Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 19

THE END OF my delinquency and the growth of my devout life followed a trauma that I was unable to confide in anyone, least of all Dad. From about the age of ten I was in the habit of stealing money from Mum’s purse to take the tube up to central London. I would take the tram, clattering along the Victoria Embankment. I would find my way from the Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of London, to the dark magnificence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral with its ancient rancid smells. I liked to walk from the Protestant Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station, marvelling at the huge apartment buildings, and the grand façade of the Army and Navy department store. By the age of eleven I had found the museums at Kensington, and I would wander there on Saturdays.

One afternoon on my way back to South Kensington a man walked in step with me along the tunnel that leads from the museum district to the underground station. He was in early middle age, well-groomed and dressed in a tweed suit. He had fair hair and a pleasant fresh complexion. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I had seen boys with fathers like him in the museums. He asked me if I would like to earn some money, showing me five shillings in the form of two newly minted half-crowns resting in the palm of his hand. It crossed my mind that the money would buy me many more trips into central London, but even as I gazed at the coins I was frightened. The tunnel was now empty of pedestrians; we were alone. I started to walk quickly ahead, but he kept pace with me. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he was murmuring. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

Saying that he was not going to hurt me made me all the more frightened. When he held me painfully by the shoulder, I was terrified of what he might do if I refused to cooperate with him.

In a cubicle of the deserted public toilets at South Kensington the man forced me into a deed for which I had neither words nor understanding. I was conscious only of the dirty cracked tiles, the evil smell, and the noise of flushing urinals. In my child’s terror of the man and what he was doing to me, I seemed to understand so clearly what I had somehow always known: that this I, this soul of mine, was a stranger in my body, a stranger in the world.

When he had finished doing things to me, he made me do things to him. Then he stood over me, telling me never to tell anybody. ‘Don’t let me see your ugly little face around here again!’ he kept saying. ‘Look at me!’ he said. But I could not look at him; I stood frozen, blind. He smacked me hard around the head, and I cried again. ‘That’s nothing to what you’ll get if you tell,’ he said. Then he made off. I had forgotten about the five shillings, and so had he.

Some time after this I had an experience in the night which seemed like a waking dream or a deeply buried memory. I was standing, dressed in nothing but a short vest, in an attic room high up in a bombed-out building where the stairs had collapsed. It was a summer’s evening and I was gazing through a dormer window over rooftops and chimneys. In the far distance I could see a church tower touched by the evening sun. The sight of the church tower filled me with sadness. I could hear a sound of sighing and wailing across the rooftops like the old air-raid sirens of the war. There was a presence in the waves of sound, like an ageless dark being, and it gathered strength and purpose in a series of sickening, irresistible pulses. I was about to be engulfed by a monotonous rhythm that intended taking me to itself for ever. This I knew was the only reality, the ultimate and inescapable truth without end. As it ebbed away, like a mighty ocean of darkness, I understood that its departure was only temporary. Finally, inevitably, it would return. This and only this was real. It was a presence greater than my sense of the entire world, and it lay in wait for everyone.

After this I began to listen with greater concentration to the words of Father Cooney as he gravely recited the prayer to Michael the Archangel at the end of Mass. He spoke of the Evil One as he who ‘wanders through the world for the ruin of souls’. I began to understand the Evil One as a dark power that threatens to devour every soul in the world. What extraordinary words they seemed. How they filled me with dread especially in the night: ‘He who wanders through the world for the ruin of souls.’ Ruin.