A Most Boring Place

Both my parents were Catholic – of the non-practising type, excepting, perhaps, Christmas, weddings and in my father’s case, his own funeral. But for some strange reason, they felt it important that I should attend and would religiously send me to church every Sunday morning . Off I would trot in my Sunday best on the short walk around the corner and sit not three pews back from the front, in the right hand side pew, all on my own, week after week.

Perhaps this was folly. I had to keep a watchful eye out to rise, kneel and sit in orchestration with the rest of the church goers and if I drifted off into reverie, I could be caught out and immediately try to put on a look of piety as if to say “I got carried away with my own prayers”, but I doubt anyone believed it or cared. Not once did anyone stop and ask me what I was doing there on my own, week after week, year after year, or how my parents were. If Sundays in the 1960s were an endless day of boredom, then the church I went to took it to the next extreme.

I periodically attempted to alleviate the ennui and make sense of what was going on using my ‘First Holy Communion’ Missal – a small book, bound in a mock marble effect plastic cover. Some of this was in the days when the mass was said, or rather mumbled, in Latin, with lack lustre responses from the congregation and I would join in, if I felt confident enough that I was in the ‘right place’ in my book. These were the days when the print in the page was helpfully divided into two columns, the left side for the Latin and the right side in English. I used to pass the time trying to marry up the words. Things did get rather confusing when a different collect or gospel was chosen, but no matter, I could amuse myself for the much of the time reading the other ‘stories’ in the other weeks. I’m still not sure what a ‘Collect’ is – perhaps it’s something to do with collecting the money in the little baskets passed around the rows? This being my local church of St Maria Goretti, I could also look at the pictures on the walls.

These paintings of The Stations of the Cross were of particular interest to me as my Uncle Ted had painted them. Born in 1896, he was not a ‘real’ uncle, but I gave him this honorific title when my mother commissioned him to paint my portrait in 1969 and we went on to be good friends. I frequently skipped out of school at lunch time to go and see him in his art studio in Bowran Street, in Preston, preferring his ‘Irish stew’ and his company, to anything on offer in the school dining room.

In the long course of his career as a self-taught artist, Edward Robinson, or Uncle Ted, had painted many things and done everything with pen, pencil and brush, including murals in churches, hotels and cinemas. As he put it: "When you live in Preston you have to be very versatile to make a living". But his great love was portraits, and I am honoured that along with his portrait of Sir Tom Finney, still hanging in the Harris Art Gallery in Preston, this small portrait of myself, aged 11 years old, with a ‘Maria from the ‘Sound of Music’ haircut and wearing my favourite blue dress, was the last he undertook.

I digress. Going back to church, communion time, when the congregation would file past me on their way to the altar, was the real reason I sat near the front. It was so that I could see the fashion parade – both on their way to and from the communion. I had a dilemma. Did I hang back until the end, or try to get there first so I could be back quickly? This was so after a decent amount of time on my knees being grateful for what I had received, then sit back all the better to see what was going on - who had a new hat, or shoes and who hadn’t been seen for a few weeks? It was all fertile ground for my imagination.

My mother later came up with the time saving brainwave of an idea - that on my way to church, I could go to the launderette on the corner ‘drop off that weeks’ laundry, as it was on my way. There I could stuff one of the cavernous mouths in a machine with the whole weeks laundry, feed it some loose change and then carry on to church, picking up the now clean washing on my way back. Looking back, I can’t say I blamed her, as this was an era when the twin tub was the ‘new’ labour saving machine to covet and we couldn’t afford even that. For a working mother, Sundays were hardly a day of rest or contemplation, but a mad scramble to fit in the whole week’s housework into one day, alongside serving up a ‘Sunday lunch’. For me the smell of our ‘Sunday roast’ (or our continental equivalent) was always tainted by the smell of fetid clothes and Daz. A benefit of escaping to church, even if it was boring, got me out of a host of chores…

However, by the time I was ten years old, I had learned that my parents would be none the wiser, or probably not even care, if I simply stopped going to church as long as I came back with the bag of washing, all cleanly and magically laundered. So that left me, adding in the ‘before and after’ laundry stop off, roughly two hours of freedom, which I soon managed to fill with less religious activities. I would call on my friend Marian, change into some ‘playing out clothes’ that were kept in her bedroom and then she would help me with the washing. Then off we would go… exploring. At some point we met up with a group of boys from her school (she was lucky enough to go to the local mixed comprehensive) and together we found the delights of the disused Preston to Longridge railway line, easily accessed, ironically, from just behind the ‘Maria Goretti’ church that I was supposed to be attending.

Joy of joys, we even unearthed a rusting flatbed 4 wheel ‘Bogie’. I would love to say that we could travel miles on it, but the reality was that it had been abandoned for a reason – it was almost immoveable, and very hard work to get it to move more than fifty yards up and down what little of the railway track had been left behind. None the less, we spruced up the flat bed with old bits of wood and my imagination was certainly not held back as I travelled long journeys on it … back to Vienna. Until it was time for myself and Marian to leave the ‘gang’ to go back to the Launderette to pick up the now clean laundry, change back into my ‘Sunday best’ and then back home, to spend the rest of the afternoon on my homework.

By about the age of fourteen, having out grown both ‘gang’ and the delights of the ‘Bogie’ and coinciding with need for my laundrette duties no longer being required (perhaps mum had saved up enough to by the coveted twin tub) I plucked up courage to tell my parents that I no longer wanted to go to church. I had all my arguments lined up, such as "I think I'm old enough to decide now and I don't want to go to church anymore." I had been under the misapprehension that they might be disappointed, but that they would eventually respect my decision. But they were not old-style churchgoer, wedded to a weekly ritual that gave comfort and solace and a time perhaps for quiet contemplation or meditation. That was not their spiritual method and it was no longer mine either. I needn’t have worried – they were neither surprised or interested and for a good many years the only time I stepped inside a church was when I was in Vienna and then for my own wedding and a few years later, my father’s funeral.

What I didn't bother to tell them was that I thought going to church seemed no longer right – not that I was going anyway We lived on the edge of a poor council estate suburb of Preston and even as a young child, I had discerned the personalities of some of congregation. From the snatches of gossip I had overheard before and after the service, I realised some of them would think nothing of stabbing their neighbours in the back metaphorically and then on Sunday they would come to church. As a child, I didn’t have a word for it, but later learnt the definition I was looking for was hypocrisy - but who am I to judge?

It took me many years to discover that there were many good, well-meaning churchgoers who tried to lead good lives, but at that time, this painting on of the pious face sickened me and added to the usual teenage awakening of knowledge and morals – and the part that the Catholic Church had (or rather hadn’t) played in the second world war, from the top, in turning a blind eye to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, I wanted no part of it.

However, I have always had a spiritually-seeking component to my nature. I think it was the Buddha who said, "There are many paths up the mountain." So it probably doesn't matter what spiritual path you follow as long as it feels right to you. I believe that all religions seem to share the same basic tenets: love and tolerance for your fellow humans and all the creatures who share this planet with us.

Edward Estlin Cummings is one of America’s most famous twentieth-century poets. He was a pastor’s son raised in the Unitarian faith, which emphasizes the oneness of God. While I know him as a poet, he invested more of his time to painting and one of his favourite subjects was the landscape surrounding his summer home at Joy Farm in New Hampshire. I think this painting of his demonstrates the elation he may have felt in this environment of wooded hills, fields, and lake – images he also used in several of his poems. I wonder if the phrases “leaping greenly spirits of trees” and “blue true dream of sky” were inspired by this view from his farmstead.

I thank you God

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

These days I have made my peace with Christianity and now follow the Anglican tradition to enjoy, practice and give thanks in my own way, starting with some bell ringing. So as the wonderful Irish comedian, Dave Allen, used to say at the end of his TV programme, "May your god go with you."

Yvonne Smallshaw