Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 14

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 a white circle of wafer bread. The round white wafer was God, which I came to eat. I put out my tongue and there he was. God was sour and soggy in my saliva. You must not bite him, Sister Paul said. You must not let him touch your teeth or the roof of your mouth. Let him rest on your tongue until you are ready to swallow him whole. I could feel him sliding down inside me, the slimy little God inside me, in under my roof. I was a little house and God could sit inside my tummy. As we walked in twos back to school for our First Communion breakfast of custard and jelly, I passed Mum standing by the school gate, gazing down at me with a peculiar expression of sadness.