Broken Music: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

Father’s innocent bookishness, combined with the fluted, stuttering tones of the upper class were a heady cocktail for a chit of an Irish girl from Sunderland. There was never a suggestion of something untoward in their relationship, but it was always “Father Jim did this” or “Father Jim did that,” and poor old Tom rarely got a “look in” or a word edgewise. He’d just sit silently in the corner and pick out old music hall tunes on his mandolin, staring into the middle distance, always humming some wordless song.
    By the time I was born, in October of 1951, they had moved to Newcastle with Father Jim, who had become the resident pastor at the Convent of the Good Shepherd in the northeast part of the city. He ministered to a group of nuns who looked after a school for wayward girls and ran a laundry that provided the local priesthood with clean sheets and altar cloths. I was never allowed near any of the girls, but my grandfather was in charge of the coke furnace in the cellar of the convent, and he ran the laundry vans picking up the soiled linens and delivering them back, pristine white. He rolled his own cigarettes and was invariably dressed in his old blue dungarees and black army beret. He was slyly laconic. Family lore has it that one day at lunch, Father Jim was musing aloud on what his Sunday sermon should be about.
    “About five minutes,” quipped my grandfather, just loud enough to be heard, earning a black and murderous look from Agnes and a puzzled one from the priest. My grandfather was a character, and I was fascinated by his long silences and the hairs that sprouted fromhis enormous nose and his ears, which grew ever larger as the rest of his body grew smaller.
    A terraced house on the convent grounds went along with my grandfather’s job (Father Jim was the perennial dinner guest). Next door lived the Dooleys, who ran the convent farm. Old man Dooley would take me to feed the pigs in the top field and would regale me with terrifying stories about big ugly sows that would gratuitously bite young lads in half just because they could. So I always kept my distance, especially as I was told that pigs were as smart as humans and just as mean. Even now I can see old man Dooley in his gypsy scarf, his rolled Wellington boots, and his enormous, piratical leather belt, which gave him the air of a swashbuckler. I supposed that walking into the pigpen was his equivalent of walking the plank.
    Agnes didn’t approve of the Dooleys. She thought they were wild and unkempt, while she aspired to some sophistication. She would complete the cryptic crossword in the
Times
every day, and subscribed to the condensed works of literature in
Reader’s Digest
, explaining that as she hadn’t had the benefit of a real education she would have to take some shortcuts. She had a lifelong interest in and love of books and encouraged me to have the same.
    Agnes kept her books on shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling in an alcove by the fireplace. She would spend much of her time in her armchair, a book in hand, her tortoiseshell reading glasses perched on her nose, with the tower of books looming behind her, a testament to her learning. She never threw a book away. But she lent me Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island to
read when I was barely seven, and with only a minimum of comprehension I would plow through it with the same bloody-minded determination that I would later apply to cross-country running. Not exactly an intellectual approach, but one that would prove useful in many other ways. Notleast of all music. She also got me to read
The Lives of the Saints
, which can’t have made much of an impression.
    Agnes would often tell me that if I had any brains at all then I must have gotten them from her. And so it was largely through my grandmother’s sponsorship and encouragement that I began to think of myself as bright.
        My own family life began in a terraced house by Swan Hunter’s shipyard in