Book Review

Lament for a vanished world

Seminary Boy

Readers of a nervous disposition approaching an account of life in a junior seminary in the 1950s by the author of Hitler's Pope may fear that they are in for a searing tale of sexual corruption and clerical failure. They will find elements of both, but the book as a whole is far more: a lament for a world we have lost; a quest for an absent father; a celebration of Cornwell's lifelong indebtedness to a great if flawed Catholic institution and the men who ran it; and a sensitive and at times bleak meditation on the human cost of the Tridentine ideal of priesthood. The result is a moving exercise in autobiography, and a social document of real importance.

Cornwell was one of five children of a working-class Cockney family. His father, Sidney, was the son of an East End pub-owner and a Jewish barmaid; his fiercely protective mother, Kathleen, second-generation London Irish and a devout Catholic. Sidney, a rackety survivor who compensated for the handicap of a withered leg with a rich fantasy life and a penchant for the girls, was a playing-field groundsman in Barkingside. The family, chronically poor and often hungry, lived in a damp, two-bedroomed "concrete box" which went with the job. When, eventually, Sidney abandoned his family, they were made homeless. The infant Cornwell was an educational reject in an inner-city sink school, loathed by his teachers, delinquent, iconoclastic, on the way to what the old prayer to St Michael calls "the ruin of souls".

Redemption came in the somewhat unlikely form of a vocation to the priesthood. A traumatic incident when Cornwell was picked up by a predatory paedophile and forced into unmentionable acts, combined with the benign influence of a gruffly holy Irish East End parish priest, Fr James Cooney from Skibereen, halted his incipient criminal career. At his mother's suggestion he became Fr Cooney's altar server, and the beauty and order of the Latin liturgy, even when celebrated in a Cork brogue in a bleak East End church, calmed and inspired the troubled boy and appealed to his sense of drama (here, as often in the book, Cornwell is hard on himself, and sees a strong element of narcissism in this "conversion"). He became conspicuously pious, and at the age of 13, Cooney arranged for him to go to Cotton College in north Staffordshire, to fit him for progression to the priesthood.

In our age of plummeting ordinations and single-figure intakes in the seminaries, it is hard now to recover the sheer expansiveness of clerical provision in the 1950s. The seminaries were bursting at the seams, building to accommodate the bulge, and money and manpower were poured into the junior boarding schools which acted as "feeders", for it was still considered appropriate for boys as young as 12 to start training for lifelong celibacy.

Seminary Boy is the story of Cornwell's years at Cotton College, of the rigours and deprivations of boarding-school life in a time of austerity, his early academic difficulties, his longing for companionship and emotional support, his love of the landscape round Cotton and the routines of college life which he treasured as a refuge from the chaos of his family existence, but also his growing sense of the emotional poverty of the lives of the clerical "Profs" who taught him. The book is full of vivid characters: the breezily amiable rugby international, Fr Tom Gavin, who gave Cornwell the nickname "Fru" (short for the Latin Frumentum Bene, Corn-well) which remained with him throughout his time at Cotton; and Cornwell's contemporary Derek Hanson, with whom he conducted elaborately Pythonesque spoof conversations for hours, to the bewilderment of other boys.

The scariest teacher was Fr Leo McCartie (subsequently Bishop of Northampton), for Cornwell a figure of joyless menace who moves through the book in silent carpet-slippers as he had moved through the darkened dormitories to police boyish peccadilloes - Cornwell is clearly still outraged by the caning he received from McCartie for reading a pious book by torchlight after lights out. Cornwell concedes that McCartie probably hated his disciplinary role at Cotton, and permits him a moment of wintry kindliness towards the end of the book, but he features here essentially as a symbol of the emotional dehydration which was the way in which some men coped with the personal demands of the priesthood.

The wonderfully depicted Fr Cooney apart, the hero of the book is Cornwell's surrogate father, Fr Vincent Armishaw, a tough-minded Cambridge graduate (trained under F.R. Leavis) and manifestly a great teacher. Leather-jacketed owner of a fast, green motorbike, Armishaw specialised in blunt, abrasive and often profane speech, but understood the fraught rollercoaster of Cornwell's dysfunctional home life, recognised his emotional neediness and, without ostentation or sentiment, befriended him. Armishaw's library and  his resolutely demanding and unchurchy conversation opened Cornwell's horizons, and established for him the existence of an intellectual and emotional world outside the conventional pieties of the Cotton syllabus.

Inevitably, the tension between sex and religion is a major theme of Cornwell's book, covering as it does the years of his own tumultuous puberty and his difficulty in reconciling piety with the demands of rebellious hormones. Catholic guilt features prominently, but more searchingly, Cornwell uses his gallery of clerics and boys to explore the ways in which Catholics of that period came to terms, or failed to come to terms, with the Church's ambivalence towards sexuality and personal relationships. He portrays his own confused infatuation with two fellow pupils, including a disturbing portrait of a boy damaged by a pre-Cotton encounter with an abusive priest. The staff of Cotton in Cornwell's time did include one abusive priest (subsequently removed) who attempted to seduce him in the confessional, but Cornwell is clear that most of the staff were decent men, for whom emotional denial, not emotional predation, was the danger. He also encountered priests whose wise advice and essential humanity lightened his own often tormented adolescent conscience, but the book climaxes in the disastrous freezing of his friendship with Fr Armishaw by the college authorities, fearful of extra-curricular contacts between boys and staff, beneath which he sees unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, tensions created by the demands of celibacy.

Cornwell eventually proceeded to the major seminary at Oscott, but left after a year, and at university abandoned Catholicism, a progress only briefly dealt with here. When, 20 years later, he returned to the practice of the faith, it was to a post-conciliar Church he found almost unrecognisable and, at times, intolerable. At Midnight Mass on the first Christmas after his return, the choir sang Happy Birthday to You at the Consecration, and Cornwell staggered outside thinking, "I'm not going to make it." He evidently has, however, and this vivid, often painful book explores the legacy of his pre-conciliar formation, from his present post-conciliar perspective. Cotton closed altogether in 1987, and is now being redeveloped as luxury homes. Seminary Boy brings it to life again and deserves a place alongside David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? as an affectionate but unblinking evocation of a unique era of English Catholicism, now in danger of being forgotten.

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