Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  We drank and smoked, and danced some more. Then each boy, except me, ended up with a girl on his knee. Some swapping went on; Pat went on several laps, and finally landed on mine. She stayed there.

  For the first time in my life I felt and tasted the tongue of another human being inside my mouth. I found it repulsive at first, but I soon got used to it; it was a surprise, like buttered toast, I thought. Pat had a long soft nose. I wanted to stroke her hair, but she wouldn’t let me. She was keen on close eye-staring which she called soul-kissing. When I was leaving, just before midnight, Pat said she would like to see me at the youth club again.

  I walked back to the hostel to find my younger brothers and Mum in bed. Maureen and Terry were out. So I lay on the sofa in the living room and pondered the evening. I could still smell Pat all over me. I smoked a cigarette. I could see Pat’s eyes with huge black pupils staring one inch away into mine, and I could hear Geoff, the patient in Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, saying: ‘Tell me what’s better! Eh! Tell me what’s better!’ Then I thought of Paul Moreland’s absent eyes staring into mine in his weird visionary state.

  I longed for physical closeness: I yearned for it. But did I have to choose between the tongue-in-my-mouth concupiscence of Pat, or Paul’s ranting, dribbling stigmatic rapture? The idea of existing just to myself – pounding up and down reading a breviary – seemed to me that night as attractive as ending up in Saint Clement’s in the Bow Road with a lobotomy.

  When Maureen came in, she sat on the bed and we talked for a while about a party she had been to. She had left school now and was working in the bank. Her demure convent-school ways had quickly lapsed. She laughed a lot about how some of the girls were dressed and the saucy things the boys got up to. I loved talking to Maureen that night; she had become so smart about people and funny. After she went to bed, I lay awake into the small hours.

  103

  THE NEXT DAY I got up at seven and went to the early Mass at Saints Peter and Paul. I spent a long time over my thanksgiving, examining my conscience about the night before; anxious that I might have entered an ‘occasion of sin.’ My mind was spinning with the old scruples again, so thinking of Father Buxton’s advice during the retreat the year before I made an act of contrition and left the church.

  Back at the hostel I was in the communal kitchen making a cup of tea, when the woman from across the corridor came in. She was half-dressed and weeping. Embarrassed, I said: ‘Good morning!’ and turned to face the stove where I had the kettle on.

  At that moment a voice shouted: ‘Fuckin’ Christ. You cunt! I turn my fuckin’ back and you’re chattin’ up a fuckin’ bloke!’

  A man was at the kitchen door, unshaven, in his underclothes. He was short but tough-looking, with the face of a wino. He was looking directly at me. ‘What the fuck are you doin’ in my kitchen!’ he yelled. Then he grabbed the woman by the hair and smacked her round the face. Turning on me again, he screamed: ‘I’ll knock your fuckin’ block off.’

  With this he came around the table, fists clenched. He was a hard labouring man in his forties and I was terrified. I made for the door, but he came around the table to cut me off. Then he had me up against the gas stove, one hard hand at my throat: ‘I’ll smash your fuckin’ face in…’ he was yelling.

  An icy voice cut in: ‘Oi! You!…Leave that boy alone!’

  Mum was at the kitchen door.

  She stood there, eyes bulging with violent intent, her left hand opening out and suddenly closing to a fist, the other hand out of sight as if she would take him with one arm tied behind her back.

  He loosened his grip. He was staring at Mum. At that moment I knew that I was safe and I adored her with all my heart and soul.

  ‘I’m goin’ to smash this bastard’s ‘ead in,’ he said, his fist raised.

  ‘That boy is MY…SON!’

  ‘I don’t care ‘oo ‘e is.’

  ‘Don’t you!’

  From behind her back Mum now produced her kitchen carving knife, a familiar bone-handled instrument she kept whetted to razor sharpness.

  He let me go.

  ‘John,’ she ordered, ‘out through the window over the sink.’

  I clambered over the sink and through the open sash window.

  Looking back, I cried out with terror as I saw Mum make a rush at the man, thrusting for his belly with the carving knife.

  The man skipped around the table, narrowly avoiding the merciless jabs, and disappeared into the corridor. He had locked himself into his room, but Mum went on after him and was rattling at the handle and throwing her shoulder at the door.

  ‘You so much as look at my son again and I’ll bloody swing for what I’ll do to you!…’ she growled.

  For a few seconds there was silence. ‘No one threatens my sons! Or they have me to deal with!’ she yelled, with a final bang on the door with her free fist.

  Shortly afterwards I followed Mum into our living room.

  She collapsed on a chair, the knife in her lap. Then she had a good cry. ‘Scum of the earth!’ she kept saying. ‘Scum of the earth! That my seminarian son should have to endure this! This is what that dirty rat your father has brought us to.’

  There and then she decided that she would telephone the college and ask them to have me back early. I pleaded with her not to, but she was adamant. ‘You can’t say here, darling. No way. Next time you’ll come back to our own home. I promise.’

  Locking me in our living room for safety, Mum took herself off to the public phone box on the corner of Cranbrook Road and The Drive. When she returned she told me that she had talked to Father McCallum, the bursar, Father Doran being away. It was agreed that I should return to Cotton straight away.

  104

  FATHER MCCALLUM was waiting at Oakamoor station in a new Morris car. He was initially full of concern about the attack. ‘What a business! How simply frightful for you.’ Then he began to talk airily about his plans for further decoration at Cotton.

  Once again I was established in the infirmary with Mère Saint Luc making a fuss of me. After I told her of the attack at the hostel, she sat with me for a while talking about dangerous moments she had experienced during the Great War.

  Later, in the clock cloister, I ran into Father Armishaw who had returned to the college early and also knew about the incident. He asked me up to his room to ‘chew the fat’. He seemed more relaxed than at our last meeting in his room. He said that priests were often attacked on sight because of their Roman collars. ‘Best policy is to run!’ he said with a laugh; but I could see that he was concerned. Sitting in the armchair facing his desk in that meticulously tidy room, I felt secure. I wanted nothing more in life than to be Father Armishaw.

  He chose from his record collection Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. As we sat listening, he smoked his pipe and read a book. The music and his presence calmed my heart. Occasionally he looked up but said nothing. Before I went to bed he asked me to serve his Mass the next day.

  I served Father Armishaw’s Mass at the side altar beneath the stained-glass window of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. The familiar ritual close to Father Armishaw in the cool, silent morning made me light-headed with happiness. Was it possible, I wondered, to reside and rest within the tranquil ambit of music, nature and the liturgy, for the whole of one’s life? The heroism of Father Fermoyle in The Cardinal, and Father Cooney, did not seem so attractive in the aftermath of the ‘halfway house’.

  In the sacristy Father Armishaw asked me if I would like to meet him after breakfast by the garages where he was working on his motorbike.

  The garages where Father Armishaw kept and maintained his gleaming green motor cycle were the other side of a wall at the end of Top Bounds. When I arrived he was on his knees cleaning engine parts which were laid out on a sheet. He was wearing old trousers and his leather flying jacket. His motorbike was a water-cooled Velocette 192cc, popular with police forces in England, he told me. As he worked he explained what he was doing. I learnt ab
out the chemistry of petrol, and the principles of the combustion engine – carburettor, cylinders, gearbox. As he bent to his task and spoke about the mechanisms, he would hand me a piece to examine and feel its weight.

  That afternoon he took me for a ride as far as the Rocks. As he opened up along a straight stretch, he called out for me to hold on to him tightly around his waist. I pressed my head against his back, watching the drystone walls zipping by.

  The hours and the days leading up to the beginning of term passed like a paradisal interlude. Father Armishaw showed me the intricacies of his camera, and how to take pictures at the right speed and with the appropriate film without artificial lighting. He talked books, and we listened to music.

  One night he took the blanket from his bed and led me down to the lawn in front of the old hall, out of bounds to boys. As we lay side by side under a clear sky he pointed out stars and planets, and the constellations. He told me a mnemonic by which I could remember the order of the planets from Mercury to Pluto, starting with the one closest to the Sun: ‘Married virgins eat mango jam sitting under nanny’s piano.’

  He did not speak to me in an intimate way, nor did he once talk about religion or the spiritual life. I asked him practical questions, or just remained silent waiting for him to say something.

  I longed to give him something back, and it was this desire that prompted me to talk about Paul Moreland. The night after our star-gazing Father Armishaw lent me a book by Sir James Jeans titled The Stars in their Courses. He had won it as a school prize and it was precious to him. He had just marked a passage for me about the method of calculating the weight of the moon and the earth, when I said: ‘I’m worried about Paul Moreland, sir…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I told him about the episode in the infirmary, when Paul had talked of stigmata. Then I described how he had lain on top of me. Father Armishaw was listening intently and gravely. His face was taking on such a serious expression that I began to feel afraid. But wasn’t that the effect I had sought? Then I went on to tell him about the abuse Moreland had experienced at the hands of the family priest.

  I thought that one confidence might lead to another. We would become closer, more intimate. But when I finished, he was suddenly offhand, although his face remained pale and intense.

  ‘These things happen,’ he said shortly. Then he told me to go to bed.

  As I made my way down to the infirmary I knew that I had made a mistake.

  105

  AS THE PROFS and boys returned and the new term began I learnt that I had a new berth in Top Dorm. My infirmary privileges had come to an end. For several days I hardly saw Father Armishaw except in class where he treated me like everybody else and betrayed no indication that there was anything special between us. I saw Paul Moreland only fleetingly, hurrying to the sixth form library with piles of books.

  I explained to James what had happened at the hostel for the homeless and he was sympathetic. We were walking up and down Top Bounds, James gossiping, just being companionable. Then Derek came up to join me at break, wondering why I had not been on the train from Saint Pancras. He tried to get our private game going; but my heart wasn’t in it.

  Two days into the term I collided with Father Armishaw in the cloister and he asked me to come and see him after night prayers. The house was in silence as I knocked. He told me to come in and shut the door.

  ‘Would you like to hear some music?’ he asked. He put a Beethoven violin sonata on the turntable. While we listened he read a book and I sat in the armchair looking into the fire. I was expecting him to say something about Paul Moreland; but he said nothing. Later we talked for a while about photography; then he said: ‘Time for your bed.’ Before I left, he said: ‘You can come here if you feel like it any Thursday after night prayers…but keep it to yourself, if you get my drift.’

  I got his drift.

  The next day Father Doran sent for me. It was a late spring morning, the distant hills blue with the promise of a glorious day. He was at his desk, his back to the open bay windows.

  He asked me to repeat what I had told Father Armishaw about Paul Moreland. His seriousness and cold voice scared me. After I had told him everything, he wanted to know whether I had ‘participated’ when Paul lay on top of me; whether I had attempted to resist. His tight-lipped questions put me on my guard. Under his stern cross-examination I stressed again and again Paul’s forcefulness and my unwillingness. Eventually he dismissed me without comment.

  I felt perplexed; betrayed. Father Armishaw had gone to Father Doran with what I had told him. We had not been speaking under the seal of confession, but I now realised, painfully, that his first loyalty was to his religious superior. My biggest disillusionment was that he had put me in danger no less than Paul. In alerting Father Doran to Moreland’s behaviour, I had been expendable. Yet I, too, had been guilty of a betrayal. Paul had begged me to treat what he had told me, and done to me, with confidence. Had I betrayed that confidence in his interests? Or the interests of the seminary? It had not for one moment escaped me, ever since that evening’s confidence, that I had betrayed Paul in my eagerness to get closer to Father Armishaw.

  The college was now entering the rhythm of its usual routines, and the rest of the morning proceeded as usual. At the end of classes we went into church in ranks for prayers before lunch. Moreland was not at his place in church. When we arrived in the refectory for lunch he was not at his place at table. Then I learnt that he had left.

  Sitting there, unable to eat, I remembered Paul sitting by the railway tunnel in the Churnet valley. It struck me that Paul was capable of doing something reckless, and I would be to blame. After lunch, ignoring the lists that had gone up on the noticeboard for cricket practice and athletics, I slipped down the valley path and hurried towards Oakamoor. I wanted to know that Paul had not harmed himself, and I was desperate to say goodbye to him and to be forgiven. My eyes were blinded with tears; I stumbled and fell again and again as I ran down the steep pathways. And all the way I was imagining Paul’s body lying on the railway track, his limbs severed, his beautiful head smashed in.

  I found him on the platform at Oakamoor, sitting amidst his bags. He was reading a book. He looked at me with that absent gaze he sometimes affected, and said nothing.

  I was crying. I told him I was sorry, over and over again.

  Eventually he said very softly: ‘I did ask you, didn’t I, Fru, not to tell anybody…Poor Fru!’

  After a while he said in a small voice: ‘I think I’m probably a better fit with the Jesuits.’ It did not occur to me then that he was being ironic.

  When the train came in, bound for Uttoxeter, I stood on the platform gazing up to where he sat in the carriage by the window. But he opened his book and did not look at me again.

  Later that day Father Doran sent for me. He told me that Paul Moreland was suffering from a form of mental illness; that he had left of his own volition and I was not to think badly of him. He hoped I would settle down to the good work of which I was capable. He had heard of my attack at home and he believed that such incidents strengthened a person’s character.

  I came away from Father Doran’s office feeling calmer, and I decided to steel myself against feeling guilty for my part in Paul’s departure.

  106

  NOW THAT I was in the sixth form I came under the direct spiritual influence of Father Doran. After night prayers we would come forward to the front of the church, filling the first three benches on both sides of the aisle. Carrying his copy of the New Testament, Father Doran would rise from his prie-dieu and come to sit behind us in the fourth row to give us ‘meditation points’, themes for our silent prayer the following morning.

  He would read a passage from the Gospels and draw reflections for our consideration. He stressed our human weaknesses, repeatedly contrasting our disobedience with the acquiescence of the Virgin Mary. His personality came across strongly during these nightly talks: an ascetical, disciplined man, wit
h a jaundiced view of human nature and of boys in particular. After he had finished he would walk back to his prie-dieu, his heavily shod shoes echoing through the church. We remained kneeling in contemplation until we heard him rising and passing through the double doors of the church and out into the cloister.

  The next morning we would be on our knees in our normal places, towards the back of the church, to begin half an hour’s meditation on Father Doran’s points before the rest of the school joined us for their morning prayers before community Mass.

  I seemed to be living through much of the week on autopilot, sustained by the rhythm of the religious round. Father Doran’s meditations dominated my mind, but there was an area of my life which remained independent of the routine – my weekly visits to Father Armishaw’s room on Thursday nights. He saw other boys on Saturday evenings, but I was the only sixth former to be invited alone to his room. This special privilege was, I knew, an act of kindness in response to my home circumstances, but I was convinced that he saw me as someone special. I was tempted to broach the affair of Paul Moreland, but I never did. Instinctively I knew that never again should I attempt to take our relationship further than the limits he had set.

  Our evenings followed a pattern. There would be music, invariably Beethoven to begin with, then Bach or Brahms, then Mozart. He would smoke a cigarette or two, but he never offered me one. He liked to talk music and the merits of different performances. He would compare, for example, the precision of Toscanini with the flexibility of Furtwängler, then he would expound the balance and contrast between freedom and control in writing: inspiration and intuition versus hard, conscious graft. He would lend me books, not all of them to my liking, and he would ask me what I thought when I returned them. The books were always outside our class work: Joyce, Shaw, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.