He had died, after a period of ill health, at the age of 85. I remember thinking it was as if the residents of the house wanted to cleanse themselves of all memory of Peter Dennis Orr SJ. “We’ve got rid of all his belongings,” said the priest who had taken the call, “there’s nothing left for you.” No condolences were offered. Thinking there might be more heirlooms to be had after his death, I rang the Jesuit house in Preston, Lancashire, where he lived during his later years, introducing myself as his only nephew.
On the last occasion I saw Peter – a dinner at home with my wife in London – he presented me with a military swagger stick belonging to his uncle, who had drowned when his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Italy in the first world war. The seven children – my father included – had grown up in what was then Malaya where my grandfather was a rubber planter between the two world wars. I remember thinking the former colonial outpost would have been a place where my uncle – indeed his whole family – might have felt at home. My family and I had just arrived in Darjeeling after a week of trekking in the Himalayas, a last hurrah before the end of my 11-year stint as a foreign correspondent in south Asia. News of Peter’s death in 2010 reached me via emails from my mother in Ireland and a cousin in Australia.
WEIRD WEST PREIST SERIAL
Peter, the serial paedophile, it turns out. Eccentric Peter, who so embarrassed me as a teenager by recounting our family history to strangers on buses and in cafes. Peter, a teacher and pedant: he once returned a letter I’d dutifully written to him from boarding school with my grammar and spelling mistakes circled in red ink. Peter, whose visits to my childhood home near Dublin I loathed. Uncle Peter – Father Peter Orr – was my father’s elder brother. I looked around for my friend who, fortunately, had just arrived. Stunned but not altogether surprised, I listened, wanting the conversation to end. “Not a connection I’d be proud of, if I were you,” said my new acquaintance who, it turned out, had been a pupil during the 1960s at Wimbledon College, the Jesuit school in south-west London where my uncle had taught and where, I was told over the bar-room chatter, he had gained a reputation as a man with a predilection for young boys. “Well, yes, he was my uncle,” I told him, as an age-old sense of embarrassment began to well up inside me. “Not related to Peter Orr by any chance? The priest?”
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