Seminary Boy. John Cornwell
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Название: Seminary Boy
Автор: John Cornwell
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007285624
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Mum, being the only girl, looked after three brothers who were still at home, and the aged and cantankerous Scottish uncle. She also became responsible for shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as being the breadwinner – a factory worker on early morning shifts. Her brothers abused her verbally, and sometimes physically, although not without explosive retribution. She continued like this for three years until she met Dad at a dance in the Spiller’s factory social club. She found him handsome and funny. But she married him, she would say later, as a result of his determination and her pity for his handicap. She was twenty-one; he was twenty-four.
My father became a Catholic to satisfy the virtual ban on mixed marriages. Mum says he was an eager convert. Once married, however, he seldom went to church. We grew up thinking him a lost soul. His mother, Grandma Lillian, being a Jew, was deemed doubly a lost soul. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Jews was matched only by their hatred of Protestants. I once heard an Egan uncle referring to my genial Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.
MUM’S DISILLUSIONMENT with Dad began with a wartime episode. To escape the air raids in London, Mum and we three children went to stay in the market town of Bicester in Oxfordshire while Dad stayed on in East Ham. During our absence, Dad got involved with a girl he met in a public air-raid shelter. Mum discovered this when she returned to East Ham without warning and found an intimate letter written from an address on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary.
Mum set off on the train to pay the girl a visit. When she arrived at South Benfleet, the station for Canvey Island, she saw Dad on the opposite platform. He waved nonchalantly (‘As if to say: “Here we are again!’”) before nipping on to a train bound back to London. So she proceeded to the address where she found the girl, aged just nineteen, living with her mother. Mum discovered that Dad had constructed a web of fantasies about himself. He claimed to be a master carpenter and had offered to take on the girl’s younger brother as an apprentice. To Mum’s fury in the those times of wartime food shortages, he had turned over his ration book to the girl’s mother.
Retrieving the precious book, Mum set off for London determined to end the marriage. Back in East Ham she confronted him. He confessed all and begged forgiveness, but she was adamant, absolutely adamant, until she went round to see my devout godmother Aunt Nelly. After many tears and over many cups of tea Aunt Nelly persuaded Mum that Dad’s erring behaviour was a consequence of ‘this terrible, terrible war’ and that God would surely wish her to forgive him and stay with him. So Mum did what she believed her Faith expected of her. We all moved back to East Ham, to Dad, and the bombing.
Some nine months later, brother Terry and my sister Maureen were evacuated to the north of England in the national scheme to save children from the flying bombs and V2 rockets. At the departure point Mum was carrying little Michael in her arms, the product of her post-Canvey reconciliation with Dad. My elder siblings looked down at us from the bus that would take them to the railway station: two sets of huge sorrowful eyes gazing accusingly through the window. They had labels bearing their names tied into the lapels of their raincoats. I have an impression that I could not wait for them to go.
BY LATE 1944, and after four wartime home removals, I was attending a Catholic primary school run by Irish nuns and spinsters. The yellow brick building surrounded by a fenced-in gravel yard was like a stockade surrounded by a hostile world of unbelief. One Sunday a V2 rocket destroyed a nearby Anglican church killing most of the congregation. The next day Miss Doonan, who taught us so piously to make the sign of the Cross, informed us that these people had been punished by God because they were Protestants.
My understanding of the Faith had been marked since infancy by wonder and illusion. The people sighed and bowed and sang together. Why did they do that? When the man at the front turned and raised his arms, he made the bells ring. The man was holding up what looked like a gold clock. When the people bowed their heads deeply, Mum said we were bowing towards God. ‘God’, then, was a clock, and the clock made people bow and sing and walk in circles.
These operations of cause and effect were puzzling. The day before we celebrated the end of the war in Europe, I was humming to myself, skipping ahead of the girl who took me to school, when two bull terriers hurtled around the corner and sank their teeth into my plump legs. I spent the morning in a doctor’s surgery being stitched up and painted with iodine. According to the policeman who visited our house on Victory Day in Europe, the dogs’ owner claimed that I made the animals bite me by my singing and dancing.
That autumn my elder siblings came back from evacuation. They had been lodged in Bolton, Lancashire, with two indulgent spinsters. My sister Maureen wore a red frock and her hair was in ringlets tied with silk ribbons. She spoke in a strange accent, laughing excitedly. I thought she had an adorable face and I fell in love with her in an instant; yet she would not deign to look at me, despite my attempts to be noticed. My brother Terry, a few weeks short of his ninth birthday, and raven-haired like my father, did not take his eyes off me: he was like a black cat with very still yellow eyes. He had returned from exile to find a younger brother living on the emotional fat of our mother’s affections. At tea I blew a raspberry at him. Then he invited me to step out into the yard where, I informed him with a wave of a small hand, ‘All this is mine.’ Why, I wondered, was his face swollen like a boiled tomato? The next thing, I was lying on the ground with a mouthful of blood and three milk teeth down my throat. My sister’s home-coming rapture did not last long. I have a recollection of her bitter wailing that evening as Mum took the scissors to those ‘silly’ ringlets which would only harbour nits.
With the arrival of a fifth child, brother Jimmy, the product apparently of Victory euphoria, our financial situation became ever more precarious. Mum and Dad worked hard to keep us respectable, clean and well fed, but we brushed our teeth with soot from the chimney (an old East End tactic), had our hair washed with carbolic soap, and ate bread and margarine for tea on a kitchen table covered with newspaper. A tonguetied Irish lodger supplemented the household income. Terry, Michael and I shared a bedroom with him. He put curlers in his hair each night and smoked in bed. Dad grew cabbages out back and Mum kept five chickens.
Mum’s mood darkened, a circumstance linked in my mind with two physical misfortunes. Before dawn one morning, looking for eggs in the run, she trod on a rusty nail planted in a piece of wood carelessly left by Dad; it went right through her foot. Not long afterwards, she had her top row of teeth out, a popular practice in those days since dentists earned more for extractions than fillings. They were replaced with ill-fitting false ones. Mum’s new menacing melancholy was also associated in my mind with churchgoing, and what the nuns told us at school. One day Sister Paul unrolled a picture which she hung on the wall for a whole day. It showed naked people standing in beds of fire. ‘These are the souls of the dead who died in mortal sin,’ she said. Talk of sin made me think of dirty cinders in the fire grate. ‘They are burning there for ever,’ she said. The next day she showed us a picture of the ‘holy souls in purgatory’, where people stood in pits of grey ash. Mum spoke often of praying for ‘the holy souls in purgatory’. But when I first heard those words I heard ‘the sorry holes in the lavatory’.
Eventually I came to understand that the clock-God was a glass case that held СКАЧАТЬ