David Charters: Ah, the old problem - Life

Sep 16 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

"YOUR laughter does not deafen me,” I said, in a peevish tone, as my latest joke seemed to lose its bearings in the humid air humming around my friend and colleague, who was sitting in the desk opposite mine, watching a skin form over the tea cooling in his stained mug.

It was one of those yawning lulls in the office afternoon, when your weary body calls for rest, but your mind knows it must splutter on, until shadows cross the streets.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I was worrying about how I’m going to cope.”

“With what?” I asked.

“Life,” he said. “Nothing special, just life in general, same as everybody else.”

“Ah, the old problem,” I said. “Life.”

This time, he smiled, before chuckling quietly in the old appreciative way. You see, observations are funny. Jokes are rarely funny, particularly those contrived ones, which place an Irishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman, a mute parrot, a Prime Minister, a Belgian belly-dancer, a surgical boot salesman, a Coptic bishop, a whoopee cushion inflater, a natterjack toad, an Aztec rain-dancer, a suicidal Swede and a yodelling Mormon, all in the same lift.

But there is always a gentle smile in our consideration of life. “It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going,” as Mona Lott used to say in the old wireless show, ITMA, now cobwebbed in the folk memory.

I remember a man who smiled at life in the most sympathetic way, through the slow blue of his eyes, shaking his head at the crazy parade, but always marvelling at how, amid all the confusion and sorrow, there rose poems and melodies, grand sculptures, paintings and the ceaseless beat of the human spirit. He was an auld country apple of a chap – the skin was rough and bruised here and there, but inside the juice was sweet and good.

He had faith, a belief in God, which thundered within, but was never expressed loudly. In noise lay emptiness, in the silence came reason.

For him, life down here was just a preparation for what was to come. He gave it all he had in passion and prayer and learning, yet he knew that one day his soul would be drawn from a body, once broad and angular, which had become stooped and wheezy.

Now he’s gone and I wonder where he is. Has he found everything he wanted? Is it just as he was told it would be when he was a little boy back on the family farm in Crossboy, County Sligo, where, by the light of a turf fire, listening to the soft blow of the wind, his mother, Ellen, would read to him from the books of Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. And the black Bible rested on the table.

The wisdom, which had come naturally to Godfrey Carney, was polished at All Hallows College, Dublin, where he trained for the priesthood.

And then he came to Liverpool, a gangly fellow of devout ways, with great, heavy-knuckled hands and a voice given by God to caress every word. People saw him, priestly black, trilling the bell on his big bike, as he did the rounds of St Sylvester’s Church, on Scotland Road.

Well, many years later, a reader said that I should interview him. “His faith is the strongest you will ever know,” he said.

By then, Father Carney was stepping into his nineties. He had served many parishes in the city and was still writing stories, aided a little by the tingle of a whisky and ginger. The man was utterly dedicated to God and the truth that He had revealed through Jesus Christ. I have never been more convinced of a man’s sincerity.

Although I met him a few times only, we became friends. One day, I phoned him to ask about Percy French, the Irish songwriter. Came the reply, in a voice perfectly pitched to tremble the soul, somewhere between a tenor and light baritone, “Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight, with people all working by day and by night. Sure they don’t sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat, but there’s gangs of them digging for gold in the street.”

Yes, French’s song, the Mountains of Mourne, was familiar to Father Carney, as were so many other ballads, hymns, prayers and passages of fine literature.

He died last month, aged 98, seemingly still at peace with this world, patiently waiting. I hope the peace in his new world has brought him all he wanted and that he is able to speak of our life on Earth with a quiet smile, perhaps offering a few words of encouragement to the rest of us in that lift.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk