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. Our attempt at mass murder was fortunately spotted.
I was chased by police 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. With vicious associates I assaulted a girl in a bomb shelter, putting our grubby hands down her knickers. She was in my class at school and had shown a liking for me. She looked at me in silent sorrow as I urged the others on.
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. I read the class copy of The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton until it fell to pieces. My craving for reading matter was eventually to be satisfied in an unexpected fashion.
My new class teacher, Sister Magdalen, with fading freckles and puckering bloodless lips, was a hard-worked, dedicated nun with charge of a class of more than 60 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 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.
Back at home, having bruised her hands with walloping me, Mum completed her punishment with the toe of a heavy shoe. There was talk of having me “put away”.
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 50 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.
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 straitjackets. I spent a lot of my time 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 to Chanctonbury Ring, a coppice of trees high on the downs with distant views of the sea. I stood intoxicated by the vistas and the fragrant air. A small aeroplane was wheeling high in the sky. 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. 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. “It’s only fit for pigs.” She looked away, saddened; and I felt wretched with myself and the world.
I returned 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.
Dad was by now chief grounds keeper at the Peel playing fields in Barkingside, at the outer reaches of the East End. We lived in a whitewashed box of a dwelling by the gates. The house was oppressed by my parents’ exhaustion and tension; my mother’s desperate longing for something better.
()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 Gants 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, 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.”
Back at school, my terrible sin against Sister Magdalen still unforgiven, I was placed, like a villain in the stocks, in a desk in the corridor. My formal education was over, but close to where I sat were shelves of battered books: Butler’s Lives of the Saints, hymnals, an ancient and incomplete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a set of 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.
When I reached 11 I was sent, as befitted an academic reject and troublemaker, to a Catholic secondary modern school on the Ilford High Road, an educational sink. 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.
SOON afterwards, however, the man in South Kensington brought an end to my delinquency.
I was unable to confide in anyone about him, least of all Dad; but I began to listen with greater concentration to the words of Father Cooney, our parish priest, 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.
At my mother’s suggestion I responded to a call from Father Cooney for altar servers. I discovered an unexpected satisfaction in the dance of the rituals and rhythm of the recitations. They calmed and soothed me. My religiosity on the altar was childishly puffed up. Father Cooney, I was convinced, was observing me on my knees before and after mass: an angelic child surrounded with sacred light; a glowing little saint in a stained-glass window.
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 began to speak to me with grudging respect. She had even taken to rewarding me with the cream that collected at the top of the milk bottle, 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.
I found a friend in an ageing woman of the parish, Miss Hyacinth Racine, who spent her days walking between her house and
the church, pulling a shopping trolley filled with reading matter. Most people tended to shun her. Mum said she was “a religious maniac”.
Unknown to anyone, I was often in her house, listening to her spellbound. 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 often spoke of a Marian shrine at a place called Aylesford priory in Kent. That year the Saint Vincent de Paul Society organised a free camping holiday there for boys of poor families. I was one of 60 taken in buses to camp in a field next to the gardens of the priory, which bordered the banks of the River Medway.
I watched the brown-and-white-robed friars singing 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.
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.
I daydreamed about Aylesford through the autumn and into the new year. I longed for that Carmelite cloister and the presence of the monks. Father Cooney’s church became for me a haven in the urban dreariness of Barkingside. 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.
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.
()The next evening I arrived at church early for solemn benediction. After vesting I looked into the sacristy. On the press stood the chalice in readiness for mass the following morning. I had an urge to touch the receptacle. I went on tiptoe across the parquet flooring and grasped the embossed stem of the sacred cup. At that moment I heard a gasp. Looking back I was seized with terror at the sight of Father Cooney perched on a stool behind the open sacristy door. He followed me with his eyes as I walked slowly past him, trembling, as if I had committed a sacrilege. He said not a word.
The following day Father Cooney asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up. I said I hoped to be a priest. Within a day it was settled that I should apply to the bishop to try my vocation at a minor seminary, a boarding college where young boys began their long training for the priesthood.
On the appointed day my mother took me on the bus to an interview with Bishop Andrew Beck of Brentwood. She was dressed in her purple coat with padded shoulders, which she kept for special occasions. I was in my elder brother’s navy blue jacket temporarily stitched up at the sleeves.
The bishop’s house was in the prosperous suburb of Woodford Green. Monsignor Shannon, the vicar general, greeted us. A stout man in a black suit, he had a flushed face as if he had climbed out of a bath. He ushered us into a room where the bishop held out a ringed hand for us to kiss.
I sat bolt upright on a straight-backed ornate chair trying to look alert and decent. The bishop wanted to know how many bedrooms we had in our house, and about the sleeping arrangements. I said that my three brothers and I, and sometimes my father too, slept in one room sharing three single beds. He asked if my father and elder brother went to church, and I said that Dad never went to church even at Christmas.
Then he spoke to Mum alone. I could tell from her pious expression when she emerged that everything had been agreeably settled.
When we reached home, Dad came in wearing his overalls. He and Mum had not been speaking to each other for some days. He had not been consulted about my visit to the bishop or its purpose. He appeared less pleased than Mum as she reported the proceedings of the morning. He was blinking frequently, as he often did when he was puzzled or nervous.
He said: “Are you sure, son?”
I had not the capacity to consider what it meant for Dad to be informed, without reference to his opinion, that I would leave home that autumn to begin my education for the priesthood. I did not consider his feelings or his opinion of any significance. I was filled with a sense of glowing ripeness and anticipation.
© John Cornwell 2006
Extracted from Seminary Boy by John Cornwell to be published by Fourth Estate on September 4 at £15.99. Copies can be ordered for £14.39 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585.
John Cornwell, who writes for The Sunday Times Magazine, directs a public understanding of science project at Jesus College, Cambridge. His recent books include The Pontiff in Winter and Hitler’s Pope.
'WE'LL BEAT YOU IF YOU TALK' – THE CHILL REALITY OF A SEMINARY
It was dark when I arrived, the air shockingly cold and pure. In a high ceilinged lobby, a priest in a cassock was standing at a noticeboard lit by a single naked bulb. 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, unsmiling.
“Cornwell? I’m Father McCartie, prefect of discipline.”
He took my bags and hurried ahead of me up four flights of a worn stone staircase. We entered a dimly lit dormitory like a tunnel under the eaves of the house. Black iron bedsteads with white coverlets stood close together. Dormer windows on each side were wide open to the raw air.
“That’s your berth,” said Father McCartie, pointing to a bed beneath one of the windows. 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.
This was Cotton College, the minor seminary in north Staffordshire where I was to start my preparation for the priesthood.
We proceeded down to the cloisters. Somewhere 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. 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. These boys were fresh and open-faced, their shoulders squared like boy soldiers’.
Father McCartie positioned me among them and we moved forward like a regiment of young undertakers into a church. My companions knelt with their faces buried in their hands.
Afterwards, in an oak-floored refectory, the boy who had knelt next to me introduced himself with a reassuring smile. “Welcome to Cotton.” But at a clangour of bells he said that we would not be allowed to speak again until breakfast the next day. “Watch out,” he said grimly. “You’ll be beaten by Leo if you’re caught talking, and so will anybody you’re caught talking to.” Leo was Father McCartie’s nickname.
I was the last to get into bed, where I lay shivering for several minutes. The air, carried on a stiff breeze through the dormer windows, was cold on my face. The sheets felt damp and the mattress was as lumpy as a sack of potatoes, but it was the first time I had slept in a bed to myself since I was a little boy.
Father McCartie began to walk along the lines of beds looking at each of the boys in turn. Then the dormitory was plunged in darkness. How comforting it would have been, I thought, had the priest wished us goodnight and blessed us.
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. I wondered what the family were doing back in London. My younger brothers would be fast asleep in their single bed, lying end to end.
I was dozing off when I was surprised by the sight of a black figure in the darkness moving silently along the dormitory. I guessed that it was Father McCartie. For an age, it seemed, I could see him standing in silence at the doorway halfway down the dormitory. Eventually he left. As I dozed, I felt the wild presence of the surrounding woods and hills which were to be my new home.
