A man, a boy, a bed

Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards after repeated suicide attempts, in therapists’ offices, at Oxford University — he has sought protection and cure. Some institutions woefully failed, while others revived Bernard from the appalling child abuse inflicted by Canon T.D. Fogarty, Latin teacher, priest and rapist. An account of the open wounds left by years of assault, Paper Cuts is also a memoir about the anxiety of seeking to belong, yet as a survivor never quite finding a part.

We follow Bernard for a day, now aged 40 and an Academic Visitor at Oxford’s Faculty of English. He has a looming deadline to finish an article for the TLS. Scenes of his abuse as a boy arise abruptly between breaks from writing, while around town (‘Fogarty’s semen on my back’), remembering elegant friends from youth (‘the boniness and weight of him in me.