Wee Georgie Day 8

But no Joe clambered victoriously up the slope.

After a fruitless five minutes of calling out, we assumed he’d just gone home, so quickly turned our minds to the next game.

At teatime, about two hours later, I got home, washed my hands and went through to the bedroom to ask Joe why he had left the game so suddenly.

I was surprised when Mum shouted through that Joe still wasn’t home.

She went a bit silent for a few seconds but then continued with peeling the potatoes, craning her neck every so often to look out of the living-room window.

Dad came in off his shift at six o’clock and by then Mum was getting anxious. It was now three hours since Joe had headed down those steps in the park.

Mum sent me back out to check our local haunts for any sign of Joe and tell him what to expect when he got back.

I went through all the back courts, did a quick check of the New Cemetery, knocked on several friends’ doors to see if he was inside, then headed back into the park following a footpath below the slope I had last seen him on.

Someone crying

My path ran parallel to Lochee Road but was midway up the grassy slope.

I walked past the bushes on my right which sloped up to the castle courtyard.

About 20 yards along the path I stopped and listened intently, trying to hear through the sound of the traffic going by below. Yes, I could definitely hear someone crying. I checked the bushes above me but couldn’t see any sign of life so I ducked down and started to crawl under the rhododendrons in the direction of the sobbing.

I called out my brother’s name. To my huge relief, Joe shouted out my name over and over again, guiding me to where he was.

As I moved towards his voice it became clear that Joe was in fact calling from beneath my feet.

I still couldn’t see him, so I asked him where he was and he told me he was in a concrete pill-box. It was hidden under the earth and accessible only by a narrow gun slit.

The slit was 10in tall and three feet wide and wasn’t hard to find at all once I knew what I was looking for.

I was happy to see Joe’s hand waving to me, though that was the only bit of him I could see.

He asked me to lean through the slit and help him up the four foot wall and out.

Four failed attempts later we gave up on that idea and he made me try sliding both my legs through the opening to give him something to climb up on.

I took up the required position but as soon as I felt myself going in and down instead of Joe coming up and out, I lashed out with my legs and sent him tumbling back to the floor of the pill-box.

Eventually we ran out of ideas so I had to run home and tell Mum and Dad where Joe was stuck.

It wasn’t long before he was extricated from his prison thanks to Dad’s strong arms and a piece of washing line.

Mum was so relieved that Joe got off with a smacked behind and no tea.

Incomprehensible

For Joe and me, being primary school Catholics was a mixture of the mysterious, the weird and the totally incomprehensible.

We were greatly loved kids as Mum had had three failed pregnancies and had lost her child Frankie, who came into the world just in time to get whooping cough and succumb in six weeks.

So simply by virtue of our survival, it was obvious to Mum that we were destined for great things.

I found out that at one stage I was pronounced dead in the womb but I somehow defied the odds and finished my nine month shorthold tenancy before moving on to larger premises.

Joe, as elder son, was expected to become someone important like a doctor or a teacher and so end up richer than Livio Terroni, who owned the local chip shop.

However, Mum interpreted the fact of Georgie’s survival as a sign that I’d become a priest.

Of course.

At age six, the priesthood seemed like a reasonable thing for me to do so I didn’t complain, no matter how strange things appeared.

Maybe working one day a week as a priest was far better than the constant daily shifts my dad had to do.

What else was there to do on Sundays anyway? Everything was closed, there were hardly any buses and there were only so many times you could walk along Riverside Drive to look at the Tay Bridge.

You might as well be in the church. I had already learned by heart the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father, Morning Offering, Grace before Meals, Grace after Meals, the Apostles’ Creed and the Act of Contrition.

So I felt well grounded in things holy and had a fair idea about guardian angels from hymns and the stories about Angel Wopsy that the teacher read to us on Friday afternoons.

I knew that William Hart was our bishop, that the Pope was John XIII.

Eventualities covered

I also knew that if you didn’t dip your fingers in the funny water bowl on the frame of our front door and make the sign of the cross as you were leaving, then you couldn’t get into heaven if you died while you were out. All eventualities seemed covered.

I only knew two people who got called “thou”: God and King Arthur, both of whom also had the useful ability to smite folk they didn’t like. Oh and both of them had beards.

I had an idea that there were a whole heap of things these two had in common but that theory fell apart when I found out Arthur ate his meals from a round table and Jesus had tea with his friends at a long rectangular one.

Well, at least the picture above our mantelpiece seemed to show him doing that.

The relationship between God and Jesus was pretty blurred for me too.

I had much less bother with the Holy Ghost, as I’d seen enough drawings to know that he was a white carrier pigeon flying around with God’s messages for people on earth. (More tomorrow.)

Maybe working one day a week as a priest was far better than the constant daily shifts my dad had to do