I followed his directions into a quadrangle of two-storey buildings at the north-east corner of the old Manners Sutton Hall, and knew I had arrived at the Cottage. These buildings had been the servants’ quarters and ancillary storerooms of the old estate. Compared to the grandeur of the main house, everything here was on a smaller scale, but it looked elegant and imposing to me. I found my way to the Cottage Master’s room where Father Peter was at his desk. I was the last of the boys to arrive, he told me, but there was time to get me settled in before Evensong. The Cottage Senior was summoned to help me. First he took me to the dormitory to stow my luggage and make my bed, showing me how to fold in the corners army style. Then he gave me a quick tour of the premises: the Common Room, the Refectory, the study I would share with two other boys, the showers and lavatories. When a distant bell sounded, he told me it was time for Evensong and we followed a stream of boys to join a flood of men, all heading for the chapel. No one spoke, but the noise of hundreds of hurrying shoes on stone floors was deafening. Coming into the Great Chapel stunned me; and for the first time I felt lonely and homesick; but I was borne on into the great space, which was soon filled with its black-cassocked and blue-scapulared congregation. We settled quietly in our places as a gong sounded. Then there was a knock on wood and we all stood. ‘O Lord open thou our lips,’ chanted a member of the Society from the stalls where the professed members of the Order sat. I knew the response to that and began to feel at ease: ‘And our mouths shall shew forth thy praise.’
There were thirty boys in the Cottage, almost all of them from working-class parishes in the Midlands and north of England, with one or two from London and the south coast. And they were a cheery and talented bunch. There were some star footballers among them; there was a brilliant pianist who couldn’t read a note of music but could play almost anything by ear on the old Cottage piano in the Common Room; and there were some great table-tennis players, a game we all played with ferocious seriousness. I could tell immediately that it was a kindly, considerate place, so it didn’t take me long to adjust to the hive-like activity of my new home. I liked the way everything worked efficiently and a lot got done. Chapel, manual work and study consumed the day. We were summoned by bells to meals three times, and to chapel four times a day. To get everyone into chapel in time from the various corners of the sprawling complex of buildings was an exercise in military precision. There was the first electric bell, which rang in every corridor of the building to advise students that they had seven minutes to finish what they were doing and get moving. A second electric bell told them they had two minutes left to get into chapel. Then the duty bell-ringer moved purposefully to a large brass gong, like the one in the opening credits of films by J. Arthur Rank, which stood at the bottom of the stair in the main hall. When he struck it, its reverberations rolled throughout the house and stragglers caught behind the ringer were in trouble. Last of all, there was a small gong just inside the chapel door. Those who were not beyond this when the ringer hit it with officious finality were late and were not permitted to take their place in chapel. Instead, they had to sit the service out in the late pew against the wall, in the face of the whole community.
Central to the ethos of Kelham, what Father Kelly had called his idea in the working, was the conviction that the total life of the place was an integrated and significant whole in which no part was more important than any other. The necessary chores we all had to share were not thought of as unwelcome distractions from the holy purpose of the place. They were as important to its integrity as the services in the chapel or the lectures we attended. And sport was held to be as important to the spirituality of the place as meditation or learning to sing plainsong. It was said that we did not play football at Kelham; we played theological football. Nothing was thought to be holier than anything else. We employed no servants and used no outside help. We were entire unto ourselves. This meant that to get everything done that had to be done every second counted and they all had a purpose.
We were up at six thirty for a cold shower followed by mass and breakfast. After washing up and other household chores, we moved into study mode till the next visit to chapel in the middle of the day. After lunch, afternoons were given over to heavy labour, either scrubbing and shining floors in the house or labouring for Brother Edward in the grounds. Two afternoons a week went on sport, football in winter, tennis and cricket in summer. There was a relaxed cup of tea with bread and jam, sometimes with bread and dripping – an English taste I never developed a liking for – at half past three. In summer this was served outdoors on the long terrace to the east of the hall. Then it was back to study again at four, till bells summoned us to Evensong at six thirty. Then dinner, more washing up and more study. The day ended at nine thirty with Compline, followed by lights out. I liked the peace evoked by the last service of the day, Completorium in Latin, because it finished the round of prayer that framed the structure of life in a monastic community. The plainsong chants for Compline were haunting. They haunt me still. Plainsong is an ancient, monophonic way of singing an unaccompanied line of melody in free rather than measured rhythm. It evolved over centuries, but it seemed as if it had been specifically designed to send waves of transcendent yearning round the great spaces of monastic churches and cathedrals. I loved not only its sound, but also its elegant black squared notes called neums. They conjured up images of cowled monks bent over parchment folios, inscribing ancient melodies handed down through the ages. We sang plainsong beautifully at Kelham, because Brother Edwin the choirmaster was a renowned authority on the subject, and he rehearsed us well. Each evening we left chapel in silence, under the spell of the fading plainsong that marked the ending of the day.
Silence was as important to the purpose of Kelham as every other aspect of our lives, and it had two modes. In Greater Silence, which ruled from Compline till the start of morning lectures, talking was forbidden everywhere. During Lesser Silence, which prevailed from the beginning of morning study till lunch, we were allowed to talk in our rooms, but not in the corridors or public spaces. Speaking was never permitted at breakfast except on special Feast Days, when the community got better food as well as time to relax.
Also central to the ethos of Kelham was a sacred understanding of time, and not just in the way we tried to fill every minute of it with significance. The rhythm of our days was set by the Christian calendar, the ancient pattern devised by the Church to mark those events through which God had revealed himself to his people. It was this side of life at Kelham I cherished most. I loved the alternations of gladness and sorrow, light and shade that marked the passing of our days, as we followed the ancient cycle of feast and fast. The Church’s Year started not at the beginning of January, but at the beginning of December, the season of Advent, when the readings and hymns trumpeted the imminent arrival of the One Who Was to Come to redeem the world. Advent reached its climax at Christmas, when the Church celebrated the fact that the One longed for, the Desire of All Nations, had slipped anonymously into history at an obscure outpost in Israel. Preachers have hammered the paradox to death, but there is still something heart-stopping about the claim that:
. . . the wise eternal Word
Like a weak infant cries!
In the form of servant is the Lord,
And God in cradle lies.14
The fact that this declaration can be taken literally by unbelievers as well as believers only adds to its power. For those who think religion is a human creation, our own attempt to offer an answer to the riddle of existence, then God has indeed become our child, conceived by our longing and cradled in our imagination. That is why it is still possible at Christmas for the godless to sing with sincerity the carols that celebrate the coming of God in human form. For them, God has indeed come down to earth from heaven – which means heaven itself is now empty. Knowing that can pierce even the confidently godless with occasional regret, the way we sometimes come across a postcard from a dead friend and remember all over again that
she is gone for ever. The godless may no longer believe in God, but they can go on missing him when he leaves.
Miss Him when a choked voice at
the crematorium recites the poem
about fearing no more the heat of the sun . . .
Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump
for the first time and an involuntary prayer
escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses
our bodies on an X-ray screen . . .
Miss Him when the linen-covered
dining-table holds warm bread rolls,
shiny glasses of red wine.15
In those waking days I was unaware of this kind of theological entropy. I loved the poetry of the liturgy and the way it led me through the story of Jesus week by week.
Advent and Christmas were succeeded by Lent, when we meditated on that period in the gospels when Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by Satan. The Lent term was meant to be a heavy time – and it was. This was the season for an outbreak of spiritual influenza known to religious communities the world over, anatomised by the fourth-century monk Cassian.
Our sixth contending is with that which the Greeks call akedia and which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection and especially felt by wandering monks and solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing the monk especially about midday, like a fever mounting at a regular time, and bringing the highest tide of inflammation at definite accustomed hours to the sick soul . . .
When this besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren . . . towards any work that may be done within the enclosure of our own lair, we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell, or attend to our reading: we lament that in all this while, living in the same spot, we have made no progress, we sigh and complain that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit; and bewail ourselves as empty of spiritual profit, abiding vacant and useless in this place; and we that could guide others and be of value to multitudes have edified no man, enriched no man with our precept and example . . . one’s mind is an irrational confusion, like the earth befogged in a mist, one is slothful and vacant in every spiritual activity, and no remedy, it seems, can be found for this state of siege than a visit from some brother, or the solace of sleep.16
At Kelham this affliction of the soul was called not akedia, but ‘the Doom’, and it rolled through the house in the early months of the year like the mists that came off the Trent in the same season. The rigours of Lent climaxed in Holy Week, when the life of the community focused exclusively on the ancient liturgies that had grown round the observance of the most solemn days in the Church’s calendar. The pace slowed down to real time, as we followed Jesus from his entrance to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, through the events of Holy Week, to his death in the afternoon of Good Friday, his lying in the tomb on Holy Saturday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. We fasted on Good Friday and spent most of the day in chapel, the main event being the Three Hours preaching of the cross starting at noon, usually led by a visiting preacher. After the Three Hours we broke our fast at four, with a dish known as Kelham beans. The beans, bought in bulk from a supplier in Newark, were soaked overnight, covered in tomato paste and other secret ingredients known only to generations of Kelham cooks, and baked in the oven.
After the heavy trudge of Lent, April was the kindest month at Kelham, because it brought the release of Easter and the promise of vacation. Then there was the Summer Term, the most delightful time of all, when the cricket pitch was restored to use and the tennis courts brought back into play. Depending on the date of Easter, this could be a long term, though it usually sped past. Those were the green days: green for the tree-circled cricket pitch lovingly tended by Brother Edward and his team; and green for the colour of the vestments worn by the celebrants in chapel at mass, green being the colour of the season after Trinity that ran from Whitsun till the end of November, when we waited for the trumpets of Advent again.
We have done with dogma and divinity
Easter and Whitsun past,
The long, long Sundays after Trinity
Are with us at last;
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,
Neither feast-day nor fast.
Christmas comes with plenty,
Lent spreads out its pall,
But these are five and twenty,
The longest Sundays of all; The placid Sundays after Trinity,
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.17
Unrelenting though it was, there were periods of relaxation in all this activity. I liked the moments before things started, the interludes between duties, the way there was time after dinner in the summer before study for a stroll down Apostles’ Walk to the orchard or a turn about the cricket pitch where swallows darted round the pavilion, their nests visible under the eaves. Those were sweet moments, because they were fleeting. I learnt that pleasure was caught on the slant. Contentment, if it happened, came when I wasn’t looking for it and was intent on something else. Concentrate on the something else, the matter I was engaged on, and a sense of wellbeing might strike like a flash of sunlight from a frozen river. It never worked the other way round. Sometimes it was in the tumult of a football match on a winter afternoon, the crows settling noisily in the elms behind the Cottage, when my blood thrilled because I’d cleared the ball from our penalty area with a kick that took it to the other goal mouth. Sometimes it came in the clash of argument and the heady joy of the struggle with ideas. Sometimes it crept up on me in the hush of the day’s ending.
Kelham was self-sufficient, autonomous, intent upon its own purpose, which was the doing of God’s will – whatever that might be, as Father Kelly would have observed wickedly. It was a complete culture that appeared to be unconcerned with what went on outside its gates, which is maybe why it integrated working-class boys into its life without difficulty. Benign though the atmosphere was, it was impossible to ignore the emphatic use of the language of sacrifice in describing the purpose of the place. It was reported that when Father Kelly was showing a distinguished guest round the great chapel, he had responded to the visitor’s dismay at the size of the altar by chuckling, ‘We sacrifice young men on that altar!’ And he wasn’t joking. We were there to sacrifice our own wills and submit them to the will of God, so that He might forge us into instruments of his mission to win back a world that had forgotten his love. At the end of one Good Friday at Kelham, when the theme of sacrifice had been wound up to an almost unbearable degree by the monk who preached the Crucifixion to us during the Three Hours, I was so fired with spiritual zeal that I determined to write to my father and call him back to God. In the interlude between breaking our fast and returning to chapel for Evensong, at the very moment he would have been girding himself for the remaining three hours of his shift in the Craft, I wrote to him, pleading with him to come home to God. I had been teaching myself calligraphy that term, so it was with italicised self-consciousness that I crafted my summons. He had the tact never to refer to it. When my mother died years later, I found the letter among her papers and felt sick with shame when I read it.
It is hard not to see the motive behind an overture of this sort as a kind of spiritual conceit. It is probably okay to interfere in the lives of people we are close to if we feel they are endangering themselves in some way. On several occasions I have done what was called ‘an intervention’ in the lives of people I knew who were suffering from a drink problem that was becoming a danger to them and their families. It was always a painful thing to do, and was not always successful, but I justified it on the grounds that if I saw someone about to back off a cliff, I’d warn them of the danger and advise them to stop. What is the difference between that kind of warning, and exhortations to come to Jesus or submit to Allah? Believers will reply that backing off an eschatological cliff is precisely what
the unrepentant sinner is about to do, hence the need to warn them of the danger they are in. The difference, of course, is between an actual cliff and a hypothetical one, which is why evangelists have to spend a lot of time persuading listeners that their imaginary cliff is real. Having persuaded them of the existence of an illusory world, they then offer them a deal on how to avoid the horrors that are part of its imaginary landscape. No wonder V.S. Naipaul said of the impact of Christian evangelism upon the native peoples of South America, ‘The missionary must first teach self-contempt. It is the basis of the faith of the heathen convert.’18
To be fair to the religion I absorbed at Kelham, it rarely mentioned Hell as the final destination of all those who refuse to turn to God. I never found it hard to reject the vulgarity of the idea of Hell and see it only as human darkness made visible. We have made enough Hell on earth to know how creative human cruelty can be, not excluding its grimmer theological metaphors. It was never fear of Hell that was to haunt me. It was the lacerating sadness of disappointing God that hurt. The idea of the heartbroken God reaching out to his children for their love and being rejected by them is emotionally powerful. What I picked up at Kelham, and was never to lose, was a powerful theology of disappointment – the flipside of the sacrifice theme – and it was imparted more by what was left unsaid than by what was said. The Society had a history of people forsaking the life of sacrifice for the life of the world. The Kelham slang for this kind of failure was ‘boshed’. Some students in every generation boshed over women. There was a strong celibate ethos in the place. Students were not allowed to establish relationships with women during the long years of their training, and they were expected to remain unmarried for at least five years after ordination. There were casualties. A student would fall in love while he was on vacation. He would be told by the authorities not to come back for the following term. We would come back and learn that he had boshed. A member of the Society would have difficulties and leave: and there would be disappointment that he had lifted his hands from the plough and looked back. There was a plangent phrase from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy that used to make me shiver with anticipatory regret when it was read in chapel: ‘Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world.’19 The life we had chosen was a high and arduous one: would we stay the course or would we, too, bosh our appointment with God and fall into regret? He would not punish us if we did, but he would be disappointed in us. He’d still love us, but we’d know that his real friends were those who stayed with him till the end, like the beloved disciple in John’s Gospel who was the only man brave enough to stand at the foot of the cross on which Jesus hung. One of Father Kelly’s favourite sayings, written in capitals for emphasis, was NOTHING COUNTS BUT LIFETIMES.20 The ones who counted were those who sacrificed themselves for life: celibate priests who stayed a lifetime in slum parishes or members of religious orders who made vows for life and kept them. For those of us who were to find ourselves incapable of that kind of steady heroism, there was to be the constant tug of disappointment. We were those who had made the great refusal and gone sadly away.
Leaving Alexandria Page 5