I stood there back in that office like a junkie desperate not to do hard time. I begged Father Sammy not to phone my mum. And that’s when he knew he’d found my weak spot – he even had his hand poised over the phone, the devious git. In the space of a few moments I went from cocky rebel to desperate witch at Salem screaming for mercy. He had me just where he wanted me. It was more an initiation than a bollocking: standing in his office pleading with him, I became a dues-paid, card-carrying member of the please-don’t-tell-the-outside-world brigade.
‘Please, please, please don’t tell my mum!’
My parents’ love and respect was all I had to help me get through my time in this horrible place. I desperately didn’t want him to tell them I’d become a bad kid. I felt lost and ill at the prospect of being morally abandoned. They had replaced the Church in my private sense of worship. They were all I had faith in. If he called home and dropped this bombshell, he would shatter my belief system.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I won’t do it again, I promise. Please don’t call my mum and dad. Please.’
In the end, he didn’t call them, but not because my begging had swayed him. Instead, he held that threat over me for months. Sammy had found the chink in my armour. I actually prayed that he’d have a stroke and be rendered speechless. I tried to imagine him shaking his head in my dad’s direction on a visiting Saturday as I silenced him with big fat spoonfuls of yogurt . . . yogurt I’d peed in, after eating a field-full of asparagus.
We earned ourselves a mention at evening prayers in the main chapel. Well, a very obvious reference to the evils of tobacco, and a couple of hundred heads turning to stare in our direction. The old me would’ve thrived off of the kudos had Sammy not found my Achilles heel. Still, beyond my personal fears, I couldn’t care less about the silent moral outrage of the rest of the college.
I think that Peter, being a lay-student with no desire what-soever to go into the priesthood, actually enjoyed the notoriety of our scandalous behaviour. He was just a naughty boy. I was the future head of a parish and therefore should know better. I always felt sad for lay-students. I mean, us students who’d heard the call to do God’s work had put ourselves in that place. I don’t think I could’ve forgiven my parents had they sent me there to get myself a ‘proper’ education.
Maybe that was what gave Peter such an obvious sense of satisfaction, maybe not. Still, God love him, he sat through evening prayers with the same big fixed grin that he’d had in Sammy’s office.
As summer came, things improved at Upholland: there were more outdoor activities available; it stayed light till much later so I could read more in the evenings; and the whole building warmed up and the trudge downstairs to wash in the morning was a much more pleasant exercise. I’d got to grips with the day-to-day routine and had settled into the idea that this was my life from now on. Anger gave way to a faint hope that I could make a go of this priesthood lark.
The poster boy for the next generation of clergymen!
I had made a really good friend in Simon, a Geordie lad in Underlow. He was a bright kid and great craic. I think his dad worked away and his mum couldn’t always make the home visiting days, so he would come back to St Helens with me on those precious Saturday afternoons out. We’d nick off over the field for a fag with our Mark and eat our own body weight in whatever treats my mum had got in. Simon was ‘proper’ working class in my eyes. We were both from backgrounds that didn’t have a great deal in terms of money, but made up for it in pride.
I could never understand why pride was considered a sin. It’s what gave most folk I knew back home the strength to endure through difficult times. And, under the Thatcher government, it was the worst of times.
We liked to dress smart, even in the absence of lasses to impress. I took to wearing shirts with tiepins in them. Burton’s finest. God, to think I thought them so smart. I’d hit that age where I wanted clothes for my birthday: Slazenger jumpers were the epitome of cool as far as I was concerned. It was the time that I was first becoming aware of gaining weight, and I think dressing to impress was a way of combating my growing self-consciousness. My burgundy Slazenger helped hide a multitude of sins, but others proved more difficult to conceal. Puberty was upon me, and you couldn’t be in a worse place when those hormones started raging than a seminary.
My first interview day at Upholland! You can see in the background they’re going all out to pitch the place as an upmarket Butlins.
You see, ten-year-olds sitting their entrance exams don’t tend to think in terms of long-term consequences. It had seemed perfectly acceptable that marriage was banned within my future career. Sex wasn’t on the agenda then. Back home at St Austin’s Junior School, I had wanted a girlfriend as a status symbol, but there were no real base urges involved beyond snogging, so what big sacrifice was there in celibacy? How was I to know that within the space of a year, the fairer sex would be dominating all my waking thoughts (not to mention my nightly indiscretions)? Ten was a crazy age to seriously consider going celibate.
In the last few months before I’d left for Upholland, I’d started to fall prey to random and demanding ‘stiffies’. I had to relieve myself. I couldn’t discuss it with anyone because I was plagued with guilt. It felt so damned good, it had to be wrong. Either that, or I was a unique medical phenomenon, because why else would nobody have ever thought to forewarn me of this? If this was normal, then surely somebody would’ve taken the time to explain to me that the contents of my Y-fronts would turn into the orgasmic equivalent of Blackpool Pleasure Beach?
I actually thought I could be a freak of nature who might be paraded around medical seminars the world over should my dirty revelation ever come to the attention of others. Or maybe I’d invented it? Just like Darwin, I was torn between my responsibility to disclose one of mankind’s greatest ever discoveries and my fear of incurring the wrath of The Mother Church.
I kept telling myself, ‘This can’t go on. When you get to Upholland, it’ll have to stop.’ Before leaving for the seminary, I went hell for leather to get it out of my system. One night, I threw my penis what can best be described as a wild going-away party, and beat the poor thing half to death in the process.
I actually thought I’d broken it. I had a panic attack, convinced that I’d done some permanent damage. I sat downstairs with it resting on a bag of frozen peas, terrified in case anyone else got up in the night. I was a wanna-be lover, not a fighter, so how did my genitals end up looking like Sly Stallone at the end of Rocky II?
I sat there into the early hours, too ashamed to pray for help, and too embarrassed to dare think of seeking medical assistance. I eventually went back to bed, slept a little on my back with legs akimbo, and left for school the next day walking like a chimpanzee that had just had a vasectomy.
But even that terrifying ordeal didn’t manage to purge me of the urge. You’ll never have a more guilt-ridden moment than your first ‘self love’ session at a seminary. You’re waiting for sirens to go off and a gang of priests in riot gear to come charging in, restraining you with a tight bed sheet like that scene from Full Metal Jacket, before smacking you with multiple bars of Pope-on-a-rope soap wielded in towels.
Occasionally, on a Saturday, the priests would take us out of the seminary for a swimming trip. They’d leave us at Skelmersdale Baths, but we’d wait for the minibus to leave and then go straight out to the shopping centre to follow girls around. (We’d wet our hair later in the sinks so as not to raise suspicion when they collected us.)
We were so socially inept, but, temporarily free from our all-male environment, we were desperate. It must have been terrifying for those girls to be followed around Topshop by a group of eleven-year-old trainee priests, capable of nothing more than gawping at