Vanished Years (16 page)

Out of the dusty gloom, Jean, insomniac, appeared in a T-shirt and tracksuit, carrying an empty mug.

‘I couldnae sleep. Ahm goin’ for a quick wee cuppa. Want one?’

And so we all woke up, spent, for another day.

When Jean wasn’t coaxing my father back to life, she was up a ladder pruning a tree, or ironing. She never stopped. I adored her. She called Duncan our gardener ‘Sexy Legs’, then one day she suddenly announced she was leaving and my mother cried.

‘I don’t think I can manage without you, Jean.’

‘It’s the right time,’ said Jean. ‘If I dinnae gae now, he’ll never come back.’

And she was right. We had to get on without her. She had pulled Daddy back to life by the sheer force of her will, like an exorcist, exhausting herself and my mother in the process. Now it was up to him, and us. Unfortunately my father’s post-operative holiness had vanished. Instead the poor man was spitting with fury at his reduced circumstances and took it out on everyone, particularly his wife. But little by little things got back on track, and one day, when the vicar was visiting, the plan was hatched to go to Lourdes.

And so we flew on the wings of faith towards Plymouth in my father’s Lexus. The silver racehorse on the bonnet and the pro-hunting sticker on the back window left no one in any doubt as to the hopes and fears of the travellers within. My father sat in the front, wearing his old straw hat and his new glasses, the lens over his blind eye blacked out. He quickly fell asleep and woke only as we reached Plymouth, after a hair-raising drive down England’s worst road, the A303. We were accompanied by his new nurse, a German lady called Marianne. You’ve probably noticed that sooner or later everything in my world is reduced to a Julie Andrews film and I had already renamed her Fräulein Maria. She was a kind, vulnerable creature, devoted to my dad and, according to him, a good driver. This was one of the ultimate accolades in my family. ‘Well parked’ was a far greater compliment than ‘You look quite sexy.’

Our disabled sticker was like a backstage pass when we arrived at the port. We waved it and drove straight on board. My mother had
made the reservations on her computer and, needless to say, had booked us the three cheapest berths. In high spirits we loaded up my father like a packhorse with all our luggage, so that his straw hat was all that could be seen above it, and pushed him through the labyrinth of passages – just wide enough for the wheelchair – towards our tiny windowless cubicles in the bowels of the ship.

Normandy Ferries is a French line, but these floating tanks are in fact the very essence of England, and Dickens, Waugh, Wilde – even Shakespeare – can be found sitting at the bar. There is a charged romance in the air as the engines grind into motion, the thick ropes strain and the boat groans to be released. Passengers crowd the decks for one last look at home, that jewel set in its silver sea, as the lines are cast off by chubby dockhands and the ship finally edges her way from quay and country towards the open sea in a swirling, wailing confetti of seagulls. England is a dripping green jungle under the low sky and Byron must have watched it disappear thus, before dragging his bad foot below for a drink.

As soon as our boat hit the open sea, Fräulein Maria became mortally ill, clutching her jaw.

‘I am having the abscess. This is not seasickness! I will burst it with this needle. Don’t worry. I have done this many times,’ she announced, turning all the colours of the German flag.

I became very frosty. ‘Who is going to take my father to the bathroom?’

‘Come and get me when he wants to go,’ she whispered, clutching her head.

So I parked her in her cubicle and left with my dad for karaoke up on deck. It was raining outside now, pouring down the windows, and there was quite a swell. The ship lurched and listed, perched and swooped on the rolling sea, but nothing detracted from the party within. Snaggle-toothed she-bears with builders’ bums swayed through the lounge, juggling six pints of lager and as many packets of crisps, towards groups of purple-faced mechanicals in chains and rings. The smell of beer and aftershave wafted through the saloon.
The revellers sat and laughed at their drinks, all elbows and arms, squeezed as they were into nightclub tables around the periphery of a sort of stage, next to older groups, retired professionals, who were neater, more controlled. They were Old Labour, worlds away from the raucous children of Blair at the next table. These ladies had posture. Their pink, grey and beige hair had been set in rollers and was backcombed and sprayed, ready to withstand the gusty Channel winds. Sensible handbags sat on their laps, surgical tights sparkled on their coffee-coloured legs and they watched entranced later on when oldie hits and magic tricks were performed by some former young hopeful just out of drama school fifteen years ago, applauding politely, as the groups around them bayed louder by the pint.

My father watched from his chair. In his dotage he reminded me of an old dog, surveying the passing world from a corner, occasionally sniffing the wind, in that lazy state between sleep and wakefulness, no energy left to judge, or condone, just pleased to be there.

‘I rather miss the smoke,’ he said. ‘Everything is so terribly clear without cigarettes.’

We had dinner in the restaurant. The rain stopped quite suddenly and the clouds drew back, revealing a creamy dusk, a large orange sun and a cargo ship like a spacecraft on the horizon. As the sun hit the water, dolphins appeared by the side of the ship. They jumped and raced in the waves.

‘Aren’t they marvellous?’ Daddy said, looking in another direction altogether where suddenly a submarine appeared out of the ocean. It sailed beside us for a few minutes and then disappeared.

‘That was a very big one.’

‘It was a submarine, Daddy.’

‘Oh. Are you sure?’

We talked about our trip, and the last time he went to Lourdes, with his mother and sister, in 1954.

‘There was a marvellous statue of Our Lady that my mother liked very much. We must find it,’ he said.

‘Well, I don’t expect much has changed.’

‘No, but we have,’ Daddy replied, staring blindly out to sea.

I had been to Lourdes on a pilgrimage with my school, a Catholic monastery in Yorkshire called Ampleforth College. Accompanied by a few congenial priests, we went by train and boat and train down France to look after the sick, whom we pushed in ancient bath chairs towards the grotto every day to take the water. Our choir sang in the basilica.

One evening I escaped from our dormitory with another student and played around all night in the woods outside Lourdes under the full moon. He was one of the most handsome boys in the school and played in the cricket eleven. We had loved and hated each other for a while in one of those typical school relationships in which childish romance is squashed by guilt and fear. Most of the time we avoided each other – but occasionally our eyes locked across a noisy common room, or in the abbey church. Without a word we would both leave, one following the other at a safe distance down long stone passages, round corners, up a turret staircase, to a classics room high up in the eaves of the school, which had a lock on the door, and in which Greek, if not Greek love, was taught. We’d silently undress and have each other among the desks under a blackboard covered in ancient Greek. Later, reclothed, we’d leave the room without a word, merging back into the traffic of the school.

This was the violence of Catholicism in action. But in the hills outside Lourdes it felt different. Maybe the Virgin was watching from above, thinking: God, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that! At any rate something was released in us, and we laughed and talked, and wandered ever further – two escaping puppies – into the woods. By the end of the night, under a sky streaked with thin pink clouds we lay under a tree, exhausted. Looking back, it should have been one of the most beautiful moments of my childish life. But it wasn’t. The religious conditioning was too strong, and post-coital remorse flooded through our veins, so without speaking – actually we hardly ever
spoke again – we climbed the hill back to the monastery and silently scaled the wall into the same open window, returning to our separate beds.

It felt important to be telling this story to my dad, now, after all this time, sailing back into the jaws of the Catholic Church, and I was looking out to sea, lost in the drama of it all, when I heard an enormous snore. He was fast asleep. Probably just as well.

Ashen-faced, Fräulein Maria stumbled into my father’s cabin to undress him while I went back up to the bar and had a drink with four truck drivers who loved me in
St Trinian’s
. When I returned she had passed out on the floor, and my father was lying on the bed with his trousers down.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what happened to Marianne,’ my father replied. ‘She was here a minute ago. Could you ask her to come back and finish me off?’

‘She’s under the bed,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’

‘Sorry, Rupert,’ murmured Fräulein Maria. ‘Could you take me to my cabin now?’

‘Oh yes, madam.’

The clowns were running the circus.

‘I shall be invoicing Mummy for this, you know,’ I quipped later, as I struggled with Daddy’s underwear.

‘Isn’t she?’ replied my dad obliquely. ‘Leave my bottle by the bed, would you?’

‘Which one? Whisky or …?’

‘Both,’ grunted Daddy, followed by his sing-song ‘Thank you.’

I was dismissed.

The next morning Fräulein Maria made a miraculous recovery so we left the boat and began the six-hour drive along the coast of Spain into France. We had lunch at a truck stop outside Bilbao, and arrived in Lourdes at six o’clock.

The grotto of Lourdes is in a deep valley with a wild slate-coloured river running through it. There is a magnificent dam, and the water thunders down it from the mountains. It is the roar of God in a place largely deafened by the industry of faith, but actually, if you can see past the basilica with its Disneyland towers and mawkish statuary – Our Lady should have appeared in Hollywood. Then she would have had statue approval – the kingdom of heaven is all around you in Lourdes. Strangely, it comes as no surprise, even to the hardened cynic, that divinity briefly congealed into human form and appeared here as a woman.

Bernadette Soubirous was a fragile little shepherdess living in one room with her large family during the middle of the nineteenth century. She was weak from having cholera as a child, semi-literate and, some say, backward. One day she was gathering firewood by the cliffs on the banks of the river when she looked up and saw a beautiful young woman standing on a small niche in a kind of half-cave where rubbish was dumped. They began to chat, and Bernadette ran home afterwards and told her mother. She described a small lady in white with a blue mantle, holding a long rosary, with yellow roses on her feet. At first nobody believed her story, but the lady kept appearing, and soon people became intrigued. The local priest told her to ask the lady who she was, but when she did, the lady just smiled and looked down. During one of the visions (sources vary as to which), the lady told Bernadette to dig in the ground, saying that a spring would come up, and that she should drink from it, and eat the surrounding plants.

By now the whole town followed her each day to the grotto, so in front of an audience of hundreds she dug in the mud and tried to suck water from it, covering her face with dirt in the process, but no water came. Then she began to eat the plants as instructed. With her muddy face, and a mouth full of dock leaves, she must have looked unhinged. The townsfolk jeered and drifted off while her mother cleaned the little girl’s face. Suddenly the whole family was facing disgrace, but a few days later water began to pour from the spot
where Bernadette had been digging. The spring has been active and miraculous ever since. Finally the lady introduced herself: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’

Interestingly, at that time, the Mother of Jesus had been largely ignored for the previous few hundred years by the Catholic Church. But only a few years before, the pope had issued new dogma concerning the Virgin Mary, claiming that she had been born without sin and was to be known henceforth as ‘the immaculate conception’. How could an illiterate peasant girl know these words when few priests at the time were even familiar with them?

The lady instructed Bernadette to tell the local priest to build a chapel over the grotto, and that people should come and drink from the spring and pray for forgiveness. And so a cult was born. Today Lourdes is the most popular pilgrims’ destination in Christendom, and countless inexplicable cures have been scientifically witnessed.

Three or four years after the visions ended, Bernadette was unable to cope with the endless scrutiny of the faithful and not so faithful. She took orders and retired to a faraway convent, for a life of contemplation. On her first day the Mother Superior assembled the nuns and ordered her to tell the whole story for the thousandth time. Then she was forbidden to mention it ever again. In the convent, she contracted TB of the knee, and when asked if she would go to Lourdes to bathe in the water, she apparently said, ‘It is not for me.’ According to Catholic propaganda she lived happily and humbly, loved by her sisters, although I doubt it. The Mother Superior wanted to plead Devil’s advocate during the Vatican inquiry thirty years later into Bernadette’s sanctity. Nuns were a mean bunch in those days. She was not allowed go to the inauguration of the basilica at Lourdes. In fact, she never went back, nor saw her beloved family again.

The world is cruel to saints while they are on earth. According to a witness, on her deathbed – she was only thirty-three – Bernadette was racked for several hours by a terrible anxiety. Maybe it had all been a dream, the fantasy of an imaginative child. Certainly the
yellow flower slippers she described the lady as wearing sound more like the wish-list of a little girl for her Christmas stocking than traditional footwear from BC Judaea. We will never know. Either way, the sisters sat around the bed murmuring the rosary, and slowly she began to calm down. Somehow it is a picture of utter desolation. A sweet little peasant girl, exiled for a vision from her beautiful mountainside home, from rivers and forests that she loved, punished and imprisoned for being simple and trusting and maybe magical, ending her life on a gurney surrounded by the stern, withered faces of a swarm of nuns in starched wimples and snoods buzzing around the honeycomb. ‘
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous
.’