Father Michael Seed, the Catholic priest who counts royalty and the Blairs among his closest friends, tells Elizabeth Grice of his extraordinary journey from being an abused child to a celebrity confessorFather Michael Seed says a large part of him feels that his book should never have seen the light of day, and a large part of me agrees.
It is a gruesome, explicit account of how he was beaten, burned and abused by his father from the age of about three, and how his drugged-up mother, equally mistreated, lay down in front of a train to end her misery, leaving eight-year-old Michael to his father's devices.
Father Michael Seed, author of 'Nobody's Child'
A graphic addition, then, to the dubious, over-populated confessional genre known as Mis-Lit - but this time from a Franciscan friar who is unofficial Roman Catholic chaplain to the House of Commons, a man credited with more high-profile conversions to the faith than you could shake a thurible at. This one must be true.
"Am I happy?" he asks, looking troubled. "No." His cheeks are pink and his emotions, like his hair, dishevelled. "The book is very basic and brutal and I hate its contents myself. But, believe it or not, I have toned it down." Even so, his friend Ann Widdecombe, the MP he received into the Church in 1993, was shocked when she combed it for grammatical errors.
"Oh, Michael, really!" she is said to have exclaimed on reaching page 74. "Do you have to?"
On page 74, the six-year-old boy is introduced to the form of sexual abuse his father called "milking", a procedure quite cleverly, but exhaustively, described in the language of a terrified child. "I just couldn't work out how we were supposed to do milking in bed."
Ms Widdecombe didn't like what followed. "I think she described the book as pornographic - in a very loving sense."
Father Michael is a lovely man. He will be 50 on Saturday but still looks like the little boy who came last in the sack race. You can see how easily his quiet-spoken faux-naif charm compels the great, the good and the not-so-good to open up to him, both emotionally and philanthropically.
Tell him the most shocking things, they say, and he won't turn a hair.
Try to walk down a short street with him, and it will take half an hour because there are so many people who stop to greet him, from rich businessmen to down-and-outs. He is known as the Great Converter, a fisher of souls, a prolific fundraiser for good causes.
"I've seen him after he's drunk far too much white wine in Soho," says a friend. "And I've seen his deeply spiritual side. He really does care. He is an extraordinary, special chap. A party in my garden once attracted the attention of the noise abatement people. He charmed them to death - they thought he was in fancy dress - and they gave up and went away. He's always up to adventures and mishaps."
It embarrasses him to be called "the celebrity priest". He has only to shake the hand of someone like Heather Mills McCartney for newspapers to assume he is about to add another converts scalp to the knotted white cord of his habit, as if it were a hobby.
But he does have a fatal fondness for politicians and celebrities - and even journalists - which makes it hard for him to stay out of the headlines. "It is becoming a sinister thing. I think we just need to grow up. When I see that priest-to-the-stars headline I get terrified to go out."
It's no secret that he has been celebrating Mass at 10 Downing Street for the Blairs, but on the subject of Tony Blair's religious leanings he preserves as deep and confidential a silence as that of a doctor with his patient. It was the same when he was rumoured to have converted the MP Alan Clark on his deathbed.
His pastoral strength and his personal weakness is that he finds it difficult to say no. So after a decade of pestering by a publisher friend who knew Michael had triumphed over the kind of hideous childhood that turns other people into criminals and abusers, he was persuaded to do the book.
It is prefaced by three of his friends - Jeffrey Archer, the novelist Martina Cole and, of course, Ms Widdecombe ("Read on and wonder...").
You have to wonder what his colleagues at Westminster Cathedral, where he has worked for 23 years, make of it all. "I think they have come to expect anything," he concedes. "I feel sorry for my colleagues, I really do. They are patient, kind, understanding. Because they put up with me. But there are a lot of people who would honestly like to see me isolated to the moon. Maybe I will be the first parish priest of the moon."
The late Cardinal Basil Hume, who hired Father Seed, had two nicknames for him. One was Mr Fixit: the other Miss Marple, because he thought his gentle, owlish friend knew everything about people's secrets. "Oh, Father Seed..." the Cardinal would murmur. "If he didn't exist, we would have to invent him. Every cathedral should have a Father Seed."
Hume's amused tolerance was summed up one day when Father Seed, desperate at having been rung up repeatedly in the middle of the night by a Labour politician who was "absolutely and atrociously drunk", taped one of the nocturnal ramblings and took it to his boss, hoping for some advice. "Oh, Michael," said the Cardinal. "You do lead an interesting life."
The astonishing thing about Father Seed is that he survived his ghastly upbringing to lead any sort of life at all. He says he is sure others have worse stories to tell, but the level of violence and neglect he exposes is in a league of its own.
His father, Joe, was a warder at Strangeways Prison and used his black baton liberally at home, especially when drunk. Michael's first memory is of being deliberately pushed against the red-hot fire grate, and branded by the bars, when he was four.
At five, he became his father's sex slave. Much of the time, he went hungry because nobody seemed to cook or even buy food.
After many failed attempts, his mother committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. He heard about it in the playground of his school in Bolton, from a bunch of eight-year-olds who tormented him with words like "splatter", "mangled" and "buckets of blood". "It was the start of my crucifixion," he says.
On the night of her death, his father demanded his usual sexual services. "I think he absolutely knew it was the personification of darkness, a grossly inhuman thing to do," says Father Seed. "After my mother's death, I withdrew completely. I became a zombie."
Too traumatised to learn (he is severely dyslexic), he was moved to a school for maladjusted children in Rochdale, but that was almost as bad. His maternal grandmother offered him a rare glimpse of affection, but this was horribly offset by the cruel machinations of his father's mother, who beat and ridiculed him. Throughout what should have been his childhood, he wanted to die.
He talks about understanding the "natural enticement" of suicide. "It is something that is always with me. It is not curable. You have to live with it daily. As with Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to concentrate every day, every hour."
When he was 16, he learnt he'd been given up for adoption by a 16-year-old Irish girl and that Joe and Lilian Seed were not his real parents. He was, as his father used to taunt, nobodys child.
"I must have been a constant daily reminder of my father's inability to have a child of his own. Eventually, I understood the hatred and the anger and why I must eventually forgive him."
By then, too, he had found an inspired teacher, Stanley Thomas - "my reverse nemesis" - who wore flower-power shirts and velvet jackets.
He was like the arrival of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets' Society and under his influence Michael Seed began to flourish. Allowed to join the sixth-form art class at a local secondary school, he discovered "there were normal people in the world who did not beat you up".
Though he left school in 1974 with only one O-level, in art, and unable to write or even do simple arithmetic, he had read The Origin of Species and Mein Kampf. He'd devoured Nietzsche, studied Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw. He couldn't boil a kettle but he knew about literature, theatre, music and art. "Surrounded by rent boys, drug dealers and the mentally subnormal, I'd become something of a philosophic eccentric."
After a few hilarious dead-end jobs, he started work in a home for the mentally ill and began to try out different churches to see if one of them would fit his growing spiritual needs. But his mother had baptised him in the Catholic Church and this is where he eventually homed.
His first instinct was to be a Carthusian monk. "It was my Hollywood reaction. I wanted to escape from the world, into a silent order, because the world had been so horrible."
Fortunately for his friends - among whom he numbers six prime ministers and several royals - he chose an outgoing, chatty lot, the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement. A family at last.
Three university degrees and two doctorates later, he was working at Westminster Cathedral (as Hume's Secretary for Ecumenical Affairs) - and still is, now under Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. "Michael's Michael," says a friend. "He's very well-loved. They let him run his own show."
He regards the celebrity stuff, the "conversions", as a distraction from his real job - fostering dialogue between faiths. "It's not the be-all and end-all of my existence. In fact, it is almost the opposite of what I do." In 2004, Pope John Paul II awarded him the gold cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontificia for his ecumenical work.
We sit in his cupboard of an office in the Cathedral Clergy House. There are thick bars on the windows and a prie-dieu against the wall. The telephone is shut in a drawer, with its wire hanging out.
His briefcase is crammed with letters he has received from people who are glad he wrote the book, a story of salvation, but he doesn't seem convinced it was the right thing to do. Perhaps the dazzle of guests at the launch party will soothe his nagging doubt about the wisdom of laying it all bare.
"What happened to me is not unusual. The only unusualness is that most people aren't so stupid as to write it down."
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