Seminary Boy (31 page)

T
HAT
I
HAD
offended not just one schoolmaster in a trivial incident but the entire Roman clerical caste, became clear to me in the course of the following days. Only one prof, apart from Father Grady, offered me a straw of understanding and sympathy, and that was Father Armishaw. But our friendship, too, was about to become a casualty of the precarious situation in which I had landed myself.

I went up to his room after night prayers two days after the house play. It was cold; he was having difficulty with the fire, and he was sitting huddled in his cloak. I asked him if he had heard about the rumpus. He took the stem of the pipe from his mouth and gave me a broad grin. ‘Heard about it? I imagine by now that it’s being hotly discussed in the offices of the Holy Inquisition in Rome.’

‘I didn’t see him in the room.’

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to explain. Father Manion has a short fuse. Anybody would think you’d made love to Mère Saint Luc in the clock cloister. But that’s not the point. The point is, Cornwell, how you behave when you find yourself at odds with clerical authority. What you do
not
do is lose your rag…Anyway, not to worry, life is full of little irritations and disappointments.’

With this he went over to his gramophone and selected a record. ‘What with one thing and another…’ he said, sighing to himself. ‘I don’t know. I fancy some Mozart. How about you?’

Father Armishaw never got as far as putting the record on the turntable. We were disturbed by a harsh rap on the door.

Before he could call out: ‘Come in,’ or even walk to the door to open it, Father Doran burst in.

The priest was white in the face and trembling. He did not look at Father Armishaw. He just glared at me, shaking a finger in my direction. ‘Go to your dormitory this instant,’ he ordered. ‘I cannot have a situation where a boy is alone in a master’s room after night prayers.’ There it was again, that de-personalised, third-person ‘
boy!
’

This time I was not in the least angry. I felt entirely cool and in charge. I turned to Father Armishaw, who was standing with a faintly amused look of surprise, and said: ‘Thank you, sir. Goodnight.’ As I passed Father Doran, and looked him directly in the face, I had a mischievous urge to come out with a catchphrase from the popular
Carry On
films at that time: ‘Ding Dong! Anything Wrong!’ Instead I said politely: ‘I’m sorry, sir. Goodnight.’ My survival instincts were in working order.

As I made my way to my cubicle in Top Dorm I felt as if a thread had loosened in the fabric of my vocation; it might take a long time unravelling, but it seemed to me that the process was irreversible. What was the value, I asked myself as I lay in bed that night, of all the prayers, and Masses, and commitment to liturgy and the divine office, and celibacy, and meditation, if you ended up treating people like things rather than as persons? Had Father Manion and Father Doran once learnt all those lessons about forbearance, understanding, charity and respect, and forgotten them? Or had they never taken them in? That, prompted by injured pride, was my first thought. My next inclined towards self-castigation. Surely it had been childish, as well as unrealistic, not to accept the rules of clerical hierarchy. In losing my temper with Father Manion I had shown not how grown-up I was, but how immature: still a boy! And yet, no, on reflection I was not prepared to be acquiescent. Perhaps I
could
be: but I
would
not.

F
ATHER
D
ORAN
never spoke to me again. And for all the trouble it had occasioned, my ridiculous play,
See How they Run
, had not impressed the anonymous reviewer in the college magazine. He had judged the performance ‘amusing enough…which better done could have been a truly hilarious affair’. My own performance was described as ‘a little too deliberate’ and the rest of the cast were ‘inaudible from bad elocution’. Despite all the campaigns for speech purged of local accents, Cottonians seemed intent on speaking in a way that came natural to them.

My sessions of spiritual direction and Father Doran’s evening talks seemed increasingly dry and tedious to me after the Manion incident. Yet my spiritual life took a surprising turn for the better during my remaining months at Cotton. This was not so much due to the influence of a priest as, yet again, to a book.

I was still a member of the League of Christ the King. Sitting in Father Grady’s room during one of our sessions, I noticed a new volume on his shelves entitled
Jesus in His Time,
by Daniel-Rops. It was a long book, five hundred pages, and the preface claimed that its object was to study the life of Christ as if it were the life of any other historical person. Daniel-Rops was a distinguished French historian who had attempted to place Jesus biographically within a social and political as well as a religious milieu. He had studied the Gospels as historical documents rather than points for pious meditation. He brought to bear a wealth of parallel sources, while making many personal journeys to Palestine and Jerusalem.

I asked Father Grady whether I could borrow his copy, and his face lit up. ‘It’s a wonderful book,’ he said. ‘You will never think about Jesus in the same way again.’

I carried it around with me for a month until he begged for it back.

Father Grady was right. After reading
Jesus in His Time
I was never to see Christ again in the same light. I felt that for the first time I was encountering the ‘real’ Jesus, a man of striking sincerity and simplicity, yet a master of every event: firm, unswayed by applause or opposition. He had authority, and also tenderness: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ and he could be brilliantly ironic: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’ He could be angry, too, and radical. ‘This is a man,’ Daniel-Rops wrote, ‘with blood in his veins, not a pallid conventional
seminarian.
’ Pallid conventional seminarian! It was the first time I had read the word ‘seminarian’ employed as a term of abuse.

I began to meditate on the character of Jesus neither as the sweet Galilean of the
Key Heaven
, nor as the moral finger-wagging creation of Father Doran, but as a man of flesh and blood; a man who put love above the laws of the prophets, and who revealed his preferences for the poor and the dispossessed; a man who gathered women about him, and to whom women were attracted. Daniel-Rops asserted that the psychological portrait of Jesus of the Gospels is so powerful that it can be said to provide one of the most striking proofs of the veracity of scripture. He cited Gide: ‘The best intentions make the worst literature. ’ The Gospel writers had drawn a portrait of perfect virtue without insipidity, and perfect charity without sentimentality. Yet how should one think of him also as God? Who did he think that he was? Who did he say that he was? The divinity, the godliness, of Christ now seemed to me so problematic that I put it to the back of my mind. Like my vocation I put it on hold. The book was a timely antidote to a recurring suspicion that the spiritual life was unreal, a state of make-believe. Danel-Rops wrote:

Nowhere is the perfect balance of his character more apparent than in Jesus’s sense of reality. It is one of the
traits which does most to humanise him for us and it is continually in evidence. There are visionaries for whom the real world hardly seems to exist, they live on that borderland where the dream and the experience merge, where madness lies in wait to open the door to their soaring ambitions…But there is no trace of it in the words and the thought of Jesus; his feet are firmly on the ground and the visible world is real.

My spiritual life in those final months at Cotton was dominated by a down-to-earth image of Jesus, who haunted my prayers and meditations, and my reading of the Gospel stories.

M
Y LAST WEEKS
at Cotton passed swiftly and busily as I sat the examinations that would qualify us for university entrance should we fail to make it through to the senior seminary and to the priesthood. I seldom considered my graduation to senior seminary, nor how I was feeling about leaving Cotton. I already suspected that I was not to be sent to Rome, but I had been told nothing; it was possible that I could end up in any of England’s four senior seminaries.

My last important duty as Public Man was to greet the visitor of honour on prize-giving day and show him around the college. He was a stout, pink-faced auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Westminster, sparkling with interest and humour. It seemed odd to me to be talking with a bishop who was not being distantly grave and ceremonious.

Mum came up from London for the special day; it was her first and only visit. Uncle Mike drove her in his temperamental Vauxhall, taking seven hours including time for break-downs.
Mum looked smart in a fashionable flared cream-white coat. Uncle Mike looked odd. His tie and collar were loose, and I counted six ballpoint pens in his top pocket. During the speeches in the assembly hall he kept his trilby hat firmly on the back of his head.

Father Doran managed to get through the entire day without exchanging a single word or glance with me. Nor did he speak to Mum. The bishop had taken a liking to me. He evidently asked Father Doran where I was bound after Cotton, for it was from the bishop that I got confirmation that I was to be sent to Oscott, Cotton’s sister college in Birmingham. The bishop said, as he wished me goodbye: ‘What a pity you’re not going to Rome, you would have enjoyed it so much.’ It was obvious to me that Father Doran had intimated my disgrace, and that it was going to dog me for the rest of my clerical life.

On the evening before the last day of the college year Father Doran entertained the big sixth to dinner in the drawing room of the old hall. This was an annual event intended to reveal to working-class ordinands the mysteries of civilised dining. It was a beautifully proportioned room with a semicircular bay, regency-striped wallpaper, and a copy of the
Monarch of the Glen
on the wall. Over the marble fireplace there were the official framed documents granting the college its coat of arms. The table was laid up with a variety of cutlery and glasses. It was a four-course affair, ending with cheese, the nuns bobbing and bowing in silence as they waited upon us.

Father Doran told us how to use our cutlery, starting from the outside and working inwards. He served two kinds of wine and gave a little lecture on how we should savour the aroma, and drink sparingly, not ‘just slurp it
beck
’. He said he was once invited to the officers’ mess of a USAF base during the war and an unscrupulous colonel spiked his beer with gin. He crashed his car in a ditch as a result and narrowly missed being jailed for drunk driving. Nobody else seemed to think the story funny, but the image of a plastered Father Doran behind the
wheel amused me and I laughed out loud. My companions looked embarrassed; Father Doran looked down at his plate with pursed lips.

‘Never touch spirits or fortified wines such as port,’ he said, ‘except after the age of forty and then only as a medicine.’ He went on to say how impressed he was with the archbishop, ‘who makes a glass of wine last an entire meal’. Priests, he told us, because of their lonely lives were often prone to alcoholism; but this could be avoided by the formation of good habits early on.

At this point I decided to tell a story about how my Uncle Mike had given me a glass of very strong ‘scrumpy’ cider from Somerset, and how I had passed out under the table. As I attempted to relate this to the entire table, Father Doran, who had just lit a cigarette, went into a coughing fit so that I was effectively drowned out. When he finished, I remarked quietly: ‘Actually, excessive smoking is not such a good idea either.’

The following day I waited for a call to receive my five pounds from Father Doran’s hands for my services as Public Man. He did not send for me. In the end I asked Father Ryall if he would let Father Doran know that I wanted to see him. Father Ryall invited me to sit in his room while he went down to the profs’ common room. When he came back he said that the headmaster was not available.

I was not to receive the five pounds that had been awarded to school captains ever since the end of the war. I wanted Father Doran to tell me to my face, and give his reasons. He intended me, though, to draw my own conclusions. Father Ryall looked sympathetic. He said I could have the run of his room for the evening. I played his record of
Eine Kleine Nacht Musik
, but I soon got bored and went down to the sixth form common room and joined James and Derek. They were talking about their holiday plans, but I hardly heard them. I was angry. Five pounds would have been a welcome sum for my mother, and I had already promised it to her. I wondered what Father Armishaw would have to say about it.

I left the common room and climbed the stairs to his room. I thought he might ask me in on this my last evening at Cotton, despite Father Doran’s proscription. The door was wide open; he was sitting at his desk reading a book. When he saw me he rose at once and put an unlit pipe into his mouth. As he came to the threshold there was something forcedly jovial about the angle of the pipe-stem between his teeth; his eyes were apologetic. He sounded as if he was speaking through a brace: ‘Oh, yes, Cornwell, you’re off to Oscott. I’m sure I’ll hear news of you.’ He shook my hand vigorously and immediately retreated, shutting the door firmly. I stood staring at the door, fit to cry. He had been a true father-figure when I most needed one. I needed him now. But he had submitted unconditionally to Father Doran’s prohibition of lone visits to masters’ rooms in the evening.

Many years later, when the terrible extent of Catholic priestly abuse was exposed, I found myself wondering about that moment outside Father Armishaw’s closed door. Was Father Doran’s repression necessary in order to thwart McCallum’s brand of emancipation? Did a priest have to choose between being a Father Doran and a Father McCallum? Was there no alternative to prudent repression and self-seeking ‘emancipation’? Abuse crises were nothing new in the Catholic Church, they had recurred down the centuries, imprinting themselves indelibly on the folk memory of the priestly caste; shaping its ideals of detachment. Religious superiors cannot be spared responsibility for enforcing prudence. Yet prudence, even in the form of a closed door, carries the risk of wounding and self-wounding consequences. On the night Father Doran ordered me out of Father Armishaw’s room I had felt the bond of my vocation loosening. On my last night at Cotton, as I walked away from Father Armishaw’s closed door, that premonition was confirmed. I imagined Father Armishaw sitting down again on the other side of the door, staring into an empty hearth, and I sorrowed for him and for the priesthood.

The next day, my last at Cotton, I rose while it was still dark and went outside. I sat in the cold air on the steps above Lower Bounds. As the birds began to sing and the sunlight touched the distant crests of the landscape, I took my leave of the valley. I was ready to go. Yet I sensed a painful nostalgia in prospect:
ad multos annos…ad multos annos…
Five years earlier I had travelled to this valley, a recently reformed hooligan, rescued from ruin by an austere parish priest who avoided personal engagement with all but the very old. Without Father Cooney, without Cotton, and without Father Doran and his staff, my prospects had been dismal. Cotton had saved me, and made me. As the sun rose over the valley, I had an intuition that Cotton would possess me for the rest of my life.