Seminary Boy

To the glee of Mr Murphy I was knocked out cold in my first gym-friendly by a boy twice my weight and reach. ‘We’ll get you in shape,’ he told me with a chuckle. I soon learnt to keep my guard up and aim for the throat.

The school latrines, housed in an open-air lean-to in the yard, were the scene of grotesque pubescent pranks. One involved bigger boys attempting to ejaculate over the wall into the girls’ playground beyond. The mechanics of these larks were a mystery, as was the fact that they possessed enormous penises compared to my own little willy. I came home uttering foul language I did not understand, my clothes filthy and in tatters from desperate playground fights. The beatings I had from my mother left me with bruised limbs and on one notable occasion the purple closure of my good eye. One day, on hearing me call one of my small brothers ‘a little shit’, she dragged me to the sink, prised my mouth open, and shoved in a bar of carbolic soap. I hid my fear cockily, coming back for more. Sobbing with pain after she had badly bruised her hand whacking my head (which, she said, had the consistency of reinforced concrete), she moaned: ‘Oh God!…My poor hand!…One day you’ll weep bitter tears over my grave.’ At the time, I seriously doubted it.

She was always there, however, demonstratively supportive for life’s big occasions. One of her greatest gifts after the interlude in the Sussex home was to send me at significant expense to piano lessons. The teacher was an indolent fellow called Mr Hall who had a brass plate on the door of his modest terrace house proclaiming ‘The Hall Academy of Music’. The piano in our otherwise unused sitting room was tuned and I began to attend the ‘academy’ once a week. After six months the struggle to pay for lessons prompted her to withdraw me, saying that Mr Hall was useless; which was probably true. But at least I had learnt to read music.

It was in the crucial matters of life and death that Mum proved strongest. One afternoon I watched as a girl I knew was carried shoulder-high out of her house into a waiting ambulance. Her back was arched and she was screaming. She had contracted tetanus, ‘lock-jaw’, after cutting her hand on a dirty broken milk bottle. When news came of the girl’s death, her mother stood in the middle of the street shrieking, her head covered with her apron. On the morning of the funeral I stood petrified on the pavement as the cortège passed.

Later that day Mum found me sitting alone on my bed, head in my hands. I had been struck for the first time with the reality of death. I felt as if I was drowning in a tide of despair and terror. Death had to be a grotesque life-in-death: dead and yet conscious, trapped in a coffin beneath the ground. She gripped me around the shoulders, a veritable wrestler’s hold: ‘You are never going to die,’ she said with a certitude that brooked no contradiction. ‘You will grow up and live for years and years…so many years that it will seem like for ever.’

Ever since I could remember, Mum had kissed us in bed every night with the dire instruction: ‘Cross your arms and pray for a happy death.’ After the incident in the bedroom, she discontinued this gloomy utterance.

12

AFTER THE WAR Dad became a grounds keeper on various sports fields. Eventually he became the chief grounds keeper at the Peel playing fields in Barkingside, a working-class suburb at the outer reaches of London’s East End. The sports facilities – a twenty-acre field and clubhouse – were used by the employees of several companies including the Plessey electrical engineering factory in Ilford. After a succession of temporary lodgings we had come finally to settle in a whitewashed box of a dwelling by the gates of the place we were to call ‘the Peel’. The house faced a highway lined with houses and blocks of flats. In one direction the road headed out towards the industrial wastes of the Essex estuary; in the other it merged into London’s North Circular Road. Frowning down on the district from a far hill was Claybury Hospital, the principal mental asylum for the East End. Claybury was a byword for lock-up wards, a threat not infrequently employed by Mum against Dad and each of us when we failed to live up to the standards of behaviour she set for us.

There was one habitable living room which contained a gas stove and sink, a built-in larder, and space for a small dining table and chairs. We had two uncomfortable armchairs lined with canvas, purchased from the Cooperative Society after the war. A corresponding room on the ground floor, where the old piano was situated, was too damp for habitation through much of the year. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a ‘box room’ where my sister would sleep.

Living on the sports ground gave us an unusual sense of outdoor freedom. To the delight of my sister the former grounds keeper had bequeathed us Gyp, a shaggy sheepdog the size of a small pony. Maureen took over this lolloping animal, taking it for walks around the field. I once saw her clutching an umbrella in the pouring rain as Gyp dragged her towards the filthy, fast-running drainage ditch. For my brother Terry, the Peel was paradise. When the summer came around I watched with growing admiration as he bowled for hour after hour in the cricket practice nets. To my tearful disappointment, he would not allow me to even fetch the balls. He was on the way to becoming a demon bowler and sometimes managed to break a stump in two.

Dad tried hard to make something of the Peel, but when it rained there were gull-infested lakes where the pitches should have been. Despite his handicapped left leg, he managed to drive the pre-war tractor, working the brake and clutch like a gymnast. He became an expert on grass and spent hours gazing at seed catalogues. In 1951 he laid out lawns and flowerbeds at the entrance to the grounds to celebrate the Festival of Britain Year: the theme was strident red, white and blue. He earned five pounds a week, with free rent, and I remember his wry announcement that his pay had been increased by one penny an hour after he had agreed to squeeze another sports club on to the fields. He tried to make a few shillings on the side, bounding with his balletic stride out to the wealthy suburbs to do private gardening jobs.

At weekends Mum managed the cafeteria in the clubhouse, preparing drifts of Spam sandwiches and pyramids of cakes. Mum’s cakes hardened on cooking to the consistency and taste of baked mud. We called them ‘rock cakes’. When bad weather turned the cricket pitches to miniature lakes, and the matches were cancelled, we would be eating stale Spam sandwiches and rock cakes all week.

There was never enough money, and every household bill was attended by Mum’s expressions of shock: ‘I don’t believe it! Not another one!’ The house was oppressed in those days by my parents’ exhaustion and tension; my mother’s desperate longing for something better. The atmosphere comes flooding back whenever I hear the strains of the radio hit song of those days from South Pacific: ‘Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger…’ Mum would sing it feelingly to herself, gazing longingly out of the window by the sink towards the gates of the sports ground.

For a period, under the influence of a prayer campaign in our parish by Father Cooney, now our parish priest, Mum instituted the daily recitation of the Rosary. The slogan was: ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ With my father sitting in his armchair by the fire, present in body but hardly in spirit, and the rest of us on our knees, we prayed five ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary every evening after supper. For a time Dad came to church with us. He half-sat-half-knelt in the pew, breathing deeply and bathed in sweat with the discomfort the posture caused his leg. The experiment did not last.

There were nights when we children huddled together upstairs as our parents brawled in the living room with crockery and kitchen pans, accompanied by the sound of smacks, grunts and curses. There were mealtimes when a bowl of stew or a custard tart would go flying through the air to explode on the opposite wall. No small matter for seven hungry people, and with nothing going spare. After a big fight they would refuse to speak for days and weeks on end, save for tight-lipped requests for basics: ‘Pass the salt…please.’ It usually ended with my father buying flowers, and promising a trip to the Odeon at Gant’s Hill, cajoling Mum back to normal communication before the next set-to commenced.

Over the years, Mum’s contempt for Dad had infected our regard for him. Yet I found it hard to dislike him. He often made us laugh with the peculiar literalness of his humour. In the height of the summer season, when he was working outside from dawn till dusk, he would limp in wearily for his supper saying: ‘Cor blimey, I’m as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger.’ When we were seated, eager for breakfast, five sets of hungry eyes, he would produce like a conjuror a tiny beef-stock cube, placing it in the middle of the table: ‘Here we are, kids. How about a square meal?’ One day I knocked down a tin of pennies and halfpennies we kept on the mantelpiece. He picked me up and rolled me about in the coppers: ‘Here we go, Jack: now you’re rolling in money!’

He had a comic sense of mischief which often stoked Mum’s anger. One afternoon I was bouncing a ball against the back of the house when the bathroom window opened and Mum hollered out: ‘Sid! Sid!’ Dad was in the garage, but he heard her clearly enough and came bounding along. I followed him into the house.

Mum had been trying to clean up Gyp in the bathroom and the dog refused to get out of the tub.

‘Sid!’ she called out to Dad, now stationed at the bottom of the stairs: ‘Lift this bloody thing out of the bath, will you!’ Instead, Dad gave me a wink and made a shrill whistle with his fingers. Gyp came out of the tub like a rocket, flew down the stairs and into the living room where he shook gallons of filthy water over the walls and furniture. Mum’s execrations followed Dad as he retreated giggling up the yard path towards the field. By nightfall Gyp had been consigned to a stray dogs’ home.

13

THE END OF my delinquency and the growth of my devout life followed a trauma that I was unable to confide in anyone, least of all Dad. From about the age of ten I was in the habit of stealing money from Mum’s purse to take the tube up to central London. I would take the tram, clattering along the Victoria Embankment. I would find my way from the Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of London, to the dark magnificence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral with its ancient rancid smells. I liked to walk from the Protestant Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station, marvelling at the huge apartment buildings, and the grand façade of the Army and Navy department store. By the age of eleven I had found the museums at Kensington, and I would wander there on Saturdays.

One afternoon on my way back to South Kensington a man walked in step with me along the tunnel that leads from the museum district to the underground station. He was in early middle age, well-groomed and dressed in a tweed suit. He had fair hair and a pleasant fresh complexion. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I had seen boys with fathers like him in the museums. He asked me if I would like to earn some money, showing me five shillings in the form of two newly minted half-crowns resting in the palm of his hand. It crossed my mind that the money would buy me many more trips into central London, but even as I gazed at the coins I was frightened. The tunnel was now empty of pedestrians; we were alone. I started to walk quickly ahead, but he kept pace with me. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he was murmuring. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

Saying that he was not going to hurt me made me all the more frightened. When he held me painfully by the shoulder, I was terrified of what he might do if I refused to cooperate with him.

In a cubicle of the deserted public toilets at South Kensington the man forced me into a deed for which I had neither words nor understanding. I was conscious only of the dirty cracked tiles, the evil smell, and the noise of flushing urinals. In my child’s terror of the man and what he was doing to me, I seemed to understand so clearly what I had somehow always known: that this I, this soul of mine, was a stranger in my body, a stranger in the world.

When he had finished doing things to me, he made me do things to him. Then he stood over me, telling me never to tell anybody. ‘Don’t let me see your ugly little face around here again!’ he kept saying. ‘Look at me!’ he said. But I could not look at him; I stood frozen, blind. He smacked me hard around the head, and I cried again. ‘That’s nothing to what you’ll get if you tell,’ he said. Then he made off. I had forgotten about the five shillings, and so had he.

Some time after this I had an experience in the night which seemed like a waking dream or a deeply buried memory. I was standing, dressed in nothing but a short vest, in an attic room high up in a bombed-out building where the stairs had collapsed. It was a summer’s evening and I was gazing through a dormer window over rooftops and chimneys. In the far distance I could see a church tower touched by the evening sun. The sight of the church tower filled me with sadness. I could hear a sound of sighing and wailing across the rooftops like the old air-raid sirens of the war. There was a presence in the waves of sound, like an ageless dark being, and it gathered strength and purpose in a series of sickening, irresistible pulses. I was about to be engulfed by a monotonous rhythm that intended taking me to itself for ever. This I knew was the only reality, the ultimate and inescapable truth without end. As it ebbed away, like a mighty ocean of darkness, I understood that its departure was only temporary. Finally, inevitably, it would return. This and only this was real. It was a presence greater than my sense of the entire world, and it lay in wait for everyone.

After this I began to listen with greater concentration to the words of Father Cooney as he gravely recited the prayer to Michael the Archangel at the end of Mass. He spoke of the Evil One as he who ‘wanders through the world for the ruin of souls’. I began to understand the Evil One as a dark power that threatens to devour every soul in the world. What extraordinary words they seemed. How they filled me with dread especially in the night: ‘He who wanders through the world for the ruin of souls.’ Ruin.

14

AT MY MOTHER’S suggestion I responded to a call from Father Cooney for altar servers. Following an evening’s instruction in the rituals, and several mornings serving Father Cooney’s Mass, I found that I had an inclination for being on the sanctuary. I discovered an unexpected satisfaction in the dance of the rituals and rhythm of the recitations. The murmured words of the Latin echoing to the church rafters, the bell chimes, the devout movements by candlelight in the cool of dawn filled me with wonder. Lighting candles before the statue of the Virgin, reverently making the sign of the Cross with Holy Water on entering and leaving church, carrying rosary beads on my person at all times, genuflecting with reverence, crossing my forehead, lips and heart in the correct manner at the Gospel, calmed and soothed me.

In retrospect, there was a measure of narcissism. Through all those bad years I had often lost myself in ritualistic play. On the bedroom wall was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with hungry eyes and blood on his hands. I knew the picture had a life of its own because its eyes followed you about the room. I would offer in my play a piece of bread to the Sacred Heart, holding it up to his bearded mouth as if bestowing on Christ himself the gift of the Eucharist. I put an old satin dress of my mother’s around my shoulders. Shaking with excitement, I carried the piece of bread around the room slowly; bobbing up and down, I muttered in pretend Latin over a vase. I jabbered away in a make-believe homily to the four walls. It was as if I was both heroic actor and awestruck audience in a cinema, watching myself on the screen. One day in the midst of these performances I heard a sound: looking towards the crack in the half-open door, I jumped with fright. I saw a sea-grey eye gazing at me, like the eye of God himself. Mum was watching in silence, from the landing. After that my rites became ever more secretive.

When I first began to serve Mass, my religiosity on the altar, for all its apparent self-discipline, was childishly puffed up. Each morning Father Cooney would open the doors of Saint Augustine’s church at twenty minutes to seven precisely, to greet me waiting on the steps whatever the weather. There I stood sometimes drenched to the skin, sometimes caked in ice and snow, after the two-mile cycle ride from home without breakfast. These were the days when communicants, including children, fasted from midnight the previous day. Father Cooney, I was convinced, was observing me on my knees before and after Mass. I saw myself as he might have seen me: an angelic child surrounded with sacred light; a glowing little saint in a stained-glass window. I bowed profoundly till my forehead touched the carpeted steps of the altar; I beat my breast heavily at the Confiteor; I turned my head low and devoutly towards Father Cooney, as the ritual demanded; I lifted his chasuble at the consecration, while ringing the sanctuary handbell with a vigorous flourish. I did all this with a show of profound reverence, while I basked in what I imagined to be Father Cooney’s approval.

Father Cooney’s unspoken admiration was as nothing, however, to the sense of power I believed I had begun to exert over my mother, who still lay abed as I let myself out of the house before dawn and who began to speak to me with grudging respect as if for the clerical estate. She had even taken to rewarding me with the cream that collected at the top of the milk bottle, which she normally reserved for herself. ‘You’ll need this,’ she would murmur, as she poured the cream over my porridge when I returned from Mass, to the sullen envy of my siblings and the wordless amusement of my father. This was holy power indeed.

15

I HAD ABANDONED the bad company of former years, and I now found a friend in an ageing woman of the parish. Miss Hyacinth Racine, who was probably in her late seventies at that time, used to haunt the pamphlet rack in the church porch. Deeply stooped, she had a prominent hook nose with hang-glider nostrils. She spent her days walking between her house and the church, pulling a shopping trolley filled with reading matter. She spoke in an accent I identified as upper class. When I held the plate beneath her bristly chin at Communion, her tongue leapt out like a trembling yellow lizard. Most people tended to shun her. Mum said she was ‘a religious maniac’.

One day after Mass at the Camp, she invited me to her home. She lived and slept at the back of her semi-detached villa amid piles of old books, holy pictures, statues and devotional knick-knacks. There were French windows looking out on to a garden wilderness of brambles. On my first visit I asked if she was a widow. She told me that she was once engaged to a man who went ‘missing in action’ in the Great War. Every year, she said, she went to Leyton station on the date he had departed and stood at the point where he had waved her goodbye. ‘For years I used to wear on that day the dress in which I said my farewell, until the moths got it.’

Some day, she assured me, he would come back.

My friendship with Miss Racine started shortly after my eleventh birthday. After that, unknown to anyone, I was often in her house, listening to her spellbound while I ate her stale biscuits and drank the weak tea she brewed in the kitchen where marauding cats had their muzzles into every item of food. She had a stock of gossip about religious books and their authors, religious communities, priests and nuns. I loved her voice. Alone in the street I would practise imitating her speech, making up conversations with myself.

She gave me a relic of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the French nun who died aged twenty-four and was venerated the world over as a patron saint of priests and the missions. It was a tiny leather wallet containing a piece of cloth that had touched the saint’s bones. On another occasion she gave me a ‘scapular’, two pieces of brown cloth not much larger than postage stamps attached to each other by silken threads, to be worn beneath one’s clothing across the back and across the breast. Those who died wearing this object, she said, were guaranteed an ‘indulgence’: release from purgatory and entry into heaven on the first Saturday following their death.

Miss Racine was mainly a gossip. She never tried to preach. But she prompted an important event in my late childhood which led to my call to the priesthood. She often spoke of her visits to a Marian shrine at a place called Aylesford in Kent. That year the Saint Vincent de Paul Society organised a free camping holiday at Aylesford priory for boys of poor families in the parish. Mum put my name forward and I was accepted.

16

SIXTY BOYS WERE taken in buses from London’s East End to camp in a field next to the gardens of the priory which bordered the banks of the River Medway in Kent. Aylesford had once been the site of a medieval Carmelite foundation from which the friars were expelled at the Reformation. After the Second World War a group of Irish Carmelites had purchased the ruins and rebuilt them as a shrine to Our Lady who, according to tradition, had appeared there in the hollow of an oak tree. In those early days of its revival Aylesford was a romantic place surrounded by the unspoilt Kent countryside.

I watched the brown-and-white-robed friars singing in their renovated church, and walking prayerfully along the cloisters. I was enraptured by the view of weeping willows through clear Gothic windows, the dawn chorus, the tolling of bells marking out the monastic day, river waters lapping below ragstone walls, the smell of baking bread in the kitchens. Aylesford was a haven from the degrading everyday realities of parental discord, the school at Ilford, and dangerous men who lurk near toilets in South Kensington. The singing of the monks, from one side of the choir to the other, created a reassuring rhythm that seemed to echo deep into my heart. At Aylesford I experienced something even more transforming than morning Mass: I felt an inclining of my heart and soul, like the opening of a flower in warm sunlight. I was especially happy in the evening when the house martins swooped above the church roof and the scent of the river drifted in through open windows to mingle with the lingering incense.

The Prior, Father Malachy Lynch, was a large man with a great swatch of silver hair combed across the dome of his head. He spoke to me sitting on a stone ledge in the cloisters. He told me that angels had kept guard over the ruins of the monastery through the years when Catholic practice had been banned in England. He said that he had often seen angels, and that he had a sense of the presence of my own guardian angel who ‘loved me very much’. One day, walking in the monastery gardens he said something that had a deep and lasting effect on me. It was natural, he said, for human beings to look for God as a son seeks a lost father: ‘We are put on this earth to search for God.’ He said that some people look for God with greater determination than others: ‘That is what we do here at Aylesford. We friars make ourselves free to do nothing but search for God.’ Before I left Aylesford to return to London, Father Malachy Lynch gave me a book, The Imitation of Christ. It was bound in black leather, the pages were edged in red. It slipped easily into my jacket pocket.

17

AFTER I RETURNED to the Peel and Saints Peter and Paul School, I daydreamed about Aylesford through the autumn and into the New Year. I longed for that Carmelite cloister and the presence of the monks. I began to spend more and more time in Father Cooney’s ‘old bit of a church’ which became for me a haven in the urban dreariness of Barkingside. The smell of candle grease, the flickering sanctuary lamp, the scent of incense, thin as it was, transported me back to Aylesford in my imagination. During school holidays I sat before the blessed sacrament for what seemed hours at a time; sometimes praying, sometimes in silence as if waiting to hear the voice of God. And it now no longer mattered to me whether Father Cooney was there to observe me. Nor did it matter whether Mum knew where I was and what I was doing.