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Seminary Boy
John Cornwell
For Gabrielle
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PART ONE FATHER FIGURES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
PART TWO SPECIAL FRIENDSHIP
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
PART THREE THE HALFWAY HOUSE
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
PART FOUR PUBLIC MAN
110
111
112
113
114
115
RECONCILIATIONS
116
117
118
119
120
Praise
Also by John Cornwell
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the absence of diaries I have relied mostly on unaided personal recollections for the writing of this memoir. In some instances I have concealed the identities of the living.
PART ONE FATHER FIGURES
1
ON MY LAST summer holiday at the minor seminary I ran into my father in the east London suburb of Woodford. His heavy limp, a handicap from childhood, seemed more laboured than I remembered. As he toiled up George Lane his hand motions were like a man steadying a skittish horse on a leading rein. His hair was plastered down with brilliantine and he was wearing a new raincoat, collar turned up in the manner of Humphrey Bogart. He accosted me affably with his familiar limelight smile, as if greeting an invisible audience somewhere above my head. He betrayed no remorse at having left my mother and his five children a year earlier. Standing outside Woolworth’s, chatting about the new soccer season, he was fishing for something in his trouser pocket. I glimpsed a ten-shilling note. Then he fetched out a large bright horse chestnut, a conker. Buffing it on his sleeve he handed it over, saying: ‘Cheerio there, Jack.’
I stood watching him until he was swallowed up in the lobby of the Majestic cinema where a matinée was about to begin. He did not look back. I was missing him, but he had always been more of a troublesome sibling than an ideal father. In any case, I had other father-figures to contend with.
2
FATHER JAMES COONEY, pastor of my early adolescent years, was an austere soul. He had a drawn grey face and blood-raw eyelids. His cracked celluloid clerical collar was the colour of soiled snow. It was the rigid cheap sort that priests and seminarians could launder in seconds with a damp cloth. He would kneel at the altar rail in our empty church, eyes shut tight, grizzled head listing in concentration. When he looked up towards the tabernacle, he seemed to be adjusting his vision to the scene of his life’s mission – the east London district of Barkingside. Father Cooney was in resigned exile from Skibbereen, County Cork.
From the age of eleven until I departed for the minor seminary aged thirteen to begin my education for the priesthood, I served Father Cooney’s Mass at seven o’clock every weekday morning in what he called his ‘old bit of a church’, dedicated to Saint Augustine the missionary to the English. On Sundays the people stood three deep in the aisles, latecomers huddled out in the churchyard. To reduce the pressure he celebrated an extra Mass in a disused army hut next to a pet cemetery where dogs, cats and horses were buried beneath headstones. Father Cooney would gaze bleakly out of the hut window, disparaging ‘the pagan English customs over the way’. I served Mass at the Camp, as we called it, before cycling up to Saint Augustine’s to assist as censer bearer at the sung High Mass. In the afternoon I returned to serve at Solemn Benediction when Father Cooney led the singing of his favourite hymn:
Lord, for tomorrow and its needs I do not pray.
Yet Father Cooney was struggling to supply the needs of tomorrow in the form of a larger church. Holding up the offertory plates he would reproach us: ‘Copper! Copper! Where’s the silver?’ In the meantime he was watching the pennies. Around the church and the presbytery he wore a frayed, black-trying-to-be-green cassock. In winter he went shod in army boots; in summer, black canvas plimsolls, sometimes without socks. He chopped his own hair. Standing close to him in the sanctuary on summer days, he smelt like a sack of fertiliser.
At High Mass, the segment of charcoal cake, painstakingly excised with a razor blade, was minuscule, the incense grains sparse. When I swung the censer high to make the smoke billow, he would come suddenly out of his meditative mode: ‘Not so briskly, child!’ he would hiss. When we buried parishioners in the Catholic section of the local cemetery, the charcoal was a morsel of white ash by the time we reached the graveside. It seemed to me strange, Father Cooney swinging a cold smokeless censer at the coffin. At Low Mass he would ease a tear-drop of wine into the chalice. The candles on the altar were dark guttering stubs appropriated from Our Lady’s votive rack. He lit them at the last moment, and snuffed them with a singed pinch before he had even finished the words of the last Gospel.
He was a withdrawn man. If we met outside church he would incline his head, silently acknowledging the bond between himself and his daily Mass server. Sometimes he made a peculiar noise, a substitute for saying anything definite: ‘Wisswiss…wisswiss.’ When the children gathered around him in the school yard he would make a nuisance-fly gesture: ‘Very good! So!…wisswiss…Run along now!’ Addressing women, young or middle-aged, he would stand sideways on to them, bleakly descrying objects of curious interest in the distance. But I had also seen him comforting in his arms a widow wracked with grief at her husband’s graveside.
He was tireless in the service of the sick and the dying. I would see him out in all weathers on his rusty bicycle, visiting the inmates at Claybury mental asylum and the bedridden at King George V hospital. Careering unsteadily along the street, narrowly missed by buses and lorries, he gripped the handlebars with one hard-knuckled hand; the other nursed the sacrament within his breast pocket.
He was self-effacing. When he dropped an object from his arthritic hands, he would whisper to himself, bending over painfully: ‘Wisswisss…Imbecile it isS!’ If he caught the servers fooling around before High Mass, he would mutter: ‘Boys will be boys as the hills are green far off!’ But he could get exasperated with our choir when they droned on beyond the Offertory: ‘Orate frates…Enough of that!…’
My mother used to say that when you confessed your sins to Father Cooney it was ‘like going on trial for your life’. Often he made me repeat my purpose of amendment: ‘Say it again…As if you meant it, now!’ But he always ended with the heartfelt murmur: ‘Be sure now and pray for me – the unworthy sinner.’
On Sundays he preached on the Gospel of the day before straying to his weekly hobby horse, the News of the World, which ‘desecrated the Sabbath by its very existence’, lingering hissingly over that final sibilant. Then he would excoriate the barbers’ shops which sold ‘prophylactics’, which I associated in my innocence with mysterious idols of a false religion. ‘No dacent, upright Catholic gentleman,’ he said, ‘should give custom to such a one as does the Divil’s business now!’
3
FATHER COONEY recruited me as a candidate for the priesthood in this way. One Sunday evening I arrived at church early for Solemn Benediction. After vesting I looked into the sacristy. The room was silent, deserted. On the press stood the chalice in readiness for Mass the following morning. I had an urge to touch the receptacle. I went on tiptoe across the parquet flooring and grasped the embossed stem of the sacred cup. At that moment I heard a gasp. Looking back I was seized with terror at the sight of Father Cooney perched on a stool behind the open sacristy door. He followed me with his eyes as I walked slowly past him, trembling, as if I had committed a sacrilege. He said not a word.
The following day, after early morning Mass, Father Cooney asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up. I said confidently that I hoped to be a priest. Within a day it was settled that I should apply to the bishop to try my vocation at a minor seminary, a boarding college where young boys began their long training for the priesthood. When Father Cooney put my name forward to the bishop I was approaching my thirteenth birthday. I was already a Johnny-come-lately: many boys of my generation had begun their priestly formation at the age of eleven.
On the appointed day, my mother took me to an interview with the Right Reverend Bishop Andrew Beck of Brentwood. She was dressed in her purple coat with padded shoulders which she kept for special occasions; it was smart but her dress showed a few inches below the hem. I was dressed in my elder brother’s navy blue jacket temporarily stitched up at the sleeves. We sat at the front of the upper deck of the London Transport bus because Mum thought it a treat to have a view of the scenery on a journey. Riding northwards from the bus-stop outside Trebor’s mint factory, we passed Hill’s car showroom festooned with bunting snapping in the spring breeze. Then we crossed the River Roding with its smell of the sewage plant and passed under the Central Line railway bridge on our way to the towering Majestic cinema. In all that journey, I reflected, there was not a single sacred image to be seen. That was how I had begun to think.
Bishop Beck’s diocese took in the county of Essex with its new towns and the poor districts of London’s East End, but he lived in the prosperous suburb of Woodford Green. The bishop’s house was set back from the road amidst clipped shrubberies. A gleaming black limousine stood on the gravel drive. Monsignor Shannon, the Vicar General, greeted us at the door. He was a stout man in a black suit, a cigarette perched between his fingers. He had a flushed face as if he had just climbed out of a steaming bath. He spoke to us softly, advising us to address the bishop as ‘My Lord’. He ushered us into a room where the bishop sat at a desk with his back to French windows. He got up and held out his ringed hand for us to kiss.
He was a lean, dark-haired, exhausted-looking man with a sallow face. He was watching me intently through half-horn-rimmed spectacles. I sat bolt upright on a straight-backed ornate chair trying to look alert and decent. He spoke for a while about Father Cooney’s recommendation. Looking up at the ceiling, he said: ‘How lucky you are to have Father Cooney as your parish priest.’ Then he asked my mother if she would mind waiting outside.
He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and dictated a passage from St John’s Gospel, which I wrote down accurately. Then he wanted to know how many bedrooms we had in our house, and about the sleeping arrangements. I said that my three brothers and I, and sometimes my father too, slept in one room sharing three single beds. He asked if my father and elder brother went to church, and I said that Dad never went to church even at Christmas. He wanted to know how I liked my school. I said I liked it well enough. I had no inclination to tell him of the fights in the school yard, and the impure larks in the evil-smelling latrines.
‘If you are to be a priest one day,’ he said eventually, ‘you will have to study hard to be an educated man. Ordination alters your entire soul…You must become a holy man.’
He asked how I felt about going away to a boarding school, the minor seminary. ‘You might be homesick,’ he said. ‘What do you think about that?’
I tried not to betray my anxiety. I was afraid that I might say something that would make him withdraw the suggestion. ‘I would like that very much,’ I virtually whispered.
Then he called my mother back, and it was my turn to go out into the hallway where Monsignor Shannon was at the ready with a biscuit and a glass of milk.
When Mum emerged accompanied by the bishop I could tell from her expression, a pious look she wore in church after taking Communion, that everything had been agreeably settled. The bishop explained that since our diocese was poor it had no minor or senior seminaries of its own. He would have me lodged in a seminary owned by one of the larger, more prosperous dioceses of England. ‘It will be a long way from home,’ he said, with a warning look.
I tried to appear intrepid.
On the bus, I surveyed the Godless landscape, rejoicing inwardly that I was soon destined to depart for a very different world where there would be constant visible reminders of the Mother of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Eventually Mum patted me on the arm and said she was proud of me. When we reached home, the house that went with my father’s job on the sports ground, she looked down at me with her lustrous grey eyes. ‘I just wonder whether it’s really you,’ she said. ‘But we’ll see…I should be so proud! And as your saintly grandmother used to say: gain a priest – never lose a son.’
Later Dad came in from the sports ground wearing his overalls. Dad and Mum had not been speaking to each other for some days. He had not been consulted about my visit to the bishop or its purpose. He appeared less pleased than Mum as she reported the proceedings of the morning. He was blinking frequently, as he often did when he was puzzled or nervous.
He said: ‘Are you sure, son?’
I had not the capacity to consider what it meant for Dad to be informed, without reference to his opinion, that I would leave home that autumn to begin my education for the priesthood. I did not consider his feelings or his opinion of any significance. I was filled with a sense of glowing ripeness and anticipation.
4
MY MOTHER, KATHLEEN, whose maiden name was Egan, told me that she became desperate on discovering in the autumn of 1939, days after Britain declared war on Germany, that she was pregnant again. She was twenty-five years of age. It would be her third child under three. In those days the family lived in East Ham, a working-class district close to the London docks north of the River Thames. Dad was out all day seeking casual labour by the hour on the wharves. He had a withered, unbending left leg and was always among the last to be hired.
If she had another baby, how would she manage? And to bring another child into a world at war! Mum began to pray day and night that she would lose the baby. Then she felt guilty. Wasn’t it a mortal sin for a pregnant mother to pray for a miscarriage? She went to see Father Heenan. Father Heenan, who would one day become Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was in 1939 a young, East End parish priest. According to Mum, the priest, from where he sat, extended both his legs, stiff at the knees, to reveal the holes in his shoes right through to his socks. He said: ‘Don’t be afraid, Kathleen, we’re all poor. Trust in God: he will provide!’ She began to pray fervently to Saint Gerard Magella, patron saint of childbirth, for the safe delivery of the baby that was me.
In the early summer of 1940, as a test air-raid warning wailed over London, I came dancing into time in my parents’ bed in Carlyle Road. Our accommodation, which sheltered my parents and elder brother and sister, was two rooms of a terrace house backing on to a busy rail route that ran from the conurbations of Essex to the City of London. I was to be named in baptism after Father Heenan: John Carmel. In Saint Stephen’s church Father Heenan blew in my face in the form of a cross, commanding my unclean spirit to depart. Even as he touched my tongue with salt to preserve me from corruption, the air-raid sirens were singing out again. It was not a test warning. The priest cut the rest of the service, save for the cleansing waters of baptism, dropping my intended second name: Carmel. The baptismal party, myself cradled in my godmother Aunt Nelly Egan’s arms, made for the public shelter even as Father Heenan called after me: ‘John, go in peace…’
5
I HAVE DIM early impressions of East Ham, the shunting steam trains, clashing couplings and buffers beyond the yard fence; fog horns echoing from the docks in the night; a medley of nostril-scorching stenches. Later I learnt that the bad smells came on the wind from the Becton gasworks, the factories in the Silvertown basin, the polluted waters of the Thames at Woolwich.
I feel my father holding me under my armpits in his strong hands, to a rising and falling chorus of sirens. Then I see it: flying high, caught in the searchlight shafts, a growling black flying object shedding fountains of fire. Dad is holding me up, arms outstretched, to watch one of Hitler’s ‘doodlebugs’ crossing the night sky.
The shelter smelt of dank clay. Lying on the top bunk wrapped in a blanket, I watched Mum gazing imploringly at the image pinned to a cross of wood, her lips moving constantly. Eventually the sirens stopped and the night was silent. Through her bowing and whispering before the figure, Mum could control the fiery black thing in the sky and the hideous wailing across the rooftops.
6
DAD WAS THE eldest son of Arthur Cornwell, a former pub manager, and Lillian Freeman, a Jewish barmaid. When Dad was born his father had charge of the Horn of Plenty at Stepney Green in the heart of London’s East End. Granddad was the eldest sibling but he quarrelled with the family because of his liaison with Grandma Lillian. She had ‘got herself into trouble’ and the result was my father. After they married, Granddad sulked. He buried himself in the dockland slums of Custom House, taking a scullery job in the works canteen at Spiller’s flour mills.
Dad was lean and compact, his hair raven black. He might have been a sportsman, but his athletic potential along with other prospects were dashed the day aged three he fell down a flight of stairs. His left leg was badly injured; it was neglected to begin with and complications set in. He spent much of his childhood lying in a body-length wicker gurney in various hospitals far from London. He emerged on to the streets of Custom House aged thirteen, his left leg sans kneecap permanently stiff and thin as a willow stick. He dragged that stick-leg behind him, hopping frantically to keep up with three younger brothers until he found his special rhythm. At a walk his gait was awkward and laboured. At speed he looked like a ballet dancer careering across a stage, his bad leg whizzing forward from the hip in a stiff-legged arc, arms balancing his body with an elegant rhythmic breast-stroke. He even managed to play a bizarre game of football and could put an impressive spin on a cricket ball.
My mother had Atlantic grey eyes and prematurely grey hair. She had nervous eczema across the temples, and a tendency to mottle instant crimson across her chest and neck when roused. She had large hips, strong hands, and an erect bearing. She had left school at fourteen and graduated through unskilled jobs in one reeking local factory after another: Tate & Lyle (sugar, syrup), Spiller’s (flour, dog food, fertiliser), and Knight’s Castille (soap, detergents). My mother’s people on her father’s side were descended from Egans and Sheehys, second-generation immigrants from County Kerry. Her mother was a Sweeney, a Catholic Scot from Leith, but originally from Donegal. Mum was the only daughter, with six brothers; there had been a second daughter who died aged five.
Granddad Thomas Egan’s people had come over from Ireland with nothing but their Faith and the family. Two of my Egan uncles would become involved in a minor way with the IRA: guns up the chimney, running ‘messages’. In truth, Granddad Egan’s children were by their generation belligerent cockneys with a vulgar sense of humour, albeit ghetto Roman Catholic to the core.
Granddad Egan worked in boiler maintenance; he knew precisely where to hit a cylinder to eradicate a dent. He met Grandma Catherine at a Catholic church social evening in Bow and they married in their teens. When Mum was a girl, her family, all nine of them, was squeezed into a two-bedroomed house on North Woolwich Road, Silvertown. Old Silvertown, before Hitler and the London County Council planners reshaped it, was isolated from metropolitan London and its suburbs by the geography of the river and the dock complexes. Rural Essex was a day’s walk away. Transport was minimal and there were few social amenities other than the pubs and churches. Eventually the Egans were joined by a tenth family member, Grandma’s destitute and ageing Sweeney uncle who had walked down from Scotland. Nobody in need was turned away.
Mum was an expert mimic, mocking the follies of pretty well everybody outside the Egan–Sweeney circle. She would hold herself tight as she dissolved into high-pitched, tearful laughter. But she was quick to anger when sensing an affront to her dignity. She thought class a matter of personal aspiration rather than accident of birth. She loathed socialists and the unions because they were ‘against bettering oneself’. She believed that a ‘real man’ is ‘clean’ and ‘truthful’, and ‘never raises his hand to a woman’. Raising her own hand to a misbe-having child was another matter.
She had an unqualified respect for the priesthood. Priests, she knew only too well, were hardly immune from individual lapses. Yet one never judged a priest; for one day, she would say, these men would come face to face with Almighty God to answer for their deeds. She had stories to tell about priests. As a girl, her route to school passed through a Protestant enclave. One morning there was a street fight. The Catholics inflicted a lot of pain and injury, and a delegation complained to Father Fitzgerald. The suspects, led by Mum (big for her age and sporting a broken front tooth and a terrible cast in her right eye), were summoned to the school hall. A cantankerous Father Fitzgerald picked on Mum first. Had she taken part? Even as she said: ‘No, Father,’ he punched her in the chest, sending her flying against the wall. ‘When that priest tumped you,’ she used to say, explosively imitating his brogue, ‘you stayed tumped.’
Despite a restricted education, Mum had a remarkable if occasionally shaky vocabulary ranging from surprising archaisms to odd vulgarisms. She had an outlandish way of undermining well-worn clichés: ‘It’s so quiet in here you could hear a bomb drop!’ And she routinely subverted key words as if striving for the caricature status of a malaprop cockney. Anything surprising was a ‘relevation’; while missing the point was always ‘irrevelant’. ‘An erring priest,’ she used to say, ‘will be judged more harshly than any other before the trinubal of God.’
Mum maintained that she acquired her religious piety from her own mother, whom she described as a ‘walking saint’. Grandma Catherine Egan was a lay member of the Franciscans. She venerated Saint Anthony of Padua and the Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux (the French saint widely known as the Little Flower of Jesus). She attended a Franciscan church at Stratford East. Mum would relate how Grandma Egan would collect her as late as eight o’clock on Saturday evenings from her Saturday job at a grocer’s store to take her to confession at Stratford.
Mum was eighteen when her parents died in the same year, both aged fifty. The event cast a shadow of remorse across the whole of her life. It was as if her parents continued to reach out from their graves to clutch her by the ankles. Granddad Egan, the boiler man, a worrier by all accounts, died first of a perforated ulcer. Mum used to say that days before his sudden death she saw a figure in a black cloak leaning over her father as he lay sleeping on a daybed (my mother’s bed at night) in the living room. Her mother died a year later of breast cancer. Towards the end there was a lapse in Grandma Egan’s piety. As she lay in agony, Mum brought up from the yard a rose her father had planted a week before he died. She said: ‘Remember the Little Flower of Jesus, Mum.’ Grandma turned her face to the wall and said: ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Dressed in the Franciscan habit, she was buried in Leyton’s Catholic cemetery along with six strangers in a common grave, close to Granddad Egan’s common grave.
Mum, being the only girl, looked after three brothers who were still at home, and the aged and cantankerous Scottish uncle. She also became responsible for shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as being the breadwinner – a factory worker on early morning shifts. Her brothers abused her verbally, and sometimes physically, although not without explosive retribution. She continued like this for three years until she met Dad at a dance in the Spiller’s factory social club. She found him handsome and funny. But she married him, she would say later, as a result of his determination and her pity for his handicap. She was twenty-one; he was twenty-four.
My father became a Catholic to satisfy the virtual ban on mixed marriages. Mum says he was an eager convert. Once married, however, he seldom went to church. We grew up thinking him a lost soul. His mother, Grandma Lillian, being a Jew, was deemed doubly a lost soul. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Jews was matched only by their hatred of Protestants. I once heard an Egan uncle referring to my genial Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.
7
MUM’S DISILLUSIONMENT with Dad began with a wartime episode. To escape the air raids in London, Mum and we three children went to stay in the market town of Bicester in Oxfordshire while Dad stayed on in East Ham. During our absence, Dad got involved with a girl he met in a public air-raid shelter. Mum discovered this when she returned to East Ham without warning and found an intimate letter written from an address on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary.
Mum set off on the train to pay the girl a visit. When she arrived at South Benfleet, the station for Canvey Island, she saw Dad on the opposite platform. He waved nonchalantly (‘As if to say: “Here we are again!’”) before nipping on to a train bound back to London. So she proceeded to the address where she found the girl, aged just nineteen, living with her mother. Mum discovered that Dad had constructed a web of fantasies about himself. He claimed to be a master carpenter and had offered to take on the girl’s younger brother as an apprentice. To Mum’s fury in the those times of wartime food shortages, he had turned over his ration book to the girl’s mother.
Retrieving the precious book, Mum set off for London determined to end the marriage. Back in East Ham she confronted him. He confessed all and begged forgiveness, but she was adamant, absolutely adamant, until she went round to see my devout godmother Aunt Nelly. After many tears and over many cups of tea Aunt Nelly persuaded Mum that Dad’s erring behaviour was a consequence of ‘this terrible, terrible war’ and that God would surely wish her to forgive him and stay with him. So Mum did what she believed her Faith expected of her. We all moved back to East Ham, to Dad, and the bombing.
Some nine months later, brother Terry and my sister Maureen were evacuated to the north of England in the national scheme to save children from the flying bombs and V2 rockets. At the departure point Mum was carrying little Michael in her arms, the product of her post-Canvey reconciliation with Dad. My elder siblings looked down at us from the bus that would take them to the railway station: two sets of huge sorrowful eyes gazing accusingly through the window. They had labels bearing their names tied into the lapels of their raincoats. I have an impression that I could not wait for them to go.
8
BY LATE 1944, and after four wartime home removals, I was attending a Catholic primary school run by Irish nuns and spinsters. The yellow brick building surrounded by a fenced-in gravel yard was like a stockade surrounded by a hostile world of unbelief. One Sunday a V2 rocket destroyed a nearby Anglican church killing most of the congregation. The next day Miss Doonan, who taught us so piously to make the sign of the Cross, informed us that these people had been punished by God because they were Protestants.
My understanding of the Faith had been marked since infancy by wonder and illusion. The people sighed and bowed and sang together. Why did they do that? When the man at the front turned and raised his arms, he made the bells ring. The man was holding up what looked like a gold clock. When the people bowed their heads deeply, Mum said we were bowing towards God. ‘God’, then, was a clock, and the clock made people bow and sing and walk in circles.
These operations of cause and effect were puzzling. The day before we celebrated the end of the war in Europe, I was humming to myself, skipping ahead of the girl who took me to school, when two bull terriers hurtled around the corner and sank their teeth into my plump legs. I spent the morning in a doctor’s surgery being stitched up and painted with iodine. According to the policeman who visited our house on Victory Day in Europe, the dogs’ owner claimed that I made the animals bite me by my singing and dancing.
That autumn my elder siblings came back from evacuation. They had been lodged in Bolton, Lancashire, with two indulgent spinsters. My sister Maureen wore a red frock and her hair was in ringlets tied with silk ribbons. She spoke in a strange accent, laughing excitedly. I thought she had an adorable face and I fell in love with her in an instant; yet she would not deign to look at me, despite my attempts to be noticed. My brother Terry, a few weeks short of his ninth birthday, and raven-haired like my father, did not take his eyes off me: he was like a black cat with very still yellow eyes. He had returned from exile to find a younger brother living on the emotional fat of our mother’s affections. At tea I blew a raspberry at him. Then he invited me to step out into the yard where, I informed him with a wave of a small hand, ‘All this is mine.’ Why, I wondered, was his face swollen like a boiled tomato? The next thing, I was lying on the ground with a mouthful of blood and three milk teeth down my throat. My sister’s home-coming rapture did not last long. I have a recollection of her bitter wailing that evening as Mum took the scissors to those ‘silly’ ringlets which would only harbour nits.
With the arrival of a fifth child, brother Jimmy, the product apparently of Victory euphoria, our financial situation became ever more precarious. Mum and Dad worked hard to keep us respectable, clean and well fed, but we brushed our teeth with soot from the chimney (an old East End tactic), had our hair washed with carbolic soap, and ate bread and margarine for tea on a kitchen table covered with newspaper. A tonguetied Irish lodger supplemented the household income. Terry, Michael and I shared a bedroom with him. He put curlers in his hair each night and smoked in bed. Dad grew cabbages out back and Mum kept five chickens.
Mum’s mood darkened, a circumstance linked in my mind with two physical misfortunes. Before dawn one morning, looking for eggs in the run, she trod on a rusty nail planted in a piece of wood carelessly left by Dad; it went right through her foot. Not long afterwards, she had her top row of teeth out, a popular practice in those days since dentists earned more for extractions than fillings. They were replaced with ill-fitting false ones. Mum’s new menacing melancholy was also associated in my mind with churchgoing, and what the nuns told us at school. One day Sister Paul unrolled a picture which she hung on the wall for a whole day. It showed naked people standing in beds of fire. ‘These are the souls of the dead who died in mortal sin,’ she said. Talk of sin made me think of dirty cinders in the fire grate. ‘They are burning there for ever,’ she said. The next day she showed us a picture of the ‘holy souls in purgatory’, where people stood in pits of grey ash. Mum spoke often of praying for ‘the holy souls in purgatory’. But when I first heard those words I heard ‘the sorry holes in the lavatory’.
Eventually I came to understand that the clock-God was a glass case that held a white circle of wafer bread. The round white wafer was God, which I came to eat. I put out my tongue and there he was. God was sour and soggy in my saliva. You must not bite him, Sister Paul said. You must not let him touch your teeth or the roof of your mouth. Let him rest on your tongue until you are ready to swallow him whole. I could feel him sliding down inside me, the slimy little God inside me, in under my roof. I was a little house and God could sit inside my tummy. As we walked in twos back to school for our First Communion breakfast of custard and jelly, I passed Mum standing by the school gate, gazing down at me with a peculiar expression of sadness.
9
In the years before I became devout and felt called by Jesus to follow Him, I had been as wicked as was possible for a child washed in Christian baptism. Sister Paul informed Mum that I had a ‘black streak’. I was physically strong for my age, demonically restless and sudden to anger. My childhood agitation was like a fever. It was as if I was permanently waiting, on edge, for the sound of the old wartime sirens; hankering for a heart-stopping explosion.
I suffered the stigma of one ‘lazy’ dim-sighted eye, just like Mum’s. When I was tired my eye turned inwards as if straining to see inside my brain. It provoked taunts from other children, who would imitate my affliction to my face until they knew me better. My knuckles would be covered in their blood. The nuns called me ‘sly-boots’, commanding me to look them ‘properly in the eye like a dacent fellow!’ When I looked at myself in a mirror I could see what they meant. My shifty myopic eyes were at war with each other, swivelling and blinking in a restless head. Mealtimes at home were the worst. Through poor hand–eye coordination I tended to make scraping noises, knock over cups, miss my mouth and spill food down my front and on to the floor. Eyeing me from on high, fork-hand trembling, as if at any moment she would skewer and devour me, Mum would struggle to maintain her patience. Crying out between her new false teeth, she would throw down her cutlery and set about me.
Yet Mum herself was no less clumsy. Dishes leapt from her hands, needles pricked her fingers, the stove burnt the porridge, and our cat, despite Mum’s training regime, peed on the kitchen floor. We all of us, including the porridge, felt the avenging Egan hand. As for the cat, I have seen our poor drop-kicked Moggy, paws pedalling frantically, crash-land on the yard fence with a scream.
After a visit to an optician I was made to wear an evil-smelling black bakelite ‘colluder’ on a pair of wire spectacle frames to blank out my good eye and so to encourage the weak and wayward one, now assisted by a lens as thick as a magnifying glass. I was always taking off the colluder. I hated the comments it evoked: ‘ ‘Ere comes Punch’s sore-eyed dog,’ quipped Uncle Mike, ever the creative and well-meaning genius of the Egan vulgarism. So Mum took to covering the good eye with a large square of sticky plaster. Since the sight in my lazy eye provided no more than peripheral vision, I was always walking into trees and lamp-posts. I would rip off the plaster, a prelude to retribution.
Desperate for companionship, reckless of punishment and danger, I became an under-aged thug. I trailed a gang of older lads, haunting bombed-out houses and tenements. Others had been there before us, but there was always something to smash. The blasted staircases and sagging floors, especially on the higher storeys, were terrifying. My talent for atrocious mayhem earned me the respect of my elders. One day, at my prompting, four of us struggled to place an iron girder on a railway track, aiming to derail an express train bound for Liverpool Street Station. Our attempt at mass murder was fortunately spotted. I was chased by police and railway workers for throwing bricks at the windows of passing trains, thrashed by a builder for setting fire to a house he was rebuilding, hit by a car as I ran away from a shop where I had stolen a pack of cigarettes. I did a lot of hitting myself. I nearly killed the boy next door by whacking him over the head with my elder brother’s cricket bat. He had contradicted me. I lied to the nuns to get a goody-goody boy into trouble, alleging he had misbehaved on the bus. With vicious associates I assaulted a girl in a disused bomb shelter, putting our grubby hands down her knickers. She was in my class at school and she had earlier shown a liking for me. She looked at me in silent sorrow as I urged the others on.
Was there no one in my childhood who calmed me with tokens of affection? My Aunt Rose, Tommy Cornwell’s wife, was a vivacious young cockney woman with thick blonde hair, a smoky voice and a husky laugh. She had two children of her own, Sylvia and young Tommy, but all children were her own children, and she seemed in a state of tearful, permanent wonder at their lovable natures. Her voice, full of heartfelt affection, filled me with joy. She was the light of my life, but she appeared all too seldom.
And what of my uncles? Mum’s six brothers were garrulous egotists who loved to put children down. Only Uncle Mike, Mum’s youngest brother, displayed an affectionate interest in us. He told us jokes and would sing popular songs in a pleasant crooning voice. Dad’s three brothers were in the Royal Navy. They would appear briefly on occasional leave, smart in their spotless uniforms. They were hard men and talked with nose-blocked accents. When angry they would screw up their lips in a silent whistle. Uncle John, a submariner, could be spiteful. He had a wife, our Aunt Edie, who wore a wig, but they had no children.
Uncle John: ‘How would you like a tasty bar of chocolate, Jack?’
‘Yes please, Uncle John.’
‘Well, I can’t give you one see Jack ‘cos I ain’t got none!’
Then he would hoot with laughter, looking down on me with a mad gleam in his eye.
10
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.
11
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.
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