Here we share the first chapter of Mark Dowd’s
acclaimed new memoir, Queer and Catholic – a superb tale of a gay,
working class boy from Manchester trying to reconcile his sexuality with his
profound commitment to Catholicism …
You open the door and it’s the first
thing you see. An altar boy on the steps of a Catholic Church. In a frame. His
cheeks heavily rouged due to the clumsy intervention of a hand that does not do
deft touches. The equally heavy graphite strokes of a HB pencil have made his
fingers look unnaturally distinct through his snow white gloves. He looks
anxious. No wonder. This is, after all, Autumn 1939 and the world is now at
war. This disturbingly beautiful boy is my father aged eleven years. It is an
image bequeathed to me more than twenty-five years ago by my grandmother, his
mother, for safe keeping. Now it greeted and bade me farewell on every entry
and exit from my Fleet Street flat.
Now my father is gone. But he is also
still very much around.
‘The owl of Minerva only spreads its
wings with the falling of dusk,’ is Hegel’s elliptical way of telling us that
the pattern and sense of life’s meaning are never fully revealed in the
present. Now that Edward Patrick Dowd is no more, I sense something with increasing
certainty – that my life is caught up between two poles, two extremities of
yearning for acceptance and chronic fear of rejection in which he will always
play a leading role.
The eldest of a family of six children
raised in Salford, my father was never given to grand displays of emotion. He
was the kind of man who would have responded to the alert of a nuclear war by
checking there were enough tea bags in the kitchen supply to get us through
those first few days of atomic hell. All the more astonishing then, his
behaviour on the night of 29 May 1968. We had just moved into our new modern
council house in Clifton, barely two hundred metres up the road from where I
was born eight years previously. As the European Cup final between Manchester
United and Benfica approached ninety minutes, my father was on the edge of his
seat with the game tied at one all. Then, three late goals from Best, Charlton
and Kidd in extra time made us the first English club to lay our hands on the
trophy. ‘Ted’ went into raptures. He jumped up and down on the sofa, picked up
my mother, Patricia, and ran around our front room in a sequence of movements
that was half dance, half pole vault. This was not a man usually given to
tactile embraces. Yet here he was, for just a few minutes, a man transformed.
Hugs were given as though we were all about to be sent off in exile to Botany
Bay. He led us on a celebratory mission to Hart’s corner shop for bottles of
dandelion and burdock and smoky bacon crisps. Even better, we were given the
next day off school. To this day, when Manchester United lose, I feel a weird
irrational sense that the fragile anchoring of my world is becoming unhinged.
Through all of our ups and downs, talking about and watching football was
always the safe lifeline of communication with my father. And on this night, I
sensed even as a young boy, a man who was liberated, released to be who he
really could be if only he could throw off the shackles.
Sadly, such moments were rare. The man who would sit there
in silence browning slices of Warburton’s sliced bread on a toasting fork on
the gas fire for me at 6.30am before I sauntered off to St Mark’s Church for
altar boy duties, was, I suspect, dogged by anxieties that always stayed below
the surface. He suffered constant migraines and missed months of work as a bus
conductor with Lancashire United Transport. On occasions, when he was ill in
bed, I was sent to pick up his beige brown pay packet from the local depot in
Swinton. When his sick pay entitlement ran out, the figure denoting his
earnings displayed in the small cellophane window often reduced my mother to a
tight-lipped silence. Tears in front of any of her three sons, I suspect, would
have been seen as ‘weakness’.
On a handful of occasions at the other end of that spectrum
of footballing ecstasy, my two brothers and I would know the sting of his brown
leather belt across the back of our legs. It was normally for ‘giving lip’. The
punishment was nothing unusual for the time, the place. My father was not
cruel, unkind or malicious. I think he was ‘trapped’. He was exceptionally
intelligent, but education had provided no passport to a world where his
talents could flourish. There was a chasm between what might have been and what
came to be. And one event stays with me to this day as the nadir of father–son
relations, an event that can still make me tremble. And sob.
At the local Catholic primary school, I was having a spot
of bother. You see, I stood out a bit. Well – a lot. The signs were there for
all to see if only they had looked more closely. How many eight year old boys
wept incessantly that year when Cliff Richard, singing ‘Congratulations’, was
defeated in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest by Spain’s Massiel singing ‘La La
La’ – by a mere point? How many young boys, bored to death at a family
wedding, learnt the steps to the old time sequence dance, the Veleta, and
within months went on to be a substandard Billy Elliot on the ballroom dance
floor? My father was conflicted on this one. It might have compromised his masculinity
with the neighbours, but it had its pluses. On one summer holiday at the
Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli, I took to the dance floor in the Regency
Ballroom with my mother, Patricia, while my father stayed back in our chalet
and played cards with my younger brother Antony. Two hours later, my mother and
I arrived back with a fistful of fivers – tips and donations from onlookers who
had admired the twinkle-toed youngster foxtrotting like a gazelle under the
sparkling silver globes with his proud mother. I like to think Pat and I set
the precedent for the later generation of pole dancers.
All this might have helped make up the occasional shortfall
in the family coffers, but it was not going down too well with some of the
rougher elements at school. They dubbed me the ‘Prof ’. They said they’d stick my
head down the toilet when we got to ‘big school’. (St Ambrose Barlow in
Swinton, the dreaded Secondary Modern.) My cousin David also started to get the
flack and for weeks, a gang of around seven ruffians would grab us after
school, hold our hands behind our backs and thump us in the stomach. I began to
run for the school gate at 3.50pm in the hope of getting back home to safety. I
hid stones in the ground which I’d hurl in self-defence. I even recall lodging
cans of aerosol behind boulders ready to spray in their faces if need be. But
more often than not, the assailers prevailed. My mother ran a ladies outfitters
near Bolton and could not meet us at the school gate. And my Dad was either on
the buses or out for the count with one of his blinding headaches.
It all came to a climax one Tuesday night. I simply dreaded
the idea of facing those boys any more at school. I had told my parents about
them and they had responded by asking an elderly next door neighbour to
occasionally meet us at the school gate. Mrs Berry, all four feet and eight
inches of her, bless her, made little difference. My mother sent me to bed
early. My sobbing only got louder and louder. Then the bedroom door was flung
open by my father. He was on an ‘early shift’ next morning at 4.30am, had gone
to bed at 8pm and I had woken him up. He was furious. I can’t recall exactly
what he said, but all I recall is that now, at this very time of desperation,
my father had turned on me. Didn’t he understand what it was like to bite your
tongue in your sleep, to wake up with your hands sweaty and clenched? When he
left the room, I stifled the sobbing with a pillow and hardly slept.
The following day, I took it all into my own hands. Unable to
face another beating, I slipped out of the school gate after the 2.10pm
playground break and ran like the clappers for home. I had expected to do my
usual latchkey child act and let myself in, light the gas fire and make a pot
of tea with some bread and Hartley’s blackcurrant jam. But this was Wednesday,
a day my mother did not open her shop. When she saw me at home, ninety minutes
early, she demanded to know what was going on. I told her I had to run away
from those boys. But instead of backing me up, she rounded on me for causing a
scene. ‘What will those teachers be thinking now? They’ll be worried sick about
you’. We still weren’t connected by phone to the outer world, so she told me to
stay put while she went round to explain it all to Mr Moss, the headteacher.
This was bleak. I felt there was no one I could turn
to. No one who would take my side. Alone. So alone. When she went through that
front door, I grabbed one of my toy cars, a yellow and silver Dinky model, and
began to snap it all to pieces. I thrust a large metal bumper plate into my
mouth and swallowed it. I had half hoped I would choke on it, but it went
straight down, so I repeated the process with another piece of the silvery car
frame. Not satisfied with that, I then wandered into the kitchen, stood on a
chair and extended my hands out for a large bottle of Dettol. I unscrewed the
plastic top and drank about a third of its contents. I spluttered and choked
but, for the time being managed to keep it down. Reflux surged up through my
nostrils but through force of will, I kept most of it in. Anything to avoid
being thumped and thumped again. Then it got even worse.
The five bullies from school now appeared out of nowhere outside
our house with their faces pressed against the lounge window. Their heads were
distorted as if they were in some grotesque hall of mirrors. A voice yelled
through the letterbox: ‘if you tell on us we’re gonna bloody knock your head
in. Mossy’s onto us. If you don’t keep your gob shut, you’re dead.’ I ran to lock the back door and for a moment I thought they
might force the front door open, so I scuttled upstairs and locked the bathroom
door behind me. There I stayed until it all went quiet and the next sound I
heard was the key turning in the front door lock. It was my mother. When I
stole back into our front room, I saw her looking at my dismembered Dinky car.
Then she clocked the now part-empty Dettol bottle with the cap off. Her eight
year ballroom dancing prodigy now started to throw up all over the carpet.
‘What’s happened to your favourite car?’ she asked. As my eyes welled up, I
pointed to my mouth. I will never forget that look on my mother’s face. Part
horror and part self-reproach. Within minutes we were with Dr Bhanji, the local
GP. She explained all the day’s events to him and he prescribed me a large
bottle brown of liquid – in effect a hefty tranquiliser. It seems odd now that
we weren’t sent to the Accident and Emergency for X-rays. Instead, my mother was
given the unpleasant task of ‘number two duty’ – to check that the two pieces
of metal I had swallowed were accounted for safely by natural means in the
hours and days ahead.
I didn’t attend school for two weeks and I’ve no idea what
was in that brown liquid. All I know was that it made my Gran’s bottle of liquid
cod liver oil taste like nectar. It was foul. I slept for twelve hours at a
stretch and even when I was ‘awake’ I was floating around in a haze with the
fairies. Back at St Mark’s primary school there was an inquest. Mr Moss, the
headteacher, sorted out the thugs. They never laid a finger on me again. During
all this period in time, my father was withdrawn, preferring, it appeared, to
leave all the officiating to my mother. I wanted some reassurance from him,
some sense that it was all OK now. But nothing followed.
Which is not to say that he was always unattentive. There was
one time I was deeply aware of his scrutiny. It was during one Sunday afternoon
while I was watching TV. I had acquired a new best friend – the boy from the
Persil ad. My viewing habits were the majority’s in reverse. They would
put the kettle on during the ad breaks, whereas when I heard the Granada
channel music sing, signalling the commercials, I would scamper back into the
front room to the alluring presence of the new Rediffusion colour TV set. My
new best friend had short blond hair and he was great at sport. But his
athleticism, said the voiceover, was a real challenge to his mother – how would
she ever get all the mud off that rugby kit? As he strutted into the house, he
was instructed to strip off – all the way down to his white underpants. I can
still see him, at the top of the stairs, throwing his dirty sports kit down to
his mother who would lovingly get his gear ‘whiter than white’. I stared and I
stared. Of course, I didn’t know what it ‘meant,’ but I had a sort of ‘Ready
Brek’ glow inside of me whenever he appeared. He was the picture of innocence.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him and made no attempt to hide my fascination with
this angelically cute apparition. Why should I? Did my father cotton on? Hard
to say, but he certainly saw me watching. And more than once. What seemed odd
was that, almost overnight, his viewing preferences seemed to take a distinct
lurch to BBC1 and BBC2 – where there were no commercials.
The eleven plus exam approached. The binary options were
clear: pass and a one way ticket to liberation at grammar school, away from the
bullies. Exodus. Fail and it would be non-stop torment at St Ambrose Barlow
where the taunts of ‘Prof ’ would end up with me hauled on to the school roof
and left to be mocked. My mother had already savoured eleven plus success with
my elder brother Christopher and now she reverted back to her tried and trusted
formula – the General Progress Reasoning Papers. No matter that
she worked all day selling frocks, cooked the family tea when she came home and
had dozens of alterations to work on with her Singer sewing machine. She
committed herself to hour after hour of it – ‘Black is to white as truth is
to…’ (four choices.)
The big day came. The omens weren’t good. While twenty per
cent or so passed the eleven plus nationally, at St Mark’s Primary it had been
several years since more than one child had passed out of a class of thirty.
I’d found it easy enough. Easy, that is, until I got home and faced my mother’s:
‘were there any you were unsure of?’ There had been a series of questions in
which one had to combine two short words from columns A and B to make a larger
lexical unit. I told her I had combined ‘rope’ with ‘let’ to make ‘ropelet’ – a
surely a short rope? ‘What were the other words in the first column?’ ‘Ring’
had eluded me – but how was an eleven year old boy to know what a ‘ringlet’
was? This omission seemed to convince my mother that I had failed. Weeks of
anguish followed, before the dreaded brown paper envelope arrived from the
local education authority. They never used the words ‘pass or fail’ – they simply
listed a series of schools to which one was now eligible to apply. All mine
were grammar schools – Thornleigh, Stand Grammar, St Bede’s and so the list went
on. My parents wanted me to go to De La Salle. It was three miles away in
Weaste, near Eccles and the competition for places was fierce. It was renowned
for its formidably difficult entrance exam which had certainly proved too much
for my elder brother who had had to settle for Stand Grammar, a Protestant school,
if you will. (This involved my mother being summoned to the local Bishop who granted
his permission for this tribal disloyalty, only on condition that Christopher
take weekly Catholic instruction from our parish priest, Fr Sweeney).
The De La Salle exam was a killer. My composition essay on
‘Bonfire Night’ had been constructed with no paragraphing. Worse still was the
maths paper. I knew nothing about fractions. To my parents’ despair, I came
home and proudly showed them how I had added one fifth and one quarter to make
two ninths by adding up the numbers above and below the lines. (I can still now
break out in a sweat if I hear the term ‘common denominator’ used, even in the most
colloquial of contexts.) But I was saved by the following question, the answer
to which possibly was one of those classic life-changing moments.
‘In a local street you view trees planted outside houses
on both sides of the road. On one side, there is a tree every fifteen houses.
On the opposite side, there is a tree every fifty houses. The only time when
two trees face each other directly is at the end of the street. How many houses
are in the street?’
I think 300 will be forever my favourite number. It got me
into one of the best schools in the north of England and guaranteed that,
from September 1971, I would run the risk of looking like a prat in my
maroon and yellow school uniform. I was the only boy to pass from
primary school and I did not know a soul at the new place. But who
cares? The clever boys wouldn’t put me on the roof or flush my head down
the toilet.
Would
they?
Queer and Catholic: A Life of Contradiction by Mark Dowd is out now in hardback, priced £14.99.
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