Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  98

  LENT TERM BEGAN the following week. Cotton was in the grip of winter and I detected an unusual transformation among the senior boys. They were obsessed with the latest pop single, ‘Singing the Blues’. For the first few days of term boys were humming the tune and arguing rowdily over the competing merits of Tommy Steele and Guy Mitchell. I heard James, of all people, hotly insisting at supper that one would dance the foxtrot to it, to the amazed derision of those around him. The pop music from home had found its way back to Cotton and created a strangely disruptive mood. Hearing two boys quarrelling about ‘Singing the Blues’ as he came into his history class, Father Grady slammed a book on his desk and said tartly: ‘Oh, how I hate all that Blue-Skies-Round-the-Corner rubbish. Why can’t people be happy with real music!’

  To my surprise and relief, Mère Saint Luc had insisted that I must remain in the infirmary and had provided me with extra blankets and two hot-water bottles. By a stroke of irony I had not been back a week before I contracted flu, and I was soon joined in the infirmary by several other boys who had caught the same virulent strain.

  Father Gavin began to appear in the infirmary after he had said his Mass. He seemed different out of the context of the classroom. Despite his premature baldness there was something angelically youthful, I thought, about his lineless, jovial face; the way he made his mouth small to prevent it breaking out into a broad grin. I was impressed that he was the only priest who visited the sick in the infirmary while the flu was about and I came to see that outside his Latin drills he was a kind and affable human being.

  Visiting me after I was on the mend, he asked me if I would like to act in the role of a Jesuit priest, Father Henry Garnet, in a play he was producing about Guy Fawkes and the 5 November plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. I had enjoyed being on the stage in the previous year and it seemed a stroke of divine providence. Encouraged by the archivist, Mr Roberts, I had been avidly reading about Father Garnet’s clandestine missionary activities during the time of the Protestant persecution of Catholics.

  The play, ‘Gunpowder, Treason and Plot’ by the Catholic writer Hugh Ross Williamson, argued that the scheme to blow up king and parliament was actually instigated by the government in order to justify a more vicious persecution of Catholics. The Protestant arch-villain of the piece, Lord Salisbury, sought to blame the Jesuits as the principal traitors, and the alleged ringleader, who might have been called a ‘master spy’, was Father Henry Garnet.

  The play was performed two evenings running, a month into the term, and attended by various Cotton benefactors. Father Doran rose at the end to commend the ‘clarity of speech of all the cast’.

  Public speaking, and clarity of speech, had become an obsession in the previous year on the initiative of the archbishop, who was a stickler for elocution. Under pressure from the archbishop, the profs had been delivering frequent pep talks about bad pronunciation and working-class accents. At his first Sunday homily that term Father Doran had complained for a full fifteen minutes about the pronunciation of a single word. During a rugby match against a visiting school, in the previous term, he said, he had listened to boys shouting: ‘Get it back!’ The word ‘back’, he insisted, had been pronounced by Cottonians, on the touchline, as well as in the team, as in ‘Bach’, the composer. ‘But it isn’t Bach,’ he insisted, ‘it’s back!’; he was pronouncing the word, it seemed to me, as in ‘beck’. On and on he went: ‘Beck, not Bach.’ Then he laboured the pronunciation of the word ‘ghost’, as in Holy Ghost. ‘It is not Horly Gorst,’ he insisted, ‘it’s Holy Ghost!’ But his ‘Holy Ghost’, it seemed to me, came out as ‘Herley Ghoost’.

  Father Gavin initiated a weekly debating club, recording the proceedings on a new Grundig tape recorder presented by the archbishop. The idea was to encourage boys to hear themselves speaking and so improve their delivery. Given that newspapers were not allowed in the school, the debates tended to be of a peculiarly abstract nature. Typical motions were: ‘This house believes that tomorrow never comes,’ ‘This house is of the opinion that it is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back,’ and ‘This house believes that the longest way round is the shortest way home.’

  By the advent of Holy Week my accent was back to a respectable, well-enunciated and emphatic version of Black Country, mainly in emulation of Father Armishaw.

  99

  I SAW LITTLE of Moreland as the term progressed, since bad weather had precluded afternoon walks. Our paths occasionally crossed and he would give me a look of affectionate complicity; but we had no opportunity to speak.

  I had noticed him during the forty hours’ devotion when the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in the Lady chapel through nearly two days and two nights surrounded by forests of lighted candles and flowers. Boys took it in turn to maintain watch. I spent more time than most on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament; but Moreland seemed to be there all the time.

  During the forty hours I had a strange experience. I had been on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament three hours on the first evening, gazing at that circle of white, the Eucharistic wafer, when I began to feel feverish. Eventually I felt as if my head was about to burst. Just at the moment when I thought I could bear it no longer I saw very clearly hovering around the monstrance, with its radiating gilt sunbeams, an intensely bright spark of light: it had the brightness of the sun itself, and it gave off an impression of supernatural energy. I said to myself: ‘I am seeing God: and God is pure energy!’ Then the moment and the ‘vision’ passed.

  I continued kneeling, wondering whether the spark would return; then the thought came to me that I should ask God for a miracle. All these years, since my childhood, I had accepted the defective vision in my right eye, akin to peripheral vision. I could not read with my left eye closed, I could only perceive the world in a shadowy fashion. Perhaps I should ask God to cure my right eye; it occurred to me that if I had sufficient Faith then God would grant me a miracle. I covered both eyes with my hands and prayed and prayed with all the Faith that I could muster.

  I wanted something dramatic, startling, to occur, revealing God’s action in the world in a direct and tangible manner. Slowly I removed my hand from my right eye and opened it. The miracle had not been granted.

  Then Moreland was sent to the infirmary.

  100

  HIS AILMENT, or ailments, lacked specifics, though I had heard rumours from James Rolle. Moreland had been suffering ‘severe migraines’ and there had been odd incidents: he had been found sleepwalking far from the dormitories in the middle of the night. On one occasion he had been followed by a member of the big sixth down into the refectory where he took his place in the dark at the head of one of the tables. When the sixth former switched on the lights, Moreland screamed. His screams could be heard all over that wing of the college and even as far as Saint Thomas’s.

  When Moreland arrived in the infirmary he greeted me affably, but he seemed to want his privacy. Dr Hall came to see him and questioned him in a quiet voice. I could not hear the conversation. He was given some sort of sedative and he slept a great deal.

  One night Moreland woke up and screamed once, only to fall asleep again immediately. Not long after this, in the early hours I heard him weeping for a while. In the morning I went out to the toilet after breakfast. When I came back he was sitting up in bed with a cup in his hand. ‘This is your cup,’ he said, laughing in a strange manner. ‘When you were outside I licked it where you drank from it. You see, Fru, I long to be intimate with you.’ I laughed, too, when he said this, but I was feeling embarrassed.

  As he got better, he started to talk. His monologues, once he got going, overwhelmed me. His speech was like a fast-running river, with currents and cross-currents, sudden digressions and tributaries. It was the repetitions more than anything that made me wonder about his sanity; they made him sound irrational. And yet he could control his tongue when the need arose, which was usually when Father Gavin came into the infirmary for his regular visi
t after Mass in the morning; or when Mère Saint Luc appeared with food or medicine.

  The content of this prodigious flow was a kind of mixed-idea salad from his wide reading, most of it religious in nature and philosophical. Yet it seemed to me that there was little depth, and increasingly fewer logical connections; it was mostly flashy, on the surface. After Matron had given him more pills, he became very quiet and slept again for a long time. Some sort of crisis had passed.

  Before I fell asleep, he woke up and told me in a lazy voice that he had been having a ‘visionary dream’ about stigmata. ‘It was so real, Fru,’ he said. ‘So real and so beautiful. Do you realise that the stigmata is your body as Christ’s cross: you don’t replicate Christ in his wounds; that would be a blasphemy. You replicate the cross on which he hung: you are the cross through which the nails penetrate, and the spear too. In stigmata Jesus is nailed to you…’

  We talked for a while that evening in low voices. When I got back into bed he came and sat next to me. He became excited and tearful. He said to me at one point that the Jesuit who had abused him had ‘penetrated’ his body. ‘I can only make reparation for that,’ Moreland said, ‘by becoming the cross on which Jesus was nailed.’ I tried to calm him; but it was a hopeless conversation, which degenerated into Moreland’s repetitions. Eventually I fell asleep while he continued to speak.

  In the middle of the night I woke up with a fright. Moreland was standing over me. The only light was from the fire in the grate, and the entire world seemed hushed as if after snowfall.

  ‘Fru, I want you to do something,’ he said. ‘Just lie on your back and stretch out your arms. Please do that for me. Stretch out your arms as if you are on the cross.’ He was so earnest and insistent, and I was so sleepy and confused, that I did as he asked me since I wanted him to get it over with.

  He pulled back the bedclothes and before I could resist he had climbed on top of me, face down, stretching out his arms as if our bodies were in mirror image. His lips were touching mine and his eyes were looking into mine. I was paralysed with fear. Then he started to gabble something about me being the tree of good-and-evil. I looked into his eyes and I was shocked to see that he was utterly absent. His eyes were wide open looking into mine, but he was not there.

  He was sweating through his pyjamas and dribbling into my mouth. Disgusted, I pushed him off and he landed in a heap on the floor. I was shaking, speechless. He picked himself up and went back to his bed. For a moment it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with him, that he had had himself put into the infirmary precisely to act out this weird ritual.

  His last words to me, in a quite normal voice, were: ‘Don’t tell anybody, Fru. Please.’

  I said nothing.

  The next morning neither Father Gavin, who slept immediately above, nor Matron, mentioned a disturbance in the night. Moreland was released from the infirmary that day and he and I did not speak of the incident again. The term was drawing to a close, I was preparing for end-of-term exams, and the annual retreat was coming up. Through Holy Week I could barely concentrate on the homilies of the retreat leader. I was worried about returning home again to the halfway-house hostel.

  101

  ON EASTER MONDAY I travelled down to London. The weather in Ilford was cold and windy. Our temporary home was sunk in an atmosphere of foreboding. The couple next door were arguing and fighting much of the day, and their baby was screaming day and night. Terry, my quiet, longsuffering elder brother, said: ‘Looks as if we’ve exchanged one boxing ring for another!’

  The day after Easter Mum, Terry and Maureen returned to work. My younger brothers were in the sitting room all day listening to the radio, watching television or playing in a desultory kind of way. To get some peace I lay on my mother’s bed rereading The Cardinal and listening to Beethoven. I was getting listless. I wondered if I should get in touch with Moreland, but I now felt afraid of him and therefore afraid for myself. Another danger, however, lurked for me in the bedroom here. All around were items of my mother’s and sister’s clothes and lingerie. In my boredom and lethargy I began to feel stirrings of those ‘irregular motions of the flesh’. After a morning of mounting sexual fantasies I got up off the bed and went out into the cold wind.

  I took a bus to Woodford Green to visit the Franciscan church of Saint Thomas. Inside the empty church I prayed before the statue of the Virgin. Then I sat in the pews feeling empty, half-praying, half-daydreaming. Eventually a man in the Franciscan habit came out on the high altar from the sacristy. He straightened the altar cloth and stood back to appraise his work, then came to where I was sitting. He was a youngish man with a bright, open face and closely cropped hair. The sleeves of his habit were rolled up and I could see bare wrists and arms. He smiled and we spoke for a while. When I told him that I was a junior seminarian, he became affable. He was intrigued to know why I had come all the way from Ilford to visit the Franciscan church. On an impulse, thinking that it would catch his interest, I said I had come to pray for a ‘special intention’.

  He told me about the community of Poor Clares who lived on the other side of the church behind a high wall. ‘The prayers of our Franciscan nuns,’ he said, ‘have the power to perform miracles. The Good Lord cannot refuse them.’ He told me about the relationship between Francis and Clare, an aristocratic lady of Assisi who had founded the Franciscan sisterhood.

  He now insisted that I accompany him to visit the Poor Clare convent. Leading the way, he took me out of the church and through a door in a wall to a garden in front of an old house with shuttered windows. He rang on a bell, and within a few moments a sister appeared dressed in a brown habit and black veil.

  ‘This young man,’ said the friar, ‘would like to see Reverend Mother.’ Before I could hesitate, or explain myself, the nun ushered me into the dark interior of the house. I heard the friar calling out behind me: ‘You’ll be all right. Tell Reverend Mother of your intention.’

  The nun brought me to a room with bare boards where there was a simple chair facing a grille covered with a gauze curtain. Asking me to sit, the nun disappeared. I heard a door opening and a different nun appeared on the other side of the grille. I could barely see her face because of the gauze, but it appeared to me that her skin was sallow, almost yellow.

  She asked me how old I was and where I lived. As we talked, it occurred to me that the Poor Clares were living a kind of entombed life-in-death. Despite this she seemed cheerful. She said that they had retreated from the world to pray day and night for others. They did not accumulate wealth for future emergencies but relied on what was given to them more or less from day to day. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘we wonder if we’re going to eat at all for a whole week. But something usually turns up.’

  She brought the conversation to a close by saying that she would ask the sisters to pray for me and my special intention. The intention, she said, could be a secret one. I was relieved as I did not want to talk to this strange nun about my sexual temptations. In my mind, though, I added an intention that I had not thought of for some time – that Dad would come back to us.

  She asked me to kneel down with her and pray a little before we parted. She said the Hail Mary followed by the Memorare. As she prayed her voice seemed to wrap me around with gentleness. I felt a great surge of warmth for this woman and her strange life of prayer and self-denial. Then she was gone. The moment she disappeared the sister who had met me at the door came in and led me out of the room. Before I knew it the front door had closed behind me and I was standing blinking in the driveway, buffeted by the cold winds.

  I went back into the church, hoping to see the friar again, but he had disappeared. After a while I heard voices singing a simple version of the Divine Office in the choir on the other side of the high altar, hidden from the sight of the main church.

  102

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT I went to confession at Saints Peter and Paul church. Walking down the Ilford High Road afterwards I collided with a boy called Bob Princ
e who I had known at my old school. I was surprised to see how much he had changed: he was dressed in a tight-fitting suit and his hair was in the new slicked-back style known as a DA (‘duck’s arse’). He had once covered the back of my blazer in chalk marks and I had bloodied his nose. He kept me in conversation for a long time, leaning up against a shop window. He couldn’t get over the way I talked and how ‘square’ I looked.

  He persuaded me eventually to go with him to the Catholic Youth Club next to the school. There were boys mostly of my age; some were playing table tennis, others were listening to the record player which was belting out Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’. A girl called Pat, with jet-black hair and high heels, came up to us and said she was having a party at her house as her parents had gone away for a wedding. She was wearing heavy make-up, as if to hide some prominent spots, but she was vivacious and attractive. She kept flicking Bob’s arm and saying: ‘Bring your friend.’

  We left the youth club, a dozen or so of us including about five girls, and walked out into the road called Green Lane. Everybody was lighting up cigarettes, including me. One of the boys had a sheaf of records. After twenty minutes’ walk, via an off-licence where we had a whip-round for quarts of cider, we arrived at a terrace house. There was a lot of joshing about the records, and pushing back of furniture. Then the girls kicked off their shoes and started dancing in their stockinged feet.

  I sat on the arm of a chair, carried away by the sound and the hectic beat. They played over and over again a version of ‘Pick a Bail o’ Cotton’ by a skiffle group called The Vipers. The girls danced and whirled with their tight skirts hitched up. Soon everybody was dancing except me. Prince came over to me and pointed at Pat. ‘Look at her,’ he said. ‘Snake-hips we call her.’ Then Pat made me get up and dance. She took me through the moves. I felt self-conscious and awkward at first, but when I picked up the rhythm I started to get into it. She cried out: ‘Hey, John, you’re in the groove!’