By the beginning of my second year at Oscott I felt that I had been buried alive. Like Thomas à Kempis I was attempting to claw my way out of the tomb. In second-year philosophy I began to experience sexual torment, quite different from those earlier years at Cotton. I was thinking about women, and my fantasies were mostly fed by films I was seeing in Birmingham. I would sneak out of the college and down to the city centre, covering my clerical collar with a scarf. I never once joined the queue after supper to confess these misdemeanours.
At Easter during my second year I received a reprimand from the vice-rector. I must mend my ways or a poor report would be sent to the Bishop of Brentwood, my sponsor. I forestalled further acrimony by leaving of my own accord after a brief interview with the rector, who seemed to think I was somebody called Andrew. The vice-rector, who knew exactly who I was, was relieved. And so I left, without saying goodbye to my companions. I slipped out of the college while the community Mass was in progress. I travelled all the way to Ilford wearing my black suit and Roman collar. I took it off at home in the presence of Mum.
‘I always thought you were acting a part when you got to that Oscott,’ she said. ‘It never was you.’
Standing in front of the mirror, she tried the collar and black stock round her own neck. It was a terrifying sight: Canon Sheehy-Egan. In a Dublin brogue she cried: ‘Y’are all sinners! And y’are all goin’ ter Hell!’ We burst out laughing.
The next day I called on Father Cooney in his presbytery. He seemed unaffected by the news. He said: ‘Ah, wisswiss…Do you say so! Well now. Keep the Faith.’ Then he shut the door. I was never to see him again.
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DUE TO COTTON’S education I earned a place at Oxford University to study English literature, supported on a full state grant. At Oxford I was intellectually and imaginatively stretched. I continued to practise as a Catholic although I no longer attended Mass every day, nor did I pray regularly. Increasingly I was finding a different kind of spiritual sustenance in literature, especially in the Romantic poets: Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, reviving memories of the landscapes around Cotton and a sense of a spirit ‘that rolls through all things’. I went to Mass on Sundays, but my devotions were as perfunctory as a prayer wheel. The scourge of malign interiority I had experienced at Oscott receded. I was living life on the surface, going to parties and meeting girls. The Cottonian misogynist attitudes evaporated on getting to know them. I loved dancing. I went to dances in the colleges and a weekly nurses’ ‘hop’ at the Radcliffe Hospital. We jived to the strains of the Marvelletes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, and to Jimmy Dean’s ‘Big Bad John’. We twisted to Chubby Checker. Through my years at Oxford, Cotton seemed a world away, but with the power to affect me – like a strong, emotionally charged dream. There were nights when I dreamt that I was back there, trying to find my place in the refectory or the church, and being turned away. Somebody would say: ‘You don’t belong here any more.’ And I would wake feeling miserable and abandoned. I thought of Father Armishaw sometimes when we revisited in university tutorials some of the texts I had studied in his class.
At last I wrote to him. It was a long descriptive letter, a result of many drafts. I told him that I was disappointed that F. R. Leavis had no influence in the English faculty at Oxford, but it was just an excuse to tempt him into a correspondence. He wrote a few lines in response, telling me that he himself was no longer enamoured of Leavis. He recommended that I read C. S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism as an antidote to Leavis’s ‘stocktaking’. The important thing, he told me, was to learn how to read and write. I was crestfallen that he had not congratulated me on having got into Oxford. There was nothing about himself or Cotton. Only when I read Lewis’s book did I realise that Father Armishaw’s advice had not been an insult. I never wrote again.
By the time I went on to Cambridge as a post-graduate student everybody was dancing to the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’, but I had become a fan of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The times were indeed a-changing. I had stopped going to Communion, because I no longer went to confession. As a young man in love in the early 1960s, I could not make a firm purpose of amendment, while failing to abide by the mores of the Catholic Church on sex outside marriage; but I was convinced that my lapse would be temporary. I missed the Eucharist. Sometimes I dreamt that I was receiving Communion and would wake in tears. Then, as a result of a crisis, came a decisive, conscientious decision that had been creeping up on me for some time.
I was a member of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where John Milton and Charles Darwin had been students. During my third term at Christ’s I had spent many hours in the college library acquainting myself with two distinct world pictures. I had been reading, more or less side by side, Paradise Lost and The Origin of Species. The underlying tension between these two versions of reality, I realised, had been forcing me into a kind of intellectual schizophrenia.
One afternoon I was walking across a stretch of grassy open ground called Parker’s Piece in central Cambridge; it was a sunny day and there were students sitting around on the grass reading and chatting. In the distance I could see the neo-Gothic tower of the Catholic church on Hills Road where I still attended Mass occasionally, without going to Communion. The sight of the tower, rising huge and solid, filled me with unbearable tension. The tower represented for me at that moment two irreconcilable choices. My old Cotton dilemma, make-believe versus reality, had returned.
One world picture involved the supernatural realm beyond the veil of appearances where resided the Holy Trinity, the angels and the saints, and the dead from the beginning of time – in hell with the Devil and all his demons, or suffering in purgatory, or enjoying celestial happiness in the presence of God. Here the powers of light were pitched against the powers of darkness. Here was the Creator, who sustained from moment to moment all of his creation in being. Here the shape of human history was determined, depending on the extent to which we appealed to the mediating power of the Virgin Mary. This sacred cosmology, moreover, was entirely subject to belief and imagination rather than direct empirical knowledge and reason.
The other world picture, admittedly skewed by my youthful Cambridge optimism and sense of certitude, acknowledged the wonder and mystery of the vast material universe, and the emergence, through blind evolution, of the stupendous fertility of life on the planet. It paid homage to the dignity, genius and resourcefulness of humankind. It was a world picture that could be constructed and perceived by direct knowledge, underpinned by the natural sciences and unaided reason. The shape of human history, within this world picture, depended not on contending unearthly powers, but on the responsibility of individuals and groups of individuals working out their destinies in communities and societies.
It struck me that I could no longer hold these mutually exclusive world pictures in parallel, let alone reconcile them. What was more, while science allowed for scepticism and healthy falsification of theory, Catholic truth made outrageous and dogmatic demands on my acquiescence, and with everlasting penalties. No intelligent, educated Catholic, it seemed to me, was spared the choice that had to be made between these contrasting world pictures. On that day I made my choice. I abandoned the Faith. It was a decision that seemed to bring instant relief. There were no pangs of conscience and no heartsearching. Importantly, it suited all the plans I had for myself; how I wanted to lead my life.
I did not renounce my belief in the historical reality of Jesus Christ, as described by Daniel-Rops, nor did I entirely renounce that great Gospel account of the Sermon on the Mount. But was he God? Was there a God? If there was a God, I reasoned, He must be a God who lay beyond all rational understanding, all proof and all human description. He was a God who was indifferent to the universe, detached from the emergence and evolution of life. He was remote from the problems of evil and suffering in the world. I was none of God’s business, nor He mine: I no longer believed in a life after death when I would come to know Him face to face. I had become an agno
stic. Yet what had happened to all that accumulated religious experience at Cotton? The years of daily ritual, spiritual reading, meditation, the disciplines of spirituality? The shaping of my younger soul? On that last morning, sitting above the valley, I knew that Cotton had claimed part of my soul. That day in Cambridge I decided to bury that claim deeply.
This is not the place for the narrative of a life journey that, twenty years on, would find me a returning Catholic, except to say that my marriage to a Catholic woman, and the birth of our children, whom she brought up as Catholics, kept the spark of Faith alive in me by proxy. But there was always a thread, tenuous, subconscious, that led back to Cotton.
In the meantime there had been rumblings in Rome, which to some presaged damaging storms, and to others, rain for famished lands. The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s shook the Catholic Church to its foundations, and the reverberations were certainly felt at Oscott and at Cotton. Half of the twenty students who started in our year at Oscott did not make it to the priesthood. Of those who did, half had abandoned their calling by 1980; they were part of the army, a hundred-thousand strong, that left the priesthood during the 1970s. Those who remained, both profs and students, have to the best of my knowledge remained good and faithful priests: some in parishes, some in seminaries, and some on remote missions in Africa and South America.
The Cotton staff priests of my time were all of them faithful survivors except Father McCallum, whose predatory ways were soon exposed. He was removed from Cotton shortly after I left and died of a heart attack during the 1960s. Father Doran was appointed to a parish in Oxford, where he died in the early 1990s. When I was doing research in Oxford in the early 1970s, I telephoned him to suggest that we meet. He said: ‘Give me at least a month’s warning for an appointment, and not at all during Lent.’ Lent was three weeks away. I never attempted to contact him again. He was said to be a dutiful parish priest, if a little dry.
And what of Cotton itself? In the 1950s there were five minor seminaries in England, several hundred in Western Europe, and more than seventy in the United States. Most were filled to capacity and the system appeared to be expanding. By the late 1960s liberated social attitudes and a growing youth culture had set the minor seminary formation at odds with the times. Many boys were failing to proceed to senior seminary and the priesthood after minor seminary. As a result of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, moreover, bishops had doubts about recruiting boy ordinands. By the late 1970s the minor seminaries were as abandoned as the monasteries of England in the late Middle Ages. Cotton attempted for several years to make it as a regular boarding school for Catholic boys who had no intention of becoming priests, but it never got over its long reputation as a minor seminary. It closed its doors in 1987.
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FATHER ARMISHAW retired from Cotton in 1976 and was appointed to a parish in Oxfordshire. I went without appointment to call on him in the summer of 1983. He was living in a bungalow by the side of his church. It was a noisy spot: at the end of the overgrown garden was a high wire fence marking the perimeter of an American air base, and every few minutes a jet aircraft took off.
He was much altered physically, deeply stooped and grey. He recognised me instantly at the doorstep. At first he was tense. He said that he was ‘tied up’ and could not entertain me. But eventually he invited me into his kitchen. I had arrived at noon and I was still there at six in the evening. He talked mostly about Cotton in the old days. There were a lot of harmless anecdotes about Cottonian characters, and especially about Father Piercy’s genius with a screwdriver and spanner; but nothing personal. I asked him at one point whether there had been repercussions for him after Father Doran had ordered me from his room. He shrugged and said: ‘Time heals most things.’ Then he changed the subject.
He had lost his aptitude for neatness. He lived in a muddle, surrounded by his hundreds of books, now dust-laden. He had a huge hi-fi set, and was neglecting Beethoven, Bach and Mozart for Elgar and Holst. His sharp and attentive mind seemed to have sunk into a state of discursive reminiscence. He asked me no questions about myself, whether I was married or had children. No talk about books, or about music. The light seemed to have gone out of his eyes; but he was a surviving disciplined priest. He showed me with pride around his church, and we knelt together in silent prayer for a few minutes before I departed.
I saw him rarely through the 1980s; then he called me in 1989. I guessed that it had taken an effort. He wanted to see me. I began to visit him more regularly. Eventually we would talk on the phone two or three times a week. He was lonely, and he had overcome the embarrassment that prevented him from reaching out. He always announced himself in a low voice: ‘It is I…’ He wanted to dispense with the formality of ‘Father Armishaw’, and yet to announce himself as ‘Vincent’ was a step too far. Much of his conversation was an evasion of intimacy. He liked to have a minor quarrel about historical dates or the meanings of words. He liked to ‘settle questions’ that had arisen in his mind. He had never ceased to be amused by Eric Partridge, the etymologist who used to visit Cotton. So a phone call usually went like this: ‘It is I…Can you settle a question in my mind?’ he would say, imitating Partridge’s plaintive voice: ‘Would it be true to say that “as yet” is redundant in a sentence such as “his mind was not as yet completely ossified”?’ Then he would chuckle.
After turning down repeated invitations, he eventually came to stay in our home; then he became a regular visitor. We found him shy before strangers, self-centred and a little crotchety; there was never enough salt on his food (although he suffered from hypertension); he could never get my wife’s name right: she was always Danielle instead of Gabrielle. He was fond of Gabrielle, I could tell, but he found it difficult to look at her directly. He was uncomfortable around women.
By this time I had returned to the Church and I had questions for him. But he disliked talking about spiritual and doctrinal matters. He refused to discuss the divide between so-called traditionalists and liberals. He seemed to harbour the worst kind of traditionalist attitudes. He confessed to me on one occasion that he had angered a forty-year-old woman parishioner by telling her that she should not go to Communion because she had not been to confession all year. As a result, he told me indignantly, she had stopped going to church. He said to me once: ‘I sit in that confessional box every Saturday, and hardly anyone comes.’
He once told my wife that being late for Mass constituted ‘a mortal sin’. It was not said tongue-in-cheek. Talking of the scarce vocations to the priesthood, he said: ‘The absence of priests is due to all those boys who failed to be born through contraception and abortion.’ We stared at him across the dinner table, stunned into silence.
In more recent years, as the scandal of priestly abuse of minors spread like a bushfire across America, I told him about Father McCallum. He appeared uncomfortable. It was obvious that he knew about the priest’s tendencies and deplored them; but the need to close ranks against the laity, whatever the issue, reasserted itself. He refused to discuss Father McCallum directly. He said: ‘If a priest must have sex, why the bloody hell doesn’t he get himself a woman, or a man for that matter? And leave the kids alone.’
I asked him on that occasion whether he thought that Cotton with its isolation had trapped boys in immaturity, ‘infantalised them’. He looked at me intensely for a moment, almost as he did when I was boy. ‘But from all you’ve told me,’ he growled, ‘you were better off at Cotton than at home. Where would you be without Cotton?’ I guessed he was thinking, too: ‘Where would I be without Cotton?’ Yes, where might he have been?
We never mentioned these matters again, but occasionally he betrayed his sorrow and fear that all he had lived for, all that he had spent his life serving, was in peril, if not in vain. He said once that the corps of the clergy, as he had known it, was about to ‘disappear over the precipice.’
In the summer of 2002, aged seventy-seven, Father Armishaw was about to move to Aston Hall, a ret
irement home for priests in the Birmingham archdiocese. He wanted to give me his books; the room he had been assigned at the home was too small to house a personal library. Two or three days before the move I went to Carterton with a van to collect them: they exuded the tobacco scent of his old room at Cotton. We sat together drinking tea out of mugs in the empty room that had been his study for more than twenty-five years. I could see that he was grieving the loss of his books. I said: ‘Your books will always be in our home, and our home is your home. So they will always be with you.’
He replied: ‘I’ve worked out the precise number of miles from Aston Hall to your front door.’ It was the closest he had ever come to an admission of emotional attachment to us.
Three days later I had a call from the Aston nuns who cared for the retired priests to say that he was seriously ill in hospital. He had not spent a single night at the home, having collapsed on arrival. He had been suffering for some time from cancer of the lymph glands.
I went to see him in Stafford general hospital. He was on a noisy public ward with an unwatched television blaring. He was propped up on the pillows and did not seem to be in pain, but I could see that he was very ill. I sat by his bed holding his hand for a long time. Then he tried to say something to me. At first I could not hear, so I put my ear close to his mouth. He said faintly: ‘My master calls, and I must go.’
Before I left him, I kissed him on the forehead. It was the first time I had ever kissed a priest. He looked up at me, shut his eyes, and nodded his head – as if to say: ‘Thank you.’ When I left, I turned at the end of the ward to look back at him. At that moment I was transported back to the day in the Staffordshire Royal Infirmary when, as a handsome young priest in a flying jacket, he had given me, the seminary boy, a thumbs-up sign as I lay sick in bed with pericarditis. From his deathbed Father Armishaw stirred an arm impeded by festoons of tubes. He raised his thumb in a firm farewell. He died on 7 July 2002, well ‘fortified’, as they used to say, ‘by the rites of Holy Mother Church’.
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