Authors: John Cornwell
In the years before I became devout and felt called by Jesus to follow Him, I had been as wicked as was possible for a child washed in Christian baptism. Sister Paul informed Mum that I had a ‘black streak’. I was physically strong for my age, demonically restless and sudden to anger. My childhood agitation was like a fever. It was as if I was permanently waiting,
on edge, for the sound of the old wartime sirens; hankering for a heart-stopping explosion.
I suffered the stigma of one ‘lazy’ dim-sighted eye, just like Mum’s. When I was tired my eye turned inwards as if straining to see inside my brain. It provoked taunts from other children, who would imitate my affliction to my face until they knew me better. My knuckles would be covered in their blood. The nuns called me ‘sly-boots’, commanding me to look them ‘properly in the eye like a dacent fellow!’ When I looked at myself in a mirror I could see what they meant. My shifty myopic eyes were at war with each other, swivelling and blinking in a restless head. Mealtimes at home were the worst. Through poor hand–eye coordination I tended to make scraping noises, knock over cups, miss my mouth and spill food down my front and on to the floor. Eyeing me from on high, fork-hand trembling, as if at any moment she would skewer and devour me, Mum would struggle to maintain her patience. Crying out between her new false teeth, she would throw down her cutlery and set about me.
Yet Mum herself was no less clumsy. Dishes leapt from her hands, needles pricked her fingers, the stove burnt the porridge, and our cat, despite Mum’s training regime, peed on the kitchen floor. We all of us, including the porridge, felt the avenging Egan hand. As for the cat, I have seen our poor drop-kicked Moggy, paws pedalling frantically, crash-land on the yard fence with a scream.
After a visit to an optician I was made to wear an evil-smelling black bakelite ‘colluder’ on a pair of wire spectacle frames to blank out my good eye and so to encourage the weak and wayward one, now assisted by a lens as thick as a magnifying glass. I was always taking off the colluder. I hated the comments it evoked: ‘ ‘Ere comes Punch’s sore-eyed dog,’ quipped Uncle Mike, ever the creative and well-meaning genius of the Egan vulgarism. So Mum took to covering the good eye with a large square of sticky plaster. Since the sight in my lazy
eye provided no more than peripheral vision, I was always walking into trees and lamp-posts. I would rip off the plaster, a prelude to retribution.
Desperate for companionship, reckless of punishment and danger, I became an under-aged thug. I trailed a gang of older lads, haunting bombed-out houses and tenements. Others had been there before us, but there was always something to smash. The blasted staircases and sagging floors, especially on the higher storeys, were terrifying. My talent for atrocious mayhem earned me the respect of my elders. One day, at my prompting, four of us struggled to place an iron girder on a railway track, aiming to derail an express train bound for Liverpool Street Station. Our attempt at mass murder was fortunately spotted. I was chased by police and railway workers for throwing bricks at the windows of passing trains, thrashed by a builder for setting fire to a house he was rebuilding, hit by a car as I ran away from a shop where I had stolen a pack of cigarettes. I did a lot of hitting myself. I nearly killed the boy next door by whacking him over the head with my elder brother’s cricket bat. He had contradicted me. I lied to the nuns to get a goody-goody boy into trouble, alleging he had misbehaved on the bus. With vicious associates I assaulted a girl in a disused bomb shelter, putting our grubby hands down her knickers. She was in my class at school and she had earlier shown a liking for me. She looked at me in silent sorrow as I urged the others on.
Was there no one in my childhood who calmed me with tokens of affection? My Aunt Rose, Tommy Cornwell’s wife, was a vivacious young cockney woman with thick blonde hair, a smoky voice and a husky laugh. She had two children of her own, Sylvia and young Tommy, but all children were her own children, and she seemed in a state of tearful, permanent wonder at their lovable natures. Her voice, full of heartfelt affection, filled me with joy. She was the light of my life, but she appeared all too seldom.
And what of my uncles? Mum’s six brothers were garrulous egotists who loved to put children down. Only Uncle Mike, Mum’s youngest brother, displayed an affectionate interest in us. He told us jokes and would sing popular songs in a pleasant crooning voice. Dad’s three brothers were in the Royal Navy. They would appear briefly on occasional leave, smart in their spotless uniforms. They were hard men and talked with nose-blocked accents. When angry they would screw up their lips in a silent whistle. Uncle John, a submariner, could be spiteful. He had a wife, our Aunt Edie, who wore a wig, but they had no children.
Uncle John: ‘How would you like a tasty bar of chocolate, Jack?’
‘Yes please, Uncle John.’
‘Well, I can’t give you one see Jack ‘cos I ain’t got none!’
Then he would hoot with laughter, looking down on me with a mad gleam in his eye.
I
WAS HAPPIEST
at the cinema. When
Scott of the Antarctic
, starring John Mills, was shown at the Plaza, I stole money from Mum’s purse and skipped school every afternoon to enter the darkened auditorium from which I faced the lands of brilliant white light. The world of the cinema merged with the world of church, everybody facing one way. Sometimes I found myself genuflecting towards the screen as I came out into the cinema aisle.
All the children in our school were taken by the nuns to see Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in
The Bells of Saint Mary’s.
I was bored and kept up a facetious running commentary, with screeches of forced laughter as I identified each ill-favoured
nun on the screen as one of our own: ‘Watch out! ‘Ere comes Sister Paul again…’ At one point I got a stinging smack round the ear from Sister Paul who had crept up on me in the dark.
Despite the dysfunction of these years Sister Paul taught me to read and write. When I found a book I liked I gorged on it greedily again and again. I read the class copy of
The Island of Adventure
by Enid Blyton until it fell to pieces. At home there was little reading matter: Mum’s
The Key to Heaven
(subtitled ‘A Selection of Prayers and Devotional Exercises’), a two-volume illustrated encyclopedia of housekeeping, and the
Evening News.
My craving for reading matter was eventually to be satisfied in an unexpected fashion as a result of what I did to my new class teacher, Sister Magdalen.
Sister Magdalen, with fading freckles and puckering bloodless lips, was a hard-worked, dedicated teacher, with charge of a class of more than sixty children. One day for some trivial playground misdemeanour she pulled me into the empty classroom by my ear while making indentations in my scalp with her knuckles. Enraged, I seized the wooden blackboard T-square which lay handy on her desk and whacked her around the head, ripping her veil off. The sight of her shorn gingery scalp paralysed me with fascination for a few seconds. She stood there yelling, holding her head, before flying at me. So I went on whacking until our plump headmistress Sister Dolores came hurtling in and pinned me to the ground with her superior weight.
Mum was sent for. She towered over me white-knuckled as the breathless reports of my sacrilegious attack were recounted. Back at home, having bruised her hands with walloping me, Mum completed her punishment with the toe of a heavy shoe. In the days that followed there was talk of having me ‘put away’. Mum took me to a clinic in a church hall on a street called Snakes Lane. A man and several women sat behind a table covered with a green cloth. He said: ‘Take a biscuit, boy!’ He was pointing to a tin box of biscuits on the table. As I
nibbled at the biscuit my case was discussed over my head. Mum uttered the word ‘wilful’ a great many times. At one point I reached out for another biscuit, but the man growled: ‘One biscuit only!’
I was sent to a ‘convalescent home’ run by the London County Council in a remote flintstone farmhouse on the Downs near Worthing in Sussex. Lodged in this place were some fifty boys suffering from a variety of physical and emotional disorders. I saw in some of them the same evasive, drowning eyes that I witnessed in my mirror. Many were being treated for additional slum-district afflictions – impetigo, ringworm and scabies; several had cotton wool stuck in their ears or sported suppurating boils on their necks. Some were pale, stick thin. Our beefy minders were known as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’. If we misbehaved we were not beaten; we were tied into our beds with skilfully knotted bandage bonds for hours on end like berserk patients in strait-jackets.
Soon after my arrival I became involved with a villainous older boy, whose face was daubed with red antiseptic paint covering an impetigo scab as big as a lobster. One day he invited me to insert my forefinger, after wetting it thoroughly with my spittle, into an empty light socket. He had said to me: ‘D’you wanna see an angel?’ It was a hard way to learn about the power of electricity. Had I enjoyed a precocious gift for irony, I would have seen it as an apt recompense for my knicker-fingering exploits in disused bomb shelters. The experiment nearly killed me and I ended up in bed swaddled in blankets. When I got better I could not wait to try it out on new arrivals. I spent a lot of my time in that place tied into my bed.
It was in Sussex that I first experienced wonder at the open countryside. One afternoon an ‘aunt’ took a group of us for a walk along footpaths to Chanctonbury Ring, a coppice of trees high on the Downs with distant views of the sea. I stood on the side of the hill intoxicated by the vistas and the fragrant
air. The sea was a distant line of fiery light. A small aeroplane was droning high in the sky, wheeling and glinting in the sunlight like a dragonfly. I threw out my arms as if they were wings and ran in circles, wild with delight. Then I threw myself down by ‘aunt’s’ side.
‘Well, John, what do you think of the countryside?’ she said. Unusual for the staff in that place, she was young and pretty, red in the cheek and pleasant. She was looking at me expectantly.
Something got into me. I did not want to give the impression that I had become tame and a softie.
‘It’s shitty!’ I whined, making a sour expression. ‘It’s only fit for pigs.’
She looked away, saddened; and I felt wretched with myself and the world.
I
RETURNED HOME
to London after three months, full of energy for renewed mischief, fattened out on a diet of unlimited porridge, eggs, bacon and doorsteps of bread and jam. Back at school, my terrible sin against Sister Magdalen still unforgiven, I was banished from the set being prepared for the Eleven Plus examination for entrance into academic grammar schools. I was placed, like a villain in the stocks, in a desk for two out in the corridor with an overgrown lad smelling of stale urine who did not know what a book was for, let alone how to read it.
The desk was sited where Sister Dolores could keep an eye on us from her office. She sat very still, with an expressionless face like a Buddha. I was trapped for a year in that desk. On the wall behind us was the shrine to Saint Maria Goretti, the
Italian virgin, stabbed to death at the age of eleven because she refused to ‘besmirch her chastity’ with the lodger. Details of Maria Goretti’s story, which was intended to promote purity in the Catholic young, prompted a darkly pleasurable excitation in my genitals. It was my special task to keep Saint Maria Goretti’s votive lamps trimmed and lit.
My formal education in primary school had come to an end the moment I attacked Sister Magadalen, but close to where I sat in the corridor were shelves containing a chaos of battered books: Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
, outdated Catholic directories, hymnals, an ancient and incomplete edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and a set of novels and short stories by Charles Dickens. I spent many undisturbed hours reading about saints like Simeon Stylites who lived at the top of a pole, or devouring encyclopaedia entries on such mysteries as the history, economy and geography of Bulgaria. Best of all I lost myself in the plots of
David Copperfield
,
Great Expectations
, and
A Christmas Carol.
At eleven I was released from the corridor and sent, as befitted an academic reject and troublemaker, to a Catholic Secondary Modern school on the Ilford High Road. The building was lit by gaslight, heated by open fires, and surrounded by a caged yard. Saints Peter and Paul was in those days an educational sink for an area that stretched from Barking, east of where my mother had been brought up, to Dagenham where Ford workers and their families lived. The head teacher, Mr J. O. Murphy, a red-necked Irishman, spent a lot of his day spying on boys. He would hide in cupboards, peep through keyholes, and stand on a ladder in order to peer around a corner from a high vantage point. He caned me almost daily, not for specific misdemeanours but on a generalised assumption that I deserved it. My classroom teacher was an exotic middle-aged woman called Roma de Roper, who had once been a professional actress. She devised bizarre theatricals mostly involving magic potions and wizards. She was a civilised contrast
rather than a sufficient antidote to the male teachers. Since we had no games facilities, except for the Ilford public swimming pool, the boys’ principal sport was boxing, with a vindictive tendency to mismatch troublemakers with heavier partners.
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.