Seminary Boy. John Cornwell

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       3

      FATHER COONEY recruited me as a candidate for the priesthood in this way. One Sunday evening I arrived at church early for Solemn Benediction. After vesting I looked into the sacristy. The room was silent, deserted. 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, after early morning Mass, Father Cooney asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up. I said confidently that 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. When Father Cooney put my name forward to the bishop I was approaching my thirteenth birthday. I was already a Johnny-come-lately: many boys of my generation had begun their priestly formation at the age of eleven.

      On the appointed day, my mother took me to an interview with the Right Reverend Bishop Andrew Beck of Brentwood. She was dressed in her purple coat with padded shoulders which she kept for special occasions; it was smart but her dress showed a few inches below the hem. I was dressed in my elder brother’s navy blue jacket temporarily stitched up at the sleeves. We sat at the front of the upper deck of the London Transport bus because Mum thought it a treat to have a view of the scenery on a journey. Riding northwards from the bus-stop outside Trebor’s mint factory, we passed Hill’s car showroom festooned with bunting snapping in the spring breeze. Then we crossed the River Roding with its smell of the sewage plant and passed under the Central Line railway bridge on our way to the towering Majestic cinema. In all that journey, I reflected, there was not a single sacred image to be seen. That was how I had begun to think.

      Bishop Beck’s diocese took in the county of Essex with its new towns and the poor districts of London’s East End, but he lived in the prosperous suburb of Woodford Green. The bishop’s house was set back from the road amidst clipped shrubberies. A gleaming black limousine stood on the gravel drive. Monsignor Shannon, the Vicar General, greeted us at the door. He was a stout man in a black suit, a cigarette perched between his fingers. He had a flushed face as if he had just climbed out of a steaming bath. He spoke to us softly, advising us to address the bishop as ‘My Lord’. He ushered us into a room where the bishop sat at a desk with his back to French windows. He got up and held out his ringed hand for us to kiss.

      He was a lean, dark-haired, exhausted-looking man with a sallow face. He was watching me intently through half-horn-rimmed spectacles. I sat bolt upright on a straight-backed ornate chair trying to look alert and decent. He spoke for a while about Father Cooney’s recommendation. Looking up at the ceiling, he said: ‘How lucky you are to have Father Cooney as your parish priest.’ Then he asked my mother if she would mind waiting outside.

      He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and dictated a passage from St John’s Gospel, which I wrote down accurately. Then he 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. He wanted to know how I liked my school. I said I liked it well enough. I had no inclination to tell him of the fights in the school yard, and the impure larks in the evil-smelling latrines.

      ‘If you are to be a priest one day,’ he said eventually, ‘you will have to study hard to be an educated man. Ordination alters your entire soul…You must become a holy man.’

      He asked how I felt about going away to a boarding school, the minor seminary. ‘You might be homesick,’ he said. ‘What do you think about that?’

      I tried not to betray my anxiety. I was afraid that I might say something that would make him withdraw the suggestion. ‘I would like that very much,’ I virtually whispered.

      Then he called my mother back, and it was my turn to go out into the hallway where Monsignor Shannon was at the ready with a biscuit and a glass of milk.

      When Mum emerged accompanied by the bishop I could tell from her expression, a pious look she wore in church after taking Communion, that everything had been agreeably settled. The bishop explained that since our diocese was poor it had no minor or senior seminaries of its own. He would have me lodged in a seminary owned by one of the larger, more prosperous dioceses of England. ‘It will be a long way from home,’ he said, with a warning look.

      I tried to appear intrepid.

      On the bus, I surveyed the Godless landscape, rejoicing inwardly that I was soon destined to depart for a very different world where there would be constant visible reminders of the Mother of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Eventually Mum patted me on the arm and said she was proud of me. When we reached home, the house that went with my father’s job on the sports ground, she looked down at me with her lustrous grey eyes. ‘I just wonder whether it’s really you,’ she said. ‘But we’ll see…I should be so proud! And as your saintly grandmother used to say: gain a priest – never lose a son.’

      Later Dad came in from the sports ground wearing his overalls. Dad 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.

       4

      MY MOTHER, KATHLEEN, whose maiden name was Egan, told me that she became desperate on discovering in the autumn of 1939, days after Britain declared war on Germany, that she was pregnant again. She was twenty-five years of age. It would be her third child under three. In those days the family lived in East Ham, a working-class district close to the London docks north of the River Thames. Dad was out all day seeking casual labour by the hour on the wharves. He had a withered, unbending left leg and was always among the last to be hired.

      If she had another baby, how would she manage? And to bring another child into a world at war! Mum began to pray day and night that she would lose the baby. Then she felt guilty. Wasn’t it a mortal sin for a pregnant mother to pray for a miscarriage? She went to see Father Heenan. Father Heenan, who would one day become Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was in 1939 a young, East End parish priest. According to Mum, the priest, from where he sat, extended both his legs, stiff at the knees, to reveal the holes in his shoes right through to his socks. He said: ‘Don’t be afraid, Kathleen, we’re all poor. Trust in God: he will provide!’ She began to pray fervently to Saint Gerard Magella, patron saint of childbirth, for the safe delivery of the baby that was me.

      In the early summer of 1940, as a test air-raid warning wailed over London, I came dancing into time in my parents’ bed in Carlyle Road. Our accommodation, which sheltered my parents and elder brother and sister, was two rooms of a terrace house backing on to a busy rail route that ran from the conurbations СКАЧАТЬ