Seminary Boy (30 page)

I
WAS STUDYING
long hours, preparing for public A-level examinations. When I wasn’t digging ditches I was taking long walks. I enjoyed long fast walks with Peter Gladden. Peter was interested in politics and science, and he had become preoccupied with the possibility of a Third World War which, he assured me, would be nuclear. He would inform me from time to time about news of the Soviet threat following the Suez crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt after Nasser had nationalised the canal. Peter, who would return to Cotton having read the
Manchester Guardian
every day during his holidays, would say: ‘It’s coming! Make no mistake.’ He had made himself an expert, so it seemed, on the technology of the hydrogen bomb: ‘Compared with an H-bomb the bombs that we dropped in Japan were just fire crackers.’ Now, he was telling me, experts were convinced that an H-bomb test could cause a chain reaction through the entire matter of the earth. ‘It could happen at any time,’ he assured me, ‘and when it does we shall all go up in a trice. Armageddon.’

As he walked, hunched and long-legged, his eyes narrowed with speculation, his mouth slightly open and moist, his
prominent Roman nose bright red with exertion, Peter invariably turned to the question of the Third Secret of Fatima, the prophecies imparted to three peasant children in Portugal in 1917. The Third Secret, he assured me, had been read by a bishop in Portugal, who had leaked the information that unless Russia converted to Catholicism the world would come to an end in a more terrible war than the previous world wars.

Peter’s preoccupations, it occurred to me, challenged at least one aspect of our strictly cloistered existence at Cotton. The point of protecting us from knowledge of current affairs was in part, as I understood it, to reduce distractions, mundane anxieties and temptations. But these Cold War crises were invading and filling our secluded uninformed lives with apocalyptic fantasies precisely
because
of our isolation. For a time Peter Gladden’s circle became obsessed with the idea that at any moment the Russians would drop atom bombs on us, or invade Britain and come racing in tanks up the valley from Oakamoor to imprison and torture us for our Faith.

I had another problem with Peter, which was not unconnected with our emotional isolation: his continuing interest in the boys in Saint Thomas’s. From time to time he would attempt to draw me into discussion about the looks and demeanour of the prettiest boys, asking me what I thought of this one and that one.

‘They’re just boring little urchins,’ I would say, before attempting to change the subject.

‘But some of them are gorgeous, Fru. Have you really studied little Brunning, for example? Why would God make such beautiful creatures if he didn’t want us to adore them?’

‘But aren’t men meant to enjoy looking at women?’ I said. ‘And aren’t we meant to resist the temptation to do that?’ Even as I said it, I was aware of being unbearably priggish.

‘Oh, I’m not in the least interested in women,’ said Peter. ‘They’re too voluptuous and they smell.’

These conversations about smaller boys left me feeling anxious
for Peter. He would go on at length about the ‘frigid beauty’ of his latest soprano crush in the choir, extolling ‘his austerely pure voice, those icy notes that only boys can attain’, and the ‘pure, pure loveliness of little Brunning’.

One day, taking a rest on the top of a hill called Below, a burial mound high above the surrounding countryside on the road to Farley, Peter said: ‘Sometimes, Fru, I daydream about Brunning. He is lying naked on an altar, and I’m stroking him and giving him pure kisses all over…’

‘Peter,’ I said, echoing what I had once told Paul Moreland, ‘our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost.’

‘But our souls are separate from our bodies,’ said Peter. ‘What I do to someone’s body doesn’t necessarily affect his spiritual, immortal soul.’

I looked at Peter, his full lips invariably parted as if he was incapable of breathing through his nose. I saw a young man who might well be mistaken for being innocently gormless: intelligent, kind in so many ways, and practical; but a minor seminarian approaching graduation to senior seminary, trapped in a delirium of warped, childish desire.

Meanwhile, despite my dogged commitment to Father Doran’s and Father Connelly’s spiritual formation, I was also aware that I was often thinking about people and the world that owed less to our seminary spirituality and much to the quiet influence of Father Armishaw’s English classes and my weekly trips to his room after night prayers.

We were reading Dryden and Pope; learning about the art of satire’s ‘fine raillery’. He liked to quote from Samuel Johnson, trenchantly proclaiming the Doctor’s didactic utterances. He would look over his spectacles, a smile playing about his lips, and come out with such lapidary phrases as: ‘The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.’ Or: ‘Anything so little in the power of man as language, cannot but be capriciously conducted.’ We were reading John Donne, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Marlowe,
George Herbert. Whatever the set books, he would send us off to the library to explore a wider circuit of texts.

One afternoon he took the sixth form in a hired bus to the theatre at Stratford-on-Avon where we saw an ageing Michael Redgrave playing Hamlet to Googie Withers’s Gertrude. I sat next to him on the long drive back and he talked all the way, passionately, excitedly, about details of design and direction. I had never seen him so happy. In turn, I had never been so happy for him.

Father Armishaw approached the study of English literature in a tense frame of mind. Qualities of genius, taste, originality, creativity, were constantly set at odds with grossness, convention, feeble imitation and ‘invincible obtuseness’. Then there were the key qualities to be noted: energy, concreteness, melody, sensibility, precision, wit,
irony.
There was a hint of alternative enlightenment in his lessons that complemented,
and rivalled, the spiritual imperatives of Father Doran and Father Connelly. It was dawning on me that one could learn how people should behave towards each other, how one should think and feel, not only through prayer and the sacraments, nor alone through ascetical disciplines, but in realms of literature, poetry, novels, plays. As we explored and discussed the undercurrents of motive, emotion and desire in Father Armishaw’s classes, I sensed a quiet countervailing influence to our seminary formation that felt more like creative tension than dislocation. By then, having read
Elected Silence
for a second time, I realised that Merton was perhaps more deeply a writer than a monk.

At the end of that summer term I went home to a new three-bedroomed council flat near Barkingside cemetery. Mum had at last been rehoused and she was much happier.

R
ETURNING TO
C
OTTON
at the beginning of my final year, Father Ryall greeted me as I came in from the bus. He was smiling – a self-conscious boyish grin. He asked me up to his room where he shook my hand and told me that I had been appointed school captain, or ‘Public Man’, a title that had been used in the first century of the school’s existence, and which had now been reinstated. I had also been appointed captain of my house. To be both school captain and house captain simultaneously was an honour that had rarely been bestowed in the history of the college. He said that I should go straight away to see Father Doran as he had something to say to me.

Father Doran was standing as usual by his fireplace fiddling with a pipe. He greeted me affably. He said: ‘I have a feeling that you will blossom with responsibility, John Cornwell. I sometimes think that you lack self-confidence.’ He went on to talk about how well I had done in my studies, and how it seemed to him that I was shaping into an ideal candidate for the priesthood. Dropping a heavy hint, he said that the last Cottonian from my diocese to be school captain had been sent to the English College in Rome. ‘That’s something we may allow ourselves to hope for in your case,’ he said. ‘I am convinced that you would benefit enormously and take the greatest advantage of the Rome experience…’

My happiness knew no bounds. Titles, responsibilities and a promise of proceeding to Rome, England’s premier seminary, for the completion of my studies for ordination. As I took my
place at the head of my table in the refectory, and at the head of the entire college, I felt ecstatic. I was assailed by just one scruple: that these honours were in part a reward for having betrayed Paul Moreland.

The duties of the Public Man were mainly devotional and disciplinary. He led morning and night prayers from the back of the church, and grace in the refectory in the absence of the Prefect of Discipline. He led the school in ranks to and from the cloisters on the way to church.

He had a room-sized cubicle in Top Dorm where he wrote up the school chronicle each day. He roused the sixth form every morning, making sure that every boy was down in church in time for the start of morning meditation. The Public Man was a link between Father Doran and the college, and he assisted the Prefect of Discipline in all matters relating to the rules and sanctions. He would ensure that his peer group did
not smoke; that they obeyed the Greater Silence. He made sure that the big sixth, the monitors, were doing their jobs. In recognition of all these duties, the Public Man, Father Doran told me, would receive five pounds at the end of the year.

But for me the greatest honour in prospect was the possibility of being sent to Rome at the end of the year to complete my studies. There was only one Roman prof and that was Dr ‘Laz’ Warner. Laz was still taking me for one lesson a week in New Testament Greek. I went to see him after tea early in the term and asked him about the Roman seminary life. He eulogised for an hour about the Venerabile: the ‘best college in the world’, he called it. He talked of the ceremonies in the great basilicas, the works of art, the catacombs, the tombs of the popes. He told me that one only came home from Rome once in seven whole years, at the end of the third year: that, I thought, would suit me very well. Each summer, he said, was spent at an idyllic summer house, a former Trappist monastery, known as Palazzola, twelve miles from Rome and high above the shores of Lake Albano, where the students swam every day and lazed in the Italian sun. My whole being yearned for Rome.

I
T SEEMED TO
me that most of the profs were happy with my elevation to Public Man; especially Father Armishaw who said it was an ‘inspired choice’. Father Grady, my housemaster, was delighted and hinted, with his polite little cough, that it would put me in good stead in future years. There was only one prof who appeared discountenanced and failed to congratulate me. This was Father ‘Bunny’ Manion, the priest who had written ‘poor’ on my botany report. There had been another more recent incident involving Bunny during the Michaelmas term
of my first year in the sixth form. During the days when I was lodged in the infirmary I had settled one afternoon with a book on the stoop of the cricket pavilion which looked out over the deserted cricket field just above Top Bounds. Father Manion and one of the Saint Thomas’s first-year boys came walking by: the boy was good-looking, pretty in fact, possibly of mixed English and Asian origin, with a shock of black hair; he was dressed in shorts and rugby shirt and he was holding his arm up a little as if he had been injured. Father Manion, who was also in shorts, had his arm around the boy’s shoulder and appeared to be speaking to him endearingly. This seemed strange for the boy did not look to be in pain and he was walking perfectly well without assistance. I must have stared with blatant curiosity; I had never seen a priest put his arm affectionately around a boy at Cotton. When Father Manion at last noticed my presence he looked shocked; then his eyes blazed, as if to say: ‘Who the hell are you looking at?’ They walked on and disappeared in the direction of Saint Thomas’s, the priest’s arm around the boy all the way.

I knew as I entered my final year that Father Manion disliked me, but I was not unduly anxious, as it seemed to me that he had no power over my career in the college. I put his jaundiced view of me down to nothing more than personal chemistry, and the fact that a former boy of Saint Thomas’s had not been made Public Man.

A
S
I
GOT
into the rhythm of my new role with all its duties, I was asked by Father Ryall to show consideration to a new member of the teaching staff called Philip Pargeter, a fleshy, clerical-looking young man with limp hair and gold-rimmed
spectacles. Philip Pargeter was a deacon at the senior seminary, Oscott, who decided that he needed an extra year before taking the plunge of priestly ordination. The archbishop suggested that he spend a year teaching at Cotton while he pondered his vocation further. He opted to wear lay clothes in the college, but nevertheless looked like a young prelate. Since he was in limbo between the teaching staff and the boys, I was recruited to accompany Deacon Pargeter on country walks to give him exercise. The walks were enjoyable as he had a pleasant turn of wit and was widely read.

I was also asked to take walks with a very civilised, somewhat pedantic elderly man called Eric Partridge, a prolific author of books on English usage and a friend of ‘Whisky’ Roberts, the archivist. Mr Partridge would come to the college to stay for several weeks at a time and loved walking in the valley. On one of our walks we talked about the derivation and usage of the word ‘smog’ for the length of three miles. Father Armishaw considered Partridge’s preoccupations trivial and would show me his latest book, reading out items of pedantry for my amusement.

This role I now had of being a walker for the junior prof Pargeter and the ageing etymologist, in addition to my dual captaincy, gave me an elevated sense of my own self-importance. Smugness, and the undeniable fact that I looked and felt mature for my seventeen years, rising eighteen, were about to contribute to the single most important event of my final year and involved the disgruntled Father Bunny Manion.

One of my duties as captain of Challoner House was to choose and direct a play. This proved an added burden to my already loaded routine, especially as I insisted on designing the set and casting myself in the lead role: Cornwell the actormanager! The piece I chose was a drawing-room farce,
See How They Run
, in which I played the part of a silly vicar, the Reverend Lionel Toop. On the day before the performance, which was to take place in the evening after supper, Father
Grady, Challoner’s housemaster, came to watch the dress rehearsal. He and I were now, as I saw it, on equal terms. He was then in his early thirties. At a pause in the rehearsal we were standing next to each other, chatting pleasantly, when he said: ‘I think the set lacks something. It looks a bit sparse. Why don’t you go over to the profs’ common room, John, and fetch one of the coffee tables.’

I set off across Top Bounds from the assembly hall. I leapt up the Bounds Steps two at a time, past the noticeboards where I chided a knot of boys for idling, and walked purposefully and not a little bumptiously along the clock cloister, turning into the area where the profs had their refectory and common room. I had never entered the profs’ common room during my entire time at Cotton, and I was conscious that I was approaching hallowed territory; through the glazed front doors of the hallway I could see the gardens at the front of the house from an unfamiliar viewpoint. The inner sanctum of the common room lay ahead, door wide open, apparently deserted, and there in the middle of the room was the item described by Father Grady. I strode up to the coffee table and bent down to lift it. At that moment from somewhere behind and to the right of me I heard a sound like the querulous bleat of a trapped sheep.

Looking back I saw the figure of Bunny Manion, hands deep in his cassock pockets, his face vermilion, his pale blue eyes starting from his head. His presence had been hidden by the open door and he was standing well back by the side of the fireplace. Before I could apologise and explain my presence and my errand, he cried out in a shrill voice: ‘Never,
never
, in all my years in this place has a
boy
come into this room without a by-your-leave. How dare a
boy
walk boldly into this room without knocking, asking permission and explaining the nature of his business…’

I felt a confused mix of angry emotions. Here I was, on the verge of manhood, accorded respect both by superiors and peers, being referred to as a disembodied third person: ‘How
dare a boy!’ Then there was the injustice of the thing: I was in the room legitimately. Certainly I should have asked his permission had I known that he was present. But what hit me bang in the solar plexus of my pride was being referred to as ‘
boy
’, twice in a single sentence, and with relish; for I had the distinct impression that he was exultant.

I should have adopted a demeanour of humility and selfrecrimination. I should have said: ‘I’m so sorry, sir, I really did think that the room was empty…’ Had I said something along these lines, events, and perhaps my whole life, might have turned out differently.

What I did was this: I slammed the coffee table down on the floor with a bang and rounded on him. I was head and shoulders above him, and judging by the frightened look on his face (not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Bunny’), my demeanour was obviously menacing. There he stood: the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth.

‘How dare
I
?’ I roared. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous! You know full well that I couldn’t see you lurking back there. I came in because Father Grady asked me to pick up a coffee table for our play rehearsal. And how dare
you
speak to
me
in such a manner!’

I was conscious as I let rip that my eyes were bulging and my fists were clenched. I concluded, pompously, disastrously: ‘And I am not a
boy.
I am the Public
Man
.’ With which I picked up the coffee table and made my exit.

Only in retrospect do I see that my action was learnt behaviour. The years of discipline at Cotton had been a poor antidote to my hot-headed maternal role model, but there was something else beyond the knee-jerk anger of my adolescent injured merit. I barely knew it at that moment, but I would have ample opportunity to ponder the incident’s significance and consequences in the coming months. I was saying an emphatic ‘No!’ to acquiescence in the face of humiliation. I
was saying ‘No!’ to the ‘Little Way’ of Saint Thérèse, who repeatedly rejoiced in such opportunities to eat dirt.

Father Manion, I learnt later, hastened as fast as his legs could carry him to Father Doran’s office to recount the outrage. According to Deacon Pargeter, who reported back to me the agitated discussion in the profs’ refectory that evening, Bunny Manion asserted to the assembled staff over their soup: ‘He marches into the common room without so much as a by-your-leave and when I remonstrate with him reasonably, he bawls at me, fists clenched as if to hit me: “I am not a boy, I am the Public Man!”’ The story, according to Deacon Pargeter, prompted gasps of horror and nervous laughter: although not on the part of Father Doran.

That evening Father Grady asked me to come to his room. ‘Oh dear,’ he said ruefully, ‘you’ve caused a terrible brouhaha.’ I tried to explain the circumstances, and he seemed to appreciate what had happened. But he made it clear that I had been guilty of an act of insolence that would admit of no excuse or explanation. Father Doran had told Father Grady that I should apologise at once to Father Manion without reservation, or pack my bags.

So I apologised to the priest on the Bounds Steps the next day as he made his way across to the main building from Saint Thomas’s. He took my apology with poor grace; with such a sense of chronic outraged dignity, in fact, that I felt like punching him. My feelings probably showed. I suspected that he was disappointed that I had apologised, devoutly wishing me to be on a train home.