Father Doran was standing as usual by his fireplace fiddling with a pipe. He greeted me affably. He said: ‘I have a feeling that you will blossom with responsibility, John Cornwell. I sometimes think that you lack self-confidence.’ He went on to talk about how well I had done in my studies, and how it seemed to him that I was shaping into an ideal candidate for the priesthood. Dropping a heavy hint, he said that the last Cottonian from my diocese to be school captain had been sent to the English College in Rome. ‘That’s something we may allow ourselves to hope for in your case,’ he said. ‘I am convinced that you would benefit enormously and take the greatest advantage of the Rome experience…’
My happiness knew no bounds. Titles, responsibilities and a promise of proceeding to Rome, England’s premier seminary, for the completion of my studies for ordination. As I took my place at the head of my table in the refectory, and at the head of the entire college, I felt ecstatic. I was assailed by just one scruple: that these honours were in part a reward for having betrayed Paul Moreland.
The duties of the Public Man were mainly devotional and disciplinary. He led morning and night prayers from the back of the church, and grace in the refectory in the absence of the Prefect of Discipline. He led the school in ranks to and from the cloisters on the way to church.
He had a room-sized cubicle in Top Dorm where he wrote up the school chronicle each day. He roused the sixth form every morning, making sure that every boy was down in church in time for the start of morning meditation. The Public Man was a link between Father Doran and the college, and he assisted the Prefect of Discipline in all matters relating to the rules and sanctions. He would ensure that his peer group did not smoke; that they obeyed the Greater Silence. He made sure that the big sixth, the monitors, were doing their jobs. In recognition of all these duties, the Public Man, Father Doran told me, would receive five pounds at the end of the year.
But for me the greatest honour in prospect was the possibility of being sent to Rome at the end of the year to complete my studies. There was only one Roman prof and that was Dr ‘Laz’ Warner. Laz was still taking me for one lesson a week in New Testament Greek. I went to see him after tea early in the term and asked him about the Roman seminary life. He eulogised for an hour about the Venerabile: the ‘best college in the world’, he called it. He talked of the ceremonies in the great basilicas, the works of art, the catacombs, the tombs of the popes. He told me that one only came home from Rome once in seven whole years, at the end of the third year: that, I thought, would suit me very well. Each summer, he said, was spent at an idyllic summer house, a former Trappist monastery, known as Palazzola, twelve miles from Rome and high above the shores of Lake Albano, where the students swam every day and lazed in the Italian sun. My whole being yearned for Rome.
111
IT SEEMED TO me that most of the profs were happy with my elevation to Public Man; especially Father Armishaw who said it was an ‘inspired choice’. Father Grady, my housemaster, was delighted and hinted, with his polite little cough, that it would put me in good stead in future years. There was only one prof who appeared discountenanced and failed to congratulate me. This was Father ‘Bunny’ Manion, the priest who had written ‘poor’ on my botany report. There had been another more recent incident involving Bunny during the Michaelmas term of my first year in the sixth form. During the days when I was lodged in the infirmary I had settled one afternoon with a book on the stoop of the cricket pavilion which looked out over the deserted cricket field just above Top Bounds. Father Manion and one of the Saint Thomas’s first-year boys came walking by: the boy was good-looking, pretty in fact, possibly of mixed English and Asian origin, with a shock of black hair; he was dressed in shorts and rugby shirt and he was holding his arm up a little as if he had been injured. Father Manion, who was also in shorts, had his arm around the boy’s shoulder and appeared to be speaking to him endearingly. This seemed strange for the boy did not look to be in pain and he was walking perfectly well without assistance. I must have stared with blatant curiosity; I had never seen a priest put his arm affectionately around a boy at Cotton. When Father Manion at last noticed my presence he looked shocked; then his eyes blazed, as if to say: ‘Who the hell are you looking at?’ They walked on and disappeared in the direction of Saint Thomas’s, the priest’s arm around the boy all the way.
I knew as I entered my final year that Father Manion disliked me, but I was not unduly anxious, as it seemed to me that he had no power over my career in the college. I put his jaundiced view of me down to nothing more than personal chemistry, and the fact that a former boy of Saint Thomas’s had not been made Public Man.
112
AS I GOT into the rhythm of my new role with all its duties, I was asked by Father Ryall to show consideration to a new member of the teaching staff called Philip Pargeter, a fleshy, clerical-looking young man with limp hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. Philip Pargeter was a deacon at the senior seminary, Oscott, who decided that he needed an extra year before taking the plunge of priestly ordination. The archbishop suggested that he spend a year teaching at Cotton while he pondered his vocation further. He opted to wear lay clothes in the college, but nevertheless looked like a young prelate. Since he was in limbo between the teaching staff and the boys, I was recruited to accompany Deacon Pargeter on country walks to give him exercise. The walks were enjoyable as he had a pleasant turn of wit and was widely read.
I was also asked to take walks with a very civilised, somewhat pedantic elderly man called Eric Partridge, a prolific author of books on English usage and a friend of ‘Whisky’ Roberts, the archivist. Mr Partridge would come to the college to stay for several weeks at a time and loved walking in the valley. On one of our walks we talked about the derivation and usage of the word ‘smog’ for the length of three miles. Father Armishaw considered Partridge’s preoccupations trivial and would show me his latest book, reading out items of pedantry for my amusement.
This role I now had of being a walker for the junior prof Pargeter and the ageing etymologist, in addition to my dual captaincy, gave me an elevated sense of my own self-importance. Smugness, and the undeniable fact that I looked and felt mature for my seventeen years, rising eighteen, were about to contribute to the single most important event of my final year and involved the disgruntled Father Bunny Manion.
One of my duties as captain of Challoner House was to choose and direct a play. This proved an added burden to my already loaded routine, especially as I insisted on designing the set and casting myself in the lead role: Cornwell the actormanager! The piece I chose was a drawing-room farce, See How They Run, in which I played the part of a silly vicar, the Reverend Lionel Toop. On the day before the performance, which was to take place in the evening after supper, Father Grady, Challoner’s housemaster, came to watch the dress rehearsal. He and I were now, as I saw it, on equal terms. He was then in his early thirties. At a pause in the rehearsal we were standing next to each other, chatting pleasantly, when he said: ‘I think the set lacks something. It looks a bit sparse. Why don’t you go over to the profs’ common room, John, and fetch one of the coffee tables.’
I set off across Top Bounds from the assembly hall. I leapt up the Bounds Steps two at a time, past the noticeboards where I chided a knot of boys for idling, and walked purposefully and not a little bumptiously along the clock cloister, turning into the area where the profs had their refectory and common room. I had never entered the profs’ common room during my entire time at Cotton, and I was conscious that I was approaching hallowed territory; through the glazed front doors of the hallway I could see the gardens at the front of the house from an unfamiliar viewpoint. The inner sanctum of the common room lay ahead, door wide open, apparently deserted, and there in the middle of the room was the item described by Father Grady. I strode up to the coffee table and bent down to lift it. At that moment from somewhere behind and to the right of me I heard a sound like the querulous bleat of a trapped sheep.
Looking back I sa
w the figure of Bunny Manion, hands deep in his cassock pockets, his face vermilion, his pale blue eyes starting from his head. His presence had been hidden by the open door and he was standing well back by the side of the fireplace. Before I could apologise and explain my presence and my errand, he cried out in a shrill voice: ‘Never, never, in all my years in this place has a boy come into this room without a by-your-leave. How dare a boy walk boldly into this room without knocking, asking permission and explaining the nature of his business…’
I felt a confused mix of angry emotions. Here I was, on the verge of manhood, accorded respect both by superiors and peers, being referred to as a disembodied third person: ‘How dare a boy!’ Then there was the injustice of the thing: I was in the room legitimately. Certainly I should have asked his permission had I known that he was present. But what hit me bang in the solar plexus of my pride was being referred to as ‘boy’, twice in a single sentence, and with relish; for I had the distinct impression that he was exultant.
I should have adopted a demeanour of humility and selfrecrimination. I should have said: ‘I’m so sorry, sir, I really did think that the room was empty…’ Had I said something along these lines, events, and perhaps my whole life, might have turned out differently.
What I did was this: I slammed the coffee table down on the floor with a bang and rounded on him. I was head and shoulders above him, and judging by the frightened look on his face (not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Bunny’), my demeanour was obviously menacing. There he stood: the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth.
‘How dare I?’ I roared. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous! You know full well that I couldn’t see you lurking back there. I came in because Father Grady asked me to pick up a coffee table for our play rehearsal. And how dare you speak to me in such a manner!’
I was conscious as I let rip that my eyes were bulging and my fists were clenched. I concluded, pompously, disastrously: ‘And I am not a boy. I am the Public Man.’ With which I picked up the coffee table and made my exit.
Only in retrospect do I see that my action was learnt behaviour. The years of discipline at Cotton had been a poor antidote to my hot-headed maternal role model, but there was something else beyond the knee-jerk anger of my adolescent injured merit. I barely knew it at that moment, but I would have ample opportunity to ponder the incident’s significance and consequences in the coming months. I was saying an emphatic ‘No!’ to acquiescence in the face of humiliation. I was saying ‘No!’ to the ‘Little Way’ of Saint Thérèse, who repeatedly rejoiced in such opportunities to eat dirt.
Father Manion, I learnt later, hastened as fast as his legs could carry him to Father Doran’s office to recount the outrage. According to Deacon Pargeter, who reported back to me the agitated discussion in the profs’ refectory that evening, Bunny Manion asserted to the assembled staff over their soup: ‘He marches into the common room without so much as a by-your-leave and when I remonstrate with him reasonably, he bawls at me, fists clenched as if to hit me: “I am not a boy, I am the Public Man!”’ The story, according to Deacon Pargeter, prompted gasps of horror and nervous laughter: although not on the part of Father Doran.
That evening Father Grady asked me to come to his room. ‘Oh dear,’ he said ruefully, ‘you’ve caused a terrible brouhaha.’ I tried to explain the circumstances, and he seemed to appreciate what had happened. But he made it clear that I had been guilty of an act of insolence that would admit of no excuse or explanation. Father Doran had told Father Grady that I should apologise at once to Father Manion without reservation, or pack my bags.
So I apologised to the priest on the Bounds Steps the next day as he made his way across to the main building from Saint Thomas’s. He took my apology with poor grace; with such a sense of chronic outraged dignity, in fact, that I felt like punching him. My feelings probably showed. I suspected that he was disappointed that I had apologised, devoutly wishing me to be on a train home.
113
THAT I HAD offended not just one schoolmaster in a trivial incident but the entire Roman clerical caste, became clear to me in the course of the following days. Only one prof, apart from Father Grady, offered me a straw of understanding and sympathy, and that was Father Armishaw. But our friendship, too, was about to become a casualty of the precarious situation in which I had landed myself.
I went up to his room after night prayers two days after the house play. It was cold; he was having difficulty with the fire, and he was sitting huddled in his cloak. I asked him if he had heard about the rumpus. He took the stem of the pipe from his mouth and gave me a broad grin. ‘Heard about it? I imagine by now that it’s being hotly discussed in the offices of the Holy Inquisition in Rome.’
‘I didn’t see him in the room.’
‘It’s all right. You don’t have to explain. Father Manion has a short fuse. Anybody would think you’d made love to Mère Saint Luc in the clock cloister. But that’s not the point. The point is, Cornwell, how you behave when you find yourself at odds with clerical authority. What you do not do is lose your rag…Anyway, not to worry, life is full of little irritations and disappointments.’
With this he went over to his gramophone and selected a record. ‘What with one thing and another…’ he said, sighing to himself. ‘I don’t know. I fancy some Mozart. How about you?’
Father Armishaw never got as far as putting the record on the turntable. We were disturbed by a harsh rap on the door.
Before he could call out: ‘Come in,’ or even walk to the door to open it, Father Doran burst in.
The priest was white in the face and trembling. He did not look at Father Armishaw. He just glared at me, shaking a finger in my direction. ‘Go to your dormitory this instant,’ he ordered. ‘I cannot have a situation where a boy is alone in a master’s room after night prayers.’ There it was again, that de-personalised, third-person ‘boy!’
This time I was not in the least angry. I felt entirely cool and in charge. I turned to Father Armishaw, who was standing with a faintly amused look of surprise, and said: ‘Thank you, sir. Goodnight.’ As I passed Father Doran, and looked him directly in the face, I had a mischievous urge to come out with a catchphrase from the popular Carry On films at that time: ‘Ding Dong! Anything Wrong!’ Instead I said politely: ‘I’m sorry, sir. Goodnight.’ My survival instincts were in working order.
As I made my way to my cubicle in Top Dorm I felt as if a thread had loosened in the fabric of my vocation; it might take a long time unravelling, but it seemed to me that the process was irreversible. What was the value, I asked myself as I lay in bed that night, of all the prayers, and Masses, and commitment to liturgy and the divine office, and celibacy, and meditation, if you ended up treating people like things rather than as persons? Had Father Manion and Father Doran once learnt all those lessons about forbearance, understanding, charity and respect, and forgotten them? Or had they never taken them in? That, prompted by injured pride, was my first thought. My next inclined towards self-castigation. Surely it had been childish, as well as unrealistic, not to accept the rules of clerical hierarchy. In losing my temper with Father Manion I had shown not how grown-up I was, but how immature: still a boy! And yet, no, on reflection I was not prepared to be acquiescent. Perhaps I could be: but I would not.
114
FATHER DORAN never spoke to me again. And for all the trouble it had occasioned, my ridiculous play, See How they Run, had not impressed the anonymous reviewer in the college magazine. He had judged the performance ‘amusing enough…which better done could have been a truly hilarious affair’. My own performance was described as ‘a little too deliberate’ and the rest of the cast were ‘inaudible from bad elocution’. Despite all the campaigns for speech purged of local accents, Cottonians seemed intent on speaking in a way that came natural to them.
My sessions of spiritual direction and Father Doran’s evening talks seemed increasingly dry and tedious to me after the Manion incident. Yet my spiritual
life took a surprising turn for the better during my remaining months at Cotton. This was not so much due to the influence of a priest as, yet again, to a book.
I was still a member of the League of Christ the King. Sitting in Father Grady’s room during one of our sessions, I noticed a new volume on his shelves entitled Jesus in His Time, by Daniel-Rops. It was a long book, five hundred pages, and the preface claimed that its object was to study the life of Christ as if it were the life of any other historical person. Daniel-Rops was a distinguished French historian who had attempted to place Jesus biographically within a social and political as well as a religious milieu. He had studied the Gospels as historical documents rather than points for pious meditation. He brought to bear a wealth of parallel sources, while making many personal journeys to Palestine and Jerusalem.
I asked Father Grady whether I could borrow his copy, and his face lit up. ‘It’s a wonderful book,’ he said. ‘You will never think about Jesus in the same way again.’
I carried it around with me for a month until he begged for it back.
Father Grady was right. After reading Jesus in His Time I was never to see Christ again in the same light. I felt that for the first time I was encountering the ‘real’ Jesus, a man of striking sincerity and simplicity, yet a master of every event: firm, unswayed by applause or opposition. He had authority, and also tenderness: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ and he could be brilliantly ironic: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’ He could be angry, too, and radical. ‘This is a man,’ Daniel-Rops wrote, ‘with blood in his veins, not a pallid conventional seminarian.’ Pallid conventional seminarian! It was the first time I had read the word ‘seminarian’ employed as a term of abuse.
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