Column

18 By Reporter -----FULFORD In My Father's
House
ONE Sunday morning not so long ago one of my sons was getting my missal ready for Mass and asked: " Which Sunday after what is it, daddy?" I told him, and noticed that the Gospel was about Our Lord being found in the Temple and His asking Our Lady whether She didn t know that He had to be about His Father's business. Now it touched me to the heart to think that three of my 6011S were then and there about their father's business. While one found a dilapidated old mortuary card to slip into the missal at the right Sunda another came with a taper for me to light my pipe svith, while a third washed his hands—after cleaning my shoes.
When our Lord, busy about His Father's business, spoke for the first time in His Father's house, He was quite young. Now I was only six when I preached my first (and only) sermon, but that was not in my father's house, though next door to it. It was a Masonic Hall 111 South America which was separated from my father's houst by a strip of garden, and into which I broke one morning with the lads of my gang. Balancing the caretaker's huge glasses on my nose, I mounted the rostrum, banged my fists on the ledge, anti yelled at my hearers around me some outrageous piece of boyish rhyming, the translation of which (from the original Spanish) went broadly like
this: " Thus saith the Lord I By thunder I've busted my vocal chord!" Later, in my father's house, I got a thunderously huge parental belting.
I was not obsessed with ptlpit fright then, but I fall quite silly many years later in the pulpit of Salford Cathedral. That was when Bishop Marshall, then Vicar Capitular, had just preached to a huge congregation and I had stood by the steps taking, notes for this paper. Afterwards he asked me to mount the pulpit and get his biretta which he had left behind. Scared to death, I nearly pushed it off the ledge into the hundreds .sf eyes I found Id staring coldly at me from lo IN Salford and Manchester, and for that matter all over Lancashire, children run about the church, skip with clasped hands from altar to altar, say theix Little " Hail Mary's," and gaily and laughingly gallop their way out. The fun is at its highest when they're released from school at noon. A bachelor girl, friend of mine, touring Spain went into a big church which, on account of the beat outside, had practically become a children's playground. They tore about from chapel to chapel, said some prayers, but mostly didn't, and all the while an old priest sat in a choir stall and said his office. She indignantly asked him why he allowed it. " But are they not in their Father's house?" he replied sweetly.
It was in that same church that I again felt silly on another occasion. I wanted to go to Confession and I approached that priest in the stall. Without lifting his eyes from his book, he nodded. I waited near him, to see to which confessional he would lead me. He did not move, so 1 repeated my request. He looked up. " Certainly," be said, " kneel down I got down on my knees'in the vastness of the tile-paved choir, but as if sensing my desire for secrecy the old priest flung his black cape about me in a fatherly way and held me close to him so that I had but to whisper his ear, and later, as he withdrew a little to talk to me, I was startled by the vileness of a breath whose owner had eaten "oll-oli."
THIS funny word might set you A thinking. of Stan Oliver calling with anguishlid cry across the wilderness to his film-mate, or it might suggest to you a church-full of Cockney kids dropping their aitches at Sunday Mass. And I might, for a consideration, allow Gillie Solid, Professor Potter, or the Editors of the " Kitchen Front " to use it as an inspiration to work up a crack at the expense of another radio celebrity, or to deal philosophically with the physiological and gastronomic considerations involved in the word's definition, or to just give a quaint name to mayonnaise next time a recipe for it is given on the air, for after all, that's all the stuff is really. The word is Catalan, the ingredients being yolk of egg, olive off,
and garlic---mostly garlic I It's so delicious to the taste that I'd eat a plate-full at any old time. I'm afraid, however, that if I dish my children might all want to leave their father's house I