Be Near Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

People said he was tough, dutiful, harsh even, and he certainly had a fund of stories about the Connollys of Drum—his Irish progenitors, a race apart—and would take second place to no man in his admiration for Celtic Football Club. But my experience of Gerard was different. To me he seemed continually buoyed with plain spiritual grace and a love of the sacred, and he never held my childhood in England against me, not in any very serious way, though I recall that he chose not to visit the English College in the via Monserrato and never failed to scoff at our considerable fondness for cricket.
    'They say you English seminarians walk differently from other people,' he said. 'The Romans can tell you a mile away, before you open your mouths, just by how you walk. They call it
il passo nordico.
'
    Once he was back home and Vicar-General of the Glasgow diocese, Gerard wrote me frequent letters about what he called, with no particular respect for reality, 'the steady progress of holy matters in the land of footballing excellence'. He never failed to keep me in mind whenever he found impertinent jokes against French wine or English literature. As was intended, I spent my pastoral career in Lancashire, most of it in Blackpool, and by the time I wanted the transfer to Scotland my old friend was the Bishop of Galloway. When I petitioned him for a parish, Gerard seemed to think long and hard before offering me Dalgarnock, a decision, I like to think, made mainly in order to present a challenge to my liking for freshly cut violets.
    I wonder if he knew what he was doing. It would be fair to say the town had a suspicion of strangers. No matter. It was the beginning of a new life. Driving over the moor at Auchentiber that first October evening, I saw Dalgarnock Abbey and the town below it emerge out of the darkness like burning matter in a dream of constant renewal. I tasted sea salt coming through the open window, I turned off the radio, and immediately thought of the Balliol drinking song. Versions of myself fanned out and danced before the headlamps, and I pursued them, these furies, the window open to the ancient world and the town glowing orange and alive down there at the centre of its own embers. I turned off the headlights to see the place better and then turned off the engine, rolling down with the handbrake off to a town that appeared to know its own past.
    It was the ruined abbey that struck me most. You could see it from every point in the town, each face of the clock tower telling the wrong time and the stones underneath heaped together in memory of a Reformation that had never stopped. The south transept was nine hundred years old. It was broken down but still powerful, magisterial, emboldening. Even the moss on the fallen stones had dignity. The tower was erected in the nineteenth century after the original collapsed in a storm. My first day in the town, suitcases still unpacked, removal men on the way, I went into the tower and climbed up to the open top. The stone steps were covered with the remains of dead birds, skeletons lying in their sprigs of feathers. Death had made the birds into their own tombs, each like a nest, their departed selves now shaped like their former dwellings.
    We come from a long line of Catholics. It still feels vaguely presumptuous to speak of 'our' ancestors. I think of them as my father's people, the Andertons, those Lancashire monks and martyrs whom my father admired less for their undying faith than for the commanding way they had tried to take hold of life. He would speak of John Rigbye, son of Margaret Rigbye née Anderton, who was hanged, drawn and quartered in London in the year 1600 for refusing to join the state church. 'He was better than a saint,' my father said. 'He knew the things he had to do.' Then there was Thomas Anderton, Prior of St Edmund's in Paris between 1668 and 1669, who wrote
The History of the Iconoclasts.
'These people had learning,' my father would say. 'They