Next day, Wednesday, it was back to the routine and for us kids that meant school, St Michael’s Elementary School. We had to be there at nine o’clock and God help us if we were late. Two of the cane on the hands for the girls and two on the bum for the boys. Getting to school on time wasn’t always as easy as it sounds. Mam made porridge with milk and sugar, and after getting it down, we were ready to go. But that morning, two things slowed us down. First the lavatory. Only one between three houses. The Hickses were no problem as they were usually in bed till twelve o’clock, Gladys had gone to the soda factory at six o’clock and Dad was on nights. No, it was old Annie. She was sitting in there singing one of her songs. ‘ Be it ever so humble , there’s no place like home.’
Her mangy dog sat outside howling in harmony.
‘Please hurry up, Mrs Swann,’ Lizzie shouted, knocking on the door. ‘We’re going to be late for school.’
‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,’ she warbled, ignoring us, ‘ there’s no place like home ’
It was quarter past eight when she came out, which didn’t leave us much time.
‘We’ll get a good hiding if we don’t get a move on,’ I said.
Then Danny said, ‘I’ve just remembered, it’s Wednesday and we have swimming today. Mr McCarron takes us to
Osborne Street Baths on Rochdale Road, for a good fumigating, he says. And I can’t find my cozzy anywhere. I’ve got to have it or I’ll get belted.’
Danny was proud of his cozzy because on it he had a badge saying he’d swum ten lengths.
‘Rubbish,’ Mam said. ‘You don’t have to have a cozzy. You can swim in your birthday suit.’
‘Aw, Mam,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to. Everyone’ll be looking at me. Anyroad, you can get locked up for swimming nude.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said again. ‘It’s lads only and what you’ve got is only the same as the others have. So I don’t know why you’re mythering us about such a little thing.’
But Danny went on moaning about it so much that we started turning the house upside down to find his lousy cozzy.
‘As if I don’t have enough with a young baby and your father coughing his lungs up half the night,’ Mam said.
We looked everywhere. In the wardrobe in the bedroom, under the bed, in the pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, on the drying rack hanging in the living room. As a last resort, I said a quick prayer to St Antony, who’s in charge of heaven’s lost property office, though you’re supposed to put a penny in the poor box if he finds your lost article. No use. No sign of it. It was half past eight and we were into danger time.
‘When was the last time you saw it?’ Mam asked.
‘Last Wednesday when we went to the baths,’ he cried. Suddenly he stopped whinging, clapped his hands to his stomach and said, ‘Wait a minute! I’ve still got it on!’
‘Thanks, Antony,’ I said, raising my eyes to heaven. ‘I owe you a penny.’
But Mam didn’t share my gratitude for she gave Danny
a clout. ‘You daft little bugger, worrying us like that. Now get to school the lot of you.’
We had ten minutes to get to school and we knew it was impossible to make it in time but, just the same, we ran all the way. We got to the big front door of the school at five past nine, where Mr Rooney, the head, was waiting with a cane hanging by a crook over his arm.
‘Late!’ he said in triumph. As if we didn’t know. ‘What’s your excuse?’
I didn’t know why he asked ’cos he never accepted excuses.
As I was the oldest, they looked at me to answer. ‘We’ve only one lavatory, sir, and the next-door neighbour wouldn’t come out. She kept singing “Home, Sweet Home”.’
‘Never mind what she was singing,’ he said. ‘It won’t do. Hands out, the girls.’
We put our hands out and all of us, including little Cissie, got two of the cane. Danny got it on his bottom. The cane caught the tips of Cissie’s fingers and she started to cry, sucking her fingers at the same time.
‘Come on, Cissie,’ I said. ‘No crying. You’re a Lally, remember. Head up.’
‘Can’t help it,’ she wailed. ‘It stings.’
Cissie had a lot to learn about life.
‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ Mr Rooney announced, as we knew he would. ‘If you’ve only one lavatory, you must get up earlier and get in there before your Home Sweet Home neighbour. Do you think the British Empire would be as great as it is today if we were late reporting for duty? Do you think I would be where I am today if I came late every day? The country, the Empire, the world, the universe must run on time. Now get to your classes.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ we chorused.
Rubbing his backside which was still wearing the rotten cozzy, Danny went to Mr McCarron’s, a tearful Cissie still sucking the ends of her fingers went to Miss Tunney’s infants class, and Lizzie and me still wringing our hands went along the corridor to Miss Gertrude Houlihan’s - Shirty Gerty we called her. She weighed about two tons and her mousey hair was curled at the back in a schoolma’am bun.
There were about forty girls in our class and every one of us hated school, every minute of it. We sat three to a desk and Lizzie and me had to sit next to the spiteful Eve Ogboddy. Gerty sat perched on her high desk looking down on us over her nip-nose glasses.
In my exercise books, she’d made me write: ‘Catherine Lally is my name, England is my nation, Manchester is my home town, the Church is my salvation.’
Round the walls she’d pinned up all kinds of religious sayings, like THE DEVIL FINDS WORK FOR IDLE HANDS and SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME. We didn’t understand much of what she taught but we weren’t there to understand but to memorise. We knew what the last one about suffer the little children meant all right. Or we thought we did.
I was sure that in another life Shirty Gerty had been in charge of a dungeon in a castle. She had five kinds of torture: the treatments, we called them. First, she cuffed you over the head or, if in a bad mood, boxed your ears. Second, slapped you hard on your wrists. Third, belted you on both hands with the leather strap she’d had specially made in the West of Ireland. Fourth, made you kneel all morning on the cold stone floor. Last, and the one we hated most, made you wear the dunce’s cap. Some days there were more girls kneeling and standing at the front than sitting at the desks. Which punishment you got
depended on the way she was feeling that morning and that depended on the state of her stomach. If she gave a good belch first thing, we knew we were going to be all right; otherwise we had to watch out. We wished her mother would give her a big spoonful of gripe water.
Her lessons were mainly learning by heart and that meant reciting together in a sing song chant, stuff like the thirteen multiplication tables, and yards and yards of poetry. I loved learning long poems, though, like the one about daffodils or the Lady of Shalott, but I hated the thousands of other useless things she knocked into our heads. God help anyone with a bad memory, and that meant nearly everyone in the class. You got one of her treatments if you couldn’t spell, didn’t remember things like the Kings and Queens of England from Alfred to Victoria, or didn’t know about bushels, pecks, rods, perches and poles and other weights and measures, or couldn’t recite sentences like, ‘The terrestrial core is of an igneous nature’.
I’d had all Gerty’s treatments except the dunce’s cap, not like my poor friend Lizzie who’d once had to stand on a chair in front of the class all morning wearing the big pointed cap because she couldn’t list the bits of Africa that belonged to Queen Victoria, and couldn’t name and point to the capital of Bechuanaland. It used to be Gaborone, in case you’re interested.
That morning, when we got there, Houlihan was giving her favourite lesson, religion, which meant learning the catechism. We didn’t understand any of it. You will one day, she said. She didn’t like being asked anything in case she didn’t know the answer. A few daring girls like Fanny and Florrie enjoyed tormenting her with awkward questions. She’d written a verse up on the blackboard and the class was busy copying it onto their slates.
I must not play on Sunday, because it is a sin.
Tomorrow will be Monday, and then I can begin.
The girls did their best to make the chalk squeak on the slates ’cos that always got her mad and she could never tell who’d done it. As we walked in, she was marching round the class, cuffing heads where girls were too slow.
‘Put your chalk down now,’ she barked. ‘Right. Now that Catherine Lally and Lizzie Brennan have favoured us with their presence, perhaps we can start our religious instruction.’
As I said, religion was her favourite subject but if she had a favourite topic in religion, it had to be heaven and hell, especially hell because it was something she knew a lot about.
‘Now today,’ she began, ‘we’re going to learn about how God punishes sinners. So wiggle the wax out of your ears and we’ll see if we can’t get something into your thick skulls. And while we’re on the subject of sin, remember that Father Muldoon will be coming to hear your Wednesday confessions at the end of the day when we go to Mass.’
How I hated these weekly compulsory confessions, mainly because I couldn’t think of any sins to say. I couldn’t very well go into the box and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have not sinned. It is a week since my last confession and since then I’ve done nowt.’ So I made a few up and said, ‘I’ve been cheeky to my dad, refused to go errands, and I pinched a penny out of my mam’s purse. Lastly, I’ve just told lies.’The priest never twigged it. I don’t think he was even listening. I was sure if I’d said ‘I’ve committed murder’, he’d have said ‘How many times, my child?’
Lizzie and me went to our desks and sat down. The desk seats had no backs - to stop us from slouching,
Houlihan said - and we’d learned to sit up straight without any support. Otherwise she was only too ready to give you a dig in the small of your back to remind you.
‘First, what will Christ say to the just?’ she asked. She looked round the class; her eye landed on Ada Davis, a little nervous girl who was knocked about something shocking at home.
‘Please, Miss Houlihan, Christ will say, “Come ye blessed of my father, possess ye the kingdom prepared for you.” ’
‘Good,’ Shirty Gerty said, hiding a belch with the back of her hand.
It looked as if we were going to have a trouble-free morning but we hadn’t counted on Fanny Butterworth, the class blabbermouth.
‘What’s heaven like, Miss Houlihan?’ Fanny asked, giving the rest of us a sly look.
‘Oh, heaven is a lovely, happy place,’ she raved. ‘That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him.’
‘What about those saints with the funny names like Barnabas, Marcellinus and Anastasia that the priest reads out at Mass. Will they be in heaven?’
‘Oh, yes indeed. They’ll be there waiting for us.’
‘What about animals, miss? Can we take our cats and dogs in?’ Fanny was in top form.
‘Certainly not! No pets allowed. Animals don’t have souls like us.’
‘Then I don’t want to, go, miss. It sounds dead boring with all those men with the beards and the funny names. And if I can’t take our Scamp, I’d rather go to hell.’
‘And that’s where you and your mongrel will end up, Miss Fanny Butterworth,’ Shirty rasped. ‘Along with the other sinners. Now, there are two kinds of sin,’ she
continued. ‘Original and actual. You’re born with original sin on your soul and so there’s nothing you can do about that except get yourself baptised by a priest or someone else if there’s no priest about. Who knows what original sin is?’
Eve Ogboddy, the teacher’s pet ’cos her mam was the school cleaner, how we hated her - Eve, not her mam - put her hand up. ‘It’s the sin committed by Adam when he pinched an apple off the tree and took a dirty big bite out of it.’
‘Is it true you can use tea or Guinness if there’s no water, miss?’ Fanny Butterworth asked. No doubt about it, Fanny was the cheekiest and the daftest girl in the class ’cos she was always trying to rattle Shirty. She was begging for it with questions like that.
‘You could,’ Shirty snapped, ‘if there’s no holy water about but who in your family would waste good Guinness when there’s plenty of water in the standpipe outside?’
‘What happens to babies that die before they get baptised?’ Fanny persisted. She really was asking for it.
‘Tell her the answer, Catherine Lally,’ Gerty said. Now I was being dragged into the stupid argument.
‘Limbo, miss. They go straight to limbo.’
‘And limbo is . . . ?’ She clucked her tongue and let her gaze wander round the room, looking for a victim. It settled on my friend Lizzie.
‘Limbe is . . .’ Lizzie began nervously.
‘Not Limbe, you stupid girl,’ Shirty bawled. ‘Limbe is a town in Nyasaland. LimbO is what we’re talking about here. Eve Ogboddy, go and point to Limbe on the map.’
Her toady tripped out to the front and put her finger somewhere in the middle of Africa on the scruffy map hanging on the wall. ‘That’s it, Miss Houlihan,’ she simpered.
‘Please, miss, limbo,’ Lizzie faltered, ‘is a place of rest where the souls of the just who died before Christ were detained.’
‘Does that mean,’ asked Fanny, ‘that the old codgers who snuffed it before Christ died on the cross were let out but that the unbaptised black babies who died afterwards had to stay?’
‘That is the teaching of the Church and you will accept it, Fanny Butterworth, whether you like it or not.’
‘Aw, miss. That’s not fair. All them babies haven’t done nothing and it’s not right that they should have to stay while the others go upstairs to heaven.’
Houlihan blew her top. ‘Come up here!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll teach you to argue with the Church, you insolent girl.’
She gave Fanny two stinging strokes of the strap and told her to kneel at the front.
Then she got on to her ‘doom and gloom’ subject which put the fear of God in us. We shivered in fearful delight ’cos we knew what was coming.
‘The world is an evil, sinful place and there will come a time on the day of the Last Judgement when God will have his revenge,’ she proclaimed, her finger pointing upwards. ‘The sun will be darkened, the moon will turn to blood, and the stars will fall from the sky.’
‘She sounds almost glad,’ Fanny whispered across the class from her kneeling position.
‘What was that, Fanny Butterworth?’ Shirty barked.
‘I said it sounds awful bad,’ Fanny replied.
‘It’ll be bad all right,’ Shirty said, ‘but especially for the wicked. Out of the clouds will ride the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first will bring war, the second, death, the third, famine; and the last, the worst of all, pestilence.’
‘What’s that - pestilence, miss?’ asked a trembling Lizzie.
‘It means a terrible disease like the Black Death, and people will break out in terrible suppurating sores before they die a painful death. And then it’ll be hell for the lot of them for eternity.’
We were petrified at the thought of going into the furnace and being shovelled about by devils with big spades and pitchforks.
‘As long as your bad deeds are venial sins,’ she continued, ‘you go to purgatory.’
‘How long do you have to stay in purgatory?’ I asked.
‘There are no clocks or calendars in purgatory,’ she grunted.
‘Then how does God know when you’ve done your time?’ Florrie asked, looking round the class for support.
‘All right, all right,’ Houlihan snarled, ‘if you must have a figure, let’s say about a thousand years.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ said Florrie, ‘that if I pinched a penny from my mam’s purse and then got run over by a horse and cart, I’d go to purgatory for a thousand years?’
‘That is correct,’ Houlihan leered through her yellow teeth, ‘and you’d well deserve it.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Florrie protested. ‘The magistrate at Minshull Street gave my mam seven days for swiping a pair of boots but I’d get a thousand years for pinching a penny.’
‘That’s bloody unfair,’ Fanny said from the floor.
‘Right, you!’ roared Houlihan, cuffing her across the head. ‘On with the dunce’s cap and up on the chair.’ But Fanny had rattled Shirty Gerty’s cage and she was happy.
‘When you’re in purgatory, miss/ Florrie said, ‘do you ever get time off for good behaviour like they do in Strangeways?’ Florrie seemed to know about courts and prisons and matters like that.
‘We can help the souls in purgatory and so reduce their sentence,’ Shirty sighed, ‘by gaining indulgences for them. Who knows what an indulgence is?’
There was little point in trying to answer, for the little Ogboddy sneak was in there quick as a flash.
‘An indulgence,’ she recited, like a parrot, ‘is a remission, granted by the Church, of the temporal punishment which often remains due to sin after its guilt has been forgiven.’
‘Good answer, Eve!’ Houlihan said. ‘We can always depend on you.’
‘Does that mean, miss,’ I asked, ‘that when we go to confession, our sins are not really forgiven and that we don’t go straight to heaven if we die?’
‘Is it a bit like when me mam does the washing?’ asked Florrie. ‘The sheets are still a bit grubby even after she’s put them through the mangle.’
‘You should buy some decent soap,’ said Agnes Scully, a red-haired girl with a face full of freckles and a head full of nits, ‘like Sunlight instead of that dog soap your mam gets from the rag and bone man.’
‘Kneel down at the blackboard, Scully!’ bellowed Houlihan. ‘Who asked for your opinion? I’ll deal with you later.’
‘I heard somewhere,’ said Fanny on the chair, ‘that people used to buy indulgences like tickets to be let off time in purgatory. So much money for so many days, like.’
Shirty ordered Fanny to turn away from the class and keep quiet.
‘Stupid men in the past did think they could buy indulgences,’ Gerty continued, ‘but the best way to earn indulgences is by prayer and suffering.’
‘What kind of suffering?’ I asked.
‘For example, people used to go up the sixty-six and the seventy-seven steps in Collyhurst on their knees to earn
days of indulgence for their loved ones who’d passed away.’
We were impressed. Everyone knew about the steps in Collyhurst.
‘I’ll bet they didn’t half have scabby knees,’ I laughed.
‘Right, that’s it,’ she barked. ‘We’ll see about scabby knees, Catherine Lally. Kneel down at the front and earn a few scabs and get yourself an indulgence or two at the same time.’
Not again, I said to myself. I must have spent half my life on my knees, scrubbing, praying, and being punished.
‘How much time would you be let off for going up the seventy-seven steps on your knees?’ Lizzie asked quietly. She was thinking of her dad in purgatory.
‘It’s hard to say,’ Houlihan said slowly. ‘About a month, I should think.’
‘That means we’d have to do it thousands of times to be let off for knocking off a penny!’ gasped Florrie. ‘That’s daft.’
‘Kneel down with the others,’ Gerty growled.
She rounded off her religious instruction with a revision of the main prayers: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, the Hail Holy Queen, the Memorare.
Finally she asked, ‘How should you finish the day?’
‘By kneeling down and saying my night prayers,’ we chanted.
‘After your night prayers what should you do?’
‘I should observe due modesty in going to bed and occupy myself with the thoughts of death,’ we chorused.
For me, the thoughts of death were one-eyed Annie Swann washing me down and putting pennies on my eyes.