Seminary Boy (33 page)

F
ATHER
A
RMISHAW
retired from Cotton in 1976 and was appointed to a parish in Oxfordshire. I went without appointment to call on him in the summer of 1983. He was living in a bungalow by the side of his church. It was a noisy spot: at the end of the overgrown garden was a high wire fence marking the perimeter of an American air base, and every few minutes a jet aircraft took off.

He was much altered physically, deeply stooped and grey. He recognised me instantly at the doorstep. At first he was tense. He said that he was ‘tied up’ and could not entertain me. But eventually he invited me into his kitchen. I had arrived at noon and I was still there at six in the evening. He talked mostly about Cotton in the old days. There were a lot of harmless anecdotes about Cottonian characters, and especially about Father Piercy’s genius with a screwdriver and spanner; but nothing personal. I asked him at one point whether there had been repercussions for him after Father Doran had ordered me from his room. He shrugged and said: ‘Time heals most things.’ Then he changed the subject.

He had lost his aptitude for neatness. He lived in a muddle, surrounded by his hundreds of books, now dust-laden. He had
a huge hi-fi set, and was neglecting Beethoven, Bach and Mozart for Elgar and Holst. His sharp and attentive mind seemed to have sunk into a state of discursive reminiscence. He asked me no questions about myself, whether I was married or had children. No talk about books, or about music. The light seemed to have gone out of his eyes; but he was a surviving disciplined priest. He showed me with pride around his church, and we knelt together in silent prayer for a few minutes before I departed.

I saw him rarely through the 1980s; then he called me in 1989. I guessed that it had taken an effort. He wanted to see me. I began to visit him more regularly. Eventually we would talk on the phone two or three times a week. He was lonely,
and he had overcome the embarrassment that prevented him from reaching out. He always announced himself in a low voice: ‘It is
I
…’ He wanted to dispense with the formality of ‘Father Armishaw’, and yet to announce himself as ‘Vincent’ was a step too far. Much of his conversation was an evasion of intimacy. He liked to have a minor quarrel about historical dates or the meanings of words. He liked to ‘settle questions’ that had arisen in his mind. He had never ceased to be amused by Eric Partridge, the etymologist who used to visit Cotton. So a phone call usually went like this: ‘It is
I
…Can you settle a question in my mind?’ he would say, imitating Partridge’s plaintive voice: ‘Would it be true to say that “as yet” is redundant in a sentence such as “his mind was not as yet completely ossified”?’ Then he would chuckle.

After turning down repeated invitations, he eventually came to stay in our home; then he became a regular visitor. We found him shy before strangers, self-centred and a little crotchety; there was never enough salt on his food (although he suffered from hypertension); he could never get my wife’s name right: she was always Danielle instead of Gabrielle. He was fond of Gabrielle, I could tell, but he found it difficult to look at her directly. He was uncomfortable around women.

By this time I had returned to the Church and I had questions for him. But he disliked talking about spiritual and doctrinal matters. He refused to discuss the divide between so-called traditionalists and liberals. He seemed to harbour the worst kind of traditionalist attitudes. He confessed to me on one occasion that he had angered a forty-year-old woman parishioner by telling her that she should not go to Communion because she had not been to confession all year. As a result, he told me indignantly, she had stopped going to church. He said to me once: ‘I sit in that confessional box every Saturday, and hardly anyone comes.’

He once told my wife that being late for Mass constituted ‘a mortal sin’. It was not said tongue-in-cheek. Talking of the
scarce vocations to the priesthood, he said: ‘The absence of priests is due to all those boys who failed to be born through contraception and abortion.’ We stared at him across the dinner table, stunned into silence.

In more recent years, as the scandal of priestly abuse of minors spread like a bushfire across America, I told him about Father McCallum. He appeared uncomfortable. It was obvious that he knew about the priest’s tendencies and deplored them; but the need to close ranks against the laity, whatever the issue, reasserted itself. He refused to discuss Father McCallum directly. He said: ‘If a priest must have sex, why the bloody hell doesn’t he get himself a woman, or a man for that matter? And leave the kids alone.’

I asked him on that occasion whether he thought that Cotton with its isolation had trapped boys in immaturity, ‘
infantalised
them’. He looked at me intensely for a moment, almost as he did when I was boy. ‘But from all you’ve told me,’ he growled, ‘you were better off at Cotton than at home. Where would you be without Cotton?’ I guessed he was thinking, too: ‘Where would
I
be without Cotton?’ Yes, where
might
he have been?

We never mentioned these matters again, but occasionally he betrayed his sorrow and fear that all he had lived for, all that he had spent his life serving, was in peril, if not in vain. He said once that the corps of the clergy, as he had known it, was about to ‘disappear over the precipice.’

In the summer of 2002, aged seventy-seven, Father Armishaw was about to move to Aston Hall, a retirement home for priests in the Birmingham archdiocese. He wanted to give me his books; the room he had been assigned at the home was too small to house a personal library. Two or three days before the move I went to Carterton with a van to collect them: they exuded the tobacco scent of his old room at Cotton. We sat together drinking tea out of mugs in the empty room that had been his study for more than twenty-five years. I could see that
he was grieving the loss of his books. I said: ‘Your books will always be in our home, and our home is your home. So they will always be with you.’

He replied: ‘I’ve worked out the precise number of miles from Aston Hall to your front door.’ It was the closest he had ever come to an admission of emotional attachment to us.

Three days later I had a call from the Aston nuns who cared for the retired priests to say that he was seriously ill in hospital. He had not spent a single night at the home, having collapsed on arrival. He had been suffering for some time from cancer of the lymph glands.

I went to see him in Stafford general hospital. He was on a noisy public ward with an unwatched television blaring. He was propped up on the pillows and did not seem to be in pain, but I could see that he was very ill. I sat by his bed holding his hand for a long time. Then he tried to say something to me. At first I could not hear, so I put my ear close to his mouth. He said faintly: ‘My master calls, and I must go.’

Before I left him, I kissed him on the forehead. It was the first time I had ever kissed a priest. He looked up at me, shut his eyes, and nodded his head – as if to say: ‘Thank you.’ When I left, I turned at the end of the ward to look back at him. At that moment I was transported back to the day in the Staffordshire Royal Infirmary when, as a handsome young priest in a flying jacket, he had given me, the seminary boy, a thumbs-up sign as I lay sick in bed with pericarditis. From his deathbed Father Armishaw stirred an arm impeded by festoons of tubes. He raised his thumb in a firm farewell. He died on 7 July 2002, well ‘fortified’, as they used to say, ‘by the rites of Holy Mother Church’.

I went to his funeral Mass a week later at Saint Chad’s cathedral in Birmingham. As I crossed the road at the traffic lights to approach the cathedral doors, I could see a group of middle-aged and elderly priests. Several of them shouted out: ‘Here comes Fru!’ I had not heard my nickname in decades.
There were a lot of old faces gathered for the requiem: including Canon Piercy, Canon Grady, Bishop Pargeter, Monsignor Gavin, Monsignor Ryall, Father Derek and many others: survivors all. As they bore the coffin out from the cathedral at the end, we sang the old Cotton Easter hymn: ‘Battle is o’er, hell’s armies flee’. He was buried late that afternoon in a graveyard in Carterton.

I
FELT THAT
summer of 2002 that I had lost a father. By a strange turn of events I had rediscovered my real father several weeks before Father Armishaw’s death. Not long after I watched Dad disappearing into the Majestic cinema in Woodford in the September of 1957, he left London for Portsmouth taking Grandma Lillian with him. He had achieved his ambition to settle in the town of his dreams and start a new life far away from Mum and sports fields. Over the years I had heard that he had worked at temporary jobs like tending the central reservations of the highways of Hampshire and Dorset. Then he was employed in the naval dockyards dipping corroded machinery in acid. In the mid-1960s came the divorce from my mother, and the death of Grandma Lillian. In the 1970s he married a woman called Ivy and departed from his last-known abode without leaving a forwarding address. From time to time down the decades I made small efforts through cousins on his side of the family to find him; to no avail.

By 1990, when he would have been approaching eighty, I was anxious to know whether he was alive or dead. I contacted the Salvation Army’s missing persons’ department. They drew a blank. An officer told me: ‘He might be alive but bedridden.’ In 2001 my brother Terry picked up his trail through the
Internet. On a people-search website we found an individual with my father’s initials in Kent. The record showed that he was sharing a house with a single widow called Freda. Through directory enquiries I found a telephone number for her.

She had a kind, reassuring voice. I said that I was trying to contact a long-lost friend and mentioned his first name. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a man of that name living with me. I’ve been looking after him for twelve years since his wife, my cousin, died of cancer.’ What sort of age would he be, I asked. He was ninety, she told me, ‘last February’.

I had found Dad. I said: ‘Well, I am his son.’

There was a shocked silence. Eventually she said: ‘He always told us that he never had any children.’

There was, of course, no going back now. I had broken in, perhaps clumsily, on his secret life; and in the subsequent spasmodic conversation I learnt that he had not only kept back important facts about himself, but that he had invented some as well. He had told his deceased wife, and all connected with him going back thirty years, that he had injured his leg when his submarine was blown up during the war.

I spoke just a few words with Dad that day. The conversation was difficult and hedged around with equivocation. But I judged there and then that Freda was a remarkable woman. I decided to write to her and tell the truth of our family’s story: which was also
his
story and therefore hers.

For almost a year I corresponded with Freda and spoke with them both on the telephone from time to time. I did not want to rush a reunion, as there were emotions and versions of lives to be sorted out before we could meet in person. Then one day Freda called me to say that she was grateful that I had persisted in finding Dad, and even more so for insisting on enabling him to talk about his family. ‘He cried for three days after he admitted to having five children,’ she said. ‘He had hidden the fact for all those years, and it had been a terrible burden.’

On 25 April 2002, I went with my son, Jonathan Samuel, to see Dad. From London’s Waterloo East we took a train which trundled across the wastelands of the Thames estuary to Rochester. We drove in a taxi to where they lived, a quiet winding suburban road in the Medway valley. It was a small detached house standing on a crest. The bottom half was painted bright red; the top half white. The front garden was filled with daffodils.

Freda, who was eighty, met us at the door dressed in a housecoat; she was frail and moved with difficulty. She showed us into the single downstairs sitting room. Dad was sitting in the corner facing a huge television set on the opposite side of the fireplace. His bad leg was placed on a footstool. I recognised him instantly, although he was much heavier than he had been in his forties. He had a wide open face, a fresh complexion with very few lines and youthful observant eyes.

He was laughing; and as he laughed his shoulders heaved a little. He had huge muscular forearms and large strong hands. When he spoke, his accent was ripe old cockney with a faint nasal twang.

Freda served tea and cakes while Dad, who was hard of hearing, embarked on a series of monologues. There was no scope for questions, nor for interjections that would have made for a true conversation. He took charge.

‘You probably had a good laugh about the submarine days, son. But you’ve got to understand that no one gave you a chance if you were just a cripple. If you had a war wound, you were OK. My Ivy knew the truth of it. In fact, she was the one who suggested it.’

Was this the truth, or yet another fabrication? It hardly seemed to matter now. In any case, he had launched into what was to prove a lengthy account of his childhood, and the origin of his handicap. As he spoke, he pulled out a red handkerchief and dabbed his eyes from time to time.

He told me that when he fell down the stairs as a child ‘the
wound went in instead of out’. He got TB in the bone and was in and out of hospitals and sanatoria from the age of four until the age of twelve. ‘My father never visited me once in hospital, he was ashamed of me,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes.

‘My leg when I was twelve was twenty-five degrees out from true at the knee, excruciatingly painful and permanently bent; so I could only walk awkwardly on my toe. They took me back in the hospital, they broke the leg at the knee and took the kneecap out to straighten it. Just so that I could stand up straight.’

There were many more stories of Custom House and his childhood, mostly in explanation of his mid-life depressions and failures. How his brother Earnie became the favourite son; how he became an unpaid drudge at home. I had heard none of these stories when I was a boy. I could see that it was doing him good to unburden himself. Just before it was time for us to depart for London, he asked me: ‘How’s your mother?’

It was a difficult question to answer in the space of a few minutes to an old man who was hard of hearing. I should have liked to tell him how she had kept the family together, maintaining a home for us all until we started families of our own. How she had taken up painting and pottery, and had written her autobiography; how she had become an expert in designer knitwear, then a librarian; then joined a choir and sang the part of a nun in
The Sound of Music.
Among her many jobs she had been a credit controller at the gas board with a team of men under her and, briefly, the housekeeper of a priest. She had travelled widely, to the United States, Italy and Spain. She was arrested in Moscow for setting her hotel bedroom on fire. Against explicit instructions to the contrary she had plugged her curlers into the bedside lamp socket. She had married, unsuccessfully, for a second time. She had kept the Faith and was still alive and well, aged eighty-eight.

Dad did not wait for an answer.

I had not expected any great epiphany on achieving reunion
with Dad. But I felt a sense of ripeness at being able to locate him in my mind and heart. As for Mum, when I reported an account of his situation after meeting him, she said: ‘You make him sound like an old reprobate, instead of what he really is…’ What was he, really? It had never occurred to me when I was a child that Dad was a clever man with a range of subtle emotions. Nor had I appreciated what it took for him to survive despite a childhood of pain, isolation and humiliation. Who knows what webs of fantasy he was obliged to construct in order to survive those lonely years of hospital and sanatoria beds? As a young married man during the war his tendency to lie undoubtedly cost others dearly. But he had found, despite that weakness, two women in his life who over a period of more than thirty years saw his qualities, experienced his ability to love, and enabled him to flourish and be loved in turn.