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.
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…’
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.
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