For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honour to honour, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no – the right no –
drags him down all his life.21
This was some way in the future for me, but even then there were tremors of unease in my soul. Why did I feel the compulsion to write so strongly to my father that Good Friday afternoon? And why did I fall in love with the most extreme version of monasticism and even try to practise it at Kelham?
In my second year I was bewitched by The Listeners, a poem by Walter de la Mare. A traveller arrives at a house in the forest and gets no answer to his repeated knocking. We are told that the house contains a 'host of phantom listeners', but no answer is given to the traveller’s question:
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
He knocks for a third time, with no result.
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word’, he said.
He gets back on his horse and rides away, and:
. . . the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.22
The forest is a frequent image in literature for the life of humanity, this wood we find ourselves traversing without map or compass, like amnesiac travellers who do not know where they came from or where they are going. Thrown into existence, gifted with the ambiguous power of consciousness, it is no surprise that we have been asking if there is anybody there since our synapses fired the first question at the universe, only for it to meet silence and invisibility. Yet there is also the mystery of latency I encountered in the hills above the Vale, the sense of something just out of reach, something unseen that listens! From that invisible listener a colossal demand has exerted itself upon some men and women, who then give themselves utterly away to it. Jesus called it Father and offered himself to it without condition. Since his death on its behalf countless others have followed his example. Always a minority, they provoke discomfort, even among believers, because most believers acquire only a mild version of faith and are made anxious by those who catch it badly. T.S. Eliot put their anxiety into the mouths of the women of Canterbury in Murder in the Cathedral.
Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;
Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted.23
I feared yet longed for the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted. I wanted to be heroic, make the ultimate sacrifice, give my life away to the silent listener who haunted me but never spoke. I fell in love with the romance of extreme monasticism. I devoured books about it, especially if they contained photographs of monasteries tucked into the lee of mountains in remote places. I searched for glimpses of monks gliding into cold chapels to pray to the unseen listener while the world slept. I was particularly drawn to the Cistercian order, founded in 1098 to establish a form of the monastic life stricter and more arduous than any that then existed. Their life was one of secluded intercession and adoration in remote places, their churches plain and without ornament. My interest had been stimulated by the autobiography of a colourful American called Thomas Merton, which was published about the time I arrived at Kelham. Radically and rather patronisingly edited by Evelyn Waugh for the English edition of the book, Elected Silence told the story of Merton’s conversion to Catholicism and his decision to become a Cistercian monk at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.
Merton’s spiritual journey was to take him far from the certainties he espoused at the time of his conversion, but his early story fired my imagination. I bought a Latin version of the Cistercian Breviary and for a whole term I crept out of bed at two in the morning and slipped into the Lady Chapel on the ground floor of the House to recite the Night Office. Having only rudimentary Latin, I was like a Madrasa student who knew no Arabic but recited the Quran by rote. The recitation of the words had a meaning for me apart from my understanding of them. I knew that at that moment, in monasteries hidden up forgotten lanes all over Europe, monks would be assembling in their cold churches to pray the Night Office because it was the hour of sorrow and despair for the wretched of the earth, the hour on the bridge above the river, the hour with the whisky bottle, the hour by the deathbed. That was what I thought I was honouring, as the Kelham community slept and I knelt in the Lady Chapel.
3
THE FALL
I didn’t have to pay fees at Kelham, but it was expensive for my parents to keep me there for the four years before I was called up for National Service in the army at eighteen. There was the cost of three return trips to Newark every year, not to mention the extra clothes I needed when I started to stretch. By the time I was seventeen, in 1951, I was a foot taller than my father – free school milk, my mother said. My mother took on extra work to help, and Rosie Kirkpatrick, our local communist councillor, heard about our struggle and got me a grant to cover my expenses. Then a suggestion was made by the Rector. Admiral Mackenzie, one of his parishioners, had a small estate at Caldarvan, a few miles east of Loch Lomond near Gartocharn, and he arranged for him to give me work on the estate farm during the spring and summer vacations.
During my second year at Kelham, after my sixteenth birthday, the family moved into a new council house across the Leven on the edge of Jamestown, the beginning of a redevelopment process in the Vale that was to see the centre of Alexandria gutted and a string of housing schemes planted on the hills above the east side of the river. We were moved to one of the earlier schemes, still within walking distance of the amenities of the town centre. It was goodbye to Random Street and its camaraderie, compensated for by an inside lavatory and the bath that went with it, not to mention separate bedrooms for everyone. It was from this house in Elmbank Drive I cycled the five miles to Admiral Mackenzie’s farm to do general labouring jobs in the spring vacation and help with the harvest in August. I would cut through the scheme to Jamestown, go round the edge of Balloch to the Stirling Road on the east side of the Loch, and after a couple of miles turn up a steep hill that led me to the farm at Caldarvan.
There was always a lot to do on the farm in the spring and summer vacations, but it was the August harvest a few months before my seventeenth birthday that I remember most vividly. When the crop was ready and the weather looked stable, Tam the ploughman scythed a corridor round the edge of the field. I followed Tam, gathering the corn into rough sheaves and binding them together with a rope of half a dozen strands of the fallen crop. Backbreaking work that opened the way for the Admiral’s new Ferguson tractor to pull the Binder onto the field. When it was lined up against the standing corn, Tam dropped the lever and the Binder chomped its way round the field spewing out sheaves more elegantly bound than my ham-fisted efforts. Those of us who followed the binder picked the sheaves up two at a time and leant them against each other at an angle, their heads of grain mingling, eight sheaves to a stook – thirsty work in the heat and rough on the inside of the wrists, especially when we were harvesting barley. When the day’s work was over I loved looking back at the rows of stooks on the harsh carpet of stubble, the evening sun sending their patterned shadows across the field. As the binder chomped its way round the field, the island of corn in the middle got smaller and the farm dogs got more excit
ed. The whole population of the farm would gather round the tiny island that remained for the last cut. When the binder started the final swathe, out would hurtle a platoon of terrified rabbits and hares who had retreated to the last redoubt of corn against the advancing machine. The dogs, in an ecstasy of barking, caught as many rabbits as they could, though the hares usually managed to elude capture. That year Lassie got a hare nearly as big as herself, grabbing it by the back of the neck. One shake and its neck was broken. I rode proudly home with it on my bike that night, and my mother soon had it skinned and in the stew pot.
In contrast to the rhythm of life at Kelham, which was a blend of physical labour, intellectual effort and spiritual struggle, being back at home during the vacation was one-dimensional and I felt distanced from that other self. The beginning of a duality in my being? It is hard to say whether it was created then or whether the divided circumstance of my life began to make visible what had always lurked under the surface – two disconnected lives. At Kelham I was caught up in the transcendental romance of the religious life, heightened by the language of sacrifice and self-offering. I wore a black cassock with a blue scapular or apron over it to keep off the wear and tear: an ideal costume for the practice of visual piety. Jesus warned us not to practise our piety ‘to be seen of men’, but where was the fun in that? Uniforms are meant to draw attention, mark us out as different. I was genuinely drawn to the romance of the given-away life, but I was also fascinated by the theatre of it. I loved playing the part, and not always ‘to be seen of men’ – or why had I been getting up at two in the morning that term to act the Cistercian in the Lady Chapel? And at the end of each long term I would hang up the cassock and come back to the Vale, where I appeared to slot back in without effort. The Rector might have understood what was going on in me, but I had begun to feel a bit embarrassed by him. He had visited me at Kelham that summer term and insisted on playing tennis. Actually he wasn’t bad at the game, with a quick, biting service, but his long comb-over fell out of place in the tumult of the rallies and floated in distracting tendrils round his head. It was hard not to feel ashamed for him. There would always be a bond of affection, but there was now a reticence on my part as well. Soon he left the Vale for England and we lost touch, though news about him filtered through from time to time, some of it sad. With my family it was easier to reconnect, but only because I resumed my place as the only son and reverted to the old pattern. I would entertain them with stories of the eccentrics at Kelham, do the voices and gestures of the dramatis personae of the place; but I could not talk about the other life that haunted me, a life that seemed unreal in this place on these streets below these hills. They saw changes in me: my accent shifting, my body lengthening, my habits changing. My mother noticed that I had started using a nail file instead of scissors and hoped I wasn’t getting above myself. Behind the barb I knew she was afraid of losing me. It was Gertie who saved the day by pointing out that filing stopped nails splitting, so it was better than cutting, and she used a file too. But there had been a shift away from the old unself-conscious closeness. I was different; they were the same. The same was true when I tried to reconnect with my pals from school, all working men in apprenticeships to local tradesmen now. We went to the movies together, but nothing of that different self I carried ever intruded here. When the pictures came out we would stand at the bus stop eating fish and chips before saying good-night, and I would look up at Carman Hill, over there on the other side of my life.
And that summer was the time of Brenda the Land Girl. Land girls were a wartime invention, aimed at helping farmers whose labourers had been called up, and they stayed around for a bit in peacetime. Brenda came from Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow, and she was a fixture at Caldarvan that summer. She was a large, cheery young woman, about three years older than me, probably pushing twenty. And she enjoyed teasing me, the college boy. Shy at first, I soon got into the pushing and shoving game young men play when they want to touch a woman but lack the confidence to do it openly. My favourite ruse was to come up behind her, wrap my arms round her waist and lift her off her feet. She played her part in the charade enthusiastically, shoving her backside against me in mock resistance as I performed the clumsy manoeuvre. On the day I remember, the two of us were in a field on our own in the early morning when it was still too damp to start harvesting. Sometimes we were sent to repair stooks that had fallen over in the night, the kind of make-work farmers did while they waited for the right weather for the main event. There the two of us were, out in the field, no one around. She bent over to pick up a couple of fallen sheaves, and I felt a shift in me as though a valve had opened somewhere. As I wrapped my arms round her waist to lift her off her feet, she giggling against me in the accustomed way, I was swept by a wave of pleasure so acute it took my breath away. I held on, pressing against her, while it rolled through me to its climax. I had no idea what had happened, but it happened again that night when I was face down on my bed, remembering Brenda in the field that morning. This time the pleasure was more intense and the consequence more obvious. When it was over I lay there stunned and depleted, already guilty at having ‘burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic’.24 That was the secret shame I brought back to Kelham that September when the vacation ended.
I didn’t come right out and ask Father Peter about it, but he must have recognised the change in me, because he called me to his study to tell me the facts of life. He was as embarrassed as I was, but he ploughed on, giving me a rudimentary sketch of the biology of reproduction, and leaving me with the distinct impression that God himself regarded the whole business as regrettable and wished he had invented a less troublesome way of guaranteeing the continuance of the species. There was no guidance on how I might deal with the impact of the reproductive imperative on my own body; nor did I ask him about the moral status of the secret pleasure that was dominating my attention, probably because I had already concluded that it must be a sin. What settled it for me was the little going away present the Rector had given me two years before. The Centenary Prayer Book, blue cloth, octavo size, had been published originally in 1933, the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Oxford Movement, from which the Catholic revival had started in the Anglican Church. In one handy volume it contained all the prayers and devotions the self-conscious Anglo Catholic needed, including a guide for making one’s confession. This was a practice the Rector had encouraged me to start, informing me that it was an essential element in the spiritual life of an ordinand, the mystical estate into which I had entered when I left Alexandria. It was a practice Kelham also encouraged, so it was soon part of my routine to make my confession once a month. Until that day at Caldarvan going to confession had hardly been a pleasure, but it had been straightforward and easily accomplished, a bit like getting in the cold shower that started the day at Kelham. I would go to the little side chapel in the gallery of the Great Chapel where I would kneel beside Father Peter, facing the form printed on the prayer desk, he sitting in a chair facing the other way, with a purple stole round his neck. I would begin: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’
Father Peter would reply: ‘The Lord be in thy heart and on thy lips that thou mayest truthfully confess all thy sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’
Following this admonition, I would recite the formula on the card in front of me, admitting that I had sinned in thought, word and deed, since my last confession, in the following ways. Then I would read out the laundry list of particular sins, ending the recitation: ‘For these and all my other sins which I cannot now remember, I am heartily sorry, firmly purpose amendment of life, and humbly ask of you, Father, penance, advice and absolution.’
Father Peter would offer a few words of advice, a penance to recite – usually a psalm – then, by the authority given to him to forgive sins, he would absolve me in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and end: ‘Go in peace, the Lord hath put away all thy sins, and pray
for me a sinner.’
Leaving Alexandria Page 6