I began to meditate on the character of Jesus neither as the sweet Galilean of the Key Heaven, nor as the moral finger-wagging creation of Father Doran, but as a man of flesh and blood; a man who put love above the laws of the prophets, and who revealed his preferences for the poor and the dispossessed; a man who gathered women about him, and to whom women were attracted. Daniel-Rops asserted that the psychological portrait of Jesus of the Gospels is so powerful that it can be said to provide one of the most striking proofs of the veracity of scripture. He cited Gide: ‘The best intentions make the worst literature. ’ The Gospel writers had drawn a portrait of perfect virtue without insipidity, and perfect charity without sentimentality. Yet how should one think of him also as God? Who did he think that he was? Who did he say that he was? The divinity, the godliness, of Christ now seemed to me so problematic that I put it to the back of my mind. Like my vocation I put it on hold. The book was a timely antidote to a recurring suspicion that the spiritual life was unreal, a state of make-believe. Danel-Rops wrote:
Nowhere is the perfect balance of his character more apparent than in Jesus’s sense of reality. It is one of the traits which does most to humanise him for us and it is continually in evidence. There are visionaries for whom the real world hardly seems to exist, they live on that borderland where the dream and the experience merge, where madness lies in wait to open the door to their soaring ambitions…But there is no trace of it in the words and the thought of Jesus; his feet are firmly on the ground and the visible world is real.
My spiritual life in those final months at Cotton was dominated by a down-to-earth image of Jesus, who haunted my prayers and meditations, and my reading of the Gospel stories.
115
MY LAST WEEKS at Cotton passed swiftly and busily as I sat the examinations that would qualify us for university entrance should we fail to make it through to the senior seminary and to the priesthood. I seldom considered my graduation to senior seminary, nor how I was feeling about leaving Cotton. I already suspected that I was not to be sent to Rome, but I had been told nothing; it was possible that I could end up in any of England’s four senior seminaries.
My last important duty as Public Man was to greet the visitor of honour on prize-giving day and show him around the college. He was a stout, pink-faced auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Westminster, sparkling with interest and humour. It seemed odd to me to be talking with a bishop who was not being distantly grave and ceremonious.
Mum came up from London for the special day; it was her first and only visit. Uncle Mike drove her in his temperamental Vauxhall, taking seven hours including time for break-downs. Mum looked smart in a fashionable flared cream-white coat. Uncle Mike looked odd. His tie and collar were loose, and I counted six ballpoint pens in his top pocket. During the speeches in the assembly hall he kept his trilby hat firmly on the back of his head.
Father Doran managed to get through the entire day without exchanging a single word or glance with me. Nor did he speak to Mum. The bishop had taken a liking to me. He evidently asked Father Doran where I was bound after Cotton, for it was from the bishop that I got confirmation that I was to be sent to Oscott, Cotton’s sister college in Birmingham. The bishop said, as he wished me goodbye: ‘What a pity you’re not going to Rome, you would have enjoyed it so much.’ It was obvious to me that Father Doran had intimated my disgrace, and that it was going to dog me for the rest of my clerical life.
On the evening before the last day of the college year Father Doran entertained the big sixth to dinner in the drawing room of the old hall. This was an annual event intended to reveal to working-class ordinands the mysteries of civilised dining. It was a beautifully proportioned room with a semicircular bay, regency-striped wallpaper, and a copy of the Monarch of the Glen on the wall. Over the marble fireplace there were the official framed documents granting the college its coat of arms. The table was laid up with a variety of cutlery and glasses. It was a four-course affair, ending with cheese, the nuns bobbing and bowing in silence as they waited upon us.
Father Doran told us how to use our cutlery, starting from the outside and working inwards. He served two kinds of wine and gave a little lecture on how we should savour the aroma, and drink sparingly, not ‘just slurp it beck’. He said he was once invited to the officers’ mess of a USAF base during the war and an unscrupulous colonel spiked his beer with gin. He crashed his car in a ditch as a result and narrowly missed being jailed for drunk driving. Nobody else seemed to think the story funny, but the image of a plastered Father Doran behind the wheel amused me and I laughed out loud. My companions looked embarrassed; Father Doran looked down at his plate with pursed lips.
‘Never touch spirits or fortified wines such as port,’ he said, ‘except after the age of forty and then only as a medicine.’ He went on to say how impressed he was with the archbishop, ‘who makes a glass of wine last an entire meal’. Priests, he told us, because of their lonely lives were often prone to alcoholism; but this could be avoided by the formation of good habits early on.
At this point I decided to tell a story about how my Uncle Mike had given me a glass of very strong ‘scrumpy’ cider from Somerset, and how I had passed out under the table. As I attempted to relate this to the entire table, Father Doran, who had just lit a cigarette, went into a coughing fit so that I was effectively drowned out. When he finished, I remarked quietly: ‘Actually, excessive smoking is not such a good idea either.’
The following day I waited for a call to receive my five pounds from Father Doran’s hands for my services as Public Man. He did not send for me. In the end I asked Father Ryall if he would let Father Doran know that I wanted to see him. Father Ryall invited me to sit in his room while he went down to the profs’ common room. When he came back he said that the headmaster was not available.
I was not to receive the five pounds that had been awarded to school captains ever since the end of the war. I wanted Father Doran to tell me to my face, and give his reasons. He intended me, though, to draw my own conclusions. Father Ryall looked sympathetic. He said I could have the run of his room for the evening. I played his record of Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, but I soon got bored and went down to the sixth form common room and joined James and Derek. They were talking about their holiday plans, but I hardly heard them. I was angry. Five pounds would have been a welcome sum for my mother, and I had already promised it to her. I wondered what Father Armishaw would have to say about it.
I left the common room and climbed the stairs to his room. I thought he might ask me in on this my last evening at Cotton, despite Father Doran’s proscription. The door was wide open; he was sitting at his desk reading a book. When he saw me he rose at once and put an unlit pipe into his mouth. As he came to the threshold there was something forcedly jovial about the angle of the pipe-stem between his teeth; his eyes were apologetic. He sounded as if he was speaking through a brace: ‘Oh, yes, Cornwell, you’re off to Oscott. I’m sure I’ll hear news of you.’ He shook my hand vigorously and immediately retreated, shutting the door firmly. I stood staring at the door, fit to cry. He had been a true father-figure when I most needed one. I needed him now. But he had submitted unconditionally to Father Doran’s prohibition of lone visits to masters’ rooms in the evening.
Many years later, when the terrible extent of Catholic priestly abuse was exposed, I found myself wondering about that moment outside Father Armishaw’s closed door. Was Father Doran’s repression necessary in order to thwart McCallum’s brand of emancipation? Did a priest have to choose between being a Father Doran and a Father McCallum? Was there no alternative to prudent repression and self-seeking ‘emancipation’? Abuse crises were nothing new in the Catholic Church, they had recurred down the centuries, imprinting themselves indelibly on the folk memory of the priestly caste; shaping its ideals of detachment. Religious superiors cannot be spared responsibility for enforcing prudence. Yet prudence, even in the form of a closed door, carries the risk of wounding and self-wounding conseque
nces. On the night Father Doran ordered me out of Father Armishaw’s room I had felt the bond of my vocation loosening. On my last night at Cotton, as I walked away from Father Armishaw’s closed door, that premonition was confirmed. I imagined Father Armishaw sitting down again on the other side of the door, staring into an empty hearth, and I sorrowed for him and for the priesthood.
The next day, my last at Cotton, I rose while it was still dark and went outside. I sat in the cold air on the steps above Lower Bounds. As the birds began to sing and the sunlight touched the distant crests of the landscape, I took my leave of the valley. I was ready to go. Yet I sensed a painful nostalgia in prospect: ad multos annos…ad multos annos… Five years earlier I had travelled to this valley, a recently reformed hooligan, rescued from ruin by an austere parish priest who avoided personal engagement with all but the very old. Without Father Cooney, without Cotton, and without Father Doran and his staff, my prospects had been dismal. Cotton had saved me, and made me. As the sun rose over the valley, I had an intuition that Cotton would possess me for the rest of my life.
RECONCILIATIONS
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FIVE WEEKS AFTER leaving Cotton I travelled to a suburb of the city of Birmingham to enter Oscott College, a neo-Gothic edifice with a proliferation of towers, spires and gables. The famous nineteenth-century Catholic architect, Augustus Welby Pugin, had designed much of the college which with leaking roofs and crumbling plaster, was in need of restoration. Pugin was also responsible for designing many of the chapel’s decaying vestments.
Oscott had been a focus of the rebirth of Catholicism in England. In 1852 John Henry Newman preached his famous ‘Second Spring Sermon’ from the chapel pulpit, anticipating a great revival of the Catholic faith in England. By the late 1950s, however, the college, albeit filled to capacity, had an autumnal atmosphere. In my class, known as First Year Philosophy, were seven other Cottonians as well as six or seven mature men who were some years out of school. There were about a hundred and twenty students in the college and we were obliged to dress in cassocks and Roman collars at all times within the buildings and the grounds. I had bought a celluloid collar like Father Cooney’s that could be wiped clean with a damp cloth before I went to bed at night. However loose I tried to wear it, I felt that it was slowly choking me.
To my dismay, James Rolle and Peter Gladden had decided during their summer holiday not to proceed to the senior seminary. They did not reply to my letters, and I was never to see them again. Such defections between junior and senior seminary, even on the part of the most promising priestly candidates, were not uncommon. For the sake of his prospective sacristy boys I was glad that Peter had decided not to persevere. James, I heard some years later, got married and raised a family. Derek had been kept back at Cotton for a further year to improve his Latin.
At Oscott we each had our own sparsely furnished room. Unless given express permission we were not allowed outside the grounds. When we did gain permission, usually to make a visit to the local shops or walk on the nearby common, we were required to go in groups of three, wearing black suits, black raincoats and Roman collars. We were instructed to walk one in front and two behind, or vice versa, so that we should not ‘crowd’ the pavements and inconvenience other pedestrians. The mature students, many of whom had spent time in the armed services, seemed to endure these disciplines with good humour. I heard one of them say: ‘Seminary’s a doddle after sar’nt-major!’ We had manual labour, mostly weeding and raking leaves, once a week. There was no obligation to take exercise or play games, and there was no gymnasium.
The elderly rector was suffering from spasmodic senile dementia. He would address students by the names of men who had long ago departed the college, and even this life. His Masses were occasionally invalid; some days he missed out the consecration altogether. College discipline was in the charge of the vice-rector, a bustling martinet of a man, who had spent the summer previous to my arrival studying the regimes in the strictest Spanish seminaries in order to tighten up discipline at Oscott. He would patrol the outside of the building after 10.15 at night to ensure that lights were out in every room. After supper each evening he would stand outside the refectory accepting apologies from any who had broken the rules of the house: there were usually about a dozen self-confessing miscreants. The teaching staff comprised ten ‘professors’, who seemed languid and mournful. There were heavy bars on the windows of their ground-floor studies off the main cloister: to keep unwanted visitors out.
Many of my companions appeared to be thriving. Yet I was not entirely alone in finding the regime difficult. Every few weeks a student would slip quietly away without farewells. By my first winter I became afflicted with a form of depressive introversion, so overwhelming that I found it difficult to concentrate or sleep. The condition was exacerbated by the influence of our ascetical theology tutor, a gentle, dough-faced individual called Father Peter Lawler. Father Lawler counselled moment-to-moment ‘recollection’. He gave us instructions on how to dispose our minds as we studied, took a walk, enjoyed a view or read a book. ‘It’s important to time yourselves,’ he said. ‘Stop every five minutes for one minute’s reflection on what you have read…Always read with your eye on the clock…’ Most students cheerfully ignored all this. I took it seriously.
I was lonely, but my agitated interiority made me a poor companion. I found it difficult to make new friends with students of my own age, including former Cottonians. In our new setting my old companions seemed stand-offish. Avoidance of special friendships was taken even more seriously at Oscott than at Cotton. I was interested in making friends with some of the mature students in the college, but they regarded the boys from Cotton as ‘mere boys’. I fell in with a set of garrulous would-be intellectuals in first-year theology who would sit around in one of our rooms, smoking and drinking instant coffee after lunch. We talked abstruse topics. One of our group was obsessed with ethical dilemmas presented in our moral textbook, H. Noldin SJ’s Summa Theologiae Moralis. For example, would one break the Eucharistic fast by chewing a piece of mahogany? Or swallowing dust? Or by accidentally swallowing a gnat? Would it be possible to eat without sin as much as one liked on a fast day by travelling from Louvain in Belgium to Oscott, via Paris, thus passing through different canonical abstinence zones?
I made friends with a mature student who had been an army officer and had read natural sciences at Cambridge. He broke the rules of the house to entertain me in his room after lights out (he covered his windows with wartime blackout material). He always had an open bottle of claret hidden in his wardrobe and he was never short of cigarettes. As he poured the wine, he would murmur ceremoniously: ‘Drink up, it’s sacramental!’ I confided my problem of self-consciousness to him, and he told me of the French theologian Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘practice of self-forgetfulness’. ‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘to forget the self in a sympathetic union with all men.’ It was this kind of language, ‘the practice of self-forgetfulness’, that drove me straight back into my self. But there was something unctuous about the way he said ‘sympathetic union’. I was not aware of a homosexual clique in the college, but I suspected without evidence that he was a homosexual when he dropped me suddenly for an effeminate-looking youth, also in first-year philosophy.
The six-year seminary course of studies began with two years’ metaphysics. I found the numbered-paragraph spoon-feeding of this abstract mode of thought tedious. We were also dictated a potted version of the multi-volume history of philosophy by Frederick Coppleston SJ. Most of the major philosophers in the history of Western thought were set up to be knocked down by our superior ‘scholastic’ critiques. We were not encouraged to read original texts. The mature students were mostly content with the spoon-feeding since they had been away from books for some years. I managed to cadge a lot of cigarettes and alcohol by helping older students with their shaky Latin. I was getting through more than twenty cigarettes a day. I started to suffer from a stomach ache which the college doctor thou
ght was ‘an incipient ulcer’.
We had a well-stocked library that included not only theological works, but aslo large collections of ‘secular’ books, mostly donated by wealthy Catholics in the hope that future priests would read widely. Some of us did. I began to read and to be influenced by recent British philosophy as an antidote to metaphysics. I started to read anthropology, history of science, sociology and biography. Due to Father Armishaw’s encouragement at Cotton, I was interested in astronomy and cosmology. I became a library cormorant, but my reading lacked direction and opportunity for discussion.
I missed Father Armishaw’s subtle intelligence: his encouragement of independent thinking and debate, and of exploring different sides of a question. I missed reading and talking literature; I desperately missed listening to music and choral music. Oscott’s music was exclusively Gregorian chant, and although it was done expertly and possessed an austere beauty, it lacked the rich variety of the four-part descant motets we sang at Cotton. We were not allowed radios or gramophones in our rooms. The landscape of our private grounds, bordered by a busy highway and a Catholic cemetery, was flat and enclosed by trees. I felt in exile from Cotton’s valley with its wild weather and steep woods.
The prospect of six years at Oscott stretched ahead like a life sentence. We stayed in the college for the whole of Easter and Christmas, and rarely went home. On my occasional visits to London, Mum and the family seemed to treat me distantly and uncertainly. Back in Barkingside I spent a lot of time pacing the streets and public parks, saying my beads which I held inside my clerical raincoat pocket. One day in Valentine’s Park, Ilford, a girl passed me who took my breath away. I turned and followed her at a distance. The beads of the rosary continued to pass through my fingers, but I was looking at her swaying hips and her head of beautiful dark hair.
Seminary Boy Page 29