Seminary Boy (5 page)

I
HAD ABANDONED
the bad company of former years, and I now found a friend in an ageing woman of the parish. Miss Hyacinth Racine, who was probably in her late seventies at that time, used to haunt the pamphlet rack in the church porch. Deeply stooped, she had a prominent hook nose with hang-glider nostrils. She spent her days walking between her house and the church, pulling a shopping trolley filled with reading matter. She spoke in an accent I identified as upper class. When I held the plate beneath her bristly chin at Communion, her tongue leapt out like a trembling yellow lizard. Most people tended to shun her. Mum said she was ‘a religious maniac’.

One day after Mass at the Camp, she invited me to her home. She lived and slept at the back of her semi-detached villa amid piles of old books, holy pictures, statues and devotional knick-knacks. There were French windows looking out on to a garden wilderness of brambles. On my first visit I asked if she was a widow. She told me that she was once engaged to a man who went ‘missing in action’ in the Great War. Every year, she said, she went to Leyton station on the date he
had departed and stood at the point where he had waved her goodbye. ‘For years I used to wear on that day the dress in which I said my farewell, until the moths got it.’

Some day, she assured me, he would come back.

My friendship with Miss Racine started shortly after my eleventh birthday. After that, unknown to anyone, I was often in her house, listening to her spellbound while I ate her stale biscuits and drank the weak tea she brewed in the kitchen where marauding cats had their muzzles into every item of food. 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 gave me a relic of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the French nun who died aged twenty-four and was venerated the world over as a patron saint of priests and the missions. It was a tiny leather wallet containing a piece of cloth that had touched the saint’s bones. On another occasion she gave me a ‘scapular’, two pieces of brown cloth not much larger than postage stamps attached to each other by silken threads, to be worn beneath one’s clothing across the back and across the breast. Those who died wearing this object, she said, were guaranteed an ‘indulgence’: release from purgatory and entry into heaven on the first Saturday following their death.

Miss Racine was mainly a gossip. She never tried to preach. But she prompted an important event in my late childhood which led to my call to the priesthood. She often spoke of her visits to a Marian shrine at a place called Aylesford in Kent. That year the Saint Vincent de Paul Society organised a free camping holiday at Aylesford priory for boys of poor families in the parish. Mum put my name forward and I was accepted.

S
IXTY BOYS WERE
taken in buses from London’s East End to camp in a field next to the gardens of the priory which bordered the banks of the River Medway in Kent. Aylesford had once been the site of a medieval Carmelite foundation from which the friars were expelled at the Reformation. After the Second World War a group of Irish Carmelites had purchased the ruins and rebuilt them as a shrine to Our Lady who, according to tradition, had appeared there in the hollow of an oak tree. In those early days of its revival Aylesford was a romantic place surrounded by the unspoilt Kent countryside.

I watched the brown-and-white-robed friars singing in their renovated church, 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. The singing of the monks, from one side of the choir to the other, created a reassuring rhythm that seemed to echo deep into my heart. At Aylesford I experienced something even more transforming than morning Mass: 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.

The Prior, Father Malachy Lynch, was a large man with a great swatch of silver hair combed across the dome of his head. He spoke to me sitting on a stone ledge in the cloisters. He told me that angels had kept guard over the ruins of the
monastery through the years when Catholic practice had been banned in England. He said that he had often seen angels, and that he had a sense of the presence of my own guardian angel who ‘loved me very much’. One day, walking in the monastery gardens he said something that had a deep and lasting effect on me. It was natural, he said, for human beings to look for God as a son seeks a lost father: ‘We are put on this earth to search for God.’ He said that some people look for God with greater determination than others: ‘That is what we do here at Aylesford. We friars make ourselves free to do nothing but search for God.’ Before I left Aylesford to return to London, Father Malachy Lynch gave me a book,
The Imitation of Christ.
It was bound in black leather, the pages were edged in red. It slipped easily into my jacket pocket.

A
FTER I RETURNED
to the Peel and Saints Peter and Paul School, I daydreamed about Aylesford through the autumn and into the New Year. I longed for that Carmelite cloister and the presence of the monks. I began to spend more and more time in Father Cooney’s ‘old bit of a church’ which became for me a haven in the urban dreariness of Barkingside. The smell of candle grease, the flickering sanctuary lamp, the scent of incense, thin as it was, transported me back to Aylesford in my imagination. 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. And it now no longer mattered to me whether Father Cooney was there to observe me. Nor did it matter whether Mum knew where I was and what I was doing.

In
The Imitation of Christ
I read: ‘If you would understand
Christ’s words fully and taste them truly you must strive to form your whole life after His pattern.’ My earlier Mass serving and displays of piety had placed me at the centre of my fantasies: the young hero saint. Now I was no longer the single and exclusive focus of my religious life. I was beginning to be interested in the person of Jesus for his own sake, as the admirable father. I saw him as he was depicted on the front of Mum’s prayer book,
The Key of Heaven
, which she had possessed since her wedding day. It showed Jesus as a beautiful, mild-eyed, bearded man, pointing to his fiercely burning heart. Protective, understanding, generous, he was a father who loved us more than his own life. In
The Imitation of Christ
I sensed his concern for the poor, for the sick and the dying; his love of the meek and the peacemakers. I felt his love for children: for me. This image of Jesus merged with my memories of Father Malachy Lynch with his flowing gestures and soft reassuring voice. As I knelt in prayer in Saint Augustine’s church I had the feeling that Jesus was calling me to himself, just as Father Malachy had described the call of Jesus: the invitation to spend my life seeking to know him; the call to imitate him.

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. I was filled with the love of Jesus: me for him, and him for me; it was as if I was shedding a warm glowing light on the entire world. As I cycled back to the Peel, past streets of terraced houses, past suburban avenues of little semi-detached houses with their privet hedges, storm porches, bird baths and garden fixtures, this entire Godless world seemed bathed in sacred radiance.

It was the next day that I crept into the sacristy before Solemn Benediction and grasped that sacred chalice, as if I were taking possession of my future calling, only to be scared out of my wits by Father Cooney, perched on a stool behind the door. Then came that morning, when as if by providence, Father Cooney turned to me at the end of Mass: ‘Wisswiss…now then, John…What is it that you want to be when you grow up?’

I told him, confidently, that I wanted to be a priest at Aylesford. I expected his joyous approval. I was not prepared for his retort: ‘Wisswiss…There are far too many monks and friars…Our Lord needs priests for our 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.

T
HE 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.