On the night of the performance there was a preliminary hitch. When the curtain came up, the entire college in attendance, I came on to the stage and began shaking uncontrollably in the grip of stage fright. The house captain, who had the heroic lead role, said under his breath: ‘Get a grip on yourself, you idiot!’ I got a grip. Then I postured and strutted and preened. The judge being utterly crazed in the final scene, I let myself go in a burst of flamboyant mouth-frothing overacting.
I basked in the praise of several of the profs, and a wide circle of boys who had never spoken to me before. Father Armishaw came up after the show to give me a gruff: ‘Well done, Cornwell!’ But the most unusual approach was from Paul Moreland who had not spoken to me since the previous term.
I was almost asleep after lights out when I was conscious of someone sitting down on the bed and shining a torch in my face. ‘Fru, wake up, it’s Moreland!’ said the disembodied voice, loud enough to wake the whole dorm. ‘That was a superb piece of acting,’ he went on. ‘You’re extremely gifted and your voice was marvellous. I especially liked the way you built your character, and the nuances of your gestures. The way you even expressed tension and impatience with the toe of your shoe. You’re an absolute natural. There’s something of Laurence Olivier in your voice. I just had to thank you.’ And with this he gently pinched my nose and ruffled my hair, the way a boisterous uncle might do with a young nephew.
After he had gone, I heard someone mutter: ‘That Moreland is completely bonkers.’ A few moments later the dark shadow of Father McCartie appeared, mooching stealthily along the linoleum in his carpet slippers.
But Moreland’s enthusiasm had touched me and made me feel good about myself. And I had not thought about my scruples for two whole days.
67
THEN IT WAS Lent again; and with the penitential season the sexual demons were plaguing my soul and body as never before. My sole consolation was recognising in the depths of night the rhythmic groan of springs elsewhere in the dorm, confirming that I was hardly alone in my solitary afflictions.
In my struggles to bring my body under subjection, I began to wear once again that rough woollen jersey next to my skin and I bound my upper arm with a piece of wire with a spike, hidden under my shirt. At night, after lights out, I tied my wrists with a pyjama cord to the bedhead, as I had done a year earlier on Good Friday. I gave up every item of food that I enjoyed, and I missed tea every day. I prayed and prayed for a miracle: that the temptations and the unwanted erections would subside.
One night, assailed by erotic fantasies, I got up and stood by my bed for several minutes. In a state of agitation I decided to go to church. Creeping along the darkened cloisters I remembered the story that the ghost of a priest, who had lain unburied in his coffin for many months in the bursar’s office, had been seen walking up and down in the night moaning softly to himself like melancholy wind. I was also terrified of being caught. Yet I felt exhilarated on my release from the narrow bed, the cockpit of unbidden urges.
I knelt shivering in the Lady chapel, praying over and over again: ‘Our Blessed Lady, please help me.’ Again and again I prayed the special prayer Father Owen had recommended, the Memorare.
I must have been kneeling for an hour when I heard the door of the church opening and banging, then the sound of footsteps coming up the central aisle. I was petrified, thinking of the ghost of the unburied priest. The confident footsteps continued right up to the sanctuary, which was fully in view to my left. A shadowy figure, too small to be a priest, went down on its knees, then prostrated itself before the Blessed Sacrament face down on the parquet floor, as the young priest-to-be had done at his ordination. After a while the figure, straightening up, began to speak in clear tones: ‘Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…’ It was the unmistakable voice of Paul Moreland.
After a while I crept away down the side aisle and left the church. As I went along the clock cloister I could still hear that voice, dim now, calling out: ‘Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…’
68
ON THE DAY the annual Holy Week retreat began, I again took from the library Archbishop Goodier’s book on the passion and death of Jesus. I wanted to relive the way of the Cross step by step with the liturgy and to identify wholly with his suffering. I believed that I was beginning to bring the ‘irregular motions of the flesh’ under control by sheer grim and persistent determination. I was still embattled, and there had been lapses and raging scruples. But what successes I had gained, had been achieved, I felt, at the cost of remorseless self-pummelling: hard work. At times I felt like the lurid picture of Saint Sebastian prominently displayed in the clock cloister: the naked boy covered in vicious arrows. Was a heavy point being made by Father Doran in having that picture thrust into our imaginations before night prayers and bed?
The retreat father, who emerged on to the sanctuary after Tennebrae on Spy Wednesday evening was a member of the Catholic Missionary Society who announced himself as Father Buxton. He was slight in build and middle-aged; his grey hair contrasted with a fresh outdoor face. He spoke to us gently that evening of the love of God.
On Maundy Thursday morning I went to see him in the archbishop’s room. He greeted me in silence, gesturing that I should sit down. What struck me first was a quality of simplicity, as if he had stripped from his life everything that was inessential. He sat with his head a little bowed as if he was content just to sit there without speaking for as long as it took. I felt as if the love of God was shining through him. Then, suddenly, it was like the sun itself, rising after a dark, turbulent night. I had a sense of Jesus himself – not an imaginary picture, or a sentimental statue, but the very person of Jesus present in the room.
‘What’s troubling you?’ he asked.
I began to cry. Then it all came out. The misery of my impurities and the struggles with my body. ‘The worst of it,’ I said, ‘is that I know that I am not worthy to be a priest. If I stay here God can’t bestow his grace upon the college.’
When I had stopped crying, Father Buxton talked for a while. What he said rescued me instantly from turmoil. At the same time, I was aware of an atmosphere like a pure fragrance pervading the room.
Jesus loved me very much, he said. Everything I was experiencing was normal in many boys, and our mode of life in the seminary exaggerated everything. Jesus did not expect the impossible. He told me to stop going to confession so often and to make an act of contrition if I failed, and to confess just once a week to one confessor who knew me well. I was not to stay away from Holy Communion, as this would give me strength. The important thing, always, was not to do harm to others and to trust in the love of Jesus Christ. As for my doubts about the priesthood, there were many years to go before I reached that goal, and many other trials lay in store. I would change with the years, and with maturity. God would not punish the entire community, he went on, because of the temptations bravely resisted by one boy.
Now he asked me to kneel by the side of his armchair and he blessed me, placing his hands on my head. I had an impression of strength and warmth flooding through my body.
As I walked in spring sunshine, up and down the lime grove by the side of the church, I felt that I had never experienced such inward peace in the whole of my life. I felt that I had been touched by Jesus himself.
69
BACK AT HOME for the Easter break I found that my father had returned from Saint Clement’s and was working again, more or less. It was decided that I would help him for several hours each day. He was still frail-looking and his hands were trembling. It was obvious that the sports field and its facilities had been allowed to slip. The cricket tables were suffering from a form of mildew; moles had been burrowing and were devastating large areas of turf; there were plantains and moss where smooth swards of grass should have been. His equipment had been neglected, and he was taking longer each day to get his tractor working.
In the living room, Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Mambo Italiano’ was belting out from the rec
ord player till late at night. My brother Michael, in his second year at Jesuit college, looked stricken. In addition to his long stints of homework, and the long journey to school, he had been suffering the over-strict disciplines of the Jesuits. He had tales of grim injustice involving savage beatings on the hand with the tolley, a piece of whalebone covered in rubber. Jimmy was still glued to the television, unable to take his eyes off the lurid greenish screen even during the long intervals between programmes when the BBC showed a windmill or daffodils swaying in the breeze. Mum, who was working harder than ever, spent her precious free time preparing for formation dance exhibitions, recklessly sewing ever more dense layers of sequins on her dresses, the outer skirts of which stood at right angles to her hips. She had the look of a femme fatale Cinderella.
I called on Miss Racine several times in the evening when I was out on a run. She never answered the door. But I saw her one day sitting on a public bench by the side of Eastern Avenue watching the traffic go by. Her clothes were filthy, and she barely recognised me. I asked her if I could do anything for her, but she just shook her head and said that she was waiting for someone.
Lonely for conversation I decided to visit Father Cooney in his presbytery, with the pretext that I needed a book on the theology of grace. I was hoping to be invited in for a cup of tea and some innocent clerical chat. His sister, who had cheeks like wizened apples, was acting as his housekeeper. She answered the door and in a brogue, Mum would say, ‘you could tar the road with’, cried out: ‘Wait on da treshold now, willya.’
Eventually he arrived. When I explained my errand his eyes froze hare-like with alarm. He seemed to be gazing with that listing, now snow-white head, somewhere to the right of my ear as if witnessing a traffic accident on the high road. ‘Tee-ology of grace is it! Our dear Lord help us and save us!…Wisswiss…Out in the fresh air witcha!’ The door slammed heavily behind me.
70
THERE WERE THREE sets of cricket practice nets on the Peel ground, and I decided to practise by myself. One evening, after watching me bowling, Terry gave me a lesson on how to hold the ball, how to bring my arm over my shoulder, and how to aim surely. He told me that my eye problem would mean that I would always find it difficult to succeed as a batsman, but there was no reason why I shouldn’t become a reasonable bowler. He said that most bowlers only focus with one eye anyway, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. I began to practise, hour after hour, putting as much concentrated effort into it as I had into my running.
One evening, Dad came limping along and showed me how to bowl a googly, a slow ball that spun in such a way that it would shoot suddenly in a new direction on bouncing. He stayed for an hour or so and suddenly he appeared younger and less anguished than I had seen him for a long time.
One morning I told Dad that I wanted to take the day off. I pumped up the tyres on my sister’s bike, and with nothing more than a bottle of water in the saddlebag, and my copy of The Imitation of Christ given to me four years earlier by Father Malachy Lynch, I set off to find Aylesford priory by road.
I had somehow thought that I would reach my destination by lunchtime. I did not arrive at Aylesford village until early evening, exhausted and hungry after a journey on busy main roads lasting eight hours. I had no money in my pocket, and on several occasions after I had emptied my bottle I had knocked on the doors of strangers to beg a cup of water. I could barely stand. The guest master, an Irish brother with a cheerful grin, emerged from the monastery as I wheeled the bike into the quadrangle known as Pilgrims’ Court. He arranged a bath and something for me to eat before finding a bed for me in a pilgrim’s guest room.
That night I rose from the bed, sleepwalking, and fell on the floor; my legs refused to stop cycling. Several times I screamed out in my sleep. Eventually the guest master appeared in pyjamas and fetched a mug of hot milk, sitting with me until I calmed down and fell asleep.
When I awoke, I went to pray at the shrine of Saint Simon Stock. Afterwards I joined a band of pilgrims in the ancient galleried dining hall for breakfast. They were gossiping among themselves about different pilgrimages they had enjoyed in places like Walsingham and Lourdes. They came from Stratford in east London and they were intrigued that I had cycled all the way on my sister’s bicycle without eating. Then Father Malachy Lynch appeared, tall, red in the face, with his great swathe of silver hair combed across the top of his head, and the room fell silent. He moved among the pilgrims, greeting them one by one, touching a head here, a shoulder there, his face lighting up occasionally when he seemed to recognise someone. At last he came to me and stopped for a few moments. I showed him my copy of The Imitation of Christ. He smiled benignly and blessed the book with a flowing gesture of his hand. I was not sure whether he remembered me, but it did not seem to matter. I felt that I was in the presence of holiness, although it was a different kind of holiness from the simplicity of Father Buxton, the retreat father at Cotton, or the grim austerity of Father Cooney. Father Malachy’s holiness was romantic, theatrical, suggestive of signs and wonders.
At midday Father Malachy talked to the pilgrims about Our Lady and the scapular. He rambled, but he held us entranced. I remembered Miss Racine’s devotion to the scapular, and I was saddened to think of her sitting by the side of the highway at Redbridge. I had long ago lost the scapular she gave me. After the talk I went up to Father Malachy and asked him how I could obtain a scapular. He took me over to the guest master’s office and produced a substantial scapular from a drawer. He blessed the object before placing the ribbons over my head and tucking the squares into my shirt back and front. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘you are a true Carmelite.’ Then he asked me to kneel while he recited over me Saint Patrick’s blessing, a prayer about protection from evil, behind, in front, all around.
The guest master arranged for me to return to London on the bus with the visiting pilgrims, the bike strapped on to the luggage rack on the top. I felt happy sitting on the bus with the pilgrims, who were laughing and sharing sandwiches.
When I arrived back home later that evening, having cycled from Stratford, Mum was angry that I had gone off without telling her of my whereabouts. ‘I hope you’re not turning out like your father!’ she said. That night in bed I fingered the scapular about my neck and felt safe and secure from every kind of evil.
PART THREE
THE HALFWAY HOUSE
71
RETURNING TO COTTON was like dawn after a long dark night. I sensed that this was going to be a new beginning. I was going to pray hard and work hard, as never before. Father Owen had promised that he would give me a new voice test for the choir. I longed to be back among the privileged group singing our sacred music in the sanctuary. After depositing my case in the dorm, I hurried to the church to go on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament. The sanctuary lamp was shining clear and steady.
On the second day of term Father Gavin announced that he was conducting trials after lunch in the cricket nets on the field above Top Bounds. He was selecting for two reserve places in the college team, and I was confident that I could make an impression with my bowling alone. About twenty boys turned up in cricket boots. I was among those told to pad up to bat, which disappointed me as I knew that I would not perform well. I faced twenty or so balls, most of which I missed, before Father Gavin told me to take my pads off and join the bowlers.
There were six of us taking turns to bowl. My first two balls were grotesque wides and several boys groaned derisively. For my third, I took a long run-up. This knocked out the middle stump with such force that the wicket-keeper hollered with alarm. My confidence was soaring: I could do no wrong. I was my brother Terry. Ball after ball I sent the stumps flying; the batsmen were leaping back at the ferocious speed. Now Father Gavin went to the crease to confront me. The first two balls he smacked skywards, and everybody cheered. The next ball I bowled a googly. As his leg stump was nicked, and the wicketkeeper yelled: ‘Howzatt!’ Father Gavin stood stunned for a moment, then his face was suffused w
ith delight. ‘Good Lord, Fru, where did you learn to bowl like that!’
In church that night I could barely concentrate on my prayers. I was thinking about my success in the practice nets. Later, after going to bed, I felt discomfort across my chest and shooting pains down my left arm; which was strange, for I bowled with my right arm.
The next morning, I looked up at the dormer window to see the sky cloudless, the trees tranquil, promising a fair day. If the weather held we would have cricket practice, and perhaps a swim. I leapt out of bed and got dressed, but as I began to walk down the dorm on my way to the wash places I felt my heart pounding in my chest and an excruciating pain in my left arm. I sat down on the floor, where I was. James was next to me, speaking soothingly. Several boys paused to look at me with concerned curiosity. A member of the big sixth came along and said I had better lay on my bed and wait for Matron. He told the dawdlers to get on down to the wash places.
I lay in the silent dormitory wondering what could be the matter. Eventually the pain went away. Then Mère Saint Luc, our stout little nun matron, bustled in. As I tried to explain the pain, she was looking directly in my face as if to discover signs of my ailment somewhere around my eyes and forehead. Eventually she asked me to stand up. ‘Good, good, now let’s just walk a little way,’ she said in her French Belgian accent. ‘Let’s see if we can walk you as far as the infirmary.’ I had walked about ten paces when I felt as if I had been slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. I went down on the floor, my lungs heaving with agony. The nun turned me over on my side and made me raise my knees a little: she held my hand in silence, and I was aware of her looking at me with strange anxiety. Next Father McCartie appeared. I heard him saying: ‘What’s happened?’ His voice sounded brittle. Then I heard Matron whispering: ‘This boy is having a heart attack! Call the doctor, Father.’
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