Authors: John Cornwell
W
HEN
I
RETURNED
to Peel for the Christmas holiday, it was to find that Dad was in hospital. There had been crying fits and more disappearances. Now he was being treated as an in-patient at Saint Clement’s hospital.
I took the bus to see him. As I approached the hospital, set back behind a wall and railings on the Bow Road, I could hear shouts coming from the windows. He had got his wish not to be committed to the dreaded Claybury; but Saint Clement’s could hardly have been better. Dad was in a lock-up ward which stank of urine, cheap cigarettes and an acrid smell like burning paraffin oil; in time I would learn that the substance was paraldehyde, a standard sedative in those days for disturbed mental patients.
Dad had lost weight; his hands shook, and he was crying. His blinking had transformed into a hideous tic: his whole face was contracting every so often to a concertina-like spasm. He spoke to me in a day room. The seats of the armchairs, placed in a semicircle and screwed to the floor, were covered in rubber mats. Most of his companions on the ward were sitting with blank faces, but two or three were pacing about agitatedly, talking to themselves or hollering up at the barred windows. Dad pointed to the patient next to him whose head was bandaged. He told me that the man had recently undergone a brain operation to quieten him down. ‘I hope they’re not going to do that operation on me, son,’ he said.
I took his hands in mine and told him that I would pray for him; but he seemed not to hear. ‘Believe you me, son,’ he said, ‘this place will be the end of me!’ It was not much of a conversation. He was absorbed in himself and his conviction that Mum had been telling tales about him behind his back to the ‘trick cyclist’ to keep him committed against his will. He
kept saying over and over again: ‘I’m not mad, son…I’m not barmy, I promise…’
Before I left I talked to a nurse, a young man in a grubby white uniform. He was a trifle unshaven. He told me in a strong Welsh accent that Dad was undergoing a therapy known as ‘modified insulin’, which he pronounced with elaborate precision. The ‘administration of insulin’, he explained, caused a shock to the system, rather like electric shock treatment, but less drastic. He said that it was sometimes beneficial, but nobody really knew why. He seemed to have psychiatric knowledge of and sympathy for Dad; but there was something sly about him, I thought.
When I came out on to the Bow Road, it was getting dark and a grey-green ‘pea-soup’ fog had descended. The late afternoon traffic was at a standstill and people were hurrying along the pavements with the last of their Christmas shopping. I walked to Mile End station to take the Central Line tube back to Gants Hill. As I walked, I wept for Dad and all he was going through in that gloomy building in the midst of that dark, dark, damp city where God, it seemed to me, was entirely absent. Was it possible, I wondered, that he could be given a brain operation against his will?
On Christmas Eve we went to Midnight Mass at the Camp. I spoke to Father Cooney, interrupting his pre-Mass meditation behind the curtain. I asked him to say a special prayer for my father. He looked up and nodded gravely. He said: ‘Is he not coming to Mass?’ Then he seemed to understand: ‘Wisswiss…to be sure…to be sure.’ And that was all. He was looking a lot older.
C
HRISTMAS PASSED WITH
the Cornwells stuffing themselves on the usual heaped plates of overcooked meat and soggy vegetables. The atmosphere was sombre, and there was a feeling that we were all retreating into our separate worlds. Mum had taken up ballroom dancing and stayed up late making flounced taffeta dresses covered in sequins.
After Christmas I was to learn that she had a dancing partner, an innocent arrangement, as we understood it. He was a married man called Arthur, whose wife was happy for him to squire Mum on the dance floor of the Majestic ballroom at Woodford once a week.
Mum had taken on more work outside of her hospital and clubhouse chores. She was washing the football gear of two teams each week, boiling mud-encrusted shirts, shorts and socks in buckets on the gas stove and drying them out before a coke fire before ironing them.
My sister, still at the convent school, talked repeatedly and at length about her companions and the nuns, some of whom, she assured me, were ‘titled ladies.’ She was ever more elegant and starched and would spend the best part of an hour brushing her felt school hat and polishing its badge, the motto of which was ‘
Serviam
’. (Let me serve.) She spent hours in the bathroom in the morning, which caused problems in the over-crowded household. The cry: ‘Are you still in there!’ punctuated the mornings as we boys queued up for our turn.
My younger brother, Michael, had won a scholarship to the Jesuit college in Stamford Hill, north London, and was absorbed in the graft of a grammar school education. The meticulous care he had squandered on his plans for ingenious mantraps, battlements and fortifications was now focused on Latin and algebra. He worked with impressive concentration
at a corner of the kitchen table oblivious of the other lives and concerns around him, and even the blare of the television set to which my youngest brother, Jimmy, was permanently glued. During intervals in television watching, Jimmy could regurgitate whole programme sections with remarkable accuracy, acting all the parts. There was more than a touch of genius in the way he could do this.
My eldest brother, Terry, now eighteen, had become an aficionado of jazz. He went regularly to the Royal Festival Hall to listen to ‘jam sessions’, and requisitioned the clubhouse to himself late on weekday evenings when he would take a shower and play records on the cafeteria radiogram. He was into British renderings of American trad and modern jazz players: Chris Barber, Humphrey Lyttleton, Ken Colyer. He invited me over to the clubroom to listen to his records, but being schooled on Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd and Gregorian chant, I found jazz too jauntily crass and secular for my liking. I could not hide my feelings of distaste, to Terry’s disdainful amusement. Every day at home I was missing the grace and elegance of the sacred music at Cotton.
I went to see my father again and he cried all through the visit. When I got up to go he tried to hang on to me like a terrified child. The nurse had to restrain him. He seemed to enjoy manhandling Dad. When I came out of the hospital I ran and alternately walked at the pace of a Swan walk all the way in freezing rain to Stratford East, then through Leyton and Leytonstone to Wanstead. As I walked I prayed the Rosary with my hand inside my raincoat pocket. When I reached Wanstead I tried to enter Our Lady of Lourdes church but it was locked. I stood with my forehead pressing against the door of the church, crying with frustration. By the time I got home it was dark.
My mother was furious that I had been out for so long, and that I was soaked. She was anxiously curious about how I had found Dad and what had passed between us. As I described
his state I could not betray my pity and affection for him, and she grew fretful. We quarrelled. She was insistent that his problem was weakness of character. I was equally insistent that he was ill and in need of loving kindness. It ended with her slapping me around the face and calling me with a characteristic malapropism a ‘sancti-nomious creeping Jesus’. When I corrected her, I got another whack – harder than the first.
I was counting the days before my return to Cotton. Every day, despite frost, fog and freezing winds and rain, I went out running; pounding the streets of Barkingside when I was not on my knees in church or in the library. One morning Mum passed me an envelope which had arrived from Cotton. It contained my college report. I already knew my marks, as they had gone up on the board before the end of term; the report also contained the profs’ comments. To my dismay I saw that Father Manion, who taught me botany, had written just one word against my performance: ‘Poor.’ As I had come equal first with my 90 out of 100, I could only guess that he had written his comment before the results. I had worked hard and, I thought, intelligently throughout the term.
From my very occasional exchanges with him in botany class I had got the impression that the priest loathed me. Whenever I had spoken to him in class he would turn to one side and speak to the window or the wall. Why was it, I wondered, that Father Manion disliked me?
In my last days before returning to Cotton, I sat in the kitchen watching my mother pummelling and squeezing the mud out of the football shirts, shorts and socks, as she sang to herself Eddie Fisher’s ‘I Need your Love’. Despite the anger in her heart, she hungered for someone’s touch, for someone’s love.
W
ITHIN DAYS OF
arriving back in the ice-bound college, my body seemed to be rebelling as if it no longer belonged to me. I only had to think about the possibility of an erection and my penis stood up. The Passionist retreat priest had called it ‘irregular motions of the flesh’. How was I to offer an erect penis to Our Blessed Lady! What was wrong with me? I found myself trapped in a tyranny of fantasy-plagued days and semen-ridden dormitory nights. Sexual temptations were demanding every iota of my embattled self-control. Images that had once been innocent now assumed wayward scope for eroticism. Turning the pages of an old
Illustrated London News
in the library, already purged of provocative female pictures by Father Doran’s scissors, I came upon a picture of our young Queen Elizabeth II. Deprived of the sight of the female anatomy, I found that the young Queen’s sheer nylon-stockinged legs showing below the modest hem of her well-cut winter coat, emphasising her hips, waist and pretty bosom, prompted stirrings of lust. How often I returned to that page, to gawp lecherously at those short shapely legs and ankles, the majestic young bosom. On another occasion, flicking through a complete edition of Shakespeare, I lighted upon the poem entitled ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and began to read with mounting curiosity and excitement right up to the moment when ‘Pure chastity is rifled of her store’. Frozen with guilt I continued to read of the mounting waves of Tarquin’s remorse for a deed of violent lust that I had employed as a stimulus for my own shameful fantasies.
Back came the scruples. Instead of taking my problems to Father Owen, or to Father Browne, I was caught in a cycle of sin–confession–sin–confession sustained by our opportunity for daily confession. I had seen other boys, with haunted faces,
queuing for confession day after day. Now I understood the impetus for such daily penitence. It was not just the terror of being taken unawares in sudden death, to be hurled down to hell for all eternity; more real and immediate was the shame of being observed to abstain from the Eucharist at Mass. For it was inconceivable that one should receive the sacrament in a state of mortal sin, since ‘he that eats this body and drinks this blood unworthily eats and drinks to his own damnation…’ So I became one of the frequent penitents: those boys with hunched shoulders and anguished faces who waited behind to confess after Rosary.
One evening, after I had unburdened myself of the sullied laundry of my soul, Father Piercy, the confessor on duty, said in his clipped nasal voice: ‘How can you expect the grace of Almighty God to be bestowed upon this house when you commit such grave sins?’ Fresh reasons for guilt and plum-meting self-worth. He gave me a hefty penance – the entire Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary – and told me to go away and sin no more. Easier said than done. As I knelt in the Lady chapel I was in a state of shocked anxiety. Could my actions result in the college being burnt to the ground or devoured in a landslide from top field?
W
ITH THE ADVENT
of ever more savage weather, the icicles hung full twenty feet from the eaves, pipes burst, our washing and drinking water often stood frozen in the pipes. My struggles increased until I arrived at a new stage of scruples, complicated by what I believed to be a supernatural sign involving the sanctuary lamp, the oil lamp that hung from the rafters before the Blessed Sacrament on the high altar.
One evening as I stayed behind after Rosary to confess the usual sins, I saw that the sanctuary lamp was unlit; it was swinging dead with a slight motion in a freezing draught. Then it occurred to me that God had sent me a personal message. The cold dead lamp revealed the state of my soul which was dead to God’s grace. As I came out of the sacristy, shriven and in a state of grace, going down on my knees to pray my penance I saw to my troubled joy that the sanctuary lamp was once again shining brightly and steadily. I might have assumed that the sacristan had relit the lamp, but instead I saw it as an infallible sign from God.
I now became obsessed with the state of the sanctuary lamp which seemed to match the state of my never-ending scruples. I took to visiting the church again and again to check the lamp. Most days I found it flickering violently, agitated by the currents of freezing air that streamed down the spiral stairway from the steeple. The flickering sanctuary lamp surely meant that my soul was neither permanently dead, nor fully alive: but in a state of imminent peril.
S
TUDYING LONG HOURS
in the music practice room, I had continued to expand my capacity to learn copious texts by heart, which I narcissistically demonstrated at every opportunity. When the leading actor in the Challoner House play went down with the flu two days before the performance, Father Grady, the housemaster, put it to the house captain that I should be invited to learn the part. The play, by Agatha Christie, was
Ten Little Nigger Boys.
The vacant part was the judge, who turned out to be the murderer. The house captain had serious doubts about my acting ability and my vocal range.
‘Has your voice broken, Fru?’ he asked. ‘This character is an old man, you know.’ My voice was cracked rather than broken, but I could force it down to a rich bass, my now prominent Adam’s apple quivering (an additional sign, I was convinced, of my rocketing concupiscence). I flicked through the pages. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can do this.’ So I was given permission to skip lessons and spend the day learning the part.
In the afternoon we had a dress rehearsal, when it was assumed that I would still be reading the part from the book. But I had my part learnt by two o’clock and got through the rehearsal faultlessly.
On the night of the performance there was a preliminary hitch. When the curtain came up, the entire college in attendance, I came on to the stage and began shaking uncontrollably in the grip of stage fright. The house captain, who had the heroic lead role, said under his breath: ‘Get a grip on yourself, you idiot!’ I got a grip. Then I postured and strutted and preened. The judge being utterly crazed in the final scene, I let myself go in a burst of flamboyant mouth-frothing overacting.
I basked in the praise of several of the profs, and a wide circle of boys who had never spoken to me before. Father Armishaw came up after the show to give me a gruff: ‘Well done, Cornwell!’ But the most unusual approach was from Paul Moreland who had not spoken to me since the previous term.
I was almost asleep after lights out when I was conscious of someone sitting down on the bed and shining a torch in my face. ‘Fru, wake up, it’s Moreland!’ said the disembodied voice, loud enough to wake the whole dorm. ‘That was a superb piece of acting,’ he went on. ‘You’re extremely gifted and your voice was marvellous. I especially liked the way you built your character, and the nuances of your gestures. The way you even expressed tension and impatience with the toe of your shoe. You’re an absolute natural. There’s something of Laurence Olivier in your voice. I just had to thank you.’ And with this
he gently pinched my nose and ruffled my hair, the way a boisterous uncle might do with a young nephew.
After he had gone, I heard someone mutter: ‘That Moreland is completely bonkers.’ A few moments later the dark shadow of Father McCartie appeared, mooching stealthily along the linoleum in his carpet slippers.
But Moreland’s enthusiasm had touched me and made me feel good about myself. And I had not thought about my scruples for two whole days.