Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  Her thunderous ‘How dare you!’ reverberated down the corridors. Then: ‘You will go back to the theatre corridor and clean it again. You will clean it so that I can see my face in it.’ With which she seemed to gather her skirts before heading off, calling out to the various people who were popping their heads around doors: ‘Never have I been spoken to like that in all my life! In all my life! In all my life!…In all my life!’

  I did as I was told, since I knew that I had still to collect my last pay packet at the end of the week. Also I had my mother to face, which I did the following morning when she came back off night duty, having heard the saga from Matron’s point of view.

  Mum was already in an extremely volatile mood, as the domestic situation had been brewing and bubbling, and there was a sense of things coming to a head. Sam and his cohort at Bearmans were one thing, getting into quarrels with the matron of Wanstead hospital was another. Mum came very close to striking me as in days of yore. I saw all the warning signs: the mottling around the upper chest and neck, the itchy fingers, the flexing forearms, the restless prizefighter’s foot shuffle; but somehow she thought better of it. Four months of being a sofa carrier, a sink operator, and floor swabber, and I was as hard as a concrete lamp-post. In any case, as that week came to a close, unknown to me then, Mum had much fatter flounders to baste.

  85

  AFTER TAKING LEAVE of Wanstead hospital for the last time, I cycled home to find the back door bolted. My sister Maureen looked through the diamond-shaped window to check who was knocking before admitting me and bolting the door again. She had been crying, and so had my younger brothers. Terry was playing cricket somewhere. My mother was in the clubhouse canteen.

  According to Maureen, Dad had left home. I was shocked and mystified. ‘Is the door bolted against Dad?’ I could get no straight answer. But I began to see things from a perspective appropriate for a seminary boy. The sibling tears were tears of abandonment. Dad had left us and this was an economic as well as an emotional abandonment; I was sensitive to moral considerations too. I saw it as my duty to bring him back.

  The sports-ground activities were continuing as usual. A late-season cricket match was in progress; there were couples playing on the tennis courts, laughing and calling out to each other. I went to see Mum in the canteen. I handed over my last pay packet, and she thrust it into her apron pocket. She was pouring tea into cups from an enormous brown enamel teapot.

  I said: ‘What’s happened to Dad?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, and I couldn’t care less.’

  Her face looked closed up; I took it to be the bitter reaction of a deserted wife and mother.

  I left the club room and stood outside, watching the cricket for a while. Where could he be? Then it occurred to me that he had only one place to go: Grandma’s. So I set off for Woodford and her basement flat.

  When I arrived, there was Dad, sitting in my late Granddad’s armchair, listening to a football match on the radio, and there was Grandma, sitting on the other side of the fireplace. Stroking her arms, she said to me: ‘I always keep an extra bed, Jack, case any o’ me sons come ‘ome.’

  We talked. Dad’s version of the morning was different. When he had tried to get into the house for his mid-morning break, he said, he had found himself locked out. As he stood in the yard his clothes were thrown down at him from an upstairs window.

  I said: ‘Do you want to come home?’

  ‘They don’t want me there.’

  ‘But it’s your home. We love you, Dad.’

  ‘No, son. They don’t want me.’

  After a little more of this, I said: ‘Why don’t we let things quieten down. Come home on Monday and everything will be normal. You’ll see how much we love you, Dad.’ He seemed happy with the proposition. He said that he would come home on Monday.

  As I cycled back to the Peel, it did not occur to me that Mum and Dad were each promoting versions of the marriage break-up that suited them. I was feeling pleased with myself. When I got home, Mum was in the house. Once again the door had to be unbolted.

  I said: ‘It’s all right, Mum. I’ve found him. He’s at Grandma’s and he’s coming back on Monday.’

  Her reaction was explosive. Who did I think I was! Who said that I could go telling him that he could come back! He walked out, so he can stay out! Mum thought this equation squared the riddle. But I could not, would not, understand. And the more I tried to get to the bottom of it, the more angry she became. It ended with a swift and unexpected act of violence.

  I was due to return to Cotton on the following Tuesday. I departed from Saint Pancras with five deep scratch wounds down the side of my face which I would carry to the other side of Saint Wilfred’s Day.

  86

  ONCE AGAIN I was riding the train alongside the fast flowing River Churnet. Once again the bus was climbing those hairpin bends above Oakamoor, rising through our beautiful valley in the fading autumn light. It felt strange to be back at Cotton. I had changed: I had started to shave; I was suffering from a bout of adolescent acne, five deep scratches; and, as Peter Gladden told me on the bus, ‘a smidgen of the old cockney’. I was returning wiser and tougher, I suspected, than most of my peers, and I had lost a large measure of seminary-boy innocence. I had also lost a father. Dad had returned to the house briefly the day before I departed. I did not see him because I was serving Mass at Saint Augustine’s. He had stayed long enough to collect the rest of his things before departing: as far as Mum and Dad were both concerned, forever.

  I arrived to find myself in an odd predicament. The idea had taken hold that my health required careful monitoring for a term or two. Instead of going into a dormitory I was placed, temporarily at least, in the infirmary opposite Mère Saint Luc’s dispensary. I would have my own wash basin and there was a toilet and bathroom close by. Since there were no sick boys that early in the term I had the entire place to myself.

  Matron explained that Dr Hall insisted that I should be one hundred per cent fit before returning to the rigorous Cotton routine. I was to be excused games, ditch digging and arduous walks. I would be dosed with cod liver oil and malt, and brought a mug of cocoa when I retired each night. I laughed inwardly when Mère Saint Luc said that she hoped I had enjoyed ‘a restful convalescence’. Then she noticed the scratches. When I told her that the cat had scratched me, she looked me in the eye wonderingly.

  ‘What a very strange cat, to have claws just like human fingernails.’ She dabbed the wounds with iodine, saying, ‘Mon cher, I think le chat Cornvell needs to be placed in the sack with a rock and drowned in the river.’ She regarded me with such protective affection, it made me feel a little tearful. She had never got over the sight of me collapsed on the dormitory floor.

  Cotton and its routines stretched ahead, secure and dependable. Kneeling in night prayers, conscious of the bruising experience of the previous months, I felt that I was trespassing within the seminary sanctum. I could not stop thinking about home and what was to become of the family. Our house went with my father’s job. It seemed obvious that Dad would leave his job as grounds keeper. Soon we would be homeless. I wondered whether it would end with my being taken away from Cotton to help support my younger brothers who were still at school.

  It was the troubled relief of being back in our valley retreat, and the anxious conviction that it could be taken away, that compelled me to do what I did next. That evening I yearned for fatherly affection.

  After night prayers I went up the staircase to Father Armishaw’s room. I knocked. A few moments later the door was opened wide with a sudden sweep. There he was: wearing black trousers and a collarless white shirt; he had no shoes on his feet. I was ready for him to tell me to bugger off and come back in the morning, but after a few moments’ delay, he asked me in. We sat facing each other. His breviary lay open on the desk. He lit a cigarette. Without invitation I began to talk; to gabble. I told him about my father leaving ho
me. I told him the story of my return to the house after leaving the hospital. I explained that our house went with his job; that I had come back to Cotton not knowing whether I would be able to stay.

  When I had finished, he looked at my face searchingly. ‘Did you get those scratches at home?’

  I nodded. I felt on the edge of tears, but intuition told me to resist weeping with all my might.

  ‘Look, you shouldn’t be here,’ he said gently. ‘You should be in bed…But since you’re here, I just want to say this…’

  The quiet reprimand, followed by the sudden change of tone, upset me for a moment, then relieved me.

  ‘You’re feeling lost, Cornwell,’ he began,’ because your father has left you; but I think you’re also feeling responsible for him leaving. There comes a time when you have to stop being a boy, and begin to think of yourself as an adult. You’re going to have to do without a father. You can’t solve the problems of your parents’ marriage. You’re not responsible. What you have to do now is be your own person, independent. Stand on your own two feet, Cornwell.’

  Then he talked for a while about a friend who had been in a similar circumstance. This friend’s father, he went on, was gassed during the Great War and never recovered. The father died when his friend was twelve years of age. Something told me that he was speaking not about a friend, but about himself.

  Then he said: ‘You’re not called to the priesthood by your mother. You’re called by the Church. It’s a good sign that she’s allowed you to return. But if she takes you away you’ll be free again the moment you reach the age of seventeen. I’m sure your bishop will support you.’

  Now, peremptorily, he told me to go to bed. Pausing by the door, and before opening it, he said: ‘Come back if you ever feel the need.’ I knew that he was prepared, within limits, to allow me to go on reaching out to him. There was something between us.

  As I passed into the corridor, I said: ‘Thank you, Father.’ He did not correct me.

  87

  AS I JOINED Derek, James and Peter for our morning constitutional on Top Bounds my heart was singing, although my happiness was not without anxiety. I knew that the problems at home were not about to disappear; that they could get worse. But I felt a secret pride in having established a special friendship with the one priest at Cotton who had beguiled me from my first days.

  They were talking cheerfully, but I did not hear what they were saying. Then Derek said: ‘Armishaw is taking us for English this term.’

  My relief from games and manual labour, and my temporary residence in the infirmary, which I had made my own domain (there was a table to work on, with a chair, as well as an armchair), was an ideal circumstance to make up for my lost term. I planned to work all through the afternoons when the rest of the college was outside, and there would be nobody to stop me reading late into the night. I was determined to excel in every subject, but especially in English.

  The first set book was Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. I aimed to learn it by heart, to bask in Father Armishaw’s approval, but from his very first lesson I was disabused of making progress just by slog and memory work.

  He arrived with his American edition of Chaucer’s Works, a beautifully bound volume that lay completely flat at whichever page he opened it. Ensconced on the stool of his high teacher’s desk he went straight to work. He had a unique way of reading, with an occasional inward smile or an upward look at the class, or towards the tall windows.

  He began teaching us how to pronounce Chaucerian English, commenting on the elements of French derivation and showing us how to detect pronunciation from rhyming schemes and meter. He wanted us to relish the music of the sounds and rhythms before we began translating unfamiliar words and getting the drift of the characterisations.

  The next lesson he began a line-by-line explication. He approached the text with subtlety: listening, scenting, doubling back to pick up subtle clues. He was inviting us to be open; to respond to the range of Chaucer’s mood and wit, the striking connections of his metaphors and similes; the vivid evocation of an entire sensory world.

  Entering the daily rhythm of the liturgy once more (I was back in the choir as a tenor now), I had resumed the daily religious routines of meditation, twice-daily examination of conscience. I was taking stock once again of my soul. With my illness, the plague of impure thoughts and ‘irregular motions of the flesh’ had subsided like the passing of a bad dream. Not since that day in hospital, when bored, trapped and anxious in bed, had I been tempted to an ‘impure act by myself’. During the months of hard labour since the end of my illness I had usually been too tired to act upon ‘irregular motions of the flesh’. If anything, the filthy talk at Bearmans and the silly behaviour of Sheila and Iris, had only served as a discouragement to the sins of the flesh.

  I seemed to have settled into a state of more or less becalmed chastity; and was gaining confidence in my ability to control my thoughts and resist temptation. The confidence arose in part from a new conviction of what a Catholic was capable of, given God’s grace: a strength of iron purpose even to the point of death. The sentiments expressed in the popular English hymn ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, composed at Cotton a hundred years earlier by Father William Faber, had begun to work on me. The hymn celebrated the English Catholic martyrs who had been executed during the time of persecution in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I:

  Faith of our Fathers! living still In spite of dungeon, fire and sword O how our hearts beat high with joy Whene’er we hear that glorious word.

  Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to Thee till death.

  One afternoon I was visiting the library, the entire school being up on the playing fields, when a lay prof we called ‘Whisky Roberts’ appeared. Mr Frank Roberts, a stout man with red hair and a stentorian voice, was the college archivist. ‘Ah, a boy with time on his hands,’ he said. He invited me into the archive room to the right of the library exit. An acrid stench arose from the stacks of documents, records and ledgers dating back to the foundation of the college in 1763 by Bishop Richard Challoner. Whisky was a serious historian of the Reformation and ‘Re-cusancy’ – the refusal of Catholics to deny their faith – when Masses were celebrated behind false walls in the dead of night, and priests hid in ‘priest holes’ during the day. He was delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the early days of the college and the long years of persecution that preceded it: the courage, the betrayals, the torture, the executions.

  As he spoke I had an impression of ancient blood and burning flesh emanating from the piles of documents. The leather-bound volumes containing the lives of martyrs and recusants seemed to glower down from the shelves, balefuleyed, watchful, eager to impart their esprit de corps on the living generation of Cottonians. Mr Roberts was enthused with his subject, and would have gone on all afternoon.

  At length I said to him, partly out of mischief, and partly for the sake of something to say: ‘But didn’t we Catholics do a lot of burning ourselves, sir? What about the Protestant martyrs who were burnt at the stake?’

  He winced with evident irritation. ‘Oh, burning at the stake is nothing,’ he muttered. ‘It only takes a few minutes.’

  88

  THE ENCOUNTER IN the archive room stimulated a renewed interest in Father Grady’s history class on the Reformation. That term I had learnt details of the martyrdom of Catholics under Henry VIII. Father Grady dwelt on the deaths of the monks of the London Charterhouse in the sixteenth century, simple enclosed monks who had taken vows of silence and who refused to utter an oath that would have sanctioned the king’s illicit marriage to his mistress Anne Boleyn. The deaths of these monks, some by hanging and disembowelling, others by being starved to death in prison, affected me deeply. I asked Father Grady where I could learn more. He recommended the two-volume work by Dom Bede Camm, Lives of the English Martyrs, which was in the college library. I carried them off to the infirmary and read both volumes within several da
ys.

  I read how a Carthusian martyr was hung at Tyburn gallows in such a way that he was still alive when he was cut down; the executioner disembowelled him so swiftly that the monk saw his own entrails and testicles (‘organs of generation’) in the executioner’s hands before he expired. When I mentioned this to Mr Roberts later, he snorted: ‘That’s nothing; there was an executioner who would fish out a priest’s heart like a plum from a porridge bowl and rub it in the victim’s face while he was still alive!’

  I also took from the library a history of the Catholic Church by Father Philip Hughes. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, I learnt, celebrating or hearing Mass could entail execution. I was not alone among the boys at Cotton awakening, yet again, to a tradition that called us to loyalty to our Faith even to the extent of the supreme sacrifice. As the hymn, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, went:

  How sweet would be their children’s fate If they like them could die for Thee.

  I began to meditate on whether I would have the courage to go to the gallows for my Faith. Striving to imagine myself in that situation, faced with the choice of apostasy or death, I knew one thing was sure: when it came to resisting sexual temptation I could look for inspiration to the English martyrs who gladly went to their deaths rather than betray the Lord. I saw a direct link between the esprit de corps of the English martyr priests and Cotton’s early teaching priests, who had taught Catholic youths in secrecy, and the current generation of Cottonian priests with their selfless unostentatious austerity.

  But then, a different kind of priestly role model entered my life.

  89

  ONE AFTERNOON THE door of the infirmary opened and a strange priest entered, to find me sitting in the armchair, my head in a book. He was of medium height and had a rounded face with swarthy Latin features. He was aged about fifty and he introduced himself as Father Lesley McCallum. His hair appeared to be dyed and artificially waved, his eyebrows plucked. He was smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder. ‘What have we here?’ he said. ‘What ails you, my dear?’