Free The Phantom of Manhattan by Frederick Forsyth Page A

English.’
    ‘It happened that on the same night there was a full moon.’
    ‘There was indeed. You’re lucky with Caesar. He was a soldier and he wrote in clear soldier’s language. When we get on to Ovid, Horace, Juvenal and Virgil there will be some real brain-teasers. Why did he say esset and not erat ?’
    ‘Subjunctive tense?’
    ‘Well done. An element of doubt. It might not have been a full moon but by chance it was. So, the subjunctive. He was lucky with the moon.’
    ‘Why, Father Joe?’
    ‘Because, lad, he was invading a foreign land in the dark. No powerful searchlights in those days. No lighthouses to keep you off the rocks. He needed to find a flat, shingly beach between the cliffs. So the moonlight was a help.’
    ‘Did he invade Ireland too?’
    ‘He did not. Old Hibernia remained inviolate for another twelve hundred years, long after St Patrick brought us Christianity. And then it was not the Romans but the British. And you’re a cunning dog, trying to draw me away from Caesar’s Gallic Wars .’
    ‘But can’t we talk about Ireland, Father Joe? I have seen most of Europe now, but never Ireland.’
    ‘Oh, why not? Caesar can make his landfall at Pevensey Bay tomorrow. What do you want to know?’
    ‘Did you come from a rich family? Did your parents have a fine house and broad estates like mine?’
    ‘Indeed they did not. For most of the great estates are owned by the English or the Anglo-Irish. But the Kilfoyles go back before the conquest. And mine were just poor farming people.’
    ‘Are most of the Irish poor?’
    ‘Well, certainly the people of the countryside do not have any silver spoons. Most are tenant farmers in a small way, scraping a living from the land. My people are like that. I came from a small farm outside the town of Mullingar. My father tilled the land from dawn till dusk. There were nine of us in the brood; I was the second-born son and we lived mostly on potatoes mixed with milk from our two cows and beet from the fields.’
    ‘But you got an education, Father Joe?’
    ‘Of course I did. Ireland may be poor, but she is steeped in saints, and scholars, poets and soldiers, and now a few priests. But the Irish are concerned with the love of God and education, in that order. So we all went to the village school which was run by the fathers. Three miles away and walking barefoot. All the way, each way. Summer evenings until after dark and all the holidays we helped our da on the farm. Then homework in the light of a single candle until we fell asleep, five of us in one bunk and the four small ones tucked in with our parents.’
    ‘ Mon Dieu , did you not have ten bedrooms?’
    ‘Listen, young lad, your bedroom at the chateau is bigger than was the entire farmhouse. You’re luckier than you know.’
    ‘You have travelled a long way since then, Father Joe.’
    ‘Oh, that I have, and I wonder daily why the Lord favoured me in such a way.’
    ‘But you still got an education.’
    ‘Yes, and a good one. Driven into us by a combination of patience, love and the strap. Reading and writing, sums and Latin, history but not much geography for the fathers had never been anywhere and it was presumed we would never do so either.’
    ‘Why did you decide to become a priest, Father Joe?’
    ‘Well, we had mass every morning before lessons, and of course on Sundays as a family. I became an altar boy and something about the mass got into me. I used to look at the great wooden figure above the altar and think that if He had done that for me, then perhaps I ought to serve Him as best I could. I was good at school and when I was about to leave I asked if there was any chance of being sent to train for the priesthood.
    ‘I knew my older brother would take over the farm one day and I would certainly be one less mouth to feed. And I was lucky. I was sent into Mullingar for an interview, with a note from Father Gabriel at the school, and they accepted me for the seminary at Kildare.