In retrospect, there was a measure of narcissism. Through all those bad years I had often lost myself in ritualistic play. On the bedroom wall was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with hungry eyes and blood on his hands. I knew the picture had a life of its own because its eyes followed you about the room. I would offer in my play a piece of bread to the Sacred Heart, holding it up to his bearded mouth as if bestowing on Christ himself the gift of the Eucharist. I put an old satin dress of my mother’s around my shoulders. Shaking with excitement, I carried the piece of bread around the room slowly; bobbing up and down, I muttered in pretend Latin over a vase. I jabbered away in a make-believe homily to the four walls. It was as if I was both heroic actor and awestruck audience in a cinema, watching myself on the screen. One day in the midst of these performances I heard a sound: looking towards the crack in the half-open door, I jumped with fright. I saw a sea-grey eye gazing at me, like the eye of God himself. Mum was watching in silence, from the landing. After that my rites became ever more secretive.
When I first began to serve Mass, my religiosity on the altar, for all its apparent self-discipline, was childishly puffed up. Each morning Father Cooney would open the doors of Saint Augustine’s church at twenty minutes to seven precisely, to greet me waiting on the steps whatever the weather. There I stood sometimes drenched to the skin, sometimes caked in ice and snow, after the two-mile cycle ride from home without breakfast. These were the days when communicants, including children, fasted from midnight the previous day. Father Cooney, I was convinced, was observing me on my knees before and after Mass. I saw myself as he might have seen me: an angelic child surrounded with sacred light; a glowing little saint in a stained-glass window. I bowed profoundly till my forehead touched the carpeted steps of the altar; I beat my breast heavily at the Confiteor; I turned my head low and devoutly towards Father Cooney, as the ritual demanded; I lifted his chasuble at the consecration, while ringing the sanctuary handbell with a vigorous flourish. I did all this with a show of profound reverence, while I basked in what I imagined to be Father Cooney’s approval.
Father Cooney’s unspoken admiration was as nothing, however, to the sense of power I believed I had begun to exert over my mother, who still lay abed as I let myself out of the house before dawn and who began to speak to me with grudging respect as if for the clerical estate. She had even taken to rewarding me with the cream that collected at the top of the milk bottle, which she normally reserved for herself. ‘You’ll need this,’ she would murmur, as she poured the cream over my porridge when I returned from Mass, to the sullen envy of my siblings and the wordless amusement of my father. This was holy power indeed.
I HAD ABANDONED the bad company of former years, and I now found a friend in an ageing woman of the parish. Miss Hyacinth Racine, who was probably in her late seventies at that time, used to haunt the pamphlet rack in the church porch. Deeply stooped, she had a prominent hook nose with hang-glider nostrils. She spent her days walking between her house and the church, pulling a shopping trolley filled with reading matter. She spoke in an accent I identified as upper class. When I held the plate beneath her bristly chin at Communion, her tongue leapt out like a trembling yellow lizard. Most people tended to shun her. Mum said she was ‘a religious maniac’.
One day after Mass at the Camp, she invited me to her home. She lived and slept at the back of her semi-detached villa amid piles of old books, holy pictures, statues and devotional knick-knacks. There were French windows looking out on to a garden wilderness of brambles. On my first visit I asked if she was a widow. She told me that she was once engaged to a man who went ‘missing in action’ in the Great War. Every year, she said, she went to Leyton station on the date he had departed and stood at the point where he had waved her goodbye. ‘For years I used to wear on that day the dress in which I said my farewell, until the moths got it.’
Some day, she assured me, he would come back.
My friendship with Miss Racine started shortly after my eleventh birthday. After that, unknown to anyone, I was often in her house, listening to her spellbound while I ate her stale biscuits and drank the weak tea she brewed in the kitchen where marauding cats had their muzzles into every item of food. She had a stock of gossip about religious books and their authors, religious communities, priests and nuns. I loved her voice. Alone in the street I would practise imitating her speech, making up conversations with myself.
She gave me a relic of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the French nun who died aged twenty-four and was venerated the world over as a patron saint of priests and the missions. It was a tiny leather wallet containing a piece of cloth that had touched the saint’s bones. On another occasion she gave me a ‘scapular’, two pieces of brown cloth not much larger than postage stamps attached to each other by silken threads, to be worn beneath one’s clothing across the back and across the breast. Those who died wearing this object, she said, were guaranteed an ‘indulgence’: release from purgatory and entry into heaven on the first Saturday following their death.
Miss Racine was mainly a gossip. She never tried to preach. But she prompted an important event in my late childhood which led to my call to the priesthood. She often spoke of her visits to a Marian shrine at a place called Aylesford in Kent. That year the Saint Vincent de Paul Society organised a free camping holiday at Aylesford priory for boys of poor families in the parish. Mum put my name forward and I was accepted.
SIXTY BOYS WERE taken in buses from London’s East End to camp in a field next to the gardens of the priory which bordered the banks of the River Medway in Kent. Aylesford had once been the site of a medieval Carmelite foundation from which the friars were expelled at the Reformation. After the Second World War a group of Irish Carmelites had purchased the ruins and rebuilt them as a shrine to Our Lady who, according to tradition, had appeared there in the hollow of an oak tree. In those early days of its revival Aylesford was a romantic place surrounded by the unspoilt Kent countryside.
I watched the brown-and-white-robed friars singing in their renovated church, and walking prayerfully along the cloisters. I was enraptured by the view of weeping willows through clear Gothic windows, the dawn chorus, the tolling of bells marking out the monastic day, river waters lapping below ragstone walls, the smell of baking bread in the kitchens. Aylesford was a haven from the degrading everyday realities of parental discord, the school at Ilford, and dangerous men who lurk near toilets in South Kensington. The singing of the monks, from one side of the choir to the other, created a reassuring rhythm that seemed to echo deep into my heart. At Aylesford I experienced something even more transforming than morning Mass: I felt an inclining of my heart and soul, like the opening of a flower in warm sunlight. I was especially happy in the evening when the house martins swooped above the church roof and the scent of the river drifted in through open windows to mingle with the lingering incense.
The Prior, Father Malachy Lynch, was a large man with a great swatch of silver hair combed across the dome of his head. He spoke to me sitting on a stone ledge in the cloisters. He told me that angels had kept guard over the ruins of the monastery through the years when Catholic practice had been banned in England. He said that he had often seen angels, and that he had a sense of the presence of my own guardian angel who ‘loved me very much’. One day, walking in the monastery gardens he said something that had a deep and lasting effect on me. It was natural, he said, for human beings to look for God as a son seeks a lost father: ‘We are put on this earth to search for God.’ He said that some people look for God with greater determination than others: ‘That is what we do here at Aylesford. We friars make ourselves free to do nothing but search for God.’ Before I left Aylesford to return to London, Father Malachy Lynch gave me a book, The Imitation of Christ. It was bound in black leather, the pages were edged in red. It slipped easily into my jacket pocket.