ceiling-high mosaics of sworded angels, one clad in purple and the other in blue, staring out at us each morning like stony sentinels; for a long time I thought that the purple one, his feet wrapped in the coils of a serpent, was not Michael but Lucifer, so stern did he seem, so defiant, that he was challenging Michaelacross from him as in the primal battle of the angels in heaven.
The services alternated between Father Mackinnon, the school principal, brisk and nimble and efficient, and Monsignor Phelan. With the monsignor the service seemed to go on forever, because he was old and spoke in a slow monotone, and because there were long pauses between each portion of the service while his finger scanned the lines of his great red missal. At the end, when he etched a sign of the cross in the air with a trembling hand, the church seemed almost to hum with suppressed energy. But I didn’t mind those morning services, the crackly thin drone of the monsignor’s voice over the loudspeakers, the high, arched hollowness of the church, because the church seemed the one place where my language wasn’t held against me, and I could relax into the familiar sounds of the Latin responses like a fist slowly opening. Sometimes when we sang or recited together I’d feel that I’d crawled up out of myself and into the sound of our voices, that I was floating inside them above the pews as pure and unburdened as air; and then in the hush afterwards a pleasant aloneness would settle around me, make me feel for an instant as if everything inside the church existed only for me, the tall stained-glass windows that the sun lit up like candy and that dappled the pews with coloured light, the stations of the cross that hung like tiny sculpted worlds along the walls of the nave, the candle-glasses for the dead that flickered red and blue on their tiered metal stands in the transepts. There were always some candles burning there when we came in for morning service – perhaps the sisters lit them, though it was odd to think that the sisters, too, might have their own dead to remember.
Afterwards we walked single file to our classrooms, past the glass showcase in the main hall housing ribbons and silvertrophies, past the portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Pope John that hung near the principal’s office like a benevolent mother and father, past the big bulletin board that the sisters and the older classes did up every month with pictures and art, on religious themes or on topics like Switzerland or Christopher Columbus. It always made me feel strangely warmed to see these things, as if they could protect me somehow, and to see how the sun glinted brightly off the floor and varnished desktops of our classroom, how the blackboards had been scrubbed clean and fresh pieces of white and coloured chalk had been lined up in the ledges. There seemed a mystery in things then, a sleepy morningtime promise, beautiful and frail as the stillness that settled over the school after a bell had rung; but it teased me like a remembered smell and then passed, seeming to hold itself from the day.
I’d been put back two years, to the first grade. Every morning our teacher, Sister Bertram, stood before us as we sang “God Save the Queen” as tall and straight-backed as the angels on the chancel wall of the church, then clapped her hands twice when we’d finished to make us sit and stretched her thin lips into a smile that held no warmth in it. For the first week or so that I was in her class I spent the first lesson of the day in the corner for failing her morning inspection of ears and hands, my own hands still cracked and discoloured from working in the fields; and after that I seemed to become that first person she’d seen me as, perpetually delinquent, always the example of error. I’d track dirt into the classroom, let my attention wander, went so far once as to fall asleep at my desk; and then suddenly Sister Bertram’s voice would ring out with the strange
The services alternated between Father Mackinnon, the school principal, brisk and nimble and efficient, and Monsignor Phelan. With the monsignor the service seemed to go on forever, because he was old and spoke in a slow monotone, and because there were long pauses between each portion of the service while his finger scanned the lines of his great red missal. At the end, when he etched a sign of the cross in the air with a trembling hand, the church seemed almost to hum with suppressed energy. But I didn’t mind those morning services, the crackly thin drone of the monsignor’s voice over the loudspeakers, the high, arched hollowness of the church, because the church seemed the one place where my language wasn’t held against me, and I could relax into the familiar sounds of the Latin responses like a fist slowly opening. Sometimes when we sang or recited together I’d feel that I’d crawled up out of myself and into the sound of our voices, that I was floating inside them above the pews as pure and unburdened as air; and then in the hush afterwards a pleasant aloneness would settle around me, make me feel for an instant as if everything inside the church existed only for me, the tall stained-glass windows that the sun lit up like candy and that dappled the pews with coloured light, the stations of the cross that hung like tiny sculpted worlds along the walls of the nave, the candle-glasses for the dead that flickered red and blue on their tiered metal stands in the transepts. There were always some candles burning there when we came in for morning service – perhaps the sisters lit them, though it was odd to think that the sisters, too, might have their own dead to remember.
Afterwards we walked single file to our classrooms, past the glass showcase in the main hall housing ribbons and silvertrophies, past the portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Pope John that hung near the principal’s office like a benevolent mother and father, past the big bulletin board that the sisters and the older classes did up every month with pictures and art, on religious themes or on topics like Switzerland or Christopher Columbus. It always made me feel strangely warmed to see these things, as if they could protect me somehow, and to see how the sun glinted brightly off the floor and varnished desktops of our classroom, how the blackboards had been scrubbed clean and fresh pieces of white and coloured chalk had been lined up in the ledges. There seemed a mystery in things then, a sleepy morningtime promise, beautiful and frail as the stillness that settled over the school after a bell had rung; but it teased me like a remembered smell and then passed, seeming to hold itself from the day.
I’d been put back two years, to the first grade. Every morning our teacher, Sister Bertram, stood before us as we sang “God Save the Queen” as tall and straight-backed as the angels on the chancel wall of the church, then clapped her hands twice when we’d finished to make us sit and stretched her thin lips into a smile that held no warmth in it. For the first week or so that I was in her class I spent the first lesson of the day in the corner for failing her morning inspection of ears and hands, my own hands still cracked and discoloured from working in the fields; and after that I seemed to become that first person she’d seen me as, perpetually delinquent, always the example of error. I’d track dirt into the classroom, let my attention wander, went so far once as to fall asleep at my desk; and then suddenly Sister Bertram’s voice would ring out with the strange
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