Seminary Boy

In The Imitation of Christ I read: ‘If you would understand Christ’s words fully and taste them truly you must strive to form your whole life after His pattern.’ My earlier Mass serving and displays of piety had placed me at the centre of my fantasies: the young hero saint. Now I was no longer the single and exclusive focus of my religious life. I was beginning to be interested in the person of Jesus for his own sake, as the admirable father. I saw him as he was depicted on the front of Mum’s prayer book, The Key of Heaven, which she had possessed since her wedding day. It showed Jesus as a beautiful, mild-eyed, bearded man, pointing to his fiercely burning heart. Protective, understanding, generous, he was a father who loved us more than his own life. In The Imitation of Christ I sensed his concern for the poor, for the sick and the dying; his love of the meek and the peacemakers. I felt his love for children: for me. This image of Jesus merged with my memories of Father Malachy Lynch with his flowing gestures and soft reassuring voice. As I knelt in prayer in Saint Augustine’s church I had the feeling that Jesus was calling me to himself, just as Father Malachy had described the call of Jesus: the invitation to spend my life seeking to know him; the call to imitate him.

One morning, as I knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, the world of my imagination and the world of daylight reality came together. I heard a low, kindly voice. I thrilled to the sound of the voice, which was even more real than the motor of a passing car on the high road outside. ‘Come, John,’ said the voice. ‘Follow me. I want you to be one of my priests.’ It was the voice of Jesus.

I cycled home in a glow of happiness; it was as if the whole world was bathed in warm light. I was filled with the love of Jesus: me for him, and him for me; it was as if I was shedding a warm glowing light on the entire world. As I cycled back to the Peel, past streets of terraced houses, past suburban avenues of little semi-detached houses with their privet hedges, storm porches, bird baths and garden fixtures, this entire Godless world seemed bathed in sacred radiance.

It was the next day that I crept into the sacristy before Solemn Benediction and grasped that sacred chalice, as if I were taking possession of my future calling, only to be scared out of my wits by Father Cooney, perched on a stool behind the door. Then came that morning, when as if by providence, Father Cooney turned to me at the end of Mass: ‘Wisswiss…now then, John…What is it that you want to be when you grow up?’

I told him, confidently, that I wanted to be a priest at Aylesford. I expected his joyous approval. I was not prepared for his retort: ‘Wisswiss…There are far too many monks and friars…Our Lord needs priests for our city parishes, not more Carmelites.’

I was thrown into confusion by Father Cooney’s response. His world was a milieu of church building debts, primary school catechism classes, vagrants at the door, hospital visits, Barkingside High Street, the Ford and Plessey factory plants, troubled parishioners like Mr and Mrs Cornwell at the Peel. When I thought of the priesthood, I was thinking of Father Malachy Lynch and a life within Aylesford’s cloisters and monastery gardens.

Then he asked me whether I had thought about applying to enter a minor seminary. I had no idea what he meant. But he was telling me, earnestly, that to delay would be a mistake. I must not miss my chance, he said.

‘Sure the boy’s not got a word of Latin…wisswiss…wisswiss,’ he mumbled, as he took off his vestments. Now he attempted to explain in a halting fashion that a minor seminary was a college for boys who wanted to be priests when they grew up; where they got themselves a decent education.

That day I went to see Miss Racine and told her what Father Cooney had said. Her hand shook with excitement as she handed me my rattling cup of grey tea with its sour milk globules. She seemed to know a lot about minor seminaries, and their histories and locations, and she painted an enticing picture of life in those places. The minor seminaries, she told me, were the best schools in England and they were situated in beautiful locations in the distant countryside. The boys there lived the lives of monks. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You surely have a vocation for the priesthood.’

She told me that the word ‘seminary’ originally meant a garden plot where seeds were grown, protected from harsh weather. Then it came to mean a college where ‘seminarians’ grew sturdily in their religious lives while being protected from the world. God would be my guide in his own good time, she assured me, whether it was to be a monk or a diocesan priest with a ministry in the world. ‘But now that Father Cooney has suggested it, it is a sign. You must respond to his call.’ She clapped her hands like a child: ‘Oh, this is too lovely for words. How happy you will be, John.’

Convinced by Miss Racine that the minor seminary would be a kind of Aylesford for boys of my age, I informed Father Cooney the very next day and without reference to my parents that, yes, I would very much like to go there. He had just turned and bowed to me as we entered the sacristy after Mass. He held his head to one side. ‘Ah, do you say so!’ he said emphatically. ‘Do you say so! Wisswiss…’

On that basis, and without further discussion, Father Cooney took action. The day soon came when he arived on his bicycle at the Peel with a letter for my mother, wishing to talk with her alone. I was sent upstairs to the boys’ bedroom, where I sat looking out at the passing traffic. They must have talked for an hour. After he had gone, she called me downstairs and handed me a letter. It contained an instruction for me to meet the bishop. Mum looked at me with a mournful smile. Then she said with tears in her eyes: ‘If only my mother were alive to see this day. Fancy, me having a son a priest. It’s surely an answer to her prayers.’

Mum did not see fit to mention the matter to Dad, nor did I think to raise it with him. So it was that I came to be riding on the bus to the pleasant suburb of Woodford Green, destined for recruitment as a minor seminarian of the diocese of Brentwood.

18

THE SEMINARY CLOTHES LIST with a letter from the Very Reverend Wilfred Doran of Cotton College, North Staffordshire, caused uproar in the house. Shaking the list above her head, Mum reckoned it equivalent to a month’s wages. She accosted Father Cooney after Mass on Sunday. He arrived the next day on his bike, looking gravely askance. Ensconsed in Dad’s armchair, still wearing his cycle clips, he slurped his tea to the bottom of the cup. The two little ones gawped as if a giant scorpion sat ready to strike.

Father Cooney snatched the clothes list and began crossing out items and altering numbers with a pencil stub. ‘Wisswiss…five pair of stockings [that’s how he referred to what we called socks]. Tree’s more than enough! Tree pair of trousers? Wisswiss…One pair. He’ll be growing out of them anyways.’

It was still a whopping prospective bill.

Mum challenged him: ‘Well, where did your parents get the money when you went to the seminary, Father?’

‘Oh, I was brought up in poor old Ireland, Missus. Not a penny in the house. My dear old Mam went out the back and killed the pig.’

After he had gone, Mum stood by the kitchen sink watching him cycling away up Woodford Avenue. ‘“Me dear owld Mam went out da back and keeld da peeg!”’ she mimicked. ‘Wish I had a peeg out da back.’

Assistance came from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. Four crisp five-pound notes, the white ones of those days large as jumbo-sized handkerchiefs. So began the process of purchasing my seminary wardrobe, mainly at the Cooperative Society store in Ilford. The new underwear and shirts were placed in a drawer in Mum’s bedroom; the black suit hung in her wardrobe. Alone in the house I would creep in and sniff the unworn items.

Time was at an agonising standstill. I attempted to bring forward the moment of departure by imagining myself sitting in the train as it pulled away from Saint Pancras station. I had chosen the passage I would read from The Imitation of Christ as I settled back in the seat of the carriage. What I read drew me into an interior world where I seemed ever more aware of my innermost secret thoughts, known only to me and my God:

Avoid the concourse of men as much as you can; for discussion of worldly affairs is very bad for the soul, even though they be discussed with a good intention. For we are quickly defiled and enslaved by vanity.

I could not wait to enter the religious life so that I could make a reality of the ordinances of Thomas à Kempis in pursuit of the example of Jesus. But time obstinately refused to pass.

19

THAT SUMMER I took a full-time job as errand boy at a grocer’s store on Claybury Broadway, our local shopping centre. The hours were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (7.30 p.m. on Saturdays), with a half day off on Thursday. In all weathers – it rained a lot that summer – I delivered boxes of groceries carried in the iron basket attached to the handlebars of an ancient bike. The popular song on the radio that summer was Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’. Recalling that doleful tune, I see the streets of Barkingside stretching before me as I struggle to keep upright on the heavily laden machine, my toes barely reaching the pedals. When I wasn’t weaving perilously on the recalcitrant bike and coping with its faulty brakes, I was blackening and chafing my hands realigning the loose chain, or mending multiple punctures in the decaying inner tubes.

I also gained first-hand experience of the amorous antics of the grocer and his assistant manageress. She was a buxom pretty woman, her peroxided hair piled high on her head. In the storeroom at the back there was a high desk at which the grocer stood doing his paperwork while eating chocolate. He would rip off the foil and bite into the chocolate bar as if it was a slice of toast. She would come up silently behind him and poke two fingers between his buttocks. Then they would go into a clinch, with a lot of tongue kissing, breast and testicle squeezing, moaning and giggling: all as, in sight of them, I attempted to fill my cardboard boxes with orders of tinned baked beans, trays of eggs, bacon, cheese, margarine, jams and marmalade. Their behaviour intrigued and yet repelled me. I prayed for them both every morning at Mass.

Two weeks before I was due to depart for Cotton College, I was fired from the job after crashing the bike while evading a dog that hurled itself at my front wheel. The dog’s owner stood smirking down at me. ‘That happened to me once,’ he said. Then he added: ‘You must have frightened him.’

The bike was a write-off, and I was concussed. The money I had earned, less compensation for broken eggs (four dozen of them were spread over the incline of Clayhall Avenue), paid for football boots and a new black blazer. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t make you pay for a new bike, you clumsy little bleeder,’ said the manager as I made my farewell.

Suffering a fever, which Mum insisted was due to homesickness in anticipation, I was unable to travel on the appointed day of the new academic year in the third week of September. For several nights I lay weeping, convinced that I was unworthy and therefore fated never to depart for Cotton. But the Very Reverend Father Doran wrote a revised travel schedule, informing Mum that a car would be waiting at Oakamoor station and that I should arrive at the college in time for Compline, Benediction and supper.

20

ON A LATE September Sunday morning of cool breezes and brilliant sunshine I served Father Cooney’s Mass for the last time. In the sacristy he handed me a parcel and told me to open it. It was a new leather-bound Roman missal in dual Latin–English translation. The pages were gilt-edged and there were sumptuous silk markers, purple, red, green, white and gold. I could smell the warm scent of the leather and the sweet aroma of the delicate rice-paper. I was moved to tears, realising the expense of the beautiful object. I attempted to thank him, but he interrupted me: ‘Wisswiss…Very good! Run along now!’ As I left the sacristy he called out: ‘And keep the Faith!’

As I made my farewells at home, Terry, my elder brother, was terse: ‘Now I’ll be able to breathe at night.’ My sister, immaculately groomed, and approaching her fifteenth birthday, gave me a quick dry kiss on the cheek. She had a knowing gleam in her eye. Not for one moment, she appeared to be telling me, was she taken in by my devout pretensions. The youngest two, aged ten and seven, stood gaping, incredulous that any of us should be escaping from the Peel. Dad came in from the field. He was blinking with nervous excitement. He lifted my bags. ‘Gawd awlmighty!’ he said. He sang a bar of ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’, then he lowered his face towards mine for a kiss. Accompanied by Mum, wearing her purple coat, I set off through the gates of the Peel, my arms almost out of their sockets with the suitcases I insisted on carrying by myself. In my unyielding new black shoes I just made it to the bus-stop.

We had lunch in the cafeteria of Saint Pancras mainline station. Mum ordered steak. It stuck in my stomach. She nevertheless ordered treacle suet pudding, urging me to finish every morsel. Her boy was not going to depart unfortified.

The station was a like stage set for the commencement of my spiritual journey: incense steam clouds, amplified pulpit-voice announcements, grand cathedral arches, shafts of lantern-light. I leant out of the window as Mum walked, then trotted alongside the carriage, her eyes suddenly reproachful and gazing into mine. She stopped at the end of the platform, a purple figure frantically waving a handkerchief. Then she was gone.

I sat hunched forward, still suffering from lunch, looking out at the passing immensity of the aged and filthy city wartorn from Hitler’s bombs. Taking The Imitation of Christ from my pocket I read the passage I had marked weeks earlier with a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:

It is no small matter to dwell in a religious community, or congregation, to converse therein without complaint, and to persevere therein faithfully unto death. Blessed is he that there lived well, and ended happily.

Opposite me sat a smartly dressed woman. She smiled, her broad lips thick with orange lipstick. But I avoided her eyes and watched the factory buildings and terraced houses slipping by. In glimpses between tunnels and high embankments, the countryside finally opened out to the horizon. I felt a delicious sense of sadness as the train sped on, carrying me farther and ever faster away from Mum and the family, from Father Cooney, from the huge, bruised city of London. From the World.

21

THE SUN WAS setting as the steam train laboured alongside a fast-flowing river, brassy blue-green in the late afternoon sun. I could see drystone walls bordering steep fields; clusters of pine trees on the summits of dark red cliffs. Eventually there was a line of cottages and a factory foundry with clashing engines. A man lit by the reflection from a furnace stood in a doorway mopping his brow. We had arrived at Oakamoor.

The waiting car was a cavernous pre-war Austin. The driver greeted me with: ‘Now then! Cotton!’ As we lurched away, he explained that the factory was a copper mill. ‘They keep those furnaces going day and night; even on a Sunday,’ he said. The taxi paused at a crossing for the train to pass. There was a church in a steep graveyard, dense with decayed headstones. We crossed a bridge where I could see a broad weir blurred with rising steam. Oakamoor was a settlement of workers’ cottages. The dwellings cowered below the wooded flanks of the hills that rose on all sides. There was a shuttered pub.

We began a climb through hairpin bends. The road was narrow, bordered by lush pastures and coppices. At turns I could see back down to Oakamoor, virtually hidden now in mist. Higher and higher we went. Then the driver called out: ‘There she is!’ We were running along a straight stretch with overarching trees. In the distance, through a break in the woods, I could see a cluster of buildings which seemed to cling perilously to the side of the valley.

We paused at a crossroads by an ancient stone inn and turned left, passing a hamlet of single-file cottages. ‘That was the village of Cotton, that was,’ said the driver facetiously. As we passed along a level lane, sideways to the hillside, the college came into full view. At its centre was an imposing mansion to which was attached a barrack-like stone building with lighted curtainless windows. To the right of the mansion, silhouetted in the evening light, was a stone church with a spire. The college faced out across a thickly wooded shoulder of the valley; above and beyond were playing fields rising in terraces towards the crest of the valley.

There were iron gates and a driveway ahead, but the driver followed the lane around the back of the buildings and came to a halt on a cinder yard as spacious as a football field. Depositing my bags, he said: ‘You go down there to the lower yard…up the steps, and someone will look after you.’ He seemed to imply, by his sympathetic tone of voice, that he felt sorry for me. Wishing me goodnight, he got into the car and shuddered away.

It was now dark, the air shockingly cold and pure. I lugged my bags down the path to the lower yard and entered a door at the top of a flight of stone steps to find myself in a high-ceilinged lobby. A priest in a cassock was standing at a noticeboard lit by a single naked bulb. He turned as I entered, as if he had been expecting me. He had huge shoulders and black horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was cut close and stood up from his scalp stiff as a brush. He had dark eyes and a strong square jaw.

‘Cornwell? I’m Father McCartie, Prefect of Discipline.’

When I said: ‘Hello, Father,’ he replied unsmiling: ‘No, you address the priests here as “sir”. It’s our custom.’

Father McCartie took my bags and hurried ahead of me up four flights of a worn stone staircase, the thick crêpe-rubber soles of his shoes squelching noisily. We entered a dimly lit dormitory like a tunnel under the eaves of the house. Black iron bedsteads with white coverlets stood close together. Behind each bed was a space for storing clothes. There was a range of narrow dormer windows on each side, wide open to the raw air. A statue of Saint Joseph stood on a pedestal at one end, and a crucifix hung on the wall at the other.

‘That’s your berth,’ said Father McCartie, pointing to a bed beneath one of the windows.

This place was called ‘Little Dorm’, he told me, so as to distinguish it from ‘Middle Dorm’ and ‘Top Dorm’. There was no talking in the dormitory for any reason, he added. I was wondering why he had not asked me about my journey, or where I had come from. I had an impression of vast chilly space beyond the windows, which looked out across the valley to a pine ridge barely visible in the dusk, and I was aware of the distance I had come from home. It was all so different from what I had imagined. Aylesford and its birdsong, its summer fragrance, bell-ringing, tranquil routines and friendly friars, could not be more different from this cold, unadorned place. I thought of Mum and her protective presence, despite her unpredictable moods.

After I had finished unpacking Father McCartie picked up the two books I had brought from home: The Imitation of Christ, and the new Roman missal. Returning them, he said: ‘Take them into church…Now bring your washbag and towel down to the wash places.’

Leading the way, he paused by the statue of Saint Joseph. ‘That was given by the parents of a boy who died of peritonitis within two days of his arrival at Cotton,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘He died fifty years ago.’

We proceeded down to the cloisters and descended again to a whitewashed cavern smelling of ancient damp. There were lines of wash bowls and pegs, all numbered. ‘Your number is ninety-two,’ said the priest, pointing out my bowl and peg.

I said: ‘Thank you, Father.’

‘No, you call us “sir”,’ he corrected me once more.

As we returned to the cloister, he explained that the college was founded two hundred years earlier during the penal times, when it was a crime to be a Catholic priest in England. ‘The priests of this college,’ he said, ‘dressed in lay clothes and were addressed as “sir” to hide their true identity. We’ve carried on the tradition of being called “sir”.’

I felt quelled, and it seemed strange that he asked me nothing about myself. Perhaps, I thought, he already knew everything that was to be known about me.

The building was echoing with the raucous clangour of a bell. Somewhere on a higher floor there was a sound of scraping of feet, and a man’s voice praying, followed by a roared response. The stone stairs reverberated as a host of boys came into view walking in silence towards the cloisters where they took their places in parallel lines, hands behind their backs. They were dressed in black suits, black ties and white shirts. The toecaps of their shoes were highly polished.

The seminarians of my imagination had been pale and pious, slow of movement, gentle-eyed. These boys were fresh and open-faced, their ears red as if with the cold and the fresh air, their shoulders squared like boy soldiers. Some of the older ones had the tough appearance of farm boys or young building labourers; I had the impression that their eyes were bright, as if with a kind of inner excitation.

Father McCartie led me down the ranks and positioned me between boys who appeared to be the same age as myself. At a signal from the priest we moved forward slowly in step along the terrazzo-floored cloister like a regiment of young undertakers. Many of the boys had metal studs on their shoes giving their precise marching the sound of a metallic drum roll. We passed into a gallery I would come to know as the ‘clock cloister’, because of the presence of a tall grandfather clock. The walls were lined with pictures, including one prominently large print of a youth whose naked body had been punctured bloodily with arrows (this, I learnt later, was a copy of Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, the early Christian boy-martyr). There was a pervasive smell in the gallery, of wood polish, burnt toast and lingering coffee fumes.

Finally we passed through double doors into the church where our footsteps echoed on the patterned tiles and the cool air was heavy with the smell of incense and candle grease. The ceiling disappeared into the darkness high above. There were simple stone columns, unadorned side altars, and a Lady chapel at the end of a side aisle beyond a wooden screen. The boys took their places in plain pine pews on either side of the main aisle; beyond the altar rails was a spacious sanctuary with choir-stalls, an organ, and a stone high altar in the distance overlooked by a massive east window gleaming in the darkness. The boys were kneeling, ramrod straight; the kneelers were made of hard wood. The boy next to me, a youth with pale limp hair, high colouring in his cheeks, and National Health spectacles, took my missal and found me the page for Sunday Compline.

A procession of boys entered the sanctuary, filing into the choir-stalls, followed by a priest wearing a white-and-gold cope. He was tall and ruddy, and walked casually without a hint of devotion. He bowed at the foot of the altar and intoned in Latin the beginning of Compline, the office of prayers at the end of the day.

The ritual appeals to God for his protection as night falls: ‘May the dreams and phantasms of the night recede; keep the enemy at bay, lest our bodies become polluted.’ At the Salve Regina the boys’ voices soared up to the high rafters: ‘To you we sigh, groaning, and weeping in this vale of tears…’ I was conscious of the wild valley in its remote and rugged setting in the darkness outside, deepening the sense of strangeness. Then it struck me that unless I begged to be allowed home the very next day, I had no other choice but to throw myself completely on the person of Jesus. I stole a look around me. My companions knelt with their faces buried in their hands in prayerful recollection.