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‘Oh, I was brought up in poor old Ireland, Missus. Not a penny in the house. My dear old Mam went out the back and killed the pig.’
After he had gone, Mum stood by the kitchen sink watching him cycling away up Woodford Avenue. ‘“Me dear owld Mam went out da back and keeld da peeg!”’ she mimicked. ‘Wish I had a peeg out da back.’
Assistance came from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. Four crisp five-pound notes, the white ones of those days large as jumbo-sized handkerchiefs. So began the process of purchasing my seminary wardrobe, mainly at the Cooperative Society store in Ilford. The new underwear and shirts were placed in a drawer in Mum’s bedroom; the black suit hung in her wardrobe. Alone in the house I would creep in and sniff the unworn items.
Time was at an agonising standstill. I attempted to bring forward the moment of departure by imagining myself sitting in the train as it pulled away from Saint Pancras station. I had chosen the passage I would read from The Imitation of Christ as I settled back in the seat of the carriage. What I read drew me into an interior world where I seemed ever more aware of my innermost secret thoughts, known only to me and my God:
Avoid the concourse of men as much as you can; for discussion of worldly affairs is very bad for the soul, even though they be discussed with a good intention. For we are quickly defiled and enslaved by vanity.
I could not wait to enter the religious life so that I could make a reality of the ordinances of Thomas à Kempis in pursuit of the example of Jesus. But time obstinately refused to pass.
19 (#ulink_6c0a4dc7-0625-55e3-8fe2-fff53b009eb8)
THAT SUMMER I took a full-time job as errand boy at a grocer’s store on Claybury Broadway, our local shopping centre. The hours were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7.30 p.m. on Saturdays), with a half day off on Thursday. In all weathers – it rained a lot that summer – I delivered boxes of groceries carried in the iron basket attached to the handlebars of an ancient bike. The popular song on the radio that summer was Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’. Recalling that doleful tune, I see the streets of Barkingside stretching before me as I struggle to keep upright on the heavily laden machine, my toes barely reaching the pedals. When I wasn’t weaving perilously on the recalcitrant bike and coping with its faulty brakes, I was blackening and chafing my hands realigning the loose chain, or mending multiple punctures in the decaying inner tubes.
I also gained first-hand experience of the amorous antics of the grocer and his assistant manageress. She was a buxom pretty woman, her peroxided hair piled high on her head. In the storeroom at the back there was a high desk at which the grocer stood doing his paperwork while eating chocolate. He would rip off the foil and bite into the chocolate bar as if it was a slice of toast. She would come up silently behind him and poke two fingers between his buttocks. Then they would go into a clinch, with a lot of tongue kissing, breast and testicle squeezing, moaning and giggling: all as, in sight of them, I attempted to fill my cardboard boxes with orders of tinned baked beans, trays of eggs, bacon, cheese, margarine, jams and marmalade. Their behaviour intrigued and yet repelled me. I prayed for them both every morning at Mass.
Two weeks before I was due to depart for Cotton College, I was fired from the job after crashing the bike while evading a dog that hurled itself at my front wheel. The dog’s owner stood smirking down at me. ‘That happened to me once,’ he said. Then he added: ‘You must have frightened him.’
The bike was a write-off, and I was concussed. The money I had earned, less compensation for broken eggs (four dozen of them were spread over the incline of Clayhall Avenue), paid for football boots and a new black blazer. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t make you pay for a new bike, you clumsy little bleeder,’ said the manager as I made my farewell.
Suffering a fever, which Mum insisted was due to homesickness in anticipation, I was unable to travel on the appointed day of the new academic year in the third week of September. For several nights I lay weeping, convinced that I was unworthy and therefore fated never to depart for Cotton. But the Very Reverend Father Doran wrote a revised travel schedule, informing Mum that a car would be waiting at Oakamoor station and that I should arrive at the college in time for Compline, Benediction and supper.
20 (#ulink_020848d9-9495-58db-b765-433bfc8167e7)
ON A LATE September Sunday morning of cool breezes and brilliant sunshine I served Father Cooney’s Mass for the last time. In the sacristy he handed me a parcel and told me to open it. It was a new leather-bound Roman missal in dual Latin–English translation. The pages were gilt-edged and there were sumptuous silk markers, purple, red, green, white and gold. I could smell the warm scent of the leather and the sweet aroma of the delicate rice-paper. I was moved to tears, realising the expense of the beautiful object. I attempted to thank him, but he interrupted me: ‘Wisswiss…Very good! Run along now!’ As I left the sacristy he called out: ‘And keep the Faith!’
As I made my farewells at home, Terry, my elder brother, was terse: ‘Now I’ll be able to breathe at night.’ My sister, immaculately groomed, and approaching her fifteenth birthday, gave me a quick dry kiss on the cheek. She had a knowing gleam in her eye. Not for one moment, she appeared to be telling me, was she taken in by my devout pretensions. The youngest two, aged ten and seven, stood gaping, incredulous that any of us should be escaping from the Peel. Dad came in from the field. He was blinking with nervous excitement. He lifted my bags. ‘Gawd awlmighty!’ he said. He sang a bar of ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’, then he lowered his face towards mine for a kiss. Accompanied by Mum, wearing her purple coat, I set off through the gates of the Peel, my arms almost out of their sockets with the suitcases I insisted on carrying by myself. In my unyielding new black shoes I just made it to the bus-stop.
We had lunch in the cafeteria of Saint Pancras mainline station. Mum ordered steak. It stuck in my stomach. She nevertheless ordered treacle suet pudding, urging me to finish every morsel. Her boy was not going to depart unfortified.
The station was a like stage set for the commencement of my spiritual journey: incense steam clouds, amplified pulpit-voice announcements, grand cathedral arches, shafts of lantern-light. I leant out of the window as Mum walked, then trotted alongside the carriage, her eyes suddenly reproachful and gazing into mine. She stopped at the end of the platform, a purple figure frantically waving a handkerchief. Then she was gone.
I sat hunched forward, still suffering from lunch, looking out at the passing immensity of the aged and filthy city wartorn from Hitler’s bombs. Taking The Imitation of Christ from my pocket I read the passage I had marked weeks earlier with a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:
It is no small matter to dwell in a religious community, or congregation, to converse therein without complaint, and to persevere therein faithfully unto death. Blessed is he that there lived well, and ended happily.
Opposite me sat a smartly dressed woman. She smiled, her broad lips thick with orange lipstick. But I avoided her eyes and watched the factory buildings and terraced houses slipping by. In glimpses between tunnels and high embankments, the countryside finally opened out to the horizon. I felt a delicious sense of sadness as the train sped on, carrying me farther and ever faster away from Mum and the family, from Father Cooney, from the huge, bruised city of London. From the World.
21 (#ulink_4e826224-c8ca-55da-b0e4-7ce593428ea8)
THE SUN WAS setting as the steam train laboured alongside a fast-flowing river, brassy blue-green in the late afternoon sun. I could see drystone walls bordering steep fields; clusters of pine trees on the summits of dark red cliffs. Eventually there was a line of cottages and a factory foundry with clashing engines. A man lit by the reflection from a furnace stood in a doorway mopping his brow. We had arrived at Oakamoor.
The waiting car was a cavernous pre-war Austin. The driver greeted me with: ‘Now then! Cotton!’ As we lurched away, he explained that the factory was a copper mill. ‘They keep those furnaces going day and night; even on a Sunday,’ he said. The taxi paused at a crossing for the train to pass. There was a church in a steep graveyard, dense with decayed headstones. We crossed a bridge where I could see a broad weir blurred with rising steam. Oakamoor was a settlement of workers’ cottages. The dwellings cowered below the wooded flanks of the hills that rose on all sides. There was a shuttered pub.
We began a climb through hairpin bends. The road was narrow, bordered by lush pastures and coppices. At turns I could see back down to Oakamoor, virtually hidden now in mist. Higher and higher we went. Then the driver called out: ‘There she is!’ We were running along a straight stretch with overarching trees. In the distance, through a break in the woods, I could see a cluster of buildings which seemed to cling perilously to the side of the valley.
We paused at a crossroads by an ancient stone inn and turned left, passing a hamlet of single-file cottages. ‘That was the village of Cotton, that was,’ said the driver facetiously. As we passed along a level lane, sideways to the hillside, the college came into full view. At its centre was an imposing mansion to which was attached a barrack-like stone building with lighted curtainless windows. To the right of the mansion, silhouetted in the evening light, was a stone church with a spire. The college faced out across a thickly wooded shoulder of the valley; above and beyond were playing fields rising in terraces towards the crest of the valley.
There were iron gates and a driveway ahead, but the driver followed the lane around the back of the buildings and came to a halt on a cinder yard as spacious as a football field. Depositing my bags, he said: ‘You go down there to the lower yard…up the steps, and someone will look after you.’ He seemed to imply, by his sympathetic tone of voice, that he felt sorry for me. Wishing me goodnight, he got into the car and shuddered away.
It was now dark, the air shockingly cold and pure. I lugged my bags down the path to the lower yard and entered a door at the top of a flight of stone steps to find myself in a high-ceilinged lobby. A priest in a cassock was standing at a noticeboard lit by a single naked bulb. He turned as I entered, as if he had been expecting me. He had huge shoulders and black horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was cut close and stood up from his scalp stiff as a brush. He had dark eyes and a strong square jaw.
‘Cornwell? I’m Father McCartie, Prefect of Discipline.’
When I said: ‘Hello, Father,’ he replied unsmiling: ‘No, you address the priests here as “sir”. It’s our custom.’
Father McCartie took my bags and hurried ahead of me up four flights of a worn stone staircase, the thick crêpe-rubber soles of his shoes squelching noisily. We entered a dimly lit dormitory like a tunnel under the eaves of the house. Black iron bedsteads with white coverlets stood close together. Behind each bed was a space for storing clothes. There was a range of narrow dormer windows on each side, wide open to the raw air. A statue of Saint Joseph stood on a pedestal at one end, and a crucifix hung on the wall at the other.
‘That’s your berth,’ said Father McCartie, pointing to a bed beneath one of the windows.
This place was called ‘Little Dorm’, he told me, so as to distinguish it from ‘Middle Dorm’ and ‘Top Dorm’. There was no talking in the dormitory for any reason, he added. I was wondering why he had not asked me about my journey, or where I had come from. I had an impression of vast chilly space beyond the windows, which looked out across the valley to a pine ridge barely visible in the dusk, and I was aware of the distance I had come from home. It was all so different from what I had imagined. Aylesford and its birdsong, its summer fragrance, bell-ringing, tranquil routines and friendly friars, could not be more different from this cold, unadorned place. I thought of Mum and her protective presence, despite her unpredictable moods.
After I had finished unpacking Father McCartie picked up the two books I had brought from home: The Imitation of Christ, and the new Roman missal. Returning them, he said: ‘Take them into church…Now bring your washbag and towel down to the wash places.’
Leading the way, he paused by the statue of Saint Joseph. ‘That was given by the parents of a boy who died of peritonitis within two days of his arrival at Cotton,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘He died fifty years ago.’
We proceeded down to the cloisters and descended again to a whitewashed cavern smelling of ancient damp. There were lines of wash bowls and pegs, all numbered. ‘Your number is ninety-two,’ said the priest, pointing out my bowl and peg.
I said: ‘Thank you, Father.’
‘No, you call us “sir”,’ he corrected me once more.
As we returned to the cloister, he explained that the college was founded two hundred years earlier during the penal times, when it was a crime to be a Catholic priest in England. ‘The priests of this college,’ he said, ‘dressed in lay clothes and were addressed as “sir” to hide their true identity. We’ve carried on the tradition of being called “sir”.’
I felt quelled, and it seemed strange that he asked me nothing about myself. Perhaps, I thought, he already knew everything that was to be known about me.
The building was echoing with the raucous clangour of a bell. Somewhere on a higher floor there was a sound of scraping of feet, and a man’s voice praying, followed by a roared response. The stone stairs reverberated as a host of boys came into view walking in silence towards the cloisters where they took their places in parallel lines, hands behind their backs. They were dressed in black suits, black ties and white shirts. The toecaps of their shoes were highly polished.
The seminarians of my imagination had been pale and pious, slow of movement, gentle-eyed. These boys were fresh and open-faced, their ears red as if with the cold and the fresh air, their shoulders squared like boy soldiers. Some of the older ones had the tough appearance of farm boys or young building labourers; I had the impression that their eyes were bright, as if with a kind of inner excitation.
Father McCartie led me down the ranks and positioned me between boys who appeared to be the same age as myself. At a signal from the priest we moved forward slowly in step along the terrazzo-floored cloister like a regiment of young undertakers. Many of the boys had metal studs on their shoes giving their precise marching the sound of a metallic drum roll. We passed into a gallery I would come to know as the ‘clock cloister’, because of the presence of a tall grandfather clock. The walls were lined with pictures, including one prominently large print of a youth whose naked body had been punctured bloodily with arrows (this, I learnt later, was a copy of Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, the early Christian boy-martyr). There was a pervasive smell in the gallery, of wood polish, burnt toast and lingering coffee fumes.
Finally we passed through double doors into the church where our footsteps echoed on the patterned tiles and the cool air was heavy with the smell of incense and candle grease. The ceiling disappeared into the darkness high above. There were simple stone columns, unadorned side altars, and a Lady chapel at the end of a side aisle beyond a wooden screen. The boys took their places in plain pine pews on either side of the main aisle; beyond the altar rails was a spacious sanctuary with choir-stalls, an organ, and a stone high altar in the distance overlooked by a massive east window gleaming in the darkness. The boys were kneeling, ramrod straight; the kneelers were made of hard wood. The boy next to me, a youth with pale limp hair, high colouring in his cheeks, and National Health spectacles, took my missal and found me the page for Sunday Compline.
A procession of boys entered the sanctuary, filing into the choir-stalls, followed by a priest wearing a white-and-gold cope. He was tall and ruddy, and walked casually without a hint of devotion. He bowed at the foot of the altar and intoned in Latin the beginning of Compline, the office of prayers at the end of the day.
The ritual appeals to God for his protection as night falls: ‘May the dreams and phantasms of the night recede; keep the enemy at bay, lest our bodies become polluted.’ At the Salve Regina the boys’ voices soared up to the high rafters: ‘To you we sigh, groaning, and weeping in this vale of tears…’ I was conscious of the wild valley in its remote and rugged setting in the darkness outside, deepening the sense of strangeness. Then it struck me that unless I begged to be allowed home the very next day, I had no other choice but to throw myself completely on the person of Jesus. I stole a look around me. My companions knelt with their faces buried in their hands in prayerful recollection.
After the celebrant and the choir processed off the sanctuary we began to leave the pews in strict order, starting with the front row. Towards the rear of the church there were six or seven priests. One older than the rest, bespectacled and with fair receding hair swept back, was scrutinising each of us in turn. I guessed that this was the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran, the superior of the house and headmaster. His face betrayed no emotion, neither severity nor kindliness. Father McCartie knelt on the opposite side of the aisle. He too was watching each boy in turn with those dark eyes through heavy black horn-rims. The others were reading their breviaries.
At the end of the cloisters we passed through a set of double doors into an oak-floored refectory and the warm atmosphere of cooked food. Someone touched me on the shoulder: it was the boy who had knelt next to me in church. He was about the same height as me, his wrists protruding a long way out from his black sleeves. He held his head submissively to one side. ‘My name is James Rolle. I’ve been deputed to look after you,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Welcome to Cotton.’ He placed me next to him in the middle of one of the rows of tables.
The boys were standing in silence, hands joined. Near the double doors there was a table where three nuns stood with ladles poised over enamel serving pans. After Father McCartie said grace we sat down while boys assigned to be servers queued in front of the nuns. Each boy received a portion of beans and a hunk of bread. They fell hungrily on the food, eating at speed. After several minutes there was a sharp rap as Father McCartie struck the serving table, and the boys began to talk all at once.
James said: ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ No sooner had I answered and begun to tell James about my home parish than Father McCartie rapped on the table again and the boys fell silent and stood up, heads bowed for the grace.
Outside the refectory, James took me down to a room in the basement. It was cold and dimly lit, with stone flags and pine benches. Boys sat around talking quietly in groups, occasionally laughing. James was intent on being kind to me. ‘On weekdays,’ he explained, ‘we have Rosary after supper, which you can say either in church or in the cloister. I rarely come in here. I usually go to the library which is above the refectory.’ James seemed unusually self-controlled and serious. I decided that I liked him.
‘Do you like reading?’ he asked. ‘What are you reading?’ When I said that I was reading The Imitation of Christ, he reacted with surprise. Slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a slim black copy of the Imitation with red edging, identical to my own. ‘I read it at odd moments of the day, and carry it everywhere,’ he said. ‘But it’s spiritual reading, isn’t it? One could hardly count it as one’s normal reading.’
At the clangour of bells, James said that we would not be allowed to speak until breakfast the next day. I should just follow him. ‘Watch out,’ he said grimly. ‘You’ll be beaten by Leo if you’re caught talking, and so will anybody you’re caught talking to.’ Leo, he explained, was Father McCartie’s nickname.
Boys were hurrying down the cloisters to the staircase leading to basement level where they took off their jackets and ties to wash in cold water and brush their teeth. I was still brushing my teeth when an older boy told me brusquely to get a move on. James was waiting to accompany me to the dormitory.
About sixty boys were lodged in Little Dorm; they changed into their pyjamas with a uniform set of modest stratagems. They went down on their knees to pray silently for a few moments before getting into bed. I was still undressing when the lights flashed off and on. I nevertheless went on to my knees to pray.
I thanked God for a safe journey and asked for his protection through the night. After a prayer to my guardian angel (‘O my good angel, whom God has appointed to be my Guardian…’), I was the last to get into bed, where I lay shivering for several minutes. The sheets felt damp and the mattress was as lumpy as a sack of potatoes, but it was the first time I had slept in a bed to myself since my brother Terry had returned from evacuation.
Father McCartie appeared by a doorway situated at the top of a wooden stairway which looked to be a laundry shoot. After a while he began to walk along the lines of beds looking at each of the boys in turn; he had taken off his noisy crêpe-soled shoes and was in bedroom slippers. Then the dormitory was plunged in darkness and silence. How comforting it would have been, I thought, had the priest wished us goodnight and blessed us.
The air, carried on a stiff breeze through the dormer windows, was cold on my face. Soon I made out the night sky through the window above my bed. A scattering of stars sailed between the clouds. I could hear the wind in the trees, then, gradually, in the far distance, the sound of a motorbike taking the steep climb up from Oakamoor, constantly changing gear before surging forward; eventually the sound grew fainter and merged with the rustling of the treetops. I wondered what the family were doing back in London. Dad and my brother Terry were probably listening to the radio, perhaps a cheerful dance number played by the Palm Court orchestra. Sister Maureen the convent-school girl would be doing her homework, while Mum was washing dishes at the sink. My younger brothers would be fast asleep in their single bed, lying end to end.
I lay awake until the breathing of the boys about me became regular. I was dozing off, when I was surprised by the sight of a black figure in the darkness moving silently along the dormitory. I guessed that it was Father McCartie. For an age, it seemed, I could see him standing in silence at the doorway halfway down the dormitory. Eventually he left. As I dozed, I was again conscious of the great spaces beyond the windows and the garret roofs. I felt the wild presence of the woods and hills which were to be my new home.
22 (#ulink_41c54026-eaa6-56a9-9692-f92c4bbd9222)
THE NAKED DORMITORY lights were switched on and a senior boy passed at a run, whacking the ends of the iron bedsteads with a heavy book and shouting: ‘Up!’ It was still dark outside and there was a stiff wind and spots of rain whipping through the dormitory windows. Boys were leaping from their beds, throwing back the bedding for airing; going down on their knees to pray. As it was a weekday, they were donning grey flannel trousers and casting over their shoulders black or navy blazers or sombre tweed jackets in readiness to depart for the wash places. I was the last out, struggling with fingers too stiff with cold to keep up. James, who was several beds down from me, was waiting and gestured for me to follow.
He saw me through my ablutions before leading the way to church where we were the last to take our places in the pews. The boys were kneeling with their shoulders hunched, heads bowed in private prayer. A bell rang and the Mass celebrant and two servers appeared on the sanctuary. I looked at my watch and saw that it was only seven o’clock. The sun was rising, revealing the magnificent detail of the stained-glass window above the high altar – an image of the enthroned Christ the King surrounded by angels and saints. I had grown used to being the only boy at dawn worship in the church at home; it was strange to be kneeling with so many youths at a time of the day that had been special for me and Father Cooney alone.
While the boys concentrated on the main community Mass there was a constant ringing of small bells, muttered Latin, and a flurry of rituals at the side altars of the church as priests came and went with servers to say their private Masses. But the activity died down after the community Mass ended. The last of the priests had returned with his server to the sacristy, and the church was silent.
The period of thanksgiving after Mass seemed interminable. My stomach was churning with hunger, my knees were giving way, and I had a headache and a full bladder. The discomfort was all the worse as I had no idea how long it would last. I felt humbled by the youths around me who seemed controlled and patient in their apparent contemplation.
Father McCartie’s rap at last signalled us to leave the church in ranks for the refectory. Breakfast, eaten in a few gulps by most boys, was porridge (grey, salty, lumpy and made without milk), hunks of dry bread and plastic mugs of tea. James accompanied me to the dormitory where we made our beds in silence, Father McCartie lurking in the background. Descending the stairs, James said we were free until the beginning of lessons so he would give me a tour.
The central focus of the array of college buildings was the façade of the mansion he called the ‘old hall’ where the priests had their rooms and refectory. Before it was a sweep of lawn and a grand cedar of Lebanon. At the back of the old hall was an ugly extension where the nuns lived. James explained that they did our laundry, cooking and cleaning. ‘We call them the witches,’ he said with a contrite smile. ‘They have taken a vow of silence. But the sister matron speaks to us.’
Attached to the old hall were two stone Victorian elevations at right angles to each other, which housed the boys’ refectory, libraries, dormitories, classrooms and wash places. A cloister with Gothic vaulting ran through one of the wings. The most recently built section of the college was a square rose brick structure known as Saint Thomas’s where the most junior boys, aged eleven to thirteen, had their dormitories under the supervision of a wraith-like balding priest called Father Manion.
James showed me the library, which smelt of beeswax floor polish. There were deep windows with views of the valley and an expanse of tall shelves. A few boys were sitting at the tables reading. Through a far door was another library with oak panelling and stained-glass windows which, James whispered to me, was the sixth form library. He pointed out a periodicals table with several magazines from other schools and seminaries on display. A single copy of the Illustrated London News lay on the table. ‘There are no newspapers,’ he said, ‘and we’re not allowed to listen to the radio.’
He explained that from among the boys in the final two years at Cotton were recruited the college monitors, house captains and their deputies: they were known as the Big Sixth and had the power to have boys punished by sending them to the Prefect of Discipline or the Prefect of Studies. The teaching staff priests, he said, were known as ‘the profs’.
We finally emerged into the chill morning air, descending by stone steps known as the Bounds Steps into an area James called Little Bounds, a yard large enough for two tennis courts. Little Bounds formed a kind of level platform or stage looking out over the panorama of the surrounding countryside, bathed that morning in early autumn sunshine. Several boys were staring like prisoners in a cage through the wire fence that bordered the yard. James and I joined them. The high fence marked the boundary, James told me, between the boys’ domain and the lawns and gravel pathways strictly for the use of ‘the profs’.
Immediately below these gardens a drystone wall bordered the lush meadows, ending abruptly at a wood that descended into the valley. Beyond the closest canopy of the woods, a mile or so away, rose a corresponding series of meadows on the opposing flank of the valley. An ancient stone cottage stood in one of the meadows, a wisp of smoke rising from its chimney. This was the only human habitation visible in the landscape. To the left of the pine wood was a sheer drop and the distant countryside opened out in a succession of gentle shoulders and folds, each softer and more hazy than the last, until the final ridge melted into the skyline. As I stood there my heart leapt with the immensity of the scene and the bracing air.
James now led the way to a second level by way of a wide sloping path up to the cinder yard he called Top Bounds, where I had been deposited the previous evening. Boys were walking up and down in threes and fours, hands in pockets. James said: ‘Shall we take a few turns?’
As we walked we were joined by another boy with severe acne and untidy hair who introduced himself as Derek Hanson from Southend, Essex. He too was a seminarian from the diocese of Brentwood. He skipped about a little as he walked, turning towards me, then suddenly turning away. He was describing the eccentricities of his parish priest at home, while occasionally giving vent to nervous ripples of laughter. After one more fit of the giggles he said: ‘Watch out for Father Armishaw.’ Then he blushed and excused himself, hurrying down towards Little Bounds.
‘Derek is very nice,’ said James, ‘but he has taken a sort of vow never to talk after mid-morning break.’ James seemed to consider the matter for a few moments. ‘I do think that his behaviour is rather singular,’ he added. It was the first time I had heard the term ‘singular’, and I was not sure what it meant. (I was soon to discover that it was an important watchword in our spiritual lives, meaning any behaviour that was deemed showy.) Then he informed me that ‘Armishaw’ was Father Vincent Armishaw who taught English. ‘He’s a character, a bit ferocious, but he’s not too bad. Derek has a crush on him; and he’s not the only one.’
23 (#ulink_607ee72a-7345-5e58-9591-b4d5496d3971)
AS WE WALKED in Top Bounds a boy came up and asked me to accompany him to Father Doran, the headmaster. His office was situated on a corridor with a highly polished linoleum floor in the old hall. The boy rapped hard on the door. When a muffled voice called out: ‘Come!’ he left me to enter by myself.
Father Doran, a thin, slightly stooped man in a caped cassock, was leaning on the mantelpiece in a room filled with light from a set of bay windows that went from floor to ceiling. There was a desk covered with papers, and glass-fronted bookcases. The atmosphere of the room was heavy with tobacco.
He was busy with a penknife and a pipe, attempting to extract burnt-out tobacco into an ashtray at his elbow. At the same time he occasionally looked down on me with penetrating grey eyes through flashing gold-rimmed spectacles. His ash-fair receding hair was brushed back flat on his head and his thin lips were firmly set in a long pale face. He looked about the same age as my father. He stopped fiddling with his pipe, snatched a cigarette from a Senior Service pack and lit it with an almost petulant movement.
‘I prefer to smoke a pipe,’ he said, the cigarette wobbling up and down on his thin lips. ‘But whenever the reverend mother comes in from the sisters’ community, I have to put it down. You see, it’s never done to smoke before the sisters. Then it’s such a business to light it up again.’ He took a deep drag and held the cigarette between his fingers as he blew out a long column of smoke. ‘She’s just been in this morning, wanting to discuss kitchen business and here we go again – down goes the pipe,’ he said. ‘So I think to myself: “Oh bother, I’ll just have a cigarette, it’s much less trouble.”’
He stopped to inspect me. ‘You don’t smoke, do you, John Cornwell?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, just make sure you don’t. In any case, you’ll need to save all your puff for cross-country running, especially when you’re sprinting up and down the valley here.’
I smiled, but he was observing me without a hint of humour. He began to talk about the history of the school. He told me that Cotton was the oldest Catholic college in England. Most boys were sent here, he said, by the Archbishop of Birmingham, who was the official owner of the school, but there were also a number of students from my own diocese, Brentwood, which had no minor seminary. A minority of the boys, he added, were ‘lay students’ who had not dedicated themselves to the priesthood, and whose parents were therefore paying for their education. ‘You must understand,’ he said with gravity, ‘that your bishop has been put to considerable expense to place you here, and that your fees are paid for out of the charity of the people of your diocese. So you will do your very best to make the most of this opportunity.’ He said that fourteen former pupils of Cotton had been ordained that year. ‘That is your aim,’ he went on. ‘To become a priest…Just keep your sights on that and you can’t go wrong.’
Father Doran now walked over to the bay windows which had an unhindered view across the valley. He beckoned me to join him. ‘Splendid, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we lucky to be enjoying all this?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, avoiding the use of the word ‘Father’. I found myself thinking of the ‘aunt’ at the home in Sussex, and how I had described the beautiful countryside as ‘shitty’. I was eager to let him know that I was impressed by the view.
‘Well, enjoy it now to the full,’ he said, ‘because one day you’ll probably be trapped in a city where there’s not a single tree, let alone grass and cows.’ For the first time he gave a husky laugh, and I smiled back at him with relief as he took another deep drag on his cigarette.
Now that I was here, standing at Father Doran’s windows with the great panorama of the valley below, I had the confidence to say: ‘I’m glad that I’m here, Father.’
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sir! not Father!’ Then he announced with an air of grandeur: ‘For the purposes of competitive spirit all the students in the college belong to one of three groups or houses, named after the great founders of the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham. You have been placed in Challoner House, which commemorates Bishop Richard Challoner who founded the college in secrecy in 1763 when Catholics were still being persecuted by the Protestants for their Faith.’ Bishop Challoner, he went on, was a wonderful man. During one of the anti-Catholic riots in London a Protestant mob threatened to burn down his house. ‘So there you are,’ he went on. ‘We have great traditions! And you are now a Challoner man as well as a Cottonian.’
With this he led me out of his office and down the corridor to a room where a priest was standing, reading some papers, his thick-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead. He was robust with a lineless cherubic face and marked dimples. He was almost bald, despite his youthful appearance; but he had a ring of hair that looked like little collections of chick feathers. He was dressed in a cassock over which he wore an academic gown with long drooping false sleeves. ‘Aha! Master Cornwell,’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself: Father Tom Gavin, Prefect of Studies!’
Before leaving me, Father Doran turned to say: ‘I’ll be watching you closely, Cornwell. And I shall be informing your good bishop of your progress.’
‘Now let me see! Cornwell!’ said Father Gavin with a radiant grin. ‘Frumentum Bene! That’s “corn” and “well” in Latin! I suppose we’d better shorten it to Fru. Yes, I like Fru. You look like a Fru. I take it you have no Latin. No Latin at all, eh, Fru!’
With this he gingerly extracted from his shelves a slim book, grinning back at me conspiratorially as he did so. ‘This, Fru,’ he said, as if he were a magician producing a tender live animal from a hat, ‘is called a Latin primer. And you are going to become well acquainted with its contents, otherwise your bottom is going to become acquainted with that stick there on the bookshelf.’ His face was bright red now, his shoulders heaving with laughter. ‘Not to worry, Fru,’ he said. ‘Only joking, eh! But my stick is there to make sure you behave in class, eh!’
I decided that I liked his joviality even if I did not care for his joke.
Placing the book in my hands he said in a low murmur, his small mouth fighting against the compulsion to smile: ‘Take it away with you, Fru. In spare moments acquaint yourself with the first ten pages in preparation for the treat of our first lesson.’ Before dismissing me, he produced a timetable, specially devised, he said, so that I could catch up with my class year, which was known as the lower fourth.
24 (#ulink_20d23a74-4adc-5dfe-88e2-409921e16d40)
THE MORNING PASSED in abrupt initiations and lessons, punctuated by an unrelenting routine of church visits and religious rituals. I was shown my desk, a capacious box with an oak lid, situated in the lower fourth’s area of the study place, a room which ran the length of one of the stone wings and contained more than a hundred such desks. I was summoned to ‘the bursary’, a room stacked with bars of soap, stationery and clothing, where Father William Browne, a sad-looking overweight priest, issued me with sports gear. I was told to attend ‘the dispensary’ where the matron prodded and poked me all over. When she had finished inspecting my tongue and poking my ribs she murmured: ‘Ah well! Let’s be thankful for small mercies.’
Lunch, which followed the visit of the whole college to the Blessed Sacrament, was a dish of tasteless greasy mincemeat, which the boys called ‘slosh’, accompanied by boiled blemished potatoes, which they called ‘chots’. Within minutes of lunch ending, a bell rang and the boys were hurrying to the dungeon wash places to change into sports gear for a cross-country run. Being under fourteen I was assigned to the ‘easy’ three-mile course.
We streamed up a footpath between drystone walls, greenedged with age, heading for the summit of the valley. I stumbled along, buffeted by a stiff wind. Ahead was a wood of stunted trees; to our right miles of uplands dappled in sunlight to the horizon. To the left was a view of barren hills, their soft green sides broken with outcrops of rock. I was breathless, my legs failing. James hung back, looking sympathetic. We were now the very last of the runners, and the rear was taken up by an older boy who prodded me forward gently with soft little punches in the small of my back. At length we were running on level terrain. Silent woods alternated with swampy open land and we were up to our ankles in the black brackish water that lay below the turf. We clambered over yet another drystone wall and plunged into a pig farm where we were up to our shins in stinking swill and mud.
The college was below, nestling around the church steeple. By the time James and I reached the wash places, most of the boys had doused themselves in cold water and changed back into their day clothes.
The lesson schedule on that first afternoon introduced me to Father Gavin’s special class for Latin beginners. My attention kept wandering to the foliage of the trees at the head of the valley while the lesson unfolded quickly and confusingly with explosions of laughter, jokes and Latin nicknames as Father Gavin drove us on, attempting to explain the mysteries of conjugations and declensions.
Afterwards we were guided to Dr Warner’s remedial class for Greek beginners. Dr Warner was dressed in an ancient grey suit patched with poorly sewn strips of black leather. His face was sallow and faded, his bald pate deeply wrinkled. After setting the others an exercise on the board, he came to sit next to me. Sighing a little as if weary to the heart, he showed me how to form the Greek letters of the alphabet. He smelt of boot polish and his breath was rancid. As I attempted to copy the letters by myself, he hummed a monotonous little tune: ‘Alpha…beta…gamma…delta…’
