IN SPITE OF the pressure of taking O levels and A levels in successive years, I really enjoyed school for the first time as a sixth-former. One was treated with more respect by staff and younger pupils, and given more independence. Teaching was more casual and intimate, in smaller groups than in the lower forms, and we had ‘free periods’ which could be spent in the library – where, in spite of its limitations, I first discovered the essays of George Orwell. Even religious instruction became interesting as we discussed issues in moral theology, and learned how to defend the Catholic faith against Protestant and atheistic attack with the aid of a textbook called The Question Box written early in the century by an American Paulist priest, the Rev. Bertrand L. Conway, but substantially revised in 1929 and issued in an abridged form in 1950. This consisted of objections to Catholicism (many of which had never occurred to me before) in question form, followed by vigorous and dogmatic refutations. I began to define my Catholic faith in more intellectual terms than previously.
As the only child in a mixed marriage, growing up in a home where religion was rarely discussed, and experiencing little of the social interaction with parish clergy and laity that is characteristic of a typical Catholic family, I always felt myself to be a somewhat marginal Catholic, especially in the latency phase. I did not, for instance, learn to serve at mass, as did most boys of my age in the parish who were deemed capable. It was suggested to my mother by one of the priests at St Mary Magdalen’s when I was about twelve, and I had a couple of trial sessions at the presbytery, learning to recite the responses in the Latin liturgy, but I didn’t feel comfortable in that ambience – nor, I fancy, did I relish the prospect of cycling to church before breakfast to serve at early-morning masses – so I did not take it further. I did, however, perform a devotion known as the Nine Fridays, which for a period entailed just such early rising once a month.
The Catechism-centred religious instruction I received at school laid a heavy emphasis on sin, how easily sins could be committed and how one would eventually be punished for them in Purgatory, even though they had been forgiven through the sacrament of confession. I was therefore much interested in the concept of indulgences, especially the Plenary Indulgence. For the benefit of non-Catholic readers I will quote the sardonic authorial explanation of this practice in How Far Can You Go?
An indulgence was a kind of spiritual voucher, obtained by performing some devotional exercise, promising the bearer so much off the punishment due to his sins, e.g. forty days’ remission for saying a certain prayer, or two hundred and forty days for making a certain pilgrimage. ‘Days’ did not refer to time spent in Purgatory (a misconception common in Protestant polemic) for earthly time did not, of course, apply there, but to the canonical penances of the mediaeval Church, when confessed sinners were required to do public penance such as sitting in sackcloth and ashes at the porch of the parish church for a certain period, instead of the nominal penances (recitation of prayers) prescribed in modern times. The remission of temporal punishment by indulgences was measured on the ancient scale. There was also such a thing as a plenary indulgence, which was a kind of jackpot, because it wiped out all the punishment accruing to your sins up to the time of obtaining the indulgence. You could get one of these by, for instance, going to mass and Communion on the first Friday of nine successive months.
I managed to perform that feat once, much to my mother’s surprise and admiration, but was never quite sure whether I had fulfilled all the requisite conditions, including a ‘right disposition’.
It took me a long time to grow out of the self-interested and superstitious element in Catholic faith – the belief that you could not only ensure your eternal salvation but also get God on your side in the quotidian trials and challenges of earthly life by petitionary prayers and performing devotions beyond those minimally required for membership of the Church. But in the sixth form my faith became a bit more sophisticated, informed not only by The Question Box, but also by literature, especially Catholic writers like James Joyce, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Malachy Carroll included Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a list of books and authors he suggested I should read ‘outside the syllabus’ – quite a bold recommendation in a Catholic school of that period – and I found it riveting, in spite of the challenging nature of its form, shifting from one prose style to another as it charted the hero’s development from infancy to young adulthood.
The ethos of English Catholicism at the parochial level in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not very different from Irish Catholicism at the beginning of the century. Doctrine and devotional habits had not changed much in the interval, and the majority of priests, nuns, teaching brothers and Catholic laity in England were Irish or descendants of Irish immigrants, so I experienced the ‘thrill of recognition’ frequently as I read. The experience of Stephen Dedalus was much more dramatic than mine, but I could identify with it at several points. The vulnerability of the sensitive child sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in the early chapters, for instance, evoked memories of my brief stay in the Lingfield convent. As an adolescent I had not sinned as spectacularly as Stephen (far from it) and I never heard hellfire sermons as pornographically vivid as the ones he hears at his school retreat, but I understood the eschatological fear they instilled and Stephen’s recoil into a phase of extreme piety, accumulating indulgences which he selflessly dedicates to the souls in Purgatory. (That was definitely a ‘right disposition’.)
Stephen, like his creator, eventually rebels against Church and faith, refusing to make his Easter Duty (i.e. the obligation to receive Holy Communion at least once a year between Easter and Trinity Sunday or be automatically excommunicated) in spite of his mother’s pleas on her deathbed, and at the end of the novel he is a defiant apostate. The effect of the book on me, however, was not to disturb my own faith, but to make me marvel at how rich a work of art Joyce’s saturation in that faith had provoked, to make me grateful that I had enough understanding of his experience to appreciate the achievement, and to feel the first stirrings of a desire to attempt creative writing myself. The novels of Graham Greene had a similar effect on me, though as an English upper-middle-class convert he had a very different take on the Catholic faith from Joyce’s, and my own. Greene did not deal with ordinary English Catholic life (of which he had little personal experience) but with Catholic characters like the teenage gangster Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock or the nameless Mexican whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, deeply flawed human beings who are distinguished from the secular societies in which they move, and thus made more interesting, by their awareness of a supernatural dimension to existence.
In the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, this dimension was indicated negatively by its signal absence in the lives of nearly all the characters, though it was some time before I perceived that. My father, whose interest went back to his time at the Silver Slipper nightclub which Waugh patronised in the twenties, enjoyed these books primarily for their comedy and gave me a tattered Penguin edition of Decline and Fall (which I still possess) when I was fifteen. I was soon searching the Deptford library for its successors and requested hardback copies of the titles not available from the library, Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags, as Christmas presents in 1950. Nothing could have been further from my own experience than the world of these novels, and much of the implied depravity of the characters’ behaviour went over my head, but I found them fascinating – as well as hilariously funny – precisely because they opened my eyes to the existence of a social milieu utterly different from my own: adult, glamorous, hedonistic and quintessentially ‘pre-war’. In due course I discovered Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s first explicitly Catholic novel in which he showed the operation of divine grace in a fallen world. For a Catholic teenager with aspirations to be a writer, it was encouraging and inspiring that these two men, probably the most famous living English literary novelists in the 1940s and early ’50s, were both Catholics and wrote on Catholic themes.
I am touching here on a process that began in the sixth form at school but developed more consciously at university, to explain why I became more rather than less committed to the Catholic faith at a time of life when many people begin to doubt the truth of the religion in which they have been brought up and throw off its constraints on their behaviour. Joyce, growing up in the repressive culture of Irish Catholicism, had to rebel against it and go into exile if he was to fulfil his artistic vocation, but for me, as a member of the Catholic minority in a nominally Christian but in fact largely secular England, it was a positive act of self-definition to remain a practising Catholic, and a source of ideas, symbols and moral dilemmas which writing, especially prose fiction, could draw on. The Catholicism I encountered in the parish church and for the most part at school was often philistine, but writers like Greene and Waugh gave the faith a compensatory literary prestige, while the most highly esteemed poet in England, T.S Eliot, expressed in his poetry an Anglo-Catholic faith that was theologically nearly identical to Roman Catholicism. Evelyn Waugh took the title of his novel A Handful of Dust from The Waste Land (‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’) and in due course, I would find in Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire a quotation which seemed a key to Graham Greene’s obsession with the idea that the sinner was at the heart of Christianity:
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human, and it is better in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said for most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.
That seems to me now pernicious nonsense, or at best self-indulgent hyperbole – it is obviously better to do nothing than to do evil – but there was a time when it seemed a thrilling insight.
That time had not yet come, however, when I was a sixth-former at St Joseph’s, between the ages of fifteen and a half and seventeen and a half. It seems to me in retrospect that I matured rapidly in those two years, though in many respects I remained extraordinarily innocent by comparison with today’s teenagers, especially in regard to sex, as were most of my peers. There was no sex education in any of the schools I had attended, and books on the subject were not easily obtainable. The representation of sexuality in literature and the other arts was subject by law to strict control and censorship, nudity and any suggestion of simulated sexual intercourse in films or stage plays being forbidden, as was explicit description of sexual acts in fiction. There was a social consensus to clamp down on the licence that the conditions of war had allowed or concealed. Monogamous marriage was reaffirmed as the foundation of society, and divorce frowned on. Premarital and extramarital sex was considered scandalous, and single parenthood a stigma on both mother and child. Homosexuality was a criminal offence. In bohemian and artistic circles, and in high society, sexual freedom was still practised with discretion, but middle- and working-class life was at this period dominated by a code of moral respectability, and breaching it could have unpleasant consequences.
In the Catholic ‘ghetto’, as parochial communities like St Mary Magdelen’s have been described, and in Catholic schools, this ethos was reinforced by the theological doctrine of sin and salvation and the institution of regular confession. The Penny Catechism was particularly severe on any propensity to sexual sin. The structure of this book required that all sins had somehow to be classified under one of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament. The two relevant ones were the sixth (seventh in the Protestant Bible), ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’, and the ninth, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’, neither of which were common temptations for adolescent boys. The Catechism, however, asserted that ‘The Sixth Commandment forbids whatever is contrary to holy purity in looks, words, or actions’, and broadened the remit of the ninth to forbid ‘all wilful consent to impure thoughts and desires, and all wilful pleasure in the irregular motions of the flesh’.
I presume this last phrase included masturbation (though it was never spelled out in school and indeed teachers tended to hurry through these parts of the Catechism), an activity which caused Catholic adolescents, especially males, a good deal of guilt and anxiety at this period, as I discovered later in life from books and private conversations. It didn’t trouble me because I didn’t masturbate. I knew neither the word nor the deed. I handled my penis in bed as a comforting accompaniment to reveries of various kinds, sometimes sexual in content, but it did not occur to me that by more vigorous manipulation I could provoke an ejaculation such as occasionally woke me from sleep with a pleasurable sensation, followed by the discovery of an uncomfortable sticky dampness inside my pyjamas and a stain on the sheets the next morning. I think that my peer group at St Joseph’s must have been an exceptionally pure-minded set of boys, because I don’t recall any of them referring to masturbation in more vernacular terms, or indeed much smutty talk at all in my schooldays.
Some of my fellow sixth-formers were positively prudish. I remember when I praised Graham Greene in a casual group conversation, one boy condemned him for the episode in Stamboul Train, the first of the thrillers the writer called ‘entertainments’, published in 1932, in which the Jewish businessman Myatt has sex with the chorus girl Coral Musker. When she faints in the corridor of the train, Myatt chivalrously vacates his first-class compartment so she can sleep in it, and later treats her to a meal in the dining car. Coral, already falling gratefully in love with him, comes to his compartment that night, nervous because she is a virgin.
He kissed her and found her mouth cool, soft, uncertainly responsive. She sat down on the seat which had become converted into a berth and asked him, ‘Did you wonder whether I’d come?’
‘You promised,’ he reminded her.
‘I might have changed my mind.’
‘But why?’ Myatt was becoming impatient. He did not want to sit about and talk. Her legs, swinging freely and touching the floor, excited him. ‘We’ll have a nice time.’ He took off her shoes and ran his hand up her stockings. ‘You know a lot, don’t you?’ she said. He flushed. ‘Do you mind that?’
‘Oh, I’m glad,’ she said, ‘so glad. I couldn’t bear it if you hadn’t known a lot.’ Her eyes large and scared, her face pale under the dim blue globe, first amused him, then attracted him. He wanted to shake her out of aloofness into passion. He kissed her again and tried to slip her frock over her shoulder. Her body trembled and moved under her dress like a cat tied in a bag; suddenly she put her lips up to him and kissed his chin. ‘I do love you,’ she said, ‘I do.’ . . . The sense of strangeness survived even the customary gestures; lying in the berth she proved awkward in a mysterious innocent fashion which astonished him . . . She said suddenly and urgently, ‘Be patient, I don’t know much,’ and then she cried out with pain. He could not have been more startled if a ghost had passed through the compartment dressed in antique wear which antedated steam. He would have left her if she had not held him to her with her hands, while she said in a voice of which snatches only escaped the sound of the engine, ‘Don’t go. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’ Then the sudden stopping of the train lurched them apart.
In comparison with post-1960 novels, the description of the sexual act in this scene is very restrained, with no specification of its ‘customary gestures’. To my censorious classmate, however, it would have fallen under the proscription of the sixth or ninth commandment, or perhaps both, because it invites the reader’s vicarious, imaginative participation in the action. As an adolescent reader I was probably aroused by it, but I also found it a very convincing and moving scene (and still find it so, except for the intrusively literary simile of the antique ghost). It was all the more appealing to me because, like Coral, I didn’t know very much when I first read it. I learned that it might be painful for a girl when she had intercourse for the first time, and it was almost unbearably poignant to me that the plot denied the lovers the more satisfying lovemaking they promised themselves later.
Passages like this in novels gave me glimpses into the adult world of sexuality, and in a culture where representations of sexual behaviour were so strictly censored and controlled they could have an extraordinarily powerful effect. Compare and contrast the situation today when nudity and simulated sexual intercourse are commonplace in network TV drama and films with a 15 and sometimes a 12A certificate, hardcore pornography is accessible on the internet with a few clicks of a mouse, graphic sex instruction manuals, videos and DVDs are freely available, and the literary treatment of sexual behaviour can be as explicit as the author wishes. Naturally teenagers are interested in this stuff and it is impossible to prevent them viewing or reading it. Inevitably this has had an effect on their behaviour. In 1991 the first National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Britain revealed that a sixth of girls and a quarter of boys under sixteen were sexually experienced. This would have been unimaginable forty years earlier. The second NATSAL in 2001 revealed a continuing trend: a quarter of girls and nearly a third of boys were sexually experienced before the age of sixteen. Every newspaper reader is aware of the social consequences: teenage promiscuity, schoolgirl mothers, fatherless families, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and psychological damage from addiction to pornography. The repressive sexual ethos of the 1940s and ’50s had its drawbacks, but we seem to have exchanged them for a different and more extensive set of problems.
I had no ambitions to have sexual intercourse as a teenager – it was simply not imaginable, given the social and religious constraints of my upbringing – but I did want to meet girls, and my main opportunity for doing that was the parish youth club, which I joined as a result of being recruited to play in its football team. We played our matches against other parish teams on Sunday afternoons, and in the evening, having washed the mud off my knees in the bath at home, I would put on my best sports jacket and flannel trousers, and a white nylon shirt – an enviable rarity in those days, a gift from my aunt Eileen, purchased from the Heidelberg PX – and go along to the youth club.
The youth club met twice a week in the Infants’ School attached to the church: on Wednesdays for games, mainly ping-pong, and on Sundays for a ‘social’. This consisted of dancing to gramophone records and partaking of sandwiches and orange squash or tea prepared by teams of girls working to a roster. The boys were required to stack the infants’ desks at the sides of the room at the beginning of the evening and replace them in rows at the end. We had the use of two classrooms normally divided by a folding partition wall. The floor was made of worn, unpolished wood blocks, the walls were covered with infantile paintings and educational charts, and the lighting was bleakly utilitarian. The gramophone was a single-speaker portable, and the records a collection of scratchy 78s. But to me, just emerging from the chrysalis of boyhood, the youth club was a site of exciting and sophisticated pleasures.
Thus Tubby Passmore, the narrator of my novel Therapy, recalling the Catholic youth club he joined, despite lacking any belief or interest in religion himself, because at the time he was smitten with a young Catholic girl who was a member. His description is closely based on my own memories of the St Mary Magdalen parish youth club (though it was rather confusingly called the St Ignatius Youth Club – perhaps the fathers thought a reformed sinner was not an appropriate patron saint for the purpose). I learned to dance, though I could not remember how, or who taught me, and had to invent a character with that function for Tubby in the novel. It was of course ballroom dancing – quickstep, foxtrot and waltz, with an occasional old-time dance for variety, and no jiving allowed. So one got to know girls, and to touch them, and to feel reasonably at ease with them, but there was none to whom I felt strongly attracted. The most beautiful was a girl called Aurora, the daughter of Italian parents, who had a magnificent bosom and lustrous black wavy hair. I would often see her on weekday mornings when waiting for a tram on my way to St Joseph’s, coming down the hill towards Brockley Cross on her way to the technical school where she was doing a commercial course, and we would smile and exchange a brief greeting. There was an opportunity here to develop a more intimate relationship than the publicity of the youth club allowed, but having danced with her and struggled to maintain a conversation I could not discover a single interest or taste that we had in common. There was no basis for genuine friendship between us, and Aurora had an elder brother who was also a member of the youth club and kept a watchful eye on his sister.
Then I met Peggy, my first girlfriend. But exactly when in 1951, my sixteenth year, did I meet her? It must have been not long after my holiday in Heidelberg that summer as the guest of my aunt Eileen, an experience from which I gained a huge increase in self-confidence.