A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  We waited there, the whole lot of us, getting wetter and wetter by the minute, the boys probably catching enough colds to keep them all off school for the next week, and I standing alongside them, at a slight remove, the keys to the hall pressing into my hands. If I wanted to, I could just unlock the door and we could all go inside and get started. We could get out of this biblical rain. But I couldn’t. Not yet.

  ‘Father!’ said another boy, who had ridiculously long hair and was wearing a T-shirt with no jacket. ‘Please. I’m getting soaked.’

  I smiled, shivering through the cold, and shook my head. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Any minute now.’

  I watched the road, I watched the cars. Come on, I thought. And then finally, at last, I saw the black BMW coming down the road at a fair old pace, barely slowing down as it turned into the parish hall, and then the lights went off and I watched as the driver sat there in the warmth of his car, talking on his mobile phone, the father of one of the altar boys, finishing some deal, leaving us all, man and boys, in the cold and the rain as he made his money.

  Finally, he clambered out, pressed a button so the car went bip-bip, and ran through the rain towards us, and now, and only now, could I select the right key, insert it into the lock and open the door. The boys scattered inside quickly, shaking the rain off their bodies like shaggy dogs, everyone pulling their seats out, organizing the rows like they always did, and I took my place at the top of the room, taking out the notebook in which I wrote down who was doing what and when, and the man who had kept us all waiting placed a seat in the corner and started tapping messages on that ever-present phone of his. I was about to get started, but before I could he raised his hand and said, ‘Sorry, Father, little boys’ room,’ and stood up to make his way out into the corridor to where the bathrooms were. I sighed and watched as he stopped in the doorway and turned around to stare at me. ‘Father?’ he said, a bored expression crossing his face.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute, lads,’ I said, standing up and following him out to the corridor, waiting there until he was finished. ‘That’s grand, thanks,’ he said when he emerged again, grinning at me. ‘I was bursting.’

  And then we could go back inside. To the boys.

  We could get started now that we were all there, now that these twenty children were gathered and an adult without a collar was in the hall to ensure that nothing bad happened to any of them, that I didn’t try to touch any of them, or bring one into a private room to remove his trousers. Now, supervised, I was allowed to say the words ‘Monday, six-thirty am?’ and Stephen was allowed to say ‘I’ll take that, Father,’ and we could get on with the quick and boring business of organizing which altar boy was serving which Mass.

  And for this level of distrust, I had all my old friends to thank. Was it any wonder that I went home every Friday night overcome with shame?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1973

  IN CAMBODIA, TWELVE years of bombing by American soldiers finally came to an end. In Texas, the world’s best female tennis player, Billie Jean King, beat Bobby Riggs, who had once been the world’s best male, in straight sets. In Sydney Harbour, on Bennelong Point, a queen from England came to open an Australian Opera House while its Danish architect stayed away. And in Dublin that same autumn, as the world was warring, playing and building, eighteen boys marched through the gates of Clonliffe College for the first time, putting their childhoods behind them as they took their first steps towards a life that would prove both rewarding and isolating in equal parts; we were making a commitment and in the hard times ahead we would often need to fall back on that commitment for support.

  Eighteen boys; no one knew that this was the peak of it. In Maynooth, that number was probably closer to forty, while around the country – from St Finbarr’s in Cork to St Joseph’s in Belfast, from St Patrick’s in Carlow to St John’s in Waterford – scores of boys were taking leave of their families with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And this was excluding those who had decided to join a religious order: the Oblates, after all, ran Cahermoyle in Limerick, with its model farm that made the place self-sufficient and fed the lads with the healthiest, freshest produce imaginable; the Vincentians looked after All Hallows; the Redemptorists had Cluain Mhuire in Galway; the Franciscans ran a seminary in Killarney. How many novitiates might there have been in 1973 alone, spread across the thirty-two counties? Three hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? I try to imagine young Irish men making their way towards the colleges now in such numbers and it’s like wondering whether life might be discovered on Mars; you wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility of it entirely, but it’s not something you’d talk about in public either.

  Most of our intake were, of course, from Dublin, but we had a few lads from other counties too. George Dunne, whom we called Kirk Douglas on account of the cleft in his chin, came from Kildare, but his grandparents lived nearby in Drumcondra and this had influenced his application. There was a lad from Kerry, Seamus Wells, whose parents had both died the year before and he’d wanted to get away from Dingle entirely so had written to Archbishop Ryan instead of Bishop Casey; Mick Sirr from Cork City said he’d always fancied life in the Big Smoke, and apparently Bishop Lucey had taken such offence that he’d named him from the pulpit as a renegade and a pup.

  One of the Dublin boys, Maurice Macwell from Glasnevin, had a terrible stutter, but no one made fun of him for it and he seemed grateful for such common humanity; he told me once that not a day had gone by in his schooling when a boy hadn’t laughed at him. The teachers were the cruellest of all, he said; when he couldn’t get an answer out quick enough in class, they would shout at him, which would only exacerbate his condition, and eventually he became so frustrated that he spent half his time out in the corridor or on detention.

  And then there was Tom Cardle, of course. From Wexford.

  We were friendly, if nervous, of each other. The Dubs all hung around together, sometimes to the exclusion of others. The Cork and Kerry lads sized each other up, historical enmities at work there. There was a set of twins, which I thought terribly strange; it only grew more curious to me when it was revealed that they were actually two of triplets, but that their third brother had shown no inclination towards the priesthood at all and was working for Premier Dairies instead. A lad from Templeogue had all the brains and had written a book about Thomas Aquinas that he hoped to publish one day. But the lad from Dorset Street, Conor Smith – well, Conor didn’t make it through the first year. His mother wept when she brought him to Clonliffe and wept even more when she came to collect him again. Which brought us down to seventeen.

  Of course, we all had different experiences of adjusting to life in the seminary, but in my case, I did not find the change particularly arduous. Perhaps I have given the impression that I was forced into this life, that Mam pushed me down a road that would offer her some consolation without any consideration for my own feelings – and yes, there would be some validity to that – but this does not negate the fact that I knew from the moment I arrived in the seminary that here was a role to which I was well suited. The fact is that I was a believer. I believed in God, in the Church, in the power of Christianity to promote a better world. I believed that the priesthood was a noble calling, a profession filled by decent men who wanted to propagate kindness and charity. I believed that the Lord had chosen me for a reason. I didn’t have to search for this faith, it was simply a part of me. And I thought it would never change.

  I felt contented in that quiet community at Clonliffe, with a spirit of learning about us, and I did not lie in my bed at night racked with thoughts of Katherine Summers, Ali MacGraw or anyone else. The truth is that I have never felt my soul stirred too violently in this direction; whether this is some deficiency in my mind or my body I do not know. No, that is a lie: there was one occasion, of course, when such matters threatened to engulf me entirely.

  Five years later. In Rome.

  We woke early, at six o’clock, Father Merriman – the Was
p – calling down the corridor with something resembling a yodel, and we leaped out of bed. We called him the Wasp because he fairly buzzed around the seminary, his hands constantly tapping against each other, emanating a low humming sound.

  Each boy had been assigned a cell-mate on our first day and we were expected to share with each other throughout the years ahead, so it was important that we got along. A curtain could be pulled down the centre of the room for privacy’s sake; I never bothered with it myself, but occasionally Tom, who could fall into fierce and bewildering storms of anger, would drag it across and I would hear him crying or raging in his bed and dared not disturb him.

  I always rose first and would step across to his bed to shake him to life and he would groan and roll away from me, turning his head to the wall.

  ‘Would you go ’way, Odran?’

  Looking out of the window, I would usually see Seamus Wells, the Kerry lad, out in the garden, running his laps around the gravelled circumference, for he had been a great man for the GAA back in Dingle, or so he told us, and would have been up for county colours had he not chosen a different path. He ran around that yard two hundred times every morning, then dropped to the ground and off he went with his push-ups and his sit-ups and all sorts of strange movements and I didn’t know where he got the energy from. Mick Sirr sneered at him, of course, but what else would a boy from Cork do to a lad from Kerry?

  Opening our cell door, I would find a dozen or more boys making their way in their pyjamas down a cold corridor towards the baths, where we would each take a quick plunge to wash away the perspiration of the night, more curtains pulled between each one of us to preserve our modesty, and I was grateful for that, for I was a thin boy and did not want to display my lack of muscle to the other lads and I had even less interest in being confronted by theirs. There were only four baths and the water was tepid, so first in got the cleanest while last in picked up every other boy’s filth and probably would have been cleaner staying out of it altogether. I made it my business to arrive in the first group every morning and always chose the same bath out of habit, for it was nearest the tank and generally the warmest; Tom was always last and always complained.

  ‘Get up earlier then, Tom,’ I would say and he’d shake his head in disgust.

  ‘Only the animals are up this early in the morning, Odran.’

  ‘The priests are up.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I didn’t care for talk like this. The priests who worked at Clonliffe – there were fifteen on staff; senior and junior lecturers in dogmatic theology, moral doctrine, canon law, scripture and Church history – worked hard as they gave instruction to about eighty boys from the fourth to the seventh years while looking after the spiritual needs and recurring crises of those of us in the first to third years. They were, for the most part, decent men, thoughtful and learned, and had done nothing, as far as I could see, to warrant such abuse.

  The Wasp was a great favourite of all, for his quick movements and sudden appearances would provoke laughter. Father Prince – nicknamed Harold Wilson for his unusual similarity to the politician and a firm commitment to his pipe, despite the strictly enforced ban on smoking among the seminarians – held a regular music-appreciation society, and he would lose himself in his records while we tried not to laugh at the expression of ecstasy crossing his face. Father Jarvis – Rudolph, for his bright-red nose – cultivated a small vegetable garden that some of the lads helped out in.

  The one who interested me the most, however, was Father Dementyev. Already in his late fifties by the time I arrived at Clonliffe, he was the only priest on the teaching staff who was not Irish, having been born in a small town named Kashin, about a hundred miles north of Moscow. He’d been a soldier in the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army that had marched into the concentration camp at Auschwitz in January 1945, liberating the seven and a half thousand inmates left to starve by the fleeing Nazi guards. It was not something he spoke of often, but once, during a walk around the grounds, I found myself in conversation with him and he told me how his faith in humanity had been almost destroyed that day and he had wandered around Europe, soul-destroyed, throughout the remainder of the 1940s, before having an epiphany, which he would not describe, in the cathedral at Chartres, and soon after making his way to Ireland, where he enrolled as a novitiate in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. I knew very little of what Father Dementyev had suffered during his impoverished childhood or during the war, I couldn’t even guess what effect seeing those skeletal prisoners in Oświcim would have had on a young man’s psyche, but I knew that for Tom Cardle to call him an animal displayed a stupidity on Tom’s part that was difficult to condone.

  By half past six all the students would be gathered in the Main Chapel to recite our Morning Office of Prime, after which we would be left to pray in silence before Mass at a quarter past seven. Starving, we would then move quicker than we might all day to the refectory, where porridge was served, and big mugs of tea, great platters of toast seeping beads of condensation on to the china plates, and as much butter and jam as we wanted, for didn’t the mothers send preserves to the seminary on a weekly basis – we could have opened a store for ourselves with all that we had. But the priests said that food was not there to be enjoyed but simply to keep us alive. Simplicity of diet was important.

  And then, dressed in our black suits and hats, our white shirts and black ties, we first, second and third years would make our way out of the building to the bicycle sheds and travel as a group across the city towards the Earlsfort Terrace campus of University College Dublin to continue our undergraduate degree in Philosophy, the first part of a priest’s education and the discipline that we needed to master before we could begin to understand Ascetical and Mystical Theology, the doctrine of the Church or the history of the sacred texts.

  What a sight we must have been to those businessmen, housewives, schoolboys and schoolgirls walking along the streets, driving in their cars or waiting at bus-stops: a crowd of about fifty black-suited young men cycling two or three abreast, like a swarm of flies, eyes ahead, seated upright, aware of the power of our collective as we took in the admiring glances of the people whom we passed. How they respected us then! How they longed for their own sons to be among our number.

  How they trusted us.

  I liked UCD well enough, but for me, the adjustment to life there was more difficult than the adjustment to life in the seminary. We were part of the student body – the BA in Philosophy attracted young men and women from around the country who outnumbered us novitiates by three to one – but we were set apart from them in ways that were often troubling.

  We could talk to the other students out of courtesy, if a question was directed towards us, but we could not initiate conversation, and a prefect was assigned, one of the lads from the third year, to ensure that we stuck to these rules.

  We could not eat with the others; at the morning break, the UCD students gathered in a big canteen that was always full of noise and laughter and music. Posters of Ziggy Stardust and John Lennon were pinned to the walls; flyers for discos and parties. We had a box-room downstairs where we met with our sandwiches and cups of tea, where we said our Grace before meals and our Grace after meals, before heading back upstairs for the rest of the morning’s lectures. The Wasp told us that this apartheid existed so we would not be distracted by the worldly nature of the young people; Rudolph said it was so we would not be contaminated by them.

  The UCD lads wore their hair long and their beards heavy; they sported bell-bottomed trousers or flared jeans, brightly coloured shirts and tinted glasses. The girls distracted us with their hot pants and knee-high boots. They talked openly of sex and drugs and continued their discussions in the bars around Dublin after class, going to concerts and all-night parties, while we took to our bikes again and cycled back across the East Wall and down the long road that would take us back to Clonliffe, where we would gather in the chapel to recite the Office of Sext and then all five
chapters of the Angelus before dinner was served, throughout which one poor unfortunate boy, usually one from the later years, would be propped up at the pulpit and would read to us from G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis or The Lives of the Apostles. We were not allowed to talk, of course. We could eat and we could listen. That was the way of it.

  Did I miss out on the experiences that my classmates in UCD were enjoying? I did, of course. And from time to time I would feel a desperate longing to join them as they boarded the buses into town, looking forward to a night in the Long Hall or Mulligan’s, where they would talk of how they might change the world over pints and shorts, and cosy up to each other, an arm casually slung across the shoulder of the person next to them, a walk to the bus-stop later, a kiss in the night air, a suggestion of more to come. I did, at times. I missed it terribly. There were a couple of lads and a girl or two whose company I sorely wanted to join, for they seemed so full of energy and youth and life, but I never even exchanged a word with any of them. But then I would arrive back at Clonliffe and think no, I’m home again. This is where I am meant to be.

  But I was one of the lucky ones, I think now. For that was where I was meant to be. There were others who should have been elsewhere, anywhere else. Far away, and the further the better.

  We were back in the seminary after lunch for lectures on spirituality, formation and liturgy, and then after dinner we had an hour to ourselves to do with what we would. A few lads might set up a game of hurley in the yard – we learned early on that to suggest a game of soccer was tantamount to toasting the queen; some might take the cloister walk to be alone with their thoughts; some might go to the music room, where there were two pianos and a violin to be found; some might have a nap; some might play billiards or lawn tennis; some might read.

  We were allowed books, of course – our families could send them to us – but they had to be approved by the priests in the mail-room before they could make their way to our cells and modern novels were frowned upon. I read Dickens and Trollope, was denied George Eliot, for there was something disturbing, or so Harold Wilson told me, about a woman presenting herself as a man. ‘She must have had a mental disorder,’ he said, ripping The Mill on the Floss out of my hands and tossing it in the nearest rubbish bin. ‘A lot of the women do. It’s in their blood.’ Virginia Woolf was out too, for hadn’t she filled her pockets with stones before taking a stroll into the River Ouse, the biggest mortaller of all.