It is Margaret you mourn for.29
The blight man was born for is not just time and the way it conducts us to the big exit at the end of the road, but the way it makes us rehearse that departure over and over again through other partings, other losses. It is possible to be an accomplished leaver, yet for something in us to cry out at the violence of separation. A few years ago a friend told me of the night he left his wife. As he opened the front door to go away, his children were leaning over the upstairs banister screaming, don’t leave daddy don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave daddy daddy don’t leave. But leave he did, their grief pounding in his ears, stricken and guilty, a monster in his own eyes, yet incapable of staying. Sometimes parting is more about moving on than moving out, but even here regret can undo us. Cardinal Newman, recalling his departure from the Church of England, remembered the snapdragon that grew on the walls opposite his rooms at Trinity – an emblem, he thought, of a life in Oxford from which only death could remove him. It was not death, but his conscience that took him away. After he became a Roman Catholic he never saw Oxford again, ‘excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway’. Our heart may want to root us in friendly soil for ever, but our mind or our will or forces we neither welcome nor understand may call us away.
After losing Caldarvan that spring, I had an elegiac summer term at Kelham, transfigured by a melancholy infatuation. Living in the Cottage afforded us frequent glimpses of the coming and going of local business people delivering food to the kitchen that backed onto the courtyard. One of the regulars was the daughter of the baker from Newark who supplied us with bread. Good brown bread it was, and there was something brown and nutlike about her as well. Dark hair, hazel eyes. Small, compact body. I was Cottage Senior, unconstrained by others, following my own course of study, so it wasn’t difficult to be in the courtyard when her van turned up. Helping with the trays of bread, I would follow her up the stairs to the pantry. She became an object of longing, as much for what she represented as for her beauty. She was the world that married and was given in marriage. The world of the back row in the picture house. The world of the walk along the riverside to the secluded place in the wood. The world of breasts and thighs and the consolation and desolation they promised. The honest world unhaunted by the divine demand. We hardly spoke. A smile, a ‘taraa’ as she got behind the wheel of the van, that was all. I discovered that the pain of longing was not without its consolations, as I carried my sadness through the green days of summer. The term ended. I went back to the Vale for my last Cottage vacation, National Service not far away on the horizon.
The manager at Caldarvan had recommended me to Muirhead’s farm, just outside Balloch. It was there I spent the last summer of my boyhood in 1951. There were three others employed to help with the harvest that year of intense and unusual heat, all women from a notorious street in the Vale, known for its pubs and punch-ups after closing time. They were a cheerful trio, and there was a lot of banter, much of it at my expense. The youngest of the three fired my senses. Unlike the quiet demeanour of the baker’s daughter, who absorbed my admiration but gave off no discernible response, Lily fired back. She was a couple of years older than me, about twenty, and I found it difficult to keep my eyes off her, particularly when the day heated up and she peeled off her jersey, then her shirt, under which she wore a cotton swimming costume. We were always dripping with sweat from the stooking by the time of the afternoon break, when the farmer’s wife left milk cans full of cold water for us under the trees at the edge of the field. After we’d drunk as much water as we wanted, Lily would soak a cloth in what was left and mop her face and chest. I tried not to look, but it was a losing battle. I had never seen a woman’s breasts before. The oldest woman would be on to me, telling Lily to gie me a wee shufti at her chest since I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Lily announced that students were a’ the same, laughing as she said it, her breasts obvious against the wet cotton. I sat there, stunned. And I saw what my life would be like. An endless struggle with the flesh.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin.30
Was I in for this my whole life long? Psychologically unsophisticated, I had enough insight to grasp that it was the very intensity of my battle with the flesh that gave it such power over me, made it such a preoccupying torment. Obsessively denying yourself something you desperately want can be as addictive as being enslaved to its performance.
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.31
Paul might have been writing about me. The difference between us was that he claimed that Christ had made him free from the law of sin. Well, he hadn’t made me free of it, and I was tired of the fight. How had I landed myself in such a predicament? Something in me still longed for surrender to God and the great abnegation – nothing counts but lifetimes – but that desire was at war with my nature and its lusts. I couldn’t square the circle. No one had warned me that this was what I was letting myself in for when I was sent to Kelham:
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.32
But it wasn’t only religion that saw my longing for ordinary belonging in the world as unheroic. The celibates who had tried to draw me into their fellowship were like the heroes of my favourite Westerns: like Jesus, they were men who had no place to lay their heads. Living on the edge of settled society, called in from time to time to overcome threats to communities they could never belong to, they were destined always to ride away from the woman standing by the white picket fence. The hot Western of the time was Shane, the loner who saves the peace of a little prairie community then rides off into the sunset because he himself is never allowed to settle down. In spite of little Joey’s cries – ‘Shane, Shane, come back, Shane, come back’ – he rides away. I realised at the edge of the woods on Muirhead’s farm that I was tired of trying to be Father Shane. I wanted to find out about the world I had renounced before I knew anything about its lures and attractions. I wanted to be able to look at Lily without feeling guilty. Actually, I wanted more than that.
A few days later I wrote to the Cottage Master.
Dear Father Peter,
I have decided not to stay at Kelham, so I won’t be coming back for the new term. I have already told the authorities and I am expecting my call-up papers any day now. Thank you for all the help and kindness you have given me over the last three years.
Yours affectionately,
Dick
The day I posted it I realised I had made a mistake. I knew that the consolation of Lily’s breasts could not last a lifetime – and nothing counted but lifetimes – so I immediately wrote again, telling him I had changed my mind and asking to come back. He replied, kindly, advising me to do my National Service and come back when I was demobbed. So into the army I went, to a boring and uneventful couple of years. The army discovered that, though I was not officer material, I was good at square-bashing, so they slapped stripes on me and made me a drill instructor. The one useful thing I retained from the repetitive routine of my service was the ability to project my voice over great distances. I still have the old drill sergeant’s impatience with public speakers who cannot make themselves heard.
Demobbed in time for the Michaelmas term in 1953, I couldn’t wait to get back to Kelham. This time I was determined to stay – for ever. During my years in the Cottage I had shuttled between two opposing demands, represented by Kelham and the Vale. The Vale, and Lily’s breasts, had nearly won. But now that I was going into the House after National Service, I could remove the Vale from the equation, get rid of the tug of war, by join
ing the Society and making Kelham my home. The first step would be to apply to join the Novitiate – the apprenticeship for professed life in a religious order that is like a formal engagement to be married to the community. During a short service in the Great Chapel I would commit myself to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and after three years training and formation I would be professed and take my final vows – a bit like getting married after a long engagement. And as soon as I reached Kelham after the army got rid of me that is what I applied to do. But there was a snag. Being only nineteen and therefore underage, the Novice Master sent me home to discuss it with my parents and get their permission. I caught the night train to Scotland. For the last time, I thought, as I boarded it at Newark Castle.
One of the sorrows of the cultural emigration on which I had embarked when I left Alexandria was the way it took me to places I could not share with my parents. What was left between us was the past – love and the past. I told them what I wanted to do. My father said he thought it was unnatural to choose that kind of life, but they wouldn’t stand in my way. I knew that’s what they’d say. That’s what they’d always said. Not that they knew me now, this son they loved but no longer fully understood. What puzzles me now is that no one in the Society probed me about my decision, either. I have always suffered from the confident man’s ability to make people think I know what I am talking about. Sometimes I do, more often I don’t. In this case I didn’t. Back then there was no such thing as a psychometric test to measure a person’s suitability for a job. SSM didn’t probe my motives. Maybe they didn’t realise how divided I was. More likely they knew it too well to want to interfere with it. Father Kelly had advised us never to examine our motives, anyway. Just assume they are wrong. God can work through our muddles and delusions, as long as we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I had applied to join the order. They thought I was worth a try. And so when I returned to Kelham from Scotland with the paperwork completed and signed by my father, they put me in a black cassock, wrapped a red girdle round it, suspended a crucifix from it, and admitted me to the Novitiate.
There were over a hundred students in the House at the time, of whom the fifteen novices were a sub-set who were necessarily thrown together more than the others. The biggest difference was that novices did not get vacations like the other students. Kelham was our home, so we stayed there during vacations with the fully professed members of the Society – apart from a couple of weeks a year when we were allowed to visit our families. Life at Kelham had a different feel during vacations. The community was smaller and more intimate. There was a greater family atmosphere, and the routine, though still severe, was more relaxed than during term time. And novices provided a useful maintenance and repair crew during the holidays. One of the novices was a qualified painter and decorator who supervised the rest of us repainting rooms and corridors while the students were away. There was time for long walks with other novices and members of the Society in the local countryside, sometimes towards the bumps on the horizon that the map called Kelham Hills, reached along the road opposite the main gate that went north towards the village of Muskham.
Towards the end of vacation there was always a sense of waiting for the main event to start, and for students to pile off the bus and fill the place with noise and enthusiasm. The great stage of the House really only came into its own during term time, when it buzzed and throbbed with life like a theatre in the middle of a brilliant season – though life in a residential drama school might be a better analogy. All that being on show, that acting before an audience of one’s peers, that close attention to the style and mannerisms of others. There were a number of stages on which we acted: sports fields, lecture rooms, the common room and library, not to mention the opportunity for observing and being observed provided by the long drives and walkways, the benches placed before romantic vistas for gazing into the distance. There was plenty of time for watching others and being watched by them just about everywhere. But the supreme stage was the Chapel, itself absolute in its theatricality. Designed to maximise the impact of great processional liturgies, the chapel was the main arena in which we watched and assessed, admired and appraised each other. At the time I assumed I was the only person doing this. Everyone else, I supposed, was unself-consciously getting on with being holy, attentive only to the captivating presence of the God for whom I longed but whose presence continued to elude me. I felt the demand of God, but little of his promised consolation. But wasn’t that the part I had been chosen to play? I had seen too many movies and they had made me too conscious of the temptation to act a part, play a role. Monastic religion offered an enormous stage on which to perform. The props of the religious life were themselves dramatic. Cassocks and cowls, red girdles and crucifixes, the theatre of the liturgy with its corps de ballet of acolytes and sacred ministers, its brocaded vestments wreathed round with clouds of incense and waves of plainchant. The rhetoric of demand and surrender was the discourse of the life, and the constant call to deny the self and give it away to God. Only the truly holy and unself-conscious could be immune to the temptation to strut their stuff on this tumultuous stage, and I was neither.
The theatrical subtext was even present in Kelham slang for serving at the Sunday High Mass. Before they erected their great basilica in the 1920s, the Society had used the carriage courtyard of the old Hall as a chapel, in which the sanctuary – the stage on which the liturgy is enacted – had a wooden floor. To serve at High Mass on Sundays was to be ‘on boards’, literally speaking. That usage flitted to the new chapel, so that to serve the Sunday liturgy was still to be ‘on boards’, even though the new sanctuary was made of stone. I was all too conscious of the opportunity the chapel provided for putting on a show of self-conscious unself-consciousness and practised spontaneity. I was sure that the others were unaware of themselves when they came back to their seats from receiving Holy Communion at the edge of the sanctuary, traversing the great space in blissful unawareness that their demeanour was the object of fascinated interest. Some returned with downcast eyes, their unself-consciousness slightly betrayed by the sudden theatricality of their genuflection to the altar, back erect, head tilted inconsequentially to one side, both hands posed briefly on the left knee, thigh parallel to the floor, before sweeping round to continue the long trek to their seat, where the intensity of inwardness was maintained for as long as possible, the body upright, till the bottom sagged gratefully onto the edge of the seat and the head fell into the hands in the usual posture of semi-somnolence. American colleges had big men on campus. Our alpha males were athletes of the spirit, their devotional form studied keenly. The equivalent of inter-collegiate matches were the big set pieces on Sundays and high holy days ‘on boards’, when the solemn liturgy required highly trained squads of acolytes to carry candles and crosses and incense thuribles stoked with burning charcoal. There was an occasion when I sabotaged the precision of it all. Unintentionally? That’s what I thought at the time.
I was the thurifer, the man in charge of the incense pot. They usually chose someone on the tall side for this role in the drama. The thurifer was accompanied by a boat bearer, usually a boy from the Cottage, who carried the incense in a boat-shaped vessel. Incense, fragrant resins that leave behind them – after they have been consumed in fire – clouds of perfumed smoke, first used as a fumigant to counteract the odours that accompanied animal sacrifice in primitive worship, has become a metaphor for the soul’s longing to ascend to God. Its use in these solemn liturgies was carefully schooled and choreographed. The big moment for the thurifer and boat boy was the censing of the principal celebrants of the liturgy, followed by a general censing of the community in their stalls in the chapel. This was the one movement in the routine that provided an opportunity for a mild display of individualism. There was no set way to swing the thurible at this moment in the choreography. Conventional performers swung it with metronomic vigour, two swings to each side, then bowed and returned to their chairs in the sanctu
ary. On the occasion I am remembering, I was experimenting with a more introverted mystical approach, which involved holding the pot slightly above my head before giving it a few limp jiggles. This manoeuvre was meant to suggest my detachment from the whole process. I was too engaged in the spirituality of the task to be aware that I was there at all, hence the rather abstracted nature of my double swings. I am still not sure whether I was copying or parodying one of the biggest souls on campus, a contemplative whose demeanour was at its most abstracted when he handled the thurible, which he held with a sort of helpless dismay, as though he were being forced to wave a week-old haddock at the congregation. It was a style that provoked as much admiration as derision. After the devotional pirouette of the censing, we returned to our chairs in the sanctuary. This was another precisely configured manoeuvre. We moved across the chapel floor by pushing our slippered feet along the polished black rubber, thereby maintaining a perfectly even posture. We bowed to the altar, turned left and walked to the side of the stone-flagged sanctuary where two heavy wooden stools were placed for our use. We stopped parallel to our respective stools, about nine inches away from them, turned right to face the centre, paused, stepped back the requisite nine inches and sat down, bodies erect, eyes to the front. Parade-ground stuff. Carefully drilled. Always immaculately performed. Never a hitch. Except that day.
We performed the manoeuvre, the boat bearer and I, in complete unison. He found his chair with accustomed precision. I missed mine and hit the floor, my legs in the air – arse over amice, as someone later described it. The chanting in the chapel ceased, except for a few short-sighted souls. In spite of the best attempts of the celebrant, that service never recovered. One or two people claimed they’d bribed me to do it. I knew it was an accident, and that was the received view of my superiors. But are there any genuine accidents? Was a part of me at work unconsciously disturbing the pattern, sabotaging the effect? If the incident in the sanctuary can be understood as a metaphor for the way life can interrupt our most cherished plans, then maybe it was also a reminder that circumstances are indifferent to our ideals and intentions. And sometimes the circumstance are inside us like buried mines waiting to explode. The main threats to the contented mind come from the mind itself. Enemies within, compulsions we did not know about, because our life did not come with a map of its inner topography enclosed, a guide to its psychic weave. The shuttle on the loom had been at work on us long before we thought we had taken charge of its design ourselves. It was about to dart a surprise at me.
Leaving Alexandria Page 8