I was taken with my sister Debbie to St John Fisher’s church on Moorfield Road by my mother. It was a 15-minute walk from home. This brown brick functional church where my parents married in 1959, aged 19 and 17, was built to accommodate a growing post-war Catholic population in Widnes and first opened in 1952. The Latin rite was replaced by the Novus Ordo (Mass in the vernacular) following the Vatican Council of 1962 – 65 so I grew up with a chance of understanding the language of the liturgy. By the time I started nursery school in 1967 it was no longer strange to see the priest facing the congregation and hear the responses of the people in their own language. The prayer for the conversion of England introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by Cardinal Wiseman was no longer said at the end of mass. I had no knowledge of the church triumphant. I liked the statues and the light in church, and looking at the bottom of peoples’ shoes when they knelt. I enjoyed the sound of voices in chorus speaking the same words and the tremulous singing of hymns. Hail Redeemer, King Divine was a favourite – “Angels, saints and nations sing, Praised be Jesus Christ our King, Lord of life, earth, sky and sea, King of love on Calvary.” Everyone joined in singing and there was the feeling that we were not alone. The place seemed full of life, colour, symbols, gesture, language and mystery. Above the altar separated by a large wooden panel were 2 plain glass arched windows. In the middle of the panel was a statue of Christ crucified. The plain side walls were adorned with the 14 Stations of the Cross and the usual statues of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady, were on each side of the church, as well as one of St John Fisher who seemed rather dull and pale, and much more severe than our round bullish priest, Fr Moore. The statue of Our Lady always looked kindly at me, and she seemed so unbothered about my behaviour. She had a white covering on her head and a gentle smile – the very opposite of my mother in church. This was the place in which I made my first Holy Communion and where I attended Sunday mass until I was eight.
My mum was the only woman in church who wore a mantilla (she pronounced it with the ‘l’ sounds). The garment seemed to separate her from every other woman in the church. The mantilla had the harsh, scratchy texture of cheap fibre-glass curtains and transformed my mother into a warning. When she wore the mantilla as a folded triangle over her hair there was no question of bad behaviour, although being almost two years younger than my sister I found it more difficult to be still. My mother was in her twenties with her two daughters as trophies of respectability; her head covering was a sign of her virtue. As we entered the church she placed the mantilla on her head with the solemnity of a judge about to announce a death sentence. She became a woman other than our mother. The 1917 Canon Law decreed (canon 1262) that women and men should be separated in church “consistent with ancient discipline” and that “women… shall have a covered head and be modestly dressed.” I doubt that my young mother was familiar with the edicts of canon law or ancient discipline but there was something in her own upbringing or ideas that made her wear the mantilla, at least until her adoptive father died.
We lived at 104, Ireland Street in a 1930s bungalow at the end of a row of private houses in the middle of a large council estate in Halton View. My dad’s ambition (to have our own council house) was thwarted by my mother who at the age of 19, with her grandfather’s help, obtained a mortgage from Widnes Corporation and arranged the purchase of the bungalow when my dad was doing national service in Germany. My mother didn’t want to live in a council house.
It was always my understanding that marriage was adversarial. My mother liked books. My father loved sport. My mother wanted an education. My father wanted a happy family. My mother took us to church. My father disdained priests. The oppositional nature of marriage was all around me and not just at home. Most of the women in the family had died, probably because of their husbands. My paternal grandmother, nanna Connor died in May 1959, aged 55, just 2 months before my mum and dad got married. My maternal grandmother, Ada Attwood, died on 11th October 1958, aged 40.
When we lived in Halton View as children we were surrounded by the invisible dead and the places where breath was lost became replaced, for me, by the breath of poetry. My sister had a daily fight to maintain her own breath as she had severe asthma. I was her alarm system. If she struggled with her breathing in the night I had to alert our parents. Debbie started to play the recorder, and later the clarinet. I was the reader and speaker, Debbie the musical one. I was clumsy and lisped; Debbie was delicate and clever. I was full of enthusiasm, Debbie was cautious. I was silk girl, Debbie was beauty girl, names we were given by our Aunty Wendy who came to share our room in 1969 after the death of Joe Attwood. He died in the bungalow in May 1968, and he remained in his coffin at home for a couple of days. Prior to his death the air was full of floating May blossom, the pink petals rushing around and gathering dust in the gutters. Debbie and I picked small red twigs of blossom and put them in little cups along the window ledge. We climbed in and out of the windows.
There was a general assumption that Joe died of lung cancer, but he spent so many years as a labourer working at the Everite Asbestos factory off Derby Road, that the probable cause of death was mesothelioma. Although this was not recorded on his death certificate.
My mother lifted me up to look at him dead in his coffin. I was quietly disturbed to see the body that my granddad had left behind. I was aware that I was required to behave, although my mother did not have her head covered. She was insistent. I must look at Grandad Attwood’s dead face. I could see his physical shape and his covered body lying in a box in the front bedroom. He was still and somehow no longer human. He was not quick and not quite dead. But the deaths that surrounded us, that we could feel but did not know were Ada and Mary’s deaths and our own sister who had died at 2 days old on 23 July 1958 and my mum’s sister Joan Valerie who died on 20th January 1954. We did not know these people alive, as children, but we carried them as memorials in our own names. My sister’s name carried 2 deaths. She had the duplicate name of our older sister who had also been named Deborah Joan, as well as the name of my mother’s sister, killed by a lorry at the age of 10. My middle name is inherited from my maternal grandmother. Our first names are a little more mysterious. My younger sister whose arrival in 1971 precipitated our move to a leafier area of town, was named Rachel Esther. Esther was another memorial name, after our aunt who died at 28. But we knew Esther. She knitted bright pink cardigans for Debbie and me, and her 3 daughters came to live with us for a short time after her death in the final year of the 1960s. So Deborah, Pauline and Rachel. I was in the middle of the Old Testament and named for the Saint
Mrs Dunne, Pat’s mum, was my closest example of another parent. I was a frequent visitor to 76, Ireland Street where Pat lived. The geraniums along the windowsill filled the room with the scent of earth and although we never took the plants to the cemetery when we travelled to pay homage to Mrs Dunne’s dead children, their astringent purgatorial aroma seemed to represent her sons in the house where they no longer lived. It is possible they had never lived there. Mrs Dunne told me she was from Manchester so perhaps the boys had died in that distant city, although she never explained how they died. Mrs Dunne tended flowers in her garden, in the house, through her regular memorial pilgrimages but the blooms she created and nurtured were always funereal in origin and destination. My childhood friend, Pat, was Mrs Dunne’s only surviving child. I didn’t know if Pat had encountered her brothers, Ian and Graham, alive but they were constant presences in their home in death. Mrs Dunne often referred to ‘the boys’ as though they were just out on a message or living upstairs like her husband, Tom.
It was a bird that signalled the end of my mother’s mantilla and the abandonment of her faith, or at least the end of her attendance at church. A young starling fell cleanly down the chimney and into our square living room. It was a room of dual aspect. The fireplace wall was to the right of the door on entry to the room, and the opposite wall had a painted wooden seat built in beneath a window that was covered in pale industrial green metal Venetian blinds. In the corner of the room on the same side as the window another door led to a small square pantry and in the opposite corner (to the left of the living room door) was a small square window overlooking the garden. The bird crashed its body in desperation against the blinds leaving smears of violet coloured blood. It became a small missile, making little noise from its throat just a deadly drive against the sharp blinds and a panic of wings. A dull, tuneless percussive crash on repeat. The creature’s desperation to escape filled me with fear and I shouted for help. Mum was calm although she left me in the room with the door closed and the crashing bird while she retrieved her mantilla from the walnut dressing table in her bedroom. She moved with grace and firm purpose and captured the bird quickly. She carried it out of the room and opened the kitchen window. I followed in relief and in hope that I would see the bird fly uninjured into the sky. Mum washed the mantilla and kept it for several years, but she never wore it again and I believed there was something in the bird’s need for rescue and her own practical action that made her turn away from God.
Pauline Rowe has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Liverpool and recent pamphlets with Maytree Press. She has also had work published by Driftwood Publications, Lapwing Publications, Headland Publications and Lark Lane Poetry Books: poems in North West Poets, Live Canon, Yaffle Press & Templar Poetry anthologies, The Interpreter’s House, Orbis, Smoke, The Rialto, Dreich, Smith’s Knoll, Iota and others.