Authors: John Cornwell
A
HOMILY
, known as a ‘conference’, was an important feature of the Sunday routine. It was delivered in the assembly hall on Sunday mornings between High Mass and lunch. I had missed the first, traditionally given by Father Doran. Thereafter the profs took it in turns. One Sunday early in the term it was delivered by Father McCartie. He started, as was the custom, by praying the Angelus. Seating himself at a table on the stage, he gave us a pep talk on the virtue of obedience and the necessity of promptly responding to the college bells as one would heed ‘the voice of God’. Father McCartie delivered all this in a dry mechanical fashion. Then he talked about the importance of forming habits of ‘self-regulation’ since many of us would one day live as priests, probably alone, where
there would be no bells, and nobody to encourage us to be prompt.
I found myself puzzling over Father McCartie. His punishments included not only beatings but making boys stand for long periods of time on the college coat of arms depicted in mosaic on the floor of the main cloister. Boys being punished in this way, sometimes ten at a time, were therefore held up to ridicule by all who passed. Father McCartie’s homily revealed, I thought, what a poor opinion he had of youth. Yet it seemed to me that compared with the lads at Saints Peter and Paul in Ilford we were unusually self-disciplined. We were rarely late for any duty, and performed our various routines enthusiastically, and yet the Prefect of Discipline applied his punishments, as he had done in my case, with grim vigour, making no allowances for circumstances.
By the middle of the term I had experienced Father McCartie’s classroom methods, too, since he was taking my class for Christian Doctrine. Week after week he handed out cyclostyled sheets – mainly notes and quotes on papal social teaching. There was not a single concrete example; not one
historical anecdote or illustration to relieve the abstract tedium couched in virtually incomprehensible language. He did not even wish us to discover for ourselves the important highlights: they were underlined for us. He spent the period reading out his own notes in a monotonous voice. One morning, as more notes were being handed out, Charles House whispered to himself at the back of the class: ‘Oh Lord, what a yawn!’ Father McCartie looked up. He had heard it. We sat frozen with terror, expecting a thundering: ‘My room!’ Instead, the priest gave House a wintry smile as if the boy had echoed precisely his own thoughts on the matter.
As week followed week the profs continued to take turns delivering Sunday homily. Mostly they rambled, filling the period between High Mass and lunch, as if begrudging us an unscheduled slice of free time. Father Gavin gave a talk on what a splendid and maligned leader Mussolini was. Father Piercy gave a disjointed and barely audible talk on the religious history of North Staffordshire.
Towards the end of October, when the college seemed generally in a state of gloom following a week or two of bad weather, the conference was given by Father Armishaw. He bounded up the steps of the stage and sat for some time staring at us. The assembled college gazed back as the tension mounted. He seemed casually conscious of his own striking good looks.
‘The first half of the first term of every new academic year,’ he began, ‘is always a difficult time. But I wonder whether you lot realise just how
bloody
lucky you are…I wonder, when I watch you sometimes, and hear you bellyaching, whether you have an inkling just how privileged you are.’ His conference, it now became obvious, was another pep talk although in very different style from the others. He spoke to us directly, briefly, and in normal language.
He realised, he said, how we missed our families; how we resented rising at an unearthly hour; putting up with cold
rooms, with no soft armchairs; digging ditches, cross-country running, taking cold showers, studying harder than most boys of our age, eating Cotton’s ‘delightful cooking’. But we had come, he said, ‘to the finest school in the whole of England’. We were taught, he went on, in small classes by the best-educated, most intelligent priests in the land (he smiled at us facetiously and it got a laugh). We had a fine library ‘filled to the gunwales with books’. Nor should we take for granted the beautiful surroundings. Above all we were living, he said, under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament and taking part daily in the full ritual of the Church to the accompaniment of one of the best church choirs in England. This place, he said, had been producing great priests and bishops for two hundred years. We should thank our lucky stars and be proud and grateful to be here. ‘So let’s get on with it, shall we, with no more bellyaching!’
He sat for a while, staring down at us, as if watching the message sinking in. Then he rose, bounded down the stage steps, and walked swiftly from the hall. His conference had taken about five minutes, whereas the norm was a droning forty minutes or more.
As I came out on to Lower Bounds I felt a distinct sense of rising spirits among my companions. I went straight back into the church where the incense was still heavy from High Mass. Alone, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, I thanked God for sending me to Cotton.
T
HANKS TO
Peter Gladden, I was catching up with the rest of the class by the middle of November, and even began to enjoy Latin and occasionally shine at it. The punishment tasks
stopped; and the busy routine of the curriculum left me little time to brood. The worst of the darkness seemed to have lifted. Did I owe this alleviation to a deepening sense of God?
Ever since I was a child, and imagined God as a clock, I had continued to puzzle over how I thought about God; what I thought him to be. I had once imagined him as an ancient man with a beard on a throne; and I had thought of him as a sort of invisible, odourless ‘gas’ – the consequence of catechism classes which informed us that God was ‘everywhere, even in our most secret thoughts’. When I heard the voice of Jesus in the church of Saint Augustine, it marked the beginning of a period in which I could think of God as Jesus of
The Imitation of Christ.
At Cotton I continued to imagine him as a fatherly companion, to whom I spoke at intervals of the day, and particularly, following Father Browne’s encouragement, when I twice daily examined my conscience. And there were times when, as a result of the moving words of Cardinal Newman’s hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light’, I thought of the presence of Jesus as a disembodied warm light.
As the weeks passed and I became more acquainted with the countryside around Cotton in all its moods, I began to feel a surprising new sense of the presence of Almighty God, beyond the person of Jesus. Sometimes on afternoon walks I had an impression of a vast and mighty presence in the wild landscape, the woods, the steep hills and the sky. After making my bed each morning I would go to Little Bounds and gaze down the valley. There were times when I felt that the scene was entering into my heart and expanding my soul. Sometimes I had an impression of the spirit of Almighty God in the hills and the sky that was far deeper, vaster, more real even, than my idea of the man–God Jesus.
One Thursday afternoon, after seeing Father Browne, I had an urge to walk down to Faber’s Retreat in the valley by myself. It was breaking a rule, but I reasoned that my intention was not self-indulgence but the need to experience alone that
special presence in the valley that had made me tremble with excitement.
I stood inside Faber’s Retreat for a long time, looking out at the late afternoon light through the trees; listening to the echoing roar of water tumbling below, I felt my spirits lift for a few moments. Then something in the dampness of the rotting leaves, and the stirring in the canopy of the trees alarmed me. I felt lonely and I shuddered.
As I walked back up the path towards Little Bounds I saw two figures among the trees. They were standing very still and close to each other: it was Charles House and the senior student Bursley. Charles looked frail and vulnerable next to the swarthy mature Bursley. When they realised who I was they turned away. I could see that they were smoking cigarettes. As I continued on up the valley, I felt a momentary spasm of jealousy for Bursley.
That evening Father Piercy showed a film: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in ‘Road to Rio’. Charles House came and sat next to me. He pressed his shoulder gently against mine and whispered: ‘So what do you get up to down in the valley?’ I was too embarrassed to say anything.
The profs arrived before the film began. They sat at the back of the hall, their legs sprawling out from under their cassocks. Father Armishaw was in their midst, wearing a cloak and puffing on a curled pipe.
At the point in the film where a group of girls begin dancing at a wedding, there was a glimpse of their bare legs, right up to their knickers, but the film suddenly cut to the next scene. Some boys at the back laughed. Charles whispered in my ear: ‘Censored by Father Goebbels.’
I
N THE LAST
week of November we celebrated the Feast of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. The choir sang a complicated Mass setting by Victoria which we had been practising ever since Saint Wilfred’s day. After Mass Father Owen talked to us in the sacristy about our choir music. The liturgical year, he said, was Christ himself living on in his Church, reliving the shape of his life, renewing the mysteries of the redemption.
That afternoon the choir was given its annual feast served by the nuns in a drawing room in the old hall. Bacon and eggs were followed by a rich trifle topped with clotted cream. Father Doran presided along with Father Owen, and Father McCartie put in an appearance. As we continued to eat, the priests, having had their fill, leant back in their chairs and smoked, watching over us benignly. Later, in the assembly hall, the choir sang excerpts from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. One of the sopranos sang ‘Little Buttercup’, and I took part in the singing of ‘We are dainty little fairies’. The audience stamped their feet as the full choir sang excerpts from
The Pirates of Penzance
and
HMS Pinafore.
My performance as one of the ‘dainty little fairies’ caused some gentle ribbing from priests and boys for several days. It was not personal, I gathered, but part of a tradition of disdain for the girlish and the feminine at Cotton. One of the Big Sixth, a lofty snaggle-toothed fellow with a great thatch of hair, stopped me on Little Bounds to say, ‘You gave your dainty little fairy just the right degree of female silliness and vanity, Fru! Well done! The way you fluttered your eyelids, perfect!’
It struck me for the first time that girls and women, excluding the nuns, were as absent from our lives as current daily news. I had also noticed the practice of assigning ‘silly’ girls’
names to some of the prettier boys in Saint Thomas’s, the junior section, – such as Priscilla, Matilda, Nancy, Primrose. The fifty or so boys in ‘Toss’s’, as it was known, were segregated from the senior school, Saint Wilfred’s, under the close supervision of Father Denis Manion. Father Manion was a balding, glum-looking priest whose face darkened whenever anybody addressed him. He seemed to acknowledge in the senior section of the college only those boys who had been in his charge in Saint Thomas’s. There was no opportunity for boys in the senior school to speak to the younger, Toss’s, boys and yet they were constantly in our presence, at meals and in church, where they attended morning Mass in the Lady Chapel. One day Peter Gladden said something that surprised and disturbed me.
Walking on Top Bounds, he said: ‘That kid Appleton in the Lower Third, he’s got a gorgeous little rump like two peaches in a brown paper bag. God! I’d dearly like to give it a smack.’ He said this quite unselfconsciously. Then he changed the subject.
A
T THE END
of the month, as the days shortened and grew colder, an old Cottonian called Peter Lees was ordained priest in our sanctuary by Bishop Bright, the auxiliary bishop of the diocese. At the litany to all the saints the priest-to-be lay full-length, face down in the sanctuary. We watched enthralled as his hands were anointed with oil in the form of a cross.
After the ordination every boy in the college came up to the altar to receive Peter Lees’s individual blessing. Then he came into the refectory at lunchtime to receive three cheers. Led by Father Piercy, Father Owen and the Sixth Form, we sang a
moving chant in descant: ‘
Ad multos annos…Ad multos annos
…’ ‘For many years…For many years…’
After Saint Cecilia’s we had been counting the days to the departure date for our brief Christmas holiday, which the boys called ‘GH’ – ‘Going Home’. The more homesick ones would mutter to each other: ‘Thirty days to GH…twenty-eight days to GH…’ I had mixed feelings about GH. I had been missing the faces of Mum and Dad and my siblings, and I longed to return home to impress them with stories of life at Cotton, but I was anxious about sharing a bed again with my brother, and I was worried how I should react if my parents started fighting. Could I bring peace to the house by the power of prayer and good example?
I had been writing home at the allotted time between breakfast and High Mass on Sundays, giving glowing accounts of my activities. Each week I received a letter from Mum, listing illnesses, accidents and money problems, along with a postal order for five shillings. The money she sent each week, a significant sacrifice for her, I placed in a safe box in the bursary to pay for college bills and to buy my return ticket home on the train.
December came, the weather grew wild. Squalls of wind and rain came riding up the valley. There were times when the gales buffeted the college so strongly on its high, unprotected promontory that the beams of the roofs cracked and groaned. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as if by a miracle, the weather changed. It was a still, cloudless day of pale sunshine. After working in the drainage ditches I took a bath, cold as usual, and went into church before tea. I was alone, and the light of the setting sun caught the stained-glass image of the Virgin in the Lady Chapel as if it was a pillar of fire. The image was surrounded by glowing symbols of the virtues we recited in her litany: Tower of David, Gate of Heaven, Mystical Rose, House of Gold…Kneeling before the window I felt as if Mary had placed a cloak of serenity and purity around my shoulders.
The wind was stirring in the bare branches of the lime trees outside. The feeling of peace was so intense that I believed Our Lady had granted me a special and personal grace on her feast day. I rose from my knees and sat gazing at the window as darkness gathered. The church was very still and the sanctuary lamp shone brightly. As I sat entranced, I heard the door of the church swinging on its hinges. The sound of slow dragged footsteps approached. Eventually the figure of the very old nun, Mother Saint Thomas, came into view supported on a stick. I had seen her at High Mass on Sundays, bent almost double. She paused to look at me for a moment where I knelt in the twilight, and smiled sweetly. Then she installed herself in a pew where she began to whisper her beads. I had seen her often, but we had never exchanged a word.