First Confession Page 5
Our mother, like other mothers, was not averse to making the occasional personal criticism. I do not mean that she was catty or unkind: she was neither of those things. But she had unshifting standards, often about things that did not always matter very much at all like dress, household tidiness, nails, and assumed or actual personal hygiene. She was judgemental about individual behaviour in a way that was pretty foreign to my father. One of her highest forms of praise was to describe someone as ‘band box’, neat and tidy as she was herself; indeed when she was dolled up to go out with Dad in the evening she could look film star glamorous. When she came to see me at school events, prize-givings or sports days, she was always the best-looking mum in the hall or on the touchline. The most important thing about her was that she loved our father and her children as much as a mother possibly could. She was very tactile, cuddled and kissed us all a lot, and glowed with pride about our achievements. I have mentioned her enthusiasm for upward mobility, frustrated by our father’s unsatisfactory business career. She was delighted that her son, kitted out in tweed and twills with his first dinner jacket from Burton’s in his suitcase, went to Oxford. Her pleasure when I became a Member of Parliament could have been sliced with one of her well-kept butter knives. I can barely imagine what she would have thought of her son, a product of the rolling acres of Greenford, being described as a Tory grandee.
A year or so after my father died my mother married his best friend, our Greenford doctor. Dad and Denis McCarthy, an Irishman from Mayo who had worked for the National Health Service since its inception, played golf and drank whisky together. Denis was a good doctor and a kind man and made my mother very happy until, at the moment of his retirement, she died of a heart attack in her sleep aged sixty-four. My last conversation with her was a result of chance. I phoned her to tell her that because a Cabinet minister, Norman St John Stevas, was unable at the last minute to appear in BBC TV’s Question Time with Robin Day, I was being parachuted into the programme, much to the producer’s displeasure. I hope that her last sight of me on the television did not contribute to her attack; more likely it was the dairy products and the occasional cigarettes. Geneticists advise us to choose our parents carefully. Mine both died ridiculously young of cardiac problems. I have been more lucky thanks to angioplasty, a keyhole bypass operation and statins. I am still here more because of modern medicine than because of self-discipline. But heredity and my dicky heart can never overwhelm my sense of good fortune that I had two parents who loved me and loved each other. Their lives could have been longer and could have been more prosperous.
As I have said, my mother became a Catholic in order to marry. I am not sure that she would ever have spent much time thinking let alone talking about religious matters, but she observed all the rites of the church that she had been obliged to join. My earliest memory of a religious observance or prayer is my dad, as he kissed me goodnight, tracing the letters INRI on my forehead with his finger. INRI – ‘Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum’: ‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews’. These were the words that Pilate insisted should be fixed to the cross of Jesus at the time of the crucifixion. To the Pharisees cavilling that it should say Jesus had only claimed the title, Pilate responded, ‘What I have written, I have written.’ As he made these marks on our foreheads, my father repeated the prayer he thought had helped to keep him safe on the passage by wartime convoy to the Middle East. ‘May Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, preserve you from sudden and unprepared death.’ I did the same with my own children and now do it with my grandchildren. Perhaps the prayer helped Dad in the wartime Mediterranean but not unfortunately on the peacetime M6.
Most of my early religious memories are based on our school and the church which was responsible for it. These were the days before Pope John XXIII and his calling of the Second Vatican Council, which first met in 1962. It did not conclude until 1965. The Council transformed the Church itself and attitudes towards it. While we were not really then a butt of popular prejudice, people were a little suspicious of us, as we seemed to want to prolong the Counter-Reformation, deny the modern world, and lock down any possibility of change in what we did and thought. We could not blame others for reckoning we were a little odd, with all that mumbo jumbo in a dead language, the smell of incense, the infallible Italian and his court in Rome, and the distancing of ourselves from others who claimed to be Christian but denied themselves the glorious certainties of the one, true faith. To some I am sure we were like Freemasons without the funny handshake and the rolled-up trouser leg. Naturally, we learned the same Bible stories as those other Christians who had protested against us and persecuted us just as we had persecuted them. But I am not sure we thought that their God was quite the same as ours, in those days before the Second Vatican Council called for the Catholic Church to be brought up to date and invited separated communities to join us in the quest for unity.
My early religious education came before all that. Sweet women teachers with twinsets and comfortable bosoms taught us the Hail Mary, the Our Father and the Rosary, and some of the simpler stories from the Bible, mainly from the New rather than the Old Testament. We learned the words of Cardinal Wiseman’s hymn ‘Full in the panting heart of Rome / Beneath the apostle’s crowning dome’, the chorus of which is the triumphalist ‘God bless our Pope’, repeated twice and followed by the epithet ‘the Great, the Good’. There were more words in it than in the National Anthem and an unqualified ultramontane sentiment that carried the chorus over the Alps and across the main, ‘from torrid south to frozen north’, which clearly meant us. Each year our knowledge of the Catechism was tested, beginning with the question, ‘Who made you?’ The Archbishop of Westminster or one of his suffragans would go from classroom to classroom asking for the answers prescribed by the Church. One year Cardinal Griffin came but he only asked easy questions. Even the slower children in our class knew who had made them and why. Answer to the first question, ‘God’, and to the second, ‘To know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.’ I always liked that answer. I was a bit riled when the Cardinal moved on without giving me the chance to show that I knew the names of all the Beatitudes.
I was an early recruit to the Guild of St Stephen, wearing as an altar boy like my father before me a cassock and cotta, scarlet beneath and white surplice with lacy frills above. The Pallotine Fathers taught us the Tridentine Liturgy; in those days the mass had to be said in Latin and girls were certainly not allowed on the altar. (In some churches abroad, for example the United States, the presence of girls is still resisted by arch-conservative bishops and priests.) We pronounced the Latin, unlike the Romans, with soft Italianate Cs and Gs, and Vs as Vs not as Ws. I used to serve mass once during the week and once on Sundays and had to fast for twelve hours before taking communion. The small vestry where we changed into our cassocks smelt of communion wine and the priest’s tobacco. I knew all the words to the mass – ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ – but my mother stopped me repeating them all when I pretended to say mass myself with Carr’s water biscuits and a glass of squash on the dining room table at home. It made a change to be a cardinal inside the house rather than King of Spain in the garden. My mother’s intervention was, I think, a reflection of her suspicion that what I was doing smacked of heresy rather than an effort to thwart any sense I might entertain of vocation for the priesthood.
One year I was chosen to lead the May procession in my scarlet and white vestments, hands devoutly and sweatily pressed together, my sticking-up straw hair plastered to my head with a dollop of glistening Brylcreem. I came at the head of two columns of would-be angels, little girls in long white dresses with blue ribbons and posies of flowers. The procession, with the parish priests and a plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary carried aloft by the Knights of St Columba, started in the school hall, wound around the car park, and then ventured briefly into the street outside accompanied by a police constable with a small crowd of goggle-eyed spectators wa
tching this exotic intrusion into Greenford life. We finished in the church with Benediction and the Rosary, and then had sticky cakes in the school hall.
Benediction, with the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the altar in a monstrance, was celebrated with some of my favourite Latin hymns – especially ‘Laudate Dominum’ (‘Praise the Lord’, based on the shortest of the psalms) and ‘Tantum Ergo’ (the end of a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas inviting the congregation to venerate the sacrament). At secondary school, I discovered that you could sing the ‘Tantum Ergo’ to the tune of ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’, which some of us used to do in a quiet descant. So much of the bone and marrow of my life was learned as part of my religious education and early religious practice. The prayers and hymns I learned and the narrative which became so familiar – the miracles, the parables, the martyrs – have provided me with a cultural framework and a personal lifeboat. In an art gallery or church, I can usually remember the story behind the biblical scenes depicted and can often recall who the saints are and how hideously they died – St Lawrence, patron saint of chefs with the gridiron on which he was horrendously barbecued; St Sebastian, usually so improbably fey given all those flesh-piercing arrows that did not apparently finish him off. Why did Caravaggio’s astonishing paintings of St Matthew in the French church in Rome make such an impression on me when I saw them too late in my life? The answer is partly because I remember being told the story behind the most famous of the paintings, the calling of St Matthew in his counting house by Jesus, by a Benedictine monk at secondary school. The point of the story for a Christian was the initial ‘Who, me?’ disinclination of Matthew to follow Jesus, hardships and all, eventually to his own crucifixion. Whenever I have been afraid, or have reason to feel grateful about the way the world has spun for me, the same prayers come to mind. I once told a friend this. He looked a shade embarrassed and said, ‘You might as well be an elderly Irish nun.’ There are far worse lives to contemplate.
Despite my gratitude for what I learned as a child, I have become increasingly outspoken as I have got older about what has often felt like an authoritarian anti-intellectualism in the Catholic Church. I wish my religion was discussed in a more rational way that goes back to its roots, to what really matters, and to the way decent people – whether Catholic or not – live. This should not be frowned upon, as it often is, in a Church which for centuries has honoured the ever-questioning Thomas Aquinas. I ceased to believe in Father Christmas at about the time I was first learning about God. I have always felt that there should be more of an intellectual rupture between the two. The great Parisian theologian Abelard, who was one of the most important European thinkers of his day and who helped to inspire the twelfth-century Renaissance, reversed the two aspects of belief which had hitherto dominated Christian thinking. While Anselm of Canterbury had argued ‘fides quaerens intellectum’ – faith seeking understanding – Abelard believed that understanding should precede faith. I have always found that a more intellectually satisfying position.
This became the focus of my anxiety about the great religious crossing that baptized Catholic children subsequently make, their first confession and communion. Pius X, a very autocratic Pope, who was determined to try to protect the Church against the modern world, decided that children could tell the difference between right and wrong at the same age – about seven – as they could understand the nature of the Eucharist. At seven I confessed my sins so that I could receive communion. I am sure I was well taught by loving teachers and I know that today most children are even more sensitively taught (given some of the scandals of recent years). Nor did I ever have much fear of the dark confessional box. Confession is the subject of a wonderful story by Frank O’Connor in which a terrified child, confused in the dark, clambers up on to the shelf designed for a penitent’s elbow so that when the confessor twitches the curtain to find out what is happening all he can see is the child’s knees.
How much did I know of good and bad when I was seven? One of the problems is that as one got older confession became like settling a driving offence – three points off for just breaking the speed limit, six for doing seventy in a built-up area. When did a venial sin – Purgatory, with just a bit of pain until you were absolved – turn into a mortal sin – lighting the sort of hellfire described in the famous sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? To be fair I cannot recall when I last heard a sermon about hell, but Catholic teaching has not departed much, if at all, from the sort of gradations of alleged wickedness satirized in the very title of the Catholic David Lodge’s novel How Far Can You Go? This inevitably became a dominant issue for boys and young men, and presumably for young women too.
Sexual behaviour, about which the celibate necessarily know less than the sexually practising, has become an obsession in debates about the Church’s teaching. This must be one reason why the numbers of practising Catholics who go to confession have plummeted. Children are required to confess before communion in churches where only a small minority of adults themselves take this sacrament. Their parents must know this. For a young man growing up I can speak to the huge embarrassment of confessing to what Baden-Powell called ‘beastliness’; from what I know, I doubt that he ever stopped many boy scouts from indulging in it. What was a more or less acceptable dirty thought on the purgatorial side of the dividing line between venial and mortal? What was touchable and what not? Which part of my body, or yours, crossed the frontier from Purgatory to Hell? How could I prevent something untoward happening in the night? It is not far-fetched to argue that the obsession with masturbation (allegedly ‘moral disorder’) and its confession must have played a significant role in the Catholic Church’s disastrous history of child abuse and the wicked attempts to cover it up. ‘Suffer little children … to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven’.
The Catholic Church, which I am happy and proud to regard as my home, has got sex badly wrong. People talk with reason about the rest of the world’s obsession with sex. But the same is true of the Church. What if we had become as focused on wealth, charity, income distribution? What if we had decided in the words of the Magnificat that we needed ‘to put down the mighty from their seat’ and to exalt ‘the humble and meek’? If it really is ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’, should we not say a lot more about this than about ‘beastliness’ and condoms?
Some argue that to ask for any change in the teachings of the Catholic Church would be tantamount to feminizing it, an odd and very offensive criticism. It would leave the world, they say, with an Anglicanized Church, Catholic-lite. I do not understand what is wrong with asserting that the Church, which has regularly changed some of its teaching, should hold on to the essential message encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount, while being a little more like the world it serves and understanding of the lives of those who are still practising Catholics. At least it should discuss more openly why so many faithful Catholics live patently good lives which are at odds with what is said by Church leaders about, in particular, the family, marriage, sex and love. All of which is some distance from Our Lady of the Visitation’s church and primary school, where I was first taught to confess. I will return to it at the end of this book.
3
Scholarship Boy
‘Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing.’
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
‘Mr Hector’s stuff’s not meant for the exams, Sir. It’s to make us more rounded human beings.’
Alan Bennett, The History Boys
It was not just the Catechism that we learned off by heart at Our Lady of the Visitation, not just prayers like the Hail Mary and the Magnificat. Like most other primary schools in those days – the 1950s – we were encouraged, no, obliged, to memorize tables, poems and correct spellings. The classes were large. A single te
acher took forty or more of us all together down a path where rigour at an early age led quite quickly to the excitement of discovering bigger and broader horizons on one’s own. The method was very didactic in ways that for many years went horribly out of fashion. It has been creeping back into primary schools in recent years, as it should. I am rather impressed by what my grandchildren appear to be learning these days.
What made for an even more disciplined environment was the personality of our headteacher, Mr Deasey, and the port for which we all set sail, the eleven-plus exam. This determined the sort of secondary schools to which we would go. Allegedly, we were directed to the type of schools that most suited our talents. Mr Deasey was a burly, grizzled and grey-haired man who ran a very tight ship. He was not unkind but expected punctuality and hard work from both his pupils and his staff. His son was in my class, consistently ahead of the rest of us, and doing practice eleven-plus papers for two or three years before we all had to sit the actual exam, which he of course passed with flying colours. He went to the same secondary school as me and from there on to Cambridge to study Classics. Some of what I learned at Our Lady of the Visitation has remained with me – friend and companion – throughout my life, not only the prayers and the first encounters with the New Testament. For example, I am still a whizz at mental arithmetic, turning Celsius into Fahrenheit or kilometres into miles. Above all, I was encouraged to read widely, and to enjoy what I read, and was allowed to have what were thought to be somewhat precocious tastes. Before everyone had a television set in the front room there seemed to be a view that provided you were reading a book, you were likely to be better occupied than if you were doing anything else.