Our homemade mass ended on a violent note

Something for which I will forever be indebted to my long-suffering parents was their ability to keep completely straight faces when, at the tender age of eight, I decided to turn our regular half-hour evening rosary into a full blown “high Mass” in the style of the Vatican at its pomp and ceremonious best.

When a slightly older cousin came to visit, that daily half-hour my family spent reciting the rosary turned into a period of intense self-restraint and inner battles against giggling.

One evening, after a particularly disruptive half hour, my mother told us that the only way she could think of stopping our incessant giggling was to make us lead the rosary.

We accepted the challenge, because in those days misbehaviour usually resulted in a clip on the ear from my father, and in the interest of not going deaf before we had a chance to reach puberty, we were as anxious as my mother to seek some form of solution.

We discussed our plan of action the following morning and decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to actually look the part. So, we raided my mother and sister’s wardrobes and found some dark flannel nighties, not quite black but close enough to be used as cassocks.

Being altar servers we knew all about vestments and by chance my cousin had brought his surplice home from church to have some unidentifiable stains removed, so he was all set.

I had to manufacture one out of a white T-shirt that I had to wear inside out because it would not have been appropriate to say the rosary with “My Parents Went Skiing In Obergurgl  And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” emblazoned across my chest.

We decided that since we were dressed for the occasion, we might as well go the whole hog. So we fetched some cardboard boxes and an old kitchen door from the storeroom and raided the linen cupboard for a white table-cloth and serviettes. Flowers came from the garden and we got a golf trophy my father had won recently to use as a chalice.

Wine came from a half bottle of medium cream sherry, and sufficient hosts for the family “communion” from a box of Corn Flakes.

Everything was set up by midday and we used the intervening six or seven hours to modify and add to our “chapel” with such enthusiasm and vigour that by 7pm the room looked like a cross between the side chapel of a Russian Orthodox cathedral and a Hollywood starlet’s coming out party.

My cousin and I concelebrated the service which started with the rosary and all went very well indeed. We were concentrating so hard on the job at hand that we had no time to giggle.

I must say that in spite of being so young, we took things very seriously, and in hindsight there was absolutely no vestige of mockery or levity. Never before had we been quite so pious and well-meaning.

But we were also enjoying every minute, and when rosary ended and the family started to get up off their knees and head for supper, my cousin announced that “Mass” would now follow.

So we said “Mass”, in Latin, and gave thanks to those kindly Fathers at the monastery parish in Pretoria who had gone to so much pain to teach us the proper responses at altar servers’ practice.

The family remained straight-faced throughout. We did notice that quite often they had their heads buried in their hands, but we just assumed that they were devout. We were told only many years later that they were desperately trying to stop giggling.

But we were on a roll. “Mass” ended and on we went to benediction, hastily crafting a monstrance out of a tennis racquet and bottle top.

An hour and a half after starting, we were about to bring this Catholic version of Herman Charles Bosman’s Bekkersdal Marathon to a dignified end when my cousin lost the plot completely and destroyed what would have been a deeply meaningful, religious experience by announcing that we would now proceed to the bathroom where my 17-year-old sister would be baptised by full immersion.

My sister chased him into the garden and the last we saw was a ghastly vision of a 12-year-old boy in a nightie having his backside kicked the length and breath of the front lawn by an irate teenage girl intent on doing grievous bodily harm.

The next day my cousin and I decided that religious life was far too dangerous.