Seminary Boy (28 page)

O
N
E
ASTER
M
ONDAY
I travelled down to London. The weather in Ilford was cold and windy. Our temporary home was sunk in an atmosphere of foreboding. The couple next door were arguing and fighting much of the day, and their baby was screaming day and night. Terry, my quiet, longsuffering elder brother, said: ‘Looks as if we’ve exchanged one boxing ring for another!’

The day after Easter Mum, Terry and Maureen returned to work. My younger brothers were in the sitting room all day listening to the radio, watching television or playing in a desultory kind of way. To get some peace I lay on my mother’s bed rereading
The Cardinal
and listening to Beethoven. I was getting listless. I wondered if I should get in touch with Moreland, but I now felt afraid of him and therefore afraid for myself. Another danger, however, lurked for me in the bedroom here. All around were items of my mother’s and sister’s clothes and lingerie. In my boredom and lethargy I began to feel stirrings of those ‘irregular motions of the flesh’. After a morning of mounting sexual fantasies I got up off the bed and went out into the cold wind.

I took a bus to Woodford Green to visit the Franciscan church of Saint Thomas. Inside the empty church I prayed before the statue of the Virgin. Then I sat in the pews feeling empty, half-praying, half-daydreaming. Eventually a man in
the Franciscan habit came out on the high altar from the sacristy. He straightened the altar cloth and stood back to appraise his work, then came to where I was sitting. He was a youngish man with a bright, open face and closely cropped hair. The sleeves of his habit were rolled up and I could see bare wrists and arms. He smiled and we spoke for a while. When I told him that I was a junior seminarian, he became affable. He was intrigued to know why I had come all the way from Ilford to visit the Franciscan church. On an impulse, thinking that it would catch his interest, I said I had come to pray for a ‘special intention’.

He told me about the community of Poor Clares who lived on the other side of the church behind a high wall. ‘The prayers of our Franciscan nuns,’ he said, ‘have the power to perform miracles. The Good Lord cannot refuse them.’ He told me about the relationship between Francis and Clare, an aristocratic lady of Assisi who had founded the Franciscan sisterhood.

He now insisted that I accompany him to visit the Poor Clare convent. Leading the way, he took me out of the church and through a door in a wall to a garden in front of an old house with shuttered windows. He rang on a bell, and within a few moments a sister appeared dressed in a brown habit and black veil.

‘This young man,’ said the friar, ‘would like to see Reverend Mother.’ Before I could hesitate, or explain myself, the nun ushered me into the dark interior of the house. I heard the friar calling out behind me: ‘You’ll be all right. Tell Reverend Mother of your intention.’

The nun brought me to a room with bare boards where there was a simple chair facing a grille covered with a gauze curtain. Asking me to sit, the nun disappeared. I heard a door opening and a different nun appeared on the other side of the grille. I could barely see her face because of the gauze, but it appeared to me that her skin was sallow, almost yellow.

She asked me how old I was and where I lived. As we talked,
it occurred to me that the Poor Clares were living a kind of entombed life-in-death. Despite this she seemed cheerful. She said that they had retreated from the world to pray day and night for others. They did not accumulate wealth for future emergencies but relied on what was given to them more or less from day to day. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘we wonder if we’re going to eat at all for a whole week. But something usually turns up.’

She brought the conversation to a close by saying that she would ask the sisters to pray for me and my special intention. The intention, she said, could be a secret one. I was relieved as I did not want to talk to this strange nun about my sexual temptations. In my mind, though, I added an intention that I had not thought of for some time – that Dad would come back to us.

She asked me to kneel down with her and pray a little before we parted. She said the Hail Mary followed by the
Memorare.
As she prayed her voice seemed to wrap me around with gentleness. I felt a great surge of warmth for this woman and her strange life of prayer and self-denial. Then she was gone. The moment she disappeared the sister who had met me at the door came in and led me out of the room. Before I knew it the front door had closed behind me and I was standing blinking in the driveway, buffeted by the cold winds.

I went back into the church, hoping to see the friar again, but he had disappeared. After a while I heard voices singing a simple version of the Divine Office in the choir on the other side of the high altar, hidden from the sight of the main church.

O
N
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
I went to confession at Saints Peter and Paul church. Walking down the Ilford High Road afterwards I collided with a boy called Bob Prince who I had known at my old school. I was surprised to see how much he had changed: he was dressed in a tight-fitting suit and his hair was in the new slicked-back style known as a DA (‘duck’s arse’). He had once covered the back of my blazer in chalk marks and I had bloodied his nose. He kept me in conversation for a long time, leaning up against a shop window. He couldn’t get over the way I talked and how ‘square’ I looked.

He persuaded me eventually to go with him to the Catholic Youth Club next to the school. There were boys mostly of my age; some were playing table tennis, others were listening to the record player which was belting out Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’. A girl called Pat, with jet-black hair and high heels, came up to us and said she was having a party at her house as her parents had gone away for a wedding. She was wearing heavy make-up, as if to hide some prominent spots, but she was vivacious and attractive. She kept flicking Bob’s arm and saying: ‘Bring your friend.’

We left the youth club, a dozen or so of us including about five girls, and walked out into the road called Green Lane. Everybody was lighting up cigarettes, including me. One of the boys had a sheaf of records. After twenty minutes’ walk, via an off-licence where we had a whip-round for quarts of cider, we arrived at a terrace house. There was a lot of joshing about the records, and pushing back of furniture. Then the girls kicked off their shoes and started dancing in their stockinged feet.

I sat on the arm of a chair, carried away by the sound and the hectic beat. They played over and over again a version of ‘Pick a Bail o’ Cotton’ by a skiffle group called The Vipers. The
girls danced and whirled with their tight skirts hitched up. Soon everybody was dancing except me. Prince came over to me and pointed at Pat. ‘Look at her,’ he said. ‘Snake-hips we call her.’ Then Pat made me get up and dance. She took me through the moves. I felt self-conscious and awkward at first, but when I picked up the rhythm I started to get into it. She cried out: ‘Hey, John, you’re in the groove!’

We drank and smoked, and danced some more. Then each boy, except me, ended up with a girl on his knee. Some swapping went on; Pat went on several laps, and finally landed on mine. She stayed there.

For the first time in my life I felt and tasted the tongue of another human being inside my mouth. I found it repulsive at first, but I soon got used to it; it was a surprise, like buttered toast, I thought. Pat had a long soft nose. I wanted to stroke her hair, but she wouldn’t let me. She was keen on close eye-staring which she called soul-kissing. When I was leaving, just before midnight, Pat said she would like to see me at the youth club again.

I walked back to the hostel to find my younger brothers and Mum in bed. Maureen and Terry were out. So I lay on the sofa in the living room and pondered the evening. I could still smell Pat all over me. I smoked a cigarette. I could see Pat’s eyes with huge black pupils staring one inch away into mine, and I could hear Geoff, the patient in Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, saying: ‘Tell me what’s better! Eh! Tell me what’s better!’ Then I thought of Paul Moreland’s absent eyes staring into mine in his weird visionary state.

I longed for physical closeness: I yearned for it. But did I have to choose between the tongue-in-my-mouth concupiscence of Pat, or Paul’s ranting, dribbling stigmatic rapture? The idea of existing just to myself – pounding up and down reading a breviary – seemed to me that night as attractive as ending up in Saint Clement’s in the Bow Road with a lobotomy.

When Maureen came in, she sat on the bed and we talked
for a while about a party she had been to. She had left school now and was working in the bank. Her demure convent-school ways had quickly lapsed. She laughed a lot about how some of the girls were dressed and the saucy things the boys got up to. I loved talking to Maureen that night; she had become so smart about people and funny. After she went to bed, I lay awake into the small hours.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I got up at seven and went to the early Mass at Saints Peter and Paul. I spent a long time over my thanksgiving, examining my conscience about the night before; anxious that I might have entered an ‘occasion of sin.’ My mind was spinning with the old scruples again, so thinking of Father Buxton’s advice during the retreat the year before I made an act of contrition and left the church.

Back at the hostel I was in the communal kitchen making a cup of tea, when the woman from across the corridor came in. She was half-dressed and weeping. Embarrassed, I said: ‘Good morning!’ and turned to face the stove where I had the kettle on.

At that moment a voice shouted: ‘Fuckin’ Christ. You cunt! I turn my fuckin’ back and you’re chattin’ up a fuckin’ bloke!’

A man was at the kitchen door, unshaven, in his underclothes. He was short but tough-looking, with the face of a wino. He was looking directly at me. ‘What the fuck are you doin’ in my kitchen!’ he yelled. Then he grabbed the woman by the hair and smacked her round the face. Turning on me again, he screamed: ‘I’ll knock your fuckin’ block off.’

With this he came around the table, fists clenched. He was a hard labouring man in his forties and I was terrified. I made
for the door, but he came around the table to cut me off. Then he had me up against the gas stove, one hard hand at my throat: ‘I’ll smash your fuckin’ face in…’ he was yelling.

An icy voice cut in: ‘Oi! You!…Leave that boy alone!’

Mum was at the kitchen door.

She stood there, eyes bulging with violent intent, her left hand opening out and suddenly closing to a fist, the other hand out of sight as if she would take him with one arm tied behind her back.

He loosened his grip. He was staring at Mum. At that moment I knew that I was safe and I adored her with all my heart and soul.

‘I’m goin’ to smash this bastard’s ‘ead in,’ he said, his fist raised.

‘That boy is MY…SON!’

‘I don’t care ‘oo ‘e is.’

‘Don’t you!’

From behind her back Mum now produced her kitchen carving knife, a familiar bone-handled instrument she kept whetted to razor sharpness.

He let me go.

‘John,’ she ordered, ‘out through the window over the sink.’

I clambered over the sink and through the open sash window.

Looking back, I cried out with terror as I saw Mum make a rush at the man, thrusting for his belly with the carving knife.

The man skipped around the table, narrowly avoiding the merciless jabs, and disappeared into the corridor. He had locked himself into his room, but Mum went on after him and was rattling at the handle and throwing her shoulder at the door.

‘You so much as look at my son again and I’ll bloody swing for what I’ll do to you!…’ she growled.

For a few seconds there was silence. ‘No one threatens my
sons! Or they have me to deal with!’ she yelled, with a final bang on the door with her free fist.

Shortly afterwards I followed Mum into our living room.

She collapsed on a chair, the knife in her lap. Then she had a good cry. ‘Scum of the earth!’ she kept saying. ‘Scum of the earth! That my seminarian son should have to endure this! This is what that dirty rat your father has brought us to.’

There and then she decided that she would telephone the college and ask them to have me back early. I pleaded with her not to, but she was adamant. ‘You can’t say here, darling. No way. Next time you’ll come back to our own home. I promise.’

Locking me in our living room for safety, Mum took herself off to the public phone box on the corner of Cranbrook Road and The Drive. When she returned she told me that she had talked to Father McCallum, the bursar, Father Doran being away. It was agreed that I should return to Cotton straight away.

F
ATHER
M
CCALLUM
was waiting at Oakamoor station in a new Morris car. He was initially full of concern about the attack. ‘What a business! How simply frightful for you.’ Then he began to talk airily about his plans for further decoration at Cotton.

Once again I was established in the infirmary with Mère Saint Luc making a fuss of me. After I told her of the attack at the hostel, she sat with me for a while talking about dangerous moments she had experienced during the Great War.

Later, in the clock cloister, I ran into Father Armishaw who had returned to the college early and also knew about the incident. He asked me up to his room to ‘chew the fat’. He
seemed more relaxed than at our last meeting in his room. He said that priests were often attacked on sight because of their Roman collars. ‘Best policy is to run!’ he said with a laugh; but I could see that he was concerned. Sitting in the armchair facing his desk in that meticulously tidy room, I felt secure. I wanted nothing more in life than to be Father Armishaw.

He chose from his record collection Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. As we sat listening, he smoked his pipe and read a book. The music and his presence calmed my heart. Occasionally he looked up but said nothing. Before I went to bed he asked me to serve his Mass the next day.

I served Father Armishaw’s Mass at the side altar beneath the stained-glass window of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. The familiar ritual close to Father Armishaw in the cool, silent morning made me light-headed with happiness. Was it possible, I wondered, to reside and rest within the tranquil ambit of music, nature and the liturgy, for the whole of one’s life? The heroism of Father Fermoyle in
The Cardinal,
and Father Cooney, did not seem so attractive in the aftermath of the ‘halfway house’.

In the sacristy Father Armishaw asked me if I would like to meet him after breakfast by the garages where he was working on his motorbike.

The garages where Father Armishaw kept and maintained his gleaming green motor cycle were the other side of a wall at the end of Top Bounds. When I arrived he was on his knees cleaning engine parts which were laid out on a sheet. He was wearing old trousers and his leather flying jacket. His motorbike was a water-cooled Velocette 192cc, popular with police forces in England, he told me. As he worked he explained what he was doing. I learnt about the chemistry of petrol, and the principles of the combustion engine – carburettor, cylinders, gearbox. As he bent to his task and spoke about the mechanisms, he would hand me a piece to examine and feel its weight.

That afternoon he took me for a ride as far as the Rocks. As he opened up along a straight stretch, he called out for me to hold on to him tightly around his waist. I pressed my head against his back, watching the drystone walls zipping by.

The hours and the days leading up to the beginning of term passed like a paradisal interlude. Father Armishaw showed me the intricacies of his camera, and how to take pictures at the right speed and with the appropriate film without artificial lighting. He talked books, and we listened to music.

One night he took the blanket from his bed and led me down to the lawn in front of the old hall, out of bounds to boys. As we lay side by side under a clear sky he pointed out stars and planets, and the constellations. He told me a mnemonic by which I could remember the order of the planets from Mercury to Pluto, starting with the one closest to the Sun: ‘Married virgins eat mango jam sitting under nanny’s piano.’

He did not speak to me in an intimate way, nor did he once talk about religion or the spiritual life. I asked him practical questions, or just remained silent waiting for him to say something.

I longed to give him something back, and it was this desire that prompted me to talk about Paul Moreland. The night after our star-gazing Father Armishaw lent me a book by Sir James Jeans titled
The Stars in their Courses.
He had won it as a school prize and it was precious to him. He had just marked a passage for me about the method of calculating the weight of the moon and the earth, when I said: ‘I’m worried about Paul Moreland, sir…’

‘What do you mean?’

I told him about the episode in the infirmary, when Paul had talked of stigmata. Then I described how he had lain on top of me. Father Armishaw was listening intently and gravely. His face was taking on such a serious expression that I began to feel afraid. But wasn’t that the effect I had sought? Then I went on to tell him about the abuse Moreland had experienced at the hands of the family priest.

I thought that one confidence might lead to another. We would become closer, more intimate. But when I finished, he was suddenly offhand, although his face remained pale and intense.

‘These things happen,’ he said shortly. Then he told me to go to bed.

As I made my way down to the infirmary I knew that I had made a mistake.