Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  He worked mainly in silence, giving me brief instructions from time to time. But when we took a break to drink tea from his flask, he would tell me stories about his struggles as a grounds keeper. ‘Believe you me, son, when I first came to this place,’ he told me one day, ‘it wasn’t fit for a fairground. The plantains were big as cabbages. As for the machinery, it was only fit for a museum…’ He told me how the land was reclaimed swamp, ‘full of tetanus’, and how step by step he rescued the soil and the grasses from dereliction, and upgraded his machines, doing it all by himself with no help.

  I enjoyed working with Dad, but I noticed that he was blinking more than usual as the day wore on. I also saw him on several occasions staring with a faraway look in the middle of the cricket table for a minute or so. As he shaved in the morning, he would say over and over: ‘Oh dear!…Oh dear!…Oh dear!…’ I thought he was merely fatigued. Like Mum he was working seven days a week, sometimes until after ten at night. In addition to working on the sports ground he was doing odd jobs as a gardener out in the wealthy suburbs. His clients used to come and pick him up in their cars, and sometimes I accompanied him. We would mow lawns, cut edges, weed, cut back, dead-head flowers, tidy around. Then we would be driven back to the Peel after dark, a few extra shillings in his pocket, one of which he would give to me. ‘Don’t spend it all at once!’ he would say with a wink.

  I first understood that Dad was in a bad way in his mind when he went missing for two whole days in the middle of a working week. Mum, who was on worse terms than usual with him, and out all night herself working in the hospital, remarked that she hoped she had ‘seen the last of him’. A strange hope, as our house and her canteen business went with his job. But such was her exasperation with him, and her desperation for a change of her fortunes. She was convinced that he was holding her back.

  On the evening of the second day, when he had still not appeared, it occurred to me to look for him in the back section of the shed where he kept his tractor. There I found him in the failing light, sitting on a pile of filthy sacks, sobbing. He had lost a tool that was essential for his work and seemed convinced that the end of his world had come. He dried his eyes, and I managed to coax him back into the house. I put my arm around his shoulders and told him how much I loved him. I was conscious of a sense of personal power: the power of a son who has outstripped his father; who aspired to be father to the man: Father John.

  The next day instead of working he sat in his armchair, rocking, sighing and screwing up his eyes, mournfully humming to himself Mario Lanza’s song, ‘Be My Love’. It was unlike him to neglect his work.

  I went with him to our local doctor. When he came out he was sweating profusely and shaking. I asked him what the matter was.

  ‘What’s the matter? I’ve got to see a trick cyclist, that’s what the matter is. But believe you me, son, they won’t get me into that Claybury there.’

  The nature of my father’s condition, which turned out to be depression, and a form of epilepsy known as petit mal, became apparent in the following weeks as he started to make regular visits to Saint Clement’s hospital, the psychiatric unit in Bow Road. Mum attempted to explain his condition to us, as it had been relayed to her by a consultant psychiatrist. Dad suffered from occasional seizures in the brain which lasted no longer than a few seconds but which left him emotionally upset.

  We did not know that Dad was only at the beginning of his tribulations. Mum said little, but she appeared to be watching him carefully. She said out of his hearing that the diagnosis of epilepsy explained many things, especially his ‘filthy moods’ and, as she pronounced it, in her occasional aptitude for cockney malapropism, ‘his panaroia’.

  He was on various medications which slowed him down. He continued to work, but he easily became exhausted and everything seemed to take him longer. A jolly young man on vacation from Exeter University was employed by the secretary of the charity that owned the playing fields to help Dad. As the summer wore on, the pitches and tennis courts were beginning to look ragged and worn. The spores and fungi were getting the upper hand. Marauding pests, wilts and slugs were beginning to have their way.

  55

  IN THE SECOND week of September, we took a family summer holiday. We stayed for a week free of charge in a house owned by a Quaker charity at Cliftonville by the sea in Kent. The terraced holiday house in a road near the cliff tops smelt strangely but not unpleasantly of damp and the quantities of aged cheap novels and travel books that lined the shelves in the sitting room. I had a tiny bedroom to myself with bars on the windows. After we had settled in, I lay on the bed, and for the first time opened the book Father Owen had lent me: The Devout Life by Francis de Sales.

  The book had been written for the spiritual guidance of a lay noblewoman. But his instructions were intended for people in all circumstances of life. Francis declared that there was no point in people fasting and being teetotal if they ‘drink deep in their neighbours’ blood with detraction’. Nor was there any point in giving to charity while refusing to forgive those who had offended you. To be good, he wrote in that first chapter, one needed charity; but to be devout one needed to practise charity cheerfully, and constantly.

  I found The Devout Life appealing for its analogies from the natural history of animals, birds, insects, plants and flowers. There was no hint of mystical spirituality in his writings, and he repeatedly counselled normality and simple routines. He wrote that religious people often appeared gloomy and serious; but a truly devout person, he insisted, was cheerful and agreeable.

  It rained frequently at Cliftonville, and cold winds laced with flying salt spray whipped in from the Channel and the North Sea. Our attempts to enjoy ourselves on the beach below the cliffs were doomed. We sat in our deck-chairs swaddled in raincoats. Looking up at the lowering skies Mum grumbled: ‘I’m never allowed to enjoy a decent holiday. What terrible wickedness have I done to deserve this!’

  My younger brothers ran in and out of the sea, their teeth chattering, their hands and limbs corpse-white. They ate their ice creams crouching behind the deck-chairs, hunched and shivering. I attended Mass and prayed in the Catholic church near the cliff tops. I went back in the afternoon to read The Devout Life and recite the Rosary.

  One day I walked around Dreamland at Margate, the nearby popular seaside town, appalled by the vulgarity of the sideshows and raucous music, despising the scantily clad girls with their goose-bump flesh and silly hats proclaiming: ‘Kiss Me Quick’. The revolting smell of hot dogs and candy floss, screeching bands of teenagers, disgusted me. In preference I took to wandering the cliff-top paths west of Cliftonville, walking as far as Broadstairs around the North Foreland, breathing in the ozone and smell of seaweed, looking out towards the broad expanses of the wastes of grey sea.

  One night before we left for London, Dad drank several bottles of beer in the kitchen. Once tipsy he told stories about his heroic youth on the streets of Custom House and did an imitation of Charlie Chaplin’s splayed shuffle, with its teetering turn on one foot. He seemed to be making a joke of his own painful disability. Mum, who had had a couple of glasses of Scotch and ginger wine, ‘Whisky Macs’, held herself tight and laughed shrilly at his antics. It made me happy to see them laughing together. I drank a couple of glasses of bottled Guinness.

  That night, in the early hours, I woke up in the midst of a wet dream. The next day, Saturday, found me in a state of consternation. We were due to depart for London after lunch, and on Tuesday I was bound for Cotton. There were confessions in Cliftonville’s Catholic church during the mid-morning. As I entered the box I was relieved that the priest did not know me. He was a small pale man with glasses, and he seemed in a hurry. I stumbled over trying to explain my sin. He looked up, and said abruptly: ‘How many times did this happen?’

  ‘Just once, Father.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to go into all that detail. All you have to say is that you committed a sexual sin by yourself on one occasion. In future that�
�s all you have to say. Now say three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Go in peace and sin no more.’ The grille trap came down with a petulant bang.

  56

  THE BUS GROANED up the steep winding road from Oakamoor, packed with noisy returning boys from the station. When I saw the familiar shape of the college looming through the evening mist on its isolated promontory I felt that I was coming home. I was no longer the boy who had arrived from London’s East End a year earlier.

  Along with the rest of my year I had moved further back in the main body of the church to make way for a new lower fourth. As the school captain led us in prayer from the back, I realised how deeply Cotton was eating into my soul. I had returned to what was truly me. As I placed myself in the presence of Almighty God during night prayers, as I sang the Salve Regina, I felt that I was being drawn into the ranks of the chosen men who now, and throughout the ages, served Holy Mother Church.

  The following day, James and Derek, who had travelled with me from London, and Peter who had returned from Wolverhampton, waited for me by the noticeboards so that we could take a morning constitutional on Top Bounds. Then I saw Charles. He was standing at the bottom of the Bounds steps talking animatedly with Staines and Bursley, making them laugh. Charles’s hair was a little bleached, his face lightly tanned. Our eyes met for a moment and I trembled.

  As the college swung into its routines I found myself observing our priests. I was struck for the first time by their poverty and discipline. The profs, all ten of them, were wedded to their routines, and lacking in ‘attachments’ save for their enthusiasm for smoking. They possessed little, other than their means of transport – mostly ageing motorbikes. Their beds and desks, the chairs they sat in, were the property of the college, and hence the Church. Only Father Armishaw stood out from the rest because of his aptitude for engaging boys, his occasional vulgarities, his books and his collections of classical records, his flying jacket and that gleaming new motorbike. And yet, Father Armishaw, as a priest, was no less perfectly in tune with the others, excercising his priesthood on the surface, without signs of inferiority. Our priests appeared content to perform the externals of the religious life. As I watched them reading their breviaries, pacing up and down the gravel paths, flicking over the pages, adjusting the silk tags, there was no hint of fervour. Their Masses were said with almost perfunctory precision with no hint of devout interiority.

  I had found confirmation of this mechanical approach to the religious life in Francis de Sales. He had a compelling chapter titled ‘Spiritual and Sensible Consolation’, in which he vehemently rejected all emotion in the growth of the spiritual life. ‘Weeping and tenderness of heart’ are but ‘snares of the Devil’, wrote the saint, for being transitory they are not to be trusted. In his characteristic employment of metaphors from natural history he wrote that tears of emotion produce toadstools and fungi, not true flowers grown from seed. True devotion, wrote Francis de Sales, is just to do our duty ‘promptly, resolutely and energetically’.

  The rhythm of priestly life at Cotton had echoes of just such military efficiency, and the unquestioned protector of Cotton’s clerical discipline was the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran. Father Doran was a lean, colourless, well-ordered man. The smoothness of his pale hair, the correctness of his manner of speaking, the precision of his Roman collar, the starch of his white shirt cuffs, were the epitome of Catholic clericalism. He kept us permanently poised as if we were all standing on our polished toecaps.

  Sometimes I watched him from the cloisters, walking the sweep drive in front of the old hall with the archbishop, His Grace Francis Grimshaw. Occasionally they would turn their heads towards each other, deep in conversation. Then it struck me that Father Doran was endowed with an authority that connected through the archbishop and the cardinal in Westminster right up to the pope in Rome: His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, cleric of all clerics, whose photograph with those huge dark eyes, set in an ascetic face, gazed down upon us in clock cloister.

  We were told repeatedly that His Holiness the Pope in Rome was the ‘servant of the servants of God’. But we were under no illusions as to the strict order of authority that ascended up to the papal pinnacle in Rome. Despite our aspirations to be servants of God, we were conscious of the special charism of our calling. When I thought now of lay people, the laity, and female laity in particular, I was thinking of ‘them’ rather than of ‘us’.

  57

  IN ACCORDANCE WITH tradition, the first Sunday homily of term was given by Father Doran. He appeared before us impassive, unsmiling. It was a pep talk for the slackers. ‘Father Gavin,’ he said at one point, ‘tells me that the fifth form can take an à la carte approach to their choice of subjects for their public examinations this year. Well, I don’t know about à la carte, but some of you are going to be in the cart if you don’t apply yourselves.’ That is how he spoke.

  Turning to discipline in the college, he addressed the matter of boys neglecting to rise the instant the first bell rang at 6.20 a.m. ‘I have received a request for an occasional sleep-in,’ he said. ‘Well, all of you here have the opportunity to sleep in for at least eight hours every night. What would you have me do? Allow you to sleep for ten hours? Eleven hours? I am reliably informed by medical experts that the sleep requirements for healthy living are as follows: an adult requires seven hours, a boy eight hours, a baby nine hours, and a pig requires ten hours.’ So he continued, speaking a little to the side of his mouth, his lips drawn down, delivering his withering reproofs.

  As we filed out of the assembly hall I found myself behind Charles. He was quietly entertaining Staines with an imitation of Father Doran’s manner of speaking. Much as I felt Father Doran had been severe and sarcastic, it pained me to hear Charles House sneering at our superior within minutes of leaving the hall.

  As the new academic year progressed, Charles’s circumstance as a seminarian became ever more extraordinary. During Mass I saw him reading a novel, or chatting to his neighbour when the choir was singing. He missed Rosary, his lips did not move when we said public prayers, and he laughed openly at students who appeared pious. He was contemptuous of Cotton. One day, waiting for Father Piercy to arrive for a maths lesson, he commented that the priest was not qualified to teach the subject. ‘You should be grateful,’ James said tartly, ‘to be attending the best Catholic school in England.’ House turned on him, sneeringly: ‘Don’t be absurd! Ampleforth, Downside, Stony-hurst, are all ten times better than this place.’

  ‘Then why,’ James said hotly, ‘did you not go to one of them?’

  ‘Perhaps I will.’

  James said to me afterwards: ‘What is House doing here? He’s so vain. And his special friendships!’ He looked at me accusingly for a moment, then went on to speak of the bad effect Charles was having on the college. ‘He exploits every little weakness in people and he sucks up to the profs. He is sly beyond belief.’

  Like me, Charles had caught up with the rest of our year in Latin. He continued to be popular with the profs who came in contact with him, especially Father Doran who was taking the upper fourth for English. He was breaking Bounds every morning, and in so slick a manner that Father McCartie and the big sixth had consistently failed to catch him. James and I, though, had seen him, accompanied by Bursley and Staines, slipping out of Little Bounds and down the steep path between the trees into the valley for what we guessed was their morning cigarette. On one occasion we saw two more boys following them. Meanwhile, Father Doran, normally so knowing about boyish wiles, was increasingly indulgent towards Charles. Charles’s weekly essay, suspiciously sophisticated beyond his years, was invariably the one to be read out, and he was always first to be called upon for his opinion. He even recycled Father Doran’s brand of cynicism.

  ‘Give me,’ Father Doran asked the class, ‘a sentence containing the phrase “a contradiction in terms”.’

  ‘A contradiction in terms,’ quipped Charles, ‘is a prompt schoolboy.’

  Fa
ther Doran chuckled indulgently, apparently unaware, as James commented, that he had been laughing at one of his own jokes. ‘And how is it,’ James went on, ‘that Father Doran failed to recognise the source of House’s essay on proverb making, lifted wholesale from the first chapter of Belloc’s Path to Rome?’ Charles, James was intimating, was guilty of something more than plagiarism. Father Doran, our superior, was being suborned and undermined by the insidious charm of Charles House. Charles was a threat to everything Cotton stood for.

  58

  THE TERM HAD once again reached that point when autumn was about to pass into early winter, when Charles suddenly disappeared from the college. I first heard the news, arriving in the refectory from prayers before lunch. Without informing anybody, Charles, Staines and Bursley had disappeared, together with two further members of the second year fifth: all of them church students. Enquiries in Oakamoor had apparently established that they had taken a mid-morning train to Uttoxeter.

  Every term there were boys who ‘did a bunk’ as it was called, but they were usually isolated, homesick individuals who had found the regime too harsh to bear. Poor grubby O’Rourke had set off earlier in the term, walking aimlessly towards Cheadle. He had been picked up by the bursar, then sent home formally a few days later. It was unusual for boys like Charles and Bursley to leave unless they had been ‘sacked’. As James Rolle explained, the voluntary departure of five church students in one day would reflect badly on Father Doran in the eyes of the archbishop.

  After supper that evening, the college was summoned to the assembly hall. The school captain made us sit in silence, which we did for a full quarter of an hour, the tension building. Then Father Doran appeared. Instead of sitting up on the stage as he would for the Sunday homily, he chose to stand before us at ground level. He started in a quiet, even voice. He confirmed that a group of boys had left the college without permission. Now he wanted to talk to us about the nature of a priestly vocation.