As he spoke, the tone of his voice, his kindness, calmed me. He said that God did not expect the impossible of us: he loves us and wants us to be happy and to flourish. ‘That Passionist I’m afraid is confused. If you believed that you were causing wet dreams by innocent actions in your waking life you would end up finding occasions of sin in everything and anything. That’s foolishness as well as heresy.’
He told me that I had been suffering from ‘scruples’, agonies of conscience, and that many boys in seminaries experienced this, especially if they became victims of irresponsible advice. He was looking at me, as if calculating whether I had taken his advice on board. I was thinking: ‘Scruples!’ It was a new word to me.
At length he said softly: ‘Now bugger off. And for God’s sake put that bloody book away and give church a rest!’
As Father Armishaw spoke in these jaunty, vulgar tones he seemed fatherly and dependable. He soothed the turmoil in me. And he revealed something of crucial importance. It had never occurred to me throughout my boyhood that priests could disagree.
Before I left the room, he said: ‘And another thing, when you go home tomorrow get out into the fresh air every day and do some exercise.’
I went down the stairs, my spirits soaring.
PART TWO
SPECIAL FRIENDSHIP
46
ON EASTER MONDAY, travelling from Derby to London, I had tea in the restaurant car with a sixth former who was taught by Father Armishaw. I asked him what he thought of the priest. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Vince is the most civilised man at Cotton. Several of us go up to his room on Saturdays to listen to music and “chew the fat” as he calls it.’ The student assured me that I had that to look forward to if I showed promise in Armishaw’s English classes. But the sixth form seemed an age away.
In London I made the journey from the city to Barkingside on my own by tube. In my suitcase I was carrying Latin and Greek grammars, the copy of Thérèse’s autobiography, trainers and running shorts.
It was the bank holiday and the family sat together for tea late in the afternoon. I was telling them about the Holy Week ceremonies, and I was conscious that I was speaking in a slightly nasal tone with an edge of Black Country no-nonsense confidence.
‘Why are you talking in that funny voice?’ Mum asked crossly.
‘You sound like that Northerner Wilfred Pickles on the radio,’ said my sister.
I felt rebellious, and determined. In the course of two terms at Cotton I was losing my cockney accent, which I had grown to despise, and now I was deliberately attempting to speak, I thought, more like Father Armishaw. Wilfred Pickles!
I had devised a holiday routine: early morning Mass, breakfast, visit to the local library where I would study Latin and Greek, then home to change for a run; then back to church for meditation and recital of the Rosary before Father Cooney shut up at five o’clock. As I put the routine into practice I was conscious that my prayers were becoming mechanical, repetitive, less interior, less troubled and self-conscious. My running and rote learning of Latin and Greek grammar helped me to avoid preoccupation with my conscience: less inclined to scruples, to those agonies of conscience.
Running was a means of escape from the crowded little house and its tense atmosphere. First I warmed up, jogging around the sports ground three or four times, wearing two football jerseys. Then I stripped off to my vest and headed along the avenues and streets of Barkingside, following a set route along the broadest pavements and the less busy districts. Each day I ran farther and farther. I began to run in the evenings, after dark, around the sports field. I ran until I was exhausted. I developed blisters, a painful knee, an ache in my groin. And as I ran, I found ringing constantly in my ears Doris Day’s latest radio hit, ‘Secret Love’.
One morning my younger brother, Michael, aged nearly eleven, scrawny and underdeveloped, asked if he could run with me. ‘Why not,’ I said brusquely. He was wearing sandals. We jogged together around the field easily enough since I was virtually running on the spot to allow him to keep up. Then it was time to take to the roads. Deliberately, I flew off at a sprint to lose him. At the corner of Claybury Broadway I paused to look back. He was standing on the pavement weeping. But I turned and ran on. It did not occur to me, despite all my religiosity at Cotton, that growth in the spiritual life should have included kindness to younger brothers.
I had noticed that Miss Racine was not attending early morning Mass, nor was she at the Camp on Sunday. Several times I called at her house while out running, but she did not answer the door. One afternoon I was running along the cycle track on the road that led from Redbridge to Wanstead when I overtook her pulling her trolley. She was slower than usual and she appeared to be in pain.
Something had happened. She did not greet me warmly as in the past, but began to splutter criticisms of Father Cooney. She was now attending church at Our Lady of Lourdes in Wanstead, a walk of about two miles from her house. She kept saying crossly: ‘I’ve written to the bishop! I’ve written to the bishop!’ It saddened me that she was so gripped by her quarrel that she had no interest in me. ‘Don’t go to Saint Augustine’s,’ she said. ‘That’s a bad parish, and a bad parish priest.’ Her quarrel with Father Cooney had something to do with his refusal to wear the biretta, the three-cornered clerical headwear, on the sanctuary (apparently his had finally fallen to pieces). Eventually I made my excuses and ran towards Wanstead. Before turning at the George pub, I looked back to see her toiling up the hill jabbering angrily to herself.
One fine afternoon my father devised a quarter-mile eightlane running track on the grass of the sports field in readiness for the summer athletics. He worked out the calculations from a book and marked the lanes and curves and staggered starting points with pegs and lengths of string. I stood watching him with astonishment as he bent to his task, walking to and fro, to and fro, with his stiff-legged limp. When he stopped for a cup of tea, which he drank from a flask, he explained what he was doing. I was fascinated by his ability to make such complicated calculations, and pretended that I understood completely. While we were talking he expressed admiration for my running, but he annoyed me when he suggested that I was using my arms too much.
After he had marked out the course with the whitewash applicator I had new targets as a middle-distance runner. I started to time myself over the quarter- and half-mile as well as doing my long-distance runs. One afternoon, despite his extraordinary handicap, my father raced me with his strange hoppity-skip around a quarter of a mile in his working boots, and almost beat me. He lay on the grass in his overalls looking up at the sky, his face covered in perspiration, his steel blue eyes dazed with satisfaction.
47
ONE MORNING I was running up Clissold Avenue when a boy came out from his front garden and shouted after me: ‘Oi! Sissy!’ He was older than me, I guessed, and fat.
I had often felt self-conscious, running in vest and shorts around the streets of Barkingside, especially when a pedestrian would smile oddly. I was enraged. All the emotions of the Lenten weeks and the retreat, the nerve-racking tensions of being at home, came to a head. I ran on a little further, and the boy called out again: ‘Sissy!’ Making a little loop, without breaking my run, I turned back and came running towards him at speed. He was making a peculiar face, curling up his lips, his fists clenched. Without slowing down I sprinted past giving him a resounding smack full in the face. I felt his bared teeth on my fingers. His squeal of rage echoed down the street; but I ran another loop and came up to him at speed again. This time he punched me in the head before I could get in another blow. I ran on a little, my ear throbbing with pain. Then I came running back and gave him a flying kick on the side of his knee, making him yell as he collapsed on the pavement.
At that moment, a man appeared at the front door. ‘Wass all this!’ he shouted.
‘Dad, ‘e kicked me,’ whined the fat boy.
‘You little bastard!’ shouted the man. ‘Just you come ‘ere!’
T
he man began to chase me. An incline of about half a mile lay ahead. He was tall, overweight like his son, and he was puffing and cursing. But he was determined.
‘Geddim, Dad!’ I could hear his son shouting, as he limped along behind.
We ran up Clissold Avenue, turning into Otley Drive, then down Clayhall Avenue, then around Sunrise Crescent, then through Clayhall Park, the man just ten yards or so behind me gasping and cursing all the way. The fat boy had dropped out by the time we reached Woodford Avenue. Up Woodford Avenue we went as far as Gants Hill then down Eastern Avenue. Something mischievous and dogged in me wanted to make the man suffer, to make him hurt in body and spirit, so I kept slowing down, allowing him to remain at the same distance, while keeping a reserve of energy. People were stopping in the street to watch us. Two young men, guessing what was happening, cheered me on. Finally I turned into Horns Road, having run about three miles, and I let him come within five yards of me before I increased my speed and sailed away up towards Barkingside High Street with a little bye-bye wave of my hand. Eventually I looked back. He was standing with his hands on his hips, his shoulders heaving.
On the Saturday, making my weekly confession, I told Father Cooney that I had struck someone in anger.
He looked at me curiously through the grille. ‘Everything gentle,’ he said. ‘Always gentleness and kindness even when we are insulted…Why would you want to go hitting anybody,’ he asked, ‘and you the seminary boy?’
‘He called me a sissy, Father.’
‘He called you what?’
‘A sissy.’
‘Well, next time give the fellah a tump from me as well,’ he said. ‘Now say three Our Fathers, and three Hail Marys…’
Violence was in the air that holiday.
The night before I returned to Cotton, I was woken by the sound of angry voices in the living room below. Mum and Dad were quarrelling about money. It was one of those familiar circuitous rows which could have only one resolution. There was a bill which she could not pay, and somehow it was Dad’s fault. His wages could not cover the household expenses, she was saying, and he had been spending money on himself going to football matches and treating himself. Dad was hotly denying everything, telling her that she should put money aside for the bills. But the more he argued back the more shrill she became. Then came the sound of a smack and a screech, and a chair overturning, followed by the full-scale rumpus: grunts, clouts, bangs, insults. My brother Terry, who had to get up at six in the morning, stirred and cursed: ‘Oh God! Not again.’ He put a pillow over his head. The little ones were now awake and whimpering and I could hear my sister weeping on the landing.
In the end I went down the stairs and entered the sitting room. Dad had Mum by the hair trying to pull her to the ground, while she was punching and kicking him. They were both yelling and screaming at each other.
‘Stop this at once!’ I bellowed at the top of my voice, emulating the accents of Father Armishaw.
They stopped. Mum was staring at me, her eyes starting out of her head as if she had been disembowelled. ‘How dare you! Who do you think you are! Get back to bed! It’s your fault I’m in this mess. I’ve had to buy new shirts and shoes for you to go back to that college. Get up to bed before I give you a bloody good hiding…’
They had stopped fighting long enough to hold a truce for the rest of the night.
48
AS THE TRAIN steamed along the valley of the Churnet following the flow of the river towards Oakamoor, I was astonished at the transformation of the countryside by the arrival of early summer. I sat next to James Rolle with the window down, breathing in the scents of the meadows and the river; gazing on the horse chestnut trees in full red and cream blossom, and the white hawthorn hedgerows brilliant as wedding dresses. In the luggage rack above my head were the items I had taken home at Easter as well as white cricket pants and cricket boots, donated by my elder brother who had grown out of them, and a new pair of swimming trunks.
At night prayers I was full of resolutions to apply myself more closely to my studies, to read more, and to make more friendships. As I came out of church in ranks at the end of prayers, I saw Father Armishaw reading his breviary. He was bathed in rich orange evening light that flooded into the back of the church from the west window. The very sight of him, sitting in a relaxed posture, one hand raised to rest his chin, filled me with relief.
I lay awake for hours listening to nightjars and owls in the woods, breathing in the cold sweet air from the dormer windows. The next morning I woke to the sound of the dawn chorus in the valley. Looking out of the window I stood entranced by the sight of the early sun lighting up the distant hills. I had been assigned to serve the Mass of Father Owen, and I knelt almost trembling with happiness beneath the floodlit stained glass of Saint Francis. The great doors were open at the west end of the church, creating a Gothic-framed vision of the steep fields on the far side of the valley. Every window in the college revealed a perspective of abundant dappled greenery and blossom, and the promise of hazy distant prospects.
Several days into the summer term Father Piercy entered the refectory to announce that the swimming pool was ready. The lower and upper fourth years were allowed up for a swim after tea. The pool was a concrete tank fed by a stream that gushed down from Peggy’s Wood.
The dark green water was stunningly cold. Boys were diving in from a crude board, and the air was filled with the echo of their shouts and laughter. Floating on my back I looked up at the great elms rising on every side of the pool. I had never been so happy in my life.
As the weather grew warmer, the daily swim became a routine of exquisite pleasure. Afterwards I would go to the library to read Hilaire Belloc’s Path to Rome. I imagined his descriptions of the French valleys as if they were part of our own landscape at Cotton. I enjoyed the rhythm of his prose and the bullish confidence of his Catholic certitudes. I had stopped reading Thérèse of Lisieux and The Imitation of Christ and I was spending time privately reciting the psalms of the Little Office of the Virgin. I felt as if I was living on the surface of Cotton’s routines, sustained like a child by the hands of Jesus and Mary.
I decided not to return to Father Browne for confession and spiritual direction for a time. I went instead to Father Owen, who heard confessions in the sacristy during Rosary on Wednesday evenings and spoke briefly and with detached reassurance. Less self-centered, and prone to those scruples, I felt that I was becoming like many of my more contented companions. I was taking myself less seriously.
As the days lengthened I was spending time after Rosary in the cricket nets with James Rolle. But I found that as a batsman I was taking more balls on my knuckles than on the bat. My defective eye was letting me down. I cracked two fingers in the third week of term during a Sunday cricket match. I was not wearing protective gloves and a huge-shouldered boy called Stubeck hurled a ball at me which I took full on my left hand. As Mère Saint Luc, the matron, bound the fingers she told me that I was off cricket for a week.
And that was how I came to fall under the spell of Charles House who had lurked at the edge of my consciousness ever since the day he had bent over me in the library during Lent and told me that I was beautiful. Why was it that I had thought of his face, close to mine, whenever I heard the refrain from Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’?
It was a blazing Wednesday afternoon on which we had a half-day holiday for cricket. I had been lying on my stomach, leaning on my elbows in the long grass below the seniors’ cricket pitch, watching a match against a visiting team. Charles appeared walking up from a lower field, where he had been playing for the under-fourteens team. He was wearing crisp white cricket pants and a short-sleeved Aertex shirt. His sports clothes were of the best quality, and his boots were of a fine creamy kid leather. He lay next to me, stretching out his arms which were already lightly suntanned, smooth and delicate like a girl’s. He was chewing on a stalk of grass. ‘I was bowled out for a duck,’ he said. Then he looked me full in the face, very clos
ely.
‘Poor old Fru!’ he whispered. ‘How’s the broken fingers?’ He had a flirtatious way of glancing to one side before looking at one directly. He talked for a while about the match; in my confusion and excitement at his proximity – his hip was gently pressed against mine – I hardly understood what he said, except that it was funny and soothing.
Then he said: ‘Shut your eyes, Fru.’
I shut them, and a moment later I felt his lips touching mine.
When I opened my eyes, my heart racing, he was lying on his back, his head in the grass. His lips were parted, his teeth pure white and even; his dancing blue eyes were laughing.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘What have I done, Fru! What on earth have I done!’
I was looking at him, breathing deeply as if he had punched me hard in the solar plexus.
He said softly: ‘Come on, Fru. Give me a kiss.’
And I did: lightly on his flushed cheek. And I found my soul melting at the smell of his hair and breath which seemed to me sweet as the early summer grass. As I looked at him, a few inches from his face, he was transfigured into the most beautiful creature in the world. His features were delicate, perfect, thrilling.
I knew that I had done something forbidden, but it did not occur to me that I had committed a sexual sin. Homosexuality meant no more to me in those days than a tendency for boys and men to behave like women – ‘sissies’. I was intoxicated, obsessed, prostrate with adoration.
49
FROM THAT MOMENT in the long grass I was thrown into a minute-by-minute agony of suspense. I was thinking of him all day long and half the night. It was as if the earth would open up and I would plunge into an abyss unless I was with him. I contrived to be with him whenever there was a break in the routine; and he, in turn, seemed to want to be with me too. My infatuation for Charles was from the start inseparable from my feelings about Cotton’s enchanted valley in those early summer weeks. Through the open windows came the scent of newly mown hay in the meadows below the college, and scents of flowers from the gardens before the old hall. When we were together our conversation was banal. We would talk about cricket, or make wry comments about Father Gavin or one of the other priests. Apart from those compulsive first kisses I felt no desire to touch him or kiss him again. Nor did he touch me either, or express endearments. Only the slightest expression in his eyes when we were not observed confirmed that he returned my adoration.
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