Seminary Boy

by Cornwell, John

  I went to his funeral Mass a week later at Saint Chad’s cathedral in Birmingham. As I crossed the road at the traffic lights to approach the cathedral doors, I could see a group of middle-aged and elderly priests. Several of them shouted out: ‘Here comes Fru!’ I had not heard my nickname in decades. There were a lot of old faces gathered for the requiem: including Canon Piercy, Canon Grady, Bishop Pargeter, Monsignor Gavin, Monsignor Ryall, Father Derek and many others: survivors all. As they bore the coffin out from the cathedral at the end, we sang the old Cotton Easter hymn: ‘Battle is o’er, hell’s armies flee’. He was buried late that afternoon in a graveyard in Carterton.

  119

  I FELT THAT summer of 2002 that I had lost a father. By a strange turn of events I had rediscovered my real father several weeks before Father Armishaw’s death. Not long after I watched Dad disappearing into the Majestic cinema in Woodford in the September of 1957, he left London for Portsmouth taking Grandma Lillian with him. He had achieved his ambition to settle in the town of his dreams and start a new life far away from Mum and sports fields. Over the years I had heard that he had worked at temporary jobs like tending the central reservations of the highways of Hampshire and Dorset. Then he was employed in the naval dockyards dipping corroded machinery in acid. In the mid-1960s came the divorce from my mother, and the death of Grandma Lillian. In the 1970s he married a woman called Ivy and departed from his last-known abode without leaving a forwarding address. From time to time down the decades I made small efforts through cousins on his side of the family to find him; to no avail.

  By 1990, when he would have been approaching eighty, I was anxious to know whether he was alive or dead. I contacted the Salvation Army’s missing persons’ department. They drew a blank. An officer told me: ‘He might be alive but bedridden.’ In 2001 my brother Terry picked up his trail through the Internet. On a people-search website we found an individual with my father’s initials in Kent. The record showed that he was sharing a house with a single widow called Freda. Through directory enquiries I found a telephone number for her.

  She had a kind, reassuring voice. I said that I was trying to contact a long-lost friend and mentioned his first name. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a man of that name living with me. I’ve been looking after him for twelve years since his wife, my cousin, died of cancer.’ What sort of age would he be, I asked. He was ninety, she told me, ‘last February’.

  I had found Dad. I said: ‘Well, I am his son.’

  There was a shocked silence. Eventually she said: ‘He always told us that he never had any children.’

  There was, of course, no going back now. I had broken in, perhaps clumsily, on his secret life; and in the subsequent spasmodic conversation I learnt that he had not only kept back important facts about himself, but that he had invented some as well. He had told his deceased wife, and all connected with him going back thirty years, that he had injured his leg when his submarine was blown up during the war.

  I spoke just a few words with Dad that day. The conversation was difficult and hedged around with equivocation. But I judged there and then that Freda was a remarkable woman. I decided to write to her and tell the truth of our family’s story: which was also his story and therefore hers.

  For almost a year I corresponded with Freda and spoke with them both on the telephone from time to time. I did not want to rush a reunion, as there were emotions and versions of lives to be sorted out before we could meet in person. Then one day Freda called me to say that she was grateful that I had persisted in finding Dad, and even more so for insisting on enabling him to talk about his family. ‘He cried for three days after he admitted to having five children,’ she said. ‘He had hidden the fact for all those years, and it had been a terrible burden.’

  On 25 April 2002, I went with my son, Jonathan Samuel, to see Dad. From London’s Waterloo East we took a train which trundled across the wastelands of the Thames estuary to Rochester. We drove in a taxi to where they lived, a quiet winding suburban road in the Medway valley. It was a small detached house standing on a crest. The bottom half was painted bright red; the top half white. The front garden was filled with daffodils.

  Freda, who was eighty, met us at the door dressed in a housecoat; she was frail and moved with difficulty. She showed us into the single downstairs sitting room. Dad was sitting in the corner facing a huge television set on the opposite side of the fireplace. His bad leg was placed on a footstool. I recognised him instantly, although he was much heavier than he had been in his forties. He had a wide open face, a fresh complexion with very few lines and youthful observant eyes.

  He was laughing; and as he laughed his shoulders heaved a little. He had huge muscular forearms and large strong hands. When he spoke, his accent was ripe old cockney with a faint nasal twang.

  Freda served tea and cakes while Dad, who was hard of hearing, embarked on a series of monologues. There was no scope for questions, nor for interjections that would have made for a true conversation. He took charge.

  ‘You probably had a good laugh about the submarine days, son. But you’ve got to understand that no one gave you a chance if you were just a cripple. If you had a war wound, you were OK. My Ivy knew the truth of it. In fact, she was the one who suggested it.’

  Was this the truth, or yet another fabrication? It hardly seemed to matter now. In any case, he had launched into what was to prove a lengthy account of his childhood, and the origin of his handicap. As he spoke, he pulled out a red handkerchief and dabbed his eyes from time to time.

  He told me that when he fell down the stairs as a child ‘the wound went in instead of out’. He got TB in the bone and was in and out of hospitals and sanatoria from the age of four until the age of twelve. ‘My father never visited me once in hospital, he was ashamed of me,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘My leg when I was twelve was twenty-five degrees out from true at the knee, excruciatingly painful and permanently bent; so I could only walk awkwardly on my toe. They took me back in the hospital, they broke the leg at the knee and took the kneecap out to straighten it. Just so that I could stand up straight.’

  There were many more stories of Custom House and his childhood, mostly in explanation of his mid-life depressions and failures. How his brother Earnie became the favourite son; how he became an unpaid drudge at home. I had heard none of these stories when I was a boy. I could see that it was doing him good to unburden himself. Just before it was time for us to depart for London, he asked me: ‘How’s your mother?’

  It was a difficult question to answer in the space of a few minutes to an old man who was hard of hearing. I should have liked to tell him how she had kept the family together, maintaining a home for us all until we started families of our own. How she had taken up painting and pottery, and had written her autobiography; how she had become an expert in designer knitwear, then a librarian; then joined a choir and sang the part of a nun in The Sound of Music. Among her many jobs she had been a credit controller at the gas board with a team of men under her and, briefly, the housekeeper of a priest. She had travelled widely, to the United States, Italy and Spain. She was arrested in Moscow for setting her hotel bedroom on fire. Against explicit instructions to the contrary she had plugged her curlers into the bedside lamp socket. She had married, unsuccessfully, for a second time. She had kept the Faith and was still alive and well, aged eighty-eight.

  Dad did not wait for an answer.

  I had not expected any great epiphany on achieving reunion with Dad. But I felt a sense of ripeness at being able to locate him in my mind and heart. As for Mum, when I reported an account of his situation after meeting him, she said: ‘You make him sound like an old reprobate, instead of what he really is…’ What was he, really? It had never occurred to me when I was a child that Dad was a clever man with a range of subtle emotions. Nor had I appreciated what it took for him to survive despite a childhood of pain, isolation and humiliation. Who knows what webs of fantasy he was obliged to
construct in order to survive those lonely years of hospital and sanatoria beds? As a young married man during the war his tendency to lie undoubtedly cost others dearly. But he had found, despite that weakness, two women in his life who over a period of more than thirty years saw his qualities, experienced his ability to love, and enabled him to flourish and be loved in turn.

  120

  AFTER MANY YEARS’ absence, my journey back to the Faith of my Fathers has not been easy. At the Mass I attended on the first Christmas of my return to practice, the choir in our local church sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’ at the consecration. I staggered out into the open air, thinking: ‘I’m not going to make it.’ Where were the ancient rhythms, the sacred repetition, the Catholic musical splendours of my youth? I had to learn the benefits of the new ‘participation’, while sorrowing over the lost liturgy of my boyhood.

  I soon discovered that I could not ‘return’ to Faith by attempting to recapture what I had left behind at Cotton all those years ago. Yet I found myself thinking about Cotton as if it contained a secret to be discovered, a riddle to be solved. I continued to return there in dreams which seemed to contrast my boyhood innocence with a sense of adult shame. It was not until the early 1990s that I understood what drew me restlessly back.

  I returned by car one summer’s afternoon to look at the valley and the old buildings. Driving down the last stretch of the lane, I thought the outline of the college on its promontory looked much the same from a distance. But as I parked on Top Bounds I saw the extent of the devastation that had befallen the place. The refectory, classrooms, libraries and cloisters had been looted, vandalised. The floors, doors, windows and most of the roofs had gone. Saint Thomas’s had been burnt to the ground (by vandals, I was told later). The gardens, once beautifully tended, were overrun with weeds. Faber’s Retreat had been smashed by a fallen tree, and the church was locked up.

  As I wandered the ruins of Cotton, I remembered how I had walked its pathways and cloisters during the Easter retreat, seeking God in fasting and silence and seclusion from the world. Now, decades on, it struck me that the desert places of spirituality are not to be found alone in religious houses where men and women shut themselves away to find God in self-denial and abstinence. The desert can lie at the very heart of a person’s life, amid the turmoil of worldly distractions.

  Many who have turned away from religion to embrace agnosticism and atheism, as I had done, are perhaps as much in a state of desert spirituality, the ‘dark night of the soul’, as any contemplative. What we are escaping is not God at all, but the false representations, the ‘trash and tinsel’, as W. B. Yeats once put it, that pass for him. So, ‘hatred of God may bring the soul to God’. At Cotton that summer’s day I recognised the truth of that ‘darker knowledge’, and it eased the feelings of a former apostate’s remorse. Yet I sensed that for years my younger self, the seminary boy, had still to forgive me for having turned my back on the auspices that had saved his soul all those years ago from ruin. As I walked through the overgrown pathways of Cotton that seminary boy came to meet me: without reproach or condemnation on his part, and with a sense of healing reconciliation on mine.

  Praise

  The wounded is the wounding heart. richard crashaw, ‘The Flaming Heart’

  Also by John Cornwell

  The Pontiff in Winter

  Hitler’s Pope

  Breaking Faith

  The Power to Harm

  A Thief in the Night

  Nature’s Imagination (editor)

  Consciousness and Human Identity (editor)

  Explanations (editor)

  Earth to Earth

  Hitler’s Scientists

  Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light

  Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary, 1772–1804

  Seven Other Demons

  The Spoiled Priest

  Strange Gods

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Copyright © John Cornwell 2006

  FIRST EDITION

  The right of John Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-28562-4

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