Free Seminary Boy by John Cornwell Page B

said James, ‘but he has taken a sort of vow never to talk after mid-morning break.’ James seemed to consider the matter for a few moments. ‘I do think that his behaviour is rather singular,’ he added. It was the first time I had heard the term ‘singular’, and I was not sure what it meant. (I was soon to discover that it was an important watchword in our spiritual lives, meaning any behaviour that was deemed showy.) Then he informed me that ‘Armishaw’ was Father Vincent Armishaw who taught English. ‘He’s a character, a bit ferocious, but he’s not too bad. Derek has a crush on him; and he’s not the only one.’

23
    A S 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 theireducation. ‘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’.