“Keep Calm and Carry On”
—WORLD WAR II PROPAGANDA POSTER
We ran to the Underground when the Blitz began,” Nanny said, sitting on the edge of my bed.
My eyes widened. “Did you hear air-raid sirens first?”
“Oh yes,” she said, nodding. “Hundreds of them, blaring across London. We had to cover our ears when we ran.”
There was something about the sound of air-raid sirens that I loved. During the worst years of the Cold War, they would test the one on the roof of the Greenwich fire station once a week. I thought it sounded cool. Adults didn’t. If they were holding your hand, they’d squeeze a little tighter or pull you to their sides when they heard it start to whine. We lived just outside New York City, probably one of the first places they’d drop a bomb.
“The bombs exploding above us were awful,” Nanny went on. “We prayed or sang school songs so we wouldn’t think about it.”
I sat on my pillow, back to the wall, hugging my knees to my chest. Listening to Nanny tell stories about living through World War II in London was my favorite bedtime ritual. Most children go to bed hearing someone read them Winnie the Pooh or The Adventures of Peter Cottontail. Instead, I heard firsthand accounts of the vagaries of war.
Nanny was our governess, a holdover from our days living in London when my father worked for Screen Gems. When the family moved back to the United States, my mother brought Nanny with us; it turned out to be a decision that saved our lives. Her name was Ethelreda Baker, and she originally hailed from Lytham St. Annes, a small town in Lancashire.
“Once, the Jerries dropped a bomb and it landed in our backyard, but it didn’t go off,” Nanny said. “We found it in the morning when we came home from the air-raid shelter.”
“What did you do, Nanny?” I whispered, leaning forward.
“We called the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit. After a few days they came and took it away,” she said, running her hands down her thighs to smooth out the wrinkles on her dress.
This amazed me: people going about their daily lives with a bomb sticking out of the ground in their backyard like a weaponized birdbath. I assumed that if Nanny could get through the Blitz in one piece, then she could get us through our childhoods. It just wouldn’t be as easy.
In early spring, when I hear the whistling of robins in the maple tree in front of my home, I think of Nanny. She was thin boned like a small bird, maybe 5'2". Her upper back was slightly rounded, which I used to think was caused by hunching over and squinting at the ground to avoid tripping on furniture. When Nanny was a child, her eyes had been badly burned during an eye exam when the ophthalmologist accidentally put the wrong drops in them. One of her eyelids drooped so low it left only a small slit for her to peer through. Her other eye was glazed and rheumy, and it wandered willy-nilly around her eye socket. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for her when I saw Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter movies. She wore powder-blue cat-eye glasses with fake diamonds on the frames. The lenses were so thick and the prescription so powerful that when you put them on, they made you feel dizzy enough to throw up. To make up for Nanny being legally blind without glasses, God gave her an exquisite radar system. She had a preternatural ability for showing up during crimes in progress. Once the offender was in custody, she would bring out the dreaded hairbrush that was always mysteriously nearby and beat your butt like it was a rug that needed dusting. Running was pointless. She could throw that hairbrush with the accuracy of a knife thrower. To this day I only use a comb.
When I was nine years old, Father Durcan told my mother that I would begin serving as an altar boy at the Friday 6 a.m. Mass the following week. To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic. I performed this duty as my brothers had before me, as well as countless generations of semiconscious Catholic boys before them. One might ask what gave this priest the right to tell a young boy and his parent that this was something they had to do. In the world of my youth, God himself gave the priest that right, and unless you or your parents wanted to spend innumerable eons in purgatory, you complied.
“Ian, it’s time to get up,” I heard Nanny whisper. She turned on the light on my bedside table.
She didn’t have to ask me more than once. This was the big morning. It was my first day on duty at the early Mass.
To allow time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and arrive at the church by 5:45, Nanny woke me at 5:15. While I brushed my teeth and wet and combed my hair, she laid out my school uniform on the bed and then padded off to the kitchen to make my breakfast. Nanny was no Jamie Oliver. Her cooking was old-school English, which meant you had to wear a Hazmat suit while you ate it. British cuisine is an oxymoron. If the Brits had lobbed their blood sausages and gelatinous white gravy at the Nazis, World War II would have been over in two weeks. Nanny did, however, have one ingredient in the larder that could resurrect even the most unpalatable dish: butter. For Nanny, butter wasn’t a condiment; it was a food group. Her Brussels sprouts performed backstrokes in it. Melting squares of it could be found lurking in the substrata of one’s porridge. Even our dry cereal wasn’t safe from the reach of these saturated fat pads. For Nanny, butter could cure anything, maybe even advanced dementia. Despite her challenges in the kitchen, I relished the poached eggs she served me most mornings, placed on butter-soaked white toast and scored into twelve tiny squares.
Nine-year-olds tend to be trusting souls. They believe that their caretakers are incapable of doing anything that is not in their best interest. When the cosmic forces that hold our planet on its course go awry, however, the more vulnerable at the back of the herd get picked off first. On the morning of my inaugural Mass, Nanny failed to put on her glasses while looking at her alarm clock, and instead of waking me at 5:15, she roused me at 3:15. I suspected that something was amiss right away. It was darker outside than it should have been. I peered out the kitchen window and did not see the line of cars filled with bleary-eyed commuters driving to the station to catch the 5:52 to Manhattan that my mother had assured me would be on the roads when I walked to the church. Even so, it did not occur to me to question Nanny on the matter. She was a half century older than I, she had attended professional nanny school, and she was packing a hairbrush. At 3:30 a.m., Nanny helped me put on my winter coat and rubbers—an unfortunate word English people use for galoshes. I innocently used it once at a new school. Once. Then she sent me into the dark of night with instructions to do as Father Durcan said and serve our Lord Jesus and the Holy Family with a gladsome heart.
I made the short walk to the church under a sky lit by an incandescent winter moon. The houses on our street were dark, and I could see my breath in the sharp air of that December morning. It was a scene from the thirteenth century. I was the innocent lamb trudging across markless snowfields to an uncertain fate in the Children’s Crusades. I paint this picture in retrospect. In reality, I was just really freaking cold.
Architecturally, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church looked Norman in design. The two square towers that abutted either side of the sanctuary were crowned with crenellated rooflines and stood majestically on Greenwich Avenue. It looked like a castle that had fallen from the sky onto one of the most expensive and desirable stretches of commercial real estate in the world. Directly to the left of the church was my grammar school. In the 1980s, that building would be torn down and the property sold to a developer. Today, a Victoria’s Secret store occupies the space where my first-grade classroom was once located. I should be morally outraged, but the irony is too sweet.
When I arrived outside the church, I stopped, confused and uneasy. Father Durcan had promised me he would be readying the altar when I got there. The medieval-looking chandeliers that hung from the ceiling on great black chains should have been illuminating the stained-glass windows. No such luck. The place was darker than the devil’s heart.
Now I faced a difficult decision: should I remain outside in the freezing cold or go inside the dark church and wait for Father Durcan, who had probably overslept and would no doubt appear in a few minutes? I looked up and down Greenwich Avenue, but there was not a light to be found. This is what Gandalf and the Fellowship of the Ring must have felt when they stood at the gates of the Mines of Moria. With great trepidation, I entered.
Unlike those mistrusting and impious Protestants, we Catholics prided ourselves on never locking our churches. It took the whole weight of my slight frame to pull open the great honey-colored oak doors that led into the narthex. I stood for a few moments in the vestibule, wondering whether I should walk through the next set of doors and enter the main sanctuary. The wind whistling through the gap in the front doors convinced me that all the way in was better than halfway out.
The main sanctuary at St. Mary’s was majestic. It had veined marble floors and fluted, marble columns. The ceiling was probably forty feet at its peak. Just beneath the ceiling on a short hanging wall were yellowed individual portraits of saints, each framed by round moldings. They peered down on the faithful with stern expressions, as if to say, “So, what’s your excuse?”
The only light came from the racks of votive candles set in burgundy glass located against the rear and side walls of the sanctuary. These weren’t the newfangled votives they use today, where you put a quarter in the collection box, say your prayer of intercession, and hit a button that lights a fake electric candle. Does anyone really think God takes that sort of tepid prayer seriously? No, these were the days when worries about fire safety were trumped by concern about offending the Almighty. We used real candles that flickered, casting dancing shadows on the walls and ceilings.
Standing in a large sanctuary illuminated only by candles, listening to the whistling wind at my back, began to have its way with me. My heart beat like a tiny hammer against my ribs. I was walking into the heart of the mysterium tremendum.
“Father Durcan, are you here?” I squeaked.
My question was answered by a long yawning sound, followed by a hiss, and then a metallic bang that went off like a gunshot. I knew in my mind that it came from air trapped in the warming radiator pipes, but it was too late. I was undone.
I am told that roughly five thousand children die every year from simply being startled. It’s called the Baskerville effect. Why I didn’t at that moment join that statistical sample of children who perish from sudden alarm is a grace. My entire body became awash in adrenaline, the kind that makes you feel like your interior is being mentholated. I dropped the cassock and surplice I had been carrying over my shoulder in the plastic dry-cleaning bag and made a run for the altar, repeating the name of Jesus to ward off the ghosts that lurked in the shadows. It didn’t matter to me that Father Durcan would be horrified if he found me hiding under the altar, desecrating the table upon which Jesus was sacrificed during the Mass. This was a matter of life or death. I curled into a ball and prayed that I would be spared.
At 4 a.m. Nanny realized her error.
“Mummy, come quickly—something terrible has happened!” she said, banging on my parents’ bedroom door.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” my father moaned, turning over to try to go back to sleep.
My mother, accustomed to Nanny’s excitability, came out to calm her down. But once the facts were known, she grabbed the first jacket she could find—a mink waistcoat—and ran out the door. A true Irish Catholic mother is rarely put off her game by news that one of her sons might be in danger. After surviving the wild exploits of my older brothers, she was inured to mother-fear. Still, a nine-year-old wandering the streets in the middle of a cold winter night was reason to take swift action.
I had already prayed well over a thousand Hail Marys when I heard the two doors leading into the sanctuary open, then swing back and forth just like the ones in saloons in Westerns. I felt certain my savior had come. Who else could it be other than Father Durcan? Peering out from under the altar frontal, however, I was stupefied. In those days, women wore full-length nightgowns. My mother’s was made of gauzy, ice-blue chiffon; it hung all the way to the floor and was trimmed with lace along the sweeping hemline. From seventy-five feet away, in the inky penumbra of the dim sanctuary, I saw not my mother but the archangel Gabriel, or perhaps even the Holy Ghost himself, attired in heavenly robes and floating side to side in the wavering candlelight at the back of the church. Then I heard the gliding figure whispering in pressured tones, “Ian, where are you?”
Even if I had wanted to answer, I could not. Even a grown man like Isaiah had fallen and trembled with fear in the presence of the Lord. I, too, was sore afraid. The indistinct figure began making its way down the center aisle toward the altar, pausing to look in every pew. With its every step my small bladder sent a flood warning to my pants.
The hovering specter stopped halfway down the nave. “If you’re hiding from me, I’ll kill you!” it said.
The religious imagination of a nine-year-old Catholic boy is an awesome thing. I shrieked as no child has ever shrieked before or since. It was a cry to wake the dead.
I leaped from under the altar and threw myself at the feet of the Virgin Mary, who stood enshrined in marble at the side of the altar and whose beatific smile had so often comforted me during the Mass. I vowed to her that I would join St. Damian as a missionary to the lepers on the island of Molokai if she would protect me.
And the Holy Mother answered.
The lights came on. There stood Father Durcan, mouth agape, staring at my bleary-eyed mother in her mink waistcoat and ice-blue chiffon nightgown, red hair run riot on her head, without the benefits of makeup, frozen in the center aisle like a thief caught in the act by an equally surprised home owner, and me quaking at the feet of the Virgin. We were a Shakespearean tableau gone awry.
I was forgiven, but days passed before my mother spoke in full sentences to Nanny again.
Nanny didn’t have to follow a troubled American family to the United States. She could have remained in England and found a stable and prestigious family with well-behaved children to work for, but she didn’t. She loved us, and love is not quick to quit.
She would stand in the gap between my father and us when he threatened harm, and she held us tight to her breast when, despite her best efforts, she failed to do so. She missed paychecks when times were hard, but to my knowledge she never once threatened to leave. Her eyes were dim, but she watched over us with ferocious devotion. This was the errand upon which God had sent her, and she completed it. Of how many people can this be said?
After twenty-three years of living in our home, my mother made arrangements for Nanny to live in an apartment complex for the elderly in Greenwich so she would be near us. She did not return to England. It was not her home. We were.
Once every few weeks I would go to her studio apartment to have a toasted cheese sandwich with her. Sometimes she’d make me poached eggs on toast, like I was a kid again. When I’d put my coat on to leave, she would stuff a five-dollar bill into my pocket to buy gas for my dinged-up Gran Torino. Nanny lived on a small pension, so I would try to give the five back.
“Don’t be cheeky,” she’d say, closing my fist around the bill with those hands I’d gripped so tightly as a boy.
I wish I knew then what I know now about duty and love. I’d have gone to visit her more.
Nanny died one month before I turned twenty-four. My mother sat on the edge of her hospital bed and held her hand as she slipped into the heart of God. There’s no one Nanny would have wanted at her side at that moment more than my mother. Nanny would sometimes tell people that my mother was her daughter, nodding her head up and down to highlight the gravity of this secret. It was a plot worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. My grandmother complained, but God bless her, my mother never told Nanny to stop.
Minutes after Nanny died, my mother removed her cat-eye glasses and gave them to me. I’ve kept them in the top drawer of my bedside table for twenty-five years. I suspect they will remain there for the rest of my life.