Family Fortunes: ‘Up to my 20s I saw myself as a bad person’

Are today's grandmothers allowed to be different? I am a 74-year-old widowed grandmother. Right now, my eldest daughter is helping me sort out her father's – my late husband's – personal papers. We came across a prayer book, The Little One's Mass Book, published by Veritas, with an imprimatur of the then archbishop of Dublin , dated September 28th, 1918. The illustrations reveal a girl and a boy. Definitely unisex.

My first instinct was to give this prayer book to my granddaughter, who will make her First Holy Communion next year. That was before reading it: it is all about sins and being good.

“My God, I know that if I am good all the days of my life, You will make me happy forever when I die. Give me the grace to live so as always to please You. May I never say or do anything that You, my God, would not wish.”

The language throughout the prayer book is mild, but even the phrase “Suffer the little children to come unto me” might have been misunderstood by a child.

Reading it, I was forcibly reminded of my own, 1940s childhood, when I found it impossible to be good, and was sure I would end up in hell, not heaven. From the age of seven or eight, I knew I was an inveterate liar and a thief. I stole money from my mother’s purse in order to buy more “black babies” than anyone else in my class. I made plans to introduce little toys bought with stolen money, as presents from Santa Claus. My sinful behaviour caused endless suffering to the good God and exasperated my mother, who was a dutiful parent.

Later on, in the 1950s, I believed my developing sexuality and my sins against the sixth commandment would condemn me. Up to my 20s, I identified myself as a bad person. That changed with change in the Catholic Church after Vatican II.

When I became a parent, I was relieved my children wouldn’t experience the rigours of the Tridentine church as I had. Almost 50 years later, I am pleased to say I have found inner peace, largely thanks to Darwinism. I no longer dread an eternity in hell, and happily accept death is the end. The 1940s and 1950s were not the good old days for me. My childhood was not deprived, in the usual sense, but it was scarred by the prevailing form of Christianity, which, incidentally, was not the sole preserve of the Roman Catholic Church.