Authors: John Cornwell
B
ACK AT COTTON
the valley was white with frost. We threw ourselves at once into work and our religious routines while trying to cope with the cold. I wore two vests under my shirt, as well as my ‘junior hair shirt’.
When the snow eventually came Father Piercy appeared with two sledges he had made in his workshop, large enough to take ten boys at a time. The favoured slide was in the field between the old hall and the margins of the wood where one could see branches of larch trees weighed down by snow, brilliant in the sunshine, and hear the muffled sound of the torrent on the icy rocks.
There was something about the snow-bound valley that matched my mood. I saw the snow as the pure mantle of God, soothing, cleansing and protective, filling my spirit with acceptance and silence. Reading Saint Thérèse, I was struck by those passages which spoke of emptying one’s desires, opening oneself to the person of Jesus by being abandoned, open to his presence. Saint Thérèse also made much of the call in the Gospel to die to oneself: unless the seed falls to the ground and dies, it cannot rise again and grow. Pondering these thoughts, I accepted the humiliation meted out to me by my mother. I had not been walking arrogantly into the Peel, of that I was certain. But I would accept her hurtful comment as an act of self-denial.
Meanwhile my studies had become not just less of a struggle but even absorbing and pleasurable. Our history teacher that term was Father Francis Grady, a Cambridge graduate with smooth dark hair, greying at the temples; he looked, as James insisted, not unlike Gregory Peck. He had a dignified walk, smooth mannerisms and careful speech; a way, every so often, of clearing his throat with a brief ‘hmm…hmm’ while putting
a genteel fist to his mouth. He was teaching us the history of the English monasteries of the Middle Ages. He brought those communities to life: the great choirs, the libraries and the chapter houses, centres of civilisation and holiness on the high moors of the North of England. I saw myself, as I knelt in church alone, conscious of the snow-bound landscape outside, as a young monk in a powerhouse of learning and spirituality.
Meanwhile, the choir master, Father Owen, was teaching us zoology. In the very first lesson he taught us the mysteries of reproduction. Like Father Armishaw he had a motorbike, although not a fashionable or new one; he would ride off along the college lane in a heavy raincoat, wearing a peculiar Gothic-shaped helmet and goggles. The motorbike figured in his instruction. He started by saying: ‘If I were to arrive in the garages and found a little motorbike one morning alongside my own, I would be most surprised.’ This led to a discussion of cell separation, reproduction in plants and mammals, then, finally, in human beings. In one notable sentence, delivered in his clerical voice, he pronounced: ‘The man inserts his penis into a hole in the woman and deposits his semen…’ He did not tell us precisely which hole in the woman. Then the bell rang and he began the prayer that we said at the end of each lesson. After he had gone from the room, I heard Charles House saying in a facetious voice behind me: ‘That sounds an interesting way to pass the time! When do we get started!’ Part of me, the priggish seminary boy, was shocked, while part of me was mischievously amused. I was not to hear any further mention by my classmates of what Father Owen had said.
Due to the snow and ice, and my dislike of tobogganing and snow sports, I was allowed to spend my afternoons during these winter-bound days poring over my books, an old curtain wrapped around my shoulders in the music practice room underneath the stage in the assembly hall. Having no gloves, and pressing my hands into my ears, I developed suppurating chilblains on my fingers and earlobes. My feet were also
suffering as my only shoes were cheap and made of imitation leather which was disintegrating in the snow and ice that turned to slush on the Bounds. I developed a painful form of foot rot. Following the example of Saint Thérèse, I regarded these miseries as an opportunity for self-mortification, conscious that I was becoming something of a Sanctebob.
As the term progressed the sun was permanently shrouded. Father Piercy kept the boilers going to heat the library and the church. The cold grew more intense and we wore raincoats and overcoats indoors. Pipes froze, the electricity supply failed. We were allowed to keep the windows of the dormitories closed at night, but if I breathed on my glasses as I got into bed the lenses became frosted within moments.
O
N THE
S
UNDAY
before Lent began, Father Armishaw gave the Sunday homily after High Mass again. He arrived in the theatre, swaddled in his heavy cloak. Lent, he announced, was an ancient ‘mystery’, reminding us of Our Lord’s forty-day fast in the desert: it is a desert time of cleansing and preparation. He ended with a word about fasting. ‘You may well think,’ he said, ‘that fasting during Lent makes you somehow a better person, but the practice was to deny oneself in order to give to the poor. We should know what it feels like to be poor and hungry.’ He asked us to give generously for the Shrove Tuesday tradition at Cotton of collecting for the orphans of the Birmingham diocese.
The homily finished abruptly. Father Armishaw gathered the collar of his cloak close to his neck and hurried out into the snow. As we followed and ran across Lower Bounds to wait in the cloister for lunch, it occurred to me that the conference coincided with my new spiritual mood. I had found courage and strength in the sufferings of winter, and now there was Lent, in which we joined Jesus fasting in the desert. I was dying to myself, like the seed that falls to the ground, so that I could rise a new and better person.
On Shrove Tuesday we auctioned a ceremonial pancake which had been tossed three times high in the air by the school captain. The aim was to hit the ceiling and yet still have the pancake fall back into the pan. The captains of the college houses had collected money from all their boys. I had given the equivalent of two weeks’ pocket money. Father McCartie conducted the auction. Our house, Challoner, won, and amidst cheers our captain received the uneatable object, which had frequently landed on the floor of the refectory. The money collected from all the houses was donated to the diocesan orphanage, Father Hudson’s Homes.
I had now started reading a novel entitled
My New Curate
by Canon Sheehan, an Irish Catholic priest. It depicted the relationship between an elderly parish priest and his smart, ambitious young assistant curate. I would daydream intensely about the rural parish he described, close to the shore of the Atlantic in the West of Ireland, and peopled with simple peasant parishioners. I imagined the austere pastoral life of these priests against the background of cliffs, stormy seas and breakers, walking the muddy roads in the teeth of rain squalls to visit the poverty-stricken hovels. This seemed to me the most desirable mission that a priest could wish for. I felt that it was deepening my love of the priesthood and poverty.
S
INCE THE BEGINNING
of the term I had spent less time with James Rolle and Peter Gladden, save for brief conversations about the weather and keeping warm. Oliver Stack had come around to acknowledging my presence, but there was no attempt on my part, nor on his, to establish a closer friendship. Derek, meanwhile, seemed to have hibernated entirely into a kind of Lenten monastic silence.
Charles House, who had never mentioned the incident when he touched my face in the night, nor the occasion when I caught him smoking down the valley, was usually in the library, surreptitiously feeding himself with sweets from time to time, although it was expressly forbidden to eat in the library, let alone eat sweets in Lent.
One day when the librarian had left the room, Charles came to lean over me to see what I was reading. ‘
My New Curate
?…Very edifying, Fru,’ he whispered in my ear, so close that I
could feel the warmth of his breath. Then he placed a sweet in its wrapper on the page before me. ‘Have a bon-bon,’ he said.
I looked into his face with its refined, even features. His eyes were golden brown with flecks of grey and blue.
After a few moments, he said quietly, so as not to be heard: ‘John. You are very beautiful.’
I could not remember a time when anybody had looked directly into my eyes. As for telling me that I was beautiful! I could not cope with the flood of feeling and confusion that he had provoked. I looked away.
He returned to the table where he had been reading and smiled before picking up his book. I watched him for some time, wondering whether he would look up again. But he appeared absorbed. I put the sweet in my pocket. It then occurred to me that Charles was doing what I had done to Oliver Stack. He was making me an object of his charity I thought, and this token of his affection was a sign that in fact he disliked me intensely. Later I threw the sweet into a waste bin. In subsequent days, whenever I saw Charles we would
exchange looks, and I would turn away embarrassed. There was something between us, and it disturbed me.
In the second week of Lent, I told Father Browne about my Canon Sheehan novel and he was disappointed. He told me that during Lent he wanted me to make sacrifices that really meant something. ‘Your Canon Sheehan,’ he said, ‘seems to me a self-indulgence.’ He wanted me to go back to Saint Thérèse.
As Lent got under way I was conscious of an underlying tension in the college. The weather had been too inclement for sports, and we had been cooped up inside the gloomy unheated buildings for days. We were giggling a lot at the least excuse. There was a spate of practical jokes which prompted paroxysms of collective nervous tittering. One night as I climbed into bed I felt a bristly object like a hedgehog. I leapt with fright, giving a great shout. It turned out to be a boot brush. All the dormitory seemed to be in the know and there were fits of giggles in the darkness, despite Father McCartie’s growled warnings from the door of the laundry chute.
Then Derek, deep in his Lenten piety, became the victim of a cruel practical joke with more drastic consequences. At supper one evening we were given a slice of cheese each. One of his table companions swapped Derek’s cheese for a piece of white soap. He scrutinised the object and sniffed it. But instead of leaving it on his plate, as was expected, he consumed it in one bite. He immediately began to retch and was violently sick. For several days the mere sight of Derek prompted titters and whispers of ‘Cheese!’
By the end of February my chilblains had begun to give me trouble, especially on my ears. As fast as they healed they would break out again in painful, bleeding sores. One evening I had to take our Greek class exercise books to Laz’s room after prep. The door was open and the old man, weary and dishevelled, was sitting in the bitter cold by his empty fire grate wearing a threadbare trench coat over his academic gown. He
smiled at me wanly. As I returned down the corridor Father Armishaw came out of his room and stopped abruptly.
‘Those chilblains look terrible,’ he said. ‘You must show them to the matron after Rosary.’ Later that evening he was invigilating prep in the study place, walking up and down the long room while reading his breviary. He stopped next to me. Bending over he said gently in my ear: ‘Make sure you see the matron.’
That evening I queued up outside the matron’s ‘dispensary’ opposite the sickbay and had my chilblains treated with an evil-smelling ointment. Matron was a Belgian, her religious name Mère Saint Luc. She clucked away, reprimanding me for not coming earlier. ‘You might have got blood poisoning,’ she said. She ordered me to return every evening until the sores had disappeared. It was the first time I had spoken to a woman since the end of the holidays.
Even after the thaw, mid-way through the term, snow remained where it had drifted in the hollows of the fields. It was still too hard to dig drains, but there were games of hockey, and the entire college was sent out on cross-country runs almost daily right up until the beginning of Holy Week. As I became more familiar with the landscape and capable of keeping up at least with the middle of the field, I began to enjoy running, especially when we spread out and I found myself alone with my thoughts and the landscape. I pushed myself hard, day after day, conscious that I was gaining in strength and stamina.
O
N THE MORNING
of Palm Sunday there was still no sign of spring and the fields looked bleached, the sky a vault of still, cold white light. Clutching our blessed palms, we walked in procession two by two along the gravel paths at the front of the old hall. When we returned to the church, the celebrant knocked on the closed doors with the tip of the processional crucifix, re-enacting the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The choir sang the Gregorian chant refrain: ‘
Gloria, laus, et honor, tibi sit Rex Christe Redemptor…Hossana filio David
.’ ‘Glory and praise to Thee, Christ King Redeemer!…Hosanna Son of David.’
The next day we started end-of-term exams before going into our annual four-day retreat which began after the ritual known as
Tenebrae
, or Shadows on ‘Spy Wednesday’, the day Judas schemed to betray Jesus. Tapers on a fourteen-branch candlestick were quenched one by one. When the church was finally in darkness, save for the glimmer of one remaining taper placed behind the high altar, we struck our missals on the benches in memory of the earthquake before Jesus’s death. The banging lasted for several minutes and my heart pounded with excitement at the strange drama.
After the service a tall, pale priest with smooth dark hair walked slowly up the aisle to take his place at a chair and table on the sanctuary. He greeted us in the semi-darkness, introducing himself as a member of the Passionist order, a religious community dedicated to preaching the passion and crucifixion of Jesus. He explained that each day of the retreat he would preach four homilies, which we should consider as ‘points for meditation’, or reflections to help us in our silent prayer.
The Gospel of the Mass of the day, he began, reminded us
that on Wednesday of Holy Week, Judas betrayed his Lord. How could that happen? ‘The answer,’ said the priest in grave tones, ‘was that Satan had entered his heart.’ These were no idle words, he went on. We should realise that Satan, ‘the Father of Lies’, lay in wait especially for those young ones who were intending to be priests. There was a seminary in Rome, he went on, after a dramatic pause, where a demon had entered a young seminarian. He was an average, decent boy proceeding
in his studies like any boy at Cotton. He became uncontrollable, raging with the strength of ten men. Only by frequent exorcisms, said the priest, was the demon cast out. Before the Devil left him, the boy chanced to put out his hand against the panelling of the seminary refectory and the shape of that hand was burnt indelibly into the wood. ‘That burn mark,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘remains to this day.’ Then he cried out: ‘Whence comes this terrible hatred of the Devil for God’s chosen? It was pride that led to his bid to challenge God. The consequences of pride are terrible indeed…’ So he went on. But I could think only of the terrible plight of the youth who through no fault of his own had been possessed. I could scarcely breathe.
When the priest had finished and retreated from the sanctuary, we sat meditating, tense and silent, on our knees for more than half an hour. Finally Father McCartie made his signal and we walked out in ranks to the refectory where we continued to sit in silence. As plates of baked beans were distributed, the school captain read out a meditation on the passion. But I hardly heard a word, nor could I eat a morsel; and I was not the only one.