Authors: John Cornwell
W
E WENT TO
midnight Mass at the church of Saints Peter and Paul next to my old Secondary Modern school as we were no longer in Saint Augustine’s parish. I went into the sacristy to ask the parish priest, a smooth-faced Englishman with a posh voice, if I could serve on the altar; but he told me politely enough that all the servers’ places were filled and, in any case, he did not know me. When I told him that I was a seminarian and a new parishioner, he shrugged his shoulders. So for the first time in years I attended a Mass of Christmas like anybody else within the congregation rather than on the high altar. How I missed Father Cooney’s ‘Wisswiss…’ and the Mass by gaslight at the Camp. Father Cooney would have squeezed me on to the sanctuary however many servers had turned up.
We walked home through Ilford afterwards and had our traditional ham sandwiches and tea with a dash of whisky sitting around the gas fire of the halfway house. Then we exchanged presents. Mum had bought me an LP record of Toscanini conducting the New York Philarmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Fifth and Eighth Symphonies. In one of my letters home I had mentioned how Father Armishaw played Beethoven on his gramophone and how the sound of it filled me with happiness and peace. It was her attempt to make up for the predicament in which I would find myself that Christmas holiday. I was overjoyed, and immediately put the record
on to our ugly grey-and-pink record player, Mum ordering me to play it softly so as not to wake the baby opposite. But even as the opening bars of the Fifth struck, I felt a pang of remorse. A long-playing record was in those days equivalent to the price of a pair of shoes, and I had noticed that my brother Jimmy had holes in the only ones he possessed.
I
MMEDIATELY AFTER
C
HRISTMAS
, Mum and my brother and sister went back to work. Mum had an office job at one of the Plessey factories creating a filing system for draughtsmen’s drawings of electronic components. I spent a lot of time lying on the sofa bed in the living room, smoking cigarettes, listening to Beethoven and reading Somerset Maugham’s
Of Human Bondage
, borrowed from Father McCallum. My younger brothers played in the yard outside or roamed Valentine’s Park opposite.
A letter arrived from Paul Moreland the day after New Year. It was written in red ink; the handwriting and the sentiments were typically extravagant. I could hear his voice as I read it. He wrote that he had been walking on the common on a ‘sherbert day, sharp, yellow and refreshing’. He was reading Immanuel Kant slowly, ‘like a tortoise’. He had had a tantrum on the previous evening after reading a book on Aquinas by a ‘tawdry British philosopher’. Then a ‘meaty mouse’ appeared from below his bed and he had another tantrum. Then, in a phrase I had heard him repeat before, he wrote: ‘So, as Plato says, life itself is the true tragedy.’ In the last paragraph he complained that he had not spoken to anyone all day: it’s so odd, he went on, when ‘no one comes to give one language’. He finished by suggesting that we meet at Sloane Square
outside the tube station on the day before the Epiphany at twelve o’clock. If I came, that would be ‘too dreamy’, and if I didn’t, no matter, as he would go shopping in the King’s Road.
I set off on the tube from Gants Hill, arriving in Chelsea at 11.30. When he had failed to arrive by 12.15, I was beginning to feel annoyed. At 12.20 I saw him coming up from the District Line train with his slight limp, full of apologies.
We walked the length of the King’s Road down as far as World’s End where we entered an Indian restaurant. I had never eaten Indian food before and Moreland ordered everything for both of us, explaining the different dishes. He ordered lager beer and drank his greedily, ordering another. All this time he had been talking knowledgeably about food. He offered me a cigarette and we both began to smoke. He was looking at me strangely.
He said that he wanted to tell me something in strict confidence. He told me that he suffered from strange ‘phenomena’. They were not so much ‘visions as
distortions’.
I wondered for a moment whether he wasn’t drunk with the lager. He went on to say that he was at times prey to roaring sounds, like a ‘thousand lions’, and the grotesque distortions of vision were so devastating that he could do nothing but lie for hours in the dark until they had faded. ‘I tell people,’ he said, ‘that I am having migraines.’ Afterwards, he said, his mind became clear and penetrating. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘into the life of things. And I can make such strange connections between things that it frightens me.’
I sat in silence, paralysed, unsure how I should react or respond.
Then he said: ‘Do you abuse yourself, Fru?’
I did not want to answer him.
Eventually, he said: ‘You’ve been raped, haven’t you?’
I was silent, terrified. I was thinking in a confused fashion of the Rape of Lucrece, wondering what he could mean.
‘I know, because it’s happened to me too. I can tell.’
I did not need to reply, since he did not wait for an answer. He went on to tell me that he had been forcibly masturbated, repeatedly, for more than two years by the priest who had been his spiritual friend. ‘What a friend! What a priest!’ he said bitterly. After his father left home, he went on, his mother had become deeply attached to this priest. He was supposed to help her. He converted her to Catholicism. He used to come every day.
‘She knew that it was happening, but she pretended to herself that he was my mentor, my special spiritual guide.’
I was dumbfounded. I just sat looking at him.
He said: ‘I came to enjoy it in a way, Fru…I came to need it, and to need
him
,’ Paul said. ‘I found my vocation to the priesthood with the priest who destroyed my soul. There’s only one answer to the murder of your soul, Fru, which is to receive God’s grace through no action of our own.’
‘But surely,’ I said at last, ‘you have been to confession, and any sinfulness is now forgiven.’
Paul laughed, a cold little laugh. ‘But evil, Fru, is not just a question of intentions.’
He then told me the story in detail: places, times, circumstances. Moreland had served the priest’s Mass, and went to him regularly in confession. The priest, whom he gave a name, was on the surface devout and dedicated. ‘He was holy,’ Moreland said, ‘except when he made me suck his penis.’
Afterwards the priest would hear his confession.
It was almost dark by the time we got up from the table. I felt sick in my soul; and I was conscious that we were just walking distance from where I had been sexually attacked five or six years earlier. Yes, I was thinking, it is true: I have been raped. Before we left the restaurant, he said: ‘I am not afraid of sex, Fru…Our bodies are just playgrounds.’
I said: ‘But our bodies, Moreland, are the temples of the Holy Ghost.’
‘Mine,’ he repeated, ‘is just a playground.’
At that moment, young as he was, his face, strangely beautiful to me, appeared ancient and ruined. Was that, I wondered, something he had seen in my face too? His last words to me were: ‘You will never tell a soul, will you, Fru?’
L
ENT TERM BEGAN
the following week. Cotton was in the grip of winter and I detected an unusual transformation among the senior boys. They were obsessed with the latest pop single, ‘Singing the Blues’. For the first few days of term boys were humming the tune and arguing rowdily over the competing merits of Tommy Steele and Guy Mitchell. I heard James, of all people, hotly insisting at supper that one would dance the foxtrot to it, to the amazed derision of those around him. The pop music from home had found its way back to Cotton and created a strangely disruptive mood. Hearing two boys quarrelling about ‘Singing the Blues’ as he came into his history class, Father Grady slammed a book on his desk and said tartly: ‘Oh, how I hate all that Blue-Skies-Round-the-Corner rubbish. Why can’t people be happy with real music!’
To my surprise and relief, Mère Saint Luc had insisted that I must remain in the infirmary and had provided me with extra blankets and two hot-water bottles. By a stroke of irony I had not been back a week before I contracted flu, and I was soon joined in the infirmary by several other boys who had caught the same virulent strain.
Father Gavin began to appear in the infirmary after he had said his Mass. He seemed different out of the context of the classroom. Despite his premature baldness there was something angelically youthful, I thought, about his lineless, jovial
face; the way he made his mouth small to prevent it breaking out into a broad grin. I was impressed that he was the only priest who visited the sick in the infirmary while the flu was about and I came to see that outside his Latin drills he was a kind and affable human being.
Visiting me after I was on the mend, he asked me if I would like to act in the role of a Jesuit priest, Father Henry Garnet, in a play he was producing about Guy Fawkes and the 5 November plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. I had enjoyed being on the stage in the previous year and it seemed a stroke of divine providence. Encouraged by the archivist, Mr Roberts, I had been avidly reading about Father Garnet’s clandestine missionary activities during the time of the Protestant persecution of Catholics.
The play, ‘Gunpowder, Treason and Plot’ by the Catholic writer Hugh Ross Williamson, argued that the scheme to blow up king and parliament was actually instigated by the government in order to justify a more vicious persecution of Catholics. The Protestant arch-villain of the piece, Lord Salisbury, sought to blame the Jesuits as the principal traitors, and the alleged ringleader, who might have been called a ‘master spy’, was Father Henry Garnet.
The play was performed two evenings running, a month into the term, and attended by various Cotton benefactors. Father Doran rose at the end to commend the ‘clarity of speech of all the cast’.
Public speaking, and clarity of speech, had become an obsession in the previous year on the initiative of the archbishop, who was a stickler for elocution. Under pressure from the archbishop, the profs had been delivering frequent pep talks about bad pronunciation and working-class accents. At his first Sunday homily that term Father Doran had complained for a full fifteen minutes about the pronunciation of a single word. During a rugby match against a visiting school, in the previous term, he said, he had listened to boys shouting: ‘Get it
back!’ The word ‘back’, he insisted, had been pronounced by Cottonians, on the touchline, as well as in the team, as in ‘Bach’, the composer. ‘But it isn’t Bach,’ he insisted, ‘it’s back!’; he was pronouncing the word, it seemed to me, as in ‘beck’. On and on he went: ‘Beck, not Bach.’ Then he laboured the pronunciation of the word ‘ghost’, as in Holy Ghost. ‘It is
not
Horly Gorst,’ he insisted, ‘it’s Holy Ghost!’ But his ‘Holy Ghost’, it seemed to me, came out as ‘Herley Ghoost’.
Father Gavin initiated a weekly debating club, recording the proceedings on a new Grundig tape recorder presented by the archbishop. The idea was to encourage boys to hear themselves speaking and so improve their delivery. Given that newspapers were not allowed in the school, the debates tended to be of a peculiarly abstract nature. Typical motions were: ‘This house believes that tomorrow never comes,’ ‘This house is of the opinion that it is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back,’
and ‘This house believes that the longest way round is the shortest way home.’
By the advent of Holy Week my accent was back to a respectable, well-enunciated and emphatic version of Black Country, mainly in emulation of Father Armishaw.
I
SAW LITTLE
of Moreland as the term progressed, since bad weather had precluded afternoon walks. Our paths occasionally crossed and he would give me a look of affectionate complicity; but we had no opportunity to speak.
I had noticed him during the forty hours’ devotion when the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in the Lady chapel through nearly two days and two nights surrounded by forests of lighted candles and flowers. Boys took it in turn to maintain watch. I spent more time than most on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament; but Moreland seemed to be there all the time.
During the forty hours I had a strange experience. I had been on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament three hours on the first evening, gazing at that circle of white, the Eucharistic wafer, when I began to feel feverish. Eventually I felt as if my head was about to burst. Just at the moment when I thought I could bear it no longer I saw very clearly hovering around the monstrance, with its radiating gilt sunbeams, an intensely bright spark of light: it had the brightness of the sun itself, and it gave off an impression of supernatural energy. I said to myself: ‘I am seeing God: and God is pure energy!’ Then the moment and the ‘vision’ passed.
I continued kneeling, wondering whether the spark would return; then the thought came to me that I should ask God for a miracle. All these years, since my childhood, I had
accepted the defective vision in my right eye, akin to peripheral vision. I could not read with my left eye closed, I could only perceive the world in a shadowy fashion. Perhaps I should ask God to cure my right eye; it occurred to me that if I had sufficient Faith then God would grant me a miracle. I covered both eyes with my hands and prayed and prayed with all the Faith that I could muster.
I wanted something dramatic, startling, to occur, revealing God’s action in the world in a direct and tangible manner. Slowly I removed my hand from my right eye and opened it. The miracle had not been granted.
Then Moreland was sent to the infirmary.
H
IS AILMENT
, or ailments, lacked specifics, though I had heard rumours from James Rolle. Moreland had been suffering ‘severe migraines’ and there had been odd incidents: he had been found sleepwalking far from the dormitories in the middle of the night. On one occasion he had been followed by a member of the big sixth down into the refectory where he took his place in the dark at the head of one of the tables. When the sixth former switched on the lights, Moreland screamed. His screams could be heard all over that wing of the college and even as far as Saint Thomas’s.
When Moreland arrived in the infirmary he greeted me affably, but he seemed to want his privacy. Dr Hall came to see him and questioned him in a quiet voice. I could not hear the conversation. He was given some sort of sedative and he slept a great deal.
One night Moreland woke up and screamed once, only to fall asleep again immediately. Not long after this, in the early
hours I heard him weeping for a while. In the morning I went out to the toilet after breakfast. When I came back he was sitting up in bed with a cup in his hand. ‘This is your cup,’ he said, laughing in a strange manner. ‘When you were outside I licked it where you drank from it. You see, Fru, I long to be intimate with you.’ I laughed, too, when he said this, but I was feeling embarrassed.
As he got better, he started to talk. His monologues, once he got going, overwhelmed me. His speech was like a fast-running river, with currents and cross-currents, sudden digressions and tributaries. It was the repetitions more than anything that made me wonder about his sanity; they made him sound irrational. And yet he could control his tongue when the need arose, which was usually when Father Gavin came into the infirmary for his regular visit after Mass in the morning; or when Mère Saint Luc appeared with food or medicine.
The content of this prodigious flow was a kind of mixed-idea salad from his wide reading, most of it religious in nature and philosophical. Yet it seemed to me that there was little depth, and increasingly fewer logical connections; it was mostly flashy, on the surface. After Matron had given him more pills, he became very quiet and slept again for a long time. Some sort of crisis had passed.
Before I fell asleep, he woke up and told me in a lazy voice that he had been having a ‘visionary dream’ about stigmata. ‘It was so
real
, Fru,’ he said. ‘So real and so beautiful. Do you realise that the stigmata is your body as Christ’s cross: you don’t replicate Christ in his wounds; that would be a blasphemy. You replicate the cross on which he hung: you are the cross through which the nails penetrate, and the spear too. In stigmata Jesus is nailed to
you
…’
We talked for a while that evening in low voices. When I got back into bed he came and sat next to me. He became excited and tearful. He said to me at one point that the Jesuit
who had abused him had ‘penetrated’ his body. ‘I can only make reparation for that,’ Moreland said, ‘by becoming the cross on which Jesus was nailed.’ I tried to calm him; but it was a hopeless conversation, which degenerated into Moreland’s repetitions. Eventually I fell asleep while he continued to speak.
In the middle of the night I woke up with a fright. Moreland was standing over me. The only light was from the fire in the grate, and the entire world seemed hushed as if after snowfall.
‘Fru, I want you to do something,’ he said. ‘Just lie on your back and stretch out your arms. Please do that for me. Stretch out your arms as if you are on the cross.’ He was so earnest and insistent, and I was so sleepy and confused, that I did as he asked me since I wanted him to get it over with.
He pulled back the bedclothes and before I could resist he had climbed on top of me, face down, stretching out his arms as if our bodies were in mirror image. His lips were touching mine and his eyes were looking into mine. I was paralysed with fear. Then he started to gabble something about me being the tree of good-and-evil. I looked into his eyes and I was shocked to see that he was utterly absent. His eyes were wide open looking into mine, but he was not there.
He was sweating through his pyjamas and dribbling into my mouth. Disgusted, I pushed him off and he landed in a heap on the floor. I was shaking, speechless. He picked himself up and went back to his bed. For a moment it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with him, that he had had himself put into the infirmary precisely to act out this weird ritual.
His last words to me, in a quite normal voice, were: ‘Don’t tell anybody, Fru. Please.’
I said nothing.
The next morning neither Father Gavin, who slept immediately above, nor Matron, mentioned a disturbance in the night. Moreland was released from the infirmary that day and he and I did not speak of the incident again. The term was drawing
to a close, I was preparing for end-of-term exams, and the annual retreat was coming up. Through Holy Week I could barely concentrate on the homilies of the retreat leader. I was worried about returning home again to the halfway-house hostel.