Thursday 6 October 2011

Grandma RIP

Today is the 4th anniversary of Grandma's death. I used to go over and spend Sunday with her quite often and over the years it morphed into me taking her to Mass. She expressed opinions by putting them onto others and so it went, 'You like Latin, so let's go to the morning o'clock Mass at Church B, rather than the other one I normally get the bus to.' She would then exhibit a perfect knowledge of all the responses and the missa de angelus. Both my maternal Grandparents were essentially brought up in religious communities; my Grandmother with the FCJ's from the ages of 2-20 after her mother died of TB aged 27 leaving 5 children, and my Grandfather with the Christian Brothers at Prior Park College Bath - it's never been explained how the 2nd youngest child of 9 from a tiny cabin in rural Co Kerry ended up there (an English public school,) and then went to St Mary's Strawberry Hill, where he did an external degree from London University in 1930, taking a first, anyone else got a Grandfather who did that? - anyway their upbringing and deference to religious authority means that only very tiny expressions of opinion could give away what they really thought. That and my Grandfather's text book Red Letter Feasts for Catholic Schools, which shall we say is a bit low on chatty group work. More read the passage answer the closed questions in full sentences whilst looking at the black and white reproductions of pictures from the old masters, published by kind permission of The National Gallery London. It was published before Vatican II, so all his pie charts of the liturgical year went out of date.... for a while and are now right back in.

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