Bless the baked beans
It's a Wednesday morning in August 1983. I'm 11, nearly 12 and our parish priest has come to bless our new home and village store.
I shared this reading at our writing group Spoken Word evening held Thursday 23rd January 2025. There are so many angles I could have taken with this, so many more details I wanted to shoehorn in, but there is where I ended up with a five-minute time limit that I’d already stretched to six…
Bless the baked beans
A drop of holy water lands on my jeans as Father John mutters blessings and sprinkles holy water on shelves stacked with tins of vegetables, Fray Bentos pies and baked beans.
As he turns towards the chest freezers, I melt further into the wall knowing that all I need to do is shuffle to the side a little and take a couple of steps back and I’ll be in the soft, musty warmth of the wool shop, he won’t come in here, will he? Because in this village shop, sorry our village shop, we don’t just sell baked beans and pints of milk. We also have two petrol pumps, a wool shop and a branch of Lloyds Bank that someone from the bank comes to open – occasionally.
I still can’t quite understand how this village shop seven miles outside Buckingham is now our home and where mum and dad work. Mum who’s never worked outside the home. And dad? Well he was always flying off to New Zealand for work, away for weeks on end, his loopy handwriting on the odd postcard arriving from Auckland. When he was home, he’d be off to London. Early starts at Smithfield meat market buying and selling New Zealand lamb that would end up in supermarkets and restaurants, and our chest freezer. When did they decide that running a business together was a good idea?
Neither can I quite believe that on this otherwise normal Wednesday morning in August, at the start of the summer holidays, our parish priest is walking around spraying us and the shop with holy water.
I don’t know whether to stay and watch this religious tableaux unfold in front of me and bemused customers or make a run for it. We were already marked in the village, what with being new, and now this, this wasn’t going to help our reputation in the village.
Maybe I should hide in the wool shop or get out before mum’s inevitable, ‘Harriet. Make yourself useful, go and put the kettle on.’
I’m old enough to be useful even if I’m not quite old enough to understand how we’ve ended up here. And being useful includes stacking shelves, manning the till, weighing vegetables, and making tea.
I decide to escape and head straight for the shop door making the universal sign for cup of tea in mum’s direction. She’s serving one of our grey-haired regulars, here for his daily Rizlas and tobacco, whilst keeping an eye on Fr John’s disappearing back, and the two petrol pumps where dad was last seen filling up a blue Ford Fiesta.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t used to prayers, priests or going to church even. It’s just that religion was something that happened elsewhere, in church, not in the house. Going to mass was all about the soothing ritual of repeated prayers and responses, belting out hymns. It was both reflective and sociable. It was cups of tea and biscuits, ‘Hello father, great sermon, thank you,’ Chats with friends after mass, spotting who we knew in the line for communion.
40 miles and a few short months separated us from our previous life cocooned in the warmth of family and familiarity, yet it might as well have been Mars.
The initial excitement of having ready access to crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks – a big plus when making friends in the new school playground - of having mum and dad at home all the time, had helped to distract me from the shock at being uprooted but that excitement was waning.
I mean apart from anything; dad now drove to the cash and carry in a canary yellow Chevanne rather than a shiny company car with electric windows. He’d replaced his sharp navy Austin Read suits with wool V-neck jumpers and he’d grown a beard. Who was this man? Mum though, was reassuringly the same her laser focus and sharp mind to rearranging the shop, bringing in new stock whilst also keeping an eye on me, my violin practice and dad.
I can’t remember dad drinking, zero memories of him splashing amber liquid into a cut glass tumbler, yet I clearly remember driving home with him from Buckingham, he’d said he was going to the bank while I looked at the cassette tapes and pick n mix in Woollies, but I had my doubts as my hands gripped the my seat, as we veered across the white lines to the blaring of car horns and flashing lights, dad trancelike, remembering other times he’d forgotten to collect me from piano or violin lessons.
And I didn’t need to overhear the two village gossips telling mum how dad had been going on solo village pub crawls and that people had started ‘talking’, to know that alcohol was the problem, even if I didn’t really understand how or why or even what alcohol really was or why that made this tall, quiet, kind man the problem.
Moving house seemed to be the catch-all answer to these vague and nebulous problems. Maps appeared on kitchen walls with towns and villages marked with drawing pins. We’d go on long car drives to check places out. We moved three times in little over a year – consecutive Christmases dominated by packing boxes, moving out dates not quite coinciding with moving in dates. And each time we moved, our family shrank a little mum figuring that my siblings were now old enough to be sent away to college or to stay with family friends, even if it was just for a few weeks to see us through the move.
But at 11 and the youngest of four I kept myself close to mum, and I was happy to be at home, even if home wasn’t recognisable as home anymore. I was happy to play shops, I loved, still love standing at a till with a pricing gun, and I liked this idea that you could start again, reinvent yourself.
And I was happy to have finally shrugged off my siblings, to be able to sprawl across the sofa reading Smash Hits, playing Wham Rap at full blast and watching Grange Hill without anyone sneering. Did I mention ready access to crisps and fizzy drinks?
And so, once clear of the holy water, the shop door closed with a ‘ding’, I wander round the back to our back door and into the kitchen. I put the kettle on, grabbing four mugs from the cupboard figuring there’s no rush. I’ll leave it a few minutes before taking tea through to mum and Fr John, maybe dad’ll have turned up by then too. I’ll grab a packet of biscuits from the shop for mum and Fr John, and maybe a packet of crisps for me, but then I’ll head back upstairs and put Wham on again.