Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 10

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 of Essex to the City of London. I was to be named in baptism after Father Heenan: John Carmel. In Saint Stephen’s church Father Heenan blew in my face in the form of a cross, commanding my unclean spirit to depart. Even as he touched my tongue with salt to preserve me from corruption, the air-raid sirens were singing out again. It was not a test warning. The priest cut the rest of the service, save for the cleansing waters of baptism, dropping my intended second name: Carmel. The baptismal party, myself cradled in my godmother Aunt Nelly Egan’s arms, made for the public shelter even as Father Heenan called after me: ‘John, go in peace…’