school, which I loved so much, I was trembling with fear. Unable to concentrate on the shorthand teacher’s rapid dictation, my mind was filled with scattered pictures of what had happened the previous Sunday.
Unaware of impending trouble, I had crept out of the back pew in which I normally hid my shabbiness, and battled my way up Princes Avenue through a brisk north-westerly carrying with it a spray of rain.
I was going home to a mother almost unhinged by her fall from considerable affluence, and to a fretful, delicate father, an underpaid, overworked city clerk. Liverpool was awash with the unemployed and the underpaid, and this governed all our lives. To a plain girl hurrying through the dusk, life seemed very hard. There was little physical strength in me. I was frail and always hungry, and I hugged my worn brown coat tightly round me for comfort.
Thankfully I pulled the string hanging from the letter box of our row house. The latch lifted, and I was glad to step inside, away from the wind.
Miss Ferguson, Fairy Godmother and deaconess of the church, was seated in our old easy chair by the fire in our living room, undisturbed, it seemed, by the fetid atmosphere and the dirty chaos surrounding her. She must have been quicker than me in leaving the service and making her way over to our house, because she was already deep in conversation with Mother as I edged my way into the cluttered room. Her square pallid face with its cherry-red nose wrinkled up into a smile as I entered.
‘Good evening, Helen.’
‘Good evening, Miss Ferguson. Hello, Mother.’
Mother was seated on a straight-backed chair opposite Miss Ferguson, and was smoking with long, deep puffs, the smoke like a fog round her head. Miss Ferguson seemed to be the only person able to penetrate beyond Mother’s polite façade and fight her way through to the real, suffering woman beneath, and Mother was listening intently as Miss Ferguson continued their conversation.
Dressed in black, with wrinkled woollen stockings and flat-heeled shoes, her hair covered by a black coif, Miss Ferguson was very different from Mother’s fashionable friends of so many years ago. But she was a cultivated woman, like my convent-bred mother, and it was a pleasure to listen to the hum of her soft voice.
I picked up an old fruit basket full of mending from beside the hearth and began my nightly task of darning the family’s socks and stockings. Everybody’s woollen socks or rayon stockings seemed to spring a hole or a ladder each day, and because we had so few pairs, they had to be darned ready for wear the next day.
At first, as my needle flew in and out, I did not take much notice of the conversation. Then Mother’s voice penetrated. She sounded pettish. ‘Helen’s at evening school three times a week. And she is often out on Saturday evenings – either at the theatre with her friend, Sylvia, or teaching her shorthand pupil. Then church on Sunday evening – she’s hardly home, to help me.’
I looked up quickly, just in time to catch a resentful glance from my tight-lipped mother.
Dear heaven! Now what had I done? My needle slowed. Miss Ferguson knew how much washing, mending, ironing and cleaning, not to speak of child care, I managed to tuck into the time before and after work and during the weekends. She visited regularly and had seen me always busy. She now favoured me with a quick wry grin, and let Mother’s complaints pass.
I looked at my flashing fingers as I darned. Broken nails and soot-ingrained cuticles, half-healed cuts and burns, all told of fires made, sooty saucepans scoured and food prepared. At work I hid my hands as much as possible.
‘It is really time dear Helen was confirmed – I should have mentioned it before,’ Miss Ferguson said persuasively. ‘The Confirmation lessons don’t take very long – in fact, she may already know all that is required.’
So that was it. Well, I was quite happy to be confirmed if it pleased my Fairy Godmother, and thereby become a full member of the church.
‘I suppose it is,’ replied Mother. She flicked the ash of her cigarette into the tiny fire, which was almost lost in the huge, old-fashioned kitchen range. ‘It is the time for the lessons – she really has to spend more time at home. I need her help.’
I let them continue to discuss the merits of Confirmation and the First Communion which would follow it, and went on darning and dreaming. Suddenly my heart jolted, when unexpectedly Miss Ferguson said, ‘Of course, the dear child has never been to Confession. If she is to take the sacrament, she will need first to go to Confession. It would be a good idea, don’t you think, if she got into the habit beforehand and went this week. Perhaps young Alan should think about it, too.’
I could feel myself going clammy all over. At that moment all the history books I had read, written almost entirely by Protestants, seemed to contribute to the sense of horror at anything which savoured of Catholicism – and Confession was surely a Catholic institution. In my nostrils there was suddenly the smoke and smell of the burning flesh of Protestant martyrs, made beloved by many a story; ordinary men and women, lords, priests, yokels, who had bravely faced being burned alive rather than acknowledge the Pope or the Mass – or confession to anyone but God.
I was weak on the theology of it, but I knew that Catholic Bloody Mary was the most hated Queen in British history, because she had tried to burn out of existence all signs of Protestantism. This unthinkable suggestion of Miss Ferguson’s went against everything I had ever learned of my church. In a city riven down the middle by religion, it seemed incredible that a Protestant deaconess should ever mention Confession.
Needle poised, I burst into the conversation with a frightened squeak, a squeak of genuine horror. ‘But we are Protestants. We say the General Confession during service. We make personal confessions only to God. I thought that was what being a Protestant was all about.’
Mother laughed, her delicate, superior, crushing laugh. ‘Helen, we are High Anglicans. It is by accident that you have never been to Confession before. By chance, most of the places we have lived in have only Low Churches, so that when you were little you were taken to them.’ She drew on her cigarette, and then added a little sharply, ‘You seemed to have enjoyed going to a High Church recently.’
‘In all the many months I stayed with Grandma I never went to Confession,’ I protested. ‘If she had gone, I am sure she would have taken me with her.’
Mother did not like being reminded of her mother-in-law, who had washed her hands of her shiftless son and would no longer have anything to do with us.
‘Your grandmother was too old to walk further than the village church – and that church was Low Church.’
I pushed my fist into one of Brian’s smelly socks and attacked another hole. My voice trembled, as I said flatly, ‘Well, I’m not going.’
Miss Ferguson looked nonplussed, and her hands with their black cotton gloves fluttered helplessly.
Mother’s heavily made-up face began to darken. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Helen. It would do you good to go, to come face to face with your arrogance and bad temper. It might teach you to honour your parents, which would be a welcome change.’
Me? Confess? Tell some strange priest that there were times when I felt like murdering my mother? Times like this moment. Tell him that I had dreamed that I took all my clothes off in front of a man? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I could tell God himself these things in the course of the General Confession, because He had made me and probably understood His faulty work. But not a priest – not a man!
Much that I had let pass during my recent churchgoing suddenly fell into place. I had puzzled that the ministers of the church strode the streets in cassocks with black birettas on their heads, that servers assisted at the altar, that incense was used, the whole elaborate ritual. Now, the theatrical beauty of it, which had so impressed me, seemed suddenly to hide a basket of vipers.
Shivering but determined, I put down the darning into my lap and turned to Miss Ferguson. Her shortsighted eyes darted from Mother to me.
‘Miss Ferguson, I couldn’t do it. If I have to go to Confession, I might as well become a Catholic and do it