ST JOSEPH’S ACADEMY was situated on the crest of a hill that rose from the centre of plebeian Lewisham, on a road that led after half a mile or so to bourgeois Blackheath Village. A dignified square building housed the offices and living quarters of the brothers. Behind it there were two blocks of classrooms, built at right angles to each other and enclosing a lawn, and beyond these were the playground and playing fields. It had a two-form entry, with fifty to sixty boys in each year. Its uniform (blazer and cap) was a very bright green, trimmed with gold, and its badge a five-pointed star with the motto Signum Fidei (Sign of Faith). The De La Salle brothers who owned and largely staffed the school wore black cassocks and collars, with two slightly splayed white linen panels at the neck. They belonged to an order founded in the mid-seventeenth century by St John Baptist De La Salle, a French aristocrat who had a laudable mission to provide education for the people. The full name of the order is the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and they are sometimes understandably confused with the Christian Brothers, a similar order but founded much later, in Ireland. The De La Salle order also had a presence in Ireland, and several of the brothers at St Joseph’s were Irish. Both sets of men took religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but were not ordained priests, and were not of the same intellectual calibre as teacher-priests in orders like the Benedictines and Jesuits. I had a sense, however, that the De La Salle order considered itself a cut above the Christian Brothers, perhaps because of its longer history.
St Joseph’s was not an academically distinguished school when I joined it, though it improved somewhat while I was there, thanks mainly to the addition of several lay teachers to the staff. Immediately after the war both human and material resources for education were limited, but even allowing for that I believe I received an education inferior to that of my peers at other London grammar schools, Catholic and non-Catholic, especially in the junior forms. Grammar itself was reasonably well taught in an old-fashioned way, and for that I am grateful; but the teaching of literature was uninspired and uninspiring. We studied the same texts in successive years, perhaps because there was a shortage of books, and ‘did’ Julius Caesar so many times that I finally knew it almost off by heart. A class typically consisted of each boy reading aloud a section of the text in turn and then the teacher commenting and asking questions about it. We had an elderly teacher called Brother Palladius, known as ‘Polly’, whose regular homework was to require us to read a few pages of a set text, for example Treasure Island, and be prepared to take a spelling test on words in it at the beginning of the next day’s lesson. He would call out five words, and if you got any wrong you would get the strap, one whack (not very hard) on the hand for each mistake. In its pedagogically incorrect way it was quite effective as a method of improving pupils’ spelling. English was always my best subject, and I vividly remember my mortification when for once I misspelled a word (it was ‘cofee’) and had to go up to the front of the class to receive chastisement. The strap was made of several layers of leather sewn together, and short enough to be concealed in the pocket of a cassock. The teacher who introduced us to physics in the third form (one of the less successful lay additions to the staff) also used a strap to punish faulty homework, which did not help me to find his lessons any more comprehensible. I dropped the subject with great relief, along with chemistry, when we were split into arts and science streams at the end of the academic year. Biology was not taught at the school at that time, so I left it lamentably ignorant of the natural sciences. There was no music either, apart from occasional lessons called Singing; so though appreciative of music and possessed of a good ear, I never acquired even an elementary understanding of its structural principles.
Surprisingly, religious instruction was probably the worst-taught subject of all, though the ethos of the school was intensely Catholic. Its War Memorial featured a statue of St Joseph cradling the infant Jesus in the crook of his arm and apparently teaching him to read. There was a crucifix on the wall of every classroom. There were prayers at morning assemblies, and every subsequent lesson of the day began with the recitation of the ‘Hail Mary’. On feast days we were marched down to the Catholic church in Blackheath for mass. But there were no specialist teachers of religious instruction. It was the responsibility of form teachers, occupying the first period of the day after the register was taken, and in the lower forms it consisted mostly of indoctrination in the Catholic faith by working through the Penny Catechism, the answers to whose questions we were required to memorise and repeat on demand. ‘Where is God? God is everywhere. Does God know and see all things? God knows and sees all things, even our most secret thoughts. What is the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church is the union of all the faithful under one Head. Who is the head of the Catholic Church?’ That was a trick question, the correct answer being not the Pope, but ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’. The Pope was defined in succeeding questions and answers as ‘the visible head of the Church and Vicar of Christ’. He was of course infallible. ‘What do you mean when you say that the Pope is infallible? When I say that the Pope is infallible, I mean that the Pope cannot err when, as Shepherd and Teacher of all Christians, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals, to be held by the whole church.’ The Penny Catechism was not a document sensitive to the views of non-Catholic Christians.
Towards the end of this little book there was a section on Virtues and Vices with lists that were more of a challenge to memorisation, like ‘Which are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit?’ (Answer: ‘Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Fear of the Lord’), easily confused with the answer to ‘Which are the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit? (Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, Benignity, Goodness, Longanimity, Mildness, Faith, Modesty, Continency, Chastity)’. Longanimity, in case you are wondering, for it is an archaic word my spellchecker refuses to recognise, means forbearance, patience under suffering. One wonders who drew up these lists, and named them, and what was supposed to be their usefulness in the effort to lead a good life. Some had footnotes with abbreviated references to verses of Scripture, but we never studied the Bible as a text, nor later in our schooling were we entered for public examinations in religious instruction which would have entailed such study. Our teachers sometimes seemed as bored by RI as we were. In the fourth year we had as our form teacher Brother Peter, an Irishman whose close-cropped grey-haired head and craggy features made him look a bit like a convict. He was also our maths teacher and insisted on using the first period of the day to give us additional maths, which he claimed we badly needed. When some bold spirits in the class protested that the lesson should be religious instruction he pulled a long rosary from the pocket of his cassock and shook it in the air, declaring with a triumphant, gap-toothed grin, ‘Say your rosary! Say your rosary! That’s all the religious instruction you need!’ The Rosary is the most mind-numbing of all Catholic devotions, consisting in the recitation of multiple ‘decades’ of prayers, namely the ‘Hail Mary’ repeated ten times, preceded by one ‘Our Father’ and concluded by one ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, Amen’. While reciting these prayers, silently or aloud with others, using your beads to keep track, you were supposed to meditate on one of the ‘Mysteries’ of the Faith to which each decade was dedicated, and these Mysteries were themselves divided into three sets of five; for example, the first Joyful Mystery was the Annunciation, the first Sorrowful Mystery was the Agony in the Garden, and the first Glorious Mystery was the Resurrection. But the repetitious droning of the prayers, and the disconnection between their words and the theme of each decade, made focused thought impossible. Brother Peter’s suggestion that saying the Rosary could be a substitute for religious instruction was preposterous.
I couldn’t help wondering in retrospect what motivated these men to choose their way of life. To take religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience without acquiring the status and sacred privileges of the priesthood, in order to pursue a vocation that was also open to laymen, would seem to betoken exceptional dedication and self-sacrifice in the cause of education. I did encounter brothers at the school of whom one could believe this was true, but not many. In most cases there were probably other motives. I raised this subject recently with a friend of about the same age, who had been a postulant with the Christian Brothers in youth. As a boy, he attended one of their grammar schools in Bristol, where he was happy and looked up to his teachers as role models. To him, coming from a Catholic working-class family in a council house, the brothers’ communal lifestyle seemed enviable, combining camaraderie with social status in this life and more or less guaranteed salvation in the next. The prospect of being trained as a teacher by the order, and possibly sent to university, was attractive, and when at the age of about twelve the boys were asked if they felt they had a vocation to join the order, he put himself forward. He was then transferred to a junior seminary, a boarding school which prepared boys to become postulants. This was traditional practice in the Roman Catholic Church: to place likely candidates for the religious life as priests or brothers in a sequestered, all-male environment before puberty to prepare them for a life of dedicated chastity and keep them from temptation. For some time my friend continued to be happy in this milieu, but when the sexual urges of adolescence kicked in the moral theology with which he was indoctrinated produced extreme spiritual anxiety, leading eventually to a kind of nervous breakdown at the age of nineteen. The order sensibly discharged him, and he went to Bristol University, where he met his future wife, and subsequently had a successful career as a lay teacher and headmaster of progressive Catholic views.
In recent times both the Christian Brothers and the De La Salle order have been implicated in shocking revelations of sexual and physical abuse of children by Catholic priests, brothers and nuns in many countries going back to the 1950s, revelations which have rocked the Church internally, badly damaged its reputation and exposed dioceses to ruinously expensive compensation claims from the victims. The record of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, Australia and Canada is particularly shameful. It is impossible not to connect this evil with the vow of celibacy required of Roman Catholic priests and brothers, to which many committed themselves without sufficient experience of life to make such a decision, and which must have become more difficult to keep as society at large became increasingly open and permissive in sexual matters. There is also evidence that many candidates for the priesthood in this period were homosexually oriented men for whom heterosexual celibacy was no sacrifice and who consciously or unconsciously sought to sublimate their desires through a religious vocation, only to find that it provided plentiful temptations and opportunities for pederasty.
I asked my friend if he was ever conscious of such behaviour in his time at the junior seminary, and he answered emphatically in the negative. He claimed proudly (and I have no reason to disbelieve him) that the Christian Brothers in England, unlike their brethren in other countries, have never been found guilty of sexual abuse. The English De La Salle order has, however, been implicated in at least one serious case of this kind: 170 people filed compensation claims for abuse suffered from 1958 onwards at St William’s care home and school in Yorkshire, owned and staffed by the order. The headmaster, Brother James Carragher, was tried twice, and sentenced for seven years and fourteen years, for a series of offences including buggery, indecent assault and taking indecent photographs of young boys, and was expelled from the order. Other brothers at the school narrowly escaped prosecution. Such stories continue to emerge in various countries, disgusting and disillusioning Catholic laity and undermining the vocations of honest, decent priests and brothers. In January 2014, at the beginning of the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, the De La Salle order admitted with deep regret that abuse took place at their boys’ home in Kircubbin. This was on the second day of an inquiry that was expected to last six months, taking evidence from 400 people.
Never at any time when I was at St Joseph’s did I observe, or hear of, or feel personally threatened by, any untoward behaviour of a sexual nature from any of the brothers. Indeed I was completely unaware of any case of sexual abuse of minors by priests, brothers or nuns in the Catholic Church anywhere until reports began to appear in the press in the 1990s. That is why it is not mentioned in How Far Can You Go? (1980), generally considered to be an accurate portrayal of English Catholic life in the post-war period up to the mid-seventies. If I had known about it I might have made it an element in the novel. Clerical abuse in England was possibly less common in my boyhood than later, and it was always most likely to happen in boarding schools, junior seminaries, orphanages and similar institutions, where the young were defenceless against adults in authority. A school like St Joseph’s, where pupils returned home at the end of every day, was an incomparably safer environment.
There was a good deal of corporal punishment at the school, which caused me some anxiety in my early years there, since it was easily incurred; but it was not sadistic and was part of educational culture in that time, though it seems barbarous from today’s vantage point. It was gradually phased out in the UK, but probably lingered longer in Catholic schools than others. I remember in the late 1970s going to pick up my wife after school hours at the Catholic comprehensive where she was a school counsellor, and seeing a few cowed-looking youths lurking outside an office who, she told me, were waiting to be caned by the deputy head. She went off to complete some task and soon the burly teacher came briskly down the corridor to usher the boys into his office with a curt command. I moved off before I might see or hear any more of this atavistic ritual, feeling sickened, and surprised by the strength of my own reaction.
Most writers owe a debt to a particular English teacher in their schooldays, and I am no exception. When I was in the fourth form, and approaching the age of fourteen, a new teacher joined the school and took over the teaching of English to my class. He was an Irish layman called Malachy Carroll (though it was some time before we discovered that unusual and potentially mockable first name). He was probably then in his late thirties, with a big ruddy-cheeked face under thinning black hair, and often wore an amused smile as if enjoying a secret joke, though he also made overt jokes for our benefit. He was like no other teacher we had encountered – relaxed, unthreatening and unorthodox. The first thing he did was to announce that he would set us no English homework for four weeks. Instead we were to write a long essay on ‘The Techniques of Poetry’. The teaching of poetry we had received up till then had consisted mostly of learning poems ‘off by heart’, with very little analysis of their verbal form, and this assignment spread alarm and despondency in the class, especially as the new teacher gave us no guidance on how to research the topic – it was left to our own initiative.
Fortunately for me, the Deptford public library had excellent holdings in literature and literary criticism, and on its shelves I found exactly what I needed. It was a short book, whose title and author’s name I have forgotten, on the elements of poetry – metre, rhyme schemes, verse forms and the figures of speech. These latter – metaphor, simile, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and the rest – particularly fascinated me, and in retrospect I traced my later specialisation as an academic critic in formal and linguistic analysis of literary texts back to that seminal exercise on ‘The Techniques of Poetry’. Mr Carroll commended my essay and must have identified me as a pupil with literary promise, for over the next few years he became my mentor as I began to develop an interest in both critical and creative writing. In 1950, when I was fifteen, he encouraged me to polish a homework essay on the poetry of Wilfred Owen for the annual school magazine, Signum Fidei, which was my first published work. It seems a sadly stilted piece to me now, but a humorous sketch on ‘The Child in Church’ and a short story called ‘Major County Award’, also selected by Malachy Carroll for publication in the magazines for 1951 and 1952, respectively, were more promising.
Malachy was himself a published author of a rather specialised kind: he supplemented his teacher’s salary by writing commissioned histories of religious orders or biographies of their saintly founders, such as The Charred Wood: the story of Blessed Julie Billiart, foundress of the Congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur. He also wrote a novel called The Stranger, published in Dublin in 1951. It carried an acknowledgement to a Gaelic novel ‘for the bones of the plot’ which he told me, when he gave me a copy, he had been pressured to insert by the publisher, although his debt was slight. The plot is in fact its weakest element, as I have just reminded myself, skimming through it for the first time in sixty-odd years: a stranger with a mysterious past arrives in a small rural Irish community, makes himself respected and loved, but is denounced by the villain of the piece as an ex-convict who served a prison sentence for theft. It is eventually revealed that the stranger is a defrocked priest who was innocent of the crime but unable to exculpate himself without breaking the seal of confession, and at the end he is vindicated and restored to his vocation. It’s a rather contrived and melodramatic story, but there is some fine descriptive writing and excellent vernacular Irish dialogue. You can tell from the first page that this author has a gift for metaphor and simile (e.g. ‘the breeze passing over the wheat, like fingers caressing plush against the pile’) and in his teaching Malachy imparted an appreciation of figurative language which influenced my own early attempts at writing – perhaps to excess, but it was a good fault. One of our set texts for A level in the sixth form, which he had selected from the list offered by the exam board, was a selection of Browning’s dramatic monologues, and he taught us to relish the combination of human interest and lyrical intensity in those poems. I found them immensely exciting, not least for Browning’s vivid portrayal of Catholic clergy whose faith was worm-eaten with worldliness, envy and lust, in poems like ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ and ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’.
There were two other lay teachers who arrived at St Joseph’s during my time there of whom I have positive memories. One was Mr Dalton, who taught Latin. He was short-tempered and had an alarming habit of hurling bits of chalk at pupils who were inattentive, but was dedicated to his subject and taught it well. He told us when he arrived that he was going to teach us a newly approved method of pronouncing classical Latin, but I discovered when I left school that most educated English people used a different pronunciation, which has sometimes caused confusion or puzzlement when I utter a Latin word or phrase. That apart, I am very grateful for Mr Dalton’s teaching. Latin is the only foreign language in which I achieved any real competence and, although it is a dead one, knowledge of it is invaluable for anyone professionally concerned with the English language and its literature.
The third memorable teacher was the art master, Archie Brew, a very unlikely member of staff in a Catholic grammar school of the 1950s. Whether he was Catholic himself I never discovered. He arrived to replace an elderly teacher who set us to draw boring objects like brooms and teapots and seldom permitted the messy business of painting. Archie Brew encouraged colour and creativity. He was tall: very tall and thin, like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, with a big Roman nose and hair that was long for the times, and he had a manner that I would later identify as ‘camp’. He called pupils by fanciful nicknames, pulled them by their ears or hair if they misbehaved, and threw tantrums of anger which might rapidly elide into peals of laughter. I knew nothing about homosexuality as a schoolboy, but retrospectively I was sure he must have been gay, as were other former pupils of St Joseph’s. However, I discovered recently, after his death, that he was happily married with two daughters. I was fairly good at art (another gene I inherited from my father, who was quite a skilful self-taught painter in oils and whose pictures still give pleasure, hanging on the walls of our house) and I always looked forward to a double period in the art room on Friday afternoons when I was in the fifth form – a perfect way to end the school week, it seemed to me. I obtained a GCE O level in Art – but not at the end of that academic year, 1949–50, for reasons that had a significant effect on other aspects of my education.
At that time the school-leaving examinations had just been revised and renamed as the General Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level and Advanced Level, and the Department of Education, or whatever its equivalent was called in those days, made a rule that candidates for the O-level examinations must be at least fifteen by the beginning of the year when they sat them. I would be fifteen on the 28th of January 1950, and so was disqualified from sitting them with the rest of my class in June. As far as I can remember, no reason was ever given for this diktat. Perhaps it was decided on egalitarian grounds that precocious pupils should not be encouraged to demonstrate their ability by taking examinations earlier than normal, a practice more common in private schools than state schools; or perhaps it was a bureaucratic mania for uniformity. Whatever the cause, the effect of the new rule on me was wholly negative. My teachers were confident, as I was myself, that I could pass the exams with good marks in all my subjects. It would be unprofitable and almost punitive to hold me back in the fifth form for another year and make me do the same syllabus all over again. To the credit of the school, and especially the headmaster, Brother Fabian, they protested vigorously, but to no avail. In the spring term I sat the school’s Mock O-level exams (designed as practice for the real thing) with the rest of the fifth form, and my papers were marked, typed and sent to the relevant authority as evidence of my ability, hoping this would prompt a change of heart.
Looking through a box of papers and documents relating to this period of my life recently, I found a typescript of my answers to five questions on the English Literature paper, with Malachy Carroll’s handwritten endorsement: ‘This is an exact copy of the answers given. Spelling mistakes – most of them being “speed slips” are included.’ He awarded marks ranging from 20/20 to 16/20, with an aggregate of 92/100 – a ‘DISTINCTION +’. But it was a lost cause: the authorities were unmoved. The school therefore proposed that, rather spend another year pointlessly in the fifth form, I should proceed to the sixth form and begin the two-year A-level curriculum, taking the O-level exams at the end of my first year.
This was a formidable undertaking, because I had to revise for the O levels, especially in subjects I was no longer studying, like maths, in parallel with new A-level work in English, History, Latin and French. I had never been very good at French, and I found the A-level set books, Balzac’s Père Goriot and a play by Molière, heavy going. I would need only three A levels for university entrance, so in the spring term I decided, against the advice of the brother who taught the subject, to drop French in order to reduce my workload, using the time saved to revise for O levels. It was a decision I deeply regret, since in consequence I have never been able to read French without constant recourse to the dictionary and am quite unable to conduct a conversation in the language. This has been particularly galling to me in the later years of my career as a writer, from 1989 onwards, when my novels began to have a remarkable success in France and I visited the country frequently to promote my books. Even if I had had the will and time to improve my spoken French, it was by then too late because of increasing deafness. I blame myself for the decision to drop French when I was sixteen, but I also blame the politicians, educationalists and civil servants who pressured me into it by the arbitrary rule which prevented me from taking my O levels in 1950, when I was ready for them.
In July of that same year there was a general election in which the Labour government, elected in 1945 by a landslide, experienced a huge swing against it that was driven partly by the electorate’s impatience with just such unnecessary interference with individual freedom. Its reduced majority of 5 was unviable, and in the following year it was replaced by a Conservative government under Winston Churchill. Labour was out of office for the next thirteen years. I did not take much interest in party politics in early adolescence, and the subject was rarely discussed at home by my parents. I have no recollection of how they voted in the 1950 and ’51 elections, but it was almost certainly Conservative, because they shared the general public mood of discontent with the post-war economic regime of ‘Austerity’ and grumbled about the rationing, shortages and taxes it entailed. Dad had probably voted Labour in 1945, like the vast majority of servicemen in the forces, but as a freelance musician he would have found the levelling and controlling tendency of its policies unsympathetic. He was a loyal member of the Musicians’ Union, which was immensely powerful at that period, but had mixed feelings about its restrictive practices. There was, for instance, something called ‘needletime’, by which the Union strictly rationed the amount of recorded music the BBC was allowed to broadcast, in order to compel them to employ musicians performing live. Incredible as it may seem to younger people today, there were only two or three weekly radio programmes on the BBC (which had a monopoly on broadcasting) in the late 1940s and early ’50s that consisted of a presenter playing records of popular music. The term ‘disc jockey’ did not become current in Britain until the mid-fifties. The agreement created employment for British musicians in a lot of indifferent radio band shows, but Dad complained that this lucrative ‘session work’ was difficult to break into unless you had the right contacts. And like other people he hankered after more American popular music, including jazz, on radio. This state of affairs continued until the 1960s, when pirate radio undermined the compact between the Musicians’ Union and the BBC and it eventually crumbled.
The newspaper we took at home was the Daily Express, then at the height of its circulation, a populist right-wing paper with similar views to those of the modern Daily Mail, so I imbibed a regular diet of anti-socialist opinion, illustrated by caricatures of leading Labour ministers, like Bevan, Bevin, Shinwell and Cripps. This reinforced a prejudice against Labour, and perhaps a distrust of the political process itself, that I had formed in 1945, when – inexplicably to a ten-year-old boy – the country voted to replace Winston Churchill, the heroic winner of the war, as Prime Minister with the far-from-heroic-looking Clement Attlee. In my late teens I began to appreciate the merits of the Beveridge-designed welfare state that Attlee’s government put in place, especially the National Health Service and the free secondary and tertiary education from which I benefited. Apart from a period in the 1980s when I supported the SDP, in its brief existence as a moderately left-of-centre breakaway party from Labour, I have been a rather lukewarm Labour supporter since attaining the age of twenty-one, voting on principle rather than from enthusiastic commitment, and always opposed to the dictatorial, ideology-driven tendencies of the party’s left wing. This antipathy I am inclined to trace back to that frustrating encounter with the edict of faceless educational bureaucrats when I was a schoolboy.