Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 13

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.