Did you ever do something good as a child only to be told stuff like “you’ll get your reward in Heaven”? No thanks, especially if a nun is on reward duty; it will be slim pickings for the protestants that day; and I was an atheist so how did that work out in my favour?
If you’re brought up by the offspring of conformist Edwardians and sent to a convent to be educated from the age of seven it is almost inevitable death is seen as some sort of reward. Any talent I had wasn’t rewarded at school, in my actual life. Did you suffer from the blatant favouritism of teachers when it came to comparing work? There was only room for one artist in the school, I did a bloody good painting of Doctor Dolittle to be usurped by the girl whose dad owned a garage; trade versus art and trade won the reward that day. Jesus was a carpenter after all. Our school was, like most of that era, an old house so the pictures and statues sat well in alcoves, walls and in the case of Saint Peter Chanel, the old kitchen; family portraits of merry burning hearts, weeping virgins, blonde beautiful Jesus practising the weary eye roll. Why we had The Rape of the Sabine Women on a classroom wall I don’t know; were they proto-Protestants? Religious lessons entailed explaining a completely abstract concept, that rejoiced in death, to children. A particularly nasty lesson with the sole purpose to break any illusion we had that life was sweet. The only good life was one with random torments of censure, penance and dirges. We had our routine to negate the trauma as we emerged from the classroom ashen faced and shaky. We checked each other out for a while but, as children do, we let the present overwhelm us, immersing ourselves in our innocence; incorruptible, worthy of love. Comrades scorching the blighted crop of conformity; survivors regrouping in the playground; we were nine years old, battling with the devil of convent education.
Surrounded and indoctrinated by so much death I became an obessive morbid little funeral planner. As a child my parents only had to innocently leave the house without me, for their absence to end in an imaginary funeral. I worried that planning funerals would make them a sudden reality but still revelled in planning what clothes I would wear and choosing the inappropriate music.
Next work in progress is titled John and Jesus death cult cousins (too intense to chase the girls) taken from my poem St Anne of the upstairs Dartmouth dining room. I think they probably enjoyed a funeral although Jesus had an annoying habit of stopping them to raise up the dead to give them back to the living – all those funeral plans temporarily ruined.
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