Seeing the Pope

Jenny and Lucy went to see the Pope, which isn’t something you do every week.  I had to get them to the school gates for two in the morning (again, not something that I do often) for them to get down to Twickenham on the coach in time for the Big Assembly, as the mass-meeting with school-children and various educators was called.  It all went tickety-boo, apparently, and they’ve got various bags and books and little flags as mementoes.

We’ve all seen the Pope before, in what you might call his natural habitat of St Peter’s Square.  It was Easter Sunday morning, a couple of years ago and we’d gone on a coach trip to Italy.  (Leger Coaches; highly recommended.)  Spring in Italy! I said, selling the idea like mad to my nearest and dearest.  Goodness knows what I thought it’d be like – sort of springlike, I suppose – and waxed as lyrical as a tourist brochure.  Manchester to Rome? queried the partner of my joys and sorrows.  Isn’t that a bit of a long journey?  We’ll love it, I assured him.  Won’t it be interesting to actually drive through Europe.

Well, we were both right.  Blimey, Rome’s so far away, I don’t know how the Ancient Romans, who seem to pop up everywhere, every made it, let alone stroll round Britain as if they owned the place.  And they didn’t have coaches. Mind you, the weather in Ancient Mamucium must have made them feel at home.  I’ve never encountered so much rain in all my born days as we did in Italy in the spring.  It was like being underwater.  Molto agitato said the weatherman on the Italian TV.  (We nicknamed him Colonel Weather because, oddly to our eyes, he was dressed up in full air force uniform with a moustache Hercule Poirot would have a hissy fit over.)  Anyway, it molto agitatioed and then some.

Now, the thing about coach trips is that you chum up with the other passengers and one girl, Charlotte, we got on with like a house on fire.  Charlotte was Jewish and quickly cottoned on to the fact we were Catholics.  At this point, the fairly glamorous thirty-year old Charlotte turned into my mother.   “You must,” she said, organizing the Gordon-Smiths, “see the pope. You can’t come to Rome and not see the Pope.  You must,” she said firmly, “be longing to see the Pope.”  Well, I wasn’t conscious of longing exactly, but there we were on Easter Sunday morning in the huge crowds outside St Peter’s Square and there, in the very far distance, was the Pope.

Charlotte was thrilled.  As the rain beat down, all the Gordon-Smiths got wetter and wetter and our thoughts turned fondly in the direction of a café.  Coffee. Tea. Food.  Not raining.  So, much to Charlotte’s horror, we upped sticks and beetled off.  She scurried after us, a drenched but determined Jewish mentor, reminding us of our religious duties.  “At the very least,” she said, sounding more like my mother than ever,“you must go to Mass.”  So, we Charlotte behind, encouraging us on, she ushered us into a church and, duty done, we found a café. There, on a television screen, was coverage of the ceremony still proceeding a few hundred yards away, under a haze of water, with depressed blokes in wet hats with wet feathers in them were gathered round a wet Pope.  “I told you,” said Charlotte, pointing to the TV screen in triumph, “that you had to see the Pope.”  Cup of delicious Italian coffee in hand, I thought it was a pretty good compromise.