Until then I had never given any thought to the fact of my voice breaking.
THE PROFS WERE always and everywhere in evidence: at the side altars saying their Masses in the morning, in the classrooms, and on the playing fields. There was a priest, sometimes two or more, present at every juncture of the day to scrutinise us. We were watched from morning until night, and even through the night, it seemed, by Father McCartie.
Father Tony Piercy made an immediate impression. Built like a boxer, and known as ‘Tank’, he was to be seen hurrying about the buildings and across the Bounds, propelling himself forward in a flurry of cassock and gown with a springy half-walk-half-run, shoulders squared. He had a head of unruly, wiry hair and his nose appeared pinched at the end, which gave him a strangely fastidious appearance, as if aware of an unpleasant smell about him. He taught mathematics and he was a tireless handyman, James told me, a ‘general factotum’ around the college, who would cure the ailing plumbing, rebuild a broken desk, mend a boiler, or service Father Doran’s car. Beneath his cassock he wore scuffed army boots caked with mud, and invariably carried a variety of tools in his capacious cassock pockets.
Two days after my arrival at Cotton, Father Piercy introduced me to ‘manual labour’. This involved digging ditches in a scheme to level and drain the playing fields above the college. The drains were constructed by digging down four feet and laying limestone-grit boulders along a channel two feet wide before replacing and levelling the soil. Boulders from disused drystone walls had to be fetched, sometimes from a mile distant. They were heavy and it was easy to tear one’s hands on the jagged edges.
James encouraged me to join Father Piercy’s ‘Workers’ Union’, as the ditching teams were called. ‘Ditching,’ he murmured, ‘is, of course, an opportunity for self-denial.’ We wore rubber Wellington boots, with rugby shorts and shirts over our second-best clothes to protect us from the mud. Father Piercy, dressed in a filthy blue boiler suit and army boots, leapt in and out of the ditches, directing operations. He never spoke to us directly, nor even looked at us, but appeared to focus his attention inches away from the end of his pinched nose as if he was trapped inside a protective bubble.
On the afternoon of the first Thursday after my arrival I attended Father Piercy’s handicraft session. Thursdays were a half-day holiday from games, lessons and manual labour, but boys were expected to do something constructive. One could choose between reading in the library, attending confession and spiritual direction, or handicraft. And it was possible to do all three. The projects in Father Piercy’s workshop included the making of rosaries, the cutting and binding of leather cases for missals and prayer books, the carving of crucifixes, or construction of pipe-racks. He set me to work making a case for my missal, Father Cooney’s gift. He moved from boy to boy at the work benches, demonstrating techniques for cutting leather, sewing, binding, making the hooks for rosary beads, and carpentry. He spoke in a quiet, barely intelligible, rapid nasal voice, and appeared to be working his mouth nervously.
Another striking prof was Father Armishaw whom Derek had mentioned blushingly when we were walking on Top Bounds. Father Armishaw taught English literature to the fifth and sixth forms. He was over six foot with broad shoulders, and dressed in a caped cassock, and an MA gown when he was teaching. He could be seen making his way across Little Bounds, a book under his arm, walking with a self-confident rolling gait. He had a swashbuckling posture; but such was his powerful physique and piercing look, it seemed natural rather than boastful or proud. He was also famous for owning a large gleaming motorcycle with a dark green petrol tank. Several times in my first week I saw him flying along the lane at the back of the school, the flaps of his leather flying jacket open to the wind.
I encountered Father Armishaw when I went up to the top corridor in the old hall to deliver an exercise I had written out for Dr Warner. He lived on a passageway known as ‘Creepers’, as boys were expected to go on tiptoe so as not to disturb the priestly inhabitants. The first door on the left stood wide open; as I glanced in I saw Father Armishaw at his desk in the middle of the room. There was a bed in one corner with a white coverlet like the ones in our dormitory. There were two simple armchairs, and bookcases running from floor to ceiling around the walls. The books, many hundreds of them, were carefully arranged, their spines all evenly regimented and displayed. Everything about the room was neat, and the polished surfaces reflected the light of the coal fire in the grate. On a table beneath the open window was a gramophone playing a piece of music. The priest sat slouched at his desk, a smoking cigarette between his fingers. He had strong, well-proportioned features; jet black wavy hair, strong and glossy like the coat of a healthy animal. He looked up from a book he was reading and stared back, his mouth a little open, his lips slightly curled as if he were mocking me.
‘What are you gawping at?’ he said in a low voice. I was rooted to the spot. Then he said evenly: ‘Well, if you don’t want anything, bugger off!’
I had never heard a priest swear or utter a vulgarity, and I was shocked. I moved along the corridor and left my exercise book outside Dr Warner’s door as I had been instructed. When I returned, Father Armishaw had come to lean up against the door jamb of his room, all his weight on one leg. He was watching me, smiling. ‘And who might you be?’
When I told him my name, he made a gesture with his head as if to show that his curiosity was satisfied. ‘You’re one of those Brentwood types, aren’t you?’
Then he nodded into his room towards his gramophone. ‘Listen to that…’
Filling his room and resounding into the corridor was the sound of a violin backed by an orchestra. The music was entering its finale, and the priest stood watching me in silence, nodding his head in time with the rhythm. When it had finished, he said: ‘Do you know what that was?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Mozart…second violin concerto. Not bad, eh!’
I stared at him, speechless.
‘One day, perhaps, I’ll play it through from beginning to end for you. In the meantime stay out of trouble.’
As I turned to go, he added: ‘And mind you don’t take life too seriously.’
The incident excited me. I felt that the priest had engaged me rather than kept me at bay like the others. The following day, walking up and down Top Bounds after breakfast, I reported the encounter to James, and James reported it to Derek when he joined us as he usually did. Derek was avid for every detail and chortled and danced around with glee.
IN THE SECOND week my name appeared on the Mass roster to serve Father Piercy. There was no hint of emotion or devotion in his voice or gestures. At Saint Augustine’s I had emulated Father Cooney’s slow and devout voice; kneeling beside Father Piercy, I found myself trying with difficulty to pace my responses with his rapid recitation. Father Cooney would take almost an hour over Mass, whereas Father Piercy said his in twenty minutes.
Day by day the choir prepared for the Sunday High Mass. On that first Sunday we sang the Mozart Mass, and Victoria’s ‘O Sacrum Convivium’ during the Offertory. The rest of the service, involving the whole college, was sung in Gregorian chant. The long, complicated Mass was celebrated by three priests robed in green vestments and beskirted with lace albs. The pillars of exorbitant incense smoke (Father Cooney would have been scandalised) rose high to the rafters. In their distant side aisle I could see the nuns, some twelve of them, following the Mass with rapt attention.
As I found my feet at Cotton in those first days, struggling with the early lessons, keeping up on runs, shivering under cold showers, and attempting to wolf down the tasteless meals, I realised that the single most important focus of our routine