Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 16

I WAS HAPPIEST at the cinema. When Scott of the Antarctic, starring John Mills, was shown at the Plaza, I stole money from Mum’s purse and skipped school every afternoon to enter the darkened auditorium from which I faced the lands of brilliant white light. The world of the cinema merged with the world of church, everybody facing one way. Sometimes I found myself genuflecting towards the screen as I came out into the cinema aisle.

All the children in our school were taken by the nuns to see Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of Saint Mary’s. I was bored and kept up a facetious running commentary, with screeches of forced laughter as I identified each ill-favoured nun on the screen as one of our own: ‘Watch out! ‘Ere comes Sister Paul again…’ At one point I got a stinging smack round the ear from Sister Paul who had crept up on me in the dark.

Despite the dysfunction of these years Sister Paul taught me to read and write. When I found a book I liked I gorged on it greedily again and again. I read the class copy of The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton until it fell to pieces. At home there was little reading matter: Mum’s The Key to Heaven (subtitled ‘A Selection of Prayers and Devotional Exercises’), a two-volume illustrated encyclopedia of housekeeping, and the Evening News. My craving for reading matter was eventually to be satisfied in an unexpected fashion as a result of what I did to my new class teacher, Sister Magdalen.

Sister Magdalen, with fading freckles and puckering bloodless lips, was a hard-worked, dedicated teacher, with charge of a class of more than sixty children. One day for some trivial playground misdemeanour she pulled me into the empty classroom by my ear while making indentations in my scalp with her knuckles. Enraged, I seized the wooden blackboard T-square which lay handy on her desk and whacked her around the head, ripping her veil off. The sight of her shorn gingery scalp paralysed me with fascination for a few seconds. She stood there yelling, holding her head, before flying at me. So I went on whacking until our plump headmistress Sister Dolores came hurtling in and pinned me to the ground with her superior weight.

Mum was sent for. She towered over me white-knuckled as the breathless reports of my sacrilegious attack were recounted. Back at home, having bruised her hands with walloping me, Mum completed her punishment with the toe of a heavy shoe. In the days that followed there was talk of having me ‘put away’. Mum took me to a clinic in a church hall on a street called Snakes Lane. A man and several women sat behind a table covered with a green cloth. He said: ‘Take a biscuit, boy!’ He was pointing to a tin box of biscuits on the table. As I nibbled at the biscuit my case was discussed over my head. Mum uttered the word ‘wilful’ a great many times. At one point I reached out for another biscuit, but the man growled: ‘One biscuit only!’

I was sent to a ‘convalescent home’ run by the London County Council in a remote flintstone farmhouse on the Downs near Worthing in Sussex. Lodged in this place were some fifty boys suffering from a variety of physical and emotional disorders. I saw in some of them the same evasive, drowning eyes that I witnessed in my mirror. Many were being treated for additional slum-district afflictions – impetigo, ringworm and scabies; several had cotton wool stuck in their ears or sported suppurating boils on their necks. Some were pale, stick thin. Our beefy minders were known as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’. If we misbehaved we were not beaten; we were tied into our beds with skilfully knotted bandage bonds for hours on end like berserk patients in strait-jackets.

Soon after my arrival I became involved with a villainous older boy, whose face was daubed with red antiseptic paint covering an impetigo scab as big as a lobster. One day he invited me to insert my forefinger, after wetting it thoroughly with my spittle, into an empty light socket. He had said to me: ‘D’you wanna see an angel?’ It was a hard way to learn about the power of electricity. Had I enjoyed a precocious gift for irony, I would have seen it as an apt recompense for my knicker-fingering exploits in disused bomb shelters. The experiment nearly killed me and I ended up in bed swaddled in blankets. When I got better I could not wait to try it out on new arrivals. I spent a lot of my time in that place tied into my bed.

It was in Sussex that I first experienced wonder at the open countryside. One afternoon an ‘aunt’ took a group of us for a walk along footpaths to Chanctonbury Ring, a coppice of trees high on the Downs with distant views of the sea. I stood on the side of the hill intoxicated by the vistas and the fragrant air. The sea was a distant line of fiery light. A small aeroplane was droning high in the sky, wheeling and glinting in the sunlight like a dragonfly. I threw out my arms as if they were wings and ran in circles, wild with delight. Then I threw myself down by ‘aunt’s’ side.

‘Well, John, what do you think of the countryside?’ she said. Unusual for the staff in that place, she was young and pretty, red in the cheek and pleasant. She was looking at me expectantly.

Something got into me. I did not want to give the impression that I had become tame and a softie.

‘It’s shitty!’ I whined, making a sour expression. ‘It’s only fit for pigs.’

She looked away, saddened; and I felt wretched with myself and the world.