Martina Evans: A Christmas memoir

I only have to hear mention of a mustard seed, a pomegranate or a date and everything seems brighter and right. The nutty smell of mustard seeds crackling in olive oil, some wine and flatbread on the table and already I am feeling better. Scenes or figures in a desert with a camel, a hint of Frankincense, and it’s like Beethoven’s 9th or a Cecil B De Mille technicolor roaring through my veins. As for any kind of a nativity – a handful of figures, the rustle of straw, a kneeling donkey – now you’ve really got me. I am down on my knees, peering in.

If nostalgia means a return to happier times, this is not nostalgia. I would rather be boiled in the aforementioned olive oil than go back to the boredom of Mass, the terror of school, to being a child at the mercy of older, stronger people. No thanks. Holding my hand out for the stick all day long, forced to watch the sadistic master torture other children, even one of the infants once, as revenge on the child’s father who’d been there 20 years before.

Jesus wasn’t fooling when he said “Suffer little children to come unto me”, and what happened in Burnfort National School was common then. The powerful were protected. They still are. But I wouldn’t mind going back as a free agent, roaming at will. Maybe in the guise of an invisible angel, observing from the outside. That would be a writer’s heaven. Besides, when I was small in Co Cork, mustard seeds, dates and pomegranates were not to be found. Wine was only seen on the altar and the nearest thing to a flatbread was Keating’s Sliced Pan.

I am a seriously lapsed Catholic, yet the older I get, the more I recognise the book that left its deepest mark on me. It was my first. I was only two or three when I crouched on the floor, pouring over the large brightly coloured pictures in our 1950s family Douay edition. I came back again and again to the picture of Isaac on the rock – Abraham, knife in hand, the saving angel suspended in air. Could a father sacrifice his child? Could Herod kill all those children? I pummelled the leering faces of the Roman centurions with my small fists and stroked the dreamy hippy face of Jesus in The Light of the World. The images were everything.

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Mammy told a story of how someone said: “That young child is reading!” and how she answered, “No, she is just looking at the pictures”. Then it was discovered to be true. I really was reading. She might have been proud of me but she was obeying her maxim: “never be seen to be praising one’s own”. I am not sure how or when I taught myself although I can remember the black marks on a white page suddenly unscrambling themselves into enchantment, when the word became my god. In contrast to Mammy’s careful deprecation, our beloved live-in barmaid, Mary Fleming, boasted freely: “That child read the bible from cover to cover by the age of three!” But it was Enid Blyton I was reading and although I was a fast learner, when it came to the bible, I preferred the pictures, drinking in those pinks, blues and crimsons; the sand, striped robes and sandals; the camels; that cross; the blood on the crown of thorns.

Recently I attended a beautifully sung Mass – part of the Portumna Shorelines Festival – and had a vision of smoke and flames, the ground opening up if I dared to approach the communion rails. Perhaps that is one reason for my attraction to the bible. I love drama and the bible is high drama. It is also a throwback to my young days when I provided my own entertainment to stave off the boredom of countless Masses. Slumped through the interminable Holy Week in Burnfort, I lit up when the voices of local men spoke the Passion; when men who bought Coke, Mars Bars and Rock Shandy in our grocery shop cried out from all corners of the church: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”. I craned to see who was roaring for Barabbas or denying Christ twice before the cock crew.

The Portumna Mass wasn’t boring with the fine voices of the Lady Barbalade Quartet and an engaging sermon on Mark. Hearing again Mark’s angry, conflicted and utterly human Jesus, it made me think yes, this is what life is like: complicated; enthralling; deeply puzzling. Mark motors on, a lean, mean folktale and it doesn’t scrimp on cruelty either. Who can forget the suicidal Gadarene swine squealing as they dive into the sea like doomed Brexiteers? Or should I take the beam out of my own eye? Mark doesn’t give easy answers. One event leads to another – “Straightway!”, “Suddenly!”, “They were amazed!”.

Having lived in London for over 30 years and having had to defend Catholics against prejudice here means I'm not as angry as I was

Then it is evening and Jesus is on the cross. What a story. And what a shame the Catholic Church has to be misogynist. What a shame that Pope Francis couldn’t lift his eyes from his script and give a heart-felt, fiery apology to the people of Ireland. What a shame that fundamentalists almost own the bible. What a shame all this poetry is nearly always in the possession of the Right.

I rebelled against the Catholic church when I was a teenager, but having lived in London for over 30 years, it’s a very different feeling now. I’m not forced to practise and I don’t. Having had to defend Catholics against prejudice on this side of the Irish Sea means I’m not as angry as I was. I know that you don’t have to wear a collar to be a child abuser or a habit to be mean. In fact, the loveliest woman I’ve ever known is a Mercy nun, Sister Therese. We all know that power corrupts but no one knows how to stop it. Like the Gospel of Mark, it’s complicated. Like the best literature.

Over the years, I've had reason to look to the Bible. My horror of striking an inauthentic note in my writing means I don't stray far from the raw material of my own life although the end product is different. When Beulah, the hero of my third novel No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors turned out to be a Protestant, I was so afraid of getting something wrong that I invented my own religious sect, the Poleites. I discovered the delights of the King James Bible along with transgressive thrill of setting my own rules which, of course, were a remix of the old stuff.

Ecclesiastes said it first: there is nothing new under the sun. The New Testament itself is a mid-rash or reflection of the Old Testament except for that fatal, shameful anti-Semitic verse in Matthew’s gospel. We’re always closer than we think. The inspiration for my Poleite sect began not with Protestants, but with the Orthodox Jewish patients whom I X-rayed in north London in the 1980s and 1990s.  The first time I saw them “Suddenly!” walk through the door of the Royal Northern X-ray Department on Holloway Road, I was “amazed!” as a nineteenth-century shtetl walked out of the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel in the pocket of my uniform.

I read the Bible (badly and sketchily) to understand my heroes better: Emily Dickinson, Mahalia Jackson, Hank Williams, Emily Brontë, William Blake, Rosetta Tharpe, Gillian Welch are only a few. The bible is everywhere in Western culture. Not just in "high" art and music, or in Dante, Shakespeare and the Eliots (George and TS). It bubbles under the terse dialogue in the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Peter Fonda; it underpins the ravishing films of Terrence Malick with his impossible Edens and charismatic Eves and Adams; it's on Netflix, blazing through the Cain and Able of Jimmy and Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul; it rumbles along in Breaking Bad, Justified, Gomorrah and Ozark. Everyone is seeking redemption but not yet. Lord, give us time to launder one last pile of that attractive green cash wrapped in plastic: "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way"!

I find it hard to separate what I was taught from what I imagined. For most of my childhood I was terrified that Satan or the Virgin might appear to me

The King James bible is particularly delicious, what excitement must have flooded Protestant ears when they first heard those Jacobean English cadences. Access to the bible was finally democratic and for everyone. I always envied the Protestants their thorough rinsing in the bible, feeling that we had been kept in ignorance. But what stopped me reading it myself anyway? I tuned out for most of my youth and I find it hard to separate what I was taught from what I imagined. For most of my childhood I was terrified that Satan or the Virgin might appear to me. Once I even knelt in the snow outside Burnfort graveyard when the muffled sound of a car and the glow of its bright headlights seemed to herald her arrival.

A few years ago I read Howard Nemerov's funny Lot Later with my class at the City Lit in Covent Garden. In a class of 20 adults from varied backgrounds and beliefs, Jews and Catholics were the most vocal. As we spoke about our different experiences of the story, I marvelled that I had to wait half a century for Nemerov to reveal that Lot slept with his daughters although I wasn't sure if my ignorance was due to my lack of attention in school. At the end of class, an elderly hard-of-hearing Irish woman rebuked me: "Oh Martina, I don't like that poem you read to us today at all. The lies about Lot's daughters! It's very wrong, very bad."

Once I attended an unforgettable High Mass at a local Hackney church where the service was largely sung in Igbo and Yoruba, an exciting melodic dimension that took Mass to the next level. I thought that I'd like to go back. Ten years later, halfway through reading Dante's Purgatorio, "Suddenly!" half-frightened out of my daylight atheism, I returned. But now the Nigerian Masses were held separately so it was back to the boring English one with a priest young enough to be my son, thundering on about contraception. Maybe the horror was on my face when I left because the older priest at the door hurriedly said he liked my coat, reminding me of Father Ted's Dougal and his awkward efforts to tell a woman what he thought she might like to hear.

Take away the hypocrisy, the sectarianism, the bullying morality and there is something in religion that I long to reach

I couldn’t wait for the next Nigerian Mass so I went to a Ghanaian one where I stood out like a sore thumb, the only non-Ghanaian in the church. To make matters worse, when the beautiful singing started, I burst into inexplicable tears. Mortified, I tried to stop but the dam had burst. As I mopped my face, there was an announcement that a leading member of the Ghanaian community had been killed in a car crash. Not only was I an idiot intruder but somehow an imposter too: “a holy show”. I left sure that I could never go back to that church again.

Sometimes the Nigerian charismatics dance and sing down our road and I feel the same lump in my throat, that urge to cry as if they are tuned into some unbearable magnetic frequency. I press my face to the glass. Take away the hypocrisy, the sectarianism, the bullying morality and there is something in religion that I long to reach. I hear it in the psalms, the speeches of Martin Luther King, the dancing charismatics outside my window. In the 1960s, I saw old women in black shawls, with opaque eyes, rocking over their rosaries and I knew they were “on something” as exciting as the ecstasy of St Teresa. I remain outside, utterly fascinated.

Like Johnny Cash, Elvis’s first and deepest love was for Gospel music. Peter Guralnick’s biography tells of how Elvis loved to hang around the dressing room singing hymns with Charlie and Ira Louvin when they were on tour. “Why don’t you do that out yonder?” , Ira asked before calling Elvis a white n*****. When Elvis answered, “When I am out there, I do what they want to hear – when I am back here, I do what I want to do.” Ira tried to strangle him.

I can do without the tree but the crib is Christmas. A photo of Elvis sits in the straw because I can resist high tack no more than I can resist high drama

Colonel Parker's favouritism for "the boy" was an important factor here (Cain and Abel again) but the racism is real and ugly. Was Charlie remembering this when he cut his album Steps to Heaven with a black gospel choir 50 years later? "This old world is nothing but a dressing place…we're just rehearsing, we're just rehearsing…someday we'll sing together in a band around God's throne…"

Elvis's fame prevented him from attending his beloved church so he had to make do with the services on television. Looking into the box. Which reminds of the diorama of the nativity. I can do without the tree but the crib is Christmas, the one thing that took my child's mind off my presents during the long Christmas Mass. These days, a photo of Elvis sits in the straw with the donkeys and sheep because I can resist high tack no more than I can resist high drama. Is this blasphemous? Is it plain silly to say it's what Elvis would have wanted? Am I no better than those crazy yahoos dancing round the golden calf with Edward G Robinson in The Ten Commandments?

St Francis invented the crib, a tableau for Christmas night, a medieval morality play. It isn’t surprising that Francis who spoke of “Brother Fire, Sister Moon and Brother Pig”, included live animals in his liturgical drama and it makes me ridiculously happy to know that Francis ensured the livestock were served double oats on the night because they are my favourite figures.

My father must have seemed devout to the outside eye, making his way to Burnfort Church every day with Fifi, our tiny toy Yorkie. But he went for Fifi’s sake because Fifi liked to roll on the orange altar carpet. Once I saw Fifi urinating on it but Daddy said it wasn’t fair to stop her when it was “hardly a teaspoon”. They were crazy about the Christmas crib too. Daddy picked his time carefully so Fifi could climb in and transport herself around the straw in privacy. Every January 6th, she barked wildly at those annoying gate-crashers, the Three Wise Men. Where had they come from “Suddenly!”? And when Fifi had satisfied herself, Daddy left, responding outside to respectful greetings of “Hello, Mr Cotter.” with an angelic, “Nice Day.”.

It was a nice day, sharing Fifi’s joy in the carpet and the crib, her high voice resounding against the pale walls. Sister Fifi. Mammy would have been deeply mortified if she knew. Or even worse than that: “if the people found out”. I hear her groan, “How will I face the public?” It could be considered blasphemous. A sin. But maybe also holy if subversive? Like something Francis would do, or maybe even Jesus himself?

Martina Evans's latest work is Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet)