Thérèse of Lisieux: An Autobiography.
28
F ROM HIS HIGH desk Father Gavin fixed me with an alarming rubicund grin of pity and glee. ‘Find time, Magister Fru,’ he said, ‘to write out one hundred times the declensions and conjugations I set you yesterday.’
It was my fourth week at Cotton and I was struggling with Latin. Most of my year had come to the college aged eleven and had started Latin two years ahead of me, or even earlier, and the majority of my companions in the remedial class, who had come to Cotton at thirteen, had made a start on Latin in their previous schools. My problems began when I failed to grasp the meaning of the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative…I struggled to apply principles I did not understand. Lack of practice in learning by heart was compounded by poor concentration. I was so astonished to be at Cotton, so entranced by the strangeness and interest of the surroundings, that my mind would still wander towards the windows to gaze at the autumn foliage and the sky. I was failing to learn the grammar set by Father Gavin day after day, and I was incapable of attempting the simple composition and translation exercises.
With Greek it was different. The elderly Laz Warner went at a slower pace, sitting next to each of us in turn, making sure that we had grasped what he had taught. He was intent merely to have us read and form the unfamiliar letters. There was not going to be much progress in the remedial Greek class, I realised. But Latin, the universal language of the Catholic Church, was the key to our future studies in the senior seminary, the daily recitation of the breviary, and the year-round ritual.
On waking each morning my first thought was dread of the commencement of Latin drill. Passing the great double doors at the entrance to the Study Place each night, I felt a surge ofrelief at the amnesty of Greater Silence and the night. I was not the only pupil in difficulty: there was another ex-Secondary Modern boy from east London, the oafish Patrick O’Rourke, who cried with homesickness in the night and proved incapable of keeping himself clean without his mother’s help. He was big for his age, with large clumsy hands and greasy hair. We were both teased on account of our cockney accents: ‘ ’Allo, me owld cock-sparrer!’ He tried to make friends with me, but I was determined not to be identified with him. He had the stricken look of a boy who was not going to make it. O’Rourke floundered so much that Father Gavin had put him down into the first year, despite his age and size, as incapable of ‘catching up’. As it was, my classmates looked at me, I thought, with smug glances every time Father Gavin scolded me. I had seen boys looking at O’Rourke like that.
My class year, the lower fourth, was composed of some fifteen boys who had moved up from the junior section, Saint Thomas’s, and about twelve of us who had arrived from a variety of schools mainly around the Midlands. As I got to know my class many of them seemed like any other boys: teasing each other, fooling around, quarrelling about favourite soccer teams back home. But I came to recognise some as peculiar to a seminary community. There were the ‘Sanctebobs’, a word James had used, who made ostentatious display of their piety even outside church, walking around college with measured gait as if still in the sanctuary, and ‘talking piosity’. They were quietly derided by their fellows, and often accused of hypocrisy. And there were the loners, who seemed, in the context of Cotton, monk-like rather than just friendless or stand-offish. Such boys were not considered odd, and their desire for solitude was respected, unless they appeared sanctimonious as well, in which case they were regarded as Sanctebobs.
For some, like James Rolle, being a seminarian seem to come naturally. Although not a Sanctebob himself, he seemed a ‘cleric’ by nature, a boy born to be a priest. Neat and studious in appearance,
28
F ROM HIS HIGH desk Father Gavin fixed me with an alarming rubicund grin of pity and glee. ‘Find time, Magister Fru,’ he said, ‘to write out one hundred times the declensions and conjugations I set you yesterday.’
It was my fourth week at Cotton and I was struggling with Latin. Most of my year had come to the college aged eleven and had started Latin two years ahead of me, or even earlier, and the majority of my companions in the remedial class, who had come to Cotton at thirteen, had made a start on Latin in their previous schools. My problems began when I failed to grasp the meaning of the cases: nominative, vocative, accusative…I struggled to apply principles I did not understand. Lack of practice in learning by heart was compounded by poor concentration. I was so astonished to be at Cotton, so entranced by the strangeness and interest of the surroundings, that my mind would still wander towards the windows to gaze at the autumn foliage and the sky. I was failing to learn the grammar set by Father Gavin day after day, and I was incapable of attempting the simple composition and translation exercises.
With Greek it was different. The elderly Laz Warner went at a slower pace, sitting next to each of us in turn, making sure that we had grasped what he had taught. He was intent merely to have us read and form the unfamiliar letters. There was not going to be much progress in the remedial Greek class, I realised. But Latin, the universal language of the Catholic Church, was the key to our future studies in the senior seminary, the daily recitation of the breviary, and the year-round ritual.
On waking each morning my first thought was dread of the commencement of Latin drill. Passing the great double doors at the entrance to the Study Place each night, I felt a surge ofrelief at the amnesty of Greater Silence and the night. I was not the only pupil in difficulty: there was another ex-Secondary Modern boy from east London, the oafish Patrick O’Rourke, who cried with homesickness in the night and proved incapable of keeping himself clean without his mother’s help. He was big for his age, with large clumsy hands and greasy hair. We were both teased on account of our cockney accents: ‘ ’Allo, me owld cock-sparrer!’ He tried to make friends with me, but I was determined not to be identified with him. He had the stricken look of a boy who was not going to make it. O’Rourke floundered so much that Father Gavin had put him down into the first year, despite his age and size, as incapable of ‘catching up’. As it was, my classmates looked at me, I thought, with smug glances every time Father Gavin scolded me. I had seen boys looking at O’Rourke like that.
My class year, the lower fourth, was composed of some fifteen boys who had moved up from the junior section, Saint Thomas’s, and about twelve of us who had arrived from a variety of schools mainly around the Midlands. As I got to know my class many of them seemed like any other boys: teasing each other, fooling around, quarrelling about favourite soccer teams back home. But I came to recognise some as peculiar to a seminary community. There were the ‘Sanctebobs’, a word James had used, who made ostentatious display of their piety even outside church, walking around college with measured gait as if still in the sanctuary, and ‘talking piosity’. They were quietly derided by their fellows, and often accused of hypocrisy. And there were the loners, who seemed, in the context of Cotton, monk-like rather than just friendless or stand-offish. Such boys were not considered odd, and their desire for solitude was respected, unless they appeared sanctimonious as well, in which case they were regarded as Sanctebobs.
For some, like James Rolle, being a seminarian seem to come naturally. Although not a Sanctebob himself, he seemed a ‘cleric’ by nature, a boy born to be a priest. Neat and studious in appearance,
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