Leaving Ardglass

by William King

  The same thunder wakes me some time after two o’clock and, before I drop off again, my fear of another confrontation in the morning returns. When I come downstairs, however, he stands, filling the doorway to the kitchen, a mug of tea in his hand: ‘I’ve a plate of rashers for you in the oven.’ He puts me in mind of a bricklayer’s remark one day in Hitchin: ‘Your brother – I may as well tell you the truth – he’s as thorny as a fucken porcupine, but he never keeps up a grudge.’

  ‘Where’re you off to for the day?’ he asks me.

  ‘Charing Cross. I’ll hang around a few bookshops, stroll by the river. The day looks promising.’

  ‘You can’t be reading any more of them dirty books from now on, Father Galvin.’

  ‘No. I suppose not. Have to be very holy from now on.’

  Steam rising from his mug of tea, he sits opposite me and hangs his head while I eat. Then he says: ‘You’ve been a topping worker. Here’s something to keep you going whatever you decide to do.’ He takes a bundle of notes from his trouser pocket and places it beside my plate. Then he grows silent, lowers his head again, and, this time, explodes into a fit of crying that startles me. ‘Sorry about last night, Tommy. There’s too much oul spite and bitterness in our family. I don’t want to be fighting with you too.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Fucken emigration made strangers out of us. And then the way things were at home. The two of them not talking half the time.’

  He dries his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Look, you’ll need a few bob in one of them priest colleges too. I’ll be late tonight, so enjoy yourself.’ He gives me a light poke on the shoulder, sits back, and takes a mouthful of tea.

  ‘What’s funny?’ he asks when he sees me smiling.

  ‘What they say about you is true: that brother of yours is a thorny bastard, but he doesn’t hold a grudge.’

  He leans in again. ‘A lesson I learned in life if you want to succeed: never keep up a spleen, because it’ll eat you up. And another thing, Tommy: never lose your rag with the fella who’s against you – same as a boxer. If a boxer loses his rag, he’s finished. He has to keep his mind on the job of getting the better of the other fella.’ He places his hands on the table as if he is about to rise, but is reluctant to go. ‘Anyway, you’re the one with the education round here.’ He cocks his head: ‘Do you know anything about dreams?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Strange oul dream last night.’ He talks from the kitchen where he’s washing his mug. ‘I dreamt my bank manager at Barclays called me in. “Sorry, Mr Galvin,” he says, “but mice got into the vault.” Then he brings me down to the main safe, opens the steel doors and says: “Look, sorry, all your money. I’m afraid, all of it.” And I stand there looking down at a heap of pulp and a mouse nibbling at a ten-pound note. And the worst of all is our mother is standing a bit away from me, laughing.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ah, oul dreams. I suppose they don’t make any sense.’

  12

  BACK FROM LONDON and with only two weeks to prepare for All Saints Seminary, I search the house for the president’s prospectus, and the brochure with the laughing students smoking their pipes in front of pillars.

  My mother is in a peevish mood when she rummages in cupboards. She finds my open wallet on the kitchen table and goes through it, but all she finds is a clipping from a newspaper showing a sultry Marilyn Monroe in a tight-fitting blouse, her blonde hair resting on the upturned collar. She peers at it: ‘Who’s this Marilyn Monroe when she’s at home?’

  ‘She’s a film star.’

  ‘Well, faith, a film star.’ She makes a tongue-clicking sound. ‘And you have her picture in your wallet. I’m sure she’d be delighted if she knew that.’

  Still searching under seat covers, she continues to grouse: ‘How is it that you could lose the prospectus, but you wouldn’t lose Marilyn Monroe?’ I sense, however, from the odd glance of concern that her testy mood is a mask to hide her sinking heart. ‘Of all the foolish young fellas.’ Muttering to herself, she lifts a pile of clothes off an armchair. ‘You’ll never be kept in that college if you don’t smarten yourself, boy.’

  With a Hitchin tan, and wearing the prescribed black suit, white shirt and black tie, I climb the steps of All Saints in mid-September. The other first-years and their families seem at ease as if sauntering through the ornate doors is a commonplace event in their lives. They are chatting and smiling by the grey pillars mottled with age; one of them simulates a golfer’s swing and follow-through, a hand up to his forehead becomes a visor so that he can keep an eye on the ball’s trajectory. He says something that causes the others to burst into laughter.

  Cars are pulling up and parking in a circle around a flowerbed of Celtic cross formation. With the satin cape of their soutanes lifting in the breeze, priests are conversing with men wearing well-cut suits, or tweeds and flannels, and women with pillbox hats.

  My father looks awkward. When he strains his neck to admire the canopy above the door and the concrete urns on the top step, I can see stubble on his scrawny neck where he has missed with the open razor; his collar stud has come unhooked, so his tie is loose. I redden when his thick country accent causes a woman with a fur stole to glance in our direction and smile.

  ‘Frightful high ceilings ye have here, Father,’ he bellows.

  The president, whose smooth black hair is parted down the middle, allows a smile to form on his thin lips. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he replies. ‘Your son, Thomas, has a wholesome complexion. Has he been abroad?’

  ‘England, Father,’ my mother says.

  ‘Oh, beautiful country this time of year. When I was a student, a few of us used to cycle around the Cotswolds. And one year we went as far as Bath – such a splendid city. I can tell you we felt it in our joints afterwards. Did you cycle, Thomas?’ A fold of pink flesh rests on his shining Roman collar.

  ‘No indeed,’ my father rushes in before I can answer. ‘Workin’ the shovel, and drivin’ men to their buildin’ site.’

  When they catch the light, the president’s rimless glasses conceal his eyes, but I know he is taking stock of us. ‘My word,’ he says and begins to rub an earlobe. And despite his polite small talk and my father’s brave efforts, two social orders are colliding, so that, now and again, the conversation founders.

  ‘Must be a job to paint them high ceilings.’ My father is thrashing about in the engulfing silence. He launches into a soliloquy about the lovely grounds and the ‘goalin’ pitches’ as he calls the playing fields. ‘Sure anybody would be glad to be here.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Galvin,’ says the president, whose earlobe is itching again. ‘We make sure our seminarians are fit in body as well as spirit. Mens sana in corpore sano.’ When he goes on to speak about rugby and soccer in winter, croquet and tennis in summer, my father loses interest and begins to rummage inside his jacket. He unfastens a safety pin from the lining and removes a roll of notes from the pocket.

  ‘I’ll pay you now, Father. For Tomásheen … for Thomas.’

  The woman in the fur stole throws another sly glance.

  ‘Well, it isn’t strictly necessary.’

  The president’s glasses twitch and there is a whiff of aniseed when he covers his mouth with a white handkerchief and utters a muffled ‘by all means, if you wish, Mr Galvin.’

  My father’s knobbly thumbs peel off one hundred and thirty pounds. ‘And here’s a fiver to say Mass for us and the holy souls, Father.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr Galvin. Very kind. Well now,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘My word, look at the time! We’ll be going for tea in Egan Hall in a moment. Lovely meeting you; we’ll chat later.’ Leaving a jet stream of aniseed, he hurries off to greet another family who have driven up in a big black car.

  ‘I suppose’, my father says, as if we are deaf or he is talking to us from the far end of a long room, ‘he’d be very learned.’

  ‘Very learned.’ I watch the president in the distance, pointin
g in the direction of the playing pitches. He seems more relaxed now, telling the new family, no doubt, about croquet in the summer.

  After tea, we all, including the president and some of the teaching staff, stroll to the front again with our families, and stand aside as they are getting into cars and cruising down the sweep of driveway. Mine are in the back seat of a hackney for the train. My mother looks straight ahead; my father, wearing dentures that seem too big for him, gapes out, and when he finds me, waves as if he is cleaning the window. I raise my hand, and in the flurry of goodbyes, am crushed by an overheard remark: ‘Where did they get your man?’ Nearby, two first-years are sniggering, one of them – the golfer – is dressed in a smart three-piece and is carrying a leather portfolio.

  I bury the insult, and trudge up the steps with the others. Inside the main door, an unsmiling student, in a Roman collar and a soutane with a row of small buttons down the front, informs us that he is the head prefect and we are to follow him to Egan Hall where the dean of discipline, Reverend Doctor Quirke, is waiting for us. Walking tall, with his heels hardly touching the floor, the prefect tells us that he had been an army cadet, before he entered All Saints. We pass oil paintings of stand-offish bishops in lace. One bishop seems peeved that his prayer has been interrupted: his index finger is inserted between the pages of a breviary that rests on a roped mahogany table.

  Seated behind a table on a platform, Doctor Quirke looms over us and, above his horn-rimmed glasses, eyes each student as we move along the benches. After a short prayer in Latin, he reminds us that we must submit our university fees to his office within three days.

  Then the rules. He covers everything: weekly confessions, table manners, personal hygiene, ‘and the decorum that is fitting to a pontifical seminary shall be observed at all times’. Students should always bear in mind that only those who conform to the rules are fit for the sacred ministry. He looks up from the rulebook and fixes on some point far off in the high ceiling.

  ‘On no account, gentlemen, is a student to enter another student’s room. No mercy will be shown to any student who breaches that rule.’ Again he rakes the hall – a mannerism we shall come to dread.

  ‘If any man here considers these rules unfair or unjust, he would do best to leave his bags packed and return to his home forthwith.’

  All shall pay strict attention to the ringing of the bell which marks the beginning and the end of the various public actions of the day.

  All shall observe strict silence except at times when speaking is permitted.

  All shall regard this observance as an indispensable means of acquiring the virtue of obedience and custody of the tongue.

  Whether in procession or alone, each student shall raise his biretta in reverence to the statues that are located in alcoves throughout the college.

  He closes the rulebook, wipes his red face with a handkerchief and stands, his massive girth straining the soutane to its limit.

  With perfect timing, the president, in a trailing cloak with a gold chain at the collar, sails into the room. Scowling, the dean jerks his two hands upwards for us to stand while the president mounts the dais and beams at us: he indicates that we are to sit. We are aware, he reassures us, that the rules are not drawn up to frustrate us in any way, but rather to help us in the formation of our character so that we may be good priests. He quotes some saint: Keep the rule and the rule will keep you. If any student fails to observe the rules, he will be showing the college authorities that he is not suitable material for ordination. ‘He may have a vocation for another diocese,’ he adds with a smile, ‘but not this one.’ Then he wishes us well, and, swishing his cloak, leaves as quickly as he had entered.

  The dean of discipline, who has been standing aside, again climbs the platform and glares at us. He announces the programme for the rest of the week, including a visit to the university where we shall be studying for the next three years. Every morning after housework has been completed, the prefects will convey the dean’s instructions from the foot of the main staircase. In a fear-stricken silence, we listen.

  ‘He’s a prick,’ someone beside me whispers.

  The dean of discipline stops. ‘You.’ He points at the student. ‘Did you have the temerity to whisper. Stand up. Were you never taught manners? What’s your name?’

  ‘Séamus Meehan, Father.’

  ‘Mr Meehan, you’re from down the country.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor Quirke.’

  ‘I thought as much. Mr Meehan. In All Saints your place is to be seen and not heard. Sit down.’

  After a cup of tea and a biscuit, we have permission to go for a walk around the grounds before Night Prayer. The sturdy figure of Meehan in a soutane that seems too tight for him sidles up to me as we all drift out by a back door where a Romanesque colonnade forms an ambulatory lit up in amber. Lining the alcoves of the ambulatory on two sides are mosaics that glitter under the spotlights: each alcove contains the names of priests, dating back to the nineteenth century, who died while on the mission fields of Africa, Pakistan and South America. At the centre is a flowing fountain. The grass has been cut; summer smells linger in the cloistered air. ‘Did you ever hear such bullshit in all your life?’ Meehan says.

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t take much notice of that.’

  When he hears I’m from Kerry and I tell him a bit about the Galtymore and playing football in New Eltham, he opens up about the great time he had in New York over the summer, carrying bags for rich old ladies in a Manhattan hotel and getting off with college ‘chicks’ who were also working in the hotel.

  Ahead of us are a group who are listening to one of the prefects – a little guy with a high-pitched voice; he is parroting what the president was saying: rules are for our formation, to make us good priests, and the dean is not such a bad old skin, his bark is worse than his bite. They nod.

  ‘We’ll organize a tog-out tomorrow,’ says Meehan. ‘Although some of these pricks, with their fancy accents, probably play croquet or some other drawers game. Do you know what one fella said to me in the refectory? “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” The pasty-faced little bollix, I should have ….’ His voice trails off when the prefect glances in our direction.

  Meehan’s candour is endearing, and even though jaded after a long day, I warm to his chatter. He tells me about his uncle, a Holy Ghost missionary in Papua New Guinea. They go fishing whenever he’s home. Great guy. Got on the Meath football team back in the 1940s. ‘I only came to All Saints to try it out, or maybe to please him.’

  ‘Same here. To try it out.’

  ‘And sure if it doesn’t work out, we’ll have a degree in our arse pocket; my parents couldn’t afford to send me to university. I don’t know about you.’

  ‘Much the same, although my brother is doing fairly well in England and he gives me a few bob.’

  Those ahead of us are now like a touring group, stopping and turning when the prefect points out the Pugin chapel, the neo-classical façade of Pio Nono House, and the gothic windows of the oratory – features that would become my daily landscape for many years to come. We have almost caught up with them. The prefect, in his squeaky voice, is giving a run-through of the following day’s programme. He mentions housework every morning after breakfast, and laughs; the others join him in a polite chuckle. ‘Nothing heavy, just sweeping the corridors and washing out the toilets – The Ritz we call them.’

  Meehan nods in their direction. ‘Would you listen? They could get the cleaning women to do that, but they want to stick our noses in it – make us humble. Pricks,’ he says between his teeth. ‘I was in a minor seminary, Tommy, a feeder for Maynooth and here; I know what goes on. I may be from the bog, but I know my arse from my elbow.’ The arched roof fills out his bursts of laughter, and he seems oblivious to the looks we are getting from the prefect and his group.

  ‘Let’s take a walk over this way, Séamus,’ I say. We head towards two massive gates with the diocesan and papal heraldry decorating the wroug
ht iron. And here, for the first time, we fix our gaze on the Roman palazzo. ‘Remind you of home, wouldn’t it?’ Another loud laugh from Meehan. But he is interested only in telling me about ‘chicks’, and especially, Siobhán, a student teacher from Galway, who worked with him in the Manhattan hotel, about the days they spent at Greenwich Village, and out at Staten Island. And then, coming back in the ferry with people from every nation under the sun.

  As young men often do in army barracks, most of us adapt to All Saints and learn how to keep in step; and, like soldiers, we gain support from each other in coping with the regime. At the same time we grumble: some about the food, others about the silence or being forbidden to mix with lay students at the university. Our shared dream, however, becomes the driving force. One day we shall break new ground: love will replace sin, dark confession boxes and the fires of hell. We’ll help to usher in a new age: priests will no longer live in big houses and drive expensive cars. Reports from Rome give us encouragement: the Pope with the face of an old peasant is spring-cleaning the Vatican. What is more: a Catholic has made it to the White House – and he is Irish.

  Our country too is leaving behind a long dark winter: ballrooms are opening up; girls have on flared dresses like they see Connie Francis and Sandra Dee wearing in the pictures. People are buying cars and television sets, and some can even afford to send their children to university. Farmers no longer rise at four o’clock to drive cattle to the fair. Instead, they chug along at nine or ten to the cattle mart in their Massey-Fergusons.

  So we slip into a routine of attending lectures, football or basketball in the afternoons, and films on a free day. And, apart from wearing priests’ clothes and getting up to pray on dark November mornings, the programme differs little from boarding school. The frequent reminders from the dean of discipline that we lack the proper attitude for seminarians, we learn to take in our stride; the rebukes too, while he wipes his forehead: ‘For the life of me, I don’t know how some of you got in here.’