Seminary Boy
John Cornwell

For Gabrielle

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART ONE FATHER FIGURES

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

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PART TWO SPECIAL FRIENDSHIP

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PART THREE THE HALFWAY HOUSE

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PART FOUR PUBLIC MAN

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111

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113

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115

RECONCILIATIONS

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118

119

120

Praise

Also by John Cornwell

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In the absence of diaries I have relied mostly on unaided personal recollections for the writing of this memoir. In some instances I have concealed the identities of the living.

PART ONE FATHER FIGURES

1

ON MY LAST summer holiday at the minor seminary I ran into my father in the east London suburb of Woodford. His heavy limp, a handicap from childhood, seemed more laboured than I remembered. As he toiled up George Lane his hand motions were like a man steadying a skittish horse on a leading rein. His hair was plastered down with brilliantine and he was wearing a new raincoat, collar turned up in the manner of Humphrey Bogart. He accosted me affably with his familiar limelight smile, as if greeting an invisible audience somewhere above my head. He betrayed no remorse at having left my mother and his five children a year earlier. Standing outside Woolworth’s, chatting about the new soccer season, he was fishing for something in his trouser pocket. I glimpsed a ten-shilling note. Then he fetched out a large bright horse chestnut, a conker. Buffing it on his sleeve he handed it over, saying: ‘Cheerio there, Jack.’

I stood watching him until he was swallowed up in the lobby of the Majestic cinema where a matinée was about to begin. He did not look back. I was missing him, but he had always been more of a troublesome sibling than an ideal father. In any case, I had other father-figures to contend with.

2

FATHER JAMES COONEY, pastor of my early adolescent years, was an austere soul. He had a drawn grey face and blood-raw eyelids. His cracked celluloid clerical collar was the colour of soiled snow. It was the rigid cheap sort that priests and seminarians could launder in seconds with a damp cloth. He would kneel at the altar rail in our empty church, eyes shut tight, grizzled head listing in concentration. When he looked up towards the tabernacle, he seemed to be adjusting his vision to the scene of his life’s mission – the east London district of Barkingside. Father Cooney was in resigned exile from Skibbereen, County Cork.

From the age of eleven until I departed for the minor seminary aged thirteen to begin my education for the priesthood, I served Father Cooney’s Mass at seven o’clock every weekday morning in what he called his ‘old bit of a church’, dedicated to Saint Augustine the missionary to the English. On Sundays the people stood three deep in the aisles, latecomers huddled out in the churchyard. To reduce the pressure he celebrated an extra Mass in a disused army hut next to a pet cemetery where dogs, cats and horses were buried beneath headstones. Father Cooney would gaze bleakly out of the hut window, disparaging ‘the pagan English customs over the way’. I served Mass at the Camp, as we called it, before cycling up to Saint Augustine’s to assist as censer bearer at the sung High Mass. In the afternoon I returned to serve at Solemn Benediction when Father Cooney led the singing of his favourite hymn:

Lord, for tomorrow and its needs I do not pray.

Yet Father Cooney was struggling to supply the needs of tomorrow in the form of a larger church. Holding up the offertory plates he would reproach us: ‘Copper! Copper! Where’s the silver?’ In the meantime he was watching the pennies. Around the church and the presbytery he wore a frayed, black-trying-to-be-green cassock. In winter he went shod in army boots; in summer, black canvas plimsolls, sometimes without socks. He chopped his own hair. Standing close to him in the sanctuary on summer days, he smelt like a sack of fertiliser.

At High Mass, the segment of charcoal cake, painstakingly excised with a razor blade, was minuscule, the incense grains sparse. When I swung the censer high to make the smoke billow, he would come suddenly out of his meditative mode: ‘Not so briskly, child!’ he would hiss. When we buried parishioners in the Catholic section of the local cemetery, the charcoal was a morsel of white ash by the time we reached the graveside. It seemed to me strange, Father Cooney swinging a cold smokeless censer at the coffin. At Low Mass he would ease a tear-drop of wine into the chalice. The candles on the altar were dark guttering stubs appropriated from Our Lady’s votive rack. He lit them at the last moment, and snuffed them with a singed pinch before he had even finished the words of the last Gospel.

He was a withdrawn man. If we met outside church he would incline his head, silently acknowledging the bond between himself and his daily Mass server. Sometimes he made a peculiar noise, a substitute for saying anything definite: ‘Wisswiss…wisswiss.’ When the children gathered around him in the school yard he would make a nuisance-fly gesture: ‘Very good! So!…wisswiss…Run along now!’ Addressing women, young or middle-aged, he would stand sideways on to them, bleakly descrying objects of curious interest in the distance. But I had also seen him comforting in his arms a widow wracked with grief at her husband’s graveside.

He was tireless in the service of the sick and the dying. I would see him out in all weathers on his rusty bicycle, visiting the inmates at Claybury mental asylum and the bedridden at King George V hospital. Careering unsteadily along the street, narrowly missed by buses and lorries, he gripped the handlebars with one hard-knuckled hand; the other nursed the sacrament within his breast pocket.

He was self-effacing. When he dropped an object from his arthritic hands, he would whisper to himself, bending over painfully: ‘Wisswisss…Imbecile it isS!’ If he caught the servers fooling around before High Mass, he would mutter: ‘Boys will be boys as the hills are green far off!’ But he could get exasperated with our choir when they droned on beyond the Offertory: ‘Orate frates…Enough of that!…’

My mother used to say that when you confessed your sins to Father Cooney it was ‘like going on trial for your life’. Often he made me repeat my purpose of amendment: ‘Say it again…As if you meant it, now!’ But he always ended with the heartfelt murmur: ‘Be sure now and pray for me – the unworthy sinner.’

On Sundays he preached on the Gospel of the day before straying to his weekly hobby horse, the News of the World, which ‘desecrated the Sabbath by its very existence’, lingering hissingly over that final sibilant. Then he would excoriate the barbers’ shops which sold ‘prophylactics’, which I associated in my innocence with mysterious idols of a false religion. ‘No dacent, upright Catholic gentleman,’ he said, ‘should give custom to such a one as does the Divil’s business now!’

3

FATHER COONEY recruited me as a candidate for the priesthood in this way. One Sunday evening I arrived at church early for Solemn Benediction. After vesting I looked into the sacristy. The room was silent, deserted. On the press stood the chalice in readiness for Mass the following morning. I had an urge to touch the receptacle. I went on tiptoe across the parquet flooring and grasped the embossed stem of the sacred cup. At that moment I heard a gasp. Looking back I was seized with terror at the sight of Father Cooney perched on a stool behind the open sacristy door. He followed me with his eyes as I walked slowly past him, trembling, as if I had committed a sacrilege. He said not a word.

The following day, after early morning Mass, Father Cooney asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up. I said confidently that I hoped to be a priest. Within a day it was settled that I should apply to the bishop to try my vocation at a minor seminary, a boarding college where young boys began their long training for the priesthood. When Father Cooney put my name forward to the bishop I was approaching my thirteenth birthday. I was already a Johnny-come-lately: many boys of my generation had begun their priestly formation at the age of eleven.

On the appointed day, my mother took me to an interview with the Right Reverend Bishop Andrew Beck of Brentwood. She was dressed in her purple coat with padded shoulders which she kept for special occasions; it was smart but her dress showed a few inches below the hem. I was dressed in my elder brother’s navy blue jacket temporarily stitched up at the sleeves. We sat at the front of the upper deck of the London Transport bus because Mum thought it a treat to have a view of the scenery on a journey. Riding northwards from the bus-stop outside Trebor’s mint factory, we passed Hill’s car showroom festooned with bunting snapping in the spring breeze. Then we crossed the River Roding with its smell of the sewage plant and passed under the Central Line railway bridge on our way to the towering Majestic cinema. In all that journey, I reflected, there was not a single sacred image to be seen. That was how I had begun to think.

Bishop Beck’s diocese took in the county of Essex with its new towns and the poor districts of London’s East End, but he lived in the prosperous suburb of Woodford Green. The bishop’s house was set back from the road amidst clipped shrubberies. A gleaming black limousine stood on the gravel drive. Monsignor Shannon, the Vicar General, greeted us at the door. He was a stout man in a black suit, a cigarette perched between his fingers. He had a flushed face as if he had just climbed out of a steaming bath. He spoke to us softly, advising us to address the bishop as ‘My Lord’. He ushered us into a room where the bishop sat at a desk with his back to French windows. He got up and held out his ringed hand for us to kiss.

He was a lean, dark-haired, exhausted-looking man with a sallow face. He was watching me intently through half-horn-rimmed spectacles. I sat bolt upright on a straight-backed ornate chair trying to look alert and decent. He spoke for a while about Father Cooney’s recommendation. Looking up at the ceiling, he said: ‘How lucky you are to have Father Cooney as your parish priest.’ Then he asked my mother if she would mind waiting outside.

He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and dictated a passage from St John’s Gospel, which I wrote down accurately. Then he wanted to know how many bedrooms we had in our house, and about the sleeping arrangements. I said that my three brothers and I, and sometimes my father too, slept in one room sharing three single beds. He asked if my father and elder brother went to church, and I said that Dad never went to church even at Christmas. He wanted to know how I liked my school. I said I liked it well enough. I had no inclination to tell him of the fights in the school yard, and the impure larks in the evil-smelling latrines.

‘If you are to be a priest one day,’ he said eventually, ‘you will have to study hard to be an educated man. Ordination alters your entire soul…You must become a holy man.’

He asked how I felt about going away to a boarding school, the minor seminary. ‘You might be homesick,’ he said. ‘What do you think about that?’

I tried not to betray my anxiety. I was afraid that I might say something that would make him withdraw the suggestion. ‘I would like that very much,’ I virtually whispered.

Then he called my mother back, and it was my turn to go out into the hallway where Monsignor Shannon was at the ready with a biscuit and a glass of milk.

When Mum emerged accompanied by the bishop I could tell from her expression, a pious look she wore in church after taking Communion, that everything had been agreeably settled. The bishop explained that since our diocese was poor it had no minor or senior seminaries of its own. He would have me lodged in a seminary owned by one of the larger, more prosperous dioceses of England. ‘It will be a long way from home,’ he said, with a warning look.

I tried to appear intrepid.

On the bus, I surveyed the Godless landscape, rejoicing inwardly that I was soon destined to depart for a very different world where there would be constant visible reminders of the Mother of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Eventually Mum patted me on the arm and said she was proud of me. When we reached home, the house that went with my father’s job on the sports ground, she looked down at me with her lustrous grey eyes. ‘I just wonder whether it’s really you,’ she said. ‘But we’ll see…I should be so proud! And as your saintly grandmother used to say: gain a priest – never lose a son.’

Later Dad came in from the sports ground wearing his overalls. Dad and Mum had not been speaking to each other for some days. He had not been consulted about my visit to the bishop or its purpose. He appeared less pleased than Mum as she reported the proceedings of the morning. He was blinking frequently, as he often did when he was puzzled or nervous.

He said: ‘Are you sure, son?’

I had not the capacity to consider what it meant for Dad to be informed, without reference to his opinion, that I would leave home that autumn to begin my education for the priesthood. I did not consider his feelings or his opinion of any significance. I was filled with a sense of glowing ripeness and anticipation.

4

MY MOTHER, KATHLEEN, whose maiden name was Egan, told me that she became desperate on discovering in the autumn of 1939, days after Britain declared war on Germany, that she was pregnant again. She was twenty-five years of age. It would be her third child under three. In those days the family lived in East Ham, a working-class district close to the London docks north of the River Thames. Dad was out all day seeking casual labour by the hour on the wharves. He had a withered, unbending left leg and was always among the last to be hired.

If she had another baby, how would she manage? And to bring another child into a world at war! Mum began to pray day and night that she would lose the baby. Then she felt guilty. Wasn’t it a mortal sin for a pregnant mother to pray for a miscarriage? She went to see Father Heenan. Father Heenan, who would one day become Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was in 1939 a young, East End parish priest. According to Mum, the priest, from where he sat, extended both his legs, stiff at the knees, to reveal the holes in his shoes right through to his socks. He said: ‘Don’t be afraid, Kathleen, we’re all poor. Trust in God: he will provide!’ She began to pray fervently to Saint Gerard Magella, patron saint of childbirth, for the safe delivery of the baby that was me.

In the early summer of 1940, as a test air-raid warning wailed over London, I came dancing into time in my parents’ bed in Carlyle Road. Our accommodation, which sheltered my parents and elder brother and sister, was two rooms of a terrace house backing on to a busy rail route that ran from the conurbations of Essex to the City of London. I was to be named in baptism after Father Heenan: John Carmel. In Saint Stephen’s church Father Heenan blew in my face in the form of a cross, commanding my unclean spirit to depart. Even as he touched my tongue with salt to preserve me from corruption, the air-raid sirens were singing out again. It was not a test warning. The priest cut the rest of the service, save for the cleansing waters of baptism, dropping my intended second name: Carmel. The baptismal party, myself cradled in my godmother Aunt Nelly Egan’s arms, made for the public shelter even as Father Heenan called after me: ‘John, go in peace…’

5

I HAVE DIM early impressions of East Ham, the shunting steam trains, clashing couplings and buffers beyond the yard fence; fog horns echoing from the docks in the night; a medley of nostril-scorching stenches. Later I learnt that the bad smells came on the wind from the Becton gasworks, the factories in the Silvertown basin, the polluted waters of the Thames at Woolwich.

I feel my father holding me under my armpits in his strong hands, to a rising and falling chorus of sirens. Then I see it: flying high, caught in the searchlight shafts, a growling black flying object shedding fountains of fire. Dad is holding me up, arms outstretched, to watch one of Hitler’s ‘doodlebugs’ crossing the night sky.

The shelter smelt of dank clay. Lying on the top bunk wrapped in a blanket, I watched Mum gazing imploringly at the image pinned to a cross of wood, her lips moving constantly. Eventually the sirens stopped and the night was silent. Through her bowing and whispering before the figure, Mum could control the fiery black thing in the sky and the hideous wailing across the rooftops.

6

DAD WAS THE eldest son of Arthur Cornwell, a former pub manager, and Lillian Freeman, a Jewish barmaid. When Dad was born his father had charge of the Horn of Plenty at Stepney Green in the heart of London’s East End. Granddad was the eldest sibling but he quarrelled with the family because of his liaison with Grandma Lillian. She had ‘got herself into trouble’ and the result was my father. After they married, Granddad sulked. He buried himself in the dockland slums of Custom House, taking a scullery job in the works canteen at Spiller’s flour mills.

Dad was lean and compact, his hair raven black. He might have been a sportsman, but his athletic potential along with other prospects were dashed the day aged three he fell down a flight of stairs. His left leg was badly injured; it was neglected to begin with and complications set in. He spent much of his childhood lying in a body-length wicker gurney in various hospitals far from London. He emerged on to the streets of Custom House aged thirteen, his left leg sans kneecap permanently stiff and thin as a willow stick. He dragged that stick-leg behind him, hopping frantically to keep up with three younger brothers until he found his special rhythm. At a walk his gait was awkward and laboured. At speed he looked like a ballet dancer careering across a stage, his bad leg whizzing forward from the hip in a stiff-legged arc, arms balancing his body with an elegant rhythmic breast-stroke. He even managed to play a bizarre game of football and could put an impressive spin on a cricket ball.

My mother had Atlantic grey eyes and prematurely grey hair. She had nervous eczema across the temples, and a tendency to mottle instant crimson across her chest and neck when roused. She had large hips, strong hands, and an erect bearing. She had left school at fourteen and graduated through unskilled jobs in one reeking local factory after another: Tate & Lyle (sugar, syrup), Spiller’s (flour, dog food, fertiliser), and Knight’s Castille (soap, detergents). My mother’s people on her father’s side were descended from Egans and Sheehys, second-generation immigrants from County Kerry. Her mother was a Sweeney, a Catholic Scot from Leith, but originally from Donegal. Mum was the only daughter, with six brothers; there had been a second daughter who died aged five.

Granddad Thomas Egan’s people had come over from Ireland with nothing but their Faith and the family. Two of my Egan uncles would become involved in a minor way with the IRA: guns up the chimney, running ‘messages’. In truth, Granddad Egan’s children were by their generation belligerent cockneys with a vulgar sense of humour, albeit ghetto Roman Catholic to the core.

Granddad Egan worked in boiler maintenance; he knew precisely where to hit a cylinder to eradicate a dent. He met Grandma Catherine at a Catholic church social evening in Bow and they married in their teens. When Mum was a girl, her family, all nine of them, was squeezed into a two-bedroomed house on North Woolwich Road, Silvertown. Old Silvertown, before Hitler and the London County Council planners reshaped it, was isolated from metropolitan London and its suburbs by the geography of the river and the dock complexes. Rural Essex was a day’s walk away. Transport was minimal and there were few social amenities other than the pubs and churches. Eventually the Egans were joined by a tenth family member, Grandma’s destitute and ageing Sweeney uncle who had walked down from Scotland. Nobody in need was turned away.

Mum was an expert mimic, mocking the follies of pretty well everybody outside the Egan–Sweeney circle. She would hold herself tight as she dissolved into high-pitched, tearful laughter. But she was quick to anger when sensing an affront to her dignity. She thought class a matter of personal aspiration rather than accident of birth. She loathed socialists and the unions because they were ‘against bettering oneself’. She believed that a ‘real man’ is ‘clean’ and ‘truthful’, and ‘never raises his hand to a woman’. Raising her own hand to a misbe-having child was another matter.

She had an unqualified respect for the priesthood. Priests, she knew only too well, were hardly immune from individual lapses. Yet one never judged a priest; for one day, she would say, these men would come face to face with Almighty God to answer for their deeds. She had stories to tell about priests. As a girl, her route to school passed through a Protestant enclave. One morning there was a street fight. The Catholics inflicted a lot of pain and injury, and a delegation complained to Father Fitzgerald. The suspects, led by Mum (big for her age and sporting a broken front tooth and a terrible cast in her right eye), were summoned to the school hall. A cantankerous Father Fitzgerald picked on Mum first. Had she taken part? Even as she said: ‘No, Father,’ he punched her in the chest, sending her flying against the wall. ‘When that priest tumped you,’ she used to say, explosively imitating his brogue, ‘you stayed tumped.’

Despite a restricted education, Mum had a remarkable if occasionally shaky vocabulary ranging from surprising archaisms to odd vulgarisms. She had an outlandish way of undermining well-worn clichés: ‘It’s so quiet in here you could hear a bomb drop!’ And she routinely subverted key words as if striving for the caricature status of a malaprop cockney. Anything surprising was a ‘relevation’; while missing the point was always ‘irrevelant’. ‘An erring priest,’ she used to say, ‘will be judged more harshly than any other before the trinubal of God.’

Mum maintained that she acquired her religious piety from her own mother, whom she described as a ‘walking saint’. Grandma Catherine Egan was a lay member of the Franciscans. She venerated Saint Anthony of Padua and the Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux (the French saint widely known as the Little Flower of Jesus). She attended a Franciscan church at Stratford East. Mum would relate how Grandma Egan would collect her as late as eight o’clock on Saturday evenings from her Saturday job at a grocer’s store to take her to confession at Stratford.

Mum was eighteen when her parents died in the same year, both aged fifty. The event cast a shadow of remorse across the whole of her life. It was as if her parents continued to reach out from their graves to clutch her by the ankles. Granddad Egan, the boiler man, a worrier by all accounts, died first of a perforated ulcer. Mum used to say that days before his sudden death she saw a figure in a black cloak leaning over her father as he lay sleeping on a daybed (my mother’s bed at night) in the living room. Her mother died a year later of breast cancer. Towards the end there was a lapse in Grandma Egan’s piety. As she lay in agony, Mum brought up from the yard a rose her father had planted a week before he died. She said: ‘Remember the Little Flower of Jesus, Mum.’ Grandma turned her face to the wall and said: ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Dressed in the Franciscan habit, she was buried in Leyton’s Catholic cemetery along with six strangers in a common grave, close to Granddad Egan’s common grave.

Mum, being the only girl, looked after three brothers who were still at home, and the aged and cantankerous Scottish uncle. She also became responsible for shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as being the breadwinner – a factory worker on early morning shifts. Her brothers abused her verbally, and sometimes physically, although not without explosive retribution. She continued like this for three years until she met Dad at a dance in the Spiller’s factory social club. She found him handsome and funny. But she married him, she would say later, as a result of his determination and her pity for his handicap. She was twenty-one; he was twenty-four.

My father became a Catholic to satisfy the virtual ban on mixed marriages. Mum says he was an eager convert. Once married, however, he seldom went to church. We grew up thinking him a lost soul. His mother, Grandma Lillian, being a Jew, was deemed doubly a lost soul. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Jews was matched only by their hatred of Protestants. I once heard an Egan uncle referring to my genial Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.

7

MUM’S DISILLUSIONMENT with Dad began with a wartime episode. To escape the air raids in London, Mum and we three children went to stay in the market town of Bicester in Oxfordshire while Dad stayed on in East Ham. During our absence, Dad got involved with a girl he met in a public air-raid shelter. Mum discovered this when she returned to East Ham without warning and found an intimate letter written from an address on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary.

Mum set off on the train to pay the girl a visit. When she arrived at South Benfleet, the station for Canvey Island, she saw Dad on the opposite platform. He waved nonchalantly (‘As if to say: “Here we are again!’”) before nipping on to a train bound back to London. So she proceeded to the address where she found the girl, aged just nineteen, living with her mother. Mum discovered that Dad had constructed a web of fantasies about himself. He claimed to be a master carpenter and had offered to take on the girl’s younger brother as an apprentice. To Mum’s fury in the those times of wartime food shortages, he had turned over his ration book to the girl’s mother.

Retrieving the precious book, Mum set off for London determined to end the marriage. Back in East Ham she confronted him. He confessed all and begged forgiveness, but she was adamant, absolutely adamant, until she went round to see my devout godmother Aunt Nelly. After many tears and over many cups of tea Aunt Nelly persuaded Mum that Dad’s erring behaviour was a consequence of ‘this terrible, terrible war’ and that God would surely wish her to forgive him and stay with him. So Mum did what she believed her Faith expected of her. We all moved back to East Ham, to Dad, and the bombing.

Some nine months later, brother Terry and my sister Maureen were evacuated to the north of England in the national scheme to save children from the flying bombs and V2 rockets. At the departure point Mum was carrying little Michael in her arms, the product of her post-Canvey reconciliation with Dad. My elder siblings looked down at us from the bus that would take them to the railway station: two sets of huge sorrowful eyes gazing accusingly through the window. They had labels bearing their names tied into the lapels of their raincoats. I have an impression that I could not wait for them to go.

8

BY LATE 1944, and after four wartime home removals, I was attending a Catholic primary school run by Irish nuns and spinsters. The yellow brick building surrounded by a fenced-in gravel yard was like a stockade surrounded by a hostile world of unbelief. One Sunday a V2 rocket destroyed a nearby Anglican church killing most of the congregation. The next day Miss Doonan, who taught us so piously to make the sign of the Cross, informed us that these people had been punished by God because they were Protestants.

My understanding of the Faith had been marked since infancy by wonder and illusion. The people sighed and bowed and sang together. Why did they do that? When the man at the front turned and raised his arms, he made the bells ring. The man was holding up what looked like a gold clock. When the people bowed their heads deeply, Mum said we were bowing towards God. ‘God’, then, was a clock, and the clock made people bow and sing and walk in circles.

These operations of cause and effect were puzzling. The day before we celebrated the end of the war in Europe, I was humming to myself, skipping ahead of the girl who took me to school, when two bull terriers hurtled around the corner and sank their teeth into my plump legs. I spent the morning in a doctor’s surgery being stitched up and painted with iodine. According to the policeman who visited our house on Victory Day in Europe, the dogs’ owner claimed that I made the animals bite me by my singing and dancing.

That autumn my elder siblings came back from evacuation. They had been lodged in Bolton, Lancashire, with two indulgent spinsters. My sister Maureen wore a red frock and her hair was in ringlets tied with silk ribbons. She spoke in a strange accent, laughing excitedly. I thought she had an adorable face and I fell in love with her in an instant; yet she would not deign to look at me, despite my attempts to be noticed. My brother Terry, a few weeks short of his ninth birthday, and raven-haired like my father, did not take his eyes off me: he was like a black cat with very still yellow eyes. He had returned from exile to find a younger brother living on the emotional fat of our mother’s affections. At tea I blew a raspberry at him. Then he invited me to step out into the yard where, I informed him with a wave of a small hand, ‘All this is mine.’ Why, I wondered, was his face swollen like a boiled tomato? The next thing, I was lying on the ground with a mouthful of blood and three milk teeth down my throat. My sister’s home-coming rapture did not last long. I have a recollection of her bitter wailing that evening as Mum took the scissors to those ‘silly’ ringlets which would only harbour nits.

With the arrival of a fifth child, brother Jimmy, the product apparently of Victory euphoria, our financial situation became ever more precarious. Mum and Dad worked hard to keep us respectable, clean and well fed, but we brushed our teeth with soot from the chimney (an old East End tactic), had our hair washed with carbolic soap, and ate bread and margarine for tea on a kitchen table covered with newspaper. A tonguetied Irish lodger supplemented the household income. Terry, Michael and I shared a bedroom with him. He put curlers in his hair each night and smoked in bed. Dad grew cabbages out back and Mum kept five chickens.

Mum’s mood darkened, a circumstance linked in my mind with two physical misfortunes. Before dawn one morning, looking for eggs in the run, she trod on a rusty nail planted in a piece of wood carelessly left by Dad; it went right through her foot. Not long afterwards, she had her top row of teeth out, a popular practice in those days since dentists earned more for extractions than fillings. They were replaced with ill-fitting false ones. Mum’s new menacing melancholy was also associated in my mind with churchgoing, and what the nuns told us at school. One day Sister Paul unrolled a picture which she hung on the wall for a whole day. It showed naked people standing in beds of fire. ‘These are the souls of the dead who died in mortal sin,’ she said. Talk of sin made me think of dirty cinders in the fire grate. ‘They are burning there for ever,’ she said. The next day she showed us a picture of the ‘holy souls in purgatory’, where people stood in pits of grey ash. Mum spoke often of praying for ‘the holy souls in purgatory’. But when I first heard those words I heard ‘the sorry holes in the lavatory’.

Eventually I came to understand that the clock-God was a glass case that held a white circle of wafer bread. The round white wafer was God, which I came to eat. I put out my tongue and there he was. God was sour and soggy in my saliva. You must not bite him, Sister Paul said. You must not let him touch your teeth or the roof of your mouth. Let him rest on your tongue until you are ready to swallow him whole. I could feel him sliding down inside me, the slimy little God inside me, in under my roof. I was a little house and God could sit inside my tummy. As we walked in twos back to school for our First Communion breakfast of custard and jelly, I passed Mum standing by the school gate, gazing down at me with a peculiar expression of sadness.

9

In the years before I became devout and felt called by Jesus to follow Him, I had been as wicked as was possible for a child washed in Christian baptism. Sister Paul informed Mum that I had a ‘black streak’. I was physically strong for my age, demonically restless and sudden to anger. My childhood agitation was like a fever. It was as if I was permanently waiting, on edge, for the sound of the old wartime sirens; hankering for a heart-stopping explosion.

I suffered the stigma of one ‘lazy’ dim-sighted eye, just like Mum’s. When I was tired my eye turned inwards as if straining to see inside my brain. It provoked taunts from other children, who would imitate my affliction to my face until they knew me better. My knuckles would be covered in their blood. The nuns called me ‘sly-boots’, commanding me to look them ‘properly in the eye like a dacent fellow!’ When I looked at myself in a mirror I could see what they meant. My shifty myopic eyes were at war with each other, swivelling and blinking in a restless head. Mealtimes at home were the worst. Through poor hand–eye coordination I tended to make scraping noises, knock over cups, miss my mouth and spill food down my front and on to the floor. Eyeing me from on high, fork-hand trembling, as if at any moment she would skewer and devour me, Mum would struggle to maintain her patience. Crying out between her new false teeth, she would throw down her cutlery and set about me.

Yet Mum herself was no less clumsy. Dishes leapt from her hands, needles pricked her fingers, the stove burnt the porridge, and our cat, despite Mum’s training regime, peed on the kitchen floor. We all of us, including the porridge, felt the avenging Egan hand. As for the cat, I have seen our poor drop-kicked Moggy, paws pedalling frantically, crash-land on the yard fence with a scream.

After a visit to an optician I was made to wear an evil-smelling black bakelite ‘colluder’ on a pair of wire spectacle frames to blank out my good eye and so to encourage the weak and wayward one, now assisted by a lens as thick as a magnifying glass. I was always taking off the colluder. I hated the comments it evoked: ‘ ‘Ere comes Punch’s sore-eyed dog,’ quipped Uncle Mike, ever the creative and well-meaning genius of the Egan vulgarism. So Mum took to covering the good eye with a large square of sticky plaster. Since the sight in my lazy eye provided no more than peripheral vision, I was always walking into trees and lamp-posts. I would rip off the plaster, a prelude to retribution.

Desperate for companionship, reckless of punishment and danger, I became an under-aged thug. I trailed a gang of older lads, haunting bombed-out houses and tenements. Others had been there before us, but there was always something to smash. The blasted staircases and sagging floors, especially on the higher storeys, were terrifying. My talent for atrocious mayhem earned me the respect of my elders. One day, at my prompting, four of us struggled to place an iron girder on a railway track, aiming to derail an express train bound for Liverpool Street Station. Our attempt at mass murder was fortunately spotted. I was chased by police and railway workers for throwing bricks at the windows of passing trains, thrashed by a builder for setting fire to a house he was rebuilding, hit by a car as I ran away from a shop where I had stolen a pack of cigarettes. I did a lot of hitting myself. I nearly killed the boy next door by whacking him over the head with my elder brother’s cricket bat. He had contradicted me. I lied to the nuns to get a goody-goody boy into trouble, alleging he had misbehaved on the bus. With vicious associates I assaulted a girl in a disused bomb shelter, putting our grubby hands down her knickers. She was in my class at school and she had earlier shown a liking for me. She looked at me in silent sorrow as I urged the others on.

Was there no one in my childhood who calmed me with tokens of affection? My Aunt Rose, Tommy Cornwell’s wife, was a vivacious young cockney woman with thick blonde hair, a smoky voice and a husky laugh. She had two children of her own, Sylvia and young Tommy, but all children were her own children, and she seemed in a state of tearful, permanent wonder at their lovable natures. Her voice, full of heartfelt affection, filled me with joy. She was the light of my life, but she appeared all too seldom.

And what of my uncles? Mum’s six brothers were garrulous egotists who loved to put children down. Only Uncle Mike, Mum’s youngest brother, displayed an affectionate interest in us. He told us jokes and would sing popular songs in a pleasant crooning voice. Dad’s three brothers were in the Royal Navy. They would appear briefly on occasional leave, smart in their spotless uniforms. They were hard men and talked with nose-blocked accents. When angry they would screw up their lips in a silent whistle. Uncle John, a submariner, could be spiteful. He had a wife, our Aunt Edie, who wore a wig, but they had no children.

Uncle John: ‘How would you like a tasty bar of chocolate, Jack?’

‘Yes please, Uncle John.’

‘Well, I can’t give you one see Jack ‘cos I ain’t got none!’

Then he would hoot with laughter, looking down on me with a mad gleam in his eye.

10

I WAS HAPPIEST at the cinema. When Scott of the Antarctic, starring John Mills, was shown at the Plaza, I stole money from Mum’s purse and skipped school every afternoon to enter the darkened auditorium from which I faced the lands of brilliant white light. The world of the cinema merged with the world of church, everybody facing one way. Sometimes I found myself genuflecting towards the screen as I came out into the cinema aisle.

All the children in our school were taken by the nuns to see Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of Saint Mary’s. I was bored and kept up a facetious running commentary, with screeches of forced laughter as I identified each ill-favoured nun on the screen as one of our own: ‘Watch out! ‘Ere comes Sister Paul again…’ At one point I got a stinging smack round the ear from Sister Paul who had crept up on me in the dark.

Despite the dysfunction of these years Sister Paul taught me to read and write. When I found a book I liked I gorged on it greedily again and again. I read the class copy of The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton until it fell to pieces. At home there was little reading matter: Mum’s The Key to Heaven (subtitled ‘A Selection of Prayers and Devotional Exercises’), a two-volume illustrated encyclopedia of housekeeping, and the Evening News. My craving for reading matter was eventually to be satisfied in an unexpected fashion as a result of what I did to my new class teacher, Sister Magdalen.

Sister Magdalen, with fading freckles and puckering bloodless lips, was a hard-worked, dedicated teacher, with charge of a class of more than sixty children. One day for some trivial playground misdemeanour she pulled me into the empty classroom by my ear while making indentations in my scalp with her knuckles. Enraged, I seized the wooden blackboard T-square which lay handy on her desk and whacked her around the head, ripping her veil off. The sight of her shorn gingery scalp paralysed me with fascination for a few seconds. She stood there yelling, holding her head, before flying at me. So I went on whacking until our plump headmistress Sister Dolores came hurtling in and pinned me to the ground with her superior weight.

Mum was sent for. She towered over me white-knuckled as the breathless reports of my sacrilegious attack were recounted. Back at home, having bruised her hands with walloping me, Mum completed her punishment with the toe of a heavy shoe. In the days that followed there was talk of having me ‘put away’. Mum took me to a clinic in a church hall on a street called Snakes Lane. A man and several women sat behind a table covered with a green cloth. He said: ‘Take a biscuit, boy!’ He was pointing to a tin box of biscuits on the table. As I nibbled at the biscuit my case was discussed over my head. Mum uttered the word ‘wilful’ a great many times. At one point I reached out for another biscuit, but the man growled: ‘One biscuit only!’

I was sent to a ‘convalescent home’ run by the London County Council in a remote flintstone farmhouse on the Downs near Worthing in Sussex. Lodged in this place were some fifty boys suffering from a variety of physical and emotional disorders. I saw in some of them the same evasive, drowning eyes that I witnessed in my mirror. Many were being treated for additional slum-district afflictions – impetigo, ringworm and scabies; several had cotton wool stuck in their ears or sported suppurating boils on their necks. Some were pale, stick thin. Our beefy minders were known as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’. If we misbehaved we were not beaten; we were tied into our beds with skilfully knotted bandage bonds for hours on end like berserk patients in strait-jackets.

Soon after my arrival I became involved with a villainous older boy, whose face was daubed with red antiseptic paint covering an impetigo scab as big as a lobster. One day he invited me to insert my forefinger, after wetting it thoroughly with my spittle, into an empty light socket. He had said to me: ‘D’you wanna see an angel?’ It was a hard way to learn about the power of electricity. Had I enjoyed a precocious gift for irony, I would have seen it as an apt recompense for my knicker-fingering exploits in disused bomb shelters. The experiment nearly killed me and I ended up in bed swaddled in blankets. When I got better I could not wait to try it out on new arrivals. I spent a lot of my time in that place tied into my bed.

It was in Sussex that I first experienced wonder at the open countryside. One afternoon an ‘aunt’ took a group of us for a walk along footpaths to Chanctonbury Ring, a coppice of trees high on the Downs with distant views of the sea. I stood on the side of the hill intoxicated by the vistas and the fragrant air. The sea was a distant line of fiery light. A small aeroplane was droning high in the sky, wheeling and glinting in the sunlight like a dragonfly. I threw out my arms as if they were wings and ran in circles, wild with delight. Then I threw myself down by ‘aunt’s’ side.

‘Well, John, what do you think of the countryside?’ she said. Unusual for the staff in that place, she was young and pretty, red in the cheek and pleasant. She was looking at me expectantly.

Something got into me. I did not want to give the impression that I had become tame and a softie.

‘It’s shitty!’ I whined, making a sour expression. ‘It’s only fit for pigs.’

She looked away, saddened; and I felt wretched with myself and the world.

11

I RETURNED HOME to London after three months, full of energy for renewed mischief, fattened out on a diet of unlimited porridge, eggs, bacon and doorsteps of bread and jam. Back at school, my terrible sin against Sister Magdalen still unforgiven, I was banished from the set being prepared for the Eleven Plus examination for entrance into academic grammar schools. I was placed, like a villain in the stocks, in a desk for two out in the corridor with an overgrown lad smelling of stale urine who did not know what a book was for, let alone how to read it.

The desk was sited where Sister Dolores could keep an eye on us from her office. She sat very still, with an expressionless face like a Buddha. I was trapped for a year in that desk. On the wall behind us was the shrine to Saint Maria Goretti, the Italian virgin, stabbed to death at the age of eleven because she refused to ‘besmirch her chastity’ with the lodger. Details of Maria Goretti’s story, which was intended to promote purity in the Catholic young, prompted a darkly pleasurable excitation in my genitals. It was my special task to keep Saint Maria Goretti’s votive lamps trimmed and lit.

My formal education in primary school had come to an end the moment I attacked Sister Magadalen, but close to where I sat in the corridor were shelves containing a chaos of battered books: Butler’s Lives of the Saints, outdated Catholic directories, hymnals, an ancient and incomplete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a set of novels and short stories by Charles Dickens. I spent many undisturbed hours reading about saints like Simeon Stylites who lived at the top of a pole, or devouring encyclopaedia entries on such mysteries as the history, economy and geography of Bulgaria. Best of all I lost myself in the plots of David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol.

At eleven I was released from the corridor and sent, as befitted an academic reject and troublemaker, to a Catholic Secondary Modern school on the Ilford High Road. The building was lit by gaslight, heated by open fires, and surrounded by a caged yard. Saints Peter and Paul was in those days an educational sink for an area that stretched from Barking, east of where my mother had been brought up, to Dagenham where Ford workers and their families lived. The head teacher, Mr J. O. Murphy, a red-necked Irishman, spent a lot of his day spying on boys. He would hide in cupboards, peep through keyholes, and stand on a ladder in order to peer around a corner from a high vantage point. He caned me almost daily, not for specific misdemeanours but on a generalised assumption that I deserved it. My classroom teacher was an exotic middle-aged woman called Roma de Roper, who had once been a professional actress. She devised bizarre theatricals mostly involving magic potions and wizards. She was a civilised contrast rather than a sufficient antidote to the male teachers. Since we had no games facilities, except for the Ilford public swimming pool, the boys’ principal sport was boxing, with a vindictive tendency to mismatch troublemakers with heavier partners.

To the glee of Mr Murphy I was knocked out cold in my first gym-friendly by a boy twice my weight and reach. ‘We’ll get you in shape,’ he told me with a chuckle. I soon learnt to keep my guard up and aim for the throat.

The school latrines, housed in an open-air lean-to in the yard, were the scene of grotesque pubescent pranks. One involved bigger boys attempting to ejaculate over the wall into the girls’ playground beyond. The mechanics of these larks were a mystery, as was the fact that they possessed enormous penises compared to my own little willy. I came home uttering foul language I did not understand, my clothes filthy and in tatters from desperate playground fights. The beatings I had from my mother left me with bruised limbs and on one notable occasion the purple closure of my good eye. One day, on hearing me call one of my small brothers ‘a little shit’, she dragged me to the sink, prised my mouth open, and shoved in a bar of carbolic soap. I hid my fear cockily, coming back for more. Sobbing with pain after she had badly bruised her hand whacking my head (which, she said, had the consistency of reinforced concrete), she moaned: ‘Oh God!…My poor hand!…One day you’ll weep bitter tears over my grave.’ At the time, I seriously doubted it.

She was always there, however, demonstratively supportive for life’s big occasions. One of her greatest gifts after the interlude in the Sussex home was to send me at significant expense to piano lessons. The teacher was an indolent fellow called Mr Hall who had a brass plate on the door of his modest terrace house proclaiming ‘The Hall Academy of Music’. The piano in our otherwise unused sitting room was tuned and I began to attend the ‘academy’ once a week. After six months the struggle to pay for lessons prompted her to withdraw me, saying that Mr Hall was useless; which was probably true. But at least I had learnt to read music.

It was in the crucial matters of life and death that Mum proved strongest. One afternoon I watched as a girl I knew was carried shoulder-high out of her house into a waiting ambulance. Her back was arched and she was screaming. She had contracted tetanus, ‘lock-jaw’, after cutting her hand on a dirty broken milk bottle. When news came of the girl’s death, her mother stood in the middle of the street shrieking, her head covered with her apron. On the morning of the funeral I stood petrified on the pavement as the cortège passed.

Later that day Mum found me sitting alone on my bed, head in my hands. I had been struck for the first time with the reality of death. I felt as if I was drowning in a tide of despair and terror. Death had to be a grotesque life-in-death: dead and yet conscious, trapped in a coffin beneath the ground. She gripped me around the shoulders, a veritable wrestler’s hold: ‘You are never going to die,’ she said with a certitude that brooked no contradiction. ‘You will grow up and live for years and years…so many years that it will seem like for ever.’

Ever since I could remember, Mum had kissed us in bed every night with the dire instruction: ‘Cross your arms and pray for a happy death.’ After the incident in the bedroom, she discontinued this gloomy utterance.

12

AFTER THE WAR Dad became a grounds keeper on various sports fields. Eventually he became the chief grounds keeper at the Peel playing fields in Barkingside, a working-class suburb at the outer reaches of London’s East End. The sports facilities – a twenty-acre field and clubhouse – were used by the employees of several companies including the Plessey electrical engineering factory in Ilford. After a succession of temporary lodgings we had come finally to settle in a whitewashed box of a dwelling by the gates of the place we were to call ‘the Peel’. The house faced a highway lined with houses and blocks of flats. In one direction the road headed out towards the industrial wastes of the Essex estuary; in the other it merged into London’s North Circular Road. Frowning down on the district from a far hill was Claybury Hospital, the principal mental asylum for the East End. Claybury was a byword for lock-up wards, a threat not infrequently employed by Mum against Dad and each of us when we failed to live up to the standards of behaviour she set for us.

There was one habitable living room which contained a gas stove and sink, a built-in larder, and space for a small dining table and chairs. We had two uncomfortable armchairs lined with canvas, purchased from the Cooperative Society after the war. A corresponding room on the ground floor, where the old piano was situated, was too damp for habitation through much of the year. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a ‘box room’ where my sister would sleep.

Living on the sports ground gave us an unusual sense of outdoor freedom. To the delight of my sister the former grounds keeper had bequeathed us Gyp, a shaggy sheepdog the size of a small pony. Maureen took over this lolloping animal, taking it for walks around the field. I once saw her clutching an umbrella in the pouring rain as Gyp dragged her towards the filthy, fast-running drainage ditch. For my brother Terry, the Peel was paradise. When the summer came around I watched with growing admiration as he bowled for hour after hour in the cricket practice nets. To my tearful disappointment, he would not allow me to even fetch the balls. He was on the way to becoming a demon bowler and sometimes managed to break a stump in two.

Dad tried hard to make something of the Peel, but when it rained there were gull-infested lakes where the pitches should have been. Despite his handicapped left leg, he managed to drive the pre-war tractor, working the brake and clutch like a gymnast. He became an expert on grass and spent hours gazing at seed catalogues. In 1951 he laid out lawns and flowerbeds at the entrance to the grounds to celebrate the Festival of Britain Year: the theme was strident red, white and blue. He earned five pounds a week, with free rent, and I remember his wry announcement that his pay had been increased by one penny an hour after he had agreed to squeeze another sports club on to the fields. He tried to make a few shillings on the side, bounding with his balletic stride out to the wealthy suburbs to do private gardening jobs.

At weekends Mum managed the cafeteria in the clubhouse, preparing drifts of Spam sandwiches and pyramids of cakes. Mum’s cakes hardened on cooking to the consistency and taste of baked mud. We called them ‘rock cakes’. When bad weather turned the cricket pitches to miniature lakes, and the matches were cancelled, we would be eating stale Spam sandwiches and rock cakes all week.

There was never enough money, and every household bill was attended by Mum’s expressions of shock: ‘I don’t believe it! Not another one!’ The house was oppressed in those days by my parents’ exhaustion and tension; my mother’s desperate longing for something better. The atmosphere comes flooding back whenever I hear the strains of the radio hit song of those days from South Pacific: ‘Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger…’ Mum would sing it feelingly to herself, gazing longingly out of the window by the sink towards the gates of the sports ground.

For a period, under the influence of a prayer campaign in our parish by Father Cooney, now our parish priest, Mum instituted the daily recitation of the Rosary. The slogan was: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ With my father sitting in his armchair by the fire, present in body but hardly in spirit, and the rest of us on our knees, we prayed five ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary every evening after supper. For a time Dad came to church with us. He half-sat-half-knelt in the pew, breathing deeply and bathed in sweat with the discomfort the posture caused his leg. The experiment did not last.

There were nights when we children huddled together upstairs as our parents brawled in the living room with crockery and kitchen pans, accompanied by the sound of smacks, grunts and curses. There were mealtimes when a bowl of stew or a custard tart would go flying through the air to explode on the opposite wall. No small matter for seven hungry people, and with nothing going spare. After a big fight they would refuse to speak for days and weeks on end, save for tight-lipped requests for basics: ‘Pass the salt…please.’ It usually ended with my father buying flowers, and promising a trip to the Odeon at Gant’s Hill, cajoling Mum back to normal communication before the next set-to commenced.

Over the years, Mum’s contempt for Dad had infected our regard for him. Yet I found it hard to dislike him. He often made us laugh with the peculiar literalness of his humour. In the height of the summer season, when he was working outside from dawn till dusk, he would limp in wearily for his supper saying: ‘Cor blimey, I’m as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger.’ When we were seated, eager for breakfast, five sets of hungry eyes, he would produce like a conjuror a tiny beef-stock cube, placing it in the middle of the table: ‘Here we are, kids. How about a square meal?’ One day I knocked down a tin of pennies and halfpennies we kept on the mantelpiece. He picked me up and rolled me about in the coppers: ‘Here we go, Jack: now you’re rolling in money!’

He had a comic sense of mischief which often stoked Mum’s anger. One afternoon I was bouncing a ball against the back of the house when the bathroom window opened and Mum hollered out: ‘Sid! Sid!’ Dad was in the garage, but he heard her clearly enough and came bounding along. I followed him into the house.

Mum had been trying to clean up Gyp in the bathroom and the dog refused to get out of the tub.

‘Sid!’ she called out to Dad, now stationed at the bottom of the stairs: ‘Lift this bloody thing out of the bath, will you!’ Instead, Dad gave me a wink and made a shrill whistle with his fingers. Gyp came out of the tub like a rocket, flew down the stairs and into the living room where he shook gallons of filthy water over the walls and furniture. Mum’s execrations followed Dad as he retreated giggling up the yard path towards the field. By nightfall Gyp had been consigned to a stray dogs’ home.

13

THE END OF my delinquency and the growth of my devout life followed a trauma that I was unable to confide in anyone, least of all Dad. From about the age of ten I was in the habit of stealing money from Mum’s purse to take the tube up to central London. I would take the tram, clattering along the Victoria Embankment. I would find my way from the Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of London, to the dark magnificence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral with its ancient rancid smells. I liked to walk from the Protestant Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station, marvelling at the huge apartment buildings, and the grand façade of the Army and Navy department store. By the age of eleven I had found the museums at Kensington, and I would wander there on Saturdays.

One afternoon on my way back to South Kensington a man walked in step with me along the tunnel that leads from the museum district to the underground station. He was in early middle age, well-groomed and dressed in a tweed suit. He had fair hair and a pleasant fresh complexion. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I had seen boys with fathers like him in the museums. He asked me if I would like to earn some money, showing me five shillings in the form of two newly minted half-crowns resting in the palm of his hand. It crossed my mind that the money would buy me many more trips into central London, but even as I gazed at the coins I was frightened. The tunnel was now empty of pedestrians; we were alone. I started to walk quickly ahead, but he kept pace with me. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he was murmuring. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

Saying that he was not going to hurt me made me all the more frightened. When he held me painfully by the shoulder, I was terrified of what he might do if I refused to cooperate with him.

In a cubicle of the deserted public toilets at South Kensington the man forced me into a deed for which I had neither words nor understanding. I was conscious only of the dirty cracked tiles, the evil smell, and the noise of flushing urinals. In my child’s terror of the man and what he was doing to me, I seemed to understand so clearly what I had somehow always known: that this I, this soul of mine, was a stranger in my body, a stranger in the world.

When he had finished doing things to me, he made me do things to him. Then he stood over me, telling me never to tell anybody. ‘Don’t let me see your ugly little face around here again!’ he kept saying. ‘Look at me!’ he said. But I could not look at him; I stood frozen, blind. He smacked me hard around the head, and I cried again. ‘That’s nothing to what you’ll get if you tell,’ he said. Then he made off. I had forgotten about the five shillings, and so had he.

Some time after this I had an experience in the night which seemed like a waking dream or a deeply buried memory. I was standing, dressed in nothing but a short vest, in an attic room high up in a bombed-out building where the stairs had collapsed. It was a summer’s evening and I was gazing through a dormer window over rooftops and chimneys. In the far distance I could see a church tower touched by the evening sun. The sight of the church tower filled me with sadness. I could hear a sound of sighing and wailing across the rooftops like the old air-raid sirens of the war. There was a presence in the waves of sound, like an ageless dark being, and it gathered strength and purpose in a series of sickening, irresistible pulses. I was about to be engulfed by a monotonous rhythm that intended taking me to itself for ever. This I knew was the only reality, the ultimate and inescapable truth without end. As it ebbed away, like a mighty ocean of darkness, I understood that its departure was only temporary. Finally, inevitably, it would return. This and only this was real. It was a presence greater than my sense of the entire world, and it lay in wait for everyone.

After this I began to listen with greater concentration to the words of Father Cooney as he gravely recited the prayer to Michael the Archangel at the end of Mass. He spoke of the Evil One as he who ‘wanders through the world for the ruin of souls’. I began to understand the Evil One as a dark power that threatens to devour every soul in the world. What extraordinary words they seemed. How they filled me with dread especially in the night: ‘He who wanders through the world for the ruin of souls.’ Ruin.

14

AT MY MOTHER’S suggestion I responded to a call from Father Cooney for altar servers. Following an evening’s instruction in the rituals, and several mornings serving Father Cooney’s Mass, I found that I had an inclination for being on the sanctuary. I discovered an unexpected satisfaction in the dance of the rituals and rhythm of the recitations. The murmured words of the Latin echoing to the church rafters, the bell chimes, the devout movements by candlelight in the cool of dawn filled me with wonder. Lighting candles before the statue of the Virgin, reverently making the sign of the Cross with Holy Water on entering and leaving church, carrying rosary beads on my person at all times, genuflecting with reverence, crossing my forehead, lips and heart in the correct manner at the Gospel, calmed and soothed me.

In retrospect, there was a measure of narcissism. Through all those bad years I had often lost myself in ritualistic play. On the bedroom wall was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with hungry eyes and blood on his hands. I knew the picture had a life of its own because its eyes followed you about the room. I would offer in my play a piece of bread to the Sacred Heart, holding it up to his bearded mouth as if bestowing on Christ himself the gift of the Eucharist. I put an old satin dress of my mother’s around my shoulders. Shaking with excitement, I carried the piece of bread around the room slowly; bobbing up and down, I muttered in pretend Latin over a vase. I jabbered away in a make-believe homily to the four walls. It was as if I was both heroic actor and awestruck audience in a cinema, watching myself on the screen. One day in the midst of these performances I heard a sound: looking towards the crack in the half-open door, I jumped with fright. I saw a sea-grey eye gazing at me, like the eye of God himself. Mum was watching in silence, from the landing. After that my rites became ever more secretive.

When I first began to serve Mass, my religiosity on the altar, for all its apparent self-discipline, was childishly puffed up. Each morning Father Cooney would open the doors of Saint Augustine’s church at twenty minutes to seven precisely, to greet me waiting on the steps whatever the weather. There I stood sometimes drenched to the skin, sometimes caked in ice and snow, after the two-mile cycle ride from home without breakfast. These were the days when communicants, including children, fasted from midnight the previous day. Father Cooney, I was convinced, was observing me on my knees before and after Mass. I saw myself as he might have seen me: an angelic child surrounded with sacred light; a glowing little saint in a stained-glass window. I bowed profoundly till my forehead touched the carpeted steps of the altar; I beat my breast heavily at the Confiteor; I turned my head low and devoutly towards Father Cooney, as the ritual demanded; I lifted his chasuble at the consecration, while ringing the sanctuary handbell with a vigorous flourish. I did all this with a show of profound reverence, while I basked in what I imagined to be Father Cooney’s approval.

Father Cooney’s unspoken admiration was as nothing, however, to the sense of power I believed I had begun to exert over my mother, who still lay abed as I let myself out of the house before dawn and who began to speak to me with grudging respect as if for the clerical estate. She had even taken to rewarding me with the cream that collected at the top of the milk bottle, which she normally reserved for herself. ‘You’ll need this,’ she would murmur, as she poured the cream over my porridge when I returned from Mass, to the sullen envy of my siblings and the wordless amusement of my father. This was holy power indeed.

15

I HAD ABANDONED the bad company of former years, and I now found a friend in an ageing woman of the parish. Miss Hyacinth Racine, who was probably in her late seventies at that time, used to haunt the pamphlet rack in the church porch. Deeply stooped, she had a prominent hook nose with hang-glider nostrils. She spent her days walking between her house and the church, pulling a shopping trolley filled with reading matter. She spoke in an accent I identified as upper class. When I held the plate beneath her bristly chin at Communion, her tongue leapt out like a trembling yellow lizard. Most people tended to shun her. Mum said she was ‘a religious maniac’.

One day after Mass at the Camp, she invited me to her home. She lived and slept at the back of her semi-detached villa amid piles of old books, holy pictures, statues and devotional knick-knacks. There were French windows looking out on to a garden wilderness of brambles. On my first visit I asked if she was a widow. She told me that she was once engaged to a man who went ‘missing in action’ in the Great War. Every year, she said, she went to Leyton station on the date he had departed and stood at the point where he had waved her goodbye. ‘For years I used to wear on that day the dress in which I said my farewell, until the moths got it.’

Some day, she assured me, he would come back.

My friendship with Miss Racine started shortly after my eleventh birthday. After that, unknown to anyone, I was often in her house, listening to her spellbound while I ate her stale biscuits and drank the weak tea she brewed in the kitchen where marauding cats had their muzzles into every item of food. She had a stock of gossip about religious books and their authors, religious communities, priests and nuns. I loved her voice. Alone in the street I would practise imitating her speech, making up conversations with myself.

She gave me a relic of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the French nun who died aged twenty-four and was venerated the world over as a patron saint of priests and the missions. It was a tiny leather wallet containing a piece of cloth that had touched the saint’s bones. On another occasion she gave me a ‘scapular’, two pieces of brown cloth not much larger than postage stamps attached to each other by silken threads, to be worn beneath one’s clothing across the back and across the breast. Those who died wearing this object, she said, were guaranteed an ‘indulgence’: release from purgatory and entry into heaven on the first Saturday following their death.

Miss Racine was mainly a gossip. She never tried to preach. But she prompted an important event in my late childhood which led to my call to the priesthood. She often spoke of her visits to a Marian shrine at a place called Aylesford in Kent. That year the Saint Vincent de Paul Society organised a free camping holiday at Aylesford priory for boys of poor families in the parish. Mum put my name forward and I was accepted.

16

SIXTY BOYS WERE taken in buses from London’s East End to camp in a field next to the gardens of the priory which bordered the banks of the River Medway in Kent. Aylesford had once been the site of a medieval Carmelite foundation from which the friars were expelled at the Reformation. After the Second World War a group of Irish Carmelites had purchased the ruins and rebuilt them as a shrine to Our Lady who, according to tradition, had appeared there in the hollow of an oak tree. In those early days of its revival Aylesford was a romantic place surrounded by the unspoilt Kent countryside.

I watched the brown-and-white-robed friars singing in their renovated church, and walking prayerfully along the cloisters. I was enraptured by the view of weeping willows through clear Gothic windows, the dawn chorus, the tolling of bells marking out the monastic day, river waters lapping below ragstone walls, the smell of baking bread in the kitchens. Aylesford was a haven from the degrading everyday realities of parental discord, the school at Ilford, and dangerous men who lurk near toilets in South Kensington. The singing of the monks, from one side of the choir to the other, created a reassuring rhythm that seemed to echo deep into my heart. At Aylesford I experienced something even more transforming than morning Mass: I felt an inclining of my heart and soul, like the opening of a flower in warm sunlight. I was especially happy in the evening when the house martins swooped above the church roof and the scent of the river drifted in through open windows to mingle with the lingering incense.

The Prior, Father Malachy Lynch, was a large man with a great swatch of silver hair combed across the dome of his head. He spoke to me sitting on a stone ledge in the cloisters. He told me that angels had kept guard over the ruins of the monastery through the years when Catholic practice had been banned in England. He said that he had often seen angels, and that he had a sense of the presence of my own guardian angel who ‘loved me very much’. One day, walking in the monastery gardens he said something that had a deep and lasting effect on me. It was natural, he said, for human beings to look for God as a son seeks a lost father: ‘We are put on this earth to search for God.’ He said that some people look for God with greater determination than others: ‘That is what we do here at Aylesford. We friars make ourselves free to do nothing but search for God.’ Before I left Aylesford to return to London, Father Malachy Lynch gave me a book, The Imitation of Christ. It was bound in black leather, the pages were edged in red. It slipped easily into my jacket pocket.

17

AFTER I RETURNED to the Peel and Saints Peter and Paul School, I daydreamed about Aylesford through the autumn and into the New Year. I longed for that Carmelite cloister and the presence of the monks. I began to spend more and more time in Father Cooney’s ‘old bit of a church’ which became for me a haven in the urban dreariness of Barkingside. The smell of candle grease, the flickering sanctuary lamp, the scent of incense, thin as it was, transported me back to Aylesford in my imagination. During school holidays I sat before the blessed sacrament for what seemed hours at a time; sometimes praying, sometimes in silence as if waiting to hear the voice of God. And it now no longer mattered to me whether Father Cooney was there to observe me. Nor did it matter whether Mum knew where I was and what I was doing.

In The Imitation of Christ I read: ‘If you would understand Christ’s words fully and taste them truly you must strive to form your whole life after His pattern.’ My earlier Mass serving and displays of piety had placed me at the centre of my fantasies: the young hero saint. Now I was no longer the single and exclusive focus of my religious life. I was beginning to be interested in the person of Jesus for his own sake, as the admirable father. I saw him as he was depicted on the front of Mum’s prayer book, The Key of Heaven, which she had possessed since her wedding day. It showed Jesus as a beautiful, mild-eyed, bearded man, pointing to his fiercely burning heart. Protective, understanding, generous, he was a father who loved us more than his own life. In The Imitation of Christ I sensed his concern for the poor, for the sick and the dying; his love of the meek and the peacemakers. I felt his love for children: for me. This image of Jesus merged with my memories of Father Malachy Lynch with his flowing gestures and soft reassuring voice. As I knelt in prayer in Saint Augustine’s church I had the feeling that Jesus was calling me to himself, just as Father Malachy had described the call of Jesus: the invitation to spend my life seeking to know him; the call to imitate him.

One morning, as I knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, the world of my imagination and the world of daylight reality came together. I heard a low, kindly voice. I thrilled to the sound of the voice, which was even more real than the motor of a passing car on the high road outside. ‘Come, John,’ said the voice. ‘Follow me. I want you to be one of my priests.’ It was the voice of Jesus.

I cycled home in a glow of happiness; it was as if the whole world was bathed in warm light. I was filled with the love of Jesus: me for him, and him for me; it was as if I was shedding a warm glowing light on the entire world. As I cycled back to the Peel, past streets of terraced houses, past suburban avenues of little semi-detached houses with their privet hedges, storm porches, bird baths and garden fixtures, this entire Godless world seemed bathed in sacred radiance.

It was the next day that I crept into the sacristy before Solemn Benediction and grasped that sacred chalice, as if I were taking possession of my future calling, only to be scared out of my wits by Father Cooney, perched on a stool behind the door. Then came that morning, when as if by providence, Father Cooney turned to me at the end of Mass: ‘Wisswiss…now then, John…What is it that you want to be when you grow up?’

I told him, confidently, that I wanted to be a priest at Aylesford. I expected his joyous approval. I was not prepared for his retort: ‘Wisswiss…There are far too many monks and friars…Our Lord needs priests for our city parishes, not more Carmelites.’

I was thrown into confusion by Father Cooney’s response. His world was a milieu of church building debts, primary school catechism classes, vagrants at the door, hospital visits, Barkingside High Street, the Ford and Plessey factory plants, troubled parishioners like Mr and Mrs Cornwell at the Peel. When I thought of the priesthood, I was thinking of Father Malachy Lynch and a life within Aylesford’s cloisters and monastery gardens.

Then he asked me whether I had thought about applying to enter a minor seminary. I had no idea what he meant. But he was telling me, earnestly, that to delay would be a mistake. I must not miss my chance, he said.

‘Sure the boy’s not got a word of Latin…wisswiss…wisswiss,’ he mumbled, as he took off his vestments. Now he attempted to explain in a halting fashion that a minor seminary was a college for boys who wanted to be priests when they grew up; where they got themselves a decent education.

That day I went to see Miss Racine and told her what Father Cooney had said. Her hand shook with excitement as she handed me my rattling cup of grey tea with its sour milk globules. She seemed to know a lot about minor seminaries, and their histories and locations, and she painted an enticing picture of life in those places. The minor seminaries, she told me, were the best schools in England and they were situated in beautiful locations in the distant countryside. The boys there lived the lives of monks. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You surely have a vocation for the priesthood.’

She told me that the word ‘seminary’ originally meant a garden plot where seeds were grown, protected from harsh weather. Then it came to mean a college where ‘seminarians’ grew sturdily in their religious lives while being protected from the world. God would be my guide in his own good time, she assured me, whether it was to be a monk or a diocesan priest with a ministry in the world. ‘But now that Father Cooney has suggested it, it is a sign. You must respond to his call.’ She clapped her hands like a child: ‘Oh, this is too lovely for words. How happy you will be, John.’

Convinced by Miss Racine that the minor seminary would be a kind of Aylesford for boys of my age, I informed Father Cooney the very next day and without reference to my parents that, yes, I would very much like to go there. He had just turned and bowed to me as we entered the sacristy after Mass. He held his head to one side. ‘Ah, do you say so!’ he said emphatically. ‘Do you say so! Wisswiss…’

On that basis, and without further discussion, Father Cooney took action. The day soon came when he arived on his bicycle at the Peel with a letter for my mother, wishing to talk with her alone. I was sent upstairs to the boys’ bedroom, where I sat looking out at the passing traffic. They must have talked for an hour. After he had gone, she called me downstairs and handed me a letter. It contained an instruction for me to meet the bishop. Mum looked at me with a mournful smile. Then she said with tears in her eyes: ‘If only my mother were alive to see this day. Fancy, me having a son a priest. It’s surely an answer to her prayers.’

Mum did not see fit to mention the matter to Dad, nor did I think to raise it with him. So it was that I came to be riding on the bus to the pleasant suburb of Woodford Green, destined for recruitment as a minor seminarian of the diocese of Brentwood.

18

THE SEMINARY CLOTHES LIST with a letter from the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran of Cotton College, North Staffordshire, caused uproar in the house. Shaking the list above her head, Mum reckoned it equivalent to a month’s wages. She accosted Father Cooney after Mass on Sunday. He arrived the next day on his bike, looking gravely askance. Ensconsed in Dad’s armchair, still wearing his cycle clips, he slurped his tea to the bottom of the cup. The two little ones gawped as if a giant scorpion sat ready to strike.

Father Cooney snatched the clothes list and began crossing out items and altering numbers with a pencil stub. ‘Wisswiss…five pair of stockings [that’s how he referred to what we called socks]. Tree’s more than enough! Tree pair of trousers? Wisswiss…One pair. He’ll be growing out of them anyways.’

It was still a whopping prospective bill.

Mum challenged him: ‘Well, where did your parents get the money when you went to the seminary, Father?’

‘Oh, I was brought up in poor old Ireland, Missus. Not a penny in the house. My dear old Mam went out the back and killed the pig.’

After he had gone, Mum stood by the kitchen sink watching him cycling away up Woodford Avenue. ‘“Me dear owld Mam went out da back and keeld da peeg!”’ she mimicked. ‘Wish I had a peeg out da back.’

Assistance came from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. Four crisp five-pound notes, the white ones of those days large as jumbo-sized handkerchiefs. So began the process of purchasing my seminary wardrobe, mainly at the Cooperative Society store in Ilford. The new underwear and shirts were placed in a drawer in Mum’s bedroom; the black suit hung in her wardrobe. Alone in the house I would creep in and sniff the unworn items.

Time was at an agonising standstill. I attempted to bring forward the moment of departure by imagining myself sitting in the train as it pulled away from Saint Pancras station. I had chosen the passage I would read from The Imitation of Christ as I settled back in the seat of the carriage. What I read drew me into an interior world where I seemed ever more aware of my innermost secret thoughts, known only to me and my God:

Avoid the concourse of men as much as you can; for discussion of worldly affairs is very bad for the soul, even though they be discussed with a good intention. For we are quickly defiled and enslaved by vanity.

I could not wait to enter the religious life so that I could make a reality of the ordinances of Thomas à Kempis in pursuit of the example of Jesus. But time obstinately refused to pass.

19

THAT SUMMER I took a full-time job as errand boy at a grocer’s store on Claybury Broadway, our local shopping centre. The hours were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7.30 p.m. on Saturdays), with a half day off on Thursday. In all weathers – it rained a lot that summer – I delivered boxes of groceries carried in the iron basket attached to the handlebars of an ancient bike. The popular song on the radio that summer was Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’. Recalling that doleful tune, I see the streets of Barkingside stretching before me as I struggle to keep upright on the heavily laden machine, my toes barely reaching the pedals. When I wasn’t weaving perilously on the recalcitrant bike and coping with its faulty brakes, I was blackening and chafing my hands realigning the loose chain, or mending multiple punctures in the decaying inner tubes.

I also gained first-hand experience of the amorous antics of the grocer and his assistant manageress. She was a buxom pretty woman, her peroxided hair piled high on her head. In the storeroom at the back there was a high desk at which the grocer stood doing his paperwork while eating chocolate. He would rip off the foil and bite into the chocolate bar as if it was a slice of toast. She would come up silently behind him and poke two fingers between his buttocks. Then they would go into a clinch, with a lot of tongue kissing, breast and testicle squeezing, moaning and giggling: all as, in sight of them, I attempted to fill my cardboard boxes with orders of tinned baked beans, trays of eggs, bacon, cheese, margarine, jams and marmalade. Their behaviour intrigued and yet repelled me. I prayed for them both every morning at Mass.

Two weeks before I was due to depart for Cotton College, I was fired from the job after crashing the bike while evading a dog that hurled itself at my front wheel. The dog’s owner stood smirking down at me. ‘That happened to me once,’ he said. Then he added: ‘You must have frightened him.’

The bike was a write-off, and I was concussed. The money I had earned, less compensation for broken eggs (four dozen of them were spread over the incline of Clayhall Avenue), paid for football boots and a new black blazer. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t make you pay for a new bike, you clumsy little bleeder,’ said the manager as I made my farewell.

Suffering a fever, which Mum insisted was due to homesickness in anticipation, I was unable to travel on the appointed day of the new academic year in the third week of September. For several nights I lay weeping, convinced that I was unworthy and therefore fated never to depart for Cotton. But the Very Reverend Father Doran wrote a revised travel schedule, informing Mum that a car would be waiting at Oakamoor station and that I should arrive at the college in time for Compline, Benediction and supper.

20

ON A LATE September Sunday morning of cool breezes and brilliant sunshine I served Father Cooney’s Mass for the last time. In the sacristy he handed me a parcel and told me to open it. It was a new leather-bound Roman missal in dual Latin–English translation. The pages were gilt-edged and there were sumptuous silk markers, purple, red, green, white and gold. I could smell the warm scent of the leather and the sweet aroma of the delicate rice-paper. I was moved to tears, realising the expense of the beautiful object. I attempted to thank him, but he interrupted me: ‘Wisswiss…Very good! Run along now!’ As I left the sacristy he called out: ‘And keep the Faith!’

As I made my farewells at home, Terry, my elder brother, was terse: ‘Now I’ll be able to breathe at night.’ My sister, immaculately groomed, and approaching her fifteenth birthday, gave me a quick dry kiss on the cheek. She had a knowing gleam in her eye. Not for one moment, she appeared to be telling me, was she taken in by my devout pretensions. The youngest two, aged ten and seven, stood gaping, incredulous that any of us should be escaping from the Peel. Dad came in from the field. He was blinking with nervous excitement. He lifted my bags. ‘Gawd awlmighty!’ he said. He sang a bar of ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’, then he lowered his face towards mine for a kiss. Accompanied by Mum, wearing her purple coat, I set off through the gates of the Peel, my arms almost out of their sockets with the suitcases I insisted on carrying by myself. In my unyielding new black shoes I just made it to the bus-stop.

We had lunch in the cafeteria of Saint Pancras mainline station. Mum ordered steak. It stuck in my stomach. She nevertheless ordered treacle suet pudding, urging me to finish every morsel. Her boy was not going to depart unfortified.

The station was a like stage set for the commencement of my spiritual journey: incense steam clouds, amplified pulpit-voice announcements, grand cathedral arches, shafts of lantern-light. I leant out of the window as Mum walked, then trotted alongside the carriage, her eyes suddenly reproachful and gazing into mine. She stopped at the end of the platform, a purple figure frantically waving a handkerchief. Then she was gone.

I sat hunched forward, still suffering from lunch, looking out at the passing immensity of the aged and filthy city wartorn from Hitler’s bombs. Taking The Imitation of Christ from my pocket I read the passage I had marked weeks earlier with a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:

It is no small matter to dwell in a religious community, or congregation, to converse therein without complaint, and to persevere therein faithfully unto death. Blessed is he that there lived well, and ended happily.

Opposite me sat a smartly dressed woman. She smiled, her broad lips thick with orange lipstick. But I avoided her eyes and watched the factory buildings and terraced houses slipping by. In glimpses between tunnels and high embankments, the countryside finally opened out to the horizon. I felt a delicious sense of sadness as the train sped on, carrying me farther and ever faster away from Mum and the family, from Father Cooney, from the huge, bruised city of London. From the World.

21

THE SUN WAS setting as the steam train laboured alongside a fast-flowing river, brassy blue-green in the late afternoon sun. I could see drystone walls bordering steep fields; clusters of pine trees on the summits of dark red cliffs. Eventually there was a line of cottages and a factory foundry with clashing engines. A man lit by the reflection from a furnace stood in a doorway mopping his brow. We had arrived at Oakamoor.

The waiting car was a cavernous pre-war Austin. The driver greeted me with: ‘Now then! Cotton!’ As we lurched away, he explained that the factory was a copper mill. ‘They keep those furnaces going day and night; even on a Sunday,’ he said. The taxi paused at a crossing for the train to pass. There was a church in a steep graveyard, dense with decayed headstones. We crossed a bridge where I could see a broad weir blurred with rising steam. Oakamoor was a settlement of workers’ cottages. The dwellings cowered below the wooded flanks of the hills that rose on all sides. There was a shuttered pub.

We began a climb through hairpin bends. The road was narrow, bordered by lush pastures and coppices. At turns I could see back down to Oakamoor, virtually hidden now in mist. Higher and higher we went. Then the driver called out: ‘There she is!’ We were running along a straight stretch with overarching trees. In the distance, through a break in the woods, I could see a cluster of buildings which seemed to cling perilously to the side of the valley.

We paused at a crossroads by an ancient stone inn and turned left, passing a hamlet of single-file cottages. ‘That was the village of Cotton, that was,’ said the driver facetiously. As we passed along a level lane, sideways to the hillside, the college came into full view. At its centre was an imposing mansion to which was attached a barrack-like stone building with lighted curtainless windows. To the right of the mansion, silhouetted in the evening light, was a stone church with a spire. The college faced out across a thickly wooded shoulder of the valley; above and beyond were playing fields rising in terraces towards the crest of the valley.

There were iron gates and a driveway ahead, but the driver followed the lane around the back of the buildings and came to a halt on a cinder yard as spacious as a football field. Depositing my bags, he said: ‘You go down there to the lower yard…up the steps, and someone will look after you.’ He seemed to imply, by his sympathetic tone of voice, that he felt sorry for me. Wishing me goodnight, he got into the car and shuddered away.

It was now dark, the air shockingly cold and pure. I lugged my bags down the path to the lower yard and entered a door at the top of a flight of stone steps to find myself in a high-ceilinged lobby. A priest in a cassock was standing at a noticeboard lit by a single naked bulb. He turned as I entered, as if he had been expecting me. He had huge shoulders and black horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was cut close and stood up from his scalp stiff as a brush. He had dark eyes and a strong square jaw.

‘Cornwell? I’m Father McCartie, Prefect of Discipline.’

When I said: ‘Hello, Father,’ he replied unsmiling: ‘No, you address the priests here as “sir”. It’s our custom.’

Father McCartie took my bags and hurried ahead of me up four flights of a worn stone staircase, the thick crêpe-rubber soles of his shoes squelching noisily. We entered a dimly lit dormitory like a tunnel under the eaves of the house. Black iron bedsteads with white coverlets stood close together. Behind each bed was a space for storing clothes. There was a range of narrow dormer windows on each side, wide open to the raw air. A statue of Saint Joseph stood on a pedestal at one end, and a crucifix hung on the wall at the other.

‘That’s your berth,’ said Father McCartie, pointing to a bed beneath one of the windows.

This place was called ‘Little Dorm’, he told me, so as to distinguish it from ‘Middle Dorm’ and ‘Top Dorm’. There was no talking in the dormitory for any reason, he added. I was wondering why he had not asked me about my journey, or where I had come from. I had an impression of vast chilly space beyond the windows, which looked out across the valley to a pine ridge barely visible in the dusk, and I was aware of the distance I had come from home. It was all so different from what I had imagined. Aylesford and its birdsong, its summer fragrance, bell-ringing, tranquil routines and friendly friars, could not be more different from this cold, unadorned place. I thought of Mum and her protective presence, despite her unpredictable moods.

After I had finished unpacking Father McCartie picked up the two books I had brought from home: The Imitation of Christ, and the new Roman missal. Returning them, he said: ‘Take them into church…Now bring your washbag and towel down to the wash places.’

Leading the way, he paused by the statue of Saint Joseph. ‘That was given by the parents of a boy who died of peritonitis within two days of his arrival at Cotton,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘He died fifty years ago.’

We proceeded down to the cloisters and descended again to a whitewashed cavern smelling of ancient damp. There were lines of wash bowls and pegs, all numbered. ‘Your number is ninety-two,’ said the priest, pointing out my bowl and peg.

I said: ‘Thank you, Father.’

‘No, you call us “sir”,’ he corrected me once more.

As we returned to the cloister, he explained that the college was founded two hundred years earlier during the penal times, when it was a crime to be a Catholic priest in England. ‘The priests of this college,’ he said, ‘dressed in lay clothes and were addressed as “sir” to hide their true identity. We’ve carried on the tradition of being called “sir”.’

I felt quelled, and it seemed strange that he asked me nothing about myself. Perhaps, I thought, he already knew everything that was to be known about me.

The building was echoing with the raucous clangour of a bell. Somewhere on a higher floor there was a sound of scraping of feet, and a man’s voice praying, followed by a roared response. The stone stairs reverberated as a host of boys came into view walking in silence towards the cloisters where they took their places in parallel lines, hands behind their backs. They were dressed in black suits, black ties and white shirts. The toecaps of their shoes were highly polished.

The seminarians of my imagination had been pale and pious, slow of movement, gentle-eyed. These boys were fresh and open-faced, their ears red as if with the cold and the fresh air, their shoulders squared like boy soldiers. Some of the older ones had the tough appearance of farm boys or young building labourers; I had the impression that their eyes were bright, as if with a kind of inner excitation.

Father McCartie led me down the ranks and positioned me between boys who appeared to be the same age as myself. At a signal from the priest we moved forward slowly in step along the terrazzo-floored cloister like a regiment of young undertakers. Many of the boys had metal studs on their shoes giving their precise marching the sound of a metallic drum roll. We passed into a gallery I would come to know as the ‘clock cloister’, because of the presence of a tall grandfather clock. The walls were lined with pictures, including one prominently large print of a youth whose naked body had been punctured bloodily with arrows (this, I learnt later, was a copy of Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, the early Christian boy-martyr). There was a pervasive smell in the gallery, of wood polish, burnt toast and lingering coffee fumes.

Finally we passed through double doors into the church where our footsteps echoed on the patterned tiles and the cool air was heavy with the smell of incense and candle grease. The ceiling disappeared into the darkness high above. There were simple stone columns, unadorned side altars, and a Lady chapel at the end of a side aisle beyond a wooden screen. The boys took their places in plain pine pews on either side of the main aisle; beyond the altar rails was a spacious sanctuary with choir-stalls, an organ, and a stone high altar in the distance overlooked by a massive east window gleaming in the darkness. The boys were kneeling, ramrod straight; the kneelers were made of hard wood. The boy next to me, a youth with pale limp hair, high colouring in his cheeks, and National Health spectacles, took my missal and found me the page for Sunday Compline.

A procession of boys entered the sanctuary, filing into the choir-stalls, followed by a priest wearing a white-and-gold cope. He was tall and ruddy, and walked casually without a hint of devotion. He bowed at the foot of the altar and intoned in Latin the beginning of Compline, the office of prayers at the end of the day.

The ritual appeals to God for his protection as night falls: ‘May the dreams and phantasms of the night recede; keep the enemy at bay, lest our bodies become polluted.’ At the Salve Regina the boys’ voices soared up to the high rafters: ‘To you we sigh, groaning, and weeping in this vale of tears…’ I was conscious of the wild valley in its remote and rugged setting in the darkness outside, deepening the sense of strangeness. Then it struck me that unless I begged to be allowed home the very next day, I had no other choice but to throw myself completely on the person of Jesus. I stole a look around me. My companions knelt with their faces buried in their hands in prayerful recollection.

After the celebrant and the choir processed off the sanctuary we began to leave the pews in strict order, starting with the front row. Towards the rear of the church there were six or seven priests. One older than the rest, bespectacled and with fair receding hair swept back, was scrutinising each of us in turn. I guessed that this was the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran, the superior of the house and headmaster. His face betrayed no emotion, neither severity nor kindliness. Father McCartie knelt on the opposite side of the aisle. He too was watching each boy in turn with those dark eyes through heavy black horn-rims. The others were reading their breviaries.

At the end of the cloisters we passed through a set of double doors into an oak-floored refectory and the warm atmosphere of cooked food. Someone touched me on the shoulder: it was the boy who had knelt next to me in church. He was about the same height as me, his wrists protruding a long way out from his black sleeves. He held his head submissively to one side. ‘My name is James Rolle. I’ve been deputed to look after you,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Welcome to Cotton.’ He placed me next to him in the middle of one of the rows of tables.

The boys were standing in silence, hands joined. Near the double doors there was a table where three nuns stood with ladles poised over enamel serving pans. After Father McCartie said grace we sat down while boys assigned to be servers queued in front of the nuns. Each boy received a portion of beans and a hunk of bread. They fell hungrily on the food, eating at speed. After several minutes there was a sharp rap as Father McCartie struck the serving table, and the boys began to talk all at once.

James said: ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ No sooner had I answered and begun to tell James about my home parish than Father McCartie rapped on the table again and the boys fell silent and stood up, heads bowed for the grace.

Outside the refectory, James took me down to a room in the basement. It was cold and dimly lit, with stone flags and pine benches. Boys sat around talking quietly in groups, occasionally laughing. James was intent on being kind to me. ‘On weekdays,’ he explained, ‘we have Rosary after supper, which you can say either in church or in the cloister. I rarely come in here. I usually go to the library which is above the refectory.’ James seemed unusually self-controlled and serious. I decided that I liked him.

‘Do you like reading?’ he asked. ‘What are you reading?’ When I said that I was reading The Imitation of Christ, he reacted with surprise. Slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a slim black copy of the Imitation with red edging, identical to my own. ‘I read it at odd moments of the day, and carry it everywhere,’ he said. ‘But it’s spiritual reading, isn’t it? One could hardly count it as one’s normal reading.’

At the clangour of bells, James said that we would not be allowed to speak until breakfast the next day. I should just follow him. ‘Watch out,’ he said grimly. ‘You’ll be beaten by Leo if you’re caught talking, and so will anybody you’re caught talking to.’ Leo, he explained, was Father McCartie’s nickname.

Boys were hurrying down the cloisters to the staircase leading to basement level where they took off their jackets and ties to wash in cold water and brush their teeth. I was still brushing my teeth when an older boy told me brusquely to get a move on. James was waiting to accompany me to the dormitory.

About sixty boys were lodged in Little Dorm; they changed into their pyjamas with a uniform set of modest stratagems. They went down on their knees to pray silently for a few moments before getting into bed. I was still undressing when the lights flashed off and on. I nevertheless went on to my knees to pray.

I thanked God for a safe journey and asked for his protection through the night. After a prayer to my guardian angel (‘O my good angel, whom God has appointed to be my Guardian…’), I was the last to get into bed, where I lay shivering for several minutes. The sheets felt damp and the mattress was as lumpy as a sack of potatoes, but it was the first time I had slept in a bed to myself since my brother Terry had returned from evacuation.

Father McCartie appeared by a doorway situated at the top of a wooden stairway which looked to be a laundry shoot. After a while he began to walk along the lines of beds looking at each of the boys in turn; he had taken off his noisy crêpe-soled shoes and was in bedroom slippers. Then the dormitory was plunged in darkness and silence. How comforting it would have been, I thought, had the priest wished us goodnight and blessed us.

The air, carried on a stiff breeze through the dormer windows, was cold on my face. Soon I made out the night sky through the window above my bed. A scattering of stars sailed between the clouds. I could hear the wind in the trees, then, gradually, in the far distance, the sound of a motorbike taking the steep climb up from Oakamoor, constantly changing gear before surging forward; eventually the sound grew fainter and merged with the rustling of the treetops. I wondered what the family were doing back in London. Dad and my brother Terry were probably listening to the radio, perhaps a cheerful dance number played by the Palm Court orchestra. Sister Maureen the convent-school girl would be doing her homework, while Mum was washing dishes at the sink. My younger brothers would be fast asleep in their single bed, lying end to end.

I lay awake until the breathing of the boys about me became regular. I was dozing off, when I was surprised by the sight of a black figure in the darkness moving silently along the dormitory. I guessed that it was Father McCartie. For an age, it seemed, I could see him standing in silence at the doorway halfway down the dormitory. Eventually he left. As I dozed, I was again conscious of the great spaces beyond the windows and the garret roofs. I felt the wild presence of the woods and hills which were to be my new home.

22

THE NAKED DORMITORY lights were switched on and a senior boy passed at a run, whacking the ends of the iron bedsteads with a heavy book and shouting: ‘Up!’ It was still dark outside and there was a stiff wind and spots of rain whipping through the dormitory windows. Boys were leaping from their beds, throwing back the bedding for airing; going down on their knees to pray. As it was a weekday, they were donning grey flannel trousers and casting over their shoulders black or navy blazers or sombre tweed jackets in readiness to depart for the wash places. I was the last out, struggling with fingers too stiff with cold to keep up. James, who was several beds down from me, was waiting and gestured for me to follow.

He saw me through my ablutions before leading the way to church where we were the last to take our places in the pews. The boys were kneeling with their shoulders hunched, heads bowed in private prayer. A bell rang and the Mass celebrant and two servers appeared on the sanctuary. I looked at my watch and saw that it was only seven o’clock. The sun was rising, revealing the magnificent detail of the stained-glass window above the high altar – an image of the enthroned Christ the King surrounded by angels and saints. I had grown used to being the only boy at dawn worship in the church at home; it was strange to be kneeling with so many youths at a time of the day that had been special for me and Father Cooney alone.

While the boys concentrated on the main community Mass there was a constant ringing of small bells, muttered Latin, and a flurry of rituals at the side altars of the church as priests came and went with servers to say their private Masses. But the activity died down after the community Mass ended. The last of the priests had returned with his server to the sacristy, and the church was silent.

The period of thanksgiving after Mass seemed interminable. My stomach was churning with hunger, my knees were giving way, and I had a headache and a full bladder. The discomfort was all the worse as I had no idea how long it would last. I felt humbled by the youths around me who seemed controlled and patient in their apparent contemplation.

Father McCartie’s rap at last signalled us to leave the church in ranks for the refectory. Breakfast, eaten in a few gulps by most boys, was porridge (grey, salty, lumpy and made without milk), hunks of dry bread and plastic mugs of tea. James accompanied me to the dormitory where we made our beds in silence, Father McCartie lurking in the background. Descending the stairs, James said we were free until the beginning of lessons so he would give me a tour.

The central focus of the array of college buildings was the façade of the mansion he called the ‘old hall’ where the priests had their rooms and refectory. Before it was a sweep of lawn and a grand cedar of Lebanon. At the back of the old hall was an ugly extension where the nuns lived. James explained that they did our laundry, cooking and cleaning. ‘We call them the witches,’ he said with a contrite smile. ‘They have taken a vow of silence. But the sister matron speaks to us.’

Attached to the old hall were two stone Victorian elevations at right angles to each other, which housed the boys’ refectory, libraries, dormitories, classrooms and wash places. A cloister with Gothic vaulting ran through one of the wings. The most recently built section of the college was a square rose brick structure known as Saint Thomas’s where the most junior boys, aged eleven to thirteen, had their dormitories under the supervision of a wraith-like balding priest called Father Manion.

James showed me the library, which smelt of beeswax floor polish. There were deep windows with views of the valley and an expanse of tall shelves. A few boys were sitting at the tables reading. Through a far door was another library with oak panelling and stained-glass windows which, James whispered to me, was the sixth form library. He pointed out a periodicals table with several magazines from other schools and seminaries on display. A single copy of the Illustrated London News lay on the table. ‘There are no newspapers,’ he said, ‘and we’re not allowed to listen to the radio.’

He explained that from among the boys in the final two years at Cotton were recruited the college monitors, house captains and their deputies: they were known as the Big Sixth and had the power to have boys punished by sending them to the Prefect of Discipline or the Prefect of Studies. The teaching staff priests, he said, were known as ‘the profs’.

We finally emerged into the chill morning air, descending by stone steps known as the Bounds Steps into an area James called Little Bounds, a yard large enough for two tennis courts. Little Bounds formed a kind of level platform or stage looking out over the panorama of the surrounding countryside, bathed that morning in early autumn sunshine. Several boys were staring like prisoners in a cage through the wire fence that bordered the yard. James and I joined them. The high fence marked the boundary, James told me, between the boys’ domain and the lawns and gravel pathways strictly for the use of ‘the profs’.

Immediately below these gardens a drystone wall bordered the lush meadows, ending abruptly at a wood that descended into the valley. Beyond the closest canopy of the woods, a mile or so away, rose a corresponding series of meadows on the opposing flank of the valley. An ancient stone cottage stood in one of the meadows, a wisp of smoke rising from its chimney. This was the only human habitation visible in the landscape. To the left of the pine wood was a sheer drop and the distant countryside opened out in a succession of gentle shoulders and folds, each softer and more hazy than the last, until the final ridge melted into the skyline. As I stood there my heart leapt with the immensity of the scene and the bracing air.

James now led the way to a second level by way of a wide sloping path up to the cinder yard he called Top Bounds, where I had been deposited the previous evening. Boys were walking up and down in threes and fours, hands in pockets. James said: ‘Shall we take a few turns?’

As we walked we were joined by another boy with severe acne and untidy hair who introduced himself as Derek Hanson from Southend, Essex. He too was a seminarian from the diocese of Brentwood. He skipped about a little as he walked, turning towards me, then suddenly turning away. He was describing the eccentricities of his parish priest at home, while occasionally giving vent to nervous ripples of laughter. After one more fit of the giggles he said: ‘Watch out for Father Armishaw.’ Then he blushed and excused himself, hurrying down towards Little Bounds.

‘Derek is very nice,’ said James, ‘but he has taken a sort of vow never to talk after mid-morning break.’ James seemed to consider the matter for a few moments. ‘I do think that his behaviour is rather singular,’ he added. It was the first time I had heard the term ‘singular’, and I was not sure what it meant. (I was soon to discover that it was an important watchword in our spiritual lives, meaning any behaviour that was deemed showy.) Then he informed me that ‘Armishaw’ was Father Vincent Armishaw who taught English. ‘He’s a character, a bit ferocious, but he’s not too bad. Derek has a crush on him; and he’s not the only one.’

23

AS WE WALKED in Top Bounds a boy came up and asked me to accompany him to Father Doran, the headmaster. His office was situated on a corridor with a highly polished linoleum floor in the old hall. The boy rapped hard on the door. When a muffled voice called out: ‘Come!’ he left me to enter by myself.

Father Doran, a thin, slightly stooped man in a caped cassock, was leaning on the mantelpiece in a room filled with light from a set of bay windows that went from floor to ceiling. There was a desk covered with papers, and glass-fronted bookcases. The atmosphere of the room was heavy with tobacco.

He was busy with a penknife and a pipe, attempting to extract burnt-out tobacco into an ashtray at his elbow. At the same time he occasionally looked down on me with penetrating grey eyes through flashing gold-rimmed spectacles. His ash-fair receding hair was brushed back flat on his head and his thin lips were firmly set in a long pale face. He looked about the same age as my father. He stopped fiddling with his pipe, snatched a cigarette from a Senior Service pack and lit it with an almost petulant movement.

‘I prefer to smoke a pipe,’ he said, the cigarette wobbling up and down on his thin lips. ‘But whenever the reverend mother comes in from the sisters’ community, I have to put it down. You see, it’s never done to smoke before the sisters. Then it’s such a business to light it up again.’ He took a deep drag and held the cigarette between his fingers as he blew out a long column of smoke. ‘She’s just been in this morning, wanting to discuss kitchen business and here we go again – down goes the pipe,’ he said. ‘So I think to myself: “Oh bother, I’ll just have a cigarette, it’s much less trouble.”’

He stopped to inspect me. ‘You don’t smoke, do you, John Cornwell?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, just make sure you don’t. In any case, you’ll need to save all your puff for cross-country running, especially when you’re sprinting up and down the valley here.’

I smiled, but he was observing me without a hint of humour. He began to talk about the history of the school. He told me that Cotton was the oldest Catholic college in England. Most boys were sent here, he said, by the Archbishop of Birmingham, who was the official owner of the school, but there were also a number of students from my own diocese, Brentwood, which had no minor seminary. A minority of the boys, he added, were ‘lay students’ who had not dedicated themselves to the priesthood, and whose parents were therefore paying for their education. ‘You must understand,’ he said with gravity, ‘that your bishop has been put to considerable expense to place you here, and that your fees are paid for out of the charity of the people of your diocese. So you will do your very best to make the most of this opportunity.’ He said that fourteen former pupils of Cotton had been ordained that year. ‘That is your aim,’ he went on. ‘To become a priest…Just keep your sights on that and you can’t go wrong.’

Father Doran now walked over to the bay windows which had an unhindered view across the valley. He beckoned me to join him. ‘Splendid, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we lucky to be enjoying all this?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, avoiding the use of the word ‘Father’. I found myself thinking of the ‘aunt’ at the home in Sussex, and how I had described the beautiful countryside as ‘shitty’. I was eager to let him know that I was impressed by the view.

‘Well, enjoy it now to the full,’ he said, ‘because one day you’ll probably be trapped in a city where there’s not a single tree, let alone grass and cows.’ For the first time he gave a husky laugh, and I smiled back at him with relief as he took another deep drag on his cigarette.

Now that I was here, standing at Father Doran’s windows with the great panorama of the valley below, I had the confidence to say: ‘I’m glad that I’m here, Father.’

‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sir! not Father!’ Then he announced with an air of grandeur: ‘For the purposes of competitive spirit all the students in the college belong to one of three groups or houses, named after the great founders of the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham. You have been placed in Challoner House, which commemorates Bishop Richard Challoner who founded the college in secrecy in 1763 when Catholics were still being persecuted by the Protestants for their Faith.’ Bishop Challoner, he went on, was a wonderful man. During one of the anti-Catholic riots in London a Protestant mob threatened to burn down his house. ‘So there you are,’ he went on. ‘We have great traditions! And you are now a Challoner man as well as a Cottonian.’

With this he led me out of his office and down the corridor to a room where a priest was standing, reading some papers, his thick-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead. He was robust with a lineless cherubic face and marked dimples. He was almost bald, despite his youthful appearance; but he had a ring of hair that looked like little collections of chick feathers. He was dressed in a cassock over which he wore an academic gown with long drooping false sleeves. ‘Aha! Master Cornwell,’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself: Father Tom Gavin, Prefect of Studies!’

Before leaving me, Father Doran turned to say: ‘I’ll be watching you closely, Cornwell. And I shall be informing your good bishop of your progress.’

‘Now let me see! Cornwell!’ said Father Gavin with a radiant grin. ‘Frumentum Bene! That’s “corn” and “well” in Latin! I suppose we’d better shorten it to Fru. Yes, I like Fru. You look like a Fru. I take it you have no Latin. No Latin at all, eh, Fru!’

With this he gingerly extracted from his shelves a slim book, grinning back at me conspiratorially as he did so. ‘This, Fru,’ he said, as if he were a magician producing a tender live animal from a hat, ‘is called a Latin primer. And you are going to become well acquainted with its contents, otherwise your bottom is going to become acquainted with that stick there on the bookshelf.’ His face was bright red now, his shoulders heaving with laughter. ‘Not to worry, Fru,’ he said. ‘Only joking, eh! But my stick is there to make sure you behave in class, eh!’

I decided that I liked his joviality even if I did not care for his joke.

Placing the book in my hands he said in a low murmur, his small mouth fighting against the compulsion to smile: ‘Take it away with you, Fru. In spare moments acquaint yourself with the first ten pages in preparation for the treat of our first lesson.’ Before dismissing me, he produced a timetable, specially devised, he said, so that I could catch up with my class year, which was known as the lower fourth.

24

THE MORNING PASSED in abrupt initiations and lessons, punctuated by an unrelenting routine of church visits and religious rituals. I was shown my desk, a capacious box with an oak lid, situated in the lower fourth’s area of the study place, a room which ran the length of one of the stone wings and contained more than a hundred such desks. I was summoned to ‘the bursary’, a room stacked with bars of soap, stationery and clothing, where Father William Browne, a sad-looking overweight priest, issued me with sports gear. I was told to attend ‘the dispensary’ where the matron prodded and poked me all over. When she had finished inspecting my tongue and poking my ribs she murmured: ‘Ah well! Let’s be thankful for small mercies.’

Lunch, which followed the visit of the whole college to the Blessed Sacrament, was a dish of tasteless greasy mincemeat, which the boys called ‘slosh’, accompanied by boiled blemished potatoes, which they called ‘chots’. Within minutes of lunch ending, a bell rang and the boys were hurrying to the dungeon wash places to change into sports gear for a cross-country run. Being under fourteen I was assigned to the ‘easy’ three-mile course.

We streamed up a footpath between drystone walls, greenedged with age, heading for the summit of the valley. I stumbled along, buffeted by a stiff wind. Ahead was a wood of stunted trees; to our right miles of uplands dappled in sunlight to the horizon. To the left was a view of barren hills, their soft green sides broken with outcrops of rock. I was breathless, my legs failing. James hung back, looking sympathetic. We were now the very last of the runners, and the rear was taken up by an older boy who prodded me forward gently with soft little punches in the small of my back. At length we were running on level terrain. Silent woods alternated with swampy open land and we were up to our ankles in the black brackish water that lay below the turf. We clambered over yet another drystone wall and plunged into a pig farm where we were up to our shins in stinking swill and mud.

The college was below, nestling around the church steeple. By the time James and I reached the wash places, most of the boys had doused themselves in cold water and changed back into their day clothes.

The lesson schedule on that first afternoon introduced me to Father Gavin’s special class for Latin beginners. My attention kept wandering to the foliage of the trees at the head of the valley while the lesson unfolded quickly and confusingly with explosions of laughter, jokes and Latin nicknames as Father Gavin drove us on, attempting to explain the mysteries of conjugations and declensions.

Afterwards we were guided to Dr Warner’s remedial class for Greek beginners. Dr Warner was dressed in an ancient grey suit patched with poorly sewn strips of black leather. His face was sallow and faded, his bald pate deeply wrinkled. After setting the others an exercise on the board, he came to sit next to me. Sighing a little as if weary to the heart, he showed me how to form the Greek letters of the alphabet. He smelt of boot polish and his breath was rancid. As I attempted to copy the letters by myself, he hummed a monotonous little tune: ‘Alpha…beta…gamma…delta…’

James met me on Little Bounds to take me in to afternoon tea. He said that Dr Warner was known as Lazarus, or Laz, but his real first name was Leslie. Laz Warner, James said, was a deacon who had studied for the priesthood at the Venerable English College, the seminary for England and Wales in Rome.

On the day before his ordination he decided that he was not worthy to be a priest after all. But his diaconate status had left him committed to celibacy. He came to Cotton where he had remained ever since. Laz was a man of immense learning, said James, but he and his strangely patched suit were unfortunately the butt of many jokes. ‘He is,’ said James, ‘like an old bridegroom who changed his mind on his wedding day.’

25

AS MY FIRST week passed, the rhythm of the day, punctuated by a huge jangling bell rung by the school captain, settled into a routine of classes, study periods, manual labour, runs, drill and hurried meals. But religious devotions dominated: meditation before the early morning Mass; Low Mass celebrated every day of the week, followed by private thanksgiving; with High Mass in addition on Sundays and feast days. There was a homily, known as ‘conference’, after High Mass; prayers before and after each lesson, and Angelus recited twice daily. There was grace before and after every meal, community prayers before lunch, spiritual reading after tea, Rosary after supper, and night prayers before bed on weekdays; Compline on Sunday evenings. Confessions could be heard each evening after supper. There was private spiritual direction on Thursday afternoons when confessions were also available. Many boys spent time in church during their scarce leisure periods.

On my second day, coming out of the refectory after tea, I was accosted by Father Anthony Owen. He was a stiff-necked man in middle age with thinning sandy hair and remarkably bowed legs, hence his nickname, ‘Bowie Owen’. He understood, he said, that I could read music and wanted to test my voice for the choir. We walked to the choir practice room where there was an upright piano.

After taking me through several scales, he said: ‘You’ll make an excellent alto, but open it out! Let yourself go!’ Choir practice, he said, was every day after tea. ‘But there are advantages, Cornwell. Outings, special treats.’

Suddenly the door was flung open and boys of all ages began to enter. Father Owen distributed music sheets for Mozart’s ‘Missa Brevis’. The youngest boys jostled in friendly horseplay while the older ones – the tenors and basses – affected a sense of disdain.

Father Owen, standing at the piano, took each of the four voices separately. Then he turned to face us as he conducted us in harmony with minimal gestures, closing his forefingers and thumbs at the dying fall of a bar in a gentle pinching gesture. At one point, looking at me directly, he put his hand to his ear as if to indicate: ‘Let it out!’ When we had finished the Gloria, he bowed and implored us not to be late for practice the next day.

As I was leaving, he took me by the arm and drew me back into the room. ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it, Cornwell,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll be a useful member of the choir. But let’s hope that your voice doesn’t break too soon.’

Until then I had never given any thought to the fact of my voice breaking.

26

THE PROFS WERE always and everywhere in evidence: at the side altars saying their Masses in the morning, in the classrooms, and on the playing fields. There was a priest, sometimes two or more, present at every juncture of the day to scrutinise us. We were watched from morning until night, and even through the night, it seemed, by Father McCartie.

Father Tony Piercy made an immediate impression. Built like a boxer, and known as ‘Tank’, he was to be seen hurrying about the buildings and across the Bounds, propelling himself forward in a flurry of cassock and gown with a springy half-walk-half-run, shoulders squared. He had a head of unruly, wiry hair and his nose appeared pinched at the end, which gave him a strangely fastidious appearance, as if aware of an unpleasant smell about him. He taught mathematics and he was a tireless handyman, James told me, a ‘general factotum’ around the college, who would cure the ailing plumbing, rebuild a broken desk, mend a boiler, or service Father Doran’s car. Beneath his cassock he wore scuffed army boots caked with mud, and invariably carried a variety of tools in his capacious cassock pockets.

Two days after my arrival at Cotton, Father Piercy introduced me to ‘manual labour’. This involved digging ditches in a scheme to level and drain the playing fields above the college. The drains were constructed by digging down four feet and laying limestone-grit boulders along a channel two feet wide before replacing and levelling the soil. Boulders from disused drystone walls had to be fetched, sometimes from a mile distant. They were heavy and it was easy to tear one’s hands on the jagged edges.

James encouraged me to join Father Piercy’s ‘Workers’ Union’, as the ditching teams were called. ‘Ditching,’ he murmured, ‘is, of course, an opportunity for self-denial.’ We wore rubber Wellington boots, with rugby shorts and shirts over our second-best clothes to protect us from the mud. Father Piercy, dressed in a filthy blue boiler suit and army boots, leapt in and out of the ditches, directing operations. He never spoke to us directly, nor even looked at us, but appeared to focus his attention inches away from the end of his pinched nose as if he was trapped inside a protective bubble.

On the afternoon of the first Thursday after my arrival I attended Father Piercy’s handicraft session. Thursdays were a half-day holiday from games, lessons and manual labour, but boys were expected to do something constructive. One could choose between reading in the library, attending confession and spiritual direction, or handicraft. And it was possible to do all three. The projects in Father Piercy’s workshop included the making of rosaries, the cutting and binding of leather cases for missals and prayer books, the carving of crucifixes, or construction of pipe-racks. He set me to work making a case for my missal, Father Cooney’s gift. He moved from boy to boy at the work benches, demonstrating techniques for cutting leather, sewing, binding, making the hooks for rosary beads, and carpentry. He spoke in a quiet, barely intelligible, rapid nasal voice, and appeared to be working his mouth nervously.

Another striking prof was Father Armishaw whom Derek had mentioned blushingly when we were walking on Top Bounds. Father Armishaw taught English literature to the fifth and sixth forms. He was over six foot with broad shoulders, and dressed in a caped cassock, and an MA gown when he was teaching. He could be seen making his way across Little Bounds, a book under his arm, walking with a self-confident rolling gait. He had a swashbuckling posture; but such was his powerful physique and piercing look, it seemed natural rather than boastful or proud. He was also famous for owning a large gleaming motorcycle with a dark green petrol tank. Several times in my first week I saw him flying along the lane at the back of the school, the flaps of his leather flying jacket open to the wind.

I encountered Father Armishaw when I went up to the top corridor in the old hall to deliver an exercise I had written out for Dr Warner. He lived on a passageway known as ‘Creepers’, as boys were expected to go on tiptoe so as not to disturb the priestly inhabitants. The first door on the left stood wide open; as I glanced in I saw Father Armishaw at his desk in the middle of the room. There was a bed in one corner with a white coverlet like the ones in our dormitory. There were two simple armchairs, and bookcases running from floor to ceiling around the walls. The books, many hundreds of them, were carefully arranged, their spines all evenly regimented and displayed. Everything about the room was neat, and the polished surfaces reflected the light of the coal fire in the grate. On a table beneath the open window was a gramophone playing a piece of music. The priest sat slouched at his desk, a smoking cigarette between his fingers. He had strong, well-proportioned features; jet black wavy hair, strong and glossy like the coat of a healthy animal. He looked up from a book he was reading and stared back, his mouth a little open, his lips slightly curled as if he were mocking me.

‘What are you gawping at?’ he said in a low voice. I was rooted to the spot. Then he said evenly: ‘Well, if you don’t want anything, bugger off!’

I had never heard a priest swear or utter a vulgarity, and I was shocked. I moved along the corridor and left my exercise book outside Dr Warner’s door as I had been instructed. When I returned, Father Armishaw had come to lean up against the door jamb of his room, all his weight on one leg. He was watching me, smiling. ‘And who might you be?’

When I told him my name, he made a gesture with his head as if to show that his curiosity was satisfied. ‘You’re one of those Brentwood types, aren’t you?’

Then he nodded into his room towards his gramophone. ‘Listen to that…’

Filling his room and resounding into the corridor was the sound of a violin backed by an orchestra. The music was entering its finale, and the priest stood watching me in silence, nodding his head in time with the rhythm. When it had finished, he said: ‘Do you know what that was?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Mozart…second violin concerto. Not bad, eh!’

I stared at him, speechless.

‘One day, perhaps, I’ll play it through from beginning to end for you. In the meantime stay out of trouble.’

As I turned to go, he added: ‘And mind you don’t take life too seriously.’

The incident excited me. I felt that the priest had engaged me rather than kept me at bay like the others. The following day, walking up and down Top Bounds after breakfast, I reported the encounter to James, and James reported it to Derek when he joined us as he usually did. Derek was avid for every detail and chortled and danced around with glee.

27

IN THE SECOND week my name appeared on the Mass roster to serve Father Piercy. There was no hint of emotion or devotion in his voice or gestures. At Saint Augustine’s I had emulated Father Cooney’s slow and devout voice; kneeling beside Father Piercy, I found myself trying with difficulty to pace my responses with his rapid recitation. Father Cooney would take almost an hour over Mass, whereas Father Piercy said his in twenty minutes.

Day by day the choir prepared for the Sunday High Mass. On that first Sunday we sang the Mozart Mass, and Victoria’s ‘O Sacrum Convivium’ during the Offertory. The rest of the service, involving the whole college, was sung in Gregorian chant. The long, complicated Mass was celebrated by three priests robed in green vestments and beskirted with lace albs. The pillars of exorbitant incense smoke (Father Cooney would have been scandalised) rose high to the rafters. In their distant side aisle I could see the nuns, some twelve of them, following the Mass with rapt attention.

As I found my feet at Cotton in those first days, struggling with the early lessons, keeping up on runs, shivering under cold showers, and attempting to wolf down the tasteless meals, I realised that the single most important focus of our routine was the sanctuary, where we created a daily pageant of music, precise rituals, and rapid rhythmic prayer. The tabernacle on the high altar, where resided the real presence of Jesus Christ, was the centre of our lives. And yet, I was conscious of another presence, in the wild panorama of the woods and hills and sky outside. I sometimes found myself gazing through a window in the cloister, fascinated by the sight and sound of the blustering winds and the racing clouds. The wild disturbance of the countryside seemed to echo an unfamiliar and troubled excitation in my soul.

I went for confession and spiritual direction to Father Browne, the bursar, who also acted as parish priest for the small community of Catholic farmers who lived in the locality of Oakamoor. Father Browne saw boys in his sitting room off the church cloister. He was a heavy man, with sleepy eyes, pale flaccid jowls and wiry grey hair. He appeared slow of movement, as if he was weary. He smelled of incense and the bars of soap in his bursar’s shop. There was something gentle and soothing about him, almost motherly. His hands were very white and plump.

He asked me to sit opposite him on a corresponding chair and began by asking about the family and my home parish. Occasionally, moving his head languidly, he would look out of the window at the valley scene where low clouds were rising, trailing rain squalls over the canopy of the woods.

An important first step in the pursuit of the devout life, he told me, was the daily, or, better still, twice daily, examination of conscience. ‘I want you to get into the habit of reviewing your behaviour,’ he said gently. ‘Have I thought unkindly of anybody today? Have I thought less of them? Have I envied anybody?’

He asked me about my spiritual reading. When I told him about The Imitation of Christ, he replied: ‘Yes, a lot of boys here read the Imitation.’ He said that excellent as it was, the work was written for enclosed monks and nuns. Had I not heard, he asked, of the greatest model of parish priests, Saint John Vianney? ‘He was known as the Curè d’Ars,’ went on Father Browne. ‘You’ll find several books about him in the college library.’

That afternoon I took down from the library shelves a book entitled A Saint in the Making: The Story of the Curé d’Ars. In the frontispiece was an engraved portrait: the saint’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes looked upwards towards the heavens. Sitting in the library with its glowing mahogany shelves and dramatic views down the valley I started to read. The historical setting of the famous priest’s life, I learnt, was France in the years after the Revolution: the persecution of bishops, priests and nuns; the suppression of seminaries. John Vianney inherited a parish sunk in drunkenness and fornication and made it a model of sanctity. He was convinced that the root of evil in his village was dancing, since it led to girls and boys touching and exposing themselves to sexual temptation. He was intent on eliminating ‘occasions of sin’; he even had the apple trees cut down in his orchard to deprive the village boys of the temptation to go scrumping. John Vianney disdained to sleep in a bed; the floor was sufficient for him, without pillows or blankets. He rose in the middle of the night and went to his church to lie full stretch on the stone flags. For food he would cook a pan of potatoes once a week, hang them in a wire basket and eat them till there were none left. The final potatoes were always rotten and wormy. He wore a hair shirt and flogged himself. What seized my imagination far more than his ‘thirst for souls’ were his heroic prayer life and self-mortification.

I realised that John Vianney’s heroism was impracticable, but I was determined to emulate the saint in so far as I could. Like other more pious boys I had begun to spend regular time in private prayer in church during mid-morning break, and between outdoor activities in the afternoon and first lessons. I had also begun to wear a hairy knitted sleeveless pullover under my vest which chafed my skin – a kind of junior hair shirt. Before going to sleep I pinched myself hard on the legs and on my waist. I was refusing sugar on my porridge at breakfast.

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