Monk dawson, p.1
Monk Dawson, page 1
Monk Dawson
Piers Paul Read
Copyright © 2013, Piers Paul Read
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
About the Author
Chapter One
Acting on mistaken principles of piety and snobbery, my parents sent me to a boarding-school in the English countryside which was run by Benedictine monks. On the first day of the first term they drove me there themselves, to the country house surrounded by woods which smelt of wild garlic and dead crows. I was then seven years old. We were given tea by the headmaster, Father Francis Ashe, in a part of the school that was afterwards out of bounds to the boys, and then they drove away, leaving me alone for the first time in my life — alone with this priest in his black habit and hood.
He was about to take me in when another car drew up on the gravel in front of us. A second family presented itself — a father, a mother and a son of my age. Father Francis turned to meet them and I waited at a respectful distance. The man was tall: the woman seemed like my own mother and for a moment I wanted to rush into her arms … but did not. I eyed the other boy and he looked back at me. He was like his father — thin, dark, with brown eyes and black hair.
‘This is Eddie,’ the mother said to the headmaster.
‘I feel sure he should be called Edward now,’ said the father.
‘Oh no, dear,’ said the mother. ‘He’s always been called Eddie.’
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ said Father Francis in his dry voice. ‘Here he will be called Dawson.’
We had beds at different ends of the dormitory and desks at different sides of the classroom because his name was Dawson while mine, Winterman, came towards the end of the alphabet. Nevertheless, because we had arrived together we became friends. In the first crisis of that miserable life he came to my assistance, teaching me how to do up a tie without scoffing at me for not knowing. Later I got into a gang with some other boys, but I still saw Dawson on and off and really thought of him as my best friend — a friend who was somehow too precious for everyday use.
One Sunday, about a month after we arrived, we went for a walk together up the avenue which ran from the house to the home farm. The trees that had once lined it had been cut down during the war and the wide margins of grass had been enclosed for the grazing of cattle. I was smaller than he was and could not quite keep up, but did not want to ask him to slow down. He must have noticed my difficulty but rather than laugh at me for my plumpness, he stopped for a moment by a gate into a field. There were five or six black bullocks on the other side which turned and stared at us.
‘Are they cows?’ Dawson asked me.
‘Of course not,’ I said with the authority of someone who had been brought up in the country.
‘They’ve no horns.’
‘Bulls have horns.’
‘What’s the difference between bulls and these?’
‘Bulls are fathers. Bullocks are just for meat.’
He was silent and remained by the gate, staring into the docile, bulging eyes of the steers. Their gaze was gentle and affectionate.
‘They can’t have them … just to kill them.’
‘Yes. For beef and things.’
The air was cold and damp and the afternoon grew darker. He remained staring at the gate, staring at the animals.
‘Come on,’ I said.
He turned to look at me. There were tears in his eyes which I pretended not to see. I too had cried, but only at night under my blankets.
That evening, for supper, we were given steak-and-kidney pudding and Dawson refused to eat it. Father Giles who sat at our table told him that he had to finish what he was given but though he ate the potatoes and cabbage, he would not touch the meat.
The headmaster, Father Francis, rang the bell. We all stood and said grace: ‘we give thee thanks almighty God for these and all thy benefits which we have received through thy bounty through Christ Our Lord, Amen.’ Then, as Father Francis walked out the the refectory, Father Giles called him to our table and showed him Dawson’s uneaten steak-and-kidney pudding. This man, normally remote among the senior boys, was now in front of Dawson, and of me, who sat near him. He had sucked-in cheeks and hairs grew out of his nose.
‘Eat it,’ Father Francis said.
Dawson stood still. His face was bright red.
‘Eat it,’ the monk repeated, growing red in the face himself. But Dawson would not move. The other boys started shuffling around and whispering. ‘Come to my room,’ Father Francis said to Dawson, and he walked out.
Dawson was not present at prayers, but he was in bed when we came up. Talking was not allowed in the dormitories so I could not ask him what had happened, but his eyes were red from crying so I guessed that he had been beaten. Next morning he told me that he had had the slipper, which was worse than the stick because it was on the bottom, not on the hands: he had it again that night and the night after until, after three days, he choked down a sausage roll we were given at lunch-time. The next day would have been a Friday.
Across the valley from this preparatory school was the monastery of Kirkham and the upper school to which we were both to go when we were older. I would sometimes stand there with Dawson, discussing what it would be like for us there. ‘Oh, we’ll really learn how to do things when we get there,’ he said. ‘Not stupid Latin and all that.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Things we can do when we’re grown up.’
‘I’m going to be a farmer,’ I said. ‘Will I learn about that?’
‘Yes, I should think so. They’ll have to teach it if that’s what you want to be.’
‘What are you going to be?’ I asked.
He looked into my eyes, as if to judge how I would receive what he might say. I looked serious and he started to stutter what must have been a secret. ‘I’m going to help people,’ he said.
‘How?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ he said, ‘but there are lots of ways. I could be an explorer or invent a medicine or something like that.’
‘Everyone wants to do that.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to, I know it. I’m going to help everyone in the world.’
I left him there, thinking to himself, and went back to fighting, teasing, learning Latin and being beaten. Dawson kept out of fights though he was tall and could have stood up to anyone his own age. He kept to himself and had no friend closer to him than I was. He might have been teased for being bad at games but no one did because he could be sharp with words, saying things that made you look stupid in front of the others though he only did this when he was provoked. Otherwise he was known to be kind and in a way respected for it but not liked, since fighting and nastiness were more fun.
In our third year at the school Dawson’s father died. I did not discover until later that he had killed himself. He had been a surgeon in York, a specialist in ear, nose and throat, and no one found out why he did it, but it was this event, I am sure, that gave the monks their early hold over Dawson. He was away for ten days in the middle of term. Father Francis and Father Giles were more circumspect with him when he came back and every now and then he would be called into Father Francis’s room, not for the slipper but for a friendly talk. He told me that on these occasions Father Francis always called him Eddie.
Though Dawson never had me to stay in his home, he gave me a good idea of what it was like. His mother was a Catholic because her mother had been half-Italian and so, of course, a Catholic: the father’s father had been an Anglican clergyman and his side of the family had provided clergymen, doctors and civil servants to the nation or the East India Company for many generations. No one knew, as I have said, why Mr Dawson killed himself. A sure sign of his normality was the paying of three of four hundred pounds a year to give his son a good education. After his death the holy monks of Kirkham allowed the son to attend their schools for what the widow could afford, which was fixed at half the regular fee. But to meet even this modest expense Mrs Dawson had to live as cheaply as she could and send her daughter to the local grammar school. She was less bitter about it, I am sure, when she remembered that not only was her son taught well, but that his school friends must necessarily be of the kind to be useful to him later in life. Mrs Dawson knew, as we all know, that the sons of the rich go on to become the rich of their day and that the rich not only have their money, but the power that goes with it. So if, by some unfortunate quirk of unpredictable genetics, her son did not have the talents of his father, he would have the friends and acquaintances to fix him up with something respectable, rather than see him sink in society to the level of a plumber or a factory hand.
At the age of thirteen we returned from our summer holidays to the other side of the valley. Dawson and I were put into the same house: they were called after the British Dominions and ours was India. There were several new boys from other schools or straight from home, but life was much the same as before — lessons, prayers, bullying, beating and sport. We now knew enough about the school to expect nothing more though here there was, besides rugby and cricket, the Officers’ Training Corps. On Mondays and Friday
Our house-master, adjutant in this little army, was called Father Timothy. We were less in terror of him than we had been of Father Francis and were allowed to call him Father Tim. He himself had been to the school of Kirkham and had passed straight from the school into the monastery, taking the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and so dedicating his life to God. When we came into his care he was forty-three years old. He smoked a pipe, and cigars when he could get hold of them, so his study smelt of tobacco — a personal smell — as well as polish — a smell general to the school and monastery. His shoes were cleaned for him by the kitchen maids and the mattress on his bed was softer than the pallets on ours. His hair still covered his head. He walked slowly, which may have been from holy insight into the futility of haste. Unlike Father Francis, this monk’s face was plump and there were no hairs protruding from his nose, nor much of a growth on his jowls — though he was said to shave and the monastery was known to reject vocations where a vow of chastity would be superfluous. Anyway, his voice was deep, though he liked to talk in a near whisper, except at mass in the morning when he turned to say Orate Fratres or Dominus Vobiscum when he shouted because most of us had gone back to sleep.
On Thursday evenings he would sit down in the common room with the whole house and talk for a short time on matters of moral and practical guidance. On the first Thursday he talked of responsibility, of how we were doubly privileged in receiving a superior education and in being blessed with the One True Faith: but the greater the privilege, the greater the responsibility we should bear for the state of own souls and the spiritual welfare of our fellow countrymen. For some days after this talk, Dawson was more silent than usual. Then one evening after supper he took me aside and asked me how I thought we could do later in life to live up to this responsibility.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be a journalist, I think.’
‘Is that enough?’ he asked. ‘I mean … do journalists help a lot of people?’
I shrugged my shoulders and then the bell rang for prayers.
The school and monastery were built in different styles and stones, all ugly, but the valley before it was always beautiful — especially in the autumn when a shallow mist clung to the ground beneath the brown trees and the sun shone above it. Gradually, as we grew older, we became aware that there were other elements in the valley, as in the world at large, that had been there for more than the hundred years since the monastery was founded: which had been there before Saint Benedict, before Christ, perhaps before Adam, when the melting glacier, the last remnant of the ice age, had burst through the soft clay to the sea. There were square-edged chips of limestone, fossils of snails and fish. There were oak trees and willows and in summer a heavy growth of elderberry and nettle. There was wheat where the farmers had planted it for countless generations, and there were cows and sheep and insects with no religion at all. And in ourselves we felt pleasure in the sun or exhilaration at a ground-frost and the emotions of hatred, affection and indifference which were found among us and all men before popes and bishops, synods and councils: and these, like the dandelion which grew in the paving stones between monastery and abbey church, these infiltrated the community of boys and men.
Edward Dawson, now aged sixteen, already with a man’s body. He remained taller than the rest of us and had the same thick, black hair, brown eyes and delicate face as when I had first seen him. It was wide at the top and thin towards the chin, which sometimes gave him the look of a Tartar. His eyebrows were most active in giving expression to what he said: his eyes were brown and they always held steady when looking into those of another. He had long hands and fingers: hair started to grow on his body before it did on those of his contemporaries and his mind too showed the same precocious maturity.
Andrew Furness: a boy of thirteen, a lovely child who probably grew into a handsome man. He had soft, fair hair and a plump, pink face. His nose was small, his eyelashes so long that the lower became enmeshed in the upper when he closed his eyes. These eyes were blue and glanced from a lowered head with respect for us, his elders, and also with humour. His teeth stuck out a little so he lisped. His torso was long, but in correct proportion to the rest of his body for a boy of his age.
The monks were acutely aware of the dangers of pederasty. So obsessed were the authorities with the possibility of sentimental and sensual relationships between boys — a custom that was rampant in most other schools of this kind — that they invented a complex of extra taboos. It was not difficult for them to do this in such a small, enclosed society as the school and monastery of Kirkham and so an atmosphere was created in which a boy could not be seen in normal, friendly conversation with another of a different age. Since attraction of this sort was usually of an older boy for a younger one, it effectively prevented seduction of the latter by the former. Once it was learnt — it is said, through the Confessional — that a boy had done something or other with a fourth-former, the poor youth would immediately be isolated in the school infirmary until his parents could come to take him away. The monks had no clear idea of what it was — a grave sin or a mental aberration — but they knew it was contagious and thought it was incurable.
The attention Dawson began to pay to Furness was never, I am sure, such as to provoke passions of that kind. The feeling was pure: the fondness was for the personality. Dawson and I were both dormitory monitors and Furness was in our charge. Like other new boys who had come directly from home, this child was gay, cheeky and affectionate. It was left to the dormitory monitors above all to teach the habits of discipline and for this we were given all powers over the person short of life and death. We had canes and could use them at our discretion. The opportunities for wrong-doing may not have extended far beyond a badly-made bed or a tap left dripping, but there was sufficient scope within these limits for the senior boys to stamp out spirit and impose order. Here, as elsewhere in the school, there was no privacy: the monitor might inspect each boy’s possessions and if he discovered, say, the photographs of his mother and sister, he could hold them up for the derision of the crowd.
Dawson, not understanding his own feelings, found himself exercising his disciplinary prerogatives over Furness more than over other boys. He was charmed by his smile and enjoyed the way he could make it come and go with a favour or a threat. Furness reacted to this attention by playing up to Dawson, and after a time it became a game they could not stop. The child was probably unsure in the new school — and bitterly unhappy as most new boys are — and felt flattered and secure in the older boy’s interest. He started to behave as if he was expected to give cause for warning or rebuke; as if an evening without incident was a slight to Dawson. And Dawson, I know, began to look forward to the half-hour between prayers and darkness when he was co-tyrant in a kingdom of twenty and could patronize or terrorize his favourite.
One evening, inevitably, Furness went too far. An owl was sitting in a tree outside the window, hooting at its mate. ‘Dawson … please,’ said Furness, ‘could you ask the owl to stop hooting?’ I smiled: the other boys burst into laughter.
‘Get out and bend over the bed,’ said Dawson. Such a course of action was normal after such impudence and I came forward to witness the flogging.
‘Oh please, Dawson,’ said Furness. ‘I didn’t mean it, I promise. I just said it as a joke, really I did …’
‘Come on, get out,’ I said.
Furness pushed forward his neatly arranged bedclothes and lifted his legs out over the mattress to put his feet on the floor. Then, still sitting, he looked up at us with an expression of real fear. He had never been beaten before — at least not at this school. ‘Please, I really didn’t mean to say anything,’ he said.
I waited for Dawson to answer this time. ‘We all heard,’ said Dawson. There was a tremor in his voice too.
Chewing his lips, Furness went to the end of his bed and stood there. ‘Bend over the bed,’ I said. ‘You have to bend over the bed.’ Furness turned and pushed his knees against the mattress, leaning forward at a slight angle. The other boys in the dormitory were quiet. ‘Bend over,’ said Dawson, gently pushing the boy’s back forward on to the bed: but as he did so, Furness lost his self-control and started to cry. He fell forward, sobbing into the bed-cover, clutching at his pyjama cord lest his trousers fall down. His legs dangled towards the floor: his backside was proffered on the edge — but at this moment, Dawson too lost his self-control. He lifted his hand to strike but then seemed overcome with emotion or excitement. He looked for a moment straight into my eyes, then lowered his hand, put the cane on to the bed and left the room. There were gasps and mutterings from the boys: Furness sobbed on. I told the rest to shut up, whacked Furness three times, and then switched off the lights.
