She wished she had been born in a Roman Catholic country.
Every night she took the Children’s Prize to bed with her to keep her safe. It had Bible Puzzles in it, and among them there was a picture of the Name of God. A shining white light, shaped like Mamma’s vinaigrette, with black marks in the middle. Mamma said the light was the light that shone above the Ark of the Covenant, and the black marks were letters and the word was the real name of God. She said he was sometimes called Jehovah, but that was not his real name. His real name was a secret name which nobody but the High Priest was allowed to say.
When you lay in the dark and shut your eyes tight and waited, you could see the light, shaped like the vinaigrette, in front of you. It quivered and shone brighter, and you saw in the middle, first, a dark blue colour, and then the black marks that were the real name of God. She was glad she couldn’t read it, for she would have been certain to let it out some day when she wasn’t thinking.
Perhaps Mamma knew, and was not allowed to say it. Supposing she forgot?
At church they sang “Praise Him in His name Jah and rejoice before Him.” Jah was God’s pet-name, short for Jehovah. It was a silly name—Jah. Somehow you couldn’t help thinking of God as a silly person; he was always flying into tempers, and he was jealous. He was like Papa. Dank said Papa was jealous of Mark because Mamma was so fond of him. There was a picture of God in the night nursery. He had a big flowing beard, and a very straight nose, like Papa, and he was lying on a sort of sofa that was a cloud. Little Jesus stood underneath him, between the Virgin Mary and Joseph, and the Holy Ghost was descending on him in the form of a dove. His real name was Jesus Christ, but they called him Emmanuel.
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.”
That was another frightening thing. It would be like the fountain in Aunt Bella’s garden, with blood in it instead of water. The goldfishes would die.
Mark was pleased when she said that Sarah wouldn’t be allowed to go to Heaven because she would try to catch the Holy Ghost.
Jesus was not like God. He was good and kind. When he grew up he was always dressed in pink and blue, and he had sad dark eyes and a little, close, tidy beard like Uncle Victor. You could love Jesus.
Jenny loved him. She was a Wesleyan; and her niece Catty was a Wesleyan. Catty marched round and round the kitchen table with the dishcloth, drying the plates and singing:
“ ‘I love Jesus, yes, I do,
For the Bible tells me to!’ ”
and
“ ‘I am so glad that my Father in Heaven
Tells of His love in the book He has given—
I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves even me!’ ”
On New Year’s Eve Jenny and Catty went to the Wesleyan Chapel at Ilford to sing the New Year in. Catty talked about the Old Year as if it was horrid and the New Year as if it was nice. She said that at twelve o’clock you ought to open the window wide and let the Old Year go out and the New Year come in. If you didn’t something dreadful would happen.
Downstairs there was a party. Uncle Victor and Aunt Lavvy and Aunt Charlotte were there, and the big boys from Vinings and the Vicarage at Aldborough Hatch. Mark and Dank and Roddy were sitting up, and Roddy had promised to wake her when the New Year was coming.
He left the door open so that she could hear the clock strike twelve. She got up and opened the windows ready. There were three in Mamma’s room. She opened them all.
The air outside was like clear black water and very cold. You couldn’t see the garden wall; the dark fields were close—close against the house. One—Two—Three.
Seven—When the last stroke sounded the New Year would have come in.
Ten—Eleven—Twelve.
The bells rang out; the bells of Ilford, the bells of Barkingside, and far beyond the flats and the cemetery there would be Bow bells, and beyond that the bells of the City of London. They clanged together and she trembled. The sounds closed over her; they left off and began again, not very loud, but tight—tight, crushing her heart, crushing tears out of her eyelids. When the bells stopped there was a faint whirring sound. That was the Old Year, that was eighteen sixty-nine, going out by itself in the dark, going away over the fields.
Mamma was not pleased when she came to bed and found the door and windows open and Mary awake in the cot.
II
At the end of January she was seven years old. Something was bound to happen when you were seven.
She was moved out of Mamma’s room to sleep by herself on the top floor in the night nursery. And the day nursery was turned into the boys’ schoolroom.
When you were little and slept in the cot behind the curtain Mamma would sometimes come and read you to sleep with the bits you wanted: “The Lord is my Shepherd,” and “Or ever the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl
