split, burst out and rolled off in all directions. A veritable Gatling gun of ricocheting shots reverberated off the corrugated iron roof, to where the resultant downfall of scattering prizes had yet to run the gauntlet of the ear-ripped, legs-bitten, rugby-tackling maniacs of St Joseph’s seminary for the mentally insane.
One of the unsolved mysteries of primary school education is that of that excruciating sub-occult phenomenon - the verruca - or more commonly, the wart. From time immemorial the esoteric significance of warts has been paramount. Why else would such a plethora of folklore have been built up around them? Rubbing one’s hands under the waning moon is supposed to be effective in their removal. Whether or not it does anything for those growing under the feet is a matter for the clairvoyant amongst you. Tales of touching the dead or their accoutrements as being methods equally efficacious when it comes to the magical removal of these mysterious tumescences - also abound. As a last example - sufficient I feel to satisfy the hermetic temperament of the most supernatural of minds - I shall relate the following: Take a length of string. Tie in it as many knots as you have warts. Touch each wart with each knot, and then throw the whole caboodle over the back of your left hand shoulder into a stagnant pond. As the strings decays your warts will disappear. But of course, you must not tell anybody. Who would! I beg to ask? This brings me to the most painful and embarrassing point of the story thus far. I may have lacked the mental capacity for the full acquisition and weight of religious and secular knowledge, but I certainly didn’t lack the physical wherewithal when it came to the accumulation of warts. Warts and I had something of a newly acquired affinity. That school was a wart-mine. The richest seam of warts in Christendom was to be found in those unhallowed catacombs. Everyone had warts. Even the nuns and priests had warts. But they it seemed only had venial warts. Warts of the mortal variety were reserved for us of the prepubescent sinning persuasion. I had them on my feet, knees and hands. Fortunately my blond, blue-eyed, cherubic face was spared the ravages of those pestilent blemishes. Placed - as they were in my case - strategically, the more spiritually adept amongst my contemporaries may have been inclined to think of them not as warts, but as stigmata. But for me alas, they were just warts. Being in the cloistered halls of Catholic learning, recourse to the more superstitious means of eradicating the affliction were of course unthinkable. Even prayer it seemed was not enough. Once again - as so often happened in my life - fate intervened. St Josephs and the clinic were mercifully separated by half a mile of blossoming suburbia. As if of divine providence my suffering was compensated for by the twice-weekly journeys through that oasis of health and freedom. Lessons could be forgotten. Knowledge was to be no more than the white puffs of amorphous clouds as they traversed and dusted the infinite spaces of the sky’s blue slate. All was trees and birds and gardens. It was the acme of didacticism. All I wanted to know; all I needed to know was there. The clinic was a different kettle of conundrums. There after booking in and waiting the statutory aeon whilst pretending to read magazines you wouldn’t even if you could, you were finally ushered into the surgery. There it was that prodding and poking became a way of life. Why one should be made to strip, cough, poke your tongue out and be weighed, all in the name of a cure for warts, passeth all understanding. But then, such is the innocence of youth. There, warts were regarded at clinical distance with no more than a tong-like nod towards the arts of diagnosis. In the dispensary - the twentieth century’s answer to the coven - a ritualistic violet-coloured potion was being concocted on my behalf. This was to become my indelible trademark, more conspicuous even than the cross of ashes thumbed into the forehead at the beginning of Lent. I, the blue-spotted one, would be known henceforth, from afar.
Part of the school - in every sense of the word - the church of St Josephs lifted its bell-ringing, mass-summoning tower into the grey-skied, low church, heaven of that town on the edge of the Essex marshes. It was from there that the full and chastening power of Catholic ritual was to be daily performed for the betterment of my eternal soul. Whether from behind a mesh in a dark and dingy cubicle or kneeling in front of the priest - enthroned in his full regalia - confession and its subsequent absolution were to become my raison d’etre. I was undoubtedly a sinner. It was common knowledge. My mother knew it, my father knew it, and the nuns knew it. Even the priest - oblivious to any attempt at mitigation on my part - sided with the rest of them. One soon learnt that the sin of inventing a sin was far easier to live with than trying to explain one’s innocence to a disbelieving confessor. “Fergiv’ me farver for I ‘ave sinned, it’s bin seven days since me last confession.” “And what have you to confess my son,” came the intoned reply.
“I stole a penny from me muvver’s purse farver,” I lied, “You know that’s very wrong of you, don’t you,” reprimanded the priest. “Yes farver I do,” I continued contritely. “I won’t do it agin, honest.” I knew that this relatively minor infringement of celestial law would be treated as venial only. Both parties would be satisfied. A sin had been admitted and absolution administered. Tacit agreement as to one’s place in the hierarchy of goodness was all that was required. Only the penance remained. “Two Hail-Marys and three Our-Fathers, kneeling outside on the gravel,” came the theological command. This may seem somewhat harsh to the uninitiated, but for someone who has prostrated himself and prayed fervently at all fourteen guilt-inducing stations of the cross, this was a real - if somewhat knee-cratering - cinch.
On occasions, sins of a more mortal magnitude - such as the obvious sacrilege of wearing a hat in the inner sanctum, or giggling while crossing oneself with holy water - were reported to the Mother Superior. She was superior by name and superior by nature. That red-faced, black-cloaked, banshee of a woman, drilled into the world and its unsuspecting occupants through a pair of all-seeing, all-knowing, laser-focused eyes. The whole terrifying effect enhanced and magnified by horn-rimmed, pebble-glazed spectacles. When summoned to her office, previous threats of purgatory and hellfire were relegated to the rightful significance of their lower order. There she would stand, stiff as a crucifix and far less forgiving. An assortment of canes of varying lengths and diameters were removed slowly, one at a time, from a long leather tube and then tested for curve and swishability. Throughout this unnerving process the rising pitch of verbal chastisement always preceded the inevitable caning. “Hold out your hand! ” Thwack! “The other one!” Thwack! The pattern of my religious life had evolved. Flagellation in one form or another was to be the scourge of my tender years. The evidence of the accumulated effect of those beatings exhibited itself in the manner of raised, hard, calloused skin that remained on the palms of my hands until well beyond the demise of puberty.
Chapter 3. Witches and Whizzbangs.
Transgressions were manifold. Despite the threats of eternal damnation, two of the most abhorred dates of the festal year - when looked at from an ecclesiastical point of view - were nevertheless indulged in to the full by the backsliding adepts of our less than sacred community. Halloween and Guy-Fawkes continued to exert their pagan influence in the face of a millennium of crusades against infidel and heretic alike. Having achieved the safe distance of five heathen miles between Pitsea and Stanford-le-Hope, the two great fire and spirit festivals of the northern calendar were to be celebrated regardless.
Not withstanding the derivation of the word Halloween, All-Saints and All-Souls were to be forgotten in favour of witches, wizards, slit-eyed gleaming pumpkins and apple bobbing. Perhaps not the trick-and-treat party-night of a festival that it’s become nowadays, it was nevertheless highly regarded by the young and Nordic-hearted. St Michael’s church - perched on the top of a hunchback-hill overlooking the marshes and encircled by two or three stands of towering elms - afforded the necessary atmosphere. There at dusk on one grey and misted late October day - looking for all the world like the set of a Hammer-Horror movie - myself and a straggling band of boot-scuffing, shoulder-shrugging oiks, made the ascent towards that squat castellated tower so rightly patronized by one of Christianity’s most famous dragon-slayers. There in the owl-hooting twilight of an x-rated, eye-covering feature, we’d come to confront the Devil. Unbeknown to us a couple of local roughnecks, half our age again and secure in the knowledge of that fact, had prefigured our arrival. Bravely - with feet and minds going in opposite directions - we passed under the lych gate and stood defiantly in God’s cold acre. The black pall of a funereal darkness fell from the wings of returning rooks. Skeletal shivers ran as fleet-footed as spiders from coccyx to