In that year most of my friends were gated at one time or another, and by the end of it not a few of us were sent down. I cannot even clearly remember who most of them were—except for Julian. He stands out vividly enough. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles and looked, I will not say like an American, but like a Frenchman trying to look like an American. He could tell long complicated stories in an American accent too nasal to be true. He was the grandson or the great-grandson of a Victorian poet and lived in the old man’s house on the Isle of Wight. He roomed in a big rabbit warren of a place on Market Hill which was going to be torn down at the end of the year to make room for a new building, belonging to Caius College. Before the wreckers came in, Julian’s friends had already begun the ruin of the house by attempting to destroy the precarious section of it where he himself lived. I seem to remember some trouble when somebody threw a teapot out of the window of these rooms and nearly brained the Dean of Kings who was passing by in the street below.
Then there was a laconic, sallow-faced fellow who came from Oundle and drove a racing car. He sat still and quiet most of the time with the strange, fevered mysticism of the racing driver in his veins while the rest of us talked and yelled. But when he got under the wheel of his car—which he was not allowed to drive as a freshman—he was transformed into a strange sort of half-spiritual being, possessed by a weird life belonging to another frightening world. The prohibition on driving could not, of course, hold him. Once in a while he would disappear. Then he would come back relatively happy, and sit down and play poker with anybody who would take him on. I think he was finally sent down altogether for the wildest of his expeditions which ended with him trying to drive his car down one of the zig-zag cliff paths at Bournemouth.
But why dig up all this old scenery and reconstruct the stews of my own mental Pompeii after enough years have covered them up? Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. There is nothing new or strange about the process. But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
Aunt Maud died that November. I found my way to London and to Ealing, and was at the funeral.
It was a grey afternoon, and rainy, almost as dark as night. Everywhere the lights were on. It was one of those short, dark, foggy days of the early English winter.
Uncle Ben sat in a wheel-chair, broken and thin, with a black skullcap on his head, and this time he really did look like a ghost. He seemed to have lost the power of speech, and looked about him with blank uncomprehension, as if all this story of a funeral were a gratuitous insult to his intelligence. Why were they trying to tell him that Maud was dead?
They committed the thin body of my poor Victorian angel to the clay of Ealing, and buried my childhood with her. In an obscure, half-conscious way I realized this and was appalled. She it was who had presided in a certain sense over my most innocent days. And now I saw those days buried with her in the ground.
Indeed the England I had seen through the clear eyes of her own simplicity, that too had died for me here. I could no longer believe in the pretty country churches, the quiet villages, the elm-trees along the common where the cricketers wait in white while the bowler pensively paces out a run for himself behind the wicket. The huge white clouds that sail over Sussex, the bell-charmed spires of the ancient county towns, the cathedral closes full of trees, the deaneries that ring with rooks—none of this any longer belonged to me, for I had lost it all. Its fragile web of charmed associations had been broken and blown away and I had fallen through the surface of old England into the hell, the vacuum and the horror that London was nursing in her avaricious heart.
It was the last time that I saw any of my family in England.
Merton is letting go of his childhood. For him, his Aunt Maud was his childhood. She was the one who told him he could be a writer, who encouraged him to pursue what he was passionate about. Every child needs a person like that, whether it's a friend, parent, aunt, uncle, teacher, or member of the clergy.
My Aunt Maud was my English teacher during my senior year in high school. Mrs. Jones. She filled me with confidence, assured me that I was a good writer. I would show up early for school to help her get ready for the day. I would stay after school to carry her books down to her car. She was a bird of a woman who was constantly out of breath, going up stairs or down, walking across a parking lot. The summer I graduated from high school, Mrs. Jones underwent cardiac surgery. She didn't survive the operation, and I felt like a part of me died with her.
Saturday afternoon, as I was driving home from church, I lost another part of my childhood. My father used to own a plumbing store in town. While the store has been closed for many years, the building still stood there, and the sign with my father's name on it still hung over the street. Driving home from church, I always looked for that building and sign. It was a huge part of my childhood.
The building is gone now. I don't know when it happened. It was there the week before. I walked by it just two Saturdays ago and peered in the windows. Saw the old carpeting and the counter where the cash register sat. This weekend, there was simply an empty lot. Not a brick or shingle remained. It was like it was whisked off to Oz by a tornado, and I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye.
I have so many memories attached to that building, some of them good, some not so good. Through my entire four years of high school, I worked there every Saturday, open to close. At the time, I hated it. I was a teenager and wanted to sleep in, be with my friends. Instead, I was selling toilet seats and faucets. Later, I used the desktop computer at the store to write my first college papers. Some nights, when my friends came home for Christmas break from college, we would sneak into the store and drink beer, smoke weed. I brought my wife there on some of our first dates, and we would make out in the dark.
So, I am sort of in mourning over the loss of that place, even though I hadn't been inside the building for more than 15 years. I grew up there, in more ways than one. Yet, loss is a part of living. I wouldn't be the writer I am today if it weren't for Mrs. Jones reading my short stories, telling me one afternoon, "You have a gift. Something special." And, if it weren't for my dad's store, I wouldn't have learned good work ethic or gotten high on cold December nights or fallen in love with my wife.
Mrs. Jones has been gone almost 35 years. My dad's store stood empty for close to ten years. It almost burned down when a neighboring building caught fire. Yet, I can still hear Mrs. Jones' voice sometimes when I'm revising a poem or essay. And I still meet people who remember me as that awkward teenager selling them a thermocouple for their water heater.
I will always bear these footprints in my person. They are a part of me. Always will be. Sort of like when you put your hands in wet cement in front of your childhood home. You go back 20 or 30 years later, those prints are still there. Maybe a little worse for the wear, but still present. Visible.
Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of these indelible prints in the cement of his soul.
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