that now their contents were all spilt on the floor. Then everyone had to hasten out of the room while the servers cleaned up the floor, and that evening there wasn’t enough soup to go round. Unfortunately, that poor novice failed to survive the noviceship.
These are but a few of the funny stories I might tell about life in the noviceship, as funny stories tend to stick in my mind, while the more serious events tend to fall into what Shakespeare calls the “formless ruin of oblivion”. Thus everything the severe Master told us about the Rules of the Society, which we had to write out with due care in our notebooks, I have completely forgotten. I even dare to think nothing of it was worth memorizing. But what most impressed me about St Beuno’s was its location on the slope of Maenefa, with a perpetual view over the Vale of Clwyd to the Snowdon range of mountains beyond. The Master might be narrow-minded with his lack of humor and his sense of self-importance, but the view from the College compensated for everything. At least we could hardly entertain such a mind when we had such a broad expanse of what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “field, fallow, and plough” before our eyes every day.
Which reminds me that we were spending the first three years of our Jesuit lives – two years as novices and one as juniors – in the same College as Hopkins had been living in his Victorian age, from 1874 to 1877, and writing his memorable poems from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” onwards. But sadly, no one, least of all the Master, reminded us of the fact. Or if anyone had reminded us, it would have meant nothing to us, since Hopkins hadn’t yet achieved the worldwide fame that he subsequently came to enjoy. As Jesus said sadly of himself, “No man is a prophet in his own country,” so I might say of Hopkins, “No man is a poet in his own province.” It was indeed only after the third edition of his poems was published in 1948 – after the first had been published in 1918, and the second in 1930 – that Hopkins may be said to have come into his own, and even then it was chiefly in America that he was welcomed. At that time I remember three American Jesuits coming all the way to England, just to follow in the footsteps of Hopkins, and we all regarded them as “crazy”. Yet, since leaving England for Japan, I myself have become no less “crazy”..
All the same, in all seriousness, I have to turn to what Shakespeare in As You Like It calls “the uses of adversity”, namely “the penalty of Adam, the seasons’ difference”. After all, it was already autumn when we “wannabe” Jesuits first arrived at St Beuno’s. Then with “nature’s changing course” it wasn’t long before autumn merged into winter, and the winter was colder than I had ever experienced in Wimbledon. For one thing there was no central heating, nor electric fires in our rooms, but we had to subsist on coal fires, which we were only allowed to make for ourselves in the evening. In any case, most of the day was spent out of our rooms, and even outdoors in the extensive gardens. For in order to receive exemption from military service we were supposed to work on the land in various forms of farming – which in fact mainly took the form of pulling weeds out of the hard ground. Inevitably I fell foul of chilblains and had to wear special gloves allowing the tips of my fingers to show. Only the silver lining in all those dark clouds was our remoteness from the war and from the so-called “doodlebugs” which were then terrorizing the poor people at home.
At the same time, one of my great joys was the arrival of my father’s weekly letters from home. In them he would describe in minute, humorous detail the day to day events of family life. He was a real comic, who should have been a regular contributor to the comic magazine of Punch, but he told me he had tried once, only to be rebutted, and so he never tried again. Anyhow, whenever I read his letters, the tears would stream from my eyes, tears not of sorrow but of laughter, they were written in such a humorous, yet such an affectionate manner. Afterwards I learnt that before committing them to the post, he would pass them round all the family members, who would have their first round of laughter, before letting it spread Northwards to me. As the scholastic motto goes, “Bonum est diffusivum sui,” or Good is diffusive of itself. That is to say, if you have a good joke in your mind, you want to communicate it to as many others as you can. Only, sadly, at the end of my noviceship, as it were following in the footsteps of Hopkins at the beginning of his noviceship, I decided to sacrifice all those precious letters I had received from my father, before taking my vows.
Between Two Houses
There is a story about a mother seeking the advice of a Jesuit priest about her son’s vocation. She tells him her son wants to become a priest, and she asks him how he is to go about it. The Jesuit answers that it depends on what kind of priest he wants to become. If it is to become a diocesan priest, it will require six years of study. If to become a Benedictine, it will take two more years, allowing for a noviceship and the study of the Rule of St Benedict. If to become a Dominican, it will take a little longer, for the study of St Thomas Aquinas. But if he wants to become a Jesuit, it will take upwards of twelve years. Then the mother replies, “Well, in that case my son must become a Jesuit, as he’s rather stupid.” As for myself, I have to confess that it took me seventeen years from my first vows in 1945 to my final vows in 1962. So I must be extremely stupid! How so? Well, in the course of my Jesuit formation after spending two years as a novice and taking my first vows, I spent another two years as a junior, then three years in the study of scholastic philosophy, before going up to Oxford for the study of the Classics and English. Then, after making my way to Japan in 1954, I had to spend two years on the study of Japanese and four years on the study of theology, during which time I was ordained priest in 1960. Finally, I still had to undergo a third year of noviceship, called “tertianship” (nothing to do with “tertian fever”), before taking my final vows and entering on my career as teacher of English at Sophia University.
So now I have to speak about my memories of the “juniorate”, or period of study as a junior scholastic, which took place “between two houses”, one year at St Beuno’s (when the novices returned to Manresa House) and another year at Manresa. I should explain that among Jesuits “scholastic” is the term still used, from medieval times, for students up till the time of ordination as a priest. I should add that by the time we took our first vows on September 8, 1945, the war had just ended. That morning I had come to the cup-room to help prepare the refectory for breakfast, when the brother in charge curtly informed me, in his Lancashire accent, “Bruther, the war’s ended!” Later, we heard fuller details from our maths teacher in the juniorate, an elderly astronomer, about the atomic bomb – he was fairly bubbling with enthusiasm about the discovery of nuclear fission – and we were treated to a reading of Ronald Knox’s recent book on the subject during meals. Otherwise, we were cut off from all news both as novices and as juniors.
For me, it was such a relief to have taken my first vows and to have become a junior, for two special reasons. The first was that I was now no longer subject to the commands of the Master. From the beginning of my noviceship, the Master had noticed that I was rather too thin for my age, partly because my parents were both on the slim side, partly because during the war there had been little food to make us fat. So he commanded me to eat as much food as possible, even till I felt myself “bursting” – that was the very word he used. Never in all my Jesuit life have I received such a difficult command, which I understood as applying to me for the duration of my noviceship, though we had another Master in our second year. But now, with my first vows, I considered myself freed from such a difficult command. The second reason was that from now on we were freed from the laborious outdoor work of the noviceship and enabled to resume a life of study, for which I had more aptitude. This study was, moreover, in the world rather of humanism than of science, and that was also welcome to me as I was always more of a humanist than a scientist. So we took up the study of the Classics, English and French literature, and Church history. English literature naturally meant Shakespeare, but our teacher chose to take the text of the dramatist’s least inspiring play of King John and to compare it with its supposed source The Troublesome Reign of John. Later on, I had the opportunity of attending Shakespeare’s play in Stratford, and I found it so boring, I couldn’t help wondering if the great dramatist had really written it all. What really attracted my interest were the classes of Church history, which aptly supplemented the study of English history we had been taught at the College. They provided me with the necessary framework for all subsequent study of literature, both the Classics and English, as well as my study of scholastic (that is, medieval) philosophy