That afternoon I was taken down to Dr Gardiner’s clinic where I was put through a battery of tests. When I came back to the ward the man opposite was lying waxen-faced and asleep; he had undergone his operation and his mouth was wide open so that I could see all the metal fillings in his back teeth. There was a small piece of plaster on his nose where his polyp had been.
I wanted to talk to somebody so I went back down to the balcony where Geoff was reading a magazine and smoking as usual. He began to speak about women again. He asked if I had ever had a girlfriend. I would never have girlfriends, I told him, because I was going to be a Catholic priest and I would never get married. He gawped at me in an exaggerated fashion. ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ he swore. ‘D’you mean to say you’re never going to have a fuck? Ever?’
I sat frozen, appalled, unsure what to do or what to say.
He said: ‘Listen, son, you obviously don’t know what you’re going to be missing. There’s nothing better in the whole of this wide world than a good fuck. It’s the whole point. That’s why we’re put on this earth. You tell me what’s better! Go on, tell me what’s better!’
At that moment an old dodderer, as Geoffrey called the elderly patients, appeared on the balcony, and there was a change of subject.
76
THAT EVENING NURSE Philomena came back on duty. The evenings were getting lighter and I had a better look at her when she made her ward round. I noticed for the first time that she had nice legs, not particularly shapely, but slender; and I liked the way she walked, swinging her hips slightly as she moved with neat steps along the ward in her low-heeled shoes, looking from side to side. She gave me a private smile when she passed, as if to say we would be talking later. I felt the stirring, perhaps for the first time, of more than seminary-boy interest in Philomena. Yet I could not envisage anything other than our just sitting close to each other in the depths of the night.
I lay in a reverie as the ward wound down and it got dark. I could see Philomena’s auburn head bent to her tasks at the nurses’ station. Her hair in the light, I noticed for the first time, was like burnished copper. At last the night superintendent came through and I pretended to be asleep. She stood for a while whispering with Philomena. Then she went, and I heard Philomena going into the kitchen.
At last she came, carrying cocoa and biscuits as usual. She sat on the bed and smoothed out her starched apron. She was looking at me intently.
‘Hello, John,’ she said. ‘I prayed for you again today.’
What got into me? What strange adolescent madness led me to say it? With a mouth full of biscuit, I said to her in a winsome voice: ‘Hello, Sweetie Pie!’
There were several moments of silence, long enough for me to realise that I had made a drastic miscalculation. She stood up. She was staring at me as if in shock.
She said, quite loudly: ‘How dare you!’ She took a sharp intake of breath, like a little sob.
‘You don’t ever speak to me like that! You little hypocrite! How dare you!’ She snatched the mug of cocoa from my hands, spilling some of it as she did so, and walked rapidly away up the ward towards the kitchen.
My head was raging with shame. I lay there, my heart pounding, although not with pericarditis now. I wondered whether I should get out of bed and go in search of her. I had to apologise, to make it all right again. But I was now afraid of her righteous anger, and her authority. She was the woman in charge of the ward.
As the night progressed I would fall asleep for a while, then wake up again. I was awake when the skyline over the houses became a wedge of sandy light at dawn. Still she had not come and I was distraught in my disgrace.
I was asleep when she came to take my temperature and pulse. She woke me up, but did not speak as she went through the routine. After she took the thermometer out of my mouth, with tears in my eyes, my voice breaking, I said: ‘Philomena, please listen. It was a just a joke. Please…?’
Shaking the thermometer vigorously, her face hard, she said: ‘I don’t want your apologies. I am just so disappointed in you. God help us if you ever become a priest. That’s all I can say.’ She walked away, her neck stiff. Then I noticed that the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour had disappeared from the bedside locker.
Later that morning, Dr Gardiner came to tell me that all my tests were good. I was better and I could go home to London. He confirmed that my illness had almost certainly been a bout of transient pericarditis.
I expressed surprise at being sent home as there were more than two months of the summer term left. He told me that my mother had been to see him on her recent visit and that she was insistent that I should not return to Cotton until the autumn; that she would look after me at home. As Dr Gardiner put it: ‘She wants to consolidate your convalescence.’
The news filled me with alarm. I tried to expostulate; but Dr Gardiner told me that it was out of his hands. It had been discussed with Father Doran and everything had been arranged. I was to be driven to the London hospital in Whitechapel, the closest teaching hospital to home, where I would be seen by a local consultant who would check me over before discharging me.
My last night in Stoke-on-Trent, Philomena came to take my temperature and pulse but she refused to speak to me. I felt aggrieved; and yet, I also felt guilty at having transformed so easily from the pious seminarian she had believed me to be into a cocky little flirt. Which was I?
Now one thing was certain: my mother still had a significant degree of power over me. Whatever Father Doran, in the name of the bishop, had to say about the conduct of my vocation, Mum could legitimately step in and take control.
Early next morning I made my farewells to everyone on the ward, including Geoff who said with a wink: ‘You tell me what’s better, eh!’ Then the ward sister, cool and very collected, accompanied me down to a waiting ambulance. She shook my hand in a formal way and I wondered if Philomena had told her of my disgrace. I felt a spasm of resentment, and fear, at the controlling power of women. Then I got into an old-fashioned Daimler ambulance and was driven at a sedate speed down the A5 towards London.
77
IN THE LATE afternoon the ambulance deposited me at the London Hospital reception and I was taken in a wheelchair to the cardiology unit where Mum was waiting. She hugged me and said that I would have some tests which were just a formality. After the examination we were led by a nurse down a corridor and into a lecture theatre where young men and women were seated on tiered benches. They were taking notes while being addressed by a tall man with a bald head and gold-rimmed half-moon glasses. He looked very grand in a flamboyant yellow-and-blue polka-dotted bow tie and a double-breasted white doctor’s coat (I had never seen double-breasted in Stoke). He now sat down at a desk, indicating that my wheelchair should be brought closer to him. With a vague gesture of the hand he waved Mum into the front row of the theatre benches. The nurse handed the man a sheaf of files and he flicked through them humming a little as he did so.
‘Here we have a boy of fifteen or sixteen’ he said, ‘who was taken ill two or three weeks ago up in Staffordshire. I am going to ask him to relate to you his symptoms. Please raise your hands if you wish to ask him a question when he has finished.’
Turning to me, he introduced himself as ‘Lord Evans’ and said that he was the Professor of Cardiology. ‘Speak loudly.’ I welcomed the opportunity to act a part and I projected my voice up to the gallery. I said: ‘I was playing a lot of cricket on one day; the next I got pain in my left arm, and palpitations. I collapsed on the dormitory floor and I was taken to the hospital…the cardiologist diagnosed…’
The consultant cut me off. ‘No, my boy, we don’t want to hear from you about diagnoses…’
‘Observe,’ he said to the audience, ‘that the lad speaks of palpitations, a nice word which he has no doubt picked up in the course of his stay in hospital. Palpitation, of course, is a collective noun which does not express a plural. I want to see no mention of palpitations in your examination papers.’
> A student asked me whether I thought that I had strained myself playing cricket, and I said that I had thought there might be a link, but then when I was diagnosed with—. Before I could get another word out the professor cut me short.
Explaining the whole thing to the students, namely, pericarditis, he ended by saying that my condition had cleared up and there was no reason why it should recur. Then he said: ‘Well, you can abandon that wheelchair Master Cornwell, and get back to your cricket.’ But, as I realised, there was no getting back to my cricket.
Mum led me out to the Whitechapel Road, to take a bus back towards Ilford. It seemed strange to be in a street, deprived of ambulances and wheelchairs and the protection of hospitals and nurses. On the bus, sitting at the front of the top deck, Mum outlined how she saw things developing over the next few months until I would return to Cotton in late September.
‘I want you at home where I can keep an eye on you,’ she said.
‘But I want to go back to Cotton,’ I said, my anxiety mounting. ‘I’m going to miss a lot of school work otherwise.’
‘Well, your health comes first.’
‘But the doctor said that I was all right. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘You’ve been very ill, and I’m going to make sure that I keep an eye on you. And that’s that. What if it comes back? So don’t think you can argue with me…I’m your mother!’ She was raising her voice, and I could see from the mottled neck that her temper was rising too.
‘But what am I going to do for the next four months?’
‘You’re going to go out to work. I can’t have you sitting around at home.’
‘What will I do?’
‘I’ve got you an interview. There’s an ideal job at Bearmans department store in Leytonstone; just walking about the store.’
I felt cruelly ill-used; utterly cast down with injustice and grief. But I was powerless to resist Mum’s will.
78
I HAD RETURNED home on a Wednesday; on the Friday I had my interview with the personnel manager of Bearmans. He asked me to fill out a form and told me immediately that I was accepted. My pay was to be two pounds eight shillings a week. Mr Grey showed me about the store and took me out to the dispatch department where I was to work. It was an area at the back of the store where the goods arrived by lorry from various suppliers. There were four men working there; the senior man was Sam, a fellow in his mid-to late-sixties with enormous shoulders and biceps. He seemed friendly enough, but once or twice he looked me up and down as if I was about to face a firing squad. He shook my hand and painfully squeezed the life out of it. I was told that my hours started at 7.30 a.m. and finished at 5.30 p.m., six days a week. I was to start on the following Monday.
I realised with foreboding that the early start meant I would not be able to attend Mass in the morning. I would not be able to receive daily Communion, which had become a routine for me since the age of eleven. I wondered whether Father Cooney would be able to intervene on my behalf.
On Saturday morning I served Father Cooney’s early morning Mass at Saint Augustine’s in his vast unadorned new church (occasion now of fresh anxieties about the interest on the loan). There were two other servers on the altar, boys aged about ten or eleven. The old sanctury bell had been replaced with an ugly gong. I noticed that when Father Cooney came to the part of the Mass known as the Domine non sum dignus, acknowledging that we are not worthy to enter under the Lord’s roof, he reverently recited: ‘Et sab-anitur anima mea.’ As most third-year minor seminarians would have known, the correct Latin was: ‘Et san-abitur anima mea.’ ‘And my soul shall be cleansed.’ He seemed to have become slow and uncertain.
I stayed behind to talk with him in the spacious new sacristy. As he took off his vestments and folded them he listened to the account of my illness, nodding, and occasionally muttering his ‘Wisswiss…’ Then I told him about the job and how I would not be able to go to Mass in the morning. When I had finished he fixed me sternly with his slate-grey eyes. ‘Sure this is a test of your vocation,’ he said firmly, although breathing as if with difficulty. ‘Thank God for the privilege you’ve had of daily Communion, and think of all those who have to do without…Now each morning on your way to work say a special prayer. Desire the sacrament and you won’t be without the fruit of it…And think of the words of the Mass…Lord I am not worthy…Wisswiss…Very good!…Run along now!’
79
THE JOB OF the dispatch workers was to take goods from the incoming lorries and deliver them to the departments. At the same time, we delivered goods from the departments back to the bay for distribution to customers by Bearmans own lorries. There was an inward flow of goods all day: sofas, carpets, bedding, kitchenware, lampshades, lingerie, hosiery. When the items were light they were frequently awkward to carry; often they were both heavy and awkward. Some items had a will of their own, especially mattresses, and we had to struggle and strain ourselves getting them on and off the lorries. They were transported around the shop on deep open-sided trolleys which we heaved to their destinations, travelling between floors in slow-moving lifts.
Sam’s first assistant, Eric, was elderly, probably well into his seventies. He had a coarse little white moustache and ill-fitting false teeth. He was deputed to do the paperwork. Being shortsighted, he found it difficult to read what was written on the order sheets. He was supposed to put stickers on the goods indicating their destination in the shop, and invariably got it wrong. Sam was patient with him when this happened.
Two others, Bill and Reg, were in late middle-age. Bill, a cockney born and bred, had a huge girth and walked with splayed feet carrying all before him with self-satisfied dignity. He had a slack jaw and a bottom row of tarnished teeth. Reg was a former merchant seaman from Glasgow. He was squat and leathery with steel-grey hair. He had a belligerent way of flinching one shoulder. He and Bill worked with a kind of brutish, muscular relish. All four men were foul-mouthed, and attempted to outdo each other when they had to struggle with an awkward item. ‘Wassiss fuckin’ thing then?’ They often broke fragile objects and Eric had to write down that the goods had arrived broken. Looking up at Sam conspiratorially, he would pronounce: ‘Thass fuckin’ broke on arrival, mate, innit!’
‘Fuckin’ oath it wass!’ Sam would agree, usually shortening it to ‘C’n’oath, mate!’
Sam was proud of working at Bearmans: ‘This ‘ere shop,’ he used to say, ‘is the fuckin’ ‘Arrods of the East End.’ He made it clear that he was my boss and that I would respond to his every command. He was a lot older than he looked. He told me that he was too old to fight in the Second World War, but he had fought in the First War.
He worked steadily all day long. ‘Fuckin’ pace yourself, mate,’ he used to say. ‘Then you’ll get through the fuckin’ day.’ He called me ‘the lad’, or ‘young Jack’.
Sam was scrupulously fair when it came to sending us off to the employees’ canteen for tea breaks and for lunch. Mum had anticipated that I would need pocket money for these breaks, for which she provided one shilling and sixpence a day which she handed to me before I set out. The cooked lunch was always the same: meat pie, gravy and chips. I usually found myself taking my break with Bill, who smoked between mouthfuls of meat pie. He had little conversation beyond a periodic: ‘Fuckit!…Thass what I say, mate. Fuckit!’
The First War had made a deep impression on Sam. One day, as we had a tea break together, I told him after his persistent questioning that I was studying to be a priest. He seemed intrigued and annoyed at the same time.
‘Believe in a God then, do you, young Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘There can’t be no such fuckin’ thing as a God, Jack.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Durin’ the Great War, Jack, I saw stacks of bodies piled up be’ind the trenches. Great stacks of them: cuntin’ great pyramids of ‘em. And when you seen fuckin’ great stacks of corpses like that, Jack, you know. You know there ain’t no such fuc
kin’ thing as a bleedin’ God.’
80
I WOULD COME home via Our Lady of Lourdes at Wanstead and say the Rosary each day. There was a special prayer I said in reparation for profanities against Almighty God. When I got home I used to lie on my bed resting. I would read the book Father Armishaw had given me, Travels with a Donkey, which transported me to the southern landscapes and forests of France. I loved reading about the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.
The television was always blaring downstairs and Mum was usually crashing pots and pans or putting chairs up on the table to sweep and mop in a flurry of impatient semi-cleaning before departing for her night shift at the hospital.
For the first time I nourished sympathy for my younger brother Michael, a highly intelligent boy who was struggling to do a dozen subjects at his grammar school. He would bring back homework along with his Jesuit-flayed hands. His fingers were so bruised at times that he could scarcely move them. ‘Hope you’re not aiming to be a brain surgeon, Mick!’ I said to him one evening as he sat with his swollen, purple hands in a basin of cold water. He shook his head wryly, old before his time. Like everybody in the house, except our blissfully contented television-glued youngest, Jim, Michael seemed to be biding his time.
Seminary Boy Page 20