Authors: John Cornwell
T
HAT SUMMER
I took a full-time job as errand boy at a grocer’s store on Claybury Broadway, our local shopping centre. The hours were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7.30 p.m. on Saturdays), with a half day off on Thursday. In all weathers – it rained a lot that summer – I delivered boxes of groceries carried in the iron basket attached to the handlebars of an ancient bike. The popular song on the radio that summer was
Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’. Recalling that doleful tune, I see the streets of Barkingside stretching before me as I struggle to keep upright on the heavily laden machine, my toes barely reaching the pedals. When I wasn’t weaving perilously on the recalcitrant bike and coping with its faulty brakes, I was blackening and chafing my hands realigning the loose chain, or mending multiple punctures in the decaying inner tubes.
I also gained first-hand experience of the amorous antics of the grocer and his assistant manageress. She was a buxom pretty woman, her peroxided hair piled high on her head. In the storeroom at the back there was a high desk at which the grocer stood doing his paperwork while eating chocolate. He would rip off the foil and bite into the chocolate bar as if it was a slice of toast. She would come up silently behind him and poke two fingers between his buttocks. Then they would go into a clinch, with a lot of tongue kissing, breast and testicle squeezing, moaning and giggling: all as, in sight of them, I attempted to fill my cardboard boxes with orders of tinned baked beans, trays of eggs, bacon, cheese, margarine, jams and marmalade. Their behaviour intrigued and yet repelled me. I prayed for them both every morning at Mass.
Two weeks before I was due to depart for Cotton College, I was fired from the job after crashing the bike while evading a dog that hurled itself at my front wheel. The dog’s owner stood smirking down at me. ‘That happened to me once,’ he said. Then he added: ‘You must have frightened him.’
The bike was a write-off, and I was concussed. The money I had earned, less compensation for broken eggs (four dozen of them were spread over the incline of Clayhall Avenue), paid for football boots and a new black blazer. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t make you pay for a new bike, you clumsy little bleeder,’ said the manager as I made my farewell.
Suffering a fever, which Mum insisted was due to homesickness in anticipation, I was unable to travel on the appointed day of the new academic year in the third week of September.
For several nights I lay weeping, convinced that I was unworthy and therefore fated never to depart for Cotton. But the Very Reverend Father Doran wrote a revised travel schedule, informing Mum that a car would be waiting at Oakamoor station and that I should arrive at the college in time for Compline, Benediction and supper.
O
N A LATE
September Sunday morning of cool breezes and brilliant sunshine I served Father Cooney’s Mass for the last time. In the sacristy he handed me a parcel and told me to open it. It was a new leather-bound Roman missal in dual Latin–English translation. The pages were gilt-edged and there were sumptuous silk markers, purple, red, green, white and gold. I could smell the warm scent of the leather and the sweet aroma of the delicate rice-paper. I was moved to tears, realising the expense of the beautiful object. I attempted to thank him, but he interrupted me: ‘Wisswiss…Very good! Run along now!’ As I left the sacristy he called out: ‘And keep the Faith!’
As I made my farewells at home, Terry, my elder brother, was terse: ‘Now I’ll be able to breathe at night.’ My sister, immaculately groomed, and approaching her fifteenth birthday, gave me a quick dry kiss on the cheek. She had a knowing gleam in her eye. Not for one moment, she appeared to be telling me, was she taken in by my devout pretensions. The youngest two, aged ten and seven, stood gaping, incredulous that any of us should be escaping from the Peel. Dad came in from the field. He was blinking with nervous excitement. He lifted my bags. ‘Gawd awlmighty!’ he said. He sang a bar of ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’, then he lowered
his face towards mine for a kiss. Accompanied by Mum, wearing her purple coat, I set off through the gates of the Peel, my arms almost out of their sockets with the suitcases I insisted on carrying by myself. In my unyielding new black shoes I just made it to the bus-stop.
We had lunch in the cafeteria of Saint Pancras mainline station. Mum ordered steak. It stuck in my stomach. She nevertheless ordered treacle suet pudding, urging me to finish every morsel. Her boy was not going to depart unfortified.
The station was a like stage set for the commencement of my spiritual journey: incense steam clouds, amplified pulpit-voice announcements, grand cathedral arches, shafts of lantern-light. I leant out of the window as Mum walked, then trotted alongside the carriage, her eyes suddenly reproachful and gazing into mine. She stopped at the end of the platform, a purple figure frantically waving a handkerchief. Then she was gone.
I sat hunched forward, still suffering from lunch, looking out at the passing immensity of the aged and filthy city wartorn from Hitler’s bombs. Taking
The Imitation of Christ
from my pocket I read the passage I had marked weeks earlier with a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:
It is no small matter to dwell in a religious community, or congregation, to converse therein without complaint, and to persevere therein faithfully unto death. Blessed is he that there lived well, and ended happily.
Opposite me sat a smartly dressed woman. She smiled, her broad lips thick with orange lipstick. But I avoided her eyes and watched the factory buildings and terraced houses slipping by. In glimpses between tunnels and high embankments, the countryside finally opened out to the horizon. I felt a delicious sense of sadness as the train sped on, carrying me farther and ever faster away from Mum and the family, from Father Cooney, from the huge, bruised city of London. From the World.
T
HE SUN WAS
setting as the steam train laboured alongside a fast-flowing river, brassy blue-green in the late afternoon sun. I could see drystone walls bordering steep fields; clusters of pine trees on the summits of dark red cliffs. Eventually there was a line of cottages and a factory foundry with clashing engines. A man lit by the reflection from a furnace stood in a doorway mopping his brow. We had arrived at Oakamoor.
The waiting car was a cavernous pre-war Austin. The driver greeted me with: ‘Now then! Cotton!’ As we lurched away, he explained that the factory was a copper mill. ‘They keep those furnaces going day and night; even on a Sunday,’ he said. The taxi paused at a crossing for the train to pass. There was a church in a steep graveyard, dense with decayed headstones. We crossed a bridge where I could see a broad weir blurred with rising steam. Oakamoor was a settlement of workers’ cottages. The dwellings cowered below the wooded flanks of the hills that rose on all sides. There was a shuttered pub.
We began a climb through hairpin bends. The road was narrow, bordered by lush pastures and coppices. At turns I could see back down to Oakamoor, virtually hidden now in mist. Higher and higher we went. Then the driver called out: ‘There she is!’ We were running along a straight stretch with overarching trees. In the distance, through a break in the woods, I could see a cluster of buildings which seemed to cling perilously to the side of the valley.
We paused at a crossroads by an ancient stone inn and turned left, passing a hamlet of single-file cottages. ‘That was the village of Cotton, that was,’ said the driver facetiously. As we passed along a level lane, sideways to the hillside, the college came into full view. At its centre was an imposing mansion to
which was attached a barrack-like stone building with lighted curtainless windows. To the right of the mansion, silhouetted in the evening light, was a stone church with a spire. The college faced out across a thickly wooded shoulder of the valley; above and beyond were playing fields rising in terraces towards the crest of the valley.
There were iron gates and a driveway ahead, but the driver followed the lane around the back of the buildings and came to a halt on a cinder yard as spacious as a football field. Depositing my bags, he said: ‘You go down there to the lower yard…up the steps, and someone will look after you.’ He seemed to imply, by his sympathetic tone of voice, that he felt sorry for me. Wishing me goodnight, he got into the car and shuddered away.
It was now dark, the air shockingly cold and pure. I lugged my bags down the path to the lower yard and entered a door at the top of a flight of stone steps to find myself in a high-ceilinged lobby. A priest in a cassock was standing at a noticeboard lit by a single naked bulb. He turned as I entered, as if he had been expecting me. He had huge shoulders and black horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was cut close and stood up from his scalp stiff as a brush. He had dark eyes and a strong square jaw.
‘Cornwell? I’m Father McCartie, Prefect of Discipline.’
When I said: ‘Hello, Father,’ he replied unsmiling: ‘No, you address the priests here as “sir”. It’s our custom.’
Father McCartie took my bags and hurried ahead of me up four flights of a worn stone staircase, the thick crêpe-rubber soles of his shoes squelching noisily. We entered a dimly lit dormitory like a tunnel under the eaves of the house. Black iron bedsteads with white coverlets stood close together. Behind each bed was a space for storing clothes. There was a range of narrow dormer windows on each side, wide open to the raw air. A statue of Saint Joseph stood on a pedestal at one end, and a crucifix hung on the wall at the other.
‘That’s your berth,’ said Father McCartie, pointing to a bed beneath one of the windows.
This place was called ‘Little Dorm’, he told me, so as to distinguish it from ‘Middle Dorm’ and ‘Top Dorm’. There was no talking in the dormitory for any reason, he added. I was wondering why he had not asked me about my journey, or where I had come from. I had an impression of vast chilly space beyond the windows, which looked out across the valley to a pine ridge barely visible in the dusk, and I was aware of the distance I had come from home. It was all so different from what I had imagined. Aylesford and its birdsong, its summer fragrance, bell-ringing, tranquil routines and friendly friars, could not be more different from this cold, unadorned place. I thought of Mum and her protective presence, despite her unpredictable moods.
After I had finished unpacking Father McCartie picked up the two books I had brought from home:
The Imitation of Christ
, and the new Roman missal. Returning them, he said: ‘Take them into church…Now bring your washbag and towel down to the wash places.’
Leading the way, he paused by the statue of Saint Joseph. ‘That was given by the parents of a boy who died of peritonitis within two days of his arrival at Cotton,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘He died fifty years ago.’
We proceeded down to the cloisters and descended again to a whitewashed cavern smelling of ancient damp. There were lines of wash bowls and pegs, all numbered. ‘Your number is ninety-two,’ said the priest, pointing out my bowl and peg.
I said: ‘Thank you, Father.’
‘No, you call us “sir”,’ he corrected me once more.
As we returned to the cloister, he explained that the college was founded two hundred years earlier during the penal times, when it was a crime to be a Catholic priest in England. ‘The priests of this college,’ he said, ‘dressed in lay clothes and were
addressed as “sir” to hide their true identity. We’ve carried on the tradition of being called “sir”.’
I felt quelled, and it seemed strange that he asked me nothing about myself. Perhaps, I thought, he already knew everything that was to be known about me.
The building was echoing with the raucous clangour of a bell. Somewhere on a higher floor there was a sound of scraping of feet, and a man’s voice praying, followed by a roared response. The stone stairs reverberated as a host of boys came into view walking in silence towards the cloisters where they took their places in parallel lines, hands behind their backs. They were dressed in black suits, black ties and white shirts. The toecaps of their shoes were highly polished.
The seminarians of my imagination had been pale and pious, slow of movement, gentle-eyed. These boys were fresh and open-faced, their ears red as if with the cold and the fresh air, their shoulders squared like boy soldiers. Some of the older ones had the tough appearance of farm boys or young building labourers; I had the impression that their eyes were bright, as if with a kind of inner excitation.
Father McCartie led me down the ranks and positioned me between boys who appeared to be the same age as myself. At a signal from the priest we moved forward slowly in step along the terrazzo-floored cloister like a regiment of young undertakers. Many of the boys had metal studs on their shoes giving their precise marching the sound of a metallic drum roll. We passed into a gallery I would come to know as the ‘clock cloister’, because of the presence of a tall grandfather clock. The walls were lined with pictures, including one prominently large print of a youth whose naked body had been punctured bloodily with arrows (this, I learnt later, was a copy of Botticelli’s
Saint Sebastian
, the early Christian boy-martyr). There was a pervasive smell in the gallery, of wood polish, burnt toast and lingering coffee fumes.
Finally we passed through double doors into the church
where our footsteps echoed on the patterned tiles and the cool air was heavy with the smell of incense and candle grease. The ceiling disappeared into the darkness high above. There were simple stone columns, unadorned side altars, and a Lady chapel at the end of a side aisle beyond a wooden screen. The boys took their places in plain pine pews on either side of the main aisle; beyond the altar rails was a spacious sanctuary with choir-stalls, an organ, and a stone high altar in the distance overlooked by a massive east window gleaming in the darkness. The boys were kneeling, ramrod straight; the kneelers were made of hard wood. The boy next to me, a youth with pale limp hair, high colouring in his cheeks, and National Health spectacles, took my missal and found me the page for Sunday Compline.
A procession of boys entered the sanctuary, filing into the choir-stalls, followed by a priest wearing a white-and-gold cope. He was tall and ruddy, and walked casually without a hint of devotion. He bowed at the foot of the altar and intoned in Latin the beginning of Compline, the office of prayers at the end of the day.
The ritual appeals to God for his protection as night falls: ‘May the dreams and phantasms of the night recede; keep the enemy at bay, lest our bodies become polluted.’ At the
Salve Regina
the boys’ voices soared up to the high rafters: ‘To you we sigh, groaning, and weeping in this vale of tears…’ I was conscious of the wild valley in its remote and rugged setting in the darkness outside, deepening the sense of strangeness. Then it struck me that unless I begged to be allowed home the very next day, I had no other choice but to throw myself completely on the person of Jesus. I stole a look around me. My companions knelt with their faces buried in their hands in prayerful recollection.
After the celebrant and the choir processed off the sanctuary we began to leave the pews in strict order, starting with the front row. Towards the rear of the church there were six or
seven priests. One older than the rest, bespectacled and with fair receding hair swept back, was scrutinising each of us in turn. I guessed that this was the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran, the superior of the house and headmaster. His face betrayed no emotion, neither severity nor kindliness. Father McCartie knelt on the opposite side of the aisle. He too was watching each boy in turn with those dark eyes through heavy black horn-rims. The others were reading their breviaries.
At the end of the cloisters we passed through a set of double doors into an oak-floored refectory and the warm atmosphere of cooked food. Someone touched me on the shoulder: it was the boy who had knelt next to me in church. He was about the same height as me, his wrists protruding a long way out from his black sleeves. He held his head submissively to one side. ‘My name is James Rolle. I’ve been deputed to look after you,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Welcome to Cotton.’ He placed me next to him in the middle of one of the rows of tables.
The boys were standing in silence, hands joined. Near the double doors there was a table where three nuns stood with ladles poised over enamel serving pans. After Father McCartie said grace we sat down while boys assigned to be servers queued in front of the nuns. Each boy received a portion of beans and a hunk of bread. They fell hungrily on the food, eating at speed. After several minutes there was a sharp rap as Father McCartie struck the serving table, and the boys began to talk all at once.
James said: ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ No sooner had I answered and begun to tell James about my home parish than Father McCartie rapped on the table again and the boys fell silent and stood up, heads bowed for the grace.
Outside the refectory, James took me down to a room in the basement. It was cold and dimly lit, with stone flags and pine benches. Boys sat around talking quietly in groups, occasionally laughing. James was intent on being kind to me.
‘On weekdays,’ he explained, ‘we have Rosary after supper, which you can say either in church or in the cloister. I rarely come in here. I usually go to the library which is above the refectory.’ James seemed unusually self-controlled and serious. I decided that I liked him.
‘Do you like reading?’ he asked. ‘What are you reading?’ When I said that I was reading
The Imitation of Christ
, he reacted with surprise. Slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a slim black copy of the
Imitation
with red edging, identical to my own. ‘I read it at odd moments of the day, and carry it everywhere,’ he said. ‘But it’s spiritual reading, isn’t it? One could hardly count it as one’s normal reading.’
At the clangour of bells, James said that we would not be allowed to speak until breakfast the next day. I should just follow him. ‘Watch out,’ he said grimly. ‘You’ll be beaten by Leo if you’re caught talking, and so will anybody you’re caught talking to.’ Leo, he explained, was Father McCartie’s nickname.
Boys were hurrying down the cloisters to the staircase leading to basement level where they took off their jackets and ties to wash in cold water and brush their teeth. I was still brushing my teeth when an older boy told me brusquely to get a move on. James was waiting to accompany me to the dormitory.
About sixty boys were lodged in Little Dorm; they changed into their pyjamas with a uniform set of modest stratagems. They went down on their knees to pray silently for a few moments before getting into bed. I was still undressing when the lights flashed off and on. I nevertheless went on to my knees to pray.
I thanked God for a safe journey and asked for his protection through the night. After a prayer to my guardian angel (‘O my good angel, whom God has appointed to be my Guardian…’), I was the last to get into bed, where I lay shivering for several minutes. The sheets felt damp and the mattress was as lumpy
as a sack of potatoes, but it was the first time I had slept in a bed to myself since my brother Terry had returned from evacuation.
Father McCartie appeared by a doorway situated at the top of a wooden stairway which looked to be a laundry shoot. After a while he began to walk along the lines of beds looking at each of the boys in turn; he had taken off his noisy crêpe-soled shoes and was in bedroom slippers. Then the dormitory was plunged in darkness and silence. How comforting it would have been, I thought, had the priest wished us goodnight and blessed us.
The air, carried on a stiff breeze through the dormer windows, was cold on my face. Soon I made out the night sky through the window above my bed. A scattering of stars sailed between the clouds. I could hear the wind in the trees, then, gradually, in the far distance, the sound of a motorbike taking the steep climb up from Oakamoor, constantly changing gear before surging forward; eventually the sound grew fainter and merged with the rustling of the treetops. I wondered what the family were doing back in London. Dad and my brother Terry were probably listening to the radio, perhaps a cheerful dance number played by the Palm Court orchestra. Sister Maureen the convent-school girl would be doing her homework, while Mum was washing dishes at the sink. My younger brothers would be fast asleep in their single bed, lying end to end.