Ferulas and Thuribles

"You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past."

Paul Modiano, in a letter from CM Hutte to Guy Roland in Rue des Boutiques Obscures

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Childhood and adolescence are significant periods for us all. The older we become, the more we look back to our formative years: the people, places and experiences which shaped us and the influences which helped make us the people we are today.

 

This memoir [Ferulas and Thuribles] is the product of three things: an idea in my mind, encouragements to write from others and the opportunity afforded by lockdowns in the pandemic. As the pandemic took hold in March 2020, my business experienced a downturn, providing an opportunity to do something different. The seed of an idea had been in my mind for two or three years and I received encouragement from two people to record my experiences: my sister-in-law, Dr Sally Williams, and Chris Belton, who had been at Stonyhurst in the 1970s. To them I owe a debt of gratitude.

 

I started writing without defining an audience. Essentially I was writing as a historian recording an eyewitness account of my experiences and those who were with me. As it covered my early life, I thought the events might interest my daughters and grandchildren, perhaps in the future after I am gone. As the book took shape, some of my Stonyhurst contemporaries showed an interest, as it was partly their story. However, my family and most of my friends knew little about Stonyhurst, so I had to write for those with no previous knowledge of the place. In an unplanned way, this led to the memoir becoming more accessible to a wider audience.

 

In his Booker prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes wrote: “History is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”. This is a reminder that to write about events and people from so long ago presented a challenge. Though my documentation was inadequate, I had my school reports, letters, diaries, newspaper accounts and photographs as resources.  The Stonyhurst Magazineprovided useful anchor points: most importantly, those who journeyed with me at both Stonyhurst and St Martin’s, my preparatory school. An enjoyable co-benefit of writing this memoir has been to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, some of whom I had not had contact with for five decades. Their contribution to the narrative has been invaluable and has made the project a collaborative effort which was not planned; it simply evolved as I wrote. For their help I am deeply grateful.

 

The process of writing has also been a reminder that no matter how highly we rate our memories, our minds play tricks with us. To counter the imperfections of memory, there is safety in numbers: some of my long-held narratives have been both disrupted and corrected, with new ones taking their place. As I have written, pieces of the jigsaw have come together, but other unplaced pieces leave an incomplete picture.

 

In creating the narrative I tried to put myself back in my situation in the 1960s, with the outlook, attitudes and values I held at the time. I felt this to be a more honest approach than to give a retrospective take on things. Inevitably, at times, a retrospective angle was needed, especially from my contemporaries, to make sense of some of the events we experienced. Whether I have succeeded in this balancing act is up to the reader to decide.

 

This memoir is partly an exercise in retrospective psychogeography. Although psychogeography eludes definition, Guy Debord described it as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. The environment of boarding school was a 24/7 culture of total immersion from which there was usually no escape – though a few boys managed to do so. But it was not just geography (inside and outside the school) but routines, norms, history, religion, with unwritten rules and expectations governing culture and behaviour. It was a total system which can sometimes be hard to understand for those who have not experienced the process. Therefore a random group of people, in an immersive culture for a limited season, provides a fertile context for a study of human behaviour – not unlike a group of survivors from a shipwreck washed up on an uninhabited desert island: they did not chose the place or their companions and simply had to survive and even thrive in their new world. Such circumstances had to leave an impression, especially at an impressionable age, without the support of family structures and stability, or otherwise, of a home environment. There were no computers, mobile phones or pastoral care. We were pretty much on our own.

 

As extracts from my school reports reveal, I had limited academic ability. I was aware of this at the time and compensated by working harder than others. I pondered if I should include relevant extracts from some of my reports but I decided to overcome my reticence and include them for two reasons: they provide varied, objective and contemporary accounts by those who were responsible for me; and secondly, parts of the reports say more about the reporter than myself and provide insight into the goals of the Jesuits. Their focus was as much about discipline, character and leadership as it was about academic attainment: the aim was to mould us into Catholic gentlemen and leaders.

 

With a wry smile, I think that in my case, the Jesuits would have been disappointed with the outcome