There were times, especially after haymaking, when I almost fainted with the fragrance of the grass and the wild flowers, a mood of longing in the distant hills, the beauty of our sunsets. I was reading the early books of Wordsworth’s Prelude which seemed to articulate these feelings, creating an even deeper sense of mystery and presence than I had felt in earlier years. We talked of this one evening in his room, and he warned me of the danger of pantheism, the heresy that would reduce God to the level of his own creation.
We did not talk spirituality, or about spiritual reading, although I knew that he had a special interest in mystical poetry. One day I asked him what he thought of the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. He looked over his spectacles, the way he did when he was about to say something quizzical, and asked if I had read the poetry of Richard Crashaw. I had not. He took a book down from his shelf and marked a page: it was Crashaw’s ‘The Flaming Heart’, dedicated to the earlier, Spanish Teresa.
Before handing it over, he read out a passage from another Crashaw poem which spoke of God taking up residence in the ‘mild and milky soul of a soft child’. He said that description was more apt for the French Saint Thérèse than the Spanish Santa Teresa. The problem of great mystics, he said, was their tendency to hurt as well as to be hurt.
For in love’s field was never found A nobler weapon than a Wound.
107
COTTON HAD A newly appointed spiritual director from outside the college – Father Joseph Connelly, a former professor at the senior seminary, who worked on a parish five miles distant, and who came to Cotton every Thursday afternoon. I had another idea. A combination of curiosity and rashness attracted me to Father ‘Rainbow’ McCallum. I had found his attentions flattering when I was in the infirmary and he offered the prospect of real engagement.
I knocked on his sitting room door one lazy Thursday afternoon beyond mid-term. His windows were wide open and he was standing looking out towards the meadow at the head of the valley. He was wearing one of his coloured silk shirts. He said that he would be delighted to act as my spiritual director. He shut the door and turned the key in the lock, inviting me to sit in an armchair.
He offered me a drink of ‘something strong’ and a cigarette, which I declined. Sitting close to me on a higher chair, he said that anything I told him would be under the seal of confession. I could talk freely and with confidence.
He started by asking me about how his predecessor Father Browne had conducted spiritual direction. He affected to be shocked when I told him about Father Browne’s recommendation of the life of Saint John Vianney. ‘How utterly preposterous!’ he said. ‘John Vianney was a sado-masochist. He would whip himself until his bedroom was spattered with blood.’
When I told him about Father Browne’s counsel on custody of the eyes, he burst out laughing. He was still laughing when his phone rang. He answered it and spoke for a few minutes, before putting down the receiver and bringing the meeting to an end.
‘I have to go out,’ he said. ‘One of our local parishioners is sick.’
I had found his spiritual direction disappointing, and I had not been to confession, but I decided I should give it another try.
I returned to Father McCallum a week later, this time determined to make my confession. He again offered me a drink and a cigarette. Again I declined, adding that I wanted to make my confession properly on my knees. Despite the fact that I was already kneeling by his chair, he got up and poured a glass of sherry. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and now drink this.’ I did as I was told. As I sat sipping the sherry he came and sat next to me, very close. I proceeded with my list of sins, feeling silly as I did so, with the glass in my hand.
Looking at me intensely, he interrupted: ‘Have you had problems with sexual sins, John?’
Something about the abrupt and intrusive way he asked this made me uneasy. I began to tell him about my difficulties two years earlier. I did not have the opportunity to explain the influence of the retreat father, Father Buxton, in my second year, because he interrupted me again.
‘Oh,’ he broke in. ‘You must not feel any guilt about masturbation. It’s now regarded by experts in sexual development as perfectly normal. In fact, it’s abnormal not to do so. You may have heard of the Kinsey report in America. Masturbation is a natural form of growing up…mutual masturbation is not such a bad thing either…all part of growing to maturity. Did you know that 99.9 per cent of all males masturbate at puberty? Don’t worry, they’re all sure to have done it: Father Doran, Father Armishaw, Father Owen, Father Browne…all of them.’ He was leaning towards me, looking at me intently and touching me lightly on the arm and on the knee.
Then he said: ‘On the other hand, there are individuals who suffer from abnormal forms of over-stimulation. Because of a deformation of the penis some boys are prone to excessive erections. If you were to show me your penis now, John, I could easily tell by manipulating it whether you have a problem of this kind…Will you let me examine your penis now?’
Suddenly I could not breathe. The question, his silk shirt, his hand on my knee, a heady smell (hair oil, aftershave, stale cigarette smoke, a faint hint of alcohol) filled me with terror. I remembered the face of the man in South Kensington subway: that same predatory look.
I stood up: ‘No, Father McCallum, I don’t think so.’
I walked to the door, turned the key in the lock, and went out into the cloister.
I looked back. He was standing in the middle of the room in an obvious state of agitation, his hands held out towards me, shaking his head. He appeared to be pleading with me not to say anything. I had a feeling as I stood in the cloister, free of him, that I had got off lightly.
108
I WAS TO say nothing to anyone about Father McCallum. I knew that it would be my word against his; and it was too close to the Paul Moreland affair. I thought of telling Father Armishaw, but I was sure that he would take it straight to Father Doran. And Father Doran, I suspected, would be obliged to believe Father McCallum before me.
For several days I could think of nothing else. Passing Father McCallum in the cloister occasionally, he would smile and greet me as if nothing had happened. But the incident had altered for ever my view of the priesthood. Throughout my time at Cotton nothing like this had ever occurred. Father McCallum had shown me what individual priests were capable of. McCallum was a ‘shitten’ priest, as Chaucer had put it in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. The fact of receiving the oils of ordination did not eradicate corruption in the heart of an individual priest. Never again, it occurred to me then, could I trust a priest unconditionally and implicitly.
A week or so after the incident, I went to Father Connelly for spiritual direction. He was a man of military bearing, well groomed and friendly. He took confessions and direction in the archbishop’s suite. On my first visit, he brought me straight back to basics. His spiritual direction coincided with Father Doran’s nightly talks in church. We are by nature imperfect, he said, but by unrelenting self-discipline we can work towards perfection. Holiness had to be worked for every day of our lives. We can never lower our guard, or be complacent.
Meanwhile, night after night Father Doran talked about temptation. We cannot control, he stressed, the suggestions that come our way through chance and imagination. The crucial issue was consent. ‘Faced with temptation, as soon as its self-seeking pleasure is perceived, if we momentarily hesitate, if we resist in a half-hearted manner, we are on the way to failing.’
If I had entertained any doubts up to this point about the relentlessly ascetical, monastic nature of our sixth form formation, the experience with Father McCallum had allayed that anxiety. Any remaining concerns I had on this score evaporated after reading a book which now fired me with ascetical enthusiasm. I had been attracted initially by Evelyn Waugh’s name on the cover. The title was Elected Silence by the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, and Waugh had written the preface. There was an epigram on the title page by Gerard Manley Hopkins:<
br />
Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
I read this book in one sitting on the Ascension Day choir outing. I took it with me to Dovedale and sat reading it all afternoon by the river. I read it on the bus back, and then right through the evening, missing the feast-day film. What struck me, to begin with, was its similarity in mood and prose style to The Cardinal. It was written in the style of a popular American novel. Like The Cardinal, it moved to and fro between Europe and the United States during the same historical period, ending in the early 1950s. Elected Silence (entitled The Seven Storey Mountain in the American edition), describes a coming-of-age spiritual quest which ends in Louisville, Kentucky, at a Trappist monastery where monks live in austere and permanent retreat from the world. The journey takes Merton from Prades in the French Pyrenees, where he was born in 1915, to Long Island, to Paris, to Bermuda, to Clare College, Cambridge, to Columbia University in New York City, and thence to the Abbey of Gethsemani where he enters the novitiate.
Since the writer is a young monk approaching ordination, his perspective both on his own life and on the history of the period, is God’s shaping providence. God’s ‘purpose’ for Thomas Merton, as he perceives it himself, is evident from the very first page. With resonances of Augustine’s Confessions, the author frankly admits his sins, and the sinfulness of the entire world.
On his spiritual journey there are false trails, adventures and misadventures of the mind and the heart, as well as acts of lechery, leading to self-disgust. If I had any doubts about the stern strictures of Fathers Doran and Connelly they were resolved by Merton’s astounding statement: ‘There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin – and yet there is no positive power in sin, only negation, only annihilation.’
Merton insisted that the life of the soul had far-reaching consequences beyond himself and his own spiritual destiny. Through Merton’s book, and as a result of the incident in Father McCallum’s room, I felt that I had reached a better understanding of our strict, monastic disciplines within the seminary, which often seemed tedious and mechanical, and remote from the world, but which were aimed at instilling long-term perseverance and resistance to temptation. But nagging questions nevertheless arose about our seminary formation, which challenged, if not undermined, my new convictions.
109
I WAS STUDYING long hours, preparing for public A-level examinations. When I wasn’t digging ditches I was taking long walks. I enjoyed long fast walks with Peter Gladden. Peter was interested in politics and science, and he had become preoccupied with the possibility of a Third World War which, he assured me, would be nuclear. He would inform me from time to time about news of the Soviet threat following the Suez crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt after Nasser had nationalised the canal. Peter, who would return to Cotton having read the Manchester Guardian every day during his holidays, would say: ‘It’s coming! Make no mistake.’ He had made himself an expert, so it seemed, on the technology of the hydrogen bomb: ‘Compared with an H-bomb the bombs that we dropped in Japan were just fire crackers.’ Now, he was telling me, experts were convinced that an H-bomb test could cause a chain reaction through the entire matter of the earth. ‘It could happen at any time,’ he assured me, ‘and when it does we shall all go up in a trice. Armageddon.’
As he walked, hunched and long-legged, his eyes narrowed with speculation, his mouth slightly open and moist, his prominent Roman nose bright red with exertion, Peter invariably turned to the question of the Third Secret of Fatima, the prophecies imparted to three peasant children in Portugal in 1917. The Third Secret, he assured me, had been read by a bishop in Portugal, who had leaked the information that unless Russia converted to Catholicism the world would come to an end in a more terrible war than the previous world wars.
Peter’s preoccupations, it occurred to me, challenged at least one aspect of our strictly cloistered existence at Cotton. The point of protecting us from knowledge of current affairs was in part, as I understood it, to reduce distractions, mundane anxieties and temptations. But these Cold War crises were invading and filling our secluded uninformed lives with apocalyptic fantasies precisely because of our isolation. For a time Peter Gladden’s circle became obsessed with the idea that at any moment the Russians would drop atom bombs on us, or invade Britain and come racing in tanks up the valley from Oakamoor to imprison and torture us for our Faith.
I had another problem with Peter, which was not unconnected with our emotional isolation: his continuing interest in the boys in Saint Thomas’s. From time to time he would attempt to draw me into discussion about the looks and demeanour of the prettiest boys, asking me what I thought of this one and that one.
‘They’re just boring little urchins,’ I would say, before attempting to change the subject.
‘But some of them are gorgeous, Fru. Have you really studied little Brunning, for example? Why would God make such beautiful creatures if he didn’t want us to adore them?’
‘But aren’t men meant to enjoy looking at women?’ I said. ‘And aren’t we meant to resist the temptation to do that?’ Even as I said it, I was aware of being unbearably priggish.
‘Oh, I’m not in the least interested in women,’ said Peter. ‘They’re too voluptuous and they smell.’
These conversations about smaller boys left me feeling anxious for Peter. He would go on at length about the ‘frigid beauty’ of his latest soprano crush in the choir, extolling ‘his austerely pure voice, those icy notes that only boys can attain’, and the ‘pure, pure loveliness of little Brunning’.
One day, taking a rest on the top of a hill called Below, a burial mound high above the surrounding countryside on the road to Farley, Peter said: ‘Sometimes, Fru, I daydream about Brunning. He is lying naked on an altar, and I’m stroking him and giving him pure kisses all over…’
‘Peter,’ I said, echoing what I had once told Paul Moreland, ‘our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost.’
‘But our souls are separate from our bodies,’ said Peter. ‘What I do to someone’s body doesn’t necessarily affect his spiritual, immortal soul.’
I looked at Peter, his full lips invariably parted as if he was incapable of breathing through his nose. I saw a young man who might well be mistaken for being innocently gormless: intelligent, kind in so many ways, and practical; but a minor seminarian approaching graduation to senior seminary, trapped in a delirium of warped, childish desire.
Meanwhile, despite my dogged commitment to Father Doran’s and Father Connelly’s spiritual formation, I was also aware that I was often thinking about people and the world that owed less to our seminary spirituality and much to the quiet influence of Father Armishaw’s English classes and my weekly trips to his room after night prayers.
We were reading Dryden and Pope; learning about the art of satire’s ‘fine raillery’. He liked to quote from Samuel Johnson, trenchantly proclaiming the Doctor’s didactic utterances. He would look over his spectacles, a smile playing about his lips, and come out with such lapidary phrases as: ‘The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.’ Or: ‘Anything so little in the power of man as language, cannot but be capriciously conducted.’ We were reading John Donne, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Marlowe, George Herbert. Whatever the set books, he would send us off to the library to explore a wider circuit of texts.
One afternoon he took the sixth form in a hired bus to the theatre at Stratford-on-Avon where we saw an ageing Michael Redgrave playing Hamlet to Googie Withers’s Gertrude. I sat next to him on the long drive back and he talked all the way, passionately, excitedly, about details of design and direction. I had never seen him so happy. In turn, I had never been so happy for him.
Father Armishaw approached the study of English literature in a tense frame of mind. Qualities of genius, taste, originality, creativity, were constantly set at
odds with grossness, convention, feeble imitation and ‘invincible obtuseness’. Then there were the key qualities to be noted: energy, concreteness, melody, sensibility, precision, wit, irony. There was a hint of alternative enlightenment in his lessons that complemented, and rivalled, the spiritual imperatives of Father Doran and Father Connelly. It was dawning on me that one could learn how people should behave towards each other, how one should think and feel, not only through prayer and the sacraments, nor alone through ascetical disciplines, but in realms of literature, poetry, novels, plays. As we explored and discussed the undercurrents of motive, emotion and desire in Father Armishaw’s classes, I sensed a quiet countervailing influence to our seminary formation that felt more like creative tension than dislocation. By then, having read Elected Silence for a second time, I realised that Merton was perhaps more deeply a writer than a monk.
At the end of that summer term I went home to a new three-bedroomed council flat near Barkingside cemetery. Mum had at last been rehoused and she was much happier.
PART FOUR
PUBLIC MAN
110
RETURNING TO COTTON at the beginning of my final year, Father Ryall greeted me as I came in from the bus. He was smiling – a self-conscious boyish grin. He asked me up to his room where he shook my hand and told me that I had been appointed school captain, or ‘Public Man’, a title that had been used in the first century of the school’s existence, and which had now been reinstated. I had also been appointed captain of my house. To be both school captain and house captain simultaneously was an honour that had rarely been bestowed in the history of the college. He said that I should go straight away to see Father Doran as he had something to say to me.
Seminary Boy Page 27