When we bought a house in the village and moved nearer to the centre of the village and the College, we were joined by one of the monks from Ampleforth, Brother Alexander McCabe. The boys were now happily settled at school. Ursula managed to get a local council grant to buy a computer in order to animate the children’s stories she was writing and had just had a series published in a local magazine. We had got permission to start a parish prayer group in the small local church and it was going well.
We settled, set to stay (at least for a good few years) and school and family all seemed to be in order.
The first clue that things were about to change came one Sunday morning as Ursula and I left the Abbey Church after Mass. I still remember the day, ‘Good Shepherd’ or Mission Sunday in 1989.
In mass, I distinctly heard the words “I want you to go back to the land of your father.” I told Ursula and both she and I took a deep breath and said nothing.
All of this suddenly turned very sour when Junior House where I had my room, suddenly had an influx of many new faces and one or two familiar faces left to teach elsewhere. We had a new science teacher and an odd young man who was reputedly previously at Fort Augustus as a student. I later found out that this was not the truth as he had been looked after by the monks as he had more than a few problems.
He turned up at my house once when I was not there and played with the boys in the garden above the house. Thomas, my son, refused to have piano lessons which he offered as Tom suggested that he was not comfortable in his presence. Unfortunately, Matron and various staff talked about the odd behaviour of the new science teacher, and I found him to be a nuisance whilst I was trying to keep order in the school. On a warm day the boys ate in the grounds alongside Junior House, and I was asked to keep them in file as they queued up for their salad and pudding. On one occasion this new teacher, called Paul, insisted on joking loudly with some of the boys, disrupting my attempts to keep order. I had no option but to berate him for doing this as he seemed to be going out of his way to undermine my approach.
Thank God I had little to do with him until one day six of the boys asked to speak to me in private. They said that this gentleman was abusing students and that they wanted to see the headmaster. I was intrigued by this as Fr. Henry slept in J.H. and had rooms there. I understood their wanting to speak to me as I taught most of them and knew them well, but I certainly never slept in the House. My sons did for a short time when my wife was not well and being operated on in York.
I felt it was my duty to take the boys to the headmaster, which I did, and left them with him so that they could explain exactly what the problem was and give him the details. I never heard any of the details myself.
A week or so later I received a letter accusing me of having caused this teacher irreparable harm even though I had never accused him of anything except that of being a nuisance during the lunch break.
Fortunately, a few days after this, I was invited to a meal where an HMI of schools happened to be present. I did not know at the time what he did for a living. He asked questions about the college, and I said I was worried as some boys suggested they were being abused. He then told me he was an Inspector of Schools. I told him that I had taken the boys to the headmaster who was not too happy with my doing so. He said he would look into it and suggested in the letter I mentioned, obviously discussed the problem with the headmaster.
I was told by my spiritual advisor, Fr. Michael Hollings, to leave Ampleforth as quickly as possible and my wife and I decided this suited us as we felt uncomfortable with what was going on in the school.
We were saddened to find out that the York Catholic school, closely linked to Ampleforth, would not accept our sons as pupils. Hence, we had to place them in the only other alternative in the area which was a non-Catholic, secular, school in the nearby town of Malton. This was one of the saddest and most painful moments in our lives as our duty as parents to provide a spiritual environment for our children was taken out of our control.