Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  Dumbarton was a bus ride away, and one I often took on my own in my excursions to the movies. I was heading for a Saturday afternoon show on this occasion, and I was feeling excited about life. Our local weekly, the Lennox Herald, had advertised the formation of a children’s pipe band. Interested candidates were to sign on the following Tuesday evening at Renton Primary School. I told my parents I’d like to join, and my father said he’d take me up to register next week. Excited, I ran to Main Street for the bus. I got to the Rialto when the house lights were going down, just in time for the film, found a seat on the central aisle, next to a man with a young girl at his other side, and lost myself in the movie. Soon the man had taken my hand in his and was whispering to me. It’s cold now the winter’s in. You should wear gloves. I’ll buy you a pair. I need to measure your hand to find out your size. Then he rubbed my hand up and down his erect penis, which was sticking out of his fly. I pulled away and ran to the lavatory. When I got home I told no one and thought little of the incident, though it must have left its mark, because it is one of the few clear recollections I have of my pre-teen years. On the following Tuesday my father took me to Renton to register for the pipe band. When we walked into the room I saw, behind the desk, the man from the Rialto. I turned and walked out. Ah’ve changed ma mind, Daddy, ah canny be bothered. My father didn’t challenge me, and we went home. I never did learn to play the pipes, but nor did I ever tell anyone why I bailed out.

  But it would have taken much more than that to stop me going to the movies. When I got my pocket money on a Friday it was a toss-up between Kinniburgh’s bookshop and the Strand, both in Bank Street, though the movies usually won. I don’t want to make pretentious claims about the impact of movies on young plastic minds, but I am certain they had an effect on mine. Maybe all they did was amplify a tendency to romantic daydreaming and discontent with the reality of my life, but they certainly did do that. More significantly, they increased a tendency to watch myself playing a role, rather than unselfconsciously getting on with my life. And they instilled a sense that authentic life was a drama packed with struggle against adversity, in which only heroic figures emerged triumphant. Hardly surprising in an imaginative child feeding on a diet of emotional carbohydrates, served up as ‘musicals, underworlders, westerners’ and described thus by Vladimir Nabokov:

  In the first, real singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned, and where, at the end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through sewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops . . . Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules, nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride.12

  This was the imaginary world that dominated my inner life and its inchoate longings. The comedies didn’t stimulate these identifications and projections to the same extent, but the thrillers and Westerns fortified a tendency, later amplified by religion, not only to hazard roles I was not cut out for, but also to see life in theatrical rather than prosaic terms. Of course, there was a consolatory side to the movie habit that was relatively benign. I think that’s what drew my mother. It was the movies that afforded the poor their best way of escaping for an hour or two from grey normality into colourful fantasy. This experience was at its most therapeutically useful during and in the years immediately following World War II, when most of my early movie-going happened. Then something else happened. Not only was I going to a lot of films, I started pretending I had been to movies I hadn’t seen.

  We used to take two Sunday papers, the Sunday Mail and the Sunday Post, the latter for the Broons and Oor Wullie. What drew me to the Sunday Mail were the dramatic advertisements for films showing in Glasgow. Glasgow loved the movies, and the city was populated with dozens of cinemas. From time to time, we went up to the city to shop at the big Woolworths and Lewis’s stores on Argyle Street and to see the Christmas pantomime at the Metropole near Glasgow Green. Occasionally we went to the pictures. I loved the cinemas on Sauchiehall Street and Renfield Street; much grander than anything in the Vale. So I usually devoured the advertisements in the Sunday Mail for ‘future presentations’ in the Glasgow picture houses. One Monday morning I found myself describing to a group of boys an exciting movie I had not actually been to, but had seen advertised in the Sunday Mail. Soon I was locked into a playground routine on Monday mornings, as a group of boys gathered round me to hear about the movie I had ‘seen’ that Saturday. I became fluent at spinning stories based on the information I’d picked up from the previous day’s paper; and I began to feel guilty about it. One night, in an agony of remorse, I woke my mother and poured out my difficulty. It’s a’ right, Dick, she said. You’ve jist got a good imagination. Don’t worry about it. Go back to bed. And I went back absolved.

  So maybe it was a true instinct that led me to choose a vocation that would make me a teller of stories that could be understood as containing their own meaning within them. What mattered to my friends in the playground on those Monday mornings was that I took them out of themselves with my fictions, not that I hadn’t actually seen the movies I described to them. Implicit in my fraudulence was a theory of religion, though it would take me years to figure it out. I was to become fascinated by Saint Paul’s description of Christian preachers as ‘deceivers, yet true’. We become true deceivers when we understand the purpose of our deceptions, when we admit that the stories we tell carry their own meaning within them, even if there is no objective reality beyond them, no movie actually seen, no stone actually rolled away from the tomb. Trouble comes when we understand what’s going on and start feeling guilty about it. That’s when we become false deceivers. To be a true deceiver you have to believe your deception – the movie actually seen, the stone actually rolled from the tomb by an angel. Tell your listeners that there was no movie, no resurrection, but that the story itself has its own power to release them – try to stop deceiving them, in fact – and they will turn on you. This is why many preachers become imposters to themselves out of tenderness towards their hearers.

  Some of the films I saw wrestled with these paradoxes, showing just how astute movies could be. One cinematic trope subverted the play-acting response that movies could provoke, by showing how a fraud could move to authenticity and end by filling the part he had started out counterfeiting: there was the adventurer in hiding, pretending to be a priest, who ends by sacrificing himself to save the community he was deluding; there was the man, fleeing from his reputation as a coward back home, who acts himself into bravery on a foreign field; there is the kidnapper holding a young woman to ransom, who falls in love with her and dies to save her life. These paradoxes are all known to religious leaders who feel they have trapped themselves in a role they find difficult to sustain. A time would come when I would nearly die of that covenanted deception, but for years I was to revel in the power of stories to challenge and console.

  I don’t think my walking in the hills and my movie-going were unrelated. Both were prompted by a need for something that did not have a name, a longing for something that constantly eluded the searcher. How can you make yourself one with a landscape? You can tramp
over it, become so familiar with its contours that you never need a map, but you can never possess it. It is always eluding your desire, just out of reach, beyond your possessing. I did not know the word at the time, or the idea that lay behind it, but on the hills I was experiencing latency, the sense of something hidden behind what is seen. How can you find words for what is beyond sound, make visible what vanishes when seen? Poets sometimes come close:

  . . . did we see that day the unseeable

  One glory of the everlasting world

  Perpetually at work, though never seen?13

  The hills prompted that yearning. I was looking for something beyond myself, something out there that would take me out of in here – the life that was going on in my head. I was looking for transcendence, the beyond that is sometimes encountered in the midst of things, usually when we are not looking for it. This is the stab of awareness that causes us to turn on our heels to catch the shadow that is behind us. It is the sense of a presence, beyond any knowing, that we reach out towards. And it can be experienced as loneliness. We are missing something, either because it is not there or because we have not yet found it. It was neither the movies nor the hills that gave me what I thought I was looking for. It was something else entirely. And it was a death that brought me to it.

  There were a lot of health scares about children during the war, the one I remember being a polio outbreak that had everyone in a panic because they thought it might have been passed on in the swimming baths all the children in the Vale went to. A boy across the street from us died of it, the first death I can remember. Random Street fell silent. Mothers clustered anxiously on doorsteps, desperate to protect their children, not sure how to. Then my cousin Mary Ann died, of meningitis. Polio and meningitis killed children, so anxiety tightened, and the street fell silent again. Because my mother was close to Mary Ann’s mother, whose husband Dick was away at sea, my mother took over. Come to Cousin Mary’s during your lunch-break, she told me the day after the death, that’s where you’ll find me. I was still there, taking my soup, when the Rector of Saint Mungo’s Episcopal Church called to comfort Cousin Mary and make arrangements for the funeral. When he was about to leave he turned to my mother. Who is that young man? That’s my boy Dick, he’s at the Academy. Can he sing? Dick’s got a good voice. He turned to me. Dick, would you like to join the choir at Saint Mungo’s? We need a good voice like yours. Aye, I said. Come on Sunday for ten thirty. There’s a rehearsal before the eleven o’clock mass. The Rector was an extreme Anglo-Catholic. Tall and thin, with an elaborate comb-over hair style and a face that bore the residual lumps and scars of youthful acne, he was an unlikely hero for a movie-struck boy. Unmarried – and contemptuous of priests who married – he had turned his little red sandstone church into a Catholic shrine, heavy with incense and alive with lighted candles.

  We weren’t a church-going family. I knew the Holloways belonged to Saint Mungo’s, but I can’t recall ever going to the little church that sat on the edge of Alexandria at Burn Brae. I can remember school services in Main Street Parish Kirk that ignited no interest in me, and visits to little mission halls that had midweek meetings for children and were quite good fun. One was called the Ebenezer, and if you kept your eyes shut during the long prayer that followed the lantern slide show of Jesus performing miracles in Galilee, you got a cup of tea and a Paris bun afterwards.

  My father was quietly but firmly unreligious, but my mother suggested there was a story behind his present position. He had been very religious as a young adult, she told me, but ‘something had happened’ – something that sounded like the death of a good friend in a fire – and he would have no truck with religion thereafter. So I was pretty much a blank page the day I encountered the Rector in Cousin Mary’s kitchen in Mitchell Street.

  On the following Sunday I turned up, as I said I would – and fell in love. It wasn’t with the wee church on the edge of town I fell in love, but with what it pointed towards. It was a place that suggested elsewhere. I had not realised what a lovely word that was, elsewhere. It hinted at a distant gate, slightly ajar, or a slit of light high up in a battlement, drawing me into the possibility of something else. And the compelling mystery of it all came with proud claims as to its efficacy and meaning.

  I cannot remember much about any doctrine the Rector tried to teach me, though one detail lodged permanently in my imagination. He said that the Holy Catholic Church, of which St Mungo’s was an outpost, existed in three dimensions: militant here on Earth; expectant in Purgatory; and triumphant in Heaven. Thus was I initiated into a drama that chimed with the themes I had picked up in the movies, and with the longings I had felt in my long tramps on the hills above the Vale. Though a drink problem was to see him removed from the priesthood long after he left Scotland for England – the reason I have a strong affection for broken priests – he painted a picture of the priesthood as a heroic calling, reserved for those with a vocation. A vocation was discerned by an inner troubling that became a summons to be set apart for a great work. It was a call to leave father and mother and all earthly ties and give oneself to a high and lonely task. The priestly vocation seemed a lot like the thrill and glamour of the movies that had captivated me, with their lonely heroes expending themselves to save the lives of others and bring them a contentment they themselves would never possess.

  After that encounter in Mitchell Street, I spent most of my spare time at Saint Mungo’s or working in the Rectory garden. I was less at home in the Rectory itself, which was often full of men, young and not so young, who came to take part in one of the Rector’s festivals. He loved the sanctuary full of servers, of whom I became one, kneeling behind him to lift the corner of his chasuble at the moment of consecration in the mass. My imagination was kindled by the drama he had called me into. He was not surprised when I told him I had heard the summons and wanted to be a priest. Unlikely as it seemed for a boy due to leave school, he did not hesitate for a moment. There was a place in England that took boys like me, but he’d have to speak to my parents before trying to get me in. My mother was thrilled and took a job at O’Hare’s fruit shop to pay for the new clothes I’d need for where I was going and the train fare to get me there. My father was compliant: ‘We’ll no’ stand in his way.’

  A few months later, not long after my fourteenth birthday, the Rector announced my departure in the parish magazine in his usual high sacerdotal style:

  I have the greatest possible pleasure in telling you all that one of our Altar boys, Richard Holloway, has been accepted by the Kelham Fathers to train for the Sacred Priesthood of our Church. I think I am right in saying that since the Vale of Leven Mission was founded and raised to the status of an incumbency at the present St Mungo’s, we have never produced a vocation to Holy Orders here. It should be with profound thankfulness to Almighty God that some of our prayers have been answered, at all events in part, and that we are now to have one of our own lads in residence in the famous seminary at Kelham. It remains with the boy himself now, with the help of God’s grace, to vindicate the faith and trust that has been placed in him, and to make the best possible use of his eight years at the College of the Sacred Mission, accepting the rough with the smooth and the firm discipline with joy and spiritual longing. Dick leaves us in September and I feel sure he will receive your grateful prayers in his journey south, with the prayers of the faithful, that one day he shall return to Scotland and serve our Church in this dear land with perseverance, holiness, obedience and sacrifice.

  2

  PLACE OF SACRIFICE

  On a crisp September day, with a suitcase full of new clothes, including garments I had never worn previously called underpants, and a brown dressing gown purchased from Burton’s in Dumbarton, my mother took me up to Glasgow to put me on the train for Newark. We caught the SMT bus, sitting on the upper deck so that my mother could smoke. I knew the road well, but I’d never been on the bus so early or seen it so packed with men going to the shipyards on the Clyde. Most of the
m slept through the journey, but some of them knew my mother and chaffed her about travelling in such dodgy company. When we got off the nearly empty bus at the terminus on Waterloo Street in Glasgow, I felt the first chill of leaver’s remorse, but kept it to myself. We cut up Hope Street and along West George Street to Queen Street Station. We didn’t say much as we approached the station, but my mother held my hand tightly as we crossed the street to the entrance. I was a homesick boy who hated being separated from his mother, but I managed the parting without tears, though there was a lump in my throat as I leant out of the carriage window to wave goodbye.

  Hours later I changed trains at Grantham in Lincolnshire, and a pile of returning Kelham students got into the same compartment, along with a priest in black cassock and red girdle whom they addressed as Father Victor. I sat quietly, cheered by their banter, wondering what the book being read by Father Victor could possibly be about – The Plantaganets. I followed them off the train at Newark Castle Station onto the Mansfield bus for Kelham – only a couple of miles away, they told me. The countryside was flat and boring, but soon I saw an astonishing silhouette pushing itself above the trees. A high clock tower without a clock but with a confident assertive steeple. A scatter of chimneys, tall triple chimneys, arranging themselves over acres of steep slated roof. Quick sight of a solid flat-topped tower. Then the road rose to the elegant span of a bridge over the Trent at the edge of the village and I caught a glimpse of expanses of red brick, quickly hidden by trees as we slowed to a stop opposite the Fox Inn at a cosy-looking gatehouse, a tiny echo of the great house itself. We streamed off the bus with our suitcases, I behind the rest. The men barged cheerfully under the high entrance arch through the great oak gates which lay open to the drive into the estate. I made to follow them up the main drive, but Father Victor told me to follow the path to the left that went behind the looming bulk of the chapel. He told me it would take me to what they called the Cottage, the boys’ bit of the college, which was in a square at the back of the main house.