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Hidden Lives Katie Grant, daughter of the former Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire Sir Simon Towneley, gives a graphic and often hilarious account of the part religion plays in her family’s life. If you come to stay with us at Dyneley, Cliviger, the home of Sir Simon Towneley, the recently retired Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, your Saturday evening may not end in quite the way you envisaged. For a curious ritual takes place after dinner. A sudden announcement from my father that 'We must get ready' sees guests and family ejected from their comfortable seats in the drawing room, their coffee cups and glasses removed. Chairs are reversed, sofas pulled into line, cushions laid on the floor. Small decanters and white cloths are carefully placed on a table. Finally, when the dogs have been chivvied out, a heavily embroidered curtain is drawn slowly back, revealing its age in clouds of golden dust. The curtain has been shielding what is probably the smallest oratory in Britain. It is a small bulge on the end of a long, thin drawing room, scarcely noticeable from outside. But this is no makeshift arrangement. Flanked by full length pictures of Our Lady and St. Elizabeth, an intricately carved altar fills the niche, its candles and other altar furniture in a permanent state of readiness. The oratory may be small, but it is a solid testament to the Towneley's enduring faith. Above the altar, whose base was made by a local farmer, is a stained glass window created by Patrick Reyntiens especially for this space. The window, deeply inset into the outside wall, is the only external clue to the chapel that lies within. Inside the drawing room, once the curtain is drawn back, the eye is irresistibly drawn to the blue and gold shadow cast by the window onto the white walls. The drawing room, five minutes previously full of chat, laughter, brandy and smoke, has become the most domestic of Catholic chapels. To get to Mass the next morning, all we have to do is to get down the stairs. In the winter, a log fire bums in the fireplace. We kneel behind my parents, medieval fashion, seven children, five husbands and ten grandchildren, hearing Mass privately as my family have done since 1395. But this is not the 1395 oratory. My family’s house, Towneley Hall, was sold in 1902 to the Burnley Corporation. We had become very bad at producing male heirs. The family took over the agent's house, Dyneley, ‘a suburban villa on a bleak hillside’, as my grandmother disdainfully called it. As children we passed Towneley every day on our way to school, a daily lesson in how the mighty fall. In the early 1960s, as babies arrived with monotonous regularity (six girls, one boy), my parents had to build on to Dyneley. Unable to create a fully fledged chapel because the steepness of the ‘bleak hillside’ proved more than a match for any digger, my parents asked George Pace, the church architect, to build a new drawing room with an oratory on the end. So at a time when most peoples' houses grooved to the new phenomenon of the Beatles, we were rocking to the beat of the Latin Mass. The Beatles passed us by unnoticed. Even to this day my mother cannot name them all. But we were all very efficient at our Latin. It was not the first time Dyneley had witnessed the Mass. During the World War Two my great grandmother, a very autocratic lady, made the dining room into a chapel. She was crazy about chapels. She had even created one in the house of her Belgian father-in-law, an agnostic and deeply eccentric man whom she once accused of being possessed by the devil. In those days, she would go to Brussels especially to consult her Confessor, much as other people might now go to the hairdresser. She would return renewed and buzzing with the latest news of Catholic fashions. When she came to live in Lancashire, my great grandmother encouraged the people of the village to come up to the house for Mass. Her chaplain, Father Goolden, whose footsteps carved a still visible path between Dyneley and his house in the stable yard, said Mass each morning, rosary each evening and offered Benediction twice a week. James, the Protestant butler, had to look after the vestments as part of his duties. He cared for them with infinite respect, for he adored my great grandmother. When she died, he laid her out in the dining room/chapel with her head nearest the altar, a privilege usually reserved for bishops. ‘Quite right’ said Father Goolden. for whom my grandmother was just as fearsome in death as she had been in life. As children in the 1960s we took our religious comfort for granted. Nanny dressed us like dolls and at 8.30 a.m. each Sunday we were sent to kneel primly in an ever increasing row. As teenagers in the mid 1970s we lurched out of bed at the last minute and hoped that by arriving just as my father was leading the priest into the drawing room, that neither of them would notice our disarray. The younger ones, still firmly in Nanny’s grasp, would look at their slobbish older siblings with a mixture of awe and horror. Falling asleep was frowned on. But the fire, the familiarity and the lack of breakfast often proved too much. My oldest sister, Alice, was lucky. She used to faint. So she was allowed Ribena before Mass. ‘She’ll pay for that in Purgatory,’ my sister Charlotte and I used to say to disguise our envy. Inter sibling squabbles were not put on hold during Mass. But the unspoken rule was that you could not make a noise and attract attention. So we conducted our wars in silence, only the tone of our responses betraying whether we were triumphant or in fearsome pain. Confessions were heard in my father’s library surrounded by books. It was an ordeal to be offered up, as the nuns used to say, ‘for the Holy Souls.’ The library, where we had to confess to the priest face to face, was so very much my father's room with his 'cello waiting in one corner. 1 was certain the list of my sins, which had to be recited aloud, would not be able to evaporate in air heavy with the aura of so much learning. I imagined my misdemeanours (most major ‘I think I hate babies’ the day after my mother produced her sixth child) would somehow appear on the page of the next volume my father took down. His displeasure was a much more frightening prospect than any punishment meted out by God. But actually I was quite safe. My father did not like babies either. Our friends, fashionably dropping their religion once they left school, to readopt it once they had children of their own, were amazed that none of us objected and refused to participate in this weekend ritual. But how could we refuse? Every Sunday the person sitting next to the fireplace had, and still has, as their nearest object of contemplation, a small, very ancient leather frame enclosing a piece of hair. The legend reads ‘My cousin Franck Towneley’s haire, who suffered for his prince August 10th 1746.’ His prince was Bonnie Prince Charlie. Francis Towneley raised the standard for him on account of their shared Catholic faith and was executed for his trouble. His head was dipped in pitch and set on a pike at Temple Bar in London. Returned to Towneley by his friends, the head was placed in a casket behind the panelling in the Chapel. Years later, finding that the newly installed central heating was not improving the condition of Uncle Franck’s head, it was taken out, put in a hat box and passed round after dinner with the port. The hat box was eventually sent, with the family papers, to Drummonds Bank in Trafalgar Square until it returned home in the 1950s for a long awaited burial in the Towneley vault at St Peter’s, Burnley. But that was not Uncle Franck’s last appearance. On a damp, dark November evening in 1978, whilst erecting his memorial stone, my mother thought it a good idea to check on Uncle Franck’s condition. The tombstone was lifted and disclosed not one, but two skulls. One was clearly Francke's. The pike hole was easily visible. Who was the other one? Nobody knows. The two skulls lie their together still. Living with this relic, how could we give up our faith, we who only had to walk down to the drawing room and not down to the scaffold? We measure the seasons by the colour of the vestments. If it is purple, it must be Lent. If it is black, someone has died. If it is rose-coloured, it is either Laetare or Gaudete Sunday. And if it is the magnificent golden Whalley vestment, it is Christmas or Easter. Christmas is the best time. After dinneron Christmas Eve, as we sit having coffee, we wait with mounting excitement for my father to say ‘We must get ready.’ Then Christmas Day begins. We rise and congregate in the hall. The youngest person puts the baby in the crib whilst my mother turns on the Christmas tree lights for the first time — always a nervous moment. We process into the drawing room singing a three part carol. Mass seems especially mystical in the drawing room at midnight on Christmas Eve and I do not think this is just the result of a good dinner and a fire. Reciting ‘Hodie Christus natus est’ with the presents piled high under the Christmas tree and the turkey waiting to go into the oven, all within the walls of the house you were born in is a very particular kind of thrill. God and Mammon, for once in holy alliance. Our lives have been immeasurably enriched by this very intimate form of worship. Outside the drawing room during Mass life goes on: the telephone rings and the dogs try to bite the farmer delivering milk. But nothing takes priority over this half hour or so of a family at prayer. We are in a spiritual bubble and observe outside activities as if they were a film. I can remember muttering my responses whilst watching helplessly as my fat pony, escaping from his starvation pen, ate his way further and further up the enormous hill behind the house. ‘Please God’ I prayed, ‘Please God make Mischief start eating his way down the hill. Please.’ It did not work - a severe test of faith. Even when one of my sisters spotted her pony cavorting in the garden making beautiful divots all over the lawn, we continued to say our Pater Noster. ‘Pater noster qui es in caelis: Trixie is in the garden: Sanctificatur nomen tuum: Oh no, I can see Papa is getting furious: Fiat voluntas tua: Do you think I could slip out and catch her before - sicut in caelo et in terra - too late! Oh well, it is good for roses I suppose.’ Even the rabbits seemed to know that this was a safe time to come and cock a snook at us through the drawing room windows. After Father Goolden died, our priest used to come from Stonyhurst. Through rain and shine Father Macadam bicycled the 15 miles over to us to say Mass. Occasionally he ended up in the casualty ward of the Burnley General Hospital after, as he put it, ‘my wheel wobbled’ and he fell off. It never deterred him. He still insisted on saying Mass, then cycling back to Stonyhurst, a patchwork of stitches and plaster, a terrible sight. He once had his trousers torn neatly from top to bottom by my dog as he left. After being persuaded to give up his bike, Father Macadam became a veteran first passenger as one after another we passed our driving test. He never actually said anything but he visibly blanched when we turned up grinning broadly saying ‘It’s me today, Father. Got my test yesterday. Hop in.’ But of course he got his own back during Confession in the library. Religion dominated the lives of my ancestors. But although this tiny oratory provides an important thread linking us with the past, it has not dominated our lives in an oppressive sense. Having Mass in the house means that your faith really does become part of yourself. We seldom bother to tell newcomers to the house what is behind the drawing room curtain. People are often too polite to ask. One friend thought it probably housed the remains of the people finished off by my particularly vicious Jack Russell terrier. The 1960s are better known for destroying, or liberating us from, the old order. But at Dyneley, less than fifty miles from the breeding ground of the Fab Four, the 1960s saw the old order being propagated in miniature through stone and glass. The Towneley rendition of the Latin Mass in the drawing room will never rival ‘She loves you, yeh, yeh, yeh’ in popularity. But for us it is just as familiar.
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