"Is that British Rail?" Asked the ticket clerk at Farnborough Main station. Eventually, ticket in hand and dressed in DIY clericals (sewn down black collared shirt and a piece of white cardboard) approx 19 months since joining Farnborough Abbey, I paid my first visit home. It was the week leading up to the late spring bank holiday 1989.
Alighting from the train I bumped into our Irish neighbour Chris, who was most impressed and assured me of a warm welcome by one and all were I to ever visit Ireland dressed like that. (Not sure 30 years on if that would still be the case?)
On the Sunday morning I wore my habit to Mass at our local Church donning a Surplus to join my Dad serving and in the Evening Mum came with me for Vespers in Colchester, except on this particular Sunday there was no public office of Vespers, so we were informed by a young Priest. Just at that moment a Church bell started ringing and we learnt it was the call to Evensong at St. James The Great on East Hill. (Middle / High Cof E) Much to the young Priest's surprise, it seemed, I said we'd go there. On entering I re-call clerical heads turning and I am sure had we stayed till the end that a conversation may have been struck, but a server appeared with a thurible and had there been Benediction my Mum would have been very uncomfortable, so we didn't wait to see.
On the Bank Holiday Monday afternoon my father was driving a steam locomotive at the railway museum near our home and asked if I would like to take the trainee fireman turn. Concerned not to be pushing out a member that may have worked hard for their place on the roster, on being assured it was ok I gladly took the turn and enjoyed one of those really good father and son moments, the more special now, since my father's death in 2006.
I cannot remember for sure the exact day of my return to the abbey, only that there was a tube strike and I had to walk from Liverpool St to Waterloo which, as it turned out, was not too difficult at all and in fact quite pleasant.
In hindsight I shouldn't have returned or at least not without bringing the whole Cuthbert thing out in the open but I was totally unresourced to be able to do that. My Farnborough Abbey experience, which started off as my liberation, was quickly becoming a prison. If I had self esteem at all it was by this stage solely in identifying as a gay man, but even here Cuthbert, who had taken me to the mountaintop and showed me this vista, would undermine me. "You're not gay! You've just got emotional problems!" (no wonder at it!!) and then again when I mooted leaving, "You wont survive! You'll be set on by every dirty old man!"
So it was, like the profession, I was on a conveyer belt. The monastic routine would stabilise things for a short while longer but as I relate in this blogsite opener, things would breakdown terminally that coming summer and by the autumn the residential part would be over, the residential part that is but not the saga, that will not end until Abbot Cuthbert and his clones are removed or laicised.
No comments:
Post a Comment