A Guest at the Feast by Colm Toibin

Author:Colm Toibin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2022-10-12T01:00:51+00:00

The Ferns Report

London Review of Books, 2005

Everybody was afraid of Dr Sherwood. My mother was afraid of him at meetings of Pax Romana, the lay Catholic discussion group in Enniscorthy, because he had a way of glaring at women members when they spoke. He didn’t, it seemed, like women speaking. At St Peter’s College he was dean of the seminary, but he had once been dean of discipline of the boarding school, and had a fearsome reputation as a merciless wielder of the strap. I studied him carefully when I first saw him; he was gaunt and unsmiling. Soon, even though he had no business on the lay side, I saw him at work. Four or five of us were hanging around the squash courts after lights out. When he saw us, he stood quietly at first and watched us; then he picked on the most innocent and vulnerable boy. He called him over and began to interrogate him while pinching one cheek hard and then the other cheek and then pulling his ears with enormous slow ferocity and then moving to his slow-growing sideburns until he had almost lifted our poor friend off the ground. Dr Sherwood was evil. I made up a song about him with a vile chorus.

Soon, he was replaced as dean of the seminary, although he still hovered darkly in corridors. The new dean, Dr Ledwith, was young and friendly and open and very good-looking. He was also reputed to be really smart. One of my friends knew him from home so he often stopped to talk to us. He was a new breed of priest; he had studied in Europe and America. Many of the teaching priests spent their summers in parishes in America so they were full of new ideas. Everything was open for discussion, or almost everything. I went to a brilliant lecture by Dr Ledwith on ideas of paradox within Catholic doctrine. It was whispered that he would one day be a great prince of the church.

I got to know some of the other priests and realized that for some of the 300 boarders, being friends with a priest meant that you could go up to his rooms and hang out, make phone calls, listen to music, watch TV. I became friends with a few of the priests, but in my last year became especially friendly with a physics teacher, Fr Collins, because my best mate was one of his brightest students.

All of the teaching priests, except Fr Collins, had rooms off a corridor in a modern extension. Fr Collins’s rooms were in an older building. It was easy to go up and down to his rooms without being noticed, as the two other priests in his part of the building were often away. His stereo system was amazing. I listened to Tommy there and Jesus Christ Superstar. He always had a box of sweets. I could ring home on his telephone. On Saturday nights after lights out, with his full

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