My middle name is Arabic. In modern Britain I’m one of
many millions.
However in a series of convent school in Australia in my dewy days of youth, my very name was considered an act of wilful sedition. Until Yrs. 11 & 12 I had never come across a nun who didn’t consider it rather uncouth not to have a “dacent” name like Mary, Ann, Elizabeth or, if one wanted to go foreign, then the Italian “Maria” should satisfy all yearning for the exotic. Opting for Arabic however, was very definitely OTT.
Despite any question of the fairness of the thing, the logic
involved in nuns taking against me for my parents transgression escaped me for
many years. When I came across the “sins of the father’s” meme it finally became
clear.
The nuns, it must be said, took against me rather helplessly
after about Yr 1, when I had already been expelled from ballet classes,
Krafts!, Brownies, and my cousin’s trainspotting gang. (No. Really.
They actually did hang about with pencils and anoraks. Spotting trains. And I was actually gutted when they threw me out.)
I was a reproach to the entire, worldwide Catholic community in any case, and could afford any more black marks against me - for I was an only child. Good Catholic parents worked bloody
hard at that time making great (as in size) Catholic families. As the first boy
and the first girl are paid to the Catholic church as clergy, you only start
counting Catholic contributions to society from child no. 3 onward.
And my parents could only be arsed making one?
Added to that was the mortification of my having a
heathenish, made-up name. It couldn’t be called a Christian name at all, for
there was nothing at all Christian about it. My heathen surname was, at
least, a name. However dodgy it’s provenance and meaning it actually existed
somewhere in the word.
But did ever you hear the like of a Saint Cireena, would you
tell me? And did ever you come across it
in any dictionary of the English language, besides?
I’ll save you the bother of research – the answer is
no. For at this time Serena & Venus
had not yet hit Wimbledon and – especially in the antipodean cloisters wherein I
spent time -, no-one had ever heard the syllables “suh-ree-nah” combined
before; regardless of how it was spelled.
(Much later I moved to Queensland where there’s a town named
Serena. However to those nuns who knew the delights of that tiny Queensland
town my name was, without doubt, incorrectly spelled. On purpose.)
As to the surname – well nothing was ever said, but I think
that the sound of ‘cocks’ in there was
considered somewhat indelicate.
The denouement inevitably came about at each new school when it was
discovered that my parents had no religion at all and I had never been baptized.
Which is exactly what was to be expected of someone with a ridiculous name like mine.
I was suddenly sent
off to extra maths each time something Catholic was happening, like Mass, or
Confession (a good hour each out of class, for either of those) or even the annual
Outing. (So yes. Of course I converted as a small kid. I may have been heathen but I
wasn’t stupid)
There’s a reason I was never able to tell the nuns anything
about my middle name. Nor anyone else
for years and years. Because my name is the name of the village in which I had
been conceived. I may have been the bane of the Brownies and the Ballet, but I
wasn’t tough enough to bring up the subject of making babies with any Bride of
Christ.
My parents, both in their 40s, had both been married before
but were told they wouldn’t have children together. They lived in Egypt at the time and my
mother, having been unsettled at the test results, my father had taken her away
for a weekend to a tiny village where the RAF had a bungalow.
After a lunch that, I am told, featured rather heroic quantities of Ouzo, my parents
were on their way back to the guest bungalow when they came across a mystic
sitting under a tree. (Just because so many stories start that way doesn’t mean
that mystics don’t really sit under trees. It is very hot in Egypt) The old man greeted them. But then,
after some polite chat, informed my mother that she had recently had a great
disappointment which was making her sad.
And then, standing suddenly erect in his tattered rags he
pointed into the far distance and with glazed eyes pronounced:-
“Eat of the fruit of the Jackfruit Tree and all will be
well!”
(OK the introductory sentence in that para is cobblers, but the actual
words have rung through family history ever since).
As they passed the market on the way home they did, with
much drunken giggling, buy a Jackfruit.
They then went back to the bungalow for more Ouzo and lots of fruit …and
nine months later there I was.
But the other thing I never told the nuns was that when my
parents first told this story, it was
actually a Prince who had “suggested” my parents give me the name of the place the miracle had taken place. (OK, the son of a
deposed King admittedly, but a fully-registered Prince.) Whom my parent knew
through his father.
Now the following means bugger all to most people, but that
king’s name was Farouk.
And in every cloister during my girlish education,
there lurked old nuns who considered this man the devil’s henchman. Any
connection in any way would have sealed my fate – I might even have been burnt
in effigy on November 5th.
The irony which strikes me however, is that even now, with the nuns nothing more than
a remembered scent of sweat and incense,
I have once more learnt that I must never let the hideous, dark secret of my
name escape again.
I have sometimes played with the idea of telling that story down the pub in the England of 2017.(Actually, I tell it rather well. I use voices and
everything.) And I shudder at the thought.
I’m right back in my remembered past, where breathing a word to anyone
about Kings or Princes would signal my instant dismissal and my fate would be
sealed. I would go down under a hail of epithets.
And yeah, maybe with
enough shots inside them some would start
looking at me speculatively when Bonfire Night comes round?
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