Seminary Boy by Cornwell John

Author:Cornwell, John [John Cornwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007285624
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THERE WAS, as it happened, a perennial and licit distraction that stirred the emotions of many boys at Cotton. As the autumn days shortened an elite set of rugby-football players, boots well-oiled, sports gear crisply laundered, became the focus of our attention as they ran self-consciously up to top field for coaching sessions. They were not necessarily the most athletic of their peers; but they had been selected early and coached to a high level of skill from the age of eleven. The best of them became the unique corps that formed the ‘first fifteen’ team chosen to play in away matches against other Catholic colleges around the Midlands. Those who had come late to Cotton, and from schools which had no tradition of rugby, like mine, were seldom considered for training: our role was to watch, to admire and to eat our hearts out.

The rugby gods made an easy fit with the wholesome, manly, clerical culture of the Cotton priests. Most of the profs had made it into the first fifteen team as boys, and enthusiastically coached their successors, refereeing games and accompanying away matches with Father Gavin, who had played rugby for Ireland (a fact deplored at the time, we had been told, by Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin). Our priests were eager even in the midst of class to be diverted into discussion of tactics and highlights of big matches.

Special treats, bacon-and-egg teas, and pub visits, figured large for the rugby gods. I heard a prim sixth former speaking with glittering eyes at table one day about the highlight of an away match in Burton upon Trent. ‘We won by a single point. We were late back but we pleaded with Father Gavin to stop at a pub before we reached Cotton. So he asked the driver to stop at the Cricketers Arms. Over our beer he relived every pass, every scrum, every tackle. By the time we got on the bus we had replenished our glasses three times! Three times!’

One notable exception to the hallowing of rugby football was Father Armishaw who, Peter Gladden told me, loathed the game as much as he deplored the ‘mindless blather of the rugger morons’. Even so, Gladden went on, Armishaw was capable of boasting on occasion about his own boyhood triumphs and how in one ferocious match he had saved the day against the ‘mollycoddled sissies at Ratcliffe College’.

I had no prospects of being a rugby god, and I resented my sneaking feelings of envy. I thought many of them soft, compared with the toughs at Saints Peter and Paul in Ilford, even though they could handle a ball. I sometimes fantasised how I would tackle such a one and such a one in boxing gloves. Yet there was another agreeable alternative to rugby which promised to allay my fear of monotony.

Country walks were not new for Cotton boys, but they had traditionally been desultory strolls, supervised by a reluctant sixth former. In the year I arrived at Cotton Father Doran had appointed a sixth former called Michael Swan as ‘head of walks’.

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