I KNEW MY Granny was not fully in tune with the modern world because when we went to Knock, she sat in the back of the car with her hat on for the entire journey, and when we went over a small humped bridge somewhere in Roscommon, she hit the roof and squashed the hat, and she was so terrified that my father had to stop the car.
“I’d travel better in a pony and trap,” she joked. But my father explained, with some irritation, that only a car could get us to Knock.
So she got out her rosary beads and prayed all the way to the shrine, a place where the Mother of God appeared 80 years earlier, and where Granny seemed more at peace than in the ordinary world.
But when Pope John XXIII appeared on our Pye Continental television set, I suspected that she might find it all a little confusing.
I was eight, but much more sophisticated than Granny because I had been watching the BBC for years. To me Grandstand, The Lone Ranger, and Bill and Ben: the Flowerpot Menwere old hat, and the Pope on the new Irish channel wasn't going to rock my boat that much.
Of course I didn't realise that the Lone Ranger, with dainty gloves and white hat, sniffing the ground for information, was an actor. I just knew that the moving figures on the grainy screen were images of something happening elsewhere, unrelated to me.
That’s what Granny never quite got, when she came out one morning to watch the opening of the second Vatican Council on our television. She knelt down and prayed in our diningroom as if the hand blessing her from the screen was truly in the room.
And I, too, was impressed. I never knew there were so many bishops in the world, with such fancy hats, or headdress as elaborate as the pelmets for curtains. Some of them had long beards and looked lean and mean, which put me off because Granny was both fat and happy.
But who was the pope? That’s what I didn’t know, and yet Granny had all the facts. “He’s the same age as myself,” she explained, “God bless him.” What startled me when I got a first glimpse of him, being carried high in the air on an enormous chair, was that he actually looked like Granny. Granny was sitting on a hard chair by the dining table, moving her beads through fat fingers, and there on the screen was himself, waving at her. I looked from one to the other, and could not resist the idea that they were one and the same person.
It confused me greatly to think that Granny was opening the second Vatican Council. Of course I always knew she was a magical woman who sugared slices of bread for me after school and who spent her days in a dark kitchen, where it was hard to distinguish where the shadows ended and Granny began, but now she had surpassed herself in magic, because there she was on the television, waving at the world with a peasant’s ironic smile.
When they carried the Pope on his chair, he rocked, just like I imagined Granny might, behind her pony, in the black trap long ago, before cars were invented. And reading from a sheaf of papers, the Pope wore round spectacles like Granny always did when she read the Anglo Celt.
I intimated my confusion to my father, when we had returned Granny to her shadowy kitchen later in the day, but he chastised me for the thought. “It’s extremely bold to say that the Pope looks like Granny,” he said.
And in that moment my world was changed and Granny was forever diminished. The Pope was an important person. There was something less in Granny. The world had been enlarged by the television set, and her poor world of sugary bread seemed very small by comparison.
From that day onwards I lived a diminished life in a parochial way, because I could no longer ignore that there was a larger world out there that made both me and Granny insignificant.
And yet even to this day, I sometimes sneak onto YouTube and watch the bobbing figure above the helmeted heads of the Swiss Guards, and the smiling face behind round spectacles, and somewhere inside me, I know it is Granny’s calm face and fat nose and lovely sensual lips that smile back at me eternally.