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Ellen’s Week – Virtual guilt tripping
Blessings should, I feel, be counted regularly lest in what sometimes seems our determination to be miserable we lose sight of them and the angels who send them our way.
Angels come in many guises. Four come to mind right now, three of them men, ageless as is the way of men, and one lady, a nun who, bless her, is now in her nineties.
Some years ago, possibly because he could not bear to go on watching a customer struggle with laundry, a bag, a stick and occasionally an umbrella, the man who owns my local laundrette hit on this plan. Here’s what we’ll do he decided. You drive up, sound the horn, and one of us will come out and attend to you. And I did, and I do, and it works like a dream.
Recently I have on a few occasions had to call to my local filling station for milk. The proprietor, maybe Pakistani, is handsome in the way of Pakistani people, dark hair, deep brown eyes and teeth that are so, so white. Add to this he is kind. ‘You choose milk, I bring to car,’ he decides, the transaction lit by his wonderful smile.
The third angel I have seen once, briefly, and probably never again. On an evening when the shopping centre was better suited to a front row forward I got in a queue behind a young man who was clearly stocking up for a party. Pushing a large trolley laden with bottles, tall, small, augmented with six packs, he reached the checkout where he paid his way with vouchers.
Then he was gone but not before he turned a charming smile my way and handed me a voucher for £6. He had earlier rescued a pot of raspberry jam from the floor where I dropped it (fortunately it didn’t break - what is it with me and pots of jam in supermarkets).
Wherever he is today I hope the party was a huge success and that he is recovering well.
Which brings me to my fourth angel, Sr Carmel, for it is she. When I turned twelve my parents decided that boarding school was the way, and the only way to go. I didn’t think so at all, but in those days children were not consulted about things like what they wore or where they went to school. Consultation was not an option.
Boarding school, I reckon, changes you for all time. For one thing it teaches you to live with other people, which is good, and for another it separates you from parental love during what are your formative and most impressionable years, which is not good. Some kids can deal with it, some can’t.
I suffered miserably from home sickness. I loved my parents and my home and wanted only to be there with them.
My first mistaken impression of Sr Carmel was that she was rosy cheeked and jolly. Rosy cheeked certainly, but that was it. As one of my teachers, aware of my misery she tried to help me settle into what was an alien existence.
‘But why do you want to go home?’ she asked me as she sat me on the edge of a bath in a bleak bathroom’. ‘I don’t like it here,’ I tried to explain through my tears. ‘But none of us like it here,’ was her surprising response.
I remembered those words through the years wondering often if it was an insight into Carmel’s own difficulties with religious life. None of us like it here, did that mean that she too was at times miserable for her own home.
Long years later when I visited her in hospital after she had badly scalded herself with a kettle of boiling water, she reminisced sadly about how much it would have meant to her had she been allowed attend her father’s funeral. And I, listening, felt anger against a superior who could make such a cold decision, and pity for the grieving nun who had to work that day with her students as though nothing had happened.
Carmel taught French, Irish, history, cookery and needlework. She called it as she saw it and she never took prisoners. If she drove her students hard it was only because she drove herself hard, determined to impart to them her own teeming knowledge of the given subject.
Equally determined to remain level with her students in a world that had spun crazily, undaunted she tackled the fashion of hot pants for young women. Never one to mince her words: ‘And would you really go out in your knickers, was how I put it to them’, she told me and I, listening to this years later, smiled remembering a time when knickers had been second on a list of verboten topics, topped only by any mention of menstruation and sanitary protection.
A heavy fall in late retirement meant that today, Sr Carmel is in a retirement home unable to return to what she calls her ‘beloved convent’. We have remained in touch, but of late she seemed to drop out of the Christmas card ritual. So when her Christmas card fell on the mat one morning last week I studied her handwriting on the envelope and was glad. It is round, strong, firm, clear as when she wrote on blackboards. Truly an amazing woman.
And so - I for my part give thanks for four people who in the past week shone a light in a life that, but for them, would have been a little darker.
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