My Gran's House 2

Hung in the hall by the stairs, and on the wall ascending the stairs were pictures. 

There there was a framed picture of the Turin shroud. I always found it fascinating and slightly disturbing, an inexplicable image, one I didn't understand. The incomprehensible burn-like marks.

Three-quarters of the way up the stairs was a shallow landing where stood a large plaster Sacred Heart Christ, gesturing to his heart which stood outside his chest, with an appropriate sorrowful-compassionate look on his face. 

On the back wall, high up, somehow ominous and frightening, stood a huge framed print of the Declaration of Arbroath, gloomy there among the shadows. The yellowed tattered ribbons of parchment, the gouts of sealing-wax, frightened me more than the Turin shroud and the plaster Jesus. 

The upstairs of the house scared me somehow. I fancied that the Jesus statue followed me with his eyes. It was gloomy and dark up there, and there was a hatch to the loft, where my brother told me that a mad woman lived, and I believed him.

Up there were several bedrooms... My gran and papa's room: It was completely dark and dominated by a huge bed. Around the walls were cupboards. Hardly any light seemed to filter in. On top of the cupboards were old and fragile stuff, an ancient moth-eaten fox stole, a hat box, things that seemed arcane and ancient to me. 

I began to entertain the notion that the upstairs hall was haunted. I thought about it every time I went up there, to use the bathroom, that smelled of green soap. I was worried that when I opened the bathroom door the ghost would be standing there in the hall. It was the ghost of a woman. I knew this idea was irrational and yet it obsessed me. I would hesitate a long time before opening the door. 

She looked like the Mona Lisa, this woman-ghost, like a woman in a painting. She had a kind, glowing face. But I was afraid of her. 

My Gran's House 1

At the other side of the village was my gran and papa's house. To get to it, you'd go through a swing park, a wide grassy area with a set of swings in it. 

It was a house on the corner, in a quiet little street called Forth Gardens. 

There was a narrow door, and on the door, to the left, was a small door knocker in the shape of a piper. The little metal bagpiper. 

You'd go in, into the hall. The smell: it smelled old and comforting. 

To the left were the stairs, carpeted with faded orange carpet. On the stairs, the dog, Ben, would often sit. He was an English sheepdog, and grew dull-witted in later years, and would lie on the stairs with his head propped between the bannisters, staring at himself in the hall-mirror opposite. He had a warm, comforting dog-smell.

In the front of the house there was a box-room, where odds and ends were kept, and which sometimes contained a spare bed, where me and my brother would sleep if we were staying over. 

We would rather have gone home, where conditions were freer, but sometimes, circumstances were such that we had to stay. 

There was also a cupboard next to the box-room, which contained an old leather flying-helmet from World War II. The atmosphere of World War II pervaded the house. One almost felt that one was in World War II, filtered through the seventies. 

The things in that box-room: a Ray Charles vinyl album, with Ray in a loveheart on the cover. Sitting on the bed, reading a Beano comic library. Staying there with my brother, one night. 

He got the bed and I was put up in a camp-bed. My gran gave me a boy's book of saints to read. I took it all very seriously. My brother mocking me from his bed. The idea of being pious and reading a book of saints was funny to him. Him in his bed, looking at me darkly.

I also had a big book of mythology to read. It was very seventies, with painted illustrations. I read all of it, though much of it was strange to me. Daedalus and Icarus, the huge Minotaur dead, the face of Humbabu in Gilgamesh, based on one of those grinning Mesopotamian masks, the strange Finnish myths.... I possibly liked the Greek epics the best. 

The next room after the box-room was the livingroom. On the left was a fireplace, and above it hung a large print of Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross. Christ hung there transfixed, suspended, floating. 

On the right was a couch, old and comfortable, and over by the fireplace was the soft chair where my gran typically sat. On the opposite side of the fireplace was a big wooden television, and another easy chair. 

In the corner was a window looking out on the front garden, and next to it, a glass sideboard or cabinet containing plates and so on. The smell of the dark wood of which it was made. 

On the mantelpiece and surrounding it were various trinkets, a gilt griffin of some kind, perhaps an ornamental candle-stick holder, and, near where my gran sat, a wooden plaque on the wall enscribed with a prayer called St. Patrick's Breastplate.

All of this was daunting. It was unpleasantly old, but very comfortable and homely. 

At the back of the lvingroom was a dining table, with wooden chairs. The smell of the wood out of which they were made. Their velvety seats. Here my papa would sit and smoke his pipe, or drink his lemon tea. The lemon on the saucer next to the cup. 

There was a wooden serving-hatch in the wall which connected with the kitchen through the wall. 

The smell of: carpets, and cleaning products, and soap, and wood. The smell of a leather flying helmet from World War II. The coppery smell of that gilt griffin. The smell of something unutterably fragrant and ancient. 

In the top-right corner was a sort of tall cabinet, on top of which was perched a sort of Japanese doll. This tall dark corner-cabinet seemed incredibly high to me, and the Japanese figure atop it seemed incredibly ancient. It sat among voluminous folds, in its dark, elaborate kimono, smiling to itself, its china face looking out over the room vacantly. It was female, though.

It, too, had a smell. On rare occasions it was taken down for us and we were allowed to touch it. It was like handling a museum-object. The smell of ancient dust from the thick, dark folds of the kimono, whose endless layers you could attempt to peel back to find a frail china body inside, swathed in rough material like a mummy. I was frightened of it but I wanted to conquer my fear of it through handling it. 

In the hall, orange-pattern-carpeted, there was a niche under the stairs where the telephone was kept, which was of the old dial-kind, and beige, and there also were dark bookshelves and the big family Bible. It was a King James Bible, enormous and full of old-paper smell, I think illustrated with prints, and thumb indexed at the edge. The shallow, fragrant depressions along the edge, like the keys of a church organ, the leather of the binding like its dark wood, like the dark wood of a sacristy, full of mystery, slightly gloomy and repellent. 

You could stand in that dark alcove under the stairs. Among those shelves were my papa's books, a collection of bound volumes of Walter Scott. There were one or two John Le Carre papebacks, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, very redolent of the Cold War. A spare pair of glasses, thick and brown-legged. An old grey diary from 1969, with scribbled notes in it, and at the back, a calendar. 

It was World War II again there, it was the Cold War. On nights when we'd get to stay up late, the whole romance of it seemed to come to life again there among the shelves. My papa's old letters, his flying instruction booklet, his pamphlets of aeroplane identification full of diagrams of Messerschmits, now yellowed and useless, and his fussy spidery hand, scribbled in the margins of Latin books he bought second hand. I understood it all somehow, I understood the war, and everything subsequent to it, and it seemed to me to be still present there, something unspeakable and romantic and sad. 

Hymn Book

The hymn book had a blue-patterned cover and was called Celebration Hymnal. The hymns sung were always the same ones. We all knew more or less where to turn. We'd also sing the same hymns at school. 

"Sing Hosanna, to the King of Kings" "Spirit of God". I'd glance at adjacent hymns in the book, and wonder about them. There were some that were never sung, or ever mentioned. There were negro spirituals, an odd assortment, they seemed almost comical next to the Victorian hymns. The odd juxtaposition. 

On the other page from some hymn we sung a lot was a Caribbean hymn which began: "God looked down from his window in the sky, he said "I created man, but I can't remember why". I always looked at it, read it over, wondered about it. I pictured it literally: A cartoon God with a window set in a bank of clouds, peering through it. 

"Spirit of God" was a hymn written by nuns, or perhaps just by one nun. For some unaccountable reason it frightened me. For some reason the final verse of it was never sung. I imagined that that final verse had a curse upon it, and I dwelt upon this idea and it began to obsess me. I thought that that verse was evil somehow, and that was why it could never be sung. I imagined the stern, penitent nuns who had written it, immeasurably old, in their grey habits. The hymn seemed to me to be written in stone, with the chill of death upon it, and to be redolent of something medieval, something ancient. There was one line of the unsung verse which really worried me:

"I saw the scar of a year that lay dying,

Heard the lament of a lone whip-poorwhill".

The imagery. It frightened me. I imagined it as something inexplicably ancient, something from Roman times, something from the dawn of Christianity. That line, in the forbidden last verse, which was never sung, as well as its authorship by nuns, led me to suppose that the hymn had uncanny powers. I had an especially strong dislike of it, and yet it impressed me as wonderfully significant, even as wildly beautiful, above all as an expression of something fundamentally true:

"Blow, blow, blow till I be

But breath of the spirit moving in me". 

Even the melody seemed profound, expression of an ancient and austere Christianity, profoundly serious and spiritually clear, like the leaden skies, the wind-strewn heath, the cold waters. 

Church

The pathways, and the roads.

The summers, the fences, the houses where the old ladies lived.

The road that went down into the wood. 

The church; it was far off among the woods. You'd have to be driven there, go down a road, under a bridge, through the ancient medieval wood. 

That was a mysterious trip. That road seemed a priestly road, and it reminded me of the priest. Sometimes we'd play around there, one time we were on that bridge, throwing things down on the empty road. All around was the wood. It seemed half-neglected, half-abandoned, medieval and yet industrial. There would be found wreckage which was industrial wreckage, or a patch of burnt ground. 

The trees clustered around the dark road, overhung it. 

You'd be driven down this road, and eventually you'd come to the church, on the right side, in the middle of this nowhere, standing on a slight green rise, denuded of trees, white, and clean, sometimes startlingly white in the sun, and shaped, it seemed to me, like a rocket ship, vertical lines pointing upward. 

There was a curving gravel path that led up to it. 

Inside it had a powerful, yet subtle smell. It was like dust, it was like polished stone. By the door were stone fonts full of the cold holy water, wherein you'd dip your fingers. 

The smell of the church: it was an incense smell, a dismal, holy smell, an ancient smell, a serious smell. It spoke to me somehow of years of suffering, centuries of pedantic and meticulous faith, millennia of mysterious labours. Genuflecting awkwardly and taking your place in the bright wooden pews, the glossy modern pews, with their padded green seats, that smell would be in your nostrils. It was the smell of the holy water in the stone fonts, and it was an incense smell, and it was the smell of the ashes on Ash Wednesday, and it was the smell of the emblazoned altarcloth, and the wooden board announcing the hymn numbers, and the plaster statues. 

It smelt almost like Christmas, almost like tinsel, but much more serious and grim, much more concentrated and monkish. 

The altarcloth, emblazoned with a chi-rho. The mysterious back parts of the church. The wooden pictures. The statue of the Virgin. The upper galleries of the church, with stairs leading up, where it was  never permitted to go. 

I hated going to church. It bored me horribly. Try as I might, I could not concentrate on the words of the priest. There would be an interminable homily, which I could pay no attention to. I'd resolve to listen this time, and follow for a minute or two, as he'd pick a Bible verse and expound upon it, but my attention would always fade away and wander around the building. I'd look at the wooden board with the Latin numbers on it, at the wooden pictures, at the windows, at a patch of masonry, and I'd wonder about the Middle Ages, about the monks, about the martyrs, about the sufferings of the saints, and be impressed and repelled by it all. 

It seemed to stretch on for an infinite amount of time. I followed mechanically the responses and went through the required motions, always feeling awkward. Many times I committed faux pas through inattention, and knelt at the wrong time, on the hard wooden frames of the pews which swung down, or fumbled with the hymn book and couldn't locate the hymn. 

The priest, Father McNay, had an odd voice, he recited the Mass like a poet intoning verse. 

"He took the bread, gave it to his dis-IPLES AND said.... TAKE THIS allof youand eat it... for this is my body, which will be given up for you. DO THIS, in memory of me".

The repetitions and the atmosphere, impressed me and moved me, but something about it would irritate me. Perhaps it was the glum coughs of the parishioners, the squaling baby in the back row, the depressing hymn book. The chanting voices, repeating, over and over again, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again"... The voices of earnest aunts and old ladies, in unison, as though reasurring themselves. 

"Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world". The imagery frightened me slightly, and I didn't understand it. I knew only that it was old, and significant, emblematic and allegorical, and that it was to be taken seriously. 

The Christ invoked was a suffering Christ, a Christ of the Passion, a serious Christ. Somehow I understood his suffering very well, understood the blood, and I dreamed in my bored moments of Christ himself there at the altar, a tortured Christ among the woods, mounting his rack, and the smell of the cold water in the stone font, and the polished stone, and the masonry, was like the smell of his Blood. This Christ was a Northern Renaissance Christ, emaciated and haggard, with a pragmatic ladder leaning on his cross, and under a leaden sky. In such a place, in a church near the woods, in a clearing of its own, by a dark road, he could still be conjured up, and primitive voices could still intone his name, all the iconoclasms and battles had after all not eradicated his enormous, theatrical, significant suffering, had not after all stemmed the blood that poured down his face. 

I got so bored, lost in the interminable Mass, that I lapsed into fantasies, and, in an agony of faith brought on by enduring the Mass, attempted to conjure up Christ himself, to see him. I used to imagine him, by the altar, mounting his cross, spotlit among the shadows, the drips of blood marking his face clearly, just as if he was a plaster statue. The Mass stretched on so endlessly that finally all I could prompt myself to do was imperfectly match my suffering to his, to this Christ who was supposed to be present in the Mass.