They emerged as ordinary men with extraordinary devotion and dedication, but as men nonetheless

Father Page took me aside one day and asked me if I was busy on Friday evenings.

When I said I wasn’t, he gave me a notebook full of names and addresses and told me to go round them on Friday evenings to collect contributions to the Bishop’s Building Fund, to help pay for our new St. Clements’s church.

This proved another great adventure for me and another power trip. I would knock on the doors of the people listed in the notebook and respectfully ask for their weekly contribution.

I told them that if they didn’t want to give anything that would be all right and I would tell Father Page to remove them from the list.

At the very mention of that priest’s name a miracle would happen right there in Charleston and the person would suddenly remember where they had put their lost purse or find a long-forgotten shilling lurking in the depths of a pocket. God really was working in mysterious ways. Back on the altar I was picking up speed with the Latin prayers and responses.

Mumbling

I had learned one or two new tricks like how to bow my head low at the long Apostles’ Creed, and start it off boldly with “Credo in unum Deum” but then kind of drift into an unintelligible mumbling and only come back to real words in time to say “Amen”.

The priest was too busy saying the Latin out loud to notice what we were doing two steps below him. Being boys between the ages of eight and 14, one problem we had was stopping ourselves from giggling on the altar when things seemed funny, particularly if our mates were in the congregation making faces and trying their best to get us to laugh.

That was really hard to do and sometimes I just bowed as respectfully as I could and quietly left the altar.

Then I could give vent to my emotions privately in the priest’s robe room, before returning and trying to look as if I’d been off on some holy errand.

But there was one thing that all the altar boys had in common. We all found it impossible not to pass wind when genuflecting.

As we did so much genuflecting during mass, it was almost inevitable that one of us, usually an older boy, would bend his knee and let one go on the way down.

He would then look at his colleagues in triumph and silently dare them to do likewise, a challenge often taken up with energy and glee.

Since there was a fair distance between the steps we knelt on and the front row of pews, nobody in the congregation was ever aware of our little game.

As for the priest, he kept a diplomatic silence on the matter, probably because we knew he would now and again accidentally join in the game.

So the experience of being an altar-boy didn’t have the outcome of making me even holier and setting me on the irreversible path to the priesthood.

While it may have reinforced my belief in God, it rather shattered my illusions of the holiness of priests and the amazing miracles I imagined they could perform.

Devotion

They emerged as ordinary men with extraordinary devotion and dedication, but as men nonetheless.

Maybe they could turn wine into blood, but I didn’t see any evidence of it.

What’s more, none of the dead people they kept in their coffins in the church overnight ever woke up and climbed back out before the funeral, so resurrection remained mysterious.

The priests were holy all right, but still had to use the toilet and eat their dinner and have a snooze. One of them even liked an occasional cigarette in the vestry.

I discovered that just like so many ordinary people in Lochee at that time, the priests were all big fans of Glasgow Celtic and regularly went to see them if they were playing locally.

Yes, it seemed they were ordinary men and not wizards. I couldn’t help but be disappointed by that.

St Mary’s Lochee was the most wonderful place to be educated. It truly was a life-changing experience to be in the hands of such fantastic teachers and to be part of the warmest of communities.

In St Mary’s Lane alone we had the big school, the church, the wash-house and the swimming baths – four natural hubs for the people of Lochee, places of vibrancy and activity, places I felt part of and felt protected by. Everybody seemed to know everybody (and a surprising amount of their personal business).

The shops on the High Street were always bustling with busy shoppers.

Alex Smith had opened a store there where you could buy furniture on hire purchase as well as all the bits of the school uniform, and The Chocolate Box was always crammed with school children buying a playtime snack or a “shivery bite” for after the swimming.

The school itself had three separate playgrounds, at the top of the hill, around the back and at the bottom of the hill.

Formidable

We played football in the top one because it had natural goals at both ends, two sections of railings below the Headmaster’s office to the left and the rain shelter to the right, which formed a perfect two posts and crossbar.

My classmate John Hackett and I became a formidable pairing up front, owing to John’s ability to beat a man and cross for me, with my talent for heading the ball, to score.

Even when we only had a tennis ball to play with, after our inflatable balls caused several broken windows and were subsequently banned by the Headmaster, we still managed a reasonable game against one of the other classes.

The girls tended to amuse themselves with a variety of chasing games.

However, they also had skipping ropes and elastic bands to play with while they chanted a whole lot of mysterious rhymes about being in love and kissing people.

They would spell out the names of their future husbands and would sometimes draw boxes on the ground with a chalky stone for their games of hopscotch.