Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

‘Any good tidings?’ I asked from the doorway of the living room. ‘In your tidings-paper?’

‘Jem, take my dirty plate back to the kitchen, will you?’

‘OK, Dad.’

Shepherd job number two. Go to Nativity. This is the topmost important part of the play for nuns and they get fretful trying to organise it. It is the Adoration part wherein we all traipse to the manger to peek at Jesus, all the shepherds, royalty and Drummer Boy, and Mr and Mrs Innkeeper who would not let Mary and Joseph have a room, maybe because Mary and Joseph were too shabby for their inn, and now, of course, since the great tidings and ensuing events, the innkeepers feel pretty bad about this. Thems the breaks. OK. Now we crowd around the Little Lord Jesus and show our great joy and next, it is time to face the audience and hold hands and sing We WISH you a merry Christmas, we WISH you a merry Christmas and a HA-ppy New Year, which is quite a boring song but it is the end of the play, one more Nativity over and out, and after the clapping, we take off costumes and go home and have a big snack and this is the beginning of the Xmas holidays. Yay.

Last year, Directing Nun had a big idea for the Adoration part. She decided the shepherds and kings and Drummer Boy (girl), etc., ought to go on a long march to the Baby Jesus and not merely sweep in from offstage in the usual scrummage, making it so obvious how we are all just waiting to do this, huddled in the wings ready to sweep in all at once and do some adoring. It’s not realistic, she said. I don’t think realism is a big issue for nuns. I think Directing Nun wanted more of a party scene last year, that’s all, like a Trooping of the Colour parade involving a long march, drum rolls and singing and gifts at the end.

Directing Nun decided we must go down the stairs on the offstage side that leads to outdoors, putting on outdoor shoes first, of course, as we are all in olden times bare feet or sandals and also because nuns are very keen on the right shoes in the right places no matter what kind of emergency situation a girl is in. Girls have three types of shoes. 1) Outdoor shoes: dark brown / lace-ups. I choose Clarks Commandos for type 1 due to the word commando. 2) Indoor shoes: dark brown / buckles. Most girls have the kind I have, with buckles and little holes over the toes part like on a cheese grater, and soft soles so as not to scuff up the stone floors or old wooden floors of our convent. In my view, you would need ice skates to scuff up convent floors, but you cannot say this to nuns. 3) Plimsolls. This is a nun word for gym shoes: black canvas / lace-ups or slip-ons. I choose slip-ons for variety and for the funny feel of stretchy elastic in a tongue shape where laces or buckles usually go. I slip them on and off, on and off. These shoes are like gloves for feet.

Playground Nun is an old nun who watches over us in the playground. I don’t know what else she does apart from praying and wandering up and down the playground. Sometimes she plays tricks. I am patient with Playground Nun who is maybe not all that well. She seeks me out quite often.

‘Jemima Weiss!’

‘Yes, Sister!’

‘What is plimsoll?’

‘Um. Gym shoes, Sister. For gym only.’

‘No! It’s the waterline on the hull of a cargo ship! A safety mark! Named after Samuel Plimsoll, MP, and his Merchant Shipping Act, 1876!’

‘I see. Great. Thank you, Sister. Is that all, Sister?’

‘Yes, my girl!’

Playground Nun pushes her glasses from the speaking to girls position (all the way down the nose for close-up inspection purposes) to her wandering the playground position (top of nose for general countryside vision). She pats me on the head, well chuffed with her trick on me. I don’t like pats on the head because I am not a dog, but Playground Nun is old and she is a nun and she may not be entirely well and you have to allow for things. Furthermore, she is full of special information that is not all to do with God and I believe she needs to impart it from time to time. She chooses Jem. Fine with me.

Three types of shoes. And then come rules. Shoes rules: Do not wear plimsolls outdoors. Even in sports. Do not wear Clarks Commandos indoors. Do not wear indoor shoes in gym (unless you have forgotten your plimsolls) and definitely not outdoors where they will get ruined and become perplexing, unfit for indoors or out. Nowhere shoes. If you have the wrong shoes, a nun will get flustered and usually call upon Mean Nun to sort out the bad situation of the wrong shoes. Mean Nun has an eye out for crime. She is the only no-good nun around, though I am not wild about Sister Clothilda, Nativity play Directing Nun who is also Music Nun. She makes me sing separately from the other girls, standing on a chair on my own, far off from the other girls standing up on benches and singing happily in one voice on the stage of the assembly hall.

Music Nun sits down below in the nun pit, looking up at girls and glancing my way now and again with a cross and confused expression on her face, like she is not quite sure what the bloody-bloody I am doing on her stage, or why I am causing such a terrible disturbance in the sound department. The waves. She is also confused due to my Jewish side. Not all nuns are the same, not all of them have this problem, and I can easily tell the ones who do, catching them looking at me with a cross face and confusion in their eyes, as they try to fathom it, and simply cannot, how I am alive and not Catholic, and nevertheless quite hearty, by which I mean not downtrodden or obviously impaired in any way. Mean Nun has a very bad case of confusion and she will watch me until she comes up with a crime of some sort and then she makes straight for me.

The day Susannah Bonnington found a maggot in her banger, I was right there and saw it poking its little head up like a periscope in a U-boat, weaving left and right, checking out the scene aloft, and I must say, I never want to see a thing like that again, not ever.

‘Sister!’ says Susannah, keeping pretty cool in the circumstances. ‘There’s a maggot in my banger!’

‘So there is, my child,’ replies Dining-Room Nun who is definitely crazy, ‘so there is.’

Sister Catherine is Dining-Room Nun and Babies Nun. Sister Catherine escorts those first year kids all over the joint like she is a bodyguard, and when they are dining, she is happy, as she can do her two jobs at the same time in one same place and she is free to carry on her favourite activity of strolling up and down the alley between dining tables, muttering to herself and twiddling her thumbs in a demented manner, hands clasped before her in woolly gloves she wears in all weathers, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off.

In my opinion, some of her behaviour is open to question. For instance, babies need their own little chairs for dining, due to their small size, and they have to transport the chairs from their classroom to the dining room under the eyes of Sister Catherine, passing by her like a row of ants struggling with crumbs nearly twice their body weight and it is painful to see the little kids stumbling along, crashing the chairs against their little legs and generally making a mess of things, looking sad and worn out but resigned to fate, reminding me of the galley slaves in Ben-Hur , men chained together and marching in the hot sun on the way to the Roman galley ship in which they will be chained to oars and fated to row at varying speeds unto the end of days. Babies enter the dining room first and bigger kids queue up with plates after the babies have settled in and been served. They get served because they are deemed too young and wobbly to carry plates of food without tipping everything on to the decks. It seems to me carrying a plate is not such a hard task, but grappling with a chair round about two-thirds your size is definitely a hard task. Possibly, for Dining-Room Nun, an avalanche of spam and peas and gravy on the nice convent floor is more of a problem than bruisy shins and outright exhaustion in a four-year-old, and this is one instance of behaviour in Sister Catherine which is open to question, and another is when she said, So there is, my child to Susannah Bonnington, bashing off straight away to do some more strolling and muttering, and leaving Susannah and me in the lurch, stark-eyed as in a horror scene from a horror film featuring graveyards and screaming.