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.
During my next session with Father Browne, I told him of my self-mortification. I wanted to be more like John Vianney, I said, but I could not see how that would be possible until I became a priest. Father Browne nodded sleepily. He said that my frustration was a good sign, because it meant that I was ready to consider what Saint Thérèse of Lisieux called her ‘Little Way’. It was not necessary to perform unusual mortifications, such as whipping oneself or wearing a hair shirt, or fasting. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you should take sugar on your porridge as you need all the energy you can get to grow strong and healthy.’
Extricating a book from the pile on the table next to his elbow, he said: ‘I want you borrow this for the rest of the term. You’ll find that Saint Thérèse made heroic sanctity out of the small everyday routines of convent life.’ He told me how she knelt in front of a nun in chapel who rattled her rosary beads. ‘She could have quelled the annoying behaviour with a single look; instead she chose to endure the irritation.’ At times, he said, Thérèse was so distressed as she struggled to resist the temptation to rebuke the nun that she would break out in a sweat.
Father Browne, in his calm motherly voice, asked me to read the book slowly and thoughtfully. It was a fat, dark green book with gold lettering: Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux: An Autobiography.
28
FROM HIS HIGH desk Father Gavin fixed me with an alarming rubicund grin of pity and glee. ‘Find time, Magister Fru,’ he said, ‘to write out one hundred times the declensions and conjugations I set you yesterday.’
It was my fourth week at Cotton and I was struggling with Latin. Most of my year had come to the college aged eleven and had started Latin two years ahead of me, or even earlier, and the majority of my companions in the remedial class, who had come to Cotton at thirteen, had made a start on Latin in their previous schools. My problems began when I failed to grasp the meaning of the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative…I struggled to apply principles I did not understand. Lack of practice in learning by heart was compounded by poor concentration. I was so astonished to be at Cotton, so entranced by the strangeness and interest of the surroundings, that my mind would still wander towards the windows to gaze at the autumn foliage and the sky. I was failing to learn the grammar set by Father Gavin day after day, and I was incapable of attempting the simple composition and translation exercises.
With Greek it was different. The elderly Laz Warner went at a slower pace, sitting next to each of us in turn, making sure that we had grasped what he had taught. He was intent merely to have us read and form the unfamiliar letters. There was not going to be much progress in the remedial Greek class, I realised. But Latin, the universal language of the Catholic Church, was the key to our future studies in the senior seminary, the daily recitation of the breviary, and the year-round ritual.
On waking each morning my first thought was dread of the commencement of Latin drill. Passing the great double doors at the entrance to the Study Place each night, I felt a surge of relief at the amnesty of Greater Silence and the night. I was not the only pupil in difficulty: there was another ex-Secondary Modern boy from east London, the oafish Patrick O’Rourke, who cried with homesickness in the night and proved incapable of keeping himself clean without his mother’s help. He was big for his age, with large clumsy hands and greasy hair. We were both teased on account of our cockney accents: ‘ ’Allo, me owld cock-sparrer!’ He tried to make friends with me, but I was determined not to be identified with him. He had the stricken look of a boy who was not going to make it. O’Rourke floundered so much that Father Gavin had put him down into the first year, despite his age and size, as incapable of ‘catching up’. As it was, my classmates looked at me, I thought, with smug glances every time Father Gavin scolded me. I had seen boys looking at O’Rourke like that.
My class year, the lower fourth, was composed of some fifteen boys who had moved up from the junior section, Saint Thomas’s, and about twelve of us who had arrived from a variety of schools mainly around the Midlands. As I got to know my class many of them seemed like any other boys: teasing each other, fooling around, quarrelling about favourite soccer teams back home. But I came to recognise some as peculiar to a seminary community. There were the ‘Sanctebobs’, a word James had used, who made ostentatious display of their piety even outside church, walking around college with measured gait as if still in the sanctuary, and ‘talking piosity’. They were quietly derided by their fellows, and often accused of hypocrisy. And there were the loners, who seemed, in the context of Cotton, monk-like rather than just friendless or stand-offish. Such boys were not considered odd, a
nd their desire for solitude was respected, unless they appeared sanctimonious as well, in which case they were regarded as Sanctebobs.
For some, like James Rolle, being a seminarian seem to come naturally. Although not a Sanctebob himself, he seemed a ‘cleric’ by nature, a boy born to be a priest. Neat and studious in appearance, good-humoured but never coarse, ever helpful and kind, he swam in the college as though it were his natural element. I liked him, and he quickly became my friend, although there was an aspect of his character that on reflection I found embarrassing. I had yet to learn the meaning of the word ‘priggish’, but it was a quality that I was beginning to recognise occasionally in myself as well; I sometimes found the former tough boy, Cornwell, sneering at his new self.
It was obvious that some of us had brought personal problems to Cotton. I thought I saw these tensions in the haunted expressions of several boys in my class: anxiety beyond their years, as if they were straining to curb their inclinations. Much as they wanted to be in the college, it went against the grain. Many, it was obvious, came like me from modest and poor homes. Although the uniformity of our ‘best’ wear – the black suit – might have ironed out the differences, the texture, cut and fit were invariably a give-away. My own black suit was several sizes too big for me, ‘so that it will last you a couple of years,’ Mum had said.
In the remedial Latin class there was a boy called Charles House whose parents lived abroad. His well-made footwear, the beautiful cut of his blazer, the fit of his shirts, and the way he wore them, singled him out. He walked with a loose-ankled swagger, his right hand inside his jacket pocket. He wore an expression of bored amusement beyond his thirteen years. He had peerless skin; high cheek-bones that gave him an almost oriental look; even, very white teeth; and a head of silken, honey-blond hair. His confident voice came from the back of his throat as if he was mocking the world. He would rub his hands together vigorously before Father Gavin’s arrival in class. ‘Very good for the mind all this Latin, Fru,’ he would say, singling me out for such remarks. ‘Keeps us mentally on our toes!’ It took me some time to realise that he was mocking me.
Charles had a way of giving the profs knowing looks, and an occasional chortle in class; he even engaged in a little quiet banter. Was it just the stylishness of Charles House that prompted the profs to direct their quips and jests in his direction? Charles had this effect, I noticed, on some of the older boys, too, and coolly played up to it. One such was Bursley, a morose senior boy whom I had got to know in the choir. Bursley had a leathery face with pit marks on his cheeks. He looked old enough to be a man, but he tended to hang around with younger boys at break. One morning, after Father McCartie’s routine distribution of letters, I saw Bursley giving Charles a soft, playful punch on the arm. Charles not so softly punched him back and said: ‘Bursley, has anyone ever told you that you have a head like a dehydrated beehive?’ I thought that Bursley would be furious, but he just smiled at the insult as if happy that Charles had spoken to him.
Charles’s odd humour provided occasional light relief from the misery of Latin lessons, but it was Peter Gladden, a tall, stooped youth with a startling Roman nose, who helped me overcome my difficulties. Learning of my plight through James, who had become concerned on my behalf, Gladden took me by the arm one evening after Rosary and said: ‘Let’s try to sort out this Latin, Fru!’ The nickname had caught on.
He led me down to a piano practice room underneath the stage in the assembly hall. With a Latin primer propped up on the music stand he began to take me through the basics. For a start, he explained the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative. As the light dawned, he said: ‘You’re not unintelligent, Fru. Nobody taught you how to learn.’
Gladden, a born teacher at the age of nearly fourteen, advised me how to learn by rote, by repetition and rhythm. ‘Sway slightly to the rhythm,’ he said, ‘as if it’s music. You can do it. Memory and music, don’t you know.’ That was one of Gladden’s favourite phrases: ‘don’t you know’; not a question but an expression of encouragement.
‘You need,’ Gladden told me during one of our sessions, ‘to brush up either the night before or early in the morning.’ He suggested I work on my primer underneath the bedclothes for half an hour at night: ‘It will put you ahead,’ he said. So he lent me his torch. ‘Make sure Leo has done his last round,’ he warned.
That night, after lights out, and after Father McCartie had made his final stealthy round in the dark, I began to study a set of irregular verbs under the tent of my sheet and blankets. I had been working for fifteen minutes or so, coming up for occasional gasps of air, when the bedclothes were pulled back sharply and the figure of Father McCartie towered over me.
‘My room!’
Leading the way with a torch of his own, he descended the staircase through the laundry room below the dormitory where we emerged into his office. Bending down in my pyjamas, I was thrashed in silence: six strokes of Father McCartie’s bamboo cane on my buttocks. Confiscating Peter’s torch, he led me back to my bed and left me without a word, my bottom throbbing agonisingly. At least, I thought, the brutal Mr Murphy of Saints Peter and Paul would have bid me goodnight.
Lying in bed looking out at the night sky through the dormer window, I felt a sense of painful loneliness sweep over me. I had the impression that my companions were gloating. The silence was broken only by an occasional rustle of a mattress as a boy turned. Thinking of home, and the immense distance that lay between our valley outside and London in the far-off south of England, I started to sob.
I was still weeping when I was conscious of a hand touching my cheek. ‘Don’t cry, Fru,’ said a boy’s voice level with my face in the dark; then I felt the hand stroking my head. ‘Come on! Cut it out! Go to sleep!’ It was Charles, whose bed was several places down from mine. I tried to reach out; I just felt his arm with the tips of my fingers as he withdrew. He had taken a risk to come the few yards to be at my side. The boy’s concern for me, even though I guessed he thought me a fool, calmed me down. I stopped crying and fell asleep.
29
ON THE FEAST of Saint Wilfred, patron saint of the college, we donned our black suits, stiff white detachable collars and black ties. The first Mass of the day was followed by a breakfast of grilled bacon. At 10.30 there was High Mass in full cloth-of-gold vestments, Father Doran celebrating in a fog of incense. We put our hearts into the glorious four-part Mass. As the choir processed out of church into the sacristy, the keyboard teacher, Mr Brennan, played a Bach fugue, with sudden crescendos reverberating in the rafters of the church. My sense of fervour was heightened by the prospect of a full day’s release from Latin drill.
At lunch the nuns had spread white tablecloths and set out vases of autumn flowers and sprays of greenery. There were flowers around the statue of Saint Wilfred situated on a plinth high above the far wall of the refectory. There was roast lamb, followed by fruit pudding and custard. Father McCartie, looking congenial, came around with an enamel jug pouring an allowance of beer into the mugs of the sixth and fifth formers. Looking about me at the flushed, merry faces, I felt that I belonged. Several nuns had come to the door of the refectory to watch us. They were blushing and shyly ducking their veiled heads.
They were usually on their knees scrubbing, sleeves rolled, reddened arms up to the elbows in soapsuds; or peeling potatoes in the dark interior of the kitchens. I had never seen them outside their working element. None of them walked out in the fresh air except the retired and very elderly Mother Saint Thomas who was allowed, in token of her great age, to keep a small garden.
‘Look,’ said Peter Gladden, ‘the witches have come to take a peek at us. Wave to them!’ He gave a little wave and inclined his head.
After lunch we were divided into groups, and set off on walks in our Wellington boots and raincoats. The morning rains had cleared and the sun was out. Eventually we turned off the road beneath a popular Cotton landmark known as The Rocks. James led me up the hill to the side of the outcrop and we
stepped gingerly to the edge to gain a view of the surrounding farms and moorland.
We took off our raincoats and sat side by side. James shouted into the blast: ‘Don’t you feel the presence of God in a place like this?’ I could see the red-edged top of his copy of The Imitation of Christ peeping above his jacket pocket. I did not respond, but, yes, I could feel the presence of God. Then he said: ‘I’m sorry about your tanning last night…Did it hurt?’ Before I could make an answer, he said: ‘I always find it best to offer up a tanning for the souls of my relatives in purgatory.’ The priggishness of James’s comment disturbed me. I too was beginning to think like that, even though a part of me cringed at such thoughts.
We continued our walk along a rough track until we found ourselves on the opposite side of the valley to the college. We went through a stone stile and plunged down into a wooded dell. The steep path was soft with pine needles and followed a roaring waterfall which pounded over rocks and sudden chasms. On all sides rose tall trees, casting shadows. The air smelt of damp fallen leaves. We began to climb until we arrived at a wooden bridge across the torrent where there was a shrine with a statue of the Virgin. James explained that it was known as Faber’s Retreat, built by Father William Faber, the famous Victorian priest and composer of many popular Catholic hymns, including ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, which celebrated the English martyrs who died for their Faith at the hands of Protestant persecutors. We stood for a while in prayer at the shrine, before continuing on up the valley past the shrine to Saint Wilfred our patron, and arriving back at Little Bounds. The day finished with Vespers and Benediction at which the choir sang Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus Natum’ and the college sang with great devotion the hymn by John Henry Newman, ‘Lead Kindly Light’. The hymn seemed to sum up the contrast between this day of happiness and the menace ‘amidst the encircling gloom’ that awaited the next working day.
Seminary Boy Page 8