I am Cornelius

After all I had just turned five and thought it was high time I had one. Mine was through the loft hatch in the bathroom then out onto the flat roof. I was completely hidden from view. It was from this secluded vantage point that I spied what was later to become my second hideaway, the roof of the tower of the Sacred Heart church. To be sure that they would never be discovered throughout my ten years here, I only ever told my close and trusted friend Peter. Twenty years later he was to be my Best Man and I his.

Most of the boys moving in with me had been born at Brettargh Holt in Cumbria where I was born. In October 1952 aged ten months I went to live in Nazareth House, Lancaster. It was here I met some of the friends I was to grow up with. I lived here for three years before moving to St Vincent’s, Fulwood. This home and school was to close six months later on Holy Wednesday, 28th March 1956, coincidently the day the mother of my three children was born. St Vincent’s in Ashton was not ready for us to move into, so along with a handful of other boys I moved into a house around the corner at 236, Garstang Road where we stayed for nine months. The ‘Hotel’, as we dubbed it, would later become the offices of the Lancaster Diocesan Protection and Rescue Society with Canon O’Neill at its helm.

Being brought up by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, has affected my whole way of life. To witness daily the love, perpetual sacrifice and selflessness of these women was truly inspirational. My seventh birthday was very special. I met my mother for the first time. Her good friend Joyce came with her to see me. It would be over thirty years before I would see her again and fifty years before I would meet Joyce at my mother’s funeral in Arnside.

Prior to my fifteenth birthday in 1966 Canon O’Neill came to see me. He told me that the time for me to leave St Vincent’s was approaching. And so it was on 7th October 1966, one of the saddest days of my life, I said good bye to the Sisters who had cared for me and to my friends whom I had grown up with, then Canon drove me away in his car. Never again would I ride in the open on the back of the flatbed wagon, taking our belongings to Ansdell for our summer holiday. No more would I recite ‘The Beautiful Hands of a Priest’ at our annual show. Over night my whole world was to change and I with it.

Forty five years later, I continue to travel to the Island of Inner Farne off the Northumberland coast, where my favourite Northumbrian Saint Cuthbert spent years alone. Here, on this remote island in the North Sea, where he built his hermitage, his very own hideaway, I remember the Sisters whose vocation I was privileged to have witnessed and the friends I was so lucky to have known.
Cornelius Phelan, 7th October 2010.