The peak of my bliss during those early days was the afternoon Charles and I came to spend two whole hours together lying side by side. Our class was sent on a walk across fields to a hidden dell where the turf was cropped down by sheep to a smooth lawn on the banks of a fast-running brook. The sixth former wanted to sit beneath the shade of a tree to study a textbook for his exams. The rest of us were allowed to laze in the sun. Charles and I lay on the warm turf out of sight. At one point, throwing blades of grass gently towards my chest, he said: ‘John, I love you so much.’ When he said it, I thought I was going to die of happiness. And yet the sense of delight was so excessive that I felt a momentary chill, as if the sun had darkened for a few seconds. I felt overwhelmed. How had I come to deserve such love? I was not good-looking, or funny, or interesting. And it was Charles, the most perfect, most adorable human being on earth, who was saying this.
‘Why?’ I asked him, trembling.
‘Because,’ he said, laughing, ‘you warm the cockles of my heart.’
As we walked back to the college in the heat of the afternoon, he just once bumped lazily against me with his shoulder. I thought that I would never forget the pressure of his beautiful shoulder against my arm. After tea we sat in the library at the same table. The windows were open, letting in the warm quiet evening air. I was happy, and yet from that moment I began to feel a sense of danger. I had dim and ominous memories of perfect summer days in London towards the end of the war, when death could come silently at any moment from a cloudless sky.
50
CHARLES WAS NO longer consorting with Bursley, who would sometimes watch us miserably from afar. One day Bursley came and joined us on Top Bounds as we were sauntering together after breakfast. Charles said to him: ‘Get lost!’ Bursley turned away wordlessly. I felt deeply for him, and it filled me with consternation that Charles could treat him like that. Will he, I wondered, say that to me one day? It was unthinkable.
James, Derek and Peter were all too aware of my attachment. I felt no embarrassment; I felt immensely proud. Standing in ranks preparing to march into church for Sunday Compline, Oliver Stack murmured in my ear: ‘Are you aware that we are not meant to indulge in special friendships?’
‘Get lost, Stack!’ I said.
I was conscious of my fall from grace, but I was living just for the moment. The point of life was to be with Charles, to be thinking about him every waking moment. I was conscious of him as I knelt saying the Rosary after supper; even as I went up to receive Communion during Mass. We were separated by several desks in class, but we would exchange looks occasionally through the lesson. When I sang in choir I could look up from my music score to see him in the front row of the pews. At night I lay in bed looking up at the sky through the dormer window, thinking of his beautiful face, his particular mannerisms, his way of turning and looking, conscious that he was just a few feet away in the darkness.
How I would have loved to climb into bed with him. I just wanted to be with him.
51
THE SPELL BROKE on the Feast of the Ascension. After a glorious High Mass, the choir set off in a bus for the annual treat at Dovedale. We passed through the town of Ashbourne singing ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ at the tops of our voices in the hope that passing Protestants would get the full force of our Catholic convictions.
Lunch was laid out in readiness at the Izaak Walton Hotel which stood at the entrance to the famous gorge with its high rocks and rapids. After feasting ourselves on roast chicken and vegetables followed by ‘cabinet pudding’ and custard, we were allowed to roam free, while the priests reclined in armchairs, their jackets unbuttoned, smoking cigars. There was a tradition that after lunch the sopranos and altos raced to the top of Thorpe Cloud, the hill overlooking the river. I sprinted off with the first five. We crossed the rushing waters on stepping stones, and approached the flanks of the hill through a stone stile. Halfway up, I was fit to vomit, and stopped. I sat on the side of the hill. Looking about me I felt overwhelmed by the immense vistas on every side. I had never stood so high, nor seen so far, nor felt so small in the vast grandeur of the landscape. There was just one person missing: Charles.
I sat there for a time, gazing at the landscape. Bursley and another fifth former came into view; Bursley said something to his companion and came over to me.
‘This thing with you and Charles,’ he said in a low voice, ‘it won’t last, you know.’ Without waiting for an answer he went to join the other boy.
I knew that Bursley was right. What Charles was doing to me was what he had done to Bursley. It was what Charles did; and I vomited. When the choir returned from Dovedale, Charles was sitting on the wall that bordered Top Bounds, waiting for me.
‘I missed you,’ I said, my heart pounding.
‘I missed you, too,’ he said.
52
CHARLES WENT COOL on me slowly, very slowly, every small token of his rejection an exquisite torture. It began when he asked me to come for a smoke down in the valley. I told him that smoking made me feel sick. In fact, I was afraid of being found out. He pulled a face, and whispered: ‘Sanctebob!’ Then he said something that filled me with anxiety: ‘The rules in this place,’ he said, ‘are ridiculous…I’ll find someone else to come with me.’
There was no dramatic falling out; just a long withdrawal of his presence. Instead of being in our usual places at our usual times, he was increasingly absent.
One Sunday evening as we gathered for a film in the assembly hall, I saved a seat for him. He came in just before the lights went out. He looked at me directly for a moment, then went off to sit with Bursley, smiling amiably as he greeted him. I felt a pang of sorrow like bereavement. That night I did not sleep; my brain raged until dawn.
For days he blew hot and cold. There were occasions when he seemed to send small signals of affection just as before; but these tokens were as agonising as his rejection. One day when we were walking on Top Bounds together after breakfast, he stopped in his tracks. He said: ‘Oh, Fru, you do know I love you, don’t you!’
I was so miserable, so confused, I wanted to scream: ‘No, Charles, I don’t know!’ I looked away, fit to cry.
For three days after this, he appeared to be ignoring me. And all the while the term was passing in a succession of painfully lovely days amidst the scents and brilliant foliage of our valley retreat.
How much time had I spent with Charles when I should have been studying. How much of my prayer life had been wasted in distracted, lovesick ponderings. What of my commitment to bask in the presence of Jesus my Lord and true Father. For how many hours had I walked up and down the cloisters and across the Bounds in the hope of ‘bumping’ into Charles when he had gone absent.
Two-thirds of the term had vanished when I was summoned to Father Gavin’s room during prep one evening. He was sitting at his desk wearing heavy reading glasses, his face solemn. He did not invite me to sit down. He had a selection of my exercise books before him.
‘Are you determined to be put on a train home?’ he asked coldly. My work in every subject was in decline, he said, and the effort the staff had made with me had been in vain. The promise I had shown at Easter was an illusion. I began to weep.
Father Gavin was unmoved: his head was cocked to one side, his mouth pursed with indignation. ‘Crying won’t do any good,’ he said.
I went to pray before the Blessed Sacrament; the doors were open and the church was filled with the scent of honeysuckle. I poured out my heart to Jesus. As I prayed, I realised that I had not come before Him for help to make a free decision. I knew that my love for Charles was utterly without a future. The choice was between deliberately shutting the door on him, or spending the rest of the term mooning around at our meeting places. That latter path, I now knew, would not win Charles back, and it would lead to expulsion. The interview with Father Gavin had frightened me. In all the weeks of infatuation I had not stopped to consider the consequences for my future and for my soul.
After Ro
sary I went to confession to Father Owen. I told him that I had given in to my feelings for another boy, that I was now anxious that my attachment had been sinful. He was brief and firm. He wanted to know whether we had committed any sexual acts together. I was not sure what that meant, but I told him that beyond one kiss we had never touched each other.
He said in a calm voice that it was only natural to form attachments. But it was not appropriate to give in to feelings of affection for someone of the same sex. ‘What you must do,’ he said, ‘is take these strong feelings and channel them towards Our Blessed Lady. There is a word for this: sublimation, the purification of our feelings in our love for Mary.’ Then he told me to say three Hail Marys for my penance.
That evening I began a regime that would continue to the end of the term a month hence. I set up my hidden workplace once more in one of the music practice rooms under the stage. I was determined that I would devote every free moment to study.
I skipped choir practice, affecting a sore throat. But after a few days I was dismissed from the choir anyway by Father Owen as having reached what he called ‘my grand climacteric’. ‘We’ll see you back here when you’re ready to go into the tenors or basses,’ he said. It was remarkable, it seemed to me, that he could speak to me as if my confidences in confession had never been.
I got through cloister Rosary in two minutes after supper so that I could spend evening recreation under the stage. I spent the spiritual reading period with my head in a textbook. I shot off my weekly letters home in several minutes instead of the usual half-hour. I gave up swimming, and spent no more than three minutes eating breakfast.
As I plunged into studying, my heart never ceased to ache for the presence of Charles. He left a note in my desk, asking why I was avoiding him. I did not respond. I was conscious of him sometimes, looking at me reproachfully; but I steeled myself against the temptation to approach him. Then he left a note in my desk asking me to meet him in the valley near the shrine to Saint Wilfred. As I read it, I remembered him standing among the trees with Bursley. I tore up the note.
Finally he found me in my hideaway. He stood at the door looking at me where I sat among my books, using the closed piano lid as a desk. ‘So, here you are, Fru!’
‘Here I am,’ I said coldly. ‘I’m working, Charles, so leave me alone.’
‘Come on, Fru,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s make up. You know I love you.’
He was wearing an appealing smile. I adored him, soul and body. I felt as if I was murdering my own soul when, conscious that my eyes were blazing, fists clenched, I said: ‘Get lost, Charles, and I mean it.’
He was not frightened of me. He just nodded and left.
That evening I knelt before the triptych of the Annunciation in the Lady chapel and tried to direct all my feelings for Charles towards Our Lady. After fifteen minutes I felt a headache coming on, so I rose and left the church.
53
DURING THE REMAINING days of the summer term I discovered that, summoning my determination, making what I called ‘a fiat’, I could study to good effect even in the midst of love-lorn misery. I could work well even as I pined. Yet I found it difficult to concentrate on my prayers. In church I found myself merely uttering the sounds, while my mind was on Charles. Whenever I attempted to meditate, and to ‘sublimate, ’ I found myself thinking about him. When I said the Rosary or attended Mass, I could not concentrate on the mysteries and the sacred words. In church I laboured to keep my mind on the rituals, while every thought and image was of Charles.
This was a fresh cause for anxiety. We had been studying prayer and liturgy in Christian doctrine classes, with special reference to the papal document, Mediator Dei. The Holy Father had written that it was not enough merely to utter the words of a prayer. We should mean what we say. The ‘interior’ expression is as important, he had declared, as the ‘exterior’ expression.
Was I losing, I wondered, my vocation? Even as I pondered this, it occurred to me that staying at Cotton was the most important thing in my life. My vocation, the idea that I would one day take a piece of bread into my hands and bring God down on to this earth, was so far in the future, that it had no power to motivate me decisively. I was living intensely in the present. And if I had been asked to choose between Charles and the distant prospect of being ordained, if I had been asked to choose even between Charles and God himself, I would have chosen Charles. But leaving Cotton was not an option. Cotton was where I belonged now.
When I saw Charles pairing off with another boy called Staines, when I caught glimpses of the two of them exchanging clandestine looks, I knew for certain, even as it scourged my heart with jealousy, that I would not now weaken. But I was also sustained by another influence, always present but hardly noticed.
The day after Father Gavin’s pep talk, Father Armishaw sent for me. He was sitting with the door and the window open. He was playing a piece of piano music on his gramophone and smoking a cigarette. Looking towards the gramophone he said: ‘Listen to that, Cornwell.’ He had never called me ‘Fru’ like the rest of the staff and boys. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful fugue! Do you know what a fugue is?…Never mind…’
I listened, and I liked it. I felt secure sitting in the priest’s room with its rows and rows of books and splendid views down the valley. My eye ran along the book shelves. Among the authors were names and titles that were strange to me then and therefore unmemorable; but I was conscious that they had nothing to do with the sacred, with Catholicism, with religion. When the music came to an end, he said abruptly: ‘How goes it?’
I was wondering whether to speak about Charles. But instinctively I kept silent.
‘No more scruples this term? No more agonies of conscience?’
I shook my head.
‘Right as a ribstone pippin?’ He paused as if he was about to say something else, but he left it hanging in the air.
We sat in silence for a few moments more.
‘And what about the man in South Kensington?’
I shook my head again. Silence.
Then I felt compelled to ask him the question that loomed uppermost in my mind. ‘Is it a sin, sir, if you don’t concentrate properly on your prayers; do we receive grace if we can’t concentrate on the Mass, if we find it impossible to pray even at Holy Communion?’
‘Are you trying to concentrate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the trying is what matters…God expects you to pray with your heart and mind as well as your lips and body. But there’s something else. There are times when you acquire grace just by going through the motions…’ He gave me a strange smile: ‘One day you’ll understand, but perhaps not today.’
‘Do you concentrate on every word of the liturgy and the divine office, sir?’
‘I certainly don’t. But you tell God that you want to concentrate, and leave the rest up to Him.’
‘But, sir…do you always concentrate when you read your books, your poetry and novels?’
He laughed. ‘Aha! I have to say that I do…but that’s different.’
‘How is it different, sir?’
He got up from his chair and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Cornwell, do something for me, will you! Scram!’
Before the last day of term I went to confession to Father Owen in his room. He was brief as usual and recommended that I say my prayers each day at regular times. Swinging around to his bookcase, he plucked a book from the shelf. ‘I’ve something for you to take away for the summer break,’ he said. It was The Devout Life by Saint Francis de Sales.
54
BACK AT THE Peel the summer sports activities were in full swing. My father was working from dawn till dark most days, while Mum was running the club-room canteen, selling her Spam sandwiches and rock cakes. My sister, the convent-school girl, took care of the house at weekends; cleaning every room, making beds, washing and ironing, while looking after my younger brothers. Jimmy, a cheerful little lad, sucked his thumb while living out his horse-riding fantasi
es. He could go nowhere, even a few yards, without mounting his imaginary horse, trotting forward or galloping, one hand on the reins, making a clopping sound with his tongue. Michael, small for his age, spent hours drawing elaborate castles with intricate defences: moats, battlements, vats of boiling oil to inflict mischief on invaders. It was if he had embarked on a massive imaginative strategy of defence against the entire malefic world, starting with the Peel.
My sister was a surrogate mother to my younger brothers, and she did it without complaint. But I sometimes caught her standing at the sink, looking through the window towards the gates, just as I had seen my mother do. That summer I heard Maureen singing ‘Mr Sandman’ at the sink, over and over again.
My eldest brother, Terry, went to night school several evenings a week as part of his training to become a draughtsman. He was obliged to work on Saturday mornings at Plessey’s factory, and on Saturday afternoons and Sundays he was out all day playing cricket.
I was to help Dad in between my home routine of early morning Mass, running, and stints in the local library. I saw at first hand now the application and expertise he put into the care of his pitches, the tennis courts, the running track, and the gardens at the entrance to the sports ground. His centre of operations was a storeroom and adjoining garage which housed his mowers, rollers, spikers, whitewash applicators and tractors, all of which he serviced himself. On a shelf in the storeroom were his seed catalogues and manuals on the proper care of the cricket ‘tables’.
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