Authors: John Cornwell
A
S THE TRAIN
steamed along the valley of the Churnet following the flow of the river towards Oakamoor, I was astonished at the transformation of the countryside by the arrival of early summer. I sat next to James Rolle with the window down, breathing in the scents of the meadows and the river; gazing on the horse chestnut trees in full red and cream blossom, and the white hawthorn hedgerows brilliant as wedding dresses. In the luggage rack above my head were the items I had taken home at Easter as well as white cricket pants and cricket boots, donated by my elder brother who had grown out of them, and a new pair of swimming trunks.
At night prayers I was full of resolutions to apply myself more closely to my studies, to read more, and to make more friendships. As I came out of church in ranks at the end of prayers, I saw Father Armishaw reading his breviary. He was bathed in rich orange evening light that flooded into the back of the church from the west window. The very sight of him, sitting in a relaxed posture, one hand raised to rest his chin, filled me with relief.
I lay awake for hours listening to nightjars and owls in the woods, breathing in the cold sweet air from the dormer windows. The next morning I woke to the sound of the dawn chorus in the valley. Looking out of the window I stood entranced by the sight of the early sun lighting up the distant hills. I had been assigned to serve the Mass of Father Owen, and I knelt almost trembling with happiness beneath the floodlit stained glass of Saint Francis. The great doors were open at the west end of the church, creating a Gothic-framed vision of the steep fields on the far side of the valley. Every window in the college revealed a perspective of abundant dappled greenery and blossom, and the promise of hazy distant prospects.
Several days into the summer term Father Piercy entered the refectory to announce that the swimming pool was ready. The lower and upper fourth years were allowed up for a swim after tea. The pool was a concrete tank fed by a stream that gushed down from Peggy’s Wood.
The dark green water was stunningly cold. Boys were diving in from a crude board, and the air was filled with the echo of their shouts and laughter. Floating on my back I looked up at the great elms rising on every side of the pool. I had never been so happy in my life.
As the weather grew warmer, the daily swim became a routine of exquisite pleasure. Afterwards I would go to the library to read Hilaire Belloc’s
Path to Rome.
I imagined his descriptions of the French valleys as if they were part of our own landscape at Cotton. I enjoyed the rhythm of his prose and the bullish confidence of his Catholic certitudes. I had stopped reading Thérèse of Lisieux and
The Imitation of Christ
and I was spending time privately reciting the psalms of the Little Office of the Virgin. I felt as if I was living on the surface of Cotton’s routines, sustained like a child by the hands of Jesus and Mary.
I decided not to return to Father Browne for confession and spiritual direction for a time. I went instead to Father Owen, who heard confessions in the sacristy during Rosary on Wednesday evenings and spoke briefly and with detached reassurance. Less self-centered, and prone to those scruples, I felt that I was becoming like many of my more contented companions. I was taking myself less seriously.
As the days lengthened I was spending time after Rosary in the cricket nets with James Rolle. But I found that as a batsman I was taking more balls on my knuckles than on the bat. My defective eye was letting me down. I cracked two fingers in the third week of term during a Sunday cricket match. I was not wearing protective gloves and a huge-shouldered boy called Stubeck hurled a ball at me which I took full on my left hand.
As Mère Saint Luc, the matron, bound the fingers she told me that I was off cricket for a week.
And that was how I came to fall under the spell of Charles House who had lurked at the edge of my consciousness ever since the day he had bent over me in the library during Lent and told me that I was beautiful. Why was it that I had thought of his face, close to mine, whenever I heard the refrain from Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’?
It was a blazing Wednesday afternoon on which we had a half-day holiday for cricket. I had been lying on my stomach, leaning on my elbows in the long grass below the seniors’ cricket pitch, watching a match against a visiting team. Charles appeared walking up from a lower field, where he had been playing for the under-fourteens team. He was wearing crisp white cricket pants and a short-sleeved Aertex shirt. His sports clothes were of the best quality, and his boots were of a fine creamy kid leather. He lay next to me, stretching out his arms which were already lightly suntanned, smooth and delicate like a girl’s. He was chewing on a stalk of grass. ‘I was bowled out for a duck,’ he said. Then he looked me full in the face, very closely.
‘Poor old Fru!’ he whispered. ‘How’s the broken fingers?’ He had a flirtatious way of glancing to one side before looking at one directly. He talked for a while about the match; in my confusion and excitement at his proximity – his hip was gently pressed against mine – I hardly understood what he said, except that it was funny and soothing.
Then he said: ‘Shut your eyes, Fru.’
I shut them, and a moment later I felt his lips touching mine.
When I opened my eyes, my heart racing, he was lying on his back, his head in the grass. His lips were parted, his teeth pure white and even; his dancing blue eyes were laughing.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘What have I done, Fru! What on earth have I done!’
I was looking at him, breathing deeply as if he had punched me hard in the solar plexus.
He said softly: ‘Come on, Fru. Give me a kiss.’
And I did: lightly on his flushed cheek. And I found my soul melting at the smell of his hair and breath which seemed to me sweet as the early summer grass. As I looked at him, a few inches from his face, he was transfigured into the most beautiful creature in the world. His features were delicate, perfect, thrilling.
I knew that I had done something forbidden, but it did not occur to me that I had committed a sexual sin. Homosexuality meant no more to me in those days than a tendency for boys and men to behave like women – ‘sissies’. I was intoxicated, obsessed, prostrate with adoration.
F
ROM THAT MOMENT
in the long grass I was thrown into a minute-by-minute agony of suspense. I was thinking of him all day long and half the night. It was as if the earth would open up and I would plunge into an abyss unless I was with him. I contrived to be with him whenever there was a break in the routine; and he, in turn, seemed to want to be with me too. My infatuation for Charles was from the start inseparable from my feelings about Cotton’s enchanted valley in those early summer weeks. Through the open windows came the scent of newly mown hay in the meadows below the college, and scents of flowers from the gardens before the old hall. When we were together our conversation was banal. We would talk about cricket, or make wry comments about Father Gavin or one of the other priests. Apart from those compulsive first kisses I felt no desire to touch him or kiss him again. Nor did
he touch me either, or express endearments. Only the slightest expression in his eyes when we were not observed confirmed that he returned my adoration.
The peak of my bliss during those early days was the afternoon Charles and I came to spend two whole hours together lying side by side. Our class was sent on a walk across fields to a hidden dell where the turf was cropped down by sheep to a smooth lawn on the banks of a fast-running brook. The sixth former wanted to sit beneath the shade of a tree to study a textbook for his exams. The rest of us were allowed to laze in the sun. Charles and I lay on the warm turf out of sight. At one point, throwing blades of grass gently towards my chest, he said: ‘John, I love you so much.’ When he said it, I thought I was going to die of happiness. And yet the sense of delight was so excessive that I felt a momentary chill, as if the sun had darkened for a few seconds. I felt overwhelmed. How had I come to deserve such love? I was not good-looking, or funny, or interesting. And it was Charles, the most perfect, most adorable human being on earth, who was saying this.
‘Why?’ I asked him, trembling.
‘Because,’ he said, laughing, ‘you warm the cockles of my heart.’
As we walked back to the college in the heat of the afternoon, he just once bumped lazily against me with his shoulder. I thought that I would never forget the pressure of his beautiful shoulder against my arm. After tea we sat in the library at the same table. The windows were open, letting in the warm quiet evening air. I was happy, and yet from that moment I began to feel a sense of danger. I had dim and ominous memories of perfect summer days in London towards the end of the war, when death could come silently at any moment from a cloudless sky.
C
HARLES WAS NO
longer consorting with Bursley, who would sometimes watch us miserably from afar. One day Bursley came and joined us on Top Bounds as we were sauntering together after breakfast. Charles said to him: ‘Get lost!’ Bursley turned away wordlessly. I felt deeply for him, and it filled me with consternation that Charles could treat him like that. Will he, I wondered, say that to me one day? It was unthinkable.
James, Derek and Peter were all too aware of my attachment. I felt no embarrassment; I felt immensely proud. Standing in ranks preparing to march into church for Sunday Compline, Oliver Stack murmured in my ear: ‘Are you aware that we are not meant to indulge in special friendships?’
‘Get lost, Stack!’ I said.
I was conscious of my fall from grace, but I was living just for the moment. The point of life was to be with Charles, to be thinking about him every waking moment. I was conscious
of him as I knelt saying the Rosary after supper; even as I went up to receive Communion during Mass. We were separated by several desks in class, but we would exchange looks occasionally through the lesson. When I sang in choir I could look up from my music score to see him in the front row of the pews. At night I lay in bed looking up at the sky through the dormer window, thinking of his beautiful face, his particular mannerisms, his way of turning and looking, conscious that he was just a few feet away in the darkness.
How I would have loved to climb into bed with him. I just wanted to be with him.
T
HE SPELL BROKE
on the Feast of the Ascension. After a glorious High Mass, the choir set off in a bus for the annual treat at Dovedale. We passed through the town of Ashbourne singing ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ at the tops of our voices in the hope that passing Protestants would get the full force of our Catholic convictions.
Lunch was laid out in readiness at the Izaak Walton Hotel which stood at the entrance to the famous gorge with its high rocks and rapids. After feasting ourselves on roast chicken and vegetables followed by ‘cabinet pudding’ and custard, we were allowed to roam free, while the priests reclined in armchairs, their jackets unbuttoned, smoking cigars. There was a tradition that after lunch the sopranos and altos raced to the top of Thorpe Cloud, the hill overlooking the river. I sprinted off with the first five. We crossed the rushing waters on stepping stones, and approached the flanks of the hill through a stone stile. Halfway up, I was fit to vomit, and stopped. I sat on the side of the hill. Looking about me I felt overwhelmed by the
immense vistas on every side. I had never stood so high, nor seen so far, nor felt so small in the vast grandeur of the landscape. There was just one person missing: Charles.
I sat there for a time, gazing at the landscape. Bursley and another fifth former came into view; Bursley said something to his companion and came over to me.
‘This thing with you and Charles,’ he said in a low voice, ‘it won’t last, you know.’ Without waiting for an answer he went to join the other boy.
I knew that Bursley was right. What Charles was doing to me was what he had done to Bursley. It was what Charles did; and I vomited. When the choir returned from Dovedale, Charles was sitting on the wall that bordered Top Bounds, waiting for me.
‘I missed you,’ I said, my heart pounding.
‘I missed you, too,’ he said.
C
HARLES WENT COOL
on me slowly, very slowly, every small token of his rejection an exquisite torture. It began when he asked me to come for a smoke down in the valley. I told him that smoking made me feel sick. In fact, I was afraid of being found out. He pulled a face, and whispered: ‘Sanctebob!’ Then he said something that filled me with anxiety: ‘The rules in this place,’ he said, ‘are ridiculous…I’ll find someone else to come with me.’
There was no dramatic falling out; just a long withdrawal of his presence. Instead of being in our usual places at our usual times, he was increasingly absent.
One Sunday evening as we gathered for a film in the assembly hall, I saved a seat for him. He came in just before
the lights went out. He looked at me directly for a moment, then went off to sit with Bursley, smiling amiably as he greeted him. I felt a pang of sorrow like bereavement. That night I did not sleep; my brain raged until dawn.
For days he blew hot and cold. There were occasions when he seemed to send small signals of affection just as before; but these tokens were as agonising as his rejection. One day when we were walking on Top Bounds together after breakfast, he stopped in his tracks. He said: ‘Oh, Fru, you do know I love you, don’t you!’
I was so miserable, so confused, I wanted to scream: ‘No, Charles, I don’t know!’ I looked away, fit to cry.
For three days after this, he appeared to be ignoring me. And all the while the term was passing in a succession of painfully lovely days amidst the scents and brilliant foliage of our valley retreat.
How much time had I spent with Charles when I should have been studying. How much of my prayer life had been wasted in distracted, lovesick ponderings. What of my commitment to bask in the presence of Jesus my Lord and true Father. For how many hours had I walked up and down the cloisters and across the Bounds in the hope of ‘bumping’ into Charles when he had gone absent.
Two-thirds of the term had vanished when I was summoned to Father Gavin’s room during prep one evening. He was sitting at his desk wearing heavy reading glasses, his face solemn. He did not invite me to sit down. He had a selection of my exercise books before him.
‘Are you determined to be put on a train home?’ he asked coldly. My work in every subject was in decline, he said, and the effort the staff had made with me had been in vain. The promise I had shown at Easter was an illusion. I began to weep.
Father Gavin was unmoved: his head was cocked to one side, his mouth pursed with indignation. ‘Crying won’t do any good,’ he said.
I went to pray before the Blessed Sacrament; the doors were open and the church was filled with the scent of honeysuckle. I poured out my heart to Jesus. As I prayed, I realised that I had not come before Him for help to make a free decision. I knew that my love for Charles was utterly without a future. The choice was between deliberately shutting the door on him, or spending the rest of the term mooning around at our meeting places. That latter path, I now knew, would not win Charles back, and it would lead to expulsion. The interview with Father Gavin had frightened me. In all the weeks of infatuation I had not stopped to consider the consequences for my future and for my soul.
After Rosary I went to confession to Father Owen. I told him that I had given in to my feelings for another boy, that I was now anxious that my attachment had been sinful. He was brief and firm. He wanted to know whether we had committed any sexual acts together. I was not sure what that meant, but I told him that beyond one kiss we had never touched each other.
He said in a calm voice that it was only natural to form attachments. But it was not appropriate to give in to feelings of affection for someone of the same sex. ‘What you must do,’ he said, ‘is take these strong feelings and channel them towards Our Blessed Lady. There is a word for this:
sublimation
, the purification of our feelings in our love for Mary.’ Then he told me to say three Hail Marys for my penance.
That evening I began a regime that would continue to the end of the term a month hence. I set up my hidden workplace once more in one of the music practice rooms under the stage. I was determined that I would devote every free moment to study.
I skipped choir practice, affecting a sore throat. But after a few days I was dismissed from the choir anyway by Father Owen as having reached what he called ‘my grand climacteric’. ‘We’ll see you back here when you’re ready to go into the tenors
or basses,’ he said. It was remarkable, it seemed to me, that he could speak to me as if my confidences in confession had never been.
I got through cloister Rosary in two minutes after supper so that I could spend evening recreation under the stage. I spent the spiritual reading period with my head in a textbook. I shot off my weekly letters home in several minutes instead of the usual half-hour. I gave up swimming, and spent no more than three minutes eating breakfast.
As I plunged into studying, my heart never ceased to ache for the presence of Charles. He left a note in my desk, asking why I was avoiding him. I did not respond. I was conscious of him sometimes, looking at me reproachfully; but I steeled myself against the temptation to approach him. Then he left a note in my desk asking me to meet him in the valley near the shrine to Saint Wilfred. As I read it, I remembered him standing among the trees with Bursley. I tore up the note.
Finally he found me in my hideaway. He stood at the door looking at me where I sat among my books, using the closed piano lid as a desk. ‘So, here you are, Fru!’
‘Here I am,’ I said coldly. ‘I’m working, Charles, so leave me alone.’
‘Come on, Fru,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s make up. You know I love you.’
He was wearing an appealing smile. I adored him, soul and body. I felt as if I was murdering my own soul when, conscious that my eyes were blazing, fists clenched, I said: ‘Get lost, Charles, and I mean it.’
He was not frightened of me. He just nodded and left.
That evening I knelt before the triptych of the Annunciation in the Lady chapel and tried to direct all my feelings for Charles towards Our Lady. After fifteen minutes I felt a headache coming on, so I rose and left the church.