Читать книгу Seminary Boy - John Cornwell - Страница 29

AS WE WALKED in Top Bounds a boy came up and asked me to accompany him to Father Doran, the headmaster. His office was situated on a corridor with a highly polished linoleum floor in the old hall. The boy rapped hard on the door. When a muffled voice called out: ‘Come!’ he left me to enter by myself.

Father Doran, a thin, slightly stooped man in a caped cassock, was leaning on the mantelpiece in a room filled with light from a set of bay windows that went from floor to ceiling. There was a desk covered with papers, and glass-fronted bookcases. The atmosphere of the room was heavy with tobacco.

He was busy with a penknife and a pipe, attempting to extract burnt-out tobacco into an ashtray at his elbow. At the same time he occasionally looked down on me with penetrating grey eyes through flashing gold-rimmed spectacles. His ash-fair receding hair was brushed back flat on his head and his thin lips were firmly set in a long pale face. He looked about the same age as my father. He stopped fiddling with his pipe, snatched a cigarette from a Senior Service pack and lit it with an almost petulant movement.

‘I prefer to smoke a pipe,’ he said, the cigarette wobbling up and down on his thin lips. ‘But whenever the reverend mother comes in from the sisters’ community, I have to put it down. You see, it’s never done to smoke before the sisters. Then it’s such a business to light it up again.’ He took a deep drag and held the cigarette between his fingers as he blew out a long column of smoke. ‘She’s just been in this morning, wanting to discuss kitchen business and here we go again – down goes the pipe,’ he said. ‘So I think to myself: “Oh bother, I’ll just have a cigarette, it’s much less trouble.”’

He stopped to inspect me. ‘You don’t smoke, do you, John Cornwell?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, just make sure you don’t. In any case, you’ll need to save all your puff for cross-country running, especially when you’re sprinting up and down the valley here.’

I smiled, but he was observing me without a hint of humour. He began to talk about the history of the school. He told me that Cotton was the oldest Catholic college in England. Most boys were sent here, he said, by the Archbishop of Birmingham, who was the official owner of the school, but there were also a number of students from my own diocese, Brentwood, which had no minor seminary. A minority of the boys, he added, were ‘lay students’ who had not dedicated themselves to the priesthood, and whose parents were therefore paying for their education. ‘You must understand,’ he said with gravity, ‘that your bishop has been put to considerable expense to place you here, and that your fees are paid for out of the charity of the people of your diocese. So you will do your very best to make the most of this opportunity.’ He said that fourteen former pupils of Cotton had been ordained that year. ‘That is your aim,’ he went on. ‘To become a priest…Just keep your sights on that and you can’t go wrong.’

Father Doran now walked over to the bay windows which had an unhindered view across the valley. He beckoned me to join him. ‘Splendid, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we lucky to be enjoying all this?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, avoiding the use of the word ‘Father’. I found myself thinking of the ‘aunt’ at the home in Sussex, and how I had described the beautiful countryside as ‘shitty’. I was eager to let him know that I was impressed by the view.

‘Well, enjoy it now to the full,’ he said, ‘because one day you’ll probably be trapped in a city where there’s not a single tree, let alone grass and cows.’ For the first time he gave a husky laugh, and I smiled back at him with relief as he took another deep drag on his cigarette.

Now that I was here, standing at Father Doran’s windows with the great panorama of the valley below, I had the confidence to say: ‘I’m glad that I’m here, Father.’

‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sir! not Father!’ Then he announced with an air of grandeur: ‘For the purposes of competitive spirit all the students in the college belong to one of three groups or houses, named after the great founders of the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham. You have been placed in Challoner House, which commemorates Bishop Richard Challoner who founded the college in secrecy in 1763 when Catholics were still being persecuted by the Protestants for their Faith.’ Bishop Challoner, he went on, was a wonderful man. During one of the anti-Catholic riots in London a Protestant mob threatened to burn down his house. ‘So there you are,’ he went on. ‘We have great traditions! And you are now a Challoner man as well as a Cottonian.’

With this he led me out of his office and down the corridor to a room where a priest was standing, reading some papers, his thick-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead. He was robust with a lineless cherubic face and marked dimples. He was almost bald, despite his youthful appearance; but he had a ring of hair that looked like little collections of chick feathers. He was dressed in a cassock over which he wore an academic gown with long drooping false sleeves. ‘Aha! Master Cornwell,’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself: Father Tom Gavin, Prefect of Studies!’

Before leaving me, Father Doran turned to say: ‘I’ll be watching you closely, Cornwell. And I shall be informing your good bishop of your progress.’

‘Now let me see! Cornwell!’ said Father Gavin with a radiant grin. ‘Frumentum Bene! That’s “corn” and “well” in Latin! I suppose we’d better shorten it to Fru. Yes, I like Fru. You look like a Fru. I take it you have no Latin. No Latin at all, eh, Fru!’

With this he gingerly extracted from his shelves a slim book, grinning back at me conspiratorially as he did so. ‘This, Fru,’ he said, as if he were a magician producing a tender live animal from a hat, ‘is called a Latin primer. And you are going to become well acquainted with its contents, otherwise your bottom is going to become acquainted with that stick there on the bookshelf.’ His face was bright red now, his shoulders heaving with laughter. ‘Not to worry, Fru,’ he said. ‘Only joking, eh! But my stick is there to make sure you behave in class, eh!’

I decided that I liked his joviality even if I did not care for his joke.

Placing the book in my hands he said in a low murmur, his small mouth fighting against the compulsion to smile: ‘Take it away with you, Fru. In spare moments acquaint yourself with the first ten pages in preparation for the treat of our first lesson.’ Before dismissing me, he produced a timetable, specially devised, he said, so that I could catch up with my class year, which was known as the lower fourth.