Authors: John Cornwell
T
HE ENCOUNTER IN
the archive room stimulated a renewed interest in Father Grady’s history class on the Reformation. That term I had learnt details of the martyrdom of Catholics under Henry VIII. Father Grady dwelt on the deaths of the monks of the London Charterhouse in the sixteenth century, simple enclosed monks who had taken vows of silence and who refused to utter an oath that would have sanctioned the king’s illicit marriage to his mistress Anne Boleyn. The deaths of these monks, some by hanging and disembowelling, others by being starved to death in prison, affected me deeply. I asked Father Grady where I could learn more. He recommended the two-volume work by Dom Bede Camm,
Lives of the English Martyrs
, which was in the college library. I carried them off to the infirmary and read both volumes within several days.
I read how a Carthusian martyr was hung at Tyburn gallows in such a way that he was still alive when he was cut down; the executioner disembowelled him so swiftly that the monk saw his own entrails and testicles (‘organs of generation’) in the executioner’s hands before he expired. When I mentioned this to Mr Roberts later, he snorted: ‘That’s nothing; there was an executioner who would fish out a priest’s heart like a plum from a porridge bowl and rub it in the victim’s face while he was still alive!’
I also took from the library a history of the Catholic Church by Father Philip Hughes. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, I learnt, celebrating or hearing Mass could entail execution. I was not alone among the boys at Cotton awakening, yet again, to a tradition that called us to loyalty to our Faith even to the extent of the supreme sacrifice. As the hymn, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, went:
How sweet would be their children’s fate If they like them could die for Thee.
I began to meditate on whether I would have the courage to go to the gallows for my Faith. Striving to imagine myself in that situation, faced with the choice of apostasy or death, I knew one thing was sure: when it came to resisting sexual temptation I could look for inspiration to the English martyrs who gladly went to their deaths rather than betray the Lord. I saw a direct link between the
esprit de corps
of the English martyr priests and Cotton’s early teaching priests, who had taught Catholic youths in secrecy, and the current generation of Cottonian priests with their selfless unostentatious austerity.
But then, a different kind of priestly role model entered my life.
O
NE AFTERNOON THE
door of the infirmary opened and a strange priest entered, to find me sitting in the armchair, my head in a book. He was of medium height and had a rounded face with swarthy Latin features. He was aged about fifty and he introduced himself as Father Lesley McCallum. His hair appeared to be dyed and artificially waved, his eyebrows plucked. He was smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder.
‘What have we here?’ he said. ‘What ails you, my dear?’
As I attempted to explain my circumstances, his face went through a series of histrionic reactions: anxiety, horror, sympathy and, finally, huge relief at the happy current conclusion of my bout of pericarditis.
He told me that he was the new assistant bursar, Father Browne being away on sick leave. He spoke with a creamy, self-mocking voice. He used his eyes, with sidelong looks, for emphasis and effect. From his voice and demeanour it was obvious that although he was a priest, he was not a priest in the tough, no-nonsense Cotton tradition. He was wearing a caped cloak like Father Doran’s, and every so often he turned his shoulders to allow its folds to flourish.
Having ascertained my name and predicament, he enlarged on his own situation. He was, he told me, a ‘late vocation’. He had been born and brought up in the British community of Buenos Aires and had gone into journalism, eventually becoming the publisher and editor of a popular lifestyle magazine. ‘A strange appointment, you might think, putting me out here in the sticks,’ he drawled, ‘but these people have no idea about finance; the archbishop is hoping to inject a bit of professionalism into the management of Cotton College at last.’ I thought this an inappropriate comment to make to a pupil of the school – ‘these people’ evidently meaning the Cotton profs – but I was flattered by the way in which he treated me as an equal.
‘Oh, what on earth are you reading?’ he said, and he started to go through the books on my bedside table, which included the Dom McCann, the Philip Hughes, the collected works of Chaucer, the collected works of Shakespeare, and Hilaire Belloc’s
Europe and the Faith.
‘Good grief! I think you could do with something more jolly. Why don’t you come next door and choose something from my shelves.’
He walked ahead of me with a rhythmic swagger. In contrast to Father Browne’s fug-heavy pipe smoke, there was a fragrance in Father McCallum’s sitting room of aftershave lotion and
exotic cigarettes. Bottles of whisky and gin, brightly coloured liqueurs and a soda siphon stood on a side table. His bookcase was lined with novels. In time, during my comfortable sojourn in the infirmary next door, I would come to borrow some of them: Somerset Maugham, Joyce Cary, Nevil Shute, Antonia White, Katherine Mansfield, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. That first visit a fat novel entitled
The Cardinal
by Henry Morton Robinson caught my eye.
‘I’d like to read that,’ I said.
‘A bit syrupy,’ he said, ‘but why not.’ He handed it to me. ‘Just come in and help yourself any time if the door is open.’
That was how my acquaintance with him began.
Father McCallum, I soon learnt, had arranged for decorators to descend on the boys’ common rooms to have them painted in gay colours. Flowers had already appeared at various vantage points in the church. The hard kneelers were being covered in foam rubber to make our devotions more comfortable, and the bells in the church tower, out of order for many years, were pealing once again. Father McCallum seemed to me a good thing.
F
ATHER
M
CCALLUM’S LOAN
to me of the popular novel,
The Cardinal
, opened up a world that both enthralled and disturbed me. I started the book that night after Matron had brought in my cocoa and I read it into the small hours. For all that it was ‘syrupy’ it was the first twentieth-century adult novel I had read, and I was gripped. Against the background of three post-First World War decades, and a huge cast of characters, the action swung tempestuously between Europe and North America.
The novel, first published in 1951, and a runaway best-seller in Catholic America, tells the story of Father Stephen Fermoyle, an Irish-American priest of the Boston archdiocese through the 1930s and 1940s. Fermoyle’s father is a streetcar motorman, struggling to bring up a second-generation migrant family in 1920s Boston. The novel is an amalgam of rags-to-riches American Dream and the rise of a pious working-class Catholic boy to the highest echelons of the Catholic Church. As Father Fermoyle’s pastoral career develops he finds himself confronting poverty, racism, anti-Semitism and union conflict in 1930s America. As he ascends the clerical ranks he does not forget his humble origins, nor does he compromise one iota on Catholic moral teaching. He becomes a close aide to the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, accompanying him to the Vatican and encountering the operation of Church policy in conflict with the Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists.
What struck me most in the early part of the book was Father Fermoyle’s pastoral work in poor parishes of Boston, the world of drugstores, factory workshops, baseball and aspiring, materialist American family life. I came to see how a priestly vocation in the poor districts of inner cities could be heroic, romantic even. As I was reading
The Cardinal
, Father Cooney became for the first time transfigured: the challenge of the priesthood existed not in a cloistered retreat, but in bringing God to the everyday world of factories, busy streets, juveniles on vacant lots, families in suburban backwaters, people striving to keep the Faith against the odds.
So, lying in the comfort of the infirmary in our valley retreat, I came to question the lives we were leading at Cotton: the absence of women (save for our enclosed nuns); the neglect of concern, still less action, for the old, the homeless, the poor, the workers; the distance of our rural redoubt not only from the East End of London, but from those crowded terraced streets and smoking chimney stacks that lay just an hour’s drive away from Cotton in the Potteries. With an
unaccustomed pang of guilt, I was struck for the first time, having worked now for a living wage, by how the free provision of our daily meals trapped us seminarians in material and emotional dependency: a predicament that stretched before me to my ordination nine years away.
I
LEARNT
C
HAUCER’S
Prologue
by heart. I did it in the hope of pleasing Father Armishaw, and I contrived an opportunity to demonstrate my achievement by asking him one morning as he arrived in class whether he himself knew the poem by heart.
He smiled down at me from his high desk.
‘Oh, I see, Cornwell…you’re trying to tell me that
you
have learnt it by heart…All right. Let’s hear it.’
So I launched forth, conscious before long that I was being an insufferable show-off. Too late. As I made progress, getting faster and faster, Father Armishaw corrected a mispronunciation here and there, or an incorrect word, or a missed line. By the time I got to the Wife of Bath, he said: ‘OK, OK, that’s enough. We believe you…Now let’s get on with some work.’ There was a groan of satisfaction and derision from my classmates. Father Armishaw gave me a look as if to say: You’ve nobody but yourself to blame.
After class James said to me: ‘That was ostentatious of you, Fru. Are you trying to suck up to Armishaw? We know that you couldn’t learn to decline “
amo, amas, amat
” when you came here, but now you probably know most of the Bible by heart. But it’s understanding that matters, not parroting.’ I felt crushed.
Father Armishaw, a good-natured smile on his face, stopped
me in the clock cloister later that day. He said: ‘I was pleasantly surprised that you’d learnt the whole of the set book by heart, Cornwell; but I didn’t relish listening to Chaucer being gabbled like that. Do you get my drift?’ I got his drift all right.
James and Derek and Peter were becoming ever more distant as the term progressed; and the fault was entirely mine. With my privileged situation in the infirmary, I stopped taking morning walks on Top Bounds. I even failed to show up at many of the regular meetings of the League of Christ the King; it was no longer a special privilege to be sitting in Father Grady’s room on a Sunday evening. I was also finding the conversations of the LOCK set pious and stilted.
I was working hard, I was reading, I was enjoying singing in the choir; I was more or less spiritually content. But I was bored with the boredom of loneliness. Any hope I had entertained of forming a closer relationship with Father Armishaw had receded with the passing of the days and weeks. I had often been tempted to climb those stairs to his door, but I did not want to risk a rejection. I had to be satisfied with encountering him every day in class.
There
was
a new attachment in my life, however, developing so slowly that I hardly noticed. Father McCallum took to dropping in on me at odd times of the day. Sometimes he would appear in cassock and caped cloak, at other times, and on the same day, without there being a noticeable change in the temperature, he would be wearing a brightly coloured silk shirt, which suggested that he had hardly needed his cloak for comfort earlier. He had a collection of silk shirts in primary colours, which resulted in a boy calling him Rainbow Man. The nickname Father Rainbow soon spread.
In the morning Father Rainbow would leave his newspaper behind for me to read, usually the
Daily Telegraph;
then he had an excuse to come by and pick it up later. He would chat about current affairs, such as the doings of Colonel Nasser in Egypt and the tensions with the Soviets. He liked to gossip
about Hollywood film stars and actors. He was obsessed by the doings of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. He also liked to gossip about the profs, whom he continued to refer to collectively as ‘these people’. I gathered that he had not made any alliances on the staff.
He professed to admire ‘Vince’, as he called Father Armishaw, more than the others, although he thought him ‘a frustrated mystery man’. He said: ‘As the Italians say, “something mysterious is bubbling away in that pot.”’ He described ‘Wilf Doran’, as he called him, as ‘civilised but dry as dust’; Tank Piercy was ‘an overgrown schoolboy and a botcher – whoever told him he was a carpenter!’ and Tom Gavin was a ‘sentimental brute’. He said, in a condescending way, that he liked the new Prefect of Discipline, Father Peter Ryall (Father McCartie had at last been sent out on a parish). He found ‘Peter’ sweet, but he went on to say that ‘like most of them, he has few resources outside his breviary and the sports field. You know he only has one record – Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nacht Musik
– and five books!’
Father McCallum told me that ‘Vince’ had asked him at lunch whether his black suede shoes with thick crêpe soles might be characterised as ‘brothel creepers’. He pulled a face that managed to be wry and smug at the same time. ‘I told him: “No, my dear Vincent, they can be properly described as sodomy cloppers!”’
Although vague as to the full meaning of ‘sodomy’, I was shocked by the word; and I suspected that Father Armishaw and the rest of the staff were similarly taken aback.
One evening he came in after Matron had delivered my cocoa. ‘For heavens’ sake! What on earth is that muck?’ he said. ‘Matron’s making a milksop of you. Why don’t you come into my room and have a proper drink.’
In his room that evening he poured me a glass of Madeira and offered me a cigarette, which I declined although I was tempted. I found the Madeira delicious and accepted his offer
of a second glass which he splashed into my glass with generous abandon.
I felt ambivalent about Father McCallum. I thought that he was vain, and I felt there was something dangerous about his cynicism. I liked the feeling of being indulged, especially by a priest who, unlike the rest of the profs, was a ‘man of the world’. He loved talking about films; I had seen very few, and the films we were shown at Cotton were limited in scope as well as being purged of kisses, endearments and plunging necklines.
We had a long discussion about
The Night of the Hunter
(of unhappy memory for me), which he thought ‘a very good film’. He deplored the films that we were shown on feast days at Cotton because they were mostly what he called ‘bland British war heroics’, like
Western Approaches
and
The First of the Few
, or ‘silly Ealing comedies’ such as
Passport to Pimlico
and
The Lavender Hill Mob.
He told me that there were three hundred cinemas in Buenos Aires where you could see films from all over the world, and especially France, Spain and Italy. He talked about the films of Rossellini, Buñuel, Bresson and Vittoria De Sica.
He sometimes played tangos on his radiogram ‘to brighten up the Cotton gloom’, but I also saw among his records the music of Mahler, Schumann and Wagner. Sometimes as I sat by his fire sipping my large glass of Madeira, he played the BBC Light programme for background music, and he would turn it up when a current hit tune came on, such as Alma Cogan’s ‘Dreamboat’, which he professed to detest. ‘Listen to that abomination,’ he would say in his precious fashion. Then he would declare: ‘Don’t you just detest all that nonsense!’ He seemed happy to listen to it all the same.
He told me that he had been an officer in the Argentine Navy, and was once nearly shipwrecked. I was fascinated by his stories of storm-lashed voyages on a destroyer, so long as I maintained strong suspension of disbelief.