Читать книгу Pitfalls of Memory - Peter Milward - Страница 9

To be precise, it was in the morning of September 7, 1943, that six would-be, or in modern parlance “wannabe”, Jesuits came together at Euston station and crowded into one compartment of the boat train for Holyhead. Not that we were going all the way to Holyhead, still less by boat to Dublin, but our destination was the seaside resort of Rhyl on the coast of North Wales. Nor that we were going to the seaside at Rhyl, but from Rhyl we had been instructed to take a taxi to St Beuno’s College, a remote building owned by the Jesuits and situated on a hill named Maenefa looking out over the wide Vale of Clwyd. There we were duly disgorged and made our way up the stone steps to the College, which wasn’t (like Wimbledon College) a high school but the novitiate of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Till the outbreak of hostilities with Germany the novitiate had been at Manresa House, Roehampton, on the other side of the Common from Wimbledon, but when that building received a direct hit from a German bomb, it was considered prudent to relocate the novices and junior scholastics to St Beuno’s (pronounced “buy-nose”), which had previously been used for the study of theology.

The period of “noviceship” was to last two years, to provide us with some idea of what we were letting ourselves in for by joining the Jesuits, and to provide the Jesuits with some idea of who we were before formally admitting us by letting us take the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In the course of that time, one or other of the novices might silently drop out and return to the life of a layman or become some other kind of priest. Only those of us who were gifted with the eyes of a lynx might notice the absence and spread the rumor that (so and so) was no longer with us. And then we others would ask the question, as if echoing the disciples at the last supper, “Is it I, Lord?” As a matter of fact, of those six wannabes who took the train to Rhyl and the taxi to the College, only three survived, and I was one of them. But we weren’t the only ones. Others joined us from Glasgow, Leeds, and elsewhere, till we were some eighteen first-year novices, with another eighteen or so in the second year. And then there were the outgoing novices who were to take their vows as “voventes” on the following day, Our Lady’s Birthday, September 8. Then they would return to their studies of “the humanities” as junior scholastics after a “fallow” period as novices.

My first experience of my new life took place at the Vow Mass early in the morning. It was quite a long ceremony, with each of the outgoing novices reciting his vows from a paper which he had written out in long-hand beforehand. And I couldn’t stand it. I already had a long history of fainting during Mass, and I added one more instalment to my history that morning. I fainted and had to be physically carried out of the chapel to my room, where I had to sit for a time with my head between my knees till I felt better. It was as if I had disgraced myself from the outset of my life as a Jesuit, but my fainting had no effect on the ceremony – at which I was much relieved.

My next memory was of the dinner held that evening in honor of the voventes, when we were served with rhubarb wine. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the taste of wine, though it was made not of grapes but of rhubarb. But I was disillusioned the following day, when we received our daily “exhortation” from the Master of Novices, a severe, self-conscious elderly man. He informed us that from then onwards, even when wine was served at table, novices were expected to abstain. That was a foretaste of what to expect from the noviceship, and it wasn’t to our liking – though as novices we had to put up with it, as with so much else. Fortunately for us, we were to be under the direction of that Master for only a year, and then he was replaced by another, younger man who was more understanding and more acceptable to us.

Anyhow, concerning that severe Master, I have two amusing anecdotes to tell, in my own experience of him, and they both relate to one of our second-year novices who was always getting into trouble of one kind or another. One of our “experiments” as novices was that of kneeling on the floor in front of the Master, while the other novices would retail the faults they had noticed in the poor victim. We were limited to the mention of three faults each, and the whole process was called “a Chapter of Faults”, or in Latin lapidatio. On one such occasion, however, the victim was a perfect novice, and none of us had anything to say against him, so it was the Master who complained, “Is this a mutual admiration society?” But then the novice I have in mind stood up and said, “The brother pays too much attention to unimportant rules, father.” “Which rules?” asked the Master in a curious tone of voice. “For example,” answered the novice, “the rules of modesty.” That made the Master fairly jump out of his chair!

Another day the novice in question was returning from an afternoon walk with two other novices. For we always went out for walks in threes, in order to prevent any intimacy developing between two alone. There in the kitchen yard they came upon someone bending over a sack of potatoes, and the novice went up to him with mischief in his mind and gave him a friendly slap on the behind. Then who should it turn out to be but the Master of Novices! It was astonishing that this particular novice survived not only till the time of his first vows, but all through his life as a Jesuit, till he died of apoplexy in Rome.

Other novices, too, showed a similar tendency to do the wrong thing. It almost seemed a characteristic of Jesuit novices to do so. One might put the blame on the severity of the above-mentioned Master, but even under his more understanding successor I have this funny story to tell. I was then a second-year novice, and there was this little novice in the first year who was excessively timid. We used to take it in turns to serve in the dining-room (or “refectory”, as we called it in monastic parlance), and this little novice was serving for the first time. His first duty at dinner was to take two tureens of soup with his serving cloth in either hand, and to put them at the head of two tables at the far end of the room. Then his one aim was to accomplish this task as soon as he could. So instead of walking with the tureens, he ran with them, with the result that some of their contents was spilt on the floor in front of him. Inevitably he trod on the spilt soup and fell with both tureens, with the result that now their contents were all spilt on the floor. Then everyone had to hasten out of the room while the servers cleaned up the floor, and that evening there wasn’t enough soup to go round. Unfortunately, that poor novice failed to survive the noviceship.

These are but a few of the funny stories I might tell about life in the noviceship, as funny stories tend to stick in my mind, while the more serious events tend to fall into what Shakespeare calls the “formless ruin of oblivion”. Thus everything the severe Master told us about the Rules of the Society, which we had to write out with due care in our notebooks, I have completely forgotten. I even dare to think nothing of it was worth memorizing. But what most impressed me about St Beuno’s was its location on the slope of Maenefa, with a perpetual view over the Vale of Clwyd to the Snowdon range of mountains beyond. The Master might be narrow-minded with his lack of humor and his sense of self-importance, but the view from the College compensated for everything. At least we could hardly entertain such a mind when we had such a broad expanse of what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “field, fallow, and plough” before our eyes every day.

Which reminds me that we were spending the first three years of our Jesuit lives – two years as novices and one as juniors – in the same College as Hopkins had been living in his Victorian age, from 1874 to 1877, and writing his memorable poems from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” onwards. But sadly, no one, least of all the Master, reminded us of the fact. Or if anyone had reminded us, it would have meant nothing to us, since Hopkins hadn’t yet achieved the worldwide fame that he subsequently came to enjoy. As Jesus said sadly of himself, “No man is a prophet in his own country,” so I might say of Hopkins, “No man is a poet in his own province.” It was indeed only after the third edition of his poems was published in 1948 – after the first had been published in 1918, and the second in 1930 – that Hopkins may be said to have come into his own, and even then it was chiefly in America that he was welcomed. At that time I remember three American Jesuits coming all the way to England, just to follow in the footsteps of Hopkins, and we all regarded them as “crazy”. Yet, since leaving England for Japan, I myself have become no less “crazy”..

All the same, in all seriousness, I have to turn to what Shakespeare in As You Like It calls “the uses of adversity”, namely “the penalty of Adam, the seasons’ difference”. After all, it was already autumn when we “wannabe” Jesuits first arrived at St Beuno’s. Then with “nature’s changing course” it wasn’t long before autumn merged into winter, and the winter was colder than I had ever experienced in Wimbledon. For one thing there was no central heating, nor electric fires in our rooms, but we had to subsist on coal fires, which we were only allowed to make for ourselves in the evening. In any case, most of the day was spent out of our rooms, and even outdoors in the extensive gardens. For in order to receive exemption from military service we were supposed to work on the land in various forms of farming – which in fact mainly took the form of pulling weeds out of the hard ground. Inevitably I fell foul of chilblains and had to wear special gloves allowing the tips of my fingers to show. Only the silver lining in all those dark clouds was our remoteness from the war and from the so-called “doodlebugs” which were then terrorizing the poor people at home.

At the same time, one of my great joys was the arrival of my father’s weekly letters from home. In them he would describe in minute, humorous detail the day to day events of family life. He was a real comic, who should have been a regular contributor to the comic magazine of Punch, but he told me he had tried once, only to be rebutted, and so he never tried again. Anyhow, whenever I read his letters, the tears would stream from my eyes, tears not of sorrow but of laughter, they were written in such a humorous, yet such an affectionate manner. Afterwards I learnt that before committing them to the post, he would pass them round all the family members, who would have their first round of laughter, before letting it spread Northwards to me. As the scholastic motto goes, “Bonum est diffusivum sui,” or Good is diffusive of itself. That is to say, if you have a good joke in your mind, you want to communicate it to as many others as you can. Only, sadly, at the end of my noviceship, as it were following in the footsteps of Hopkins at the beginning of his noviceship, I decided to sacrifice all those precious letters I had received from my father, before taking my vows.