At My Mother's Knee (10 page)

My mother loved these excursions. When the Mothers
announced at one of their regular meetings that a trip to
Lourdes was on the cards and that any ladies wishing to go
should put their name down, she was first in line to sign up, as
ecstatic as a kid who has just been told that this year's school
trip is to Euro-Disney. The package included one night in Paris
and by all accounts they had a ball. They stayed up late, drank
wine with their meals and went to see the show at the Folies-Bergère. My mother thought this was spectacular, although a
few members of the party didn't share her enthusiasm. 'Some
of the Mothers weren't very amused. You should have seen
Elsie's face when those girls came traipsing across the stage
with their dirty great big you-know-whats hanging out.'

Lourdes was a big hit even though it looked nothing like the
Lourdes of the movie
Song of Bernadette
. My mother loved
that film. Gladys Cooper playing a cynical and embittered old
nun, jealous and doubtful of Bernadette, played by Jennifer
Jones, could'nt understand why the Virgin Mary chose to
appear to an ignorant peasant girl and not to her, a faithful
servant of the Church. After months of being an utter bitch to
her, the old nun finally discovers the tubercular ulcer on
Bernadette's knee and slowly realizes that she must be a true
saint to endure such agony without complaining. Relenting of
her cruel ways, the nun becomes the dying girl's devoted nurse
– and this bit always reduced my mother to tears. 'See, she did
see her, you wicked old bitch,' she would mutter to the telly as
she blew her nose noisily.

She hated the commercial side of Lourdes, with all the shops
selling religious tat. Yet when I came home from work the day
she returned from Lourdes I found her pouring liquid from a
five-litre plastic container into a plastic bottle fashioned in the
shape of the Virgin Mary. On Mary's head was a little blue plastic crown which you unscrewed when you needed to gain
access to her contents.

At first I thought that she'd gone into the business of bootleg
gin and was distributing her bath-tub concoction inside
plastic Our Ladies.

'It's holy water,' she explained as she gingerly poured the
precious liquid into the funnel sticking out of another Virgin
Mary's head.

I looked around the table. There were at least forty of these
bottles lined up neatly in regimented rows.

'Some people would kill for a bottle of this,' she said,
nodding knowingly towards the bottles. 'It's the real McCoy,
you know, none of your muck. This stuff would cure
anything.'

She had an unswerving belief in the power of Lourdes water
and these bottles with their magical contents would be handed
out to those she considered to be deserving individuals. She
was also rather fond of splashing it liberally around the house
to dispel any evil that might have crept in. On New Year's Eve
the house and its occupants usually got a good soaking.

If I came home from a club in Liverpool in the wee small
hours of 1 January worse the wear for cider, she would be
waiting and I would be greeted with a cup of holy water flung
all over me. When my
cousin Tricia
was a young girl she had
an unfortunate outbreak of warts on her face. Nothing would
shift them until finally her skin was bathed in Lourdes water.
They vanished overnight – positive proof for my mother and,
indeed, the rest of the family of the miraculous healing
properties of the waters of Lourdes. My aunty Bridget in
Ireland swore by it and she often had a bottle handy in case a
cow fell ill. I still have a bottle to this day, the holy water inside
now a murky shade of green. I wonder if holy water goes off?
Or like a fine wine does it improve with age? Answers on a
postcard, please.

My mother never tired of telling how, after a dip in the
waters of Lourdes, she came out 'dry as a bone'.

'You put this linen shift on and stand on a step that leads
into the pool,' she would recall, 'and then these two nuns
standing waist-deep in the waters, great big beefy nuns with
hard faces and dirty big 'ands like shovels, get hold of you and
throw you in it – backwards, head and all, casual as
you like, without saying a bloody word to you. It was a bit of
a shock.'

Pausing momentarily to allow time for this startling act of
aggression on the part of two daughters of the Church to sink
in, she would pick up the thread.

'They're very rough-handed, these nuns,' she said knowingly.
'I think they're Dutch. They were dragging the lame and
dying alike out of their wheelchairs and chucking them into the
pool as if they were a bundle of dirty washing. Still, they had
a smile on their poor faces as they hit the water,' she added,
fondly recalling the experience. 'It's ice cold, that water. I'm
surprised some of them didn't drop dead from the shock of it.
Anyway, when the nuns throw you out on to the other side,'
she went on, and I had an image of the nuns hurling her out of
the grotto and over the heads of the wailing pilgrims as if she
were a body surfer at a Led Zeppelin concert, 'you're as dry as
a bone! No need to dry yourself with a towel, which was just
as well since I didn't happen to have one on me.'

The house was full of souvenirs carted back home after each
charabanc trip with the Mothers. Over the years she amassed
quite a collection of holy medals, mass cards and candles.
Assorted chalk statues were dotted about the house; on the
mantelpiece in my parents' bedroom sat a large plaster image
of
St Bernadette
praying at the feet of the Virgin Mary at the
grotto in Lourdes, complete with a little plastic font that was
meant to hold holy water but was home to a shirt button and
a safety pin for years instead. In the back of the statue was a music box which, when wound up, played 'Ave Maria'. The
statues that were damaged or broken she couldn't bring herself
to throw out. Instead she kept chipped and decapitated effigies
of St Jude, the Virgin Mary and various other saints in a Coop
carrier bag at the bottom of her wardrobe.

Without doubt her pride and joy was a medal of St
Bernadette that had been blessed by the Pope. She kept this
wrapped inside a lace handkerchief and tucked away in her
knicker drawer to preserve the power that His Holiness had
infused into the medal by his touch. According to my mother,
in the ecclesiastical pecking order there was God and then
there was the Pope. She had a china plate of Pope Paul brought
back from Rome by one of the Mothers who had made the
envied pilgrimage to the Holy City and this had pride of place
on the frontroom wall, along with plates depicting previous
popes she hadn't had the heart to take down after they'd died.

She'd stood for hours in the street to see
Pope John Paul II
as
he drove past in the Popemobile when he made his papal visit to
Liverpool. She said he nodded at her and went around for weeks
afterwards like an excited teenager who'd just seen McFly.

On that night in 1979, my mother reached up from the sofa to
examine the travel alarm clock on the mantelpiece.

'Half six,' she sighed, slumping back down and gathering the
duvet around her. 'Isn't this weather bloody torture?'

We sat in silence listening to the tick of the clock while
the freezing wind howled through the letter box and
around the house. Suddenly she was up on her feet again.

'I knew there was something I wanted to ask you,' she
muttered as she bent over the mantelpiece to rummage among
the ornaments, squinting in the half-light. 'What's this?' She
turned to face me, one hand clutching her bedjacket around
her shoulders and the other holding up a lump of dope. 'I
found it on your bedroom floor. It's not dogshit and it's certainly not an Oxo cube or a bit of chocolate, so what is it?'
She sniffed the dope suspiciously.

I nearly died. It was a chunk of black Lebanese that somebody
had given me to nibble on at a party and I'd forgotten to
give it back, whether by accident or by design I really can't
recall. Either way I was'nt particularly interested in it as I had
a puritanical attitude to drugs at the time. It must have fallen
out of my jeans pocket. I could hear the blood pounding in my
ears and feel my face flushing a guilty red. Thank God the
room was in semi-darkness and she couldn't see me clearly.

'I dunno,' I said airily, playing for time. 'Give it here and let
me have a look.' I took the dope from her and pretended I'd
never seen it before, staring at it quizzically.

As she waited for an answer it dawned on me that there was
no reasonable explanation. I'd have to bite the bullet and tell
her the truth. I mean, surely she wouldn't throw me out on a
night like this into the cold, cold snow? Would she? I took
a deep breath. 'It's a lump of dope,' I said flatly, bracing myself
against the onslaught. 'Someone gave it to me at a party.'

'You mean mara-hadge-a-wana?' she shrieked, her voice
rising ten octaves. 'Mother of God, tell me please that you're
not a bloody drug addict,' she went on, panicking but bringing
her voice down to a whisper in case next door heard her. I
assured her that I wasn't and calmed her down.

'I'll flush it down the lav,' I lied, getting up to brave the
glacial wind blowing up the stairs and straight into the toilet at
the top.

She pulled me back. 'You will not, I want to have a good
look at it first. Pass me one of those candles.' She sat
examining the dope in the blue light of the votive candle. With
her hair uncombed and her multicoloured crocheted bedjacket
draped round her shoulders, surrounded by a crumpled duvet
and pages of newspaper, she could have passed for an elderly
hippy sizing up a ten-pound deal.

'What does it do?' she asked. 'Does it make you hallucinate?
Do you go out of your mind and jump out of windows?'

She never ceased to amaze me. Instead of going berserk as I
had anticipated, she seemed excited and genuinely interested in
the lump of dope. I tried to explain.

'It sort of relaxes you, makes you feel mellow and calm, a bit
like a Valium, I suppose,' I added craftily. She couldn't object
if she thought it was on a par with something she had in plentiful
supply in the kitchen cabinet.

'Can you eat it?'

Jesus, I wished she'd give up on the dope and go back to
moaning about the weather. Liberal Mother made me nervous.
I preferred Mrs Fire and Brimstone; at least then I knew
where I stood.

'Some people smoke it, some people eat it . . . I think,' I said
offhandedly. 'Listen to that wind! It's getting louder.'
I rubbed my hands together and blew into them. 'I'll make a
cup of tea, eh?' I got up from the sofa, desperately trying to get
her off the subject of dope and back on to her normal
track.

'Mmm,' she muttered absently, staring at the dope. She
pursed her lips and tapped her chin. 'The thing is, you don't
know where it's been, do you?' she said, suddenly looking up
at me. 'I'm not eating something that's been up someone's
bum.'

My sixty-seven-year-old mother, a pillar of the Union of
Catholic Mothers, was considering eating hashish. This was
too much. She didn't even smoke or drink.

'They bring it into the country up their bum,' she went on
knowingly. 'They wrap it in a Durex first, then shove it up
their bums. I read it in the
Echo
. I suppose they wash it before
they sell it though.'

'Mother, it's not clotted cream toffees, it's dope. It's illegal!'
I shouted, our roles suddenly reversing.

'Shh!' she hissed, flapping her hand at me. 'They'll hear you
next door. Jesus tonight, it's only a tiny little lump,' she
reasoned, holding the dope up, pleading its case. 'This much
couldn't be illegal. Now get that kettle on and give this a good
wash under the tap and we'll have a little bit.'

What the hell, I thought,
taking the dope
from her and heading
for the kitchen, might as well make use of this unexpected
turn of events and get stoned. I was in a turmoil as I stood
shivering, waiting for the kettle to boil. It would be interesting
to see my mother stoned but suppose it made her ill? Had an
adverse affect? She might get out of her mind and lose control,
even collapse. How would an ambulance get up the hill in this
snow? She might die and I'd be trapped in the dark with her
corpse. Found by the police sat on the sofa with my dead
mother wrapped in a duvet. Oh my God, this is straight out of
Psycho
! I can see the headlines in the
Echo
: BIRKENHEAD MAN
MURDERS MOTHER IN DRUG BINGE! My mind raced as I poured
the boiling water into the teapot.

'Don't forget to give it a good rinse under the tap,' she called
out cheerily from the front room. 'Give it a scrub with the nailbrush
and a drop of Dettol.'

When I got back she was like an excited child, grinning
wickedly at the thought of forbidden fruit.

I'd heated a knife and cut a few slivers from the lump and
put them on a saucer. She sniffed it cautiously.

'Poo, it stinks,' she said. 'What do I do with it?'

'Take a bite,' I replied, feeling like the witch with Snow
White. 'Swallow a bit with a cup of tea.'

'Have you had some?' she asked.

I'd cut myself a large slice in the kitchen and told her so.

'Go on then,' she said daringly after a moment's pause. 'Give
us a bit. Thank God your father's not alive.'

She took the biggest sliver and, pulling an exaggerated face,
she swallowed it down with a swig of tea. She sat for a moment. 'It hasn't worked,' she announced, disappointed.
'Give us another bit.'

'Hang on,' I said, growing nervous. 'You have to give it time
to kick in.'

We sat in silence drinking our tea and listening to the
maelstrom outside.

'Are you sure that was dope? Because nothing's happening to
me. I think you've been done, mate.' She sat back in her corner
of the sofa. 'Don't know what all the fuss is about.'