‘There’s a cruelty easily available in mocking your younger self.’ Niall Williams.
I’m guilty of this, too. Though it’s one thing to mock your younger self, but to have another cast aspersions on that younger self can sting indeed. After all she’s part of you and although you might laugh at her folly, it’s harder when someone else takes up the cudgel.
Whenever my analyst Mrs Milanova remarked on how much I had grown in understanding, I crowed inside with delight. At the same time I felt a pang of sorrow for my younger self, her puritanical and intolerant ways.
I was on my way to gaining the wisdom of my elders, people like Mrs Milanova who had earned her qualifications through the process of her own analysis and training. She could help get me there, too, but still it pained me to lose something of the certainty of my younger foolish self.
When Niall Williams narrator, Noe (for Noel) Crowe explains to his readers how foolish a young man can be when he falls in love, we travel alongside.
A young man who so falls for the local doctor’s middle daughter Sophie Troy that he elects to throw himself headfirst down a ladder to cause himself an injury that will bring him to the doctor’s surgery so he can once more cast eyes on Sophie, the beautiful.
The doctor is unimpressed. Not that he knows why Noe has fallen headlong off a ladder, but he dislikes the young man’s propensity towards accidents. Noe had already tried to take the full weight of a falling electricity pole as it crashed over his head.
The young are like this full of bravado and self-confidence, in some matters at least.
In others, my younger self, like that of Noe, has no confidence at all. Noe considers himself ugly. And so did I. Noe considered himself not much of a scholar. So did I. Noe took himself into the priesthood to atone for the untimely and early death of his mother following a series of falls when he was twelve.
I can’t make similar claims, though I too toyed with life in a convent. Given my gender, as a nun. I’d far rather have managed to take a priest into my care and live happily ever after with one of the forbidden men.
The priests were like that, off limits and alluring. At least the young ones.
When I was sixteen and boarding with a Dutch family in Camberwell after my eldest brother decided we younger children needed to be taken out of our parents’ care and shipped elsewhere to give them a chance to sort their marriage, I encountered one of the most delectable priests.
Father John was still in the seminary when we first met. The eldest son of the family with whom my sister and I stayed. An olive-skinned man with four good looking brothers below him, one of whom, an accountant was married with a child. The next down was studying medicine. He too was divine with the bluest of eyes. The youngest son, around my age was a pain. He disliked the intrusion of two girls into his household, I suspect. Years earlier he had endured the arrival of the last child into this family, a girl. And he was always surly.
They were a devout Catholic family like all the families in Williams’ story, but they were Dutch and Dutch Catholics are more sophisticated in their religious beliefs than the Irish, or so my mother believed.
Because John was a priest, I set my sights on the third brother, whose blue eyes sent my heart into raptures. I would most certainly have flung myself off a ladder to receive his administrations. But I hated it when he was studying gums and teeth and wanted to examine the inner workings of everyone’s mouth within his household.
My teeth were rotten. It was bad I knew this, but I did not want him to see. Every time he asked to take a look, I made excuses and scurried off. I left the house and wandered to the local park on the pretext of learning my Latin texts. But it was to avoid the would be doctor’s scrutiny and the jealousy I felt for my younger sister, who was also well into adolescence at fourteen, and held no such scruples about her teeth. Nowhere as deteriorated as mine.
She was happy to let the would-be doctor poke away as much as he wanted.
How my young self pined and squirmed and suffered on the swing seat of a park intended only for toddlers but sometimes occupied by bored adolescents who came to kill time. But most days I was alone and pining for love. A love that never came.
Of all the ironies, as time passed, and a series of circumstances led us to leave from under the Dutch family’s roof and move instead to board at our convent school, the eldest son was ordained a priest. Within two years he sought a dispensation. He had fallen in love with my eldest sister and together they had a child even before he left the priesthood.
It seemed priests could be seduced after all. And the third son, the one on whom I had set my sights, eventually graduated as a medical practitioner, and worked for several years as such.
He never married. He had a religious vocation and decades later he left medicine and trained to become a priest. A more devoted a priest you could not imagine.
What a strange world my younger self occupied. A world of mystery and awe. With rules that others broke and temptations they denied. A world where everything seemed in order but was not.
I must hold my younger self more gently; she was only doing the best she could with what was at hand. She did not see the folly of her ways.
