On my last summer holiday at the minor seminary I ran into my father
in the east London suburb of South Woodford. His heavy limp, a
handicap from childhood, seemed more labored than I remembered. As
he toiled up George Lane his hand motions were like a man steadying
a skittish horse on a leading rein. His hair was plastered down with
brilliantine and he was wearing a new raincoat, collar turned up in
the manner of Humphrey Bogart. He accosted me affably with his
familiar limelight smile, as if greeting an invisible audience
somewhere above my head. Nobody would have guessed he had left my
mother and his five children a year earlier.
Standing outside Woolworth’s, chatting about the new soccer season,
he was fishing for something in his trouser pocket. I glimpsed a
ten-shilling note. Then he fetched out a large bright horse
chestnut, a conker. Buffing it on his sleeve, he handed it over,
saying: “Cheerio there, Jack.”
I stood watching him until he was swallowed up in the lobby of the
Majestic cinema, where a matinee was about to begin. He did not look
back. I would not lay eyes on him again for forty-five years.
I was missing him, but he had always been more of a troublesome
sibling than an ideal father. In any case, I had other father
figures to contend with.
2
Father James Cooney, pastor of my early adolescent years, was an
austere soul. He had a drawn gray face and blood-raw eyelids. His
cracked celluloid clerical collar was the color of soiled snow. It
was the rigid cheap sort that priests and seminarians could launder
in seconds with a damp cloth. He would kneel at the altar rail in
our empty church, eyes shut tight, grizzled head listing in
concentration. When he looked up toward the tabernacle, he seemed to
be adjusting his vision to the scene of his life’s mission-the east
London district of Barkingside. Father Cooney was in resigned exile
from Skibbereen, County Cork.
From the age of eleven until I departed for the minor seminary, aged
thirteen, to begin my education for the priesthood, I served Father
Cooney’s Mass at seven o’clock every weekday morning in what he
called his “old bit of a church,” dedicated to Saint Augustine the
missionary to the English. On Sundays the people stood three deep in
the aisles; latecomers huddled out in the yard. To reduce the
pressure he celebrated an extra Mass on the southern border of the
parish in a disused army hut next to a pet cemetery, where dogs,
cats, and horses were buried beneath headstones. Father Cooney would
gaze bleakly out of the hut window, disparaging “the pagan English
customs over the way.” I served Mass at the Camp, as we called it,
before cycling up to Saint Augustine’s to assist as censer bearer at
the sung High Mass. In the afternoon I returned to serve at Solemn
Benediction, when Father Cooney led the singing of his favorite
hymn:
Lord, for tomorrow and its needs
I do not pray.
But Father Cooney was struggling to supply the needs of tomorrow in
the form of a larger church. Holding up the offertory plates he
would reproach us: “Copper! Copper! Where’s the silver!” In the
meantime he was watching the pennies. Around the church and the
presbytery he wore a frayed, black-trying-to-be-green cassock. In
winter he went shod in army boots; in summer, black canvas
sneakers-what we called plimsolls-sometimes without socks. He
chopped his own hair. When I stood close to him in the sanctuary on
summer days, he smelled like a sack of fertilizer.
At High Mass, the segment of charcoal cake, painstakingly excised
with a razor blade, was minuscule, the incense grains sparse. When I
swung the censer high to make the smoke billow, he would come
suddenly out of his meditative mode. “Not so briskly, child!” he
would hiss. When we buried parishioners in the Catholic section of
the local cemetery, the charcoal was a morsel of white ash by the
time we reached the graveside. It seemed to me strange, Father
Cooney swinging a cold, smokeless censer at the coffin. At Low Mass
he would ease a teardrop of wine into the chalice. The candles on
the altar were dark, guttering stubs appropriated from Our Lady’s
votive rack. He would light them at the last moment, and snuff them
with a singed pinch before he had even finished the words of the
Last Gospel.
He was a shy man. If we met outside church he would incline his
head, silently acknowledging the bond between himself and his daily
Mass server. Sometimes he made a peculiar noise, a substitute for
saying anything definite: “Wisswiss … wisswiss.” When the
children gathered around him in the school yard he would make a
nuisance-fly gesture: “Very good! So! … wisswiss … Run along
now!” Addressing women, young or middle-aged, he would stand
sideways on to them, bleakly descrying objects of curious interest
in the distance. But I have seen him comforting in his arms a widow
wracked with grief at her husband’s graveside.
He was tireless in the service of the sick and the dying. I would
see him out in all weathers on his rusty bicycle, visiting the
inmates at the Claybury mental asylum and the bedridden at King
George V Hospital. Careering unsteadily along the street, narrowly
missed by buses and lorries, he gripped the handlebars with one
hard-knuckled hand; the other would nurse the Sacrament within his
breast pocket.
He was self-effacing. When he dropped an object from his arthritic
hands, he would whisper to himself, bending over painfully:
“Wisswiss … Imbecile it is!” If he caught the servers fooling
around before High Mass, he would mutter: “Boys will be boys as the
hills are green far off!” But he could get exasperated with our
choir when they droned on beyond the Offertory. “Orate, frates …
Enough of that!”
My mother used to say that when you confessed your sins to Father
Cooney it was “like going on trial for your life.” Often he made me
repeat my purpose of amendment: “Say it again … As if you meant
it, now!” But he always ended with the heartfelt murmur “Be sure now
and pray for me-the unworthy sinner.”
On Sundays he would preach on the gospel of the day before straying
to his weekly hobbyhorse, the News of the World, which “desecrated
the Sabbath by its very existence,” lingering hissingly over that
final sibilant. Then he would excoriate the barbershops which sold
“prophylactics,” which I associated in my innocence with mysterious
idols of a false religion. “No dacent, upright Catholic gentleman,”
he would say, “should give custom to such a one as does the Divil’s
business now!”
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
profanity. 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 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 as a candidate for the priesthood 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 George 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 northward
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 Saint John’s gospel, which I did well. 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 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 gray 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, was desperate on
learning 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 and the family was
destitute. In those days the family lived in East Ham, a
working-class district close to the London docks north of the river
Thames. According to Mum’s stories, Dad was out all day seeking
casual labor 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 should 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 grew anxious. Was it a mortal sin for
a pregnant mother to pray for a miscarriage? She went to see her
parish priest of those days, Father Heenan. 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: “Kathleen, we’re all poor. Trust in God: he will provide!”
She began to pray fervently to Saint Gerard Majella, patron saint of
childbirth, for the safe delivery of the baby that was me.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Seminary Boy
by John Cornwell
Copyright © 2006 by John Cornwell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Doubleday
Copyright © 2006
John Cornwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-51486-7
