Alfred Hitchcock (4 page)

The Hitchcocks usually attended Sunday services in Stratford because that was where Father John, his father’s nephew, said Mass. Hitchcock even briefly served as an altar boy; filming
I Confess
years later, he flourished his Latin and recalled the swinging of incense.

As a boy of six or seven, he may briefly have attended the public Mayville Road School in Leytonstone, where his sister Nellie took classes. It was conveniently close to the greengrocery on The High Road. But according to published accounts, Father Flanagan, a local priest, took the Hitchcocks aside one day and scolded them, saying that the boy ought to be receiving a proper religious schooling, and shortly thereafter he transferred to Howrah House in nearby Poplar.

The choice of Howrah House suggests a broad outlook on the Hitchcocks’ part. A private convent school run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, an order founded by a French missionary, it boasted spacious rooms, pleasant gardens, high academic standards, and an emphasis on music, painting, and drama. The students were mostly middle-class, although Howrah House accepted boarders from other countries, and even Jewish students, advertising that it did not interfere with competing religious beliefs. What Howrah House didn’t have was very many boys: the school took male pupils only if not enough girls enrolled, and the son of a Catholic shop owner from the area would have been a preferred candidate.

Catholicism swirled around Hitchcock’s boyhood the way London fog envelops
The Lodger.
He was inclined to say religion never had much effect on him, even though he remained a churchgoer and a steadfast Catholic throughout his life (priests were welcome visitors to his home as well as to his sets). But Catholicism pervades his films, albeit a brand of Catholicism spiked with irreverence and iconoclasm. It’s there in characters and settings, in the small details and larger arc of the stories, in the symbols and motifs.

Think of the oft-sighted and sometimes lightheartedly juxtaposed nuns and
priests (a priest sitting across from a ladies’ underwear salesman in
The 39 Steps
), or the many church buildings (even
Rebecca
’s Manderley is cathedrallike in appearance). It’s there even in costumes and crucial props: bullets stopped by hymnbooks (“Hymns that have helped me,” chirps Robert Donat in
The 39 Steps
), Henry Fonda’s rosary beads in
The Wrong Man.

It’s there, emphatically, in his vision of romance. Hitchcock films believe in true love and marriage, but they are also cautionary, and warn of having sex with the devil. Hitchcock’s devil is very Catholic—a ubiquitous devil, locked in an eternal struggle with good. The tension between crime and punishment in his films is almost always resolved, interestingly, by the criminal, not the police. Guilt usually forces a confessional ending, often a suicide, and at the end of nearly every Hitchcock film a kind of forgiveness, or absolution.

Today the Howrah House records are lost. But Hitchcock stayed there for at most two years, and then may briefly have attended the local Wode Street School, where the Faithful Companions also taught classes. After moving to Salmon Lane, however, the family found another enlightened situation for their son at the Catholic Salesian College boarding school in Battersea. There are no records of him at Salesian College, however, because he was there fleetingly, perhaps as little as a week. Apparently hearing immediate complaints from his son, William Hitchcock investigated the school meals and promptly withdrew the boy. Not only was the food subpar, but students were routinely given a distasteful purgative in their tea.

Whatever else he inherited from his father, Hitchcock developed an appreciation of good food, replete with quirky likes and violent dislikes. His father, for example, is said to have detested cheese and eggs, and Hitchcock shared the latter dislike, exploiting it to comic effect in his films. (“Poached eggs are the worst in the world,” says Desmond Tester in
Sabotage.
) On the other hand, he learned to love steak (which must have been scarce in his fish-abundant household) and fresh Dover sole (which was standard shop fare).

By October 5, 1910, Hitchcock had been enrolled in St. Ignatius College.

Founded by Jesuit fathers in 1894, St. Ignatius College was a day school for “young gentlemen” at Stamford Hill. The eleven-year-old son of William and Emma Hitchcock had to get on the train to arrive daily by 8:45
A.M.
for Mass before classes. The train ride from Limehouse stimulated the imagination. “The boys of my form would come armed with scissors and knives,” Hitchcock recalled, “to cut up the seats and luggage racks.”

By the time Hitchcock was enrolled as a “new boy” in the fall of 1910, the small original facility had been expanded into an Elementary School, New College, Church, and Chapel (the latter still under construction), and the enrollment was rising to nearly 250 students. They came from all back-grounds.
Although the Hitchcocks were able to afford the tuition, a growing number of board of education “free place” boys, the progeny of clerks, tailors, accountants, and laborers, joined the sons of solicitors and physicians.

Students attended classes in a jacket and tie, some with Eton collars; everybody wore a school cap marked with the letters
S.I.
on the front, leading local wags to refer to them as “silly idiots.” Silly idiots they were not, however. With its rounded and liberal intermediate education, St. Ignatius guided some boys toward higher education while preparing others for technical or commercial careers. To this end the school had organized an ambitious curriculum emphasizing science, physics, mathematics, English and literature, and modern and classical languages. Latin was mandatory; Greek, French, and German were optional. Longfellow, Defoe, Dante, Dickens, and Shakespeare—committed to memory and performed annually in their entirety—were part of the curriculum.

Any boy who showed signs of religious vocation was sent to a seminary. Among the students during Hitchcock’s era was John C. Heenan, who rose to become England’s highest-ranking Catholic prelate, the archbishop of Westminster. Another was Ambrose King, later one of England’s leading authorities on venereal disease and the author of a standard textbook on the subject. A third was Reginald Dunn, who went from schoolteacher to IRA assassin (of whom more later). A fourth, Hugh Gray, wrote essays and dabbled in film writing and later translated André Bazin’s criticism. Among these only Gray was counted as a friend, someone Hitchcock kept up with until the end of his life, when Gray taught film at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

The prefect of studies from 1905 to 1914 was Father Charles Newdigate. According to the school’s official history, Father Newdigate was unfailingly courteous and cheerful, “ever ready to see the best” in his boys, yet “almost too ready, perhaps, to be a good disciplinarian.”

The Jesuit ethic of corporal punishment was a dubious tradition of the school. Archbishop Heenan described in his memoir how the teachers (mostly young Jesuits not yet priests) called out infractors to “receive the ferule” on the palms of their hands—or worse, on their knuckles. The ferule was like a flat ruler, yet “considerably more menacing,” wrote Heenan. “It was, I believe, made of gutta-percha and caused a very painful swelling. The delinquent was ordered to receive three, six, nine, twelve, or for exceptionally serious offenses, eighteen (called, perhaps because it could be administered in two sessions, twice-nine).”

Students were usually allowed twenty-four hours in which to choose from one of two “tolley masters” assigned the duty of punishing boys.
^*
This “excellent system,” wrote Heenan, “forbade a master who ordered punishment to be the executioner.”

The beating (which could also be administered with a strap or wooden cane) was also ordered for poor scholastic performance, although Heenan said he was punished less than once a year during his time at St. Ignatius, and that end-of-day general amnesties were standard. And it’s important to remember, added the archbishop, that “stupid boys in those days were beaten in every type of school almost as a matter of routine.”

The effect on Hitchcock was more psychological than physical, he often said. Rarely did he violate the rules, so rarely, if ever, did he suffer the “tolley.”

One notorious transgression was the “dangerous” practical joke presented by Donald Spoto as a tone-setting anecdote of his biography
The Dark Side of Genius.
As Spoto told the anecdote, Hitchcock and an accomplice grabbed a younger student named Robert Goold and hauled him off to the boiler room, immobilizing him for “a carefully planned psychological torture,” ending when the two depantsed Goold and pinned a string of lit firecrackers to his underwear. That was certainly a deed calling for the tolley.

Goold told this entertaining story to Spoto and others over the years. Unfortunately, his recollection couldn’t possibly be true; admission records show that Goold entered St. Ignatius a full term after Hitchcock departed. Confronted with the contradiction in 1998, Goold realized that he was “wrong in ascribing the incident to him [Hitchcock].”

Hitchcock could recall being summoned to receive the standard punishment only once, and that time he trudged into the room to face his “favorite priest, my friend”—whom he had chosen as his punisher. The priest, recognizing him, shook his head and said, “This isn’t nice, is it?” “I said, ‘No, Father,’” Hitchcock recalled, “And he took the hand and he let the instrument just drop on it. Very touching, of course.”

Boys gathered outside the room to wait their turn and scrutinize the faces of the emerging culprits. “Yes, they were voyeurs,” Hitchcock reflected in one interview. A boy could also choose the time of day for his punishment: morning break, lunchtime, midafternoon, or the end of the day; and putting off the punishment for as long as possible, Hitchcock decided later, was an early education in the power of suspense, like “in a minor way, going for execution.”

Asked by the St. Ignatius College student newspaper in 1973 whether he would “regard [him]self today as a religious person,” the school’s most famous alumnus replied intriguingly: “Religious, that is a pretty wide term. It is a question of one’s behavior pattern and a claim to be religious rests entirely on your own conscience, whether you believe it or not. A Catholic attitude
was indoctrinated into me. After all I was born a Catholic, I went to a Catholic school and I now have a conscience with lots of trials over belief.”

The stern, bleak Catholicism of St. Ignatius shouldn’t be exaggerated. Partly because it wasn’t a boarding school, the school had a lively personality. There was a full complement of sports and athletics (fierce soccer rivalries, cricket matches with other colleges, an annual all-school tennis tournament). There was institutional interest in poetry, literature, music, and drama (the students mounted an annual operetta, and took field trips to the Old Vic and other productions). The annual Prize Distribution in Tottenham Town Hall was an especially gala occasion for the student body, with elocution and dramatic sketches, and parents performing music alongside students.

Apart from daily Mass, there was also a daily catechism drill and an optional Friday confession. There was an annual three-day all-school retreat for spiritual reflection: not optional. One popular priest of Hitchcock’s time, Father Richard Mangan, used to give a well-remembered talk at these annual retreats, reflecting on death and dying, and exhorting students to be unafraid of their own deaths if they had lived decent lives.

Every classroom boasted its own altar of Our Lady, with flowers and candles. Every class was divided into two, row by row, Romans versus Carthaginians, with academic score books kept by designated class leaders. “Victory was celebrated with extra play,” recalled the Reverend Albert V. Ellis, a fellow student during this period.

Certainly Hitchcock excelled academically, and it wasn’t an easy curriculum. There was homework every night, and on weekends and holidays. Hitchcock told one interviewer years later that he always placed second or third in his classes, and that seems accurate. Twice he showed up on the irregularly published distinction lists. In 1911, he was ranked first out of five in mathematics. In 1913 he was listed as the second leader, without any subjects specified.

“We weren’t allowed any latitude in our work,” Hitchcock recalled. “Sometimes they were probably a little too zealous, especially when it came to giving us holiday tasks. When I was quite young—I must have been nine or ten—we’d be given something like Macaulay’s
Horatius
to learn in the holidays.
^*

“Some kids don’t care, others do. I was sensitive enough to care, and the last days of vacation were days of misery and fear, trying to learn this thing. As I remember it, they then kind of forgot to ask for it when we got back to school. It was very, very cruel.”

St. Ignatius wasn’t only a school. It was a parish community thriving with family socials, jumble sales, holy day festivals, fund-raising bazaars, garden fetes, and holiday concerts. Yet the Hitchcocks, if they belonged anywhere, belonged to Father John’s parish; taken along with his status as a “train boy,” this may have set him apart, isolating him and contributing to a nature that was as shy, solitary, and contemplative as it was also urgently social.

It’s tempting to envision Hitchcock on the fringe of the St. Ignatius theatricals or writing for the school paper, but there is no evidence; nor is there any evidence that he participated in sports. The impression he gave in interviews was that he kept to himself on the playground while others—even the scholastics and priests, their gowns tucked up—played soccer.

One sympathetic reason for his isolation was suggested by Ambrose King, who was in the same form as Hitchcock and rode the same train to school. Hitchcock was “a big boy who sat in the corner” of the train, recalled King. “He said little and was not easily engaged in conversation.” But King remembered Hitchcock as “the subject of some idle conversation because he was considered odd.” He and other St. Ignatius boys knew what Hitchcock’s father did for a living and, with the cruelty of children, thought the Hitchcock boy “stank of fish” (a genuine occupational hazard for people who dwell in a fish shop).