Father Joe The Man Who Saved My Soul

chapter one How I met Father Joe: I was fourteen and having an affair with a married woman. At least she called it an affair; she also said we were lovers, and on several occasions, doomed lovers. An average teen, I was quite content with these exalted terms; in practice, however, I only got to second base with her. (I didn't yet know it was second base, as I was growing up in England.) It was only rather later too, when I saw The Graduate, that I realized my Mrs. Robinson may have been somewhat older than she admitted towhich was twenty-two. To my unpracticed eye she could certainly pass for that; I was still young enough that any woman with breasts and a waist and her own teeth was roughly the same age as any otherwhich is to say a grown-upand the mysterious repository of unimaginable pleasures deserving . . . . . . hideous, very specific torments. The fly in the ointment of this relationship was that we were both Catholics. At least in theory (theory to me, practice to her), there was a terrible bill being racked up somewhere, calibrating the relative sinfulness of everything we did, every gesture made, every word exchanged, let alone every kiss. Should death strike, should lightning fork from one of the huge trees outside into our concupiscent bodies, should one of the experimental jets being developed over the hill at DeHavilland's disintegrate and plummet to earth (as they often threatened to do when trying to break the sound barrier), turning her trailer into a fireball, down, down we would plunge, into the bowels of Hell, unshriven, unforgiven, damned for all eternity to indescribable suffering. A lot of what little conversation we hadmuch more the norm were interminable, agonized, what she called "existential" silencesconcerned whether we should even be having a conversation, should even be together for that matter, doomed lovers in the throes of a hopeless and illicit liaison, wrestling with the irresistible temptation of being in the same neighborhood, town, county, country, planet, dimension. We were so bad for one another, she said, such a monumental occasion of sin for each other, it was playing with fire; oh, if only we'd never met and plunged ourselves into this cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no escape! These sentiments were very new to me. My instinctive response was that they were pretty goofy, but what did I know? I dimly recognized that I was going through some kind of passage out of childhood and would from now on be required to learn, without being taught, how grown-ups acted and spoke. Best not to rock the boat, by suppressing a classroom splutter. I had a good thing going. Mrs. Bootle was no slouch in the looks department. Perhaps this was the way women always spoke in extremis. Books were my only guide and so far it all seemed pretty true to formlike being in The Thorn Birds if it had been written by Christina Rossetti. But it had been a long time since the first hesitant kiss, and we'd done lots of kissing since. I was getting restless, anxious to find out what would be the next cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no escape. Now on a bleak Saturday morning in the damp, dank early spring of green, green Hertfordshire, England, The World, The Solar System, The Universe, in the year of our Lord 1956, I was about to find out. She stood at the kitchen end of the trailer, where the sink was, surrounded by dirty dishes, her back to the picture window through which a waterlogged plot ran down to the river, swollen and sullen in the rain, the depressed little green caps of her higgledy-piggledy vegetable garden poking through the mud. "Should we?" she said in an agonized half-sob. "I think we should," I replied, having no idea what she was tHendra, Tony is the author of 'Father Joe The Man Who Saved My Soul', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400061846 and ISBN 1400061849.