Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  30

  I HAD STARTED on the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I learnt that she was born in Alençon, France, the youngest of five sisters who became nuns ahead of her. Entering the Carmelites aged fifteen she wrote the story of her life under obedience. After her death of tuberculosis, aged twenty-four, she became one of the most famous of modern saints. Thérèse confirmed the impression I had of my soul as a kind of inner garden or landscape. And like her, I had times when my soul felt more like a wasteland filled with rubbish than a place of beauty. There were occasions, especially during thanksgiving after Communion, when I felt no comfort or peace, only selfpity and discomfort: fear of Latin drill, fear of being sent home (and yet homesickness, too), tortured knees, blisters from my ill-fitting shoes, hunger, headache, exhaustion, my bladder full to bursting. One should pray to Our Lady in desolate periods, Thérèse advised. So I begged the Blessed Virgin to remove the rubbish from my soul. I would try to imagine a splendid tabernacle worthy of the Lord, inviting in the angels and saints to sing songs of praise to Jesus. All this I tried to do every morning, but still the discomfort and distractions, the dread of Latin, would take over my thoughts. On some mornings as Father McCartie made the signal for us to proceed to breakfast, I would, like Thérèse, resolve to continue my thanksgiving during the day since I had performed it so poorly in church.

  After pouring out my heart to Father Browne about my difficulties with Latin, he reminded me that John Vianney had struggled with his studies. And he told me about Saint Joseph of Cupertino who was obliged to take his exams for the priesthood many times before he passed them. Father Browne counselled me to think of my soul like a seedling in a nursery. Jesus allows us to bask at times in his sunshine, at other times he sends the cold waters of humiliation and suffering in order to strengthen us. We must not be cast down, he told me, by setbacks and minor discomforts.

  The next time we met he talked again about Saint Thérèse’s ‘Little Way’. He read a passage from her writings in which she says that she saw herself as a toy for the child Jesus, a little ball of no price which he could throw on the ground, kick with his foot, or leave in a corner. Sometimes, he went on, she saw herself as a little paintbrush used for filling in the small details of a picture. Most often she was his ‘Little Flower’. But there was nothing sentimental about Thérèse, he insisted: ‘Saint Thérèse,’ he said, ‘was not a delicate flower, she was tough, tough, tough.’

  As the daylight hours shortened, the college buildings became colder and darker and the valley was often shrouded in mist and rain. I found myself feeling miserable to the point of tears as I struggled with Latin, or dug into the clay of the ditches, or tried to concentrate during prayers. In Thérèse’s writings I found a passage that seemed to correspond exactly with my own feelings. There were times, she wrote, when a ray of sunshine lit up the darkness and she was happy and content. But then that time of joy made the darkness even more unbearable when it returned.

  Father Browne said this was a passing phase; that I should think less about myself and more about others. Thérèse, he said, showed us how to spread love within the community. She said it was natural to feel drawn to one sister in the convent, and yet go a long way around to avoid meeting another. But Our Lord wants us to love those who are less attractive to us. This coincided with Father Browne’s counsel to avoid ‘particular’ or ‘special’ friendships, spending too much time with those we were inclined to like most, while neglecting the friendless and those we felt an aversion for.

  So I began to ration the time I spent with James, Derek and Peter, and sought the company of Oliver Stack, whom many boys accused of being a Sanctebob. He was a freckly youth with a receding forehead and untidy hair. He had a sanctimonious way of genuflecting and crossing himself in church. He walked in a hunched, self-absorbed fashion, as if to proclaim: ‘Look at me! What a holy fellow I am.’ He was, to boot, a grumpy, ill-favoured boy who showed, initially, not the least interest in me.

  Often Stack walked alone on Top Bounds after breakfast so I took to falling in beside him and starting up a conversation. At first he looked at me suspiciously. But it was not long before he would be expecting me. Then he took to tagging along even when I came down from Little Dorm after bed-making as if to lay claim to me.

  Stack was also a member of the Workers’ Union, the drain-digging team. He would wait for me outside the wash places so that we would go up to the fields together and work in the same ditch. It was during manual labour that I discovered how far I was from attaining Thérèse’s ideal of the ‘Little Way’.

  One wet afternoon we were working together in a ditch so filled with muddy water that it almost spilt over the tops of our Wellington boots. Stack was attempting to widen the ditch and smacked the surface of the water with his spade to remove the clots of clay. Each time he did this he sprayed me with mire.

  Saint Thérèse had told how a nun splashed her carelessly in the convent laundry, and how, although she hated it, she would thrust her face forward to receive the dirty water more fully, seeing an opportunity to humiliate herself. But I was less concerned about my humility than my clothes. Although we wore football shorts and shirts over our normal clothes to protect them, pulling our thick socks up to our knees, I only had one pair of second-best trousers and they were being ruined by Stack’s carelessness.

  I asked him, kindly I thought, to be more careful. But he splashed me even more. I pleaded with him, hoping that he was merely being thoughtless rather than aggressive. Splashing me again, he said: ‘You should have more pairs of trousers. Why didn’t your parents make proper provision for you when you came to Cotton? This is not a college for down-and-outs.’

  Thinking of Mum and Dad and how hard they had to struggle, I was stunned for their sakes by the insult. With the next splash, which soaked my trousers across the front, it was as if a pair of soapy hands had plunged inside the back of my skull and squeezed my brain. The long-suppressed rage of my former, younger self erupted, as if I had never practised self-control. I tossed my spade over the parapet of the ditch, grabbed Stack by the scruff of the neck and brought him down sideways in the freezing muddy water, yanking him straight back on to his feet again while still holding on to him. ‘Wannanother dip, you bastard?’ I grunted. Then I pushed him down again so that he was sitting in the mire as if taking a bath.

  As he clambered up, flaying his arms, he was shaking, his face deathly white. The rest of the work team in the ditch looked on in amazement as Stack stood up and confronted me with tightened fists. I squared up to him. ‘Come on then!’ I said. But he scrambled out of the ditch.

  There was a cry of horror from the onlookers. He had grabbed my spade and was holding it aloft as if preparing to strike. I raised my arms to protect myself, but he threw down the spade and set off for the college, dripping mud.

  By teatime, my spat with Stack and its resolution had gone around the college. As he came into the refectory there were waves of giggles. It was an infectious, nervous tittering that I had heard before at Cotton – wracking the entire community, sometimes on the most solemn occasions.

  Nothing could have been further from the spiritual strategy of Thérèse, and I had gained in credibility as a strong character for all the wrong reasons. But Oliver Stack had taken a plunge in reputation and lost the only friend he had in the college. He now refused to speak to me or look at me. Again and again I approached him and told him how sorry I was. As I asked his forgiveness, Stack became ever more self-absorbed, looking upwards, myopically, his nostrils flaring. In desperation, I said: ‘But, Oliver, Jesus says we must forgive one another.’ Eventually he snorted: ‘Shut up, you bloody Sanctebob!’ Those were the only words I was to get from Stack for the rest of the term.

  31

  A HOMILY, known as a ‘conference’, was an important feature of the Sunday routine. It was delivered in the assembly hall on Sunday mornings between High Mass and lunch. I had missed the first, traditionally given by Father Doran. Ther
eafter the profs took it in turns. One Sunday early in the term it was delivered by Father McCartie. He started, as was the custom, by praying the Angelus. Seating himself at a table on the stage, he gave us a pep talk on the virtue of obedience and the necessity of promptly responding to the college bells as one would heed ‘the voice of God’. Father McCartie delivered all this in a dry mechanical fashion. Then he talked about the importance of forming habits of ‘self-regulation’ since many of us would one day live as priests, probably alone, where there would be no bells, and nobody to encourage us to be prompt.

  I found myself puzzling over Father McCartie. His punishments included not only beatings but making boys stand for long periods of time on the college coat of arms depicted in mosaic on the floor of the main cloister. Boys being punished in this way, sometimes ten at a time, were therefore held up to ridicule by all who passed. Father McCartie’s homily revealed, I thought, what a poor opinion he had of youth. Yet it seemed to me that compared with the lads at Saints Peter and Paul in Ilford we were unusually self-disciplined. We were rarely late for any duty, and performed our various routines enthusiastically, and yet the Prefect of Discipline applied his punishments, as he had done in my case, with grim vigour, making no allowances for circumstances.

  By the middle of the term I had experienced Father McCartie’s classroom methods, too, since he was taking my class for Christian Doctrine. Week after week he handed out cyclostyled sheets – mainly notes and quotes on papal social teaching. There was not a single concrete example; not one historical anecdote or illustration to relieve the abstract tedium couched in virtually incomprehensible language. He did not even wish us to discover for ourselves the important highlights: they were underlined for us. He spent the period reading out his own notes in a monotonous voice. One morning, as more notes were being handed out, Charles House whispered to himself at the back of the class: ‘Oh Lord, what a yawn!’ Father McCartie looked up. He had heard it. We sat frozen with terror, expecting a thundering: ‘My room!’ Instead, the priest gave House a wintry smile as if the boy had echoed precisely his own thoughts on the matter.

  As week followed week the profs continued to take turns delivering Sunday homily. Mostly they rambled, filling the period between High Mass and lunch, as if begrudging us an unscheduled slice of free time. Father Gavin gave a talk on what a splendid and maligned leader Mussolini was. Father Piercy gave a disjointed and barely audible talk on the religious history of North Staffordshire.

  Towards the end of October, when the college seemed generally in a state of gloom following a week or two of bad weather, the conference was given by Father Armishaw. He bounded up the steps of the stage and sat for some time staring at us. The assembled college gazed back as the tension mounted. He seemed casually conscious of his own striking good looks.

  ‘The first half of the first term of every new academic year,’ he began, ‘is always a difficult time. But I wonder whether you lot realise just how bloody lucky you are…I wonder, when I watch you sometimes, and hear you bellyaching, whether you have an inkling just how privileged you are.’ His conference, it now became obvious, was another pep talk although in very different style from the others. He spoke to us directly, briefly, and in normal language.

  He realised, he said, how we missed our families; how we resented rising at an unearthly hour; putting up with cold rooms, with no soft armchairs; digging ditches, cross-country running, taking cold showers, studying harder than most boys of our age, eating Cotton’s ‘delightful cooking’. But we had come, he said, ‘to the finest school in the whole of England’. We were taught, he went on, in small classes by the best-educated, most intelligent priests in the land (he smiled at us facetiously and it got a laugh). We had a fine library ‘filled to the gunwales with books’. Nor should we take for granted the beautiful surroundings. Above all we were living, he said, under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament and taking part daily in the full ritual of the Church to the accompaniment of one of the best church choirs in England. This place, he said, had been producing great priests and bishops for two hundred years. We should thank our lucky stars and be proud and grateful to be here. ‘So let’s get on with it, shall we, with no more bellyaching!’

  He sat for a while, staring down at us, as if watching the message sinking in. Then he rose, bounded down the stage steps, and walked swiftly from the hall. His conference had taken about five minutes, whereas the norm was a droning forty minutes or more.

  As I came out on to Lower Bounds I felt a distinct sense of rising spirits among my companions. I went straight back into the church where the incense was still heavy from High Mass. Alone, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, I thanked God for sending me to Cotton.

  32

  THANKS TO Peter Gladden, I was catching up with the rest of the class by the middle of November, and even began to enjoy Latin and occasionally shine at it. The punishment tasks stopped; and the busy routine of the curriculum left me little time to brood. The worst of the darkness seemed to have lifted. Did I owe this alleviation to a deepening sense of God?

  Ever since I was a child, and imagined God as a clock, I had continued to puzzle over how I thought about God; what I thought him to be. I had once imagined him as an ancient man with a beard on a throne; and I had thought of him as a sort of invisible, odourless ‘gas’ – the consequence of catechism classes which informed us that God was ‘everywhere, even in our most secret thoughts’. When I heard the voice of Jesus in the church of Saint Augustine, it marked the beginning of a period in which I could think of God as Jesus of The Imitation of Christ. At Cotton I continued to imagine him as a fatherly companion, to whom I spoke at intervals of the day, and particularly, following Father Browne’s encouragement, when I twice daily examined my conscience. And there were times when, as a result of the moving words of Cardinal Newman’s hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light’, I thought of the presence of Jesus as a disembodied warm light.

  As the weeks passed and I became more acquainted with the countryside around Cotton in all its moods, I began to feel a surprising new sense of the presence of Almighty God, beyond the person of Jesus. Sometimes on afternoon walks I had an impression of a vast and mighty presence in the wild landscape, the woods, the steep hills and the sky. After making my bed each morning I would go to Little Bounds and gaze down the valley. There were times when I felt that the scene was entering into my heart and expanding my soul. Sometimes I had an impression of the spirit of Almighty God in the hills and the sky that was far deeper, vaster, more real even, than my idea of the man–God Jesus.

  One Thursday afternoon, after seeing Father Browne, I had an urge to walk down to Faber’s Retreat in the valley by myself. It was breaking a rule, but I reasoned that my intention was not self-indulgence but the need to experience alone that special presence in the valley that had made me tremble with excitement.

  I stood inside Faber’s Retreat for a long time, looking out at the late afternoon light through the trees; listening to the echoing roar of water tumbling below, I felt my spirits lift for a few moments. Then something in the dampness of the rotting leaves, and the stirring in the canopy of the trees alarmed me. I felt lonely and I shuddered.

  As I walked back up the path towards Little Bounds I saw two figures among the trees. They were standing very still and close to each other: it was Charles House and the senior student Bursley. Charles looked frail and vulnerable next to the swarthy mature Bursley. When they realised who I was they turned away. I could see that they were smoking cigarettes. As I continued on up the valley, I felt a momentary spasm of jealousy for Bursley.

  That evening Father Piercy showed a film: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in ‘Road to Rio’. Charles House came and sat next to me. He pressed his shoulder gently against mine and whispered: ‘So what do you get up to down in the valley?’ I was too embarrassed to say anything.

  The profs arrived before the film began. They sat at the back of the hall, their legs sprawling out from under
their cassocks. Father Armishaw was in their midst, wearing a cloak and puffing on a curled pipe.

  At the point in the film where a group of girls begin dancing at a wedding, there was a glimpse of their bare legs, right up to their knickers, but the film suddenly cut to the next scene. Some boys at the back laughed. Charles whispered in my ear: ‘Censored by Father Goebbels.’

  33

  IN THE LAST week of November we celebrated the Feast of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. The choir sang a complicated Mass setting by Victoria which we had been practising ever since Saint Wilfred’s day. After Mass Father Owen talked to us in the sacristy about our choir music. The liturgical year, he said, was Christ himself living on in his Church, reliving the shape of his life, renewing the mysteries of the redemption.

  That afternoon the choir was given its annual feast served by the nuns in a drawing room in the old hall. Bacon and eggs were followed by a rich trifle topped with clotted cream. Father Doran presided along with Father Owen, and Father McCartie put in an appearance. As we continued to eat, the priests, having had their fill, leant back in their chairs and smoked, watching over us benignly. Later, in the assembly hall, the choir sang excerpts from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. One of the sopranos sang ‘Little Buttercup’, and I took part in the singing of ‘We are dainty little fairies’. The audience stamped their feet as the full choir sang excerpts from The Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore.