Seminary Boy. John Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ