Authors: John Cornwell
T
HE BUS GROANED
up the steep winding road from Oakamoor, packed with noisy returning boys from the station. When I saw the familiar shape of the college looming through the evening mist on its isolated promontory I felt that I was coming home. I was no longer the boy who had arrived from London’s East End a year earlier.
Along with the rest of my year I had moved further back in the main body of the church to make way for a new lower fourth. As the school captain led us in prayer from the back, I realised how deeply Cotton was eating into my soul. I had returned to what was truly me. As I placed myself in the presence of Almighty God during night prayers, as I sang the
Salve Regina
, I felt that I was being drawn into the ranks of the chosen men who now, and throughout the ages, served Holy Mother Church.
The following day, James and Derek, who had travelled with me from London, and Peter who had returned from Wolverhampton, waited for me by the noticeboards so that we could take a morning constitutional on Top Bounds. Then I saw Charles. He was standing at the bottom of the Bounds steps talking animatedly with Staines and Bursley, making them laugh. Charles’s hair was a little bleached, his face lightly tanned. Our eyes met for a moment and I trembled.
As the college swung into its routines I found myself observing our priests. I was struck for the first time by their poverty and discipline. The profs, all ten of them, were wedded to their routines, and lacking in ‘attachments’ save for their enthusiasm for smoking. They possessed little, other than their means of transport – mostly ageing motorbikes. Their beds and desks, the chairs they sat in, were the property of the college, and hence the Church. Only Father Armishaw stood out from the
rest because of his aptitude for engaging boys, his occasional vulgarities, his books and his collections of classical records, his flying jacket and that gleaming new motorbike. And yet, Father Armishaw, as a priest, was no less perfectly in tune with the others, excercising his priesthood on the surface, without signs of inferiority. Our priests appeared content to perform the externals of the religious life. As I watched them reading their breviaries, pacing up and down the gravel paths, flicking over the pages, adjusting the silk tags, there was no hint of fervour. Their Masses were said with almost perfunctory precision with no hint of devout interiority.
I had found confirmation of this mechanical approach to the religious life in Francis de Sales. He had a compelling chapter titled ‘Spiritual and Sensible Consolation’, in which he vehemently rejected all emotion in the growth of the spiritual life. ‘Weeping and tenderness of heart’ are but ‘snares of the Devil’, wrote the saint, for being transitory they are not to be trusted. In his characteristic employment of metaphors from natural history he wrote that tears of emotion produce toadstools and fungi, not true flowers grown from seed. True devotion, wrote Francis de Sales, is just to do our duty ‘promptly, resolutely and energetically’.
The rhythm of priestly life at Cotton had echoes of just such military efficiency, and the unquestioned protector of Cotton’s clerical discipline was the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran. Father Doran was a lean, colourless, well-ordered man. The smoothness of his pale hair, the correctness of his manner of speaking, the precision of his Roman collar, the starch of his white shirt cuffs, were the epitome of Catholic clericalism. He kept us permanently poised as if we were all standing on our polished toecaps.
Sometimes I watched him from the cloisters, walking the sweep drive in front of the old hall with the archbishop, His Grace Francis Grimshaw. Occasionally they would turn their heads towards each other, deep in conversation. Then it struck
me that Father Doran was endowed with an authority that connected through the archbishop and the cardinal in Westminster right up to the pope in Rome: His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, cleric of all clerics, whose photograph with those huge dark eyes, set in an ascetic face, gazed down upon us in clock cloister.
We were told repeatedly that His Holiness the Pope in Rome was the ‘servant of the servants of God’. But we were under no illusions as to the strict order of authority that ascended up to the papal pinnacle in Rome. Despite our aspirations to be
servants
of God, we were conscious of the special charism of our calling. When I thought now of lay people, the laity, and female laity in particular, I was thinking of ‘them’ rather than of ‘us’.
I
N ACCORDANCE WITH
tradition, the first Sunday homily of term was given by Father Doran. He appeared before us impassive, unsmiling. It was a pep talk for the slackers. ‘Father Gavin,’ he said at one point, ‘tells me that the fifth form can take an
à la carte
approach to their choice of subjects for their public examinations this year. Well, I don’t know about
à la carte
, but some of you are going to be
in the cart
if you don’t apply yourselves.’ That is how he spoke.
Turning to discipline in the college, he addressed the matter of boys neglecting to rise the instant the first bell rang at 6.20 a.m. ‘I have received a request for an occasional
sleep-in,
’ he said. ‘Well, all of you here have the opportunity to sleep
in
for at least eight hours every night. What would you have me do? Allow you to sleep for ten hours? Eleven hours? I am reliably informed by medical experts that the sleep requirements
for healthy living are as follows: an adult requires seven hours, a boy eight hours, a baby nine hours, and a
pig
requires
ten
hours.’ So he continued, speaking a little to the side of his mouth, his lips drawn down, delivering his withering reproofs.
As we filed out of the assembly hall I found myself behind Charles. He was quietly entertaining Staines with an imitation of Father Doran’s manner of speaking. Much as I felt Father Doran had been severe and sarcastic, it pained me to hear Charles House sneering at our superior within minutes of leaving the hall.
As the new academic year progressed, Charles’s circumstance as a seminarian became ever more extraordinary. During Mass I saw him reading a novel, or chatting to his neighbour when the choir was singing. He missed Rosary, his lips did not move when we said public prayers, and he laughed openly at students who appeared pious. He was contemptuous of Cotton. One day, waiting for Father Piercy to arrive for a maths lesson, he commented that the priest was not qualified to teach the subject. ‘You should be grateful,’ James said tartly, ‘to be attending the best Catholic school in England.’ House turned on him, sneeringly: ‘Don’t be absurd! Ampleforth, Downside, Stony-hurst, are all ten times better than this place.’
‘Then why,’ James said hotly, ‘did you not go to one of them?’
‘Perhaps I will.’
James said to me afterwards: ‘What is House doing here? He’s so vain. And his special friendships!’ He looked at me accusingly for a moment, then went on to speak of the bad effect Charles was having on the college. ‘He exploits every little weakness in people and he sucks up to the profs. He is sly beyond belief.’
Like me, Charles had caught up with the rest of our year in Latin. He continued to be popular with the profs who came in contact with him, especially Father Doran who was taking the upper fourth for English. He was breaking Bounds every morning, and in so slick a manner that Father McCartie and
the big sixth had consistently failed to catch him. James and I, though, had seen him, accompanied by Bursley and Staines, slipping out of Little Bounds and down the steep path between the trees into the valley for what we guessed was their morning cigarette. On one occasion we saw two more boys following them. Meanwhile, Father Doran, normally so knowing about boyish wiles, was increasingly indulgent towards Charles. Charles’s weekly essay, suspiciously sophisticated beyond his years, was invariably the one to be read out, and he was always first to be called upon for his opinion. He even recycled Father Doran’s brand of cynicism.
‘Give me,’ Father Doran asked the class, ‘a sentence containing the phrase “a contradiction in terms”.’
‘A contradiction in terms,’ quipped Charles, ‘is a prompt schoolboy.’
Father Doran chuckled indulgently, apparently unaware, as James commented, that he had been laughing at one of his own jokes. ‘And how is it,’ James went on, ‘that Father Doran failed to recognise the source of House’s essay on proverb making, lifted wholesale from the first chapter of Belloc’s
Path to Rome
?’ Charles, James was intimating, was guilty of something more than plagiarism. Father Doran, our superior, was being suborned and undermined by the insidious charm of Charles House. Charles was a threat to everything Cotton stood for.
T
HE TERM HAD
once again reached that point when autumn was about to pass into early winter, when Charles suddenly disappeared from the college. I first heard the news, arriving in the refectory from prayers before lunch. Without informing
anybody, Charles, Staines and Bursley had disappeared, together with two further members of the second year fifth: all of them church students. Enquiries in Oakamoor had apparently established that they had taken a mid-morning train to Uttoxeter.
Every term there were boys who ‘did a bunk’ as it was called, but they were usually isolated, homesick individuals who had found the regime too harsh to bear. Poor grubby O’Rourke had set off earlier in the term, walking aimlessly towards Cheadle. He had been picked up by the bursar, then sent home formally a few days later. It was unusual for boys like Charles and Bursley to leave unless they had been ‘sacked’. As James Rolle explained, the voluntary departure of five church students in one day would reflect badly on Father Doran in the eyes of the archbishop.
After supper that evening, the college was summoned to the assembly hall. The school captain made us sit in silence, which we did for a full quarter of an hour, the tension building. Then Father Doran appeared. Instead of sitting up on the stage as he would for the Sunday homily, he chose to stand before us at ground level. He started in a quiet, even voice. He confirmed that a group of boys had left the college without permission. Now he wanted to talk to us about the nature of a priestly vocation.
‘It was for you, and only for you, to apply to your bishop to be accepted as seminarians. You heard your vocation in your hearts. But once your bishop accepted you to be educated by the diocese for the priesthood, then your situation changed.’
The judgement as to whether we had vocations, he was saying, was a matter not only for us individually but for the Church. It was the Church that called us to the priesthood, not our interior voices, and it was for the Church in the person of our religious superior to release us from our vocations. The obligation for a boy to consult with his superior before leaving the seminary, he went on, was not trivial. ‘Over the years there
have been boys who left this place without consultation. In every case the consequences have been devastating, even fatal.’
He now set before us the fates, one by one, of those who had abandoned their vocations down the years without seeking permission. There was the boy who left one year and developed a brain tumour the next. The youth who absconded and was killed weeks later riding a bicycle. The boy who went mad and was locked up in a lunatic asylum.
Before he finished he said in a low voice: ‘I need hardly tell you the moral of this desertion today: the influence of bad company; the forming of cliques and undesirable particular friendships. Avoid those companions who would attempt to draw you into secret meeting places and conspiracies to break the rules of the house. Of these fellows who have left us today, I fear for them from the bottom of my heart.’
I
WAS TROUBLED
by Charles’s departure and Father Doran’s talk. It made me more aware of a shadowy corner of anxiety in my soul. Charles had awakened me to intense and irresistible feelings. I had felt intensely, ecstatically alive. Now that he had gone, I began to wonder about my ability to resist the temptation to give in to those feelings, should they occur again.
The answer, as it had been suggested in spiritual direction, was the avoidance of ‘special friendships’. But I remained anxious. At my next visit to Father Owen, I raised my fears with him. Once again, he talked about ‘sublimation’. His voice filled uncharacteristically with emotion as he said: ‘If it happens again, pour all your unbidden feelings, the stew pot of your passions, into your love of Our Blessed Lady. Transform those unbidden feelings by offering them to her, who is your true
mother and the only intimate human being in your life.’ He gave me a card with a prayer called the
Memorare.
He assured me that this prayer had ‘extraordinary efficacy’ over every need in our lives:
Remember, O most loving Virgin Mary, that it is a thing unheard of, that anyone ever had recourse to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, and was left forsaken. Filled therefore with confidence in your goodness I fly to you, O Mother, Virgin of virgins. To you I come, before you I stand, a sorrowful sinner. Despise not my poor words, O Mother of the Word of God, but graciously hear and grant my prayer.
Something about the prayer worried me.
Memorare:
remember! It assumed, absurdly, that the Virgin Mary, like some absentminded flibbertigibbet, was likely to forget my needs unless reminded. Yet perhaps the petition was no more than an acknowledgement of our own childlike insignificance, our need to plead with a mother who knew our needs only too well. But no sooner had I eliminated this difficulty than it began to dawn on me, in a niggling, insistent scruple, that our spiritual lives involved not real feelings for real persons, but invented feelings for imaginary persons. The reflection disturbed me so much that I wondered whether it was not a whispered suggestion of the Devil himself, the Father of Lies. For if we were inventing our joys and our struggles, our light and our darkness, if we were inventing our relationships with Jesus and Mary, were we not therefore dwelling in a world of make-believe? Against this creeping temptation to Faith I argued with myself that there was nothing necessarily wrong with imagining the world of the spirit. After all, the spiritual, the supernatural, lay beyond the veil of mere appearances. There was a sense in which our imaginings were a means of connecting with a deeper reality than this world of passing vanities. And yet, and yet. On the night that I had been beaten for
studying under the bedclothes it had not been the Virgin Mary nor my Guardian Angel who came to comfort me, but Charles, the cynical, vain, absconding Charles. More than this, for all his capriciousness Charles had made me feel with an intensity that had devoured me. For the first time in my life I had been utterly besotted with another human being. I had been kissed, and had kissed in return. Being with Charles, short-lived as it was, had been worth every single passing moment. According to Father Owen, though, I should have taken those intense feelings and directed them towards Our Lady.
I surely spent a great deal of my everyday life speaking to Our Lady! I prayed to her constantly and fervently, with frequent invocations and routine prayers such as the Angelus, the Rosary, and the nightly Salve Regina. Yet Mary was, I had to admit, a figment, an amalgam of all the images of the Virgin I had venerated through my life, from the statue on my mother’s dressing table, to the image of Our Lady of Fatima in Saint Augustine’s, Barkingside, to the stained-glass Immaculate Conception in the church at Cotton.
My relationship with the person of the Virgin Mary, as it happened, had been subject to a gradual and troubling transformation. Since I came to Cotton I had begun to experience a confused, disturbing association between the Virgin Mary and my own mother. I could not think of my mother without remembering her violent, sometimes gratuitous, beatings, her rash and hurtful comments. Hence I could not think of her as associated with the Mother of God and vice versa. Yet the association had been encouraged by the awestruck reverence expressed for ‘motherhood’ by the profs and many of the boys. Devotion to the Mother God coalescing with love of our natural mothers was quietly and constantly fostered. The profs spoke of ‘your esteemed mothers’, and they made it known that like most diocesan priests they spent their free days or afternoons travelling considerable distances across the diocese to visit their own ‘dear mothers’. Many of the boys received
lengthy letters from their mothers each week as well as parcels containing items of clothing in which treats had been hidden. There was a spiritual counsel that swept aside all these anxieties. Was it not better to quash all emotions entirely, the better to avoid the quagmire of feelings? Saint Francis de Sales did not write of sublimation. If we would promote ‘perseverance’ in the religious life, he advised, we should distrust and reject all feelings, even in our everyday prayer. But then I asked myself: would I have the strength to resist an upsurge of feeling for another person, another infatuation, if it should occur again? I would build up the strength of resistance, I told myself, by rejecting and distrusting all feelings, even spiritual feelings. I would resist feelings: resist, resist, resist.