It\u2019s now over two years since my mother\u2019s funeral, her body returned to the church in Coventry where she had worshipped for so long.\u00a0 Born and brought up in Ireland, she died in a coastal care home close to me.\u00a0 Yet for eighty years Frances Smith had lived in her adopted city, much of that time in the same house.\u00a0 Taken together, Frances\u2019s close identification with Coventry and her increasingly relaxed view of Catholicism revealed much about who she was and how she viewed the world.<\/p>\n
St John Fisher is a bright, spacious, generously furnished building, light on guilt-inducing statuary, intimidating confessionals and ill-lit side chapels.\u00a0 Mid-century modernism and the second Vatican Council meant Catholic parish churches differed little in design from the Anglican outstations of Coventry\u2019s stunning new cathedral, consecrated in 1962.\u00a0 Within a young, fast-growing congregation were families where the main wage earner was \u2018making good money on the track.\u2019\u00a0 Coventry was a vibrant and prosperous car city, its citizens\u2019 keen sense of collective identity and civic pride forged by the Blitz and consolidated by an ambitious programme of reconstruction.\u00a0 However real its achievements postwar Coventry had obvious flaws, witness a thinly veiled suspicion of first-generation Afro-Caribbean and south Asian migrants.\u00a0 Concentrated in the city\u2019s poorest areas, these recent arrivals challenged the model of cultural assimilation promoted by local churches and the city council.<\/p>\n
Labour\u2019s thirty-year control of \u2018The Corporation\u2019 saw local leaders become household names.\u00a0 They cultivated long resident working-class families \u2013 Coventry had a long history of nonconformity and organised labour \u2013 and they embraced successive waves of migration.\u00a0 The Depression hit the Midlands hard, but \u2018sunrise industries\u2019 like cars and machine tools attracted workers from areas ravaged by mass unemployment: migrants from south Wales reinforced Coventry\u2019s reputation as a city where rugby union cut across class barriers.\u00a0 The Welsh were mostly nonconformist, but not so other incomers.<\/p>\n
The 1930s saw Irish men start to settle in the city.\u00a0 Large families and limited work opportunities in the Irish Free State meant increased migration to England.\u00a0 Recent arrivals either married local girls (alienating in-laws given the Catholic Church\u2019s insistence on conversion) or in due course brought young wives from home.\u00a0 More men arrived during the Second World War, most of them working in local factories but a sizeable number joining the British Army.\u00a0 Coventry\u2019s hospitals already employed Irish-trained nurses, but the onset of the National Health Service saw freshly qualified doctors and dentists leave Ireland to set up GP practices and dental surgeries in the city.\u00a0 Cultivated by the local clergy, this fledgling professional middle class acquired a privileged place within local parishes, their patients and fellow worshippers suitably deferential.\u00a0 St John Fisher was an exception, not least as the church had only two parish priests in half a century, both proudly proletarian.<\/p>\n
These days worshippers at St John Fisher come from across the world, many of them working in social care or the NHS, but in its early decades the congregation was almost wholly white and European.\u00a0 Religion, reinforced by faith-based schools, remained at the core of respective Irish, Polish and Italian heritages \u2013 for second and third generations family ties and traditions prevailed in the face of aggressive secularism, even when mass attendance every Sunday and holy day was no longer the norm.\u00a0 Among the early worshippers the presence of so many Poles was a story of betrayal and exile; the presence of so many Italians a consequence of early-century enterprise and mid-century defeat.\u00a0 The shadow of the Second World War loomed large for everyone, not just survivors of the Blitz.<\/p>\n
The Spanish and Portuguese enjoyed a token presence, as indeed did the English \u2013 unlike Lancashire, the west Midlands had no tradition of working-class recusancy.\u00a0 By weight of numbers the Irish dominated the parish, including the school.\u00a0 Built in the mid-fifties to an open-plan design, the classrooms of St John Fisher RC Primary School embodied a fresh progressive environment.\u00a0 In theory the curriculum acknowledged these new ideas, but in practice the first teachers appointed were almost all Irish and instructed to inculcate an ultramontane belief system little changed in a hundred years.\u00a0 This was an undisguised process of indoctrination rooted in rote-learning of the Catechism.\u00a0 Few parents challenged an approach so radically different from the education that non-Catholic primary schoolchildren enjoyed at this time.\u00a0 Someone who did was my mother.<\/p>\n
Frances Margaret Reid was born in 1920, and like her elder sister was well over a hundred when she died.\u00a0 Good genes meant their three brothers might have enjoyed similar longevity had they not lived lives of long hours and arduous labour.\u00a0 The children of a Galway tenant farmer and his wife (another centenarian), my mum and her siblings had few material possessions growing up, but they did benefit from plentiful exercise and a nutritious diet; with an abundance of vegetables, fresh milk and poultry, plus a salmon poached from the local stream every Sunday, it\u2019s no wonder the girls enjoyed such good health.\u00a0 Both mother and aunt were bright, but in different ways.\u00a0 The younger resourceful and receptive to change, the older scholarly and respectful of tradition; one saw no point in learning Irish and looked to the wider world, the other enthusiastically embraced a convent education and sought to continue her studies.<\/p>\n
Harsh reality ended my aunt\u2019s ambition of going to university, and she moved to Dublin.\u00a0 My mother soon followed, intending to join her sister in a dress shop.\u00a0 Frances left Galway for Dublin in late May 1936, but via England.\u00a0 The intention was to stay just a week with her brother in Coventry, but when she saw a haberdashery advertising a job my mum applied.\u00a0 To secure the position she lied about her age, advancing her sixteenth birthday several weeks to 26th May.\u00a0 Henceforth she celebrated her birthday in late May not mid-June.\u00a0 When twenty years ago I found her birth certificate and queried the inconsistency my mum claimed her father\u2019s poor command of the Irish language had left him confused when registering the date of birth.\u00a0 In due course I worked out what had happened, but I\u2019m sure my father never knew.\u00a0 In the eyes of the British state my mother\u2019s DOB was 26\/5\/20, and this de facto creation of a new persona symbolised the future Frances Smith\u2019s wholehearted embrace of England, and of her beloved Coventry.\u00a0 In every sense of the term, my mum started a new life.<\/p>\n
Frances found digs with Emily and Charlie Butler, becoming the daughter that they never had.\u00a0 She looked after the couple in old age, with \u2018Auntie Pem\u2019 like a grandmother to me.\u00a0 This was unsurprising as I scarcely saw my Irish grandma, the visits to Ireland tailing off early in my life.\u00a0 As a still relatively young woman my mum would go years without returning home; an absence I scarcely considered as a child and as a young man, but which when older astonished me.\u00a0 This reluctance to return home wasn\u2019t because she lacked the means.\u00a0 In fact, the very opposite applied.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s reinvention started with her voice.\u00a0 Unless you listened closely you would never guess she was Irish, but neither would you assume she came from Coventry.\u00a0 She never took elocution lessons, but it was as if she had.\u00a0 When my mum put on airs and graces she could sound comically posh; but her default voice was that of lower middle-class England, unidentifiable, anonymous, and slightly flawed (the odd grammatical error that no-one, least of all me, would ever pick her up on).\u00a0 I know no-one from Ireland who has lost their accent, but my mother did.\u00a0 She had an incentive given the backlash in Coventry when in August 1939 the IRA planted a bomb in the city centre, killing five people and injuring seventy.\u00a0 Meeting my father, with his low church anti-Papist parents, gave Frances a further reason to downplay her Irish roots.<\/p>\n
An accomplished cricketer and ballroom dancer, and a keen motorcyclist, Alf Smith worked in an aircraft factory.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, my mum passed on cricket catering but she quickly proved the ideal dance partner and the perfect pillion passenger.\u00a0 In autumn 1940 she proved her credentials as a partner for life, when on the terrible night of 14 November dad was temporarily blinded by a phosphorous explosion.\u00a0 My mum tracked him down to a Black Country asylum requisitioned as an emergency hospital.\u00a0 Imagine my father\u2019s feelings when in darkness he heard, \u2018Alf, it\u2019s Frances\u2026\u2019.\u00a0 Relieved and grateful my grandparents lost their prejudices in an instant, and yet they still refused to enter a Catholic church when Alf and Frances married in March 1945.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no doubt my mother had guts.\u00a0 She served in the East End as a St John Ambulance nurse at the height of the Blitz, and back in Coventry she crossed a devastated city on the morning of 15 November 1940 to report for work \u2013 a stupefied gateman sent her straight home.\u00a0 She worked at the Standard in the wages department.\u00a0 This was the ideal job for Frances who, though never mean, was singularly astute when it came to cash.\u00a0 When the war ended she borrowed the money for a house deposit, and thereafter although she never scrimped she always saved; helped by an inheritance from her oldest friend my mother died a modestly wealthy woman.\u00a0 Not that she was ever hard up, having married a man whose future circumstances \u2013 and whose view of the world \u2013 were transformed by his having secured a commission.\u00a0 Blooded in Normandy, Captain Alf Smith, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, held a series of staff appointments in Brussels and Berlin before being demobbed in December 1947.\u00a0 There followed a horrendous winter in the newly built, barely furnished house before a rapid promotion at Armstrong Whitworth Aviation saw my dad\u2019s impressive administrative and managerial skills properly recognised.\u00a0 From overseeing AWA\u2019s vehicle fleet he rose steadily through the factory hierarchy of Hawker Siddeley to retire as a senior manager at British Aerospace.\u00a0 From the shopfloor to the boardroom no one ever had a word to say against Alf Smith, a true gentleman, generous in spirit and in kind.<\/p>\n
My parents never left their neat terraced house.\u00a0 Ironically this reluctance to move up the property market consolidated their place within the aspirational middle class.\u00a0 My father never forgot his working-class roots; it wasn\u2019t in his nature, and anyway his family were an ever-present reminder.\u00a0 For my mother, however, her family were the other side of the Irish Sea.\u00a0 On balance friends counted more than relatives, with social activities focused on personal relationships developed within the workplace.\u00a0 My father and his peers were the last generation within British manufacturing industry where workplace qualifications and wartime experience counted as much if not more than a university degree.\u00a0 Only late in his career did dad have regular contact with graduates, and as a transport manager in the 1950s his drivers looked on him as the strict but kindly company commander they\u2019d responded well to in North Africa or Burma (my father and his fellow managers ate in The Mess and always answered the phone with their surnames: \u2018Smith speaking\u2026\u2019).<\/p>\n
My dad, his colleagues and their wives were first-generation middle class, all too evident across Britain as the years of austerity turned into the years of relative affluence.\u00a0 Generous salaries and workplace perks ensured ever-increasing disposable income, and disproportionately so for my parents given their modest mortgage repayments.\u00a0 As early as 1963 they took me to France, as early as 1960 they installed central heating and extended the house, and as early as 1959 they sent me to a fee-paying school \u2013 a non-Catholic fee-paying school.<\/p>\n
My parents were married seven years before I was born; a long time to wait for a first child.\u00a0 This may explain why my mother reacted so badly to two unexpected pregnancies in our extended family, each thirty years apart.\u00a0 She always gave the impression of a relaxed view towards sex outside of marriage, but her behaviour was frankly appalling when faced with the unplanned consequences.\u00a0 To be fair she redeemed herself in due course.\u00a0 How would she have behaved had a daughter revealed that she was pregnant prior to getting married?\u00a0 We\u2019ll never know as I was an only child.\u00a0 An only child raised as a Catholic, in accordance with the Church\u2019s dictat, and with my father\u2019s acquiescence.<\/p>\n
My mum made sure I could read and write before starting at St John Fisher.\u00a0 Despite an inauspicious start (on day one a belated arrival in reception left me drawing a disturbingly violent battle scene while the rest of the class depicted \u2018Our Lady of Lourdes appearing to St Bernadette.\u2019), I effortlessly accommodated a teaching environment in which the Holy Family and the Pope loomed a lot larger than Janet and John and the Queen.\u00a0 In time I became dimly aware that my home background was different from that of my peers.\u00a0 As an altar server my cotta and cassock were new not hand-me-downs, the costume for Hiawatha<\/em> was bought not made, none of my classmates read Knowledge<\/em> magazine or a twelve-volume encyclopaedia, and above all, the inside of our house did not look like that of a cottage in rural Ireland: downstairs there was no Marian iconography, no \u2018Sacred Heart of Jesus\u2019 and no statues of the saints.\u00a0 Nor was there was much of this stuff upstairs.\u00a0 My mother did not surround herself with Catholic statuary partly because hers was \u2018a mixed marriage\u2019 but primarily because she nurtured a domestic environment no different from that of her \u2013 universally Protestant \u2013 friends.<\/p>\n To be fair, my mum was genuinely ecumenical: she often accompanied my dad to the local Anglican church, she was a guide in the Cathedral\u2019s Chapel of Unity, she saw no sense in celibacy, and she scorned Rome\u2019s insistence on \u2018The One True Faith.\u2019\u00a0 Because \u2013 with me reluctantly in tow \u2013 she always attended mass on Sundays and days of obligation and in Holy Week, my mother displayed her credentials as a \u2018good Catholic.\u2019\u00a0 Only later, when such devotion became less visible, did I realise that her engagement was minimal (no benediction, no stations of the cross other than Good Friday, and confession once or twice a year); and that as the years passed this shrank to solely mass on Sunday.\u00a0 Mum had clearly felt a need to fulfil her parental requirement and set an example, especially when she decided that my education was best served in a non-Catholic school. \u00a0My father made the financial commitment, but it was Frances who confronted an angry headmaster, informing Mr Hume that I was leaving from St John Fisher for King Henry VIII \u2013 anyone familiar with martyrdom in the Henrician Reformation must surely appreciate the irony.<\/p>\n King Henry VIII Junior School was\/is on the south side of the city in the heartland of the local bourgeoisie.\u00a0 Previously I walked to school, but now I relied on car and bus to get me to and from Warwick Road.\u00a0 The master plan saw my parents pay what then were quite modest fees until I passed my eleven-plus and moved into the senior school.\u00a0 King Henry VIII is today independent, coeducational and expensive to attend, but from 1945 to the mid-1970s it received central funding (\u2018direct grant\u2019) and was one of Coventry\u2019s two grammar schools for boys.\u00a0 In the final year of junior school my class sat a mock eleven-plus every week; in due course all but one pupil passed the real exam, most of us being placed in the top two streams when we moved up.\u00a0 I later learnt that only one child in my old class at St John Fisher passed the eleven-plus and progressed to Bishop Ullathorne, the city\u2019s Catholic grammar school.\u00a0 Had my mother known this then she would have felt fully vindicated.<\/p>\n Each year at King Henry VIII was organised on a system of strict streaming, with pupils moved up or down at the end of every academic year; an incentive for remaining in the A and Alpha forms was sitting O-levels and thus A-levels a year early.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, once I found myself struggling in a survival of the fittest based on aggregate performance my mum had no problem with my not opting out of Religious Education \u2013 here was a subject like History so I could anticipate high marks.\u00a0 In due course I started attending assembly so I could sing the hymns and not wait silent and bored outside with all the other \u2018RCs and Jews.\u2019\u00a0 Once more my mother had no objection, quietly approving of a son acquainted with both Catholic and Anglican modes of worship.<\/p>\n Half a century later, kneeling beside my mother\u2019s coffin in St John Fisher, I knew that all was in accordance with her wishes.\u00a0 She had received the last rites, and now she was back in her own church for a short service of thanksgiving and farewell.\u00a0 A requiem mass was out of the question given that everyone in the church was either non-Catholic or lapsed; and the first to point this out would have been my mum.\u00a0 A harsh critic would see her as an unprincipled embodiment of upward social mobilisation, dismissing her country and compromising her religion.\u00a0 The reality, however, was that she immersed herself in her adopted city, always grateful for the opportunities it gave her, not least as a wife and a mother.\u00a0 The Galway girl became the Coventry kid, but her affection for Ireland was evident to all.\u00a0 Similarly, her relaxed view of Roman Catholicism, for so long adroitly disguised, demonstrated a strength of personality and a refusal to accept without question dogma, tradition and accepted practice.\u00a0 She had no time for blind obedience, her healthy scepticism reflective of how contemporary Catholics mainly view their faith and their relationship with the Church establishment.\u00a0 Frances Smith was very much her own woman; someone who knew what she wanted and what she believed in.\u00a0 Someone who, like so many women of that generation, across her long life was a force for good \u2013 we salute her, and we salute them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s now over two years since my mother\u2019s funeral, her body returned to the church in Coventry where she had worshipped for so long.\u00a0 Born and brought up in Ireland, she died in a coastal care home close to me.\u00a0 Yet for eighty years Frances Smith had lived in her adopted city, much of that … <\/p>\n