When High Mass was sung with a king's escort and fixed bayonets

Spectator, The, Mar 22, 2003 by Johnson, Paul

AND ANOTHER THING

I am mystified by people who write hostile accounts of their Catholic schooling under nuns and priests. Their experience of cruelty and suffering bears no relation to my own. My years at Stonyhurst were of almost unblemished happiness, and when I think of my good fortune, and the sacrifices of my parents to make it possible, the tears come to my eyes. The Jesuits contrived to make me feel I was participating in a great adventure, the creation of a special breed of human being committed to making the world a better and holier place. We were 'apart', chosen. The school had been founded in Flanders during the 1590s, when it was unlawful in England to give a boy a Catholic education. Blood and torture, the rope and rack and prison bars were knit into its history. It had only come to England two centuries later, after the fresh horrors of the French Revolution. But there it found an idyllic home in the north of Lancashire, where the Ribble and the Hodder valleys form the most blissful landscape in the entire country, between the burly shoulders of the High Pennines and the seaplains. Each day I looked out on Pendle Hill, that magic silhouette which I knew by heart, for I painted it scores of times. We tramped the vast moors on all sides and bathed in the fierce streams and the deep, clear pools formed by cataracts or 'roughs'.

The building, donated by an ancient Catholic family, centred on an early Jacobean tower with stone eagles on its roof and a Renaissance system of classical orders on its faqade. But there were earlier, mediaeval parts, and labyrinthine corridors opening on to quaint rooms with strange names, where the older boys had their studies and bedrooms. Vast Victorian additions supplied immense internal spaces, including a theatre, an indoor football pitch, swimming pool, shooting gallery and a large room called the Study Place, where boys up to the age of 16 or so did their homework. Each of us was given, on arrival, a desk with our name and date of admission engraved on a brass plate, and the desk followed you up the school and the Study Place - until, on your departure, the brass plate was transferred to the front, along with those of other old boys who had once owned it. Each desk had two lids, opening laterally from the middle, as was common in mediaeval Continental schools. If a presiding master in the Study Place broke one of the ancient unwritten rules, like sitting at the lectern, the boys started to make a brutal noise with the desk-lids, ending in a terrifying crescendo. I once saw a young master faint at the savage din his unwitting behaviour had provoked. Later, when I worked in Paris, where the Chambre des Deputes had similar desks, I occasionally heard the same noise, denoted in Le Monde as claquement des pupitres.

The school was the centre of a vast estate, with a well-run home farm which, although it was wartime, supplied us with copious and delicious food. In many ways we were self-contained. We had our own bootmaker and tailor, our barber's shop; we made our own pop, beer and cider; we had our own golf course and outdoor shooting range; and every conceivable game, from fives and squash to real and lawn tennis, was provided for. In front of the Eagle Tower were two long ponds called 'canals' which originally produced ice, but which we used for skating, though a much larger stretch of water served for ice-hockey. In accordance with Jesuit customs, there was an observatory with a magnificent telescope and a meteorological station run by a Jesuit who was an expert on earthquakes. Our forms, instead of the usual numbers, were called, in ascending order: Rudiments, Figures, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry and Rhetoric, the last forming the scholarship Sixth.

Yet the Jesuits never lost sight of the school's aim: to produce leaders of a learned and moral community. During each threemonth term (no half-term holidays and no exeats) we were isolated and enclosed in an entirely Catholic enclave, for we were in the centre of a district which had never been effectively Protestantised in the 16th century, so that all the employees and servants of the school were Catholics from birth. The great liturgical cycle of the Church was performed in all its detailed majesty, with a splendour I have never seen equalled even at Westminster Cathedral or St Peter's, Rome. The Lent term was prolonged so that the dramatic plainchant of the Tenebrae could be sung, the finest musical experience, as a member of the choir, of my entire life, though I learnt some superlative masses too, from Hummel and Beethoven to Gounod and Faure. Every day we attended chapel twice, and on Sundays the big church, too, a replica of King's, Cambridge. With more than 60 priests in the community, masses were said every morning at scores of altars throughout the school, the tinkling of altar bells sounding from 6 to 9 a.m. The love of God and the faith of the Church were not so much taught as allowed to permeate every fibre of our being, so that our knowledge and devotion were instinctive and our responses to any challenge intuitive.