a few bombs. Once or twice it was even successful in downing one or other of the planes. Whenever one came down, even at some distance from the house, it made a real thud, giving us the sensation of an earthquake – to which in England we were comparatively unaccustomed. Whenever I went to bed in the boys’ room on the upper floor, I would stand at the window looking up at the night sky and enjoying this new kind of fireworks display, without feeling any sense of danger. The following morning on our way to school we would pick up numerous pieces of shrapnel that had fallen from the anti-aircraft shells – making it dangerous for anyone to go outside without a helmet. As a result many boys amassed quite an impressive museum of shrapnel or bits and pieces of bombs.
Also on waking up in the morning, we might see the Eastern sky, in the direction of London, lit up with a rosy red color, as described by Homer in his Iliad, “rhododaktulos eos”, or the rosy-fingered dawn. Only, this was no natural color, but the result of the bombing of London. One morning it was particularly impressive, when the target had been a paper factory between Wimbledon and London, but then it looked as if the whole of London was engulfed in flames – as in the Great Fire of 1666. On the other hand, not a few bombs happened to fall on and around Wimbledon – as often as not when the bombers found they still had a few bombs left over from their principal raids, and then they would drop them on us before returning home. Our house in Devas Road seemed to enjoy the divine protection, as we were ringed by a radius of some 200 meters where bombs had fallen, but none inside that charmed circle. That was because every night we would pray to Our Lady of Quito and St Jude as “patron of lost causes” – also as an apostle who might be less preoccupied than his fellow apostles with the prayers of the faithful. There was one bomb in particular which had made a direct hit on the College, and for which I was particularly grateful, as it had fallen on the gymnasium, and I wasn’t so fond of gymnastics.
But then there were the flying bombs that were specially unnerving, as they made a zooming sound up till the moment their engine was automatically stopped, and then they would fall. One such bomb happened to come over the church just at the time when the priest was giving an eloquent sermon on death, on the text, “You know not the day nor the hour.” Just then the engine stopped, and the preacher had no further need of eloquence. The bomb had taken the words out of his mouth. But by that time I had taken the road to safety in North Wales, where the Jesuits had their novitiate at St Beuno’s College. And thereby, as we say, hangs my further tale.
Wannabe Jesuits
To be precise, it was in the morning of September 7, 1943, that six would-be, or in modern parlance “wannabe”, Jesuits came together at Euston station and crowded into one compartment of the boat train for Holyhead. Not that we were going all the way to Holyhead, still less by boat to Dublin, but our destination was the seaside resort of Rhyl on the coast of North Wales. Nor that we were going to the seaside at Rhyl, but from Rhyl we had been instructed to take a taxi to St Beuno’s College, a remote building owned by the Jesuits and situated on a hill named Maenefa looking out over the wide Vale of Clwyd. There we were duly disgorged and made our way up the stone steps to the College, which wasn’t (like Wimbledon College) a high school but the novitiate of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Till the outbreak of hostilities with Germany the novitiate had been at Manresa House, Roehampton, on the other side of the Common from Wimbledon, but when that building received a direct hit from a German bomb, it was considered prudent to relocate the novices and junior scholastics to St Beuno’s (pronounced “buy-nose”), which had previously been used for the study of theology.
The period of “noviceship” was to last two years, to provide us with some idea of what we were letting ourselves in for by joining the Jesuits, and to provide the Jesuits with some idea of who we were before formally admitting us by letting us take the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In the course of that time, one or other of the novices might silently drop out and return to the life of a layman or become some other kind of priest. Only those of us who were gifted with the eyes of a lynx might notice the absence and spread the rumor that (so and so) was no longer with us. And then we others would ask the question, as if echoing the disciples at the last supper, “Is it I, Lord?” As a matter of fact, of those six wannabes who took the train to Rhyl and the taxi to the College, only three survived, and I was one of them. But we weren’t the only ones. Others joined us from Glasgow, Leeds, and elsewhere, till we were some eighteen first-year novices, with another eighteen or so in the second year. And then there were the outgoing novices who were to take their vows as “voventes” on the following day, Our Lady’s Birthday, September 8. Then they would return to their studies of “the humanities” as junior scholastics after a “fallow” period as novices.
My first experience of my new life took place at the Vow Mass early in the morning. It was quite a long ceremony, with each of the outgoing novices reciting his vows from a paper which he had written out in long-hand beforehand. And I couldn’t stand it. I already had a long history of fainting during Mass, and I added one more instalment to my history that morning. I fainted and had to be physically carried out of the chapel to my room, where I had to sit for a time with my head between my knees till I felt better. It was as if I had disgraced myself from the outset of my life as a Jesuit, but my fainting had no effect on the ceremony – at which I was much relieved.
My next memory was of the dinner held that evening in honor of the voventes, when we were served with rhubarb wine. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the taste of wine, though it was made not of grapes but of rhubarb. But I was disillusioned the following day, when we received our daily “exhortation” from the Master of Novices, a severe, self-conscious elderly man. He informed us that from then onwards, even when wine was served at table, novices were expected to abstain. That was a foretaste of what to expect from the noviceship, and it wasn’t to our liking – though as novices we had to put up with it, as with so much else. Fortunately for us, we were to be under the direction of that Master for only a year, and then he was replaced by another, younger man who was more understanding and more acceptable to us.
Anyhow, concerning that severe Master, I have two amusing anecdotes to tell, in my own experience of him, and they both relate to one of our second-year novices who was always getting into trouble of one kind or another. One of our “experiments” as novices was that of kneeling on the floor in front of the Master, while the other novices would retail the faults they had noticed in the poor victim. We were limited to the mention of three faults each, and the whole process was called “a Chapter of Faults”, or in Latin lapidatio. On one such occasion, however, the victim was a perfect novice, and none of us had anything to say against him, so it was the Master who complained, “Is this a mutual admiration society?” But then the novice I have in mind stood up and said, “The brother pays too much attention to unimportant rules, father.” “Which rules?” asked the Master in a curious tone of voice. “For example,” answered the novice, “the rules of modesty.” That made the Master fairly jump out of his chair!
Another day the novice in question was returning from an afternoon walk with two other novices. For we always went out for walks in threes, in order to prevent any intimacy developing between two alone. There in the kitchen yard they came upon someone bending over a sack of potatoes, and the novice went up to him with mischief in his mind and gave him a friendly slap on the behind. Then who should it turn out to be but the Master of Novices! It was astonishing that this particular novice survived not only till the time of his first vows, but all through his life as a Jesuit, till he died of apoplexy in Rome.
Other novices, too, showed a similar tendency to do the wrong thing. It almost seemed a characteristic of Jesuit novices to do so. One might put the blame on the severity of the above-mentioned Master, but even under his more understanding successor I have this funny story to tell. I was then a second-year novice, and there was this little novice in the first year who was excessively timid. We used to take it in turns to serve in the dining-room (or “refectory”, as we called it in monastic parlance), and this little novice was serving for the first time. His first duty at dinner was to take two tureens of soup with his serving cloth in either hand, and to put them at the head of two tables at the far end of the room. Then his one aim was to accomplish this task as soon as he could. So instead of walking with the tureens, he ran with them, with the result that some of their