My mother, as a staunch Roman Catholic, seldom gave religion a second thought. My father, however, was a convinced agnostic, so he thought and worried about religion a great deal of the time.
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to convert to Catholicism when you got married?’ I asked him once.
‘Easier than what?’ he said.
‘Well, than being creedless,’ I said. ‘Being as certain about everything as a Catholic is takes up no time at all, but being unsure is a full-time activity. You would have saved a lot of time and worry by going over to Rome.’
‘I might at least have learnt a bit of Latin,’ conceded my father. ‘That way we would probably have got a better family motto.’
'Have we got a family motto?' I asked, a bit shocked. ‘I mean, have we got a family motto apart from “Wait and see” and “We will be there soon” and “Don’t ask your father questions he can’t answer” and “Nobody appreciates me” and “Never you mind” and “The Bogey man will get you if you don’t go to sleep this very moment” and…’
‘Those aren’t mottoes,’ he said. ‘Those are catchphrases. Very useful, catchphrases. Unlike mottoes, which never seem to be any use at all. But yes, we’ve got a family motto. It came about like this…’
Apparently, when my father was courting my mother, he sometimes wanted to take her dancing at the weekend, but she would never go out on a Sunday to a dance. This was partly because she had to be up bright and early on a Monday to go to work, but mostly because she said it was sinful to dance on a Sunday and against her religion.
‘Show me!’ said my father-to-be scornfully. ‘Show me where in the Bible it says you shouldn’t dance on a Sunday!’
My mother did have a desultory look in the Old Testament, but found so many injunctions not to do various things that she liked doing, such as eating shellfish, that she gave up quickly.
‘No, I don’t think it’s in the Bible,’ she said. ‘But it must be in a Papal decree somewhere. I am sure the Pope is against dancing on a Sunday.’
‘Of course he is!’ said my father. ‘He’s against any kind of dancing! He’s a priest! He’s not allowed to dance with women! And he would not be seen dancing with men!’
(In this, my father later admitted, he was absolutely wrong, as Catholic priests and even nuns are allowed to dance, and play golf or go to the cinema or whatever. It’s just marrying and the sexual act they’re not allowed. In fact, when recruitment to the priesthood began to fall off, my father suggested that the Catholics could have a priest recruitment campaign with a slogan that went something like: ‘Join the Catholic priesthood and dance and drink and smoke all you like! And here’s more good news – you don’t have to have sex afterwards!’)
So my father decided to write to the Vatican asking for adjudication on this one. Did the Church allow Catholics to dance on Sunday or did they not? That’s all he wanted to know. Not having the Latin, he wrote it in English and then got a friend of his who had done classics at school to translate it into Latin.
‘It’s much more likely to be answered if I send it in Latin,’ he said to my mother. ‘Of course there’s always the risk that they’ll answer in Latin and I won’t have the faintest idea if they’re letting you dance with me or not, but that’s a risk we’ll have to take.’
He sent the letter off. It came back a month later, unopened.
Someone had written the words: ‘NON SATIS PECUNIA’ on the envelope.
He took it to his friend to translate.
His friend said that it meant something like ‘Money is Not Enough’.
‘Are they trying to teach me that material things don’t matter?’ said my father. ‘I wrote to the Pope for advice on dancing, not to get a sermon on the vanity of filthy lucre! Does the Pope really despise money?’
‘Of course not,’ said the friend. ‘The Vatican thinks of little else but earthly riches. If anyone has learnt how to serve both God and Mammon, it’s the Pope. No, I think I must have translated it wrong… Ah, I’ve got it! Look at the envelope!’
My father looked. His friend was pointing at the stamp.
‘The stamp you put on was only enough for domestic purposes! To send a letter to Italy costs more than that! That’s what they’re trying to tell you – that you need to pay more! Non Satis Pecunia doesn’t just mean “money is not enough” – it also means “not enough money”. It must be the Latin way of saying “postage due”. There must be a cardinal at the Vatican in charge of postage who has rejected this letter on financial grounds and of course Latin is still the lingua franca of the Vatican, if nowhere else on earth, so he’s written “postage due” in Latin.’
None of this endeared the Catholics to my father, though he was somewhat mollified when the local priest told him the next day that he could do all the dancing he liked on the Sunday, as long as he had done all his religious duties beforehand.
‘There was no problem with that,’ he told me. ‘I have always done my religious duties beforehand. That is the great advantage of being an agnostic. You are always in a perfect state of unpreparedness.’
‘And did Mother agree to dance with you of a Sunday?’ I said.
‘She did. All except the samba.’
‘She refused to dance the samba?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘She could never get the hang of it.’
And I thought that was that, until my father said, ‘Oh, I forgot to say – we later adopted Non Sutis Pecunia as the unofficial family motto. Not only did “Not enough money” almost always fit our position perfectly, but we felt it had received the blessing of the Pope. Indeed, indirectly it had been the Pope’s own suggestion. I did once write to thank him for it, but of course we never heard back.’
Someone Like Me 2005
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