Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 17

I RETURNED HOME to London after three months, full of energy for renewed mischief, fattened out on a diet of unlimited porridge, eggs, bacon and doorsteps of bread and jam. Back at school, my terrible sin against Sister Magdalen still unforgiven, I was banished from the set being prepared for the Eleven Plus examination for entrance into academic grammar schools. I was placed, like a villain in the stocks, in a desk for two out in the corridor with an overgrown lad smelling of stale urine who did not know what a book was for, let alone how to read it.

The desk was sited where Sister Dolores could keep an eye on us from her office. She sat very still, with an expressionless face like a Buddha. I was trapped for a year in that desk. On the wall behind us was the shrine to Saint Maria Goretti, the Italian virgin, stabbed to death at the age of eleven because she refused to ‘besmirch her chastity’ with the lodger. Details of Maria Goretti’s story, which was intended to promote purity in the Catholic young, prompted a darkly pleasurable excitation in my genitals. It was my special task to keep Saint Maria Goretti’s votive lamps trimmed and lit.

My formal education in primary school had come to an end the moment I attacked Sister Magadalen, but close to where I sat in the corridor were shelves containing a chaos of battered books: Butler’s Lives of the Saints, outdated Catholic directories, hymnals, an ancient and incomplete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a set of novels and short stories by Charles Dickens. I spent many undisturbed hours reading about saints like Simeon Stylites who lived at the top of a pole, or devouring encyclopaedia entries on such mysteries as the history, economy and geography of Bulgaria. Best of all I lost myself in the plots of David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol.

At eleven I was released from the corridor and sent, as befitted an academic reject and troublemaker, to a Catholic Secondary Modern school on the Ilford High Road. The building was lit by gaslight, heated by open fires, and surrounded by a caged yard. Saints Peter and Paul was in those days an educational sink for an area that stretched from Barking, east of where my mother had been brought up, to Dagenham where Ford workers and their families lived. The head teacher, Mr J. O. Murphy, a red-necked Irishman, spent a lot of his day spying on boys. He would hide in cupboards, peep through keyholes, and stand on a ladder in order to peer around a corner from a high vantage point. He caned me almost daily, not for specific misdemeanours but on a generalised assumption that I deserved it. My classroom teacher was an exotic middle-aged woman called Roma de Roper, who had once been a professional actress. She devised bizarre theatricals mostly involving magic potions and wizards. She was a civilised contrast rather than a sufficient antidote to the male teachers. Since we had no games facilities, except for the Ilford public swimming pool, the boys’ principal sport was boxing, with a vindictive tendency to mismatch troublemakers with heavier partners.

To the glee of Mr Murphy I was knocked out cold in my first gym-friendly by a boy twice my weight and reach. ‘We’ll get you in shape,’ he told me with a chuckle. I soon learnt to keep my guard up and aim for the throat.

The school latrines, housed in an open-air lean-to in the yard, were the scene of grotesque pubescent pranks. One involved bigger boys attempting to ejaculate over the wall into the girls’ playground beyond. The mechanics of these larks were a mystery, as was the fact that they possessed enormous penises compared to my own little willy. I came home uttering foul language I did not understand, my clothes filthy and in tatters from desperate playground fights. The beatings I had from my mother left me with bruised limbs and on one notable occasion the purple closure of my good eye. One day, on hearing me call one of my small brothers ‘a little shit’, she dragged me to the sink, prised my mouth open, and shoved in a bar of carbolic soap. I hid my fear cockily, coming back for more. Sobbing with pain after she had badly bruised her hand whacking my head (which, she said, had the consistency of reinforced concrete), she moaned: ‘Oh God!…My poor hand!…One day you’ll weep bitter tears over my grave.’ At the time, I seriously doubted it.

She was always there, however, demonstratively supportive for life’s big occasions. One of her greatest gifts after the interlude in the Sussex home was to send me at significant expense to piano lessons. The teacher was an indolent fellow called Mr Hall who had a brass plate on the door of his modest terrace house proclaiming ‘The Hall Academy of Music’. The piano in our otherwise unused sitting room was tuned and I began to attend the ‘academy’ once a week. After six months the struggle to pay for lessons prompted her to withdraw me, saying that Mr Hall was useless; which was probably true. But at least I had learnt to read music.

It was in the crucial matters of life and death that Mum proved strongest. One afternoon I watched as a girl I knew was carried shoulder-high out of her house into a waiting ambulance. Her back was arched and she was screaming. She had contracted tetanus, ‘lock-jaw’, after cutting her hand on a dirty broken milk bottle. When news came of the girl’s death, her mother stood in the middle of the street shrieking, her head covered with her apron. On the morning of the funeral I stood petrified on the pavement as the cortège passed.

Later that day Mum found me sitting alone on my bed, head in my hands. I had been struck for the first time with the reality of death. I felt as if I was drowning in a tide of despair and terror. Death had to be a grotesque life-in-death: dead and yet conscious, trapped in a coffin beneath the ground. She gripped me around the shoulders, a veritable wrestler’s hold: ‘You are never going to die,’ she said with a certitude that brooked no contradiction. ‘You will grow up and live for years and years…so many years that it will seem like for ever.’

Ever since I could remember, Mum had kissed us in bed every night with the dire instruction: ‘Cross your arms and pray for a happy death.’ After the incident in the bedroom, she discontinued this gloomy utterance.