Broken Music: A Memoir (5 page)

There is a moment of stunned silence and my mother looks horrified, and I immediately know that I have said something terribly wrong. Auntie Amy looks nonplussed for only a moment but then quickly recovers her composure.

“I had a husband,” she says, “but he died in the war.” She gives me a kindly look. “He was a very brave soldier,” she says quietly, and then she and my mother both begin to sip at their teacups as if synchronized with a choreographed ritual of suppressed grief and loneliness.

I am now too afraid to ask his name or if he is one of those listed on the war memorial, and I never mention it again.

Soon Auntie Amy will become ill and be unable to work in the shipyard, and each morning before school my mother will give me a cup of milky tea with one spoonful of sugar and a plain digestive biscuit in the saucer to take next door. I have a key and let myself in, careful not to spill the precious tea. I knock gently on her bedroom door with my free hand, and enter the dark room where there is a strange smell that I can’t identify. I suppose it is the smell of sickness. She thanks me and briefly holds my hand. Weeks pass and Auntie Amy will be the first person I know in my life who will die. My mother cries all day and I can’t console her. “So this is death,” I say to myself, and I begin to have catastrophic fantasies, obsessing about my parents dying or that a war will suddenly break out and I will be left alone, but I do not share these thoughts with anyone else.

    The back lane behind our house is cobbled stone and I will often find a wedge of grass between many of the cold gray stones. Perhaps
the seeds have been carried by a bird or have been blown here by the wind. I often dream that all the tiny wedges of grass will one day join up and our lane will become a beautiful garden, green, green, green. But I’m always dreaming, and the landscape will remain resolutely gray, mitigated only by the muted plumage of those eking out a life among the bricks and stones.

There are two shops farther down from Auntie Amy’s, a china shop that no one ever seems to frequent and then Trotters, the barbers, where my dad and I get our hair cut. We each get a “short back and sides,” and because I am small, I have to sit on a plank across the arms of the barber’s chair. I love the prickly chill as I run my fingers over the short hairs at the back of my newly shorn head. But most of all I am fascinated by the exclusively masculine smells and atmosphere of the shop: the leather straps where they ostentatiously strop the open blades; the flourish of the lathering brush; the bracing scent of hair tonic and pomade; the growing tumble of hair on the floor and the snip-snip of the scissors between the discreet, colorful language of menfolk away from the ears of women.

Next door to the barbers is the newspaper office, where a large and noisy printing press churns out the Newcastle
Evening Chronicle
in the late afternoon and the
Journal
in the morning. My best friend, Tommy Thompson, sells the papers on the corner outside the office to the shipyard workers as they come to and from work. Tommy and I have been friends since the first day of school. He has dark gypsy eyes and luxuriant black hair arranged in a sculpted pompadour quiff in imitation of his elder brother, who is a teddy boy. The teds are a dandified gang of toughs who terrorize the town, or at least like to think they do. While there is a great sweetness in Tommy, his studied pose as a hoodlum, a kind of precocious Gene Vincent, with an insolent swagger and an impudent face, seems to set him constantly at
odds with authority. He rolls his own cigarettes, goes to school only when he feels like it, steals junk out of Woolworth’s with a casual courage that beggars belief, and demonstrates a bafflingly exotic knowledge of sexual deviance with all of its appropriate vocabulary.

“Do ye know what a titty roll is?”

Shamed and fascinated in equal measure I reply, “No.”

“A pearl necklace?”

“No, Tommy, I don’t…”

“It’s where a bloke gets his cock out, right? And sticks it in between …”

Tommy doesn’t go to church, and claims not to believe in God. He is my first existential hero.

If I can manage to engage my most sophisticated friend in conversation long enough, he’ll let me take over selling the
Chronicle
while he goes back into the office for a fag and a cup of tea. He teaches me how to call out the name of the paper in the street, elongating every vowel so that it sounds like “eevenaienn chroaniicaaell” sung at the top of my voice. I always have to be careful that my mother is never in the street when I do this because she thinks that it’s common and people will think I’ve been “dragged up,” but it is my first singing job.

On the opposite side of the street stands the Victorian-gothic St. Luke’s Anglican Church, and farther down toward the river is Lloyds Bank, and then the post office, where, on Wednesday, I collect the family allowance, our weekly stipend from the government. The vicar from St. Luke’s comes into the dairy every morning for a half-pint of milk, which he says is for his pussycat. This is his idea of a joke—I know he doesn’t have a pussycat. He catches my eye with a wink and then looks quizzically at Betty’s latest black eye. I like the vicar, I like his friendly smile, I like the white hair beneath his black
hat, I even like his silly joke. He seems to be the prophet of a gentler religion than that of the Irish zealots who are beginning to terrorize me at the Catholic church two streets away.

Down from the post office is the railway station. Tommy’s elder brother Mick works there, collecting tickets from the commuters rushing back home from their jobs in the “toon.” In between trains I’ve often seen Mick hanging out the waiting room window high above Hugh Street, where he practices spitting across to the other side of the road. “Hey, Mick,” I say.

He ignores me as if I’m some lower life-form, but manages to land a green gob close to my feet before the bell rings in the station to warn him that another train is coming. Every fifteen minutes an electric commuter train pulls in, but occasionally a noisy, prehistoric leviathan of steam will rumble over the bridge of Station Road and the small boy at number 84 will run out and experience the near-sexual thrill of the machine that made George Stephenson famous throughout the world. (Stephenson, the father of the steam engine, was born not three miles away, and probably was the only famous person ever to come from around here.)

My mother sends me underneath the railway bridge on Friday mornings to buy fresh cod and haddock from the fishwife. Her barrow is crudely hammered together with wood and nails atop an old set of pram wheels, which she pushes up from the fish quay. She wraps the wet, shining fish in old newspaper. Her fingernails are filthy, and her salt-and-pepper hair is pulled violently back from a face as wrinkled as a road map. She has one tooth. I’m afraid of the fishwife, because in my fetid imagination she is the evil spouse of a sea creature, and the twitching, openmouthed fish are her wide-eyed victims. I try to go missing on Friday mornings whenever I can or plead with my mother to let me go to the chip shop where
the fish are already dead and battered and one sanitized stage away from the violence of the charnel house.

    I attend St. Columba’s primary school, which is housed in an old Victorian building next to the church where my parents were married and named after one of the wild Irish monks who converted the local pagans to Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries. These monks must have had some serious “blarney” as well as “bottle” to set off from their monastery on the island of Iona to replace Odin and Thor with a God who turned the other cheek and preached love. Hundreds of years later our priests are still mad Irishmen and we still call the fourth day of the week Thorsday in the local dialect. Some things never change.

It was at St. Columba’s that I began my lifelong fascination with religion and conversely my lifelong problem with it. All Catholic school children are taught the catechism, a little red book from which we are indoctrinated and expected to memorize verbatim, like proto-Maoists about to convert the world.

Who made you?

“God made me.”

Why did God make you?

“To know him, love him, and serve him.”

In whose likeness did God make you?

“In his own likeness etc., etc….”

Implicit in all of this was that God was a Catholic and that anyone who wasn’t a Catholic would not be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and ought to be pitied or, if at all possible, converted to the true church. Luckily, being the child of a mixed marriage—my mother Church of England, my father nominally a Catholic—I didn’t really swallow this idea whole. Consigning millions of lost
souls to eternal hellfire just because they weren’t members of the Catholic Women’s League or the Knights of Saint Columba seemed hubristic long before I’d even heard the word. The concept of limbo, a place where unfortunate babies who hadn’t been baptized into the Catholic and Apostolic Church were meant to sit out eternity, horrified me as much as hell itself (which one was signed up for immediately on missing mass on any given Sunday). In fact eternity, whether in purgatory, hell, or heaven, struck me as an appalling concept. Heaven to me just seemed like an endless boring mass while everyone I knew, including my parents, would be frying downstairs. I did become an altar boy, which paradoxically relieved some of the boredom of the liturgy. I could parrot the Latin mass with the best of them, although my understanding of the text was negligible. I’m sure I was far from alone in this, but I think I must have enjoyed the dressing up, a full-length black robe under a white surplice on a weekday and red on a Sunday—it was basically a dress—and the theatricality and the solemn pomp of the ritual must have appealed to the performer in me.

Since a genuine religious experience had up until then eluded me, I always felt like something of an imposter in the house of the faithful. I didn’t quite belong. My biggest problem was confession. At the age of seven a child is supposed to know good from evil, but most seven-year-olds, as far as I know, don’t commit evil acts. Yet the solemn sacrament of confession requires that, kneeling in a closed cubicle and facing a largely opaque scrim of canvas, you will confess your sins to the shadowy form of a seated priest on the other side.

The form of the sacrament begins as follows: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was two weeks ago” (you see, you’re supposed to go once a fortnight), but I had difficulties with both of these statements. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t committed any
sins to speak of, but was too embarrassed to tell the priest that I was sinless, so the first statement that I had sinned was in itself a lie. I would then have to compound the lie by making up a catalog of venial misdemeanors like, “I have been disobedient” (I hadn’t), or “I have told lies.” Where the only lies I had been involved in had been told at my last confession, within the sanctity of the sacrament, compounding the lie with a sacrilege, which of course carried the penalty of eternal torment. This terrifying ontological conundrum and moral paradox was frankly too much for my seven-year-old brain, so I avoided confession like the plague, which of course made matters even worse. One is supposed to receive the sacrament once a year at least, under pain of excommunication (another offense carrying a statutory minimum of eternal hellfire). So, simply to avoid embarrassment in the confessional, I had condemned myself to life outside of the communion of the church as well as everlasting torment in the Joycean version of hell that our Hibernian priests favored. Either I was a very stupid seven-year-old or I was overthinking things.

I have carried such conundrums well into adult life, and sometimes they have served me well and other times they have not, but thought and torment seem to be inextricably linked and this is the lasting legacy of my Catholicism.