ABSTRACT
I was born within the sound o f my own nomenclature, too close to Our Lady’s birthday to be called anything other than Mary Christina; and I come from an old English Catholic family. Mine, however, was not the easy glittered world o f Brideshead Revisited or Antonia White, but the siege Catholicism o f Walworth and Bermondsey. The Gordon riots, for all my parents knew, had happened but yesterday. They were as proud o f their spiritual as o f their temporal birthright. London and Catholicism merged into a single identity - heavenly cockneys.
