Authors: John Cornwell
I
N THE LATE
afternoon the ambulance deposited me at the London Hospital reception and I was taken in a wheelchair to the cardiology unit where Mum was waiting. She hugged me and said that I would have some tests which were just a formality. After the examination we were led by a nurse down a corridor and into a lecture theatre where young men and women were seated on tiered benches. They were taking notes while being addressed by a tall man with a bald head and gold-rimmed half-moon glasses. He looked very grand in a flamboyant yellow-and-blue polka-dotted bow tie and a double-breasted white doctor’s coat (I had never seen double-breasted in Stoke). He now sat down at a desk, indicating that my wheelchair should be brought closer to him. With a vague gesture of the hand he waved Mum into the front row of the theatre benches. The nurse handed the man a sheaf of files and he flicked through them humming a little as he did so.
‘Here we have a boy of fifteen or sixteen’ he said, ‘who was
taken ill two or three weeks ago up in Staffordshire. I am going to ask him to relate to you his symptoms. Please raise your hands if you wish to ask him a question when he has finished.’
Turning to me, he introduced himself as ‘Lord Evans’ and said that he was the Professor of Cardiology. ‘Speak loudly.’ I welcomed the opportunity to act a part and I projected my voice up to the gallery. I said: ‘I was playing a lot of cricket on one day; the next I got pain in my left arm, and palpitations. I collapsed on the dormitory floor and I was taken to the hospital…the cardiologist diagnosed…’
The consultant cut me off. ‘No, my boy, we don’t want to hear from
you
about diagnoses…’
‘Observe,’ he said to the audience, ‘that the lad speaks of palpitations, a nice word which he has no doubt picked up in the course of his stay in hospital. Palpitation, of course, is a collective noun which does not express a plural. I want to see no mention of palpitations in your examination papers.’
A student asked me whether I thought that I had strained myself playing cricket, and I said that I had thought there might be a link, but then when I was diagnosed with—. Before I could get another word out the professor cut me short.
Explaining the whole thing to the students, namely, pericarditis, he ended by saying that my condition had cleared up and there was no reason why it should recur. Then he said: ‘Well, you can abandon that wheelchair Master Cornwell, and get back to your cricket.’ But, as I realised, there was no getting back to my cricket.
Mum led me out to the Whitechapel Road, to take a bus back towards Ilford. It seemed strange to be in a street, deprived of ambulances and wheelchairs and the protection of hospitals and nurses. On the bus, sitting at the front of the top deck, Mum outlined how she saw things developing over the next few months until I would return to Cotton in late September.
‘I want you at home where I can keep an eye on you,’ she said.
‘But I want to go back to Cotton,’ I said, my anxiety mounting. ‘I’m going to miss a lot of school work otherwise.’
‘Well, your health comes first.’
‘But the doctor said that I was all right. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘You’ve been very ill, and I’m going to make sure that I keep an eye on you. And that’s that. What if it comes back? So don’t think you can argue with me…I’m your mother!’ She was raising her voice, and I could see from the mottled neck that her temper was rising too.
‘But what am I going to do for the next four months?’
‘You’re going to go out to work. I can’t have you sitting around at home.’
‘What will I do?’
‘I’ve got you an interview. There’s an ideal job at Bearmans department store in Leytonstone; just walking about the store.’
I felt cruelly ill-used; utterly cast down with injustice and grief. But I was powerless to resist Mum’s will.
I
HAD RETURNED
home on a Wednesday; on the Friday I had my interview with the personnel manager of Bearmans. He asked me to fill out a form and told me immediately that I was accepted. My pay was to be two pounds eight shillings a week. Mr Grey showed me about the store and took me out to the dispatch department where I was to work. It was an area at the back of the store where the goods arrived by lorry from various suppliers. There were four men working there; the senior man was Sam, a fellow in his mid-to late-sixties with enormous shoulders and biceps. He seemed friendly enough, but once or twice he looked me up and down as if
I was about to face a firing squad. He shook my hand and painfully squeezed the life out of it. I was told that my hours started at 7.30 a.m. and finished at 5.30 p.m., six days a week. I was to start on the following Monday.
I realised with foreboding that the early start meant I would not be able to attend Mass in the morning. I would not be able to receive daily Communion, which had become a routine for me since the age of eleven. I wondered whether Father Cooney would be able to intervene on my behalf.
On Saturday morning I served Father Cooney’s early morning Mass at Saint Augustine’s in his vast unadorned new church (occasion now of fresh anxieties about the interest on the loan). There were two other servers on the altar, boys aged about ten or eleven. The old sanctury bell had been replaced with an ugly gong. I noticed that when Father Cooney came to the part of the Mass known as the
Domine non sum dignus
, acknowledging that we are not worthy to enter under the Lord’s roof, he reverently recited: ‘
Et sab-anitur anima mea.
’ As most third-year minor seminarians would have known, the correct Latin was: ‘
Et san-abitur anima mea
.’ ‘And my soul shall be cleansed.’ He seemed to have become slow and uncertain.
I stayed behind to talk with him in the spacious new sacristy. As he took off his vestments and folded them he listened to the account of my illness, nodding, and occasionally muttering his ‘Wisswiss…’ Then I told him about the job and how I would not be able to go to Mass in the morning. When I had finished he fixed me sternly with his slate-grey eyes. ‘Sure this is a test of your vocation,’ he said firmly, although breathing as if with difficulty. ‘Thank God for the privilege you’ve had of daily Communion, and think of all those who have to do without…Now each morning on your way to work say a special prayer. Desire the sacrament and you won’t be without the fruit of it…And think of the words of the Mass…Lord I am not worthy…Wisswiss…Very good!…Run along now!’
T
HE JOB OF
the dispatch workers was to take goods from the incoming lorries and deliver them to the departments. At the same time, we delivered goods from the departments back to the bay for distribution to customers by Bearmans own lorries. There was an inward flow of goods all day: sofas, carpets, bedding, kitchenware, lampshades, lingerie, hosiery. When the items were light they were frequently awkward to carry; often they were both heavy and awkward. Some items had a will of their own, especially mattresses, and we had to struggle and strain ourselves getting them on and off the lorries. They were transported around the shop on deep open-sided trolleys which we heaved to their destinations, travelling between floors in slow-moving lifts.
Sam’s first assistant, Eric, was elderly, probably well into his seventies. He had a coarse little white moustache and ill-fitting false teeth. He was deputed to do the paperwork. Being shortsighted, he found it difficult to read what was written on the order sheets. He was supposed to put stickers on the goods indicating their destination in the shop, and invariably got it wrong. Sam was patient with him when this happened.
Two others, Bill and Reg, were in late middle-age. Bill, a cockney born and bred, had a huge girth and walked with splayed feet carrying all before him with self-satisfied dignity. He had a slack jaw and a bottom row of tarnished teeth. Reg was a former merchant seaman from Glasgow. He was squat and leathery with steel-grey hair. He had a belligerent way of flinching one shoulder. He and Bill worked with a kind of brutish, muscular relish. All four men were foul-mouthed, and attempted to outdo each other when they had to struggle with an awkward item. ‘Wassiss fuckin’ thing then?’ They often broke fragile objects and Eric had to write down that the goods
had arrived broken. Looking up at Sam conspiratorially, he would pronounce: ‘Thass fuckin’ broke on arrival, mate, innit!’
‘Fuckin’ oath it wass!’ Sam would agree, usually shortening it to ‘C’n’oath, mate!’
Sam was proud of working at Bearmans: ‘This ‘ere shop,’ he used to say, ‘is the fuckin’ ‘Arrods of the East End.’ He made it clear that he was my boss and that I would respond to his every command. He was a lot older than he looked. He told me that he was too old to fight in the Second World War, but he had fought in the First War.
He worked steadily all day long. ‘Fuckin’ pace yourself, mate,’ he used to say. ‘Then you’ll get through the fuckin’ day.’ He called me ‘the lad’, or ‘young Jack’.
Sam was scrupulously fair when it came to sending us off to the employees’ canteen for tea breaks and for lunch. Mum had anticipated that I would need pocket money for these breaks, for which she provided one shilling and sixpence a day which she handed to me before I set out. The cooked lunch was always the same: meat pie, gravy and chips. I usually found myself taking my break with Bill, who smoked between mouthfuls of meat pie. He had little conversation beyond a periodic: ‘Fuckit!…Thass what I say, mate. Fuckit!’
The First War had made a deep impression on Sam. One day, as we had a tea break together, I told him after his persistent questioning that I was studying to be a priest. He seemed intrigued and annoyed at the same time.
‘Believe in a God then, do you, young Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘There can’t be no such fuckin’ thing as a God, Jack.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Durin’ the Great War, Jack, I saw stacks of bodies piled up be’ind the trenches. Great stacks of them: cuntin’ great pyramids of ‘em. And when you seen fuckin’ great stacks of corpses like that, Jack, you
know.
You
know
there ain’t no such fuckin’ thing as a bleedin’ God.’
I
WOULD COME
home via Our Lady of Lourdes at Wanstead and say the Rosary each day. There was a special prayer I said in reparation for profanities against Almighty God. When I got home I used to lie on my bed resting. I would read the book Father Armishaw had given me,
Travels with a Donkey
, which transported me to the southern landscapes and forests of France. I loved reading about the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.
The television was always blaring downstairs and Mum was usually crashing pots and pans or putting chairs up on the table to sweep and mop in a flurry of impatient semi-cleaning before departing for her night shift at the hospital.
For the first time I nourished sympathy for my younger brother Michael, a highly intelligent boy who was struggling to do a dozen subjects at his grammar school. He would bring back homework along with his Jesuit-flayed hands. His fingers were so bruised at times that he could scarcely move them. ‘Hope you’re not aiming to be a brain surgeon, Mick!’ I said to him one evening as he sat with his swollen, purple hands in a basin of cold water. He shook his head wryly, old before his time. Like everybody in the house, except our blissfully contented television-glued youngest, Jim, Michael seemed to be biding his time.
I also had my copy of the autobiography of Saint Thérèse, which I was reading for a short period each day. I felt that her writing kept me in touch with the world from which I had been so unfairly excluded. I was living in a limbo where the sustenance of my soul and my mind had been suspended. Sometimes, though, it felt as if I was in a desert which brought me closer to God in an unforeseen way. I sensed a grim, monk-like austerity about my way of life now. I was acquainted
with the word ‘asceticism’, and understood its meaning. And there was a curious parallel with Thérèse. Even though Thérèse was living in a convent, she was sometimes close to despair. She wrote that her doubts rose like a great dark mountain blotting out belief in God and hope of heaven. It seemed to connect with Grandma Egan’s final hours of near despair on her deathbed, when Mum had brought her a rose from the garden.
‘Think of the little flower of Jesus, Mum.’
‘Don’t be stupid!’
There were times at Bearmans when my soul felt as flayed as Michael’s hands. The worst was Reg, with his flinching shoulder. The entrance to the lorry bay looked out on to a side road off Leytonstone Road. Every so often a woman would pass along the pavement and Eric would wolf-whistle. He didn’t care if she was hobbling with a stick or pushing a pram, so long as she was wearing a skirt. Then he would turn to whoever was listening, invariably me, and voice his fantasies. One of his repeated observations was: ‘Looka tha’ fuckin’ cunt, laddie. Ard lake ta ger’ ma cork arp tha’.’ After a demonic nasal laugh, he would start badgering me. ‘Wouldncha, eh? Wouldncha lake ta ger’ ya cork arp tha’, laddie!’
Then Sam would intervene to say: ‘Nah, Reg, young Jack’s goin’ ter wear ‘is collar and ‘is trouzis back to front, ain’tcha, Jack!’ And they would laugh together, their eyes aglint at my discomfort.
I derived no consolation from getting paid. We had to clock on in the morning and clock off at night. Any deviation from timekeeping, by minutes, meant that we lost an hour’s pay. I was often five or ten minutes late because I had to wait my turn to get into the bathroom in the mornings. My sister was taking longer and longer to achieve whatever she was up to in there, so my wage packet was regularly docked. I was paid in cash every Friday by Sam who would hand me the brown envelope which he brought from the general manager’s
office. Mum insisted that the pay packet was delivered into her hand unopened. When I gave her my first week’s wages she put it behind a vase on the mantelpiece. I stood there, hoping at least for a ‘thank you’. I was proud to have earned my first serious wage. She looked at me for a moment. Then she said: ‘Well…what are
you
waiting for? A round of applause?’
‘You even get a thank you when the bus conductor takes your fare,’ I said pompously.
‘Well, I’m not a bus conductor, am I, you cheeky brat!’