4 Small Rivers

Four Small Rivers: a chaotic ramble of notes from my travels; from my life; from my professional world; and musings on the Meaning of Life. Related website: joeinc.tv/Personal NOTE: the notes in here represent personal opinions not those of any entity I may otherwise be affiliated with (employers, customers, etc.)

Monday, April 04, 2005

The joys of boyhood

Once upon a very long time ago indeed … my parents wanted me to be a priest. Being small, very small indeed, and a good boy, very good indeed, I somehow ended up in the swirl of ideas surrounding this … and into the very Catholic idea of a Vocation as a priest. And so, without any real idea of what it was I was getting into I was packed off to a boarding school in southern England, there to start on the road to become a Man of the Cloth, a priest. The boarding school, a junior seminary, became a quite transformative hell. I was (I believe) nine years and four months old when I was packed away on the train and left home.

Now, by continental standards, England is a small place; southern England very much so. The destination, a school on a rural road between the villages of Rotherfield and Mark Cross, is less than 40 miles from central London. For a small boy, leaving home for the first time, and at a time when England was still very poor, and personal cars were rare … I could have been going to the heart of Africa. I imagine that the combination of trains and buses needed took four hours from door to door, perhaps more.

The first train journey out to Mark Cross I remember quite well. I was alone, lonely, terrified. I knew none of the other boys on the train; they were, of course, mainly older than me, boisterous, … some fireworks were thrown, I think, into the tunnel under the tracks at one of the stations.

Where is this place?

Go to: www.streetmap.co.uk and enter Rotherfield or Mark Cross as a location. Or: enter 557630,130810 in the location bar (National Ordnance Survey locator). Then, if this works right … you’ll see, south of ‘Catt’s Hill’ … two short drives. These are the drives into the school property. If you zoom back … just one click … you can see a little pond to the SW of those two drives. This is ‘Acre Lake’.

Some pictures & info of the little villages nearby of Mark Cross and Rotherfield

http://www.rotherfield-countryside.org.uk/church_english_st_denys.html ... the Church wall here famously had a fresco of demons, a so-called Doom painting

http://www.villagenet.co.uk/esussex-iron/villages/markcross.php

http://steve.pickthall.users.btopenworld.com/ssx1867/rotherfield1867.html

http://www.rotherfield-countryside.org.uk/rotherfield_information_directory.html

I believe the school was originally built as a rural orphanage: http://steve.pickthall.users.btopenworld.com/ssx1867/mayfield1867.html Two pictures of it can be seen at http://www.roughwood.net/ChurchAlbum/EastSussex/MarkCross/MarkCrossStJoseph2004.htm But: the old school as a Madrassah? http://www.salaam.co.uk/education/index.php?file=info2.html

|| Unknown, 4:23 PM

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A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
~Edward de Bono

Every man's memory is his private literature. ~Aldous Huxley

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand

The past is never dead, it is not even past.
~William Faulkner

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
~Cynthia Ozick

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
~Michel de Montaigne

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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Blogger Mark Seery, at 10:10 PM  

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