Alma, mater and pater

 

Jeffrey Talbot was sitting in the back of his Father's VW Beetle as it trundled noisily down a long and unmemorable A-road, one which would, he hoped, eventually lead to the much-discussed Devonshire holiday. The atmosphere in the car was tense following and incident with a map that had caused an argument between his parents. His father was driving now, so the radio was under his control and therefore tuned to football results which were momentarily disrupted each time they drove under a bridge, causing him to tut and slap the steering wheel as he missed the score of a particularly important team. In stark contrast his mother was very obviously not listening to the radio, rather she had turned slightly towards her passenger window and was smoking in a slightly theatrical manner. Every few moments she aimed a jet of smoke at the gap between the top of the glass on the door from where it would hit the incoming breeze and blow backwards in Jeffrey’s direction. Now, and again, she would set aside her cigarette in the fold-out ashtray and pull down the vanity mirror hidden in the back of the passenger sun-visor to adjust an eyelash or check her lipstick during which time her eyes would briefly meet with Jeffrey’s, and he would feel as if she was checking on his behaviour as much as her appearance.

Jeffrey was trying to 'be good' as his mother had stipulated when she had demanded that he stop jigging his leg on the back of her seat when they were barely out of Bristol, and insofar as Jeffrey knew anything, he knew that being good was a code for doing nothing. He was to sit there and simply do nothing for the rest of the journey or, as his father had warned, the holiday would be ruined before it even began. Adults imploring him to do nothing loomed large in Jeffrey’s life, from his enforced snooze on Sunday afternoons to the quiet desperation of rainy school holidays it seemed to be the ideal state of stupefaction that he never could reach. 'Good children should be seen and not heard' his grandmother often reflected as she let the ash dangle dangerously from her Peter Stuyvesant. She smoked at the kitchen table every day after lunch as she retouched her blue eyeshadow and the phrase particularly haunted Jeffrey as he ate his allotted Mr Kipling fondant fancy because as much as he found it hard to 'be good' he apparently found it harder not to make any noise. Recently, while trying to climb the stairs, he had been accused of 'galumphing' whatever that meant, and he was famous for chewing loudly with his mouth open, 'like a man walking through a bog' his mother had declared. At school none of this was a problem, but at home it all seemed so overwhelmingly important that he had begun to worry about making noise before he had made any, which made him clumsy and therefore apt to make more noise. He just couldn’t win.

Happily, there wasn’t anything left to eat in the Beetle since he had eaten the last of the sugar-dusted travel sweets from the old round tin in the glove compartment during a recent school drop-off, so Jeffrey couldn’t be accused of crunching boiled sweets again either. Peeling his legs away from the sticky vinyl of the back seat he knelt up to look out of the back window through the wire lines of the defrosting mechanism, and concentrated on watching out for unusual pub signs, a favourite game he would play with his father when they were alone together. The Alma Arms was on their left at a traffic light and Jeffrey's eyes fixed on it until the car turned and it blurred in the distance. “Alma” Jeffrey said under his breath, feeling the pleasing juxtaposition of tongue and lips in the middle of the word. He’d only heard this word in one place before, one of the prayers that was said, occasionally in the school chapel; one of the prayers in Latin that nobody really understood. “Alma” he muttered again, this time releasing the final vowel with a theatrical puff of air, so his jaw dropped down low and his father glanced at him warily in the rear-view mirror.

Alma Redemptoris Mater, quae pervia caeli porta manes… the school chaplain would read aloud and Jeffrey, safely anonymous in a long row of boys sat cross-legged on the chapel floor would read the English translation line by line in response: Loving Mother of the Redeemer, who remains the gate by which we mortals enter heaven…

Jeffrey looked at his own mother as she picked at her chipped nail polish. Did she know where the gate to heaven was? Probably, he thought as he mouthed the word again “Alma”. Then he said it three times in a row, “Alma, Alma, Alma.” Then an idea struck him, he would keep saying Alma quietly to himself for the rest of the journey, that way it might become the most said word in the world. Just then the car bounced over a small hump-backed bridge, “Alma, Alma, Alma” Jeffrey said, the last one sounding louder than he intended. He blushed bright red and sat down meekly. “Alma, Alma, Alma” he muttered again as they pulled away at a roundabout. “Alma, Alma, Alma” he muttered again and again until is mother slapped the back of the seat. “For Christsakes Jeff” she hissed, “your father’s listening to the radio”.