Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  I was not to realise until the following year that when Father Armishaw was at Cambridge he had sat at the feet of F. R. Leavis, the famous judgemental literary critic, and had come to emulate many of Leavis’s attitudes.

  Eventually Moreland said: ‘Oh, Vincent. He’s wasted at Cotton…He should have stayed in Cambridge.’

  Before we reached Little Bounds, he did what he had done the night of the house play: he stood before me, looked into my eyes and tweaked my nose, gently. I just let it happen. ‘You’re so sweet, Fru,’ he said. ‘You’re an absolute poppet.’

  For the rest of the day and the evening I found it difficult to get Moreland out of my mind. I felt, again, those early symptoms of infatuation, and I was trying to resist.

  The next morning at breakfast Moreland handed me a sealed envelope. He whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t open it here. Open it when you are alone.’

  I took it to the infirmary.

  I could hear an echo of his speaking voice in the note. It went something like this:

  ‘Dearest John,

  Walking with you was too nice yesterday. I enjoyed my time with you too much. Did you realise that? Can you see it? I dare say you can with your discerning eye. There are some things I can only just think, so much do I think them. I expect you know that too. Would you accompany me again? Say that you will. I loved you asking me How do I think God to be? That was so sweet. But I wasn’t quite in the mood just then to launch forth on those deep and mysterious waters. Dearest, I would love to sit beneath a larch tree talking with you about How I think God to be.

  Much love,

  Paul

  The drift of the letter, with its ‘dearest’ twice over, its ‘sweet’, and its ‘much love’ opened the prospect of a relationship that I knew, instinctively, was something more than ‘special friendship’. Yet I suspected that these endearments, which affected tender feelings, were exaggerated mannerisms that Paul uttered without thinking. I found myself yielding to fascination; but I remained guarded.

  94

  PAUL INVITED ME for another walk in the last week of term, the day after we had finished exams. We walked to Alton via Oakamoor on a freezing day, the woods white with hoar frost under a pale cloudless sky. He did not talk about God. He asked me first about my spiritual reading. When I told him that I had a great fondness for the autobiography of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, he joined his hands, looked upwards and said in a simpering voice: ‘Ah, oui, la petite fleurette.’ He went on to say how much he preferred Teresa of Avila. ‘Now there’s a tough lady. Did you know, Fru, that the Devil threw her down the stairs and she broke her arm in three places? They had to break it again and again to get it straight.’ He said that after she died the odour of sanctity was so great that the nuns in her convent passed out. Did I know, he asked, that when they dug her up a year later her habit was rotten, but the corpse was entirely incorrupt? ‘But her devotees tore her fresh, pink incorrupt body to pieces in the violent scramble to get themselves relics…’

  On and on he went. It was a prelude to an extraordinary monologue ranging over the darker side of sainthood and mysticism: a saint who licked the sores of lepers; another who drank a cup of pus to show solidarity with the sick; one that lived solely on the Eucharistic wafer.

  At Alton, strictly against the rules, he insisted that we stop at the Bridge Café where he ordered tea and buttered toast, which we ate by an open wood fire. He told me about Saint Catherine of Genoa’s vow of chastity while still married, and how she and her husband founded a hospice for the sick and the dying where she worked and prayed for thirty years until her death. He told me of Saint Catherine of Genoa’s visions and ‘lights in prayer’, as he called them; her unusual experience of odours of sweetness, her great fasts, her experience of fiery darts of love, and her unusual acts of self-abnegation. Once she came upon a patient dying of the plague. The patient was wordlessly uttering the name of Jesus with her dying breath. Catherine could not resist kissing the diseased person’s lips, since as far as she was concerned she was kissing Jesus himself. She caught the plague, suffering all its horrid torments, although she was not to die of it.

  We walked back to Cotton via Farley and the Old Star crossroads, and all the way Moreland’s monologue ranged over the problem of distinguishing between mysticism and madness. He was very worked up; and I gathered that this was more than just a topic of passing interest. One memorable thing he said was that Saint Catherine could tell the difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated host. ‘She knew this,’ said Paul, ‘because the consecrated host sent forth a ray of love that pierced her heart.’

  Before we reached Top Bounds he grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed his forehead, cool in the late afternoon, on my forehead. I felt a momentary return of those breathtaking emotions I had experienced with Charles. But this was different; I was fearful of Paul, and I was determined not to put myself in danger again of being expelled.

  95

  THAT WEEK I received a letter from Mum telling me that the family had moved from the house at the Peel and into a ‘halfway-house hostel’ in Ilford. The new address was at the top of the page with directions. She assured me that this was just temporary accommodation until the council provided us with a proper house at an affordable rent. It would be a tight squeeze when I came home, she wrote, but she was determined that we would stay together as a family and that we would have a good Christmas. There was no mention of my having to leave Cotton, but the very phrase ‘halfway house’ filled me with anxiety. I had a vague childhood memory of our insecure wanderings during the war, and I imagined having to spend the Christmas holiday living temporarily, like the bombed-out homeless, in a public assembly hall.

  Paul Moreland and I did not take another walk before the end of term but we exchanged addresses. On the night before GH, Moreland came into the infirmary at about midnight. I was reading. He seemed distracted and restless and kept twisting strands of his thick black hair. Eventually he said: ‘God bless and love you, Fru. Have a happy and holy Christmas.’ Then he bent over and kissed me on the cheek.

  He left me in the infirmary, my face burning with excitement and emotion, and I could tell that his footsteps were echoing in the direction of the church rather than back towards the school cloister and the dormitories. Then I remembered the night when I had seen him prostrating himself before the Blessed Sacrament on the darkened sanctuary, praying in that odd repetitive way out loud. There was something frightening about Moreland; he was, I thought, a troubled person.

  On the following day I travelled to London with James and Derek. Then I found my own way from Saint Pancras to Ilford mainline station, walking the rest of the way to our temporary home where I arrived after dark.

  The ‘halfway house’ for the homeless was a barrack-like building in which a number of families shared kitchens in common, but had their own rooms situated off corridors on two floors. The Cornwell family, all six of us, had one living room, with two bedrooms. We shared our kitchen, toilet and bathroom with another couple and their baby who dwelt in the room facing our living room across the corridor. Mum and Maureen slept in one room upstairs, and the boys in the other. I was to sleep on a sofa in the living room which Mum had made comfortable. There was a Christmas tree and decorations. A hissing gas fire was attached to a meter which had to be fed frequently with pennies. My two younger brothers were glued to the television set, which was turned up loud to drown out the screams of the baby in the room opposite. The TV had a poor reception which Michael was constantly trying to improve by placing the aerial in different positions.

  Mum showed me the communal kitchen. It was basic. One gas stove, one sink, some cupboards and a table. A window looked out over a concrete yard with a washing line. As we stood watching the kettle boil, the woman with the baby came in. Her dyed hair was unkempt, her bare legs were bruised and covered in sores. The baby was convulsed with crying and the woman awkwardly attempted to heat a bottle of milk. Mum intervened and helped. The bab
y fell silent as the woman put the teat in its mouth.

  We made tea for ourselves and went back into the sitting room. I said: ‘That woman looks pitiful.’

  Then Mum started to cry: tears of rage. ‘Scum of the earth!’ she said through her teeth. ‘We’re living with the scum of the earth, and all because of that dirty rat your father!’ There was something melodramatically disingenuous about the way she said this; I thought better than to begin an argument on the point.

  After a while my sister and elder brother arrived. Maureen was beautifully dressed and bright-eyed; Terry was relaxed and seemingly unconcerned about our new situation. When Mum went out to the kitchen to prepare supper I spoke to Terry about her ‘scum of the earth’ comment. He said: ‘Don’t worry about it. We could have stayed at the Peel longer, but Mum got us into this place because it’s the quickest route to a council house.’

  It struck me, and not for the first time, that Mum could keep several versions of her life, and several paths of emotion, in train at the same time. Later that evening Uncle Mike, Mum’s youngest brother, turned up to stay the night before driving back to Somerset the next day. Even in our homelessness Mum would find room for anybody in need: shades of the old Silvertown hospitality. He was to sleep on the floor in the sitting room with me. We sat around the gas fire talking until late. At one point he said: ‘You know, Kath, I went over to Ireland not so long ago and visited Tralee. Our Egan forebears knew what they were doing when they got out of that dump and came to England.’ I saw my mother’s face cloud. ‘Don’t talk like that, Mike,’ she said. Then Mike began to sing: ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ and she joined in.

  Then he offered me a Senior Service cigarette: ‘Come on, mate, won’t do you any harm. Help you to relax in this madhouse. ’ The baby was screaming again in the room opposite. So I took it and smoked it through, enjoying the kick it gave me, but feeling slightly ill. The Cotton priests had been effective role models as smoking enthusiasts.

  Terry, who did not smoke, nor ever would, grinned at me oddly: ‘You’re nuts!’ he said.

  96

  WE WENT TO midnight Mass at the church of Saints Peter and Paul next to my old Secondary Modern school as we were no longer in Saint Augustine’s parish. I went into the sacristy to ask the parish priest, a smooth-faced Englishman with a posh voice, if I could serve on the altar; but he told me politely enough that all the servers’ places were filled and, in any case, he did not know me. When I told him that I was a seminarian and a new parishioner, he shrugged his shoulders. So for the first time in years I attended a Mass of Christmas like anybody else within the congregation rather than on the high altar. How I missed Father Cooney’s ‘Wisswiss…’ and the Mass by gaslight at the Camp. Father Cooney would have squeezed me on to the sanctuary however many servers had turned up.

  We walked home through Ilford afterwards and had our traditional ham sandwiches and tea with a dash of whisky sitting around the gas fire of the halfway house. Then we exchanged presents. Mum had bought me an LP record of Toscanini conducting the New York Philarmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Fifth and Eighth Symphonies. In one of my letters home I had mentioned how Father Armishaw played Beethoven on his gramophone and how the sound of it filled me with happiness and peace. It was her attempt to make up for the predicament in which I would find myself that Christmas holiday. I was overjoyed, and immediately put the record on to our ugly grey-and-pink record player, Mum ordering me to play it softly so as not to wake the baby opposite. But even as the opening bars of the Fifth struck, I felt a pang of remorse. A long-playing record was in those days equivalent to the price of a pair of shoes, and I had noticed that my brother Jimmy had holes in the only ones he possessed.

  97

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Mum and my brother and sister went back to work. Mum had an office job at one of the Plessey factories creating a filing system for draughtsmen’s drawings of electronic components. I spent a lot of time lying on the sofa bed in the living room, smoking cigarettes, listening to Beethoven and reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, borrowed from Father McCallum. My younger brothers played in the yard outside or roamed Valentine’s Park opposite.

  A letter arrived from Paul Moreland the day after New Year. It was written in red ink; the handwriting and the sentiments were typically extravagant. I could hear his voice as I read it. He wrote that he had been walking on the common on a ‘sherbert day, sharp, yellow and refreshing’. He was reading Immanuel Kant slowly, ‘like a tortoise’. He had had a tantrum on the previous evening after reading a book on Aquinas by a ‘tawdry British philosopher’. Then a ‘meaty mouse’ appeared from below his bed and he had another tantrum. Then, in a phrase I had heard him repeat before, he wrote: ‘So, as Plato says, life itself is the true tragedy.’ In the last paragraph he complained that he had not spoken to anyone all day: it’s so odd, he went on, when ‘no one comes to give one language’. He finished by suggesting that we meet at Sloane Square outside the tube station on the day before the Epiphany at twelve o’clock. If I came, that would be ‘too dreamy’, and if I didn’t, no matter, as he would go shopping in the King’s Road.

  I set off on the tube from Gants Hill, arriving in Chelsea at 11.30. When he had failed to arrive by 12.15, I was beginning to feel annoyed. At 12.20 I saw him coming up from the District Line train with his slight limp, full of apologies.

  We walked the length of the King’s Road down as far as World’s End where we entered an Indian restaurant. I had never eaten Indian food before and Moreland ordered everything for both of us, explaining the different dishes. He ordered lager beer and drank his greedily, ordering another. All this time he had been talking knowledgeably about food. He offered me a cigarette and we both began to smoke. He was looking at me strangely.

  He said that he wanted to tell me something in strict confidence. He told me that he suffered from strange ‘phenomena’. They were not so much ‘visions as distortions’. I wondered for a moment whether he wasn’t drunk with the lager. He went on to say that he was at times prey to roaring sounds, like a ‘thousand lions’, and the grotesque distortions of vision were so devastating that he could do nothing but lie for hours in the dark until they had faded. ‘I tell people,’ he said, ‘that I am having migraines.’ Afterwards, he said, his mind became clear and penetrating. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘into the life of things. And I can make such strange connections between things that it frightens me.’

  I sat in silence, paralysed, unsure how I should react or respond.

  Then he said: ‘Do you abuse yourself, Fru?’

  I did not want to answer him.

  Eventually, he said: ‘You’ve been raped, haven’t you?’

  I was silent, terrified. I was thinking in a confused fashion of the Rape of Lucrece, wondering what he could mean.

  ‘I know, because it’s happened to me too. I can tell.’

  I did not need to reply, since he did not wait for an answer. He went on to tell me that he had been forcibly masturbated, repeatedly, for more than two years by the priest who had been his spiritual friend. ‘What a friend! What a priest!’ he said bitterly. After his father left home, he went on, his mother had become deeply attached to this priest. He was supposed to help her. He converted her to Catholicism. He used to come every day.

  ‘She knew that it was happening, but she pretended to herself that he was my mentor, my special spiritual guide.’

  I was dumbfounded. I just sat looking at him.

  He said: ‘I came to enjoy it in a way, Fru…I came to need it, and to need him,’ Paul said. ‘I found my vocation to the priesthood with the priest who destroyed my soul. There’s only one answer to the murder of your soul, Fru, which is to receive God’s grace through no action of our own.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said at last, ‘you have been to confession, and any sinfulness is now forgiven.’

  Paul laughed, a cold little laugh. ‘But evil, Fru, is not just a question of intentions.’
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br />   He then told me the story in detail: places, times, circumstances. Moreland had served the priest’s Mass, and went to him regularly in confession. The priest, whom he gave a name, was on the surface devout and dedicated. ‘He was holy,’ Moreland said, ‘except when he made me suck his penis.’

  Afterwards the priest would hear his confession.

  It was almost dark by the time we got up from the table. I felt sick in my soul; and I was conscious that we were just walking distance from where I had been sexually attacked five or six years earlier. Yes, I was thinking, it is true: I have been raped. Before we left the restaurant, he said: ‘I am not afraid of sex, Fru…Our bodies are just playgrounds.’

  I said: ‘But our bodies, Moreland, are the temples of the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Mine,’ he repeated, ‘is just a playground.’

  At that moment, young as he was, his face, strangely beautiful to me, appeared ancient and ruined. Was that, I wondered, something he had seen in my face too? His last words to me were: ‘You will never tell a soul, will you, Fru?’