Authors: John Cornwell
T
HEN IT WAS
Lent again; and with the penitential season the sexual demons were plaguing my soul and body as never before. My sole consolation was recognising in the depths of night the rhythmic groan of springs elsewhere in the dorm, confirming that I was hardly alone in my solitary afflictions.
In my struggles to bring my body under subjection, I began to wear once again that rough woollen jersey next to my skin and I bound my upper arm with a piece of wire with a spike, hidden under my shirt. At night, after lights out, I tied my wrists with a pyjama cord to the bedhead, as I had done a year earlier on Good Friday. I gave up every item of food that I enjoyed, and I missed tea every day. I prayed and prayed for a miracle: that the temptations and the unwanted erections would subside.
One night, assailed by erotic fantasies, I got up and stood by my bed for several minutes. In a state of agitation I decided to go to church. Creeping along the darkened cloisters I remembered the story that the ghost of a priest, who had lain unburied in his coffin for many months in the bursar’s office, had been seen walking up and down in the night moaning
softly to himself like melancholy wind. I was also terrified of being caught. Yet I felt exhilarated on my release from the narrow bed, the cockpit of unbidden urges.
I knelt shivering in the Lady chapel, praying over and over again: ‘Our Blessed Lady, please help me.’ Again and again I prayed the special prayer Father Owen had recommended, the
Memorare.
I must have been kneeling for an hour when I heard the door of the church opening and banging, then the sound of footsteps coming up the central aisle. I was petrified, thinking of the ghost of the unburied priest. The confident footsteps continued right up to the sanctuary, which was fully in view to my left. A shadowy figure, too small to be a priest, went down on its knees, then prostrated itself before the Blessed Sacrament face down on the parquet floor, as the young priest-to-be had done at his ordination. After a while the figure, straightening up, began to speak in clear tones: ‘Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…’ It was the unmistakable voice of Paul Moreland.
After a while I crept away down the side aisle and left the church. As I went along the clock cloister I could still hear that voice, dim now, calling out: ‘Jesus, Lord!…Jesus, Lord!…’
O
N THE DAY
the annual Holy Week retreat began, I again took from the library Archbishop Goodier’s book on the passion and death of Jesus. I wanted to relive the way of the Cross step by step with the liturgy and to identify wholly with his suffering. I believed that I was beginning to bring the ‘irregular motions of the flesh’ under control by sheer grim and persistent
determination. I was still embattled, and there had been lapses and raging scruples. But what successes I had gained, had been achieved, I felt, at the cost of remorseless self-pummelling: hard work. At times I felt like the lurid picture of Saint Sebastian prominently displayed in the clock cloister: the naked boy covered in vicious arrows. Was a heavy point being made by Father Doran in having that picture thrust into our imaginations before night prayers and bed?
The retreat father, who emerged on to the sanctuary after Tennebrae on Spy Wednesday evening was a member of the Catholic Missionary Society who announced himself as Father Buxton. He was slight in build and middle-aged; his grey hair contrasted with a fresh outdoor face. He spoke to us gently that evening of the love of God.
On Maundy Thursday morning I went to see him in the archbishop’s room. He greeted me in silence, gesturing that I should sit down. What struck me first was a quality of simplicity, as if he had stripped from his life everything that was inessential. He sat with his head a little bowed as if he was content just to sit there without speaking for as long as it took. I felt as if the love of God was shining through him. Then, suddenly, it was like the sun itself, rising after a dark, turbulent night. I had a sense of Jesus himself – not an imaginary picture, or a sentimental statue, but the very person of Jesus present in the room.
‘What’s troubling you?’ he asked.
I began to cry. Then it all came out. The misery of my impurities and the struggles with my body. ‘The worst of it,’ I said, ‘is that I know that I am not worthy to be a priest. If I stay here God can’t bestow his grace upon the college.’
When I had stopped crying, Father Buxton talked for a while. What he said rescued me instantly from turmoil. At the same time, I was aware of an atmosphere like a pure fragrance pervading the room.
Jesus loved me very much, he said. Everything I was experiencing
was normal in many boys, and our mode of life in the seminary exaggerated everything. Jesus did not expect the impossible. He told me to stop going to confession so often and to make an act of contrition if I failed, and to confess just once a week to one confessor who knew me well. I was not to stay away from Holy Communion, as this would give me strength. The important thing, always, was not to do harm to others and to trust in the love of Jesus Christ. As for my doubts about the priesthood, there were many years to go before I reached that goal, and many other trials lay in store. I would change with the years, and with maturity. God would not punish the entire community, he went on, because of the temptations bravely resisted by one boy.
Now he asked me to kneel by the side of his armchair and he blessed me, placing his hands on my head. I had an impression of strength and warmth flooding through my body.
As I walked in spring sunshine, up and down the lime grove by the side of the church, I felt that I had never experienced such inward peace in the whole of my life. I felt that I had been touched by Jesus himself.
B
ACK AT HOME
for the Easter break I found that my father had returned from Saint Clement’s and was working again, more or less. It was decided that I would help him for several hours each day. He was still frail-looking and his hands were trembling. It was obvious that the sports field and its facilities had been allowed to slip. The cricket tables were suffering from a form of mildew; moles had been burrowing and were devastating large areas of turf; there were plantains and moss where smooth swards of grass should have been. His
equipment had been neglected, and he was taking longer each day to get his tractor working.
In the living room, Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Mambo Italiano’ was belting out from the record player till late at night. My brother Michael, in his second year at Jesuit college, looked stricken. In addition to his long stints of homework, and the long journey to school, he had been suffering the over-strict disciplines of the Jesuits. He had tales of grim injustice involving savage beatings on the hand with the tolley, a piece of whalebone covered in rubber. Jimmy was still glued to the television, unable to take his eyes off the lurid greenish screen even during the long intervals between programmes when the BBC showed a windmill or daffodils swaying in the breeze. Mum, who was working harder than ever, spent her precious free time preparing for formation dance exhibitions, recklessly sewing ever more dense layers of sequins on her dresses, the outer skirts of which stood at right angles to her hips. She had the look of a femme fatale Cinderella.
I called on Miss Racine several times in the evening when I was out on a run. She never answered the door. But I saw her one day sitting on a public bench by the side of Eastern Avenue watching the traffic go by. Her clothes were filthy, and she barely recognised me. I asked her if I could do anything for her, but she just shook her head and said that she was waiting for someone.
Lonely for conversation I decided to visit Father Cooney in his presbytery, with the pretext that I needed a book on the theology of grace. I was hoping to be invited in for a cup of tea and some innocent clerical chat. His sister, who had cheeks like wizened apples, was acting as his housekeeper. She answered the door and in a brogue, Mum would say, ‘you could tar the road with’, cried out: ‘Wait on da treshold now, willya.’
Eventually he arrived. When I explained my errand his eyes froze hare-like with alarm. He seemed to be gazing with that
listing, now snow-white head, somewhere to the right of my ear as if witnessing a traffic accident on the high road. ‘Tee-ology of grace is it! Our dear Lord help us and save us!…Wisswiss…Out in the fresh air witcha!’ The door slammed heavily behind me.
T
HERE WERE THREE
sets of cricket practice nets on the Peel ground, and I decided to practise by myself. One evening, after watching me bowling, Terry gave me a lesson on how to hold the ball, how to bring my arm over my shoulder, and how to aim surely. He told me that my eye problem would mean that I would always find it difficult to succeed as a batsman, but there was no reason why I shouldn’t become a reasonable bowler. He said that most bowlers only focus with one eye anyway, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. I began to practise, hour after hour, putting as much concentrated effort into it as I had into my running.
One evening, Dad came limping along and showed me how to bowl a googly, a slow ball that spun in such a way that it would shoot suddenly in a new direction on bouncing. He stayed for an hour or so and suddenly he appeared younger and less anguished than I had seen him for a long time.
One morning I told Dad that I wanted to take the day off. I pumped up the tyres on my sister’s bike, and with nothing more than a bottle of water in the saddlebag, and my copy of
The Imitation of Christ
given to me four years earlier by Father Malachy Lynch, I set off to find Aylesford priory by road.
I had somehow thought that I would reach my destination by lunchtime. I did not arrive at Aylesford village until early evening, exhausted and hungry after a journey on busy main
roads lasting eight hours. I had no money in my pocket, and on several occasions after I had emptied my bottle I had knocked on the doors of strangers to beg a cup of water. I could barely stand. The guest master, an Irish brother with a cheerful grin, emerged from the monastery as I wheeled the bike into the quadrangle known as Pilgrims’ Court. He arranged a bath and something for me to eat before finding a bed for me in a pilgrim’s guest room.
That night I rose from the bed, sleepwalking, and fell on the floor; my legs refused to stop cycling. Several times I screamed out in my sleep. Eventually the guest master appeared in pyjamas and fetched a mug of hot milk, sitting with me until I calmed down and fell asleep.
When I awoke, I went to pray at the shrine of Saint Simon Stock. Afterwards I joined a band of pilgrims in the ancient galleried dining hall for breakfast. They were gossiping among themselves about different pilgrimages they had enjoyed in places like Walsingham and Lourdes. They came from Stratford in east London and they were intrigued that I had cycled all the way on my sister’s bicycle without eating. Then Father Malachy Lynch appeared, tall, red in the face, with his great swathe of silver hair combed across the top of his head, and the room fell silent. He moved among the pilgrims, greeting them one by one, touching a head here, a shoulder there, his face lighting up occasionally when he seemed to recognise someone. At last he came to me and stopped for a few moments. I showed him my copy of
The Imitation of Christ.
He smiled benignly and blessed the book with a flowing gesture of his hand. I was not sure whether he remembered me, but it did not seem to matter. I felt that I was in the presence of holiness, although it was a different kind of holiness from the simplicity of Father Buxton, the retreat father at Cotton, or the grim austerity of Father Cooney. Father Malachy’s holiness was romantic, theatrical, suggestive of signs and wonders.
At midday Father Malachy talked to the pilgrims about Our
Lady and the scapular. He rambled, but he held us entranced. I remembered Miss Racine’s devotion to the scapular, and I was saddened to think of her sitting by the side of the highway at Redbridge. I had long ago lost the scapular she gave me. After the talk I went up to Father Malachy and asked him how I could obtain a scapular. He took me over to the guest master’s office and produced a substantial scapular from a drawer. He blessed the object before placing the ribbons over my head and tucking the squares into my shirt back and front. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘you are a true Carmelite.’ Then he asked me to kneel while he recited over me Saint Patrick’s blessing, a prayer about protection from evil, behind, in front, all around.
The guest master arranged for me to return to London on the bus with the visiting pilgrims, the bike strapped on to the luggage rack on the top. I felt happy sitting on the bus with the pilgrims, who were laughing and sharing sandwiches.
When I arrived back home later that evening, having cycled from Stratford, Mum was angry that I had gone off without telling her of my whereabouts. ‘I hope you’re not turning out like your father!’ she said. That night in bed I fingered the scapular about my neck and felt safe and secure from every kind of evil.
R
ETURNING TO
C
OTTON
was like dawn after a long dark night. I sensed that this was going to be a new beginning. I was going to pray hard and work hard, as never before. Father Owen had promised that he would give me a new voice test for the choir. I longed to be back among the privileged group singing our sacred music in the sanctuary. After depositing my case in the dorm, I hurried to the church to go on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament. The sanctuary lamp was shining clear and steady.
On the second day of term Father Gavin announced that he was conducting trials after lunch in the cricket nets on the field above Top Bounds. He was selecting for two reserve places in the college team, and I was confident that I could make an impression with my bowling alone. About twenty boys turned up in cricket boots. I was among those told to pad up to bat, which disappointed me as I knew that I would not perform well. I faced twenty or so balls, most of which I missed, before Father Gavin told me to take my pads off and join the bowlers.
There were six of us taking turns to bowl. My first two balls were grotesque wides and several boys groaned derisively. For my third, I took a long run-up. This knocked out the middle stump with such force that the wicket-keeper hollered with alarm. My confidence was soaring: I could do no wrong. I was my brother Terry. Ball after ball I sent the stumps flying; the batsmen were leaping back at the ferocious speed. Now Father Gavin went to the crease to confront me. The first two balls
he smacked skywards, and everybody cheered. The next ball I bowled a googly. As his leg stump was nicked, and the wicketkeeper yelled: ‘Howzatt!’ Father Gavin stood stunned for a moment, then his face was suffused with delight. ‘Good Lord, Fru, where did you learn to bowl like that!’
In church that night I could barely concentrate on my prayers. I was thinking about my success in the practice nets. Later, after going to bed, I felt discomfort across my chest and shooting pains down my left arm; which was strange, for I bowled with my right arm.
The next morning, I looked up at the dormer window to see the sky cloudless, the trees tranquil, promising a fair day. If the weather held we would have cricket practice, and perhaps a swim. I leapt out of bed and got dressed, but as I began to walk down the dorm on my way to the wash places I felt my heart pounding in my chest and an excruciating pain in my left arm. I sat down on the floor, where I was. James was next to me, speaking soothingly. Several boys paused to look at me with concerned curiosity. A member of the big sixth came along and said I had better lay on my bed and wait for Matron. He told the dawdlers to get on down to the wash places.
I lay in the silent dormitory wondering what could be the matter. Eventually the pain went away. Then Mère Saint Luc, our stout little nun matron, bustled in. As I tried to explain the pain, she was looking directly in my face as if to discover signs of my ailment somewhere around my eyes and forehead. Eventually she asked me to stand up. ‘Good, good, now let’s just walk a little way,’ she said in her French Belgian accent. ‘Let’s see if we can walk you as far as the infirmary.’ I had walked about ten paces when I felt as if I had been slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. I went down on the floor, my lungs heaving with agony. The nun turned me over on my side and made me raise my knees a little: she held my hand in silence, and I was aware of her looking at me with strange anxiety. Next Father McCartie appeared. I heard him saying:
‘What’s happened?’ His voice sounded brittle. Then I heard Matron whispering: ‘This boy is having a heart attack! Call the doctor, Father.’
The pain came in a terrible rhythm as if an engine was sending a pile driver through my chest. Matron put a pillow under my head and knelt beside me soothing my hair. I felt a sudden wave of terror and self-pity.
Matron said softly: ‘Don’t worry,
mon cher
, we are all in God’s hands!’ Part of my mind told me that I was dying, and that this event had been lying in wait for me every moment of my existence. I saw a fleeting image of myself being carried in my coffin past the old hall to the little cemetery at the head of the valley. I could see, where I lay, the statue to Saint Joseph in memory of the long-dead Cottonian boy.
Dr Hall, the school doctor, arrived, a dapper man whose dark hair was smoothly plastered down on his scalp. He was wearing a tweed suit and a mustard-coloured waistcoat. His hands smelt of antiseptic lotion. He gave me an injection, and the pain began to ease. He helped me to sit up a little and took off my shirt. He expressed mild surprise at my scapular. ‘And what is the meaning of this?’ he asked as he took it off. He was not a Catholic. The nun explained that it was an item of devotion. I was not happy that the scapular had been taken off, remembering the special indulgence accorded those who died wearing it.
He questioned me in a quiet authoritative voice and spent a lot of time taking my pulse and listening to my back and my chest with his stethoscope. Eventually he said that he didn’t think that I had had a severe heart attack; but he wanted me in hospital straight away. As he went off to make some phone calls, Father McCartie appeared with three hefty members of the sixth form. They carried me downstairs and out through the front door of the old hall to where the doctor’s car was parked. They placed me in a lying position on the back seat.
The doctor drove and Matron sat next to him. As we passed
through the country lanes, Matron did not take her eyes off me once; but she chatted a little with the doctor, telling him about her war service as a nurse. After driving for an hour or so I was conscious that we had left the countryside and entered a town. From where I lay looking up at the car windows I could see terraces of dark red-brick houses rising up the sides of the hills. Then there were clusters of strangely shaped chimneys, like fat black bottles, belching smoke. The doctor explained that the town was called Stoke-on-Trent, and it was also known as the Potteries, where china like Wedgwood was made to be sold all over the world. We were destined for the hospital known as the Staffordshire Royal Infirmary.
At the hospital I was placed in a wheelchair and propelled very slowly down a corridor to a room with various machines. A bespectacled man in a white coat came in. He introduced himself as Dr Gardiner and explained that he was a cardiologist, a heart specialist. He placed a number of wires with suction pads at various points over my chest and proceeded to work a machine placed on a trolley. As the contraption whirred and crackled, a paper printout emerged. It seemed strange to see my heart registered on paper as a series of peaks and troughs. Showing Dr Hall the results, Dr Gardiner said that he had never seen anything quite like it before. ‘This boy seems to have angina,’ he said, ‘but he is only fifteen or sixteen years of age.’
Before she and Dr Hall left, Mère Saint Luc asked if I wanted anything. I said impulsively: ‘Please bring me the life of Saint Thérèse from the library.’
Dr Gardiner said that until I was told otherwise I should have to lie flat and not raise my arms above my head. I asked him whether I could have caused my illness by bowling too vigorously. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that we can blame this on cricket.’
I was taken in a lift to a ward on the top storey of the hospital with views out over a residential district – rows and
rows of red-brick houses with smoking chimneys. There was a strong smell of antiseptic.
The ward sister came to see me. She was a short woman with an ample figure, wearing a starched frilly cap and a belted blue dress. She had a flat, shiny face, with placid eyes, and she sounded a little dreamy in her voice and manner. She pulled a screen around the bed and told me to take off all my clothes and put on a nightgown which opened at the back. As I did all this in full view of the woman I felt myself blushing with shame. She tied up the strings at the back of the gown and I felt her cold fingers on my back. After I had got between the sheets she sat for a while on the bed with my clothes, as if she had my life and my privacy just casually placed across her starched apron. I had a strong sense of her femininity; she was wearing nail varnish, and had an aura of faintly sweet scent.
When I asked her what was wrong with me, she said with a crooked little smile that I was a ‘mystery boy with a heart disease only suffered by old men’. This frightened me; I wondered whether my hair would go grey and fall out prematurely. As she walked off with my clothes, I felt as though she was taking my freedom and modesty down the ward with her.
I was the youngest person in the ward and found myself in a bay facing a man in his late fifties, called Mr Raymont. He told me that he was waiting for an operation on a ‘delicate part’ of his anatomy, but that when he was under the anaesthetic they would also take away an unsightly little polyp. He pointed to a red blob on the side of his nose. ‘I’m much more interested in losing this horrible thing,’ he said with a cheerless laugh. He wanted to engage me in conversation, but I felt too sad and tired.
The sister had told me that a nurse would come and give me a ‘blanket bath’ and I would have to use a bottle and a bedpan. I had earphones to listen to the radio, but I had nothing to read. I lay for along time rapt in my thoughts, watching the comings and goings on the ward, and looking
out at the view over the rooftops. If I was going to die, I thought, it would be a lonely death.
There was a ward maid called Hilda. She grumbled to herself while she cleaned around with a feather duster. I couldn’t possibly be dying, I thought, while a woman grumbled and cleaned under my bed with a ludicrous-looking set of feathers on a bamboo cane.
As it was getting dark Dr Gardiner appeared on the ward with two other younger doctors. Sister was in attendance. He told me that I was very ill, and that I must take great care not to put a strain on my heart otherwise there would be a recurrence of the attack I had experienced at school. He was not sure of the diagnosis, he said, but there were various possibilities. My symptoms were identical with those of angina pectoris caused by lack of blood supply to the heart muscle, but it was also possible that I was suffering from a disease known as pericarditis. He explained that the heart floats in a sac known as the pericardium and that sometimes the membrane becomes infected and inflamed, creating pain, palpitation and the build-up of fluid around the heart. He was hoping that it was pericarditis, but he was not taking any chances. He suggested that I now sit up a little, propped up by my pillows, rather than completely flat. On no account should I get out of bed until I had been given permission to do so, nor should I raise my hands above my head or strain myself.
‘Am I likely to die?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we won’t let that happen.’
From that moment I put all thoughts of death out of my mind.