On holy days like Ash Wednesday, you had to be up early to walk to morning Mass and get the ashes on your forehead. The ashes were from the burned palms from Palm Sunday, and they’d be mixed with oil and the priest would anoint people’s foreheads with this mixture in the sign of the cross.I can still smell that oil. Catechism oil, we used to call it. It was like the smell of the tabernacle at a funeral, when the canon waved incense over the coffin.Agnes was once given a tiny vial of perfume that smelled of the Far East, with incense and amber in it. I couldn’t bear the smell of it: it reminded me of being a child in the church, and the thought of the cold, hard corpse in the coffin beside us. We were all used to death, you know, Eleanor. Not like people today. We all went to the funerals, and as a small child I’d kissed the marble-cold forehead of many a corpse. In a way it was good: death held no fear for us.Ash Wednesday was the start of Lent and it was a day of fasting. You could eat no meat, only one decent meal and two small collations – which were tiny meals.My mother always cooked us cod on Ash Wednesday with a little butter and a few small boiled potatoes.
