Authors: John Cornwell
F
ROM HIS HIGH
desk Father Gavin fixed me with an alarming rubicund grin of pity and glee. ‘Find time,
Magister
Fru,’ he said, ‘to write out one hundred times the declensions and conjugations I set you yesterday.’
It was my fourth week at Cotton and I was struggling with Latin. Most of my year had come to the college aged eleven and had started Latin two years ahead of me, or even earlier, and the majority of my companions in the remedial class, who had come to Cotton at thirteen, had made a start on Latin in their previous schools. My problems began when I failed to grasp the meaning of the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative…I struggled to apply principles I did not understand. Lack of practice in learning by heart was compounded by poor concentration. I was so astonished to be at Cotton, so entranced by the strangeness and interest of the surroundings, that my mind would still wander towards the windows to gaze at the autumn foliage and the sky. I was failing to learn the grammar set by Father Gavin day after day, and I was incapable of attempting the simple composition and translation exercises.
With Greek it was different. The elderly Laz Warner went at a slower pace, sitting next to each of us in turn, making sure that we had grasped what he had taught. He was intent merely to have us read and form the unfamiliar letters. There was not going to be much progress in the remedial Greek class, I realised. But Latin, the universal language of the Catholic Church, was the key to our future studies in the senior seminary, the daily recitation of the breviary, and the year-round ritual.
On waking each morning my first thought was dread of the commencement of Latin drill. Passing the great double doors at the entrance to the Study Place each night, I felt a surge of
relief at the amnesty of Greater Silence and the night. I was not the only pupil in difficulty: there was another ex-Secondary Modern boy from east London, the oafish Patrick O’Rourke, who cried with homesickness in the night and proved incapable of keeping himself clean without his mother’s help. He was big for his age, with large clumsy hands and greasy hair. We were both teased on account of our cockney accents: ‘ ’Allo, me owld cock-sparrer!’ He tried to make friends with me, but I was determined not to be identified with him. He had the stricken look of a boy who was not going to make it. O’Rourke floundered so much that Father Gavin had put him down into the first year, despite his age and size, as incapable of ‘catching up’. As it was, my classmates looked at me, I thought, with smug glances every time Father Gavin scolded me. I had seen boys looking at O’Rourke like that.
My class year, the lower fourth, was composed of some fifteen boys who had moved up from the junior section, Saint Thomas’s, and about twelve of us who had arrived from a variety of schools mainly around the Midlands. As I got to know my class many of them seemed like any other boys: teasing each other, fooling around, quarrelling about favourite soccer teams back home. But I came to recognise some as peculiar to a seminary community. There were the ‘Sanctebobs’, a word James had used, who made ostentatious display of their piety even outside church, walking around college with measured gait as if still in the sanctuary, and ‘talking piosity’. They were quietly derided by their fellows, and often accused of hypocrisy. And there were the loners, who seemed, in the context of Cotton, monk-like rather than just friendless or stand-offish. Such boys were not considered odd, and their desire for solitude was respected, unless they appeared sanctimonious as well, in which case they were regarded as Sanctebobs.
For some, like James Rolle, being a seminarian seem to come naturally. Although not a Sanctebob himself, he seemed a ‘cleric’ by nature, a boy born to be a priest. Neat and studious in appearance, good-humoured but never coarse, ever helpful and kind, he swam in the college as though it were his natural element. I liked him, and he quickly became my friend, although there was an aspect of his character that on reflection I found embarrassing. I had yet to learn the meaning of the word ‘priggish’, but it was a quality that I was beginning to recognise occasionally in myself as well; I sometimes found the former tough boy, Cornwell, sneering at his new self.
It was obvious that some of us had brought personal problems to Cotton. I thought I saw these tensions in the haunted expressions of several boys in my class: anxiety beyond their years, as if they were straining to curb their inclinations. Much as they wanted to be in the college, it went against the grain. Many, it was obvious, came like me from modest and poor
homes. Although the uniformity of our ‘best’ wear – the black suit – might have ironed out the differences, the texture, cut and fit were invariably a give-away. My own black suit was several sizes too big for me, ‘so that it will last you a couple of years,’ Mum had said.
In the remedial Latin class there was a boy called Charles House whose parents lived abroad. His well-made footwear, the beautiful cut of his blazer, the fit of his shirts, and the way he wore them, singled him out. He walked with a loose-ankled swagger, his right hand inside his jacket pocket. He wore an expression of bored amusement beyond his thirteen years. He had peerless skin; high cheek-bones that gave him an almost oriental look; even, very white teeth; and a head of silken, honey-blond hair. His confident voice came from the back of his throat as if he was mocking the world. He would rub his hands together vigorously before Father Gavin’s arrival in class. ‘Very good for the mind all this Latin, Fru,’ he would say, singling me out for such remarks. ‘Keeps us mentally on our toes!’ It took me some time to realise that he was mocking me.
Charles had a way of giving the profs knowing looks, and an occasional chortle in class; he even engaged in a little quiet banter. Was it just the stylishness of Charles House that prompted the profs to direct their quips and jests in his direction? Charles had this effect, I noticed, on some of the older boys, too, and coolly played up to it. One such was Bursley, a morose senior boy whom I had got to know in the choir. Bursley had a leathery face with pit marks on his cheeks. He looked old enough to be a man, but he tended to hang around with younger boys at break. One morning, after Father McCartie’s routine distribution of letters, I saw Bursley giving Charles a soft, playful punch on the arm. Charles not so softly punched him back and said: ‘Bursley, has anyone ever told you that you have a head like a dehydrated beehive?’ I thought that Bursley would be furious, but he just smiled at the insult as if happy that Charles had spoken to him.
Charles’s odd humour provided occasional light relief from the misery of Latin lessons, but it was Peter Gladden, a tall, stooped youth with a startling Roman nose, who helped me overcome my difficulties. Learning of my plight through James, who had become concerned on my behalf, Gladden took me by the arm one evening after Rosary and said: ‘Let’s try to sort out this Latin, Fru!’ The nickname had caught on.
He led me down to a piano practice room underneath the stage in the assembly hall. With a Latin primer propped up on the music stand he began to take me through the basics. For a start, he explained the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative. As the light dawned, he said: ‘You’re not unintelligent, Fru. Nobody taught you how to learn.’
Gladden, a born teacher at the age of nearly fourteen, advised me how to learn by rote, by repetition and rhythm. ‘Sway slightly to the rhythm,’ he said, ‘as if it’s music. You can do it. Memory and music, don’t you know.’ That was one of Gladden’s favourite phrases: ‘don’t you know’; not a question but an expression of encouragement.
‘You need,’ Gladden told me during one of our sessions, ‘to brush up either the night before or early in the morning.’ He suggested I work on my primer underneath the bedclothes for half an hour at night: ‘It will put you ahead,’ he said. So he lent me his torch. ‘Make sure Leo has done his last round,’ he warned.
That night, after lights out, and after Father McCartie had made his final stealthy round in the dark, I began to study a set of irregular verbs under the tent of my sheet and blankets. I had been working for fifteen minutes or so, coming up for occasional gasps of air, when the bedclothes were pulled back sharply and the figure of Father McCartie towered over me.
‘My room!’
Leading the way with a torch of his own, he descended the staircase through the laundry room below the dormitory where we emerged into his office. Bending down in my pyjamas,
I was thrashed in silence: six strokes of Father McCartie’s bamboo cane on my buttocks. Confiscating Peter’s torch, he led me back to my bed and left me without a word, my bottom throbbing agonisingly. At least, I thought, the brutal Mr Murphy of Saints Peter and Paul would have bid me goodnight.
Lying in bed looking out at the night sky through the dormer window, I felt a sense of painful loneliness sweep over me. I had the impression that my companions were gloating. The silence was broken only by an occasional rustle of a mattress as a boy turned. Thinking of home, and the immense distance that lay between our valley outside and London in the far-off south of England, I started to sob.
I was still weeping when I was conscious of a hand touching my cheek. ‘Don’t cry, Fru,’ said a boy’s voice level with my face in the dark; then I felt the hand stroking my head. ‘Come on! Cut it out! Go to sleep!’ It was Charles, whose bed was several places down from mine. I tried to reach out; I just felt his arm with the tips of my fingers as he withdrew. He had taken a risk to come the few yards to be at my side. The boy’s concern for me, even though I guessed he thought me a fool, calmed me down. I stopped crying and fell asleep.
O
N THE FEAST
of Saint Wilfred, patron saint of the college, we donned our black suits, stiff white detachable collars and black ties. The first Mass of the day was followed by a breakfast of grilled bacon. At 10.30 there was High Mass in full cloth-of-gold vestments, Father Doran celebrating in a fog of incense. We put our hearts into the glorious four-part Mass. As the choir processed out of church into the sacristy, the keyboard teacher, Mr Brennan, played a Bach fugue, with sudden crescendos
reverberating in the rafters of the church. My sense of fervour was heightened by the prospect of a full day’s release from Latin drill.
At lunch the nuns had spread white tablecloths and set out vases of autumn flowers and sprays of greenery. There were flowers around the statue of Saint Wilfred situated on a plinth high above the far wall of the refectory. There was roast lamb, followed by fruit pudding and custard. Father McCartie, looking congenial, came around with an enamel jug pouring an allowance of beer into the mugs of the sixth and fifth formers. Looking about me at the flushed, merry faces, I felt that I belonged. Several nuns had come to the door of the refectory to watch us. They were blushing and shyly ducking their veiled heads.
They were usually on their knees scrubbing, sleeves rolled, reddened arms up to the elbows in soapsuds; or peeling potatoes in the dark interior of the kitchens. I had never seen them outside their working element. None of them walked out in the fresh air except the retired and very elderly Mother Saint Thomas who was allowed, in token of her great age, to keep a small garden.
‘Look,’ said Peter Gladden, ‘the witches have come to take a peek at us. Wave to them!’ He gave a little wave and inclined his head.
After lunch we were divided into groups, and set off on walks in our Wellington boots and raincoats. The morning rains had cleared and the sun was out. Eventually we turned off the road beneath a popular Cotton landmark known as The Rocks. James led me up the hill to the side of the outcrop and we stepped gingerly to the edge to gain a view of the surrounding farms and moorland.
We took off our raincoats and sat side by side. James shouted into the blast: ‘Don’t you feel the presence of God in a place like this?’ I could see the red-edged top of his copy of
The Imitation of Christ
peeping above his jacket pocket. I did not
respond, but, yes, I could feel the presence of God. Then he said: ‘I’m sorry about your tanning last night…Did it hurt?’ Before I could make an answer, he said: ‘I always find it best to offer up a tanning for the souls of my relatives in purgatory.’ The priggishness of James’s comment disturbed me. I too was beginning to think like that, even though a part of me cringed at such thoughts.
We continued our walk along a rough track until we found ourselves on the opposite side of the valley to the college. We went through a stone stile and plunged down into a wooded dell. The steep path was soft with pine needles and followed a roaring waterfall which pounded over rocks and sudden chasms. On all sides rose tall trees, casting shadows. The air smelt of damp fallen leaves. We began to climb until we arrived at a wooden bridge across the torrent where there was a shrine with a statue of the Virgin. James explained that it was known as Faber’s Retreat, built by Father William Faber, the famous Victorian priest and composer of many popular Catholic hymns, including ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, which celebrated the English martyrs who died for their Faith at the hands of Protestant persecutors. We stood for a while in prayer at the
shrine, before continuing on up the valley past the shrine to Saint Wilfred our patron, and arriving back at Little Bounds. The day finished with Vespers and Benediction at which the choir sang Mozart’s ‘
Ave Verum Corpus Natum
’ and the college sang with great devotion the hymn by John Henry Newman, ‘Lead Kindly Light’. The hymn seemed to sum up the contrast between this day of happiness and the menace ‘amidst the encircling gloom’ that awaited the next working day.
I
HAD STARTED
on the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I learnt that she was born in Alençon, France, the youngest of five sisters who became nuns ahead of her. Entering the Carmelites aged fifteen she wrote the story of her life under obedience. After her death of tuberculosis, aged twenty-four, she became one of the most famous of modern saints. Thérèse confirmed the impression I had of my soul as a kind of inner garden or landscape. And like her, I had times when my soul felt more like a wasteland filled with rubbish than a place of beauty. There were occasions, especially during thanksgiving after Communion, when I felt no comfort or peace, only selfpity and discomfort: fear of Latin drill, fear of being sent home (and yet homesickness, too), tortured knees, blisters from my ill-fitting shoes, hunger, headache, exhaustion, my bladder full to bursting. One should pray to Our Lady in desolate periods, Thérèse advised. So I begged the Blessed Virgin to remove the rubbish from my soul. I would try to imagine a splendid tabernacle worthy of the Lord, inviting in the angels and saints to sing songs of praise to Jesus. All this I tried to do every morning, but still the discomfort and distractions, the dread of Latin, would take over my thoughts. On some mornings as
Father McCartie made the signal for us to proceed to breakfast, I would, like Thérèse, resolve to continue my thanksgiving during the day since I had performed it so poorly in church.
After pouring out my heart to Father Browne about my difficulties with Latin, he reminded me that John Vianney had struggled with his studies. And he told me about Saint Joseph of Cupertino who was obliged to take his exams for the priesthood many times before he passed them. Father Browne counselled me to think of my soul like a seedling in a nursery. Jesus allows us to bask at times in his sunshine, at other times he sends the cold waters of humiliation and suffering in order to strengthen us. We must not be cast down, he told me, by setbacks and minor discomforts.
The next time we met he talked again about Saint Thérèse’s ‘Little Way’. He read a passage from her writings in which she says that she saw herself as a toy for the child Jesus, a little ball of no price which he could throw on the ground, kick with his foot, or leave in a corner. Sometimes, he went on, she saw herself as a little paintbrush used for filling in the small details of a picture. Most often she was his ‘Little Flower’. But there was nothing sentimental about Thérèse, he insisted: ‘Saint Thérèse,’ he said, ‘was not a delicate flower, she was tough, tough, tough.’
As the daylight hours shortened, the college buildings became colder and darker and the valley was often shrouded in mist and rain. I found myself feeling miserable to the point of tears as I struggled with Latin, or dug into the clay of the ditches, or tried to concentrate during prayers. In Thérèse’s writings I found a passage that seemed to correspond exactly with my own feelings. There were times, she wrote, when a ray of sunshine lit up the darkness and she was happy and content. But then that time of joy made the darkness even more unbearable when it returned.
Father Browne said this was a passing phase; that I should think less about myself and more about others. Thérèse, he
said, showed us how to spread love within the community. She said it was natural to feel drawn to one sister in the convent, and yet go a long way around to avoid meeting another. But Our Lord wants us to love those who are less attractive to us. This coincided with Father Browne’s counsel to avoid ‘particular’ or ‘special’ friendships, spending too much time with those we were inclined to like most, while neglecting the friendless and those we felt an aversion for.
So I began to ration the time I spent with James, Derek and Peter, and sought the company of Oliver Stack, whom many boys accused of being a Sanctebob. He was a freckly youth with a receding forehead and untidy hair. He had a sanctimonious way of genuflecting and crossing himself in church. He walked in a hunched, self-absorbed fashion, as if to proclaim: ‘Look at me! What a holy fellow I am.’ He was, to boot, a grumpy, ill-favoured boy who showed, initially, not the least interest in me.
Often Stack walked alone on Top Bounds after breakfast so I took to falling in beside him and starting up a conversation. At first he looked at me suspiciously. But it was not long before he would be expecting me. Then he took to tagging along even when I came down from Little Dorm after bed-making as if to lay claim to me.
Stack was also a member of the Workers’ Union, the drain-digging team. He would wait for me outside the wash places so that we would go up to the fields together and work in the same ditch. It was during manual labour that I discovered how far I was from attaining Thérèse’s ideal of the ‘Little Way’.
One wet afternoon we were working together in a ditch so filled with muddy water that it almost spilt over the tops of our Wellington boots. Stack was attempting to widen the ditch and smacked the surface of the water with his spade to remove the clots of clay. Each time he did this he sprayed me with mire.
Saint Thérèse had told how a nun splashed her carelessly in the convent laundry, and how, although she hated it, she would
thrust her face forward to receive the dirty water more fully, seeing an opportunity to humiliate herself. But I was less concerned about my humility than my clothes. Although we wore football shorts and shirts over our normal clothes to protect them, pulling our thick socks up to our knees, I only had one pair of second-best trousers and they were being ruined by Stack’s carelessness.
I asked him, kindly I thought, to be more careful. But he splashed me even more. I pleaded with him, hoping that he was merely being thoughtless rather than aggressive. Splashing me again, he said: ‘You should have more pairs of trousers. Why didn’t your parents make proper provision for you when you came to Cotton? This is not a college for down-and-outs.’
Thinking of Mum and Dad and how hard they had to struggle, I was stunned for their sakes by the insult. With the next splash, which soaked my trousers across the front, it was as if a pair of soapy hands had plunged inside the back of my skull and squeezed my brain. The long-suppressed rage of my former, younger self erupted, as if I had never practised self-control. I tossed my spade over the parapet of the ditch, grabbed Stack by the scruff of the neck and brought him down sideways in the freezing muddy water, yanking him straight back on to his feet again while still holding on to him. ‘Wannanother dip, you bastard?’ I grunted. Then I pushed him down again so that he was sitting in the mire as if taking a bath.
As he clambered up, flaying his arms, he was shaking, his face deathly white. The rest of the work team in the ditch looked on in amazement as Stack stood up and confronted me with tightened fists. I squared up to him. ‘Come on then!’ I said. But he scrambled out of the ditch.
There was a cry of horror from the onlookers. He had grabbed my spade and was holding it aloft as if preparing to strike. I raised my arms to protect myself, but he threw down the spade and set off for the college, dripping mud.
By teatime, my spat with Stack and its resolution had gone around the college. As he came into the refectory there were waves of giggles. It was an infectious, nervous tittering that I had heard before at Cotton – wracking the entire community, sometimes on the most solemn occasions.
Nothing could have been further from the spiritual strategy of Thérèse, and I had gained in credibility as a strong character for all the wrong reasons. But Oliver Stack had taken a plunge in reputation and lost the only friend he had in the college. He now refused to speak to me or look at me. Again and again I approached him and told him how sorry I was. As I asked his forgiveness, Stack became ever more self-absorbed, looking upwards, myopically, his nostrils flaring. In desperation, I said: ‘But, Oliver, Jesus says we must forgive one another.’ Eventually he snorted: ‘Shut up, you bloody Sanctebob!’ Those were the only words I was to get from Stack for the rest of the term.