. Plato addresses a similar problem, for example, in his Phaedrus, in the story of wise King Thamus of Egypt and the inventions of the god Theuth. Francie, however, has not read widely outside the Bible and devotional literature, so he is not familiar with what Barry in Philosophy for Beginners (Lecture 6: ‘Epistemology’) calls the ‘obvious connection between Phaedrus, commodity fetishism, and our symbolic lives and psychic habits’. Francie simply calls his discussions ‘FDFX?’ (Fully Devoted Followers of Christ), and is encouraging more prayerful texting.
* See Bob Savory’s Speedy Bap!, chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches à la Turque’.
* Victor Russell, a supercilious man with a Hitler moustache, who was the owner-manager of the Troxy and who wore a white tuxedo every day of his working life, was convicted in 1989 of arson and fraud: he’d torched the Troxy, trying to cash in on a £25,000 insurance policy. He died in disgrace, in prison up in the city, his moustache intact but his tuxedo long since gone. His wife, Doreen, and daughter, Olivia, now live abroad, near Nîmes, in France, where Olivia is a dealer in art deco antiques. Doreen tells her story in a moving interview with Minnie Mitchell in the Impartial Recorder, 22 August 2001.
* She missed musicals, though – musicals seemed to have gone out of fashion. Hello, Dolly! she’d enjoyed, back in the old days, with Barbra Streisand, and Sweet Charity even, with Shirley MacLaine, although that was a bit weird. And Liza Minnelli, Cabaret, of course. They were classics. But you couldn’t get to see a good musical in our town these days for love nor money, unless you counted Colette Bradley’s amateur youth theatre productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver! at the Good Templar Hall, which are OK but which are lacking in a certain something – lavish sets, for example, and costumes, lighting, full orchestras, Topol, Ron Moody; pretty much everything, in fact, that makes a good musical a good musical.
* For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the Impartial Recorder, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present.
* This, of course, seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible: there are happy endings, even for fish and the proverbial tin soldier. On 19 May 1991 the Impartial Recorder ran a story about Monica Hawkins (née Williams), from the Longfields Estate, who went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1971, aged twenty-one. While swimming in the sea she lost a solid-silver locket which had been a gift to her from her mother, and which contained a small gold tooth, her father’s only mortal remains after he’d been cremated at what was then the town’s newly opened crematorium on Prospect Road. Twenty years later, at a car boot sale in the car park at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, not half a mile from the crematorium on Prospect Road, Mrs Hawkins, by that time twice married and twice widowed, happened to be going through a pile of costume jewellery in an old Quality Street tin when something caught her eye – a locket just like the one she’d lost all those years ago. And on opening the locket she found and yes, the gold tooth. The stallholder could offer no explanation of how she had acquired the locket – she bought bags of stuff from men in pubs – and after Mrs Hawkins’s death her daughter Joanne bequeathed the tooth to P. W. Grieve, the dentist who as a young man had made the gold tooth for Mr Williams in the first place, back in the 1960s, and who now has the tooth proudly on display in his waiting room, along with a bible open at the passage, ‘The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Psalms 119:72).
* The Woolly Hat for Seamen Scheme has long since been abandoned: the Mission now seeks instead to provide every sailor of every nation with a small, waterproof, shockproof CD player and an evangelistic CD containing hymns, sermons and prayers. The original knitting patterns and accompanying pamphlets can, however, be consulted in the Mission to Seamen Special Collection at the library – contact Divisional Librarian Philomena Rocks for details. A typical 1952 pattern and outline reads thus:
WOOLLY HAT FOR SEAMEN
Ladies, keep up the good work! Not only do these colourful hats provide much needed protection from the harsh sea winds, but also a cover for many a bible smuggled on board ship bound for pagan lands. Every one of us can share in God’s ministry to the needy simply by picking up our knitting needles! So don’t hesitate, ladies, get knitting today, to advance the kingdom of God!
Pattern for Hat:
3 balls 20g d.k. wool.
Using No. 10 needles cast on 132 sts.
1st and every K.2 P.2.
Continue until work measures 2½ inches.
Change to size 8 needles and continue to double rib until work measures 9½ inches.
Shape top:
1st row *K.3 tog. K.9 repeat from * to end (110 sts).
2nd and every alt. row Purl.
3rd row *K.3 tog. K.7 repeat from * to end (88 sts).
5th row *K.3 tog. K.5 repeat from * to end (66 sts).
7th row *K.3 tog. K.3 repeat from * to end (44 sts).
9th row *K.3 tog. K.1 repeat from * to end (22 sts).
11th row *K.2 tog to end (11 sts).
Thread wool through sts, draw up and fasten. Sew seam.
* An unorthodox view of the Virgin Birth which Mr Donelly happens to share with Barry McClean, the Gnostics, David Hume, Friedrich Schleiermacher, certain twentieth-century German theologians and the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins.