Alfred Hitchcock Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 andpriests (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