Authors: John Cornwell
D
URING THE REMAINING
days of the summer term I discovered that, summoning my determination, making what I called ‘a
fiat
’, I could study to good effect even in the midst of love-lorn misery. I could work well even as I pined. Yet I found it difficult to concentrate on my prayers. In church I found myself merely uttering the sounds, while my mind was on Charles. Whenever I attempted to meditate, and to ‘sublimate, ’ I found myself thinking about him. When I said the Rosary or attended Mass, I could not concentrate on the mysteries and the sacred words. In church I laboured to keep my mind on the rituals, while every thought and image was of Charles.
This was a fresh cause for anxiety. We had been studying prayer and liturgy in Christian doctrine classes, with special reference to the papal document,
Mediator Dei.
The Holy Father had written that it was not enough merely to utter the words of a prayer. We should mean what we say. The ‘interior’ expression is as important, he had declared, as the ‘exterior’ expression.
Was I losing, I wondered, my vocation? Even as I pondered this, it occurred to me that staying at Cotton was the most important thing in my life. My vocation, the idea that I would one day take a piece of bread into my hands and bring God down on to this earth, was so far in the future, that it had no power to motivate me decisively. I was living intensely in the present. And if I had been asked to choose between Charles and the distant prospect of being ordained, if I had been asked to choose even between Charles and God himself, I would have chosen Charles. But leaving Cotton was not an option. Cotton was where I belonged now.
When I saw Charles pairing off with another boy called
Staines, when I caught glimpses of the two of them exchanging clandestine looks, I knew for certain, even as it scourged my heart with jealousy, that I would not now weaken. But I was also sustained by another influence, always present but hardly noticed.
The day after Father Gavin’s pep talk, Father Armishaw sent for me. He was sitting with the door and the window open. He was playing a piece of piano music on his gramophone and smoking a cigarette. Looking towards the gramophone he said: ‘Listen to that, Cornwell.’ He had never called me ‘Fru’ like the rest of the staff and boys. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful fugue! Do you know what a fugue is?…Never mind…’
I listened, and I liked it. I felt secure sitting in the priest’s room with its rows and rows of books and splendid views down the valley. My eye ran along the book shelves. Among the authors were names and titles that were strange to me then and therefore unmemorable; but I was conscious that they had nothing to do with the sacred, with Catholicism, with religion. When the music came to an end, he said abruptly: ‘How goes it?’
I was wondering whether to speak about Charles. But instinctively I kept silent.
‘No more
scruples
this term? No more agonies of conscience?’
I shook my head.
‘Right as a ribstone pippin?’ He paused as if he was about to say something else, but he left it hanging in the air.
We sat in silence for a few moments more.
‘And what about the man in South Kensington?’
I shook my head again. Silence.
Then I felt compelled to ask him the question that loomed uppermost in my mind. ‘Is it a sin, sir, if you don’t concentrate properly on your prayers; do we receive grace if we can’t concentrate on the Mass, if we find it impossible to pray even at Holy Communion?’
‘Are you trying to concentrate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the trying is what matters…God expects you to pray with your heart and mind as well as your lips and body. But there’s something else. There are times when you acquire grace just by going through the motions…’ He gave me a strange smile: ‘One day you’ll understand, but perhaps not today.’
‘Do you concentrate on every word of the liturgy and the divine office, sir?’
‘I certainly don’t. But you tell God that you want to concentrate, and leave the rest up to Him.’
‘But, sir…do you always concentrate when you read your books, your poetry and novels?’
He laughed. ‘Aha! I have to say that I do…but that’s different.’
‘How is it different, sir?’
He got up from his chair and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Cornwell, do something for me, will you! Scram!’
Before the last day of term I went to confession to Father Owen in his room. He was brief as usual and recommended that I say my prayers each day at regular times. Swinging around to his bookcase, he plucked a book from the shelf. ‘I’ve something for you to take away for the summer break,’ he said. It was
The Devout Life
by Saint Francis de Sales.
B
ACK AT THE
Peel the summer sports activities were in full swing. My father was working from dawn till dark most days, while Mum was running the club-room canteen, selling her Spam sandwiches and rock cakes. My sister, the convent-school
girl, took care of the house at weekends; cleaning every room, making beds, washing and ironing, while looking after my younger brothers. Jimmy, a cheerful little lad, sucked his thumb while living out his horse-riding fantasies. He could go nowhere, even a few yards, without mounting his imaginary horse, trotting forward or galloping, one hand on the reins, making a clopping sound with his tongue. Michael, small for his age, spent hours drawing elaborate castles with intricate defences: moats, battlements, vats of boiling oil to inflict mischief on invaders. It was if he had embarked on a massive imaginative strategy of defence against the entire malefic world, starting with the Peel.
My sister was a surrogate mother to my younger brothers, and she did it without complaint. But I sometimes caught her standing at the sink, looking through the window towards the gates, just as I had seen my mother do. That summer I heard Maureen singing ‘Mr Sandman’ at the sink, over and over again.
My eldest brother, Terry, went to night school several evenings a week as part of his training to become a draughtsman. He was obliged to work on Saturday mornings at Plessey’s factory, and on Saturday afternoons and Sundays he was out all day playing cricket.
I was to help Dad in between my home routine of early morning Mass, running, and stints in the local library. I saw at first hand now the application and expertise he put into the care of his pitches, the tennis courts, the running track, and the gardens at the entrance to the sports ground. His centre of operations was a storeroom and adjoining garage which housed his mowers, rollers, spikers, whitewash applicators and tractors, all of which he serviced himself. On a shelf in the storeroom were his seed catalogues and manuals on the proper care of the cricket ‘tables’.
He worked mainly in silence, giving me brief instructions from time to time. But when we took a break to drink tea
from his flask, he would tell me stories about his struggles as a grounds keeper. ‘Believe you me, son, when I first came to this place,’ he told me one day, ‘it wasn’t fit for a fairground. The plantains were big as cabbages. As for the machinery, it was only fit for a museum…’ He told me how the land was reclaimed swamp, ‘full of tetanus’, and how step by step he rescued the soil and the grasses from dereliction, and upgraded his machines, doing it all by himself with no help.
I enjoyed working with Dad, but I noticed that he was blinking more than usual as the day wore on. I also saw him on several occasions staring with a faraway look in the middle of the cricket table for a minute or so. As he shaved in the morning, he would say over and over: ‘Oh dear!…Oh dear!…Oh dear!…’ I thought he was merely fatigued. Like Mum he was working seven days a week, sometimes until after ten at night. In addition to working on the sports ground he was doing odd jobs as a gardener out in the wealthy suburbs. His clients used to come and pick him up in their cars, and sometimes I accompanied him. We would mow lawns, cut edges, weed, cut back, dead-head flowers, tidy around. Then we would be driven back to the Peel after dark, a few extra shillings in his pocket, one of which he would give to me. ‘Don’t spend it all at once!’ he would say with a wink.
I first understood that Dad was in a bad way in his mind when he went missing for two whole days in the middle of a working week. Mum, who was on worse terms than usual with him, and out all night herself working in the hospital, remarked that she hoped she had ‘seen the last of him’. A strange hope, as our house and her canteen business went with his job. But such was her exasperation with him, and her desperation for a change of her fortunes. She was convinced that he was holding her back.
On the evening of the second day, when he had still not appeared, it occurred to me to look for him in the back section of the shed where he kept his tractor. There I found him in
the failing light, sitting on a pile of filthy sacks, sobbing. He had lost a tool that was essential for his work and seemed convinced that the end of his world had come. He dried his eyes, and I managed to coax him back into the house. I put my arm around his shoulders and told him how much I loved him. I was conscious of a sense of personal power: the power of a son who has outstripped his father; who aspired to be father to the man: Father John.
The next day instead of working he sat in his armchair, rocking, sighing and screwing up his eyes, mournfully humming to himself Mario Lanza’s song, ‘Be My Love’. It was unlike him to neglect his work.
I went with him to our local doctor. When he came out he was sweating profusely and shaking. I asked him what the matter was.
‘What’s the matter? I’ve got to see a trick cyclist, that’s what the matter is. But believe you me, son, they won’t get me into that Claybury there.’
The nature of my father’s condition, which turned out to be depression, and a form of epilepsy known as
petit mal
, became apparent in the following weeks as he started to make regular visits to Saint Clement’s hospital, the psychiatric unit in Bow Road. Mum attempted to explain his condition to us, as it had been relayed to her by a consultant psychiatrist. Dad suffered from occasional seizures in the brain which lasted no longer than a few seconds but which left him emotionally upset.
We did not know that Dad was only at the beginning of his tribulations. Mum said little, but she appeared to be watching him carefully. She said out of his hearing that the diagnosis of epilepsy explained many things, especially his ‘filthy moods’ and, as she pronounced it, in her occasional aptitude for cockney malapropism, ‘his
panaroia’.
He was on various medications which slowed him down. He continued to work, but he easily became exhausted and everything seemed to take him longer. A jolly young man on
vacation from Exeter University was employed by the secretary of the charity that owned the playing fields to help Dad. As the summer wore on, the pitches and tennis courts were beginning to look ragged and worn. The spores and fungi were getting the upper hand. Marauding pests, wilts and slugs were beginning to have their way.
I
N THE SECOND
week of September, we took a family summer holiday. We stayed for a week free of charge in a house owned by a Quaker charity at Cliftonville by the sea in Kent. The terraced holiday house in a road near the cliff tops smelt strangely but not unpleasantly of damp and the quantities of aged cheap novels and travel books that lined the shelves in the sitting room. I had a tiny bedroom to myself with bars on the windows. After we had settled in, I lay on the bed, and for the first time opened the book Father Owen had lent me:
The Devout Life
by Francis de Sales.
The book had been written for the spiritual guidance of a lay noblewoman. But his instructions were intended for people in all circumstances of life. Francis declared that there was no point in people fasting and being teetotal if they ‘drink deep in their neighbours’ blood with detraction’. Nor was there any point in giving to charity while refusing to forgive those who had offended you. To be good, he wrote in that first chapter, one needed charity; but to be devout one needed to practise charity cheerfully, and constantly.
I found
The Devout Life
appealing for its analogies from the natural history of animals, birds, insects, plants and flowers. There was no hint of mystical spirituality in his writings, and he repeatedly counselled normality and simple routines. He
wrote that religious people often appeared gloomy and serious; but a truly devout person, he insisted, was cheerful and agreeable.
It rained frequently at Cliftonville, and cold winds laced with flying salt spray whipped in from the Channel and the North Sea. Our attempts to enjoy ourselves on the beach below the cliffs were doomed. We sat in our deck-chairs swaddled in raincoats. Looking up at the lowering skies Mum grumbled: ‘I’m never allowed to enjoy a decent holiday. What terrible wickedness have I done to deserve this!’
My younger brothers ran in and out of the sea, their teeth chattering, their hands and limbs corpse-white. They ate their ice creams crouching behind the deck-chairs, hunched and shivering. I attended Mass and prayed in the Catholic church near the cliff tops. I went back in the afternoon to read
The Devout Life
and recite the Rosary.
One day I walked around Dreamland at Margate, the nearby popular seaside town, appalled by the vulgarity of the sideshows and raucous music, despising the scantily clad girls with their goose-bump flesh and silly hats proclaiming: ‘Kiss Me Quick’. The revolting smell of hot dogs and candy floss, screeching bands of teenagers, disgusted me. In preference I took to wandering the cliff-top paths west of Cliftonville, walking as far as Broadstairs around the North Foreland, breathing in the ozone and smell of seaweed, looking out towards the broad expanses of the wastes of grey sea.
One night before we left for London, Dad drank several bottles of beer in the kitchen. Once tipsy he told stories about his heroic youth on the streets of Custom House and did an imitation of Charlie Chaplin’s splayed shuffle, with its teetering turn on one foot. He seemed to be making a joke of his own painful disability. Mum, who had had a couple of glasses of Scotch and ginger wine, ‘Whisky Macs’, held herself tight and laughed shrilly at his antics. It made me happy to see them laughing together. I drank a couple of glasses of bottled Guinness.
That night, in the early hours, I woke up in the midst of a wet dream. The next day, Saturday, found me in a state of consternation. We were due to depart for London after lunch, and on Tuesday I was bound for Cotton. There were confessions in Cliftonville’s Catholic church during the mid-morning. As I entered the box I was relieved that the priest did not know me. He was a small pale man with glasses, and he seemed in a hurry. I stumbled over trying to explain my sin. He looked up, and said abruptly: ‘How many times did this happen?’
‘Just once, Father.’
‘Well, you don’t have to go into all that detail. All you have to say is that you committed a sexual sin by yourself on one occasion. In future that’s all you have to say. Now say three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Go in peace and sin no more.’ The grille trap came down with a petulant bang.