The time I washed in holy water!
Was she enlightened?
Possibly she was – but the long and the short of it was that between the age of nine and 11 my dear old mum had a notion for me learning a foreign language and to this end, via a special family-swap agency, she had a number of foreign children to stay for part of the summer.
There was George Kulenkampff from Germany, there was Christina Ericsen from Sweden (who was six years older than me, and so beautiful that she made all the Tain lads wolf whistle), there was Chistina’s little brother Leif, there was Hugo from Belgium (who didn’t wash his feet), and there was Jacques de Tilly.
Jacques came from a grand old French family descended from another Jacques de Tilly (Jacques-Louis-François Delaistre de Tilly, to be exact) who was one of Napoleon’s generals and whose name is inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris – and Jacques’ mother had sent a letter with him stipulating that Jacques absolutely had to go to church every Sunday.
Now in those days there wasn’t a Catholic church in Tain – now and again the faithful worshipped in a room in Tain library – but there was one in Invergordon and, by parental decree, I was to accompany Jacques there every Sunday.
“Gloria in excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis…”
Eh?
“Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth...”
Wasn’t the chap at the front ringing little bells? And wait a minute, didn’t “sanctus” mean “holy” in Latin? You see, another of my mother’s little quirks, at that tender age I was being taught a little Latin.
It was all terribly confusing. People kept bobbing up and down, but at least Jacques seemed to know what he was doing. I muddled along as best I could, and heeded Jacques’s restraining hand when the congregation stood up and started to file forward to kneel and receive something (a sweetie?) from the minister.
“Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Osanna in excelsis!”
“Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest” – ah, now everyone was heading for the door. Time to go home.
But as we queued to leave I noticed that people in front of me were putting their hand in a little basin of water on the left and then raising it their heads. So I did the same when I reached the basin and washed my face. Very thoroughly in fact.
It was only afterwards, in the car on the way back to Tain, that Jacques told me that the water in the basin was holy water and that in fact the people ahead of me had been dipping their fingers in before making the sign of the cross, “bonnet, piece, fags and matches” as an irreverent Protestant Nigg workmate was to describe it to me many years later.
Needless to say, I was mortified by my fearful faux pas. Indeed I still rather shudder to think of it now. But, during my adolescent years I was not greatly troubled by acne, and I like to think that this was all to do with the Invergordon holy water.
Jacques de Tilly was an exceptionally nice boy and I sometimes wonder what he does and where he is now. Methinks that this is exactly where social media could prove instrumental. I must settle down and have a go. I wonder if he still remembers his summer in Easter Ross?
When I told my holy water story to Tain’s Father Richard Reese this week, he positively shouted with laughter.
“I’ll send you a bottle of holy water. Why, I do it all the time. And in return you can send me some of your brother’s Tain cheese.”
And to end where I began – while German and Swedish evade me (apart from “Jag älskar dig” the Swedish for “I love you”), I can today speak some French.
Merci Maman.
Thank you Ma.
