Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  I thought I was where I wanted to be, back:

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

  And out of the swing of the sea.33

  It did not last. I became emotionally fixated on another novice. It crept over me like sadness, more like falling in regret than falling in love. He was a year ahead of me, so I became aware of his presence only gradually. Easy to overlook, he was short, slight and almost nun-like in his demeanour. It wasn’t hard to believe that when he made the journey back to his seat from the sanctuary after communion he was genuinely oblivious to those around him. He moved quietly, economically, with short, quick steps, head tilted slightly forward, eyes downcast. The eyes were my undoing. They were large, a startlingly pale blue, fringed with long black lashes. His black hair, kept short, was wiry. But that was not the word I wanted to use. It suggested hardness, tautness, whereas he had the kind of beauty that evoked protectiveness, and a desire to shelter such delicacy from life’s storms. His skin was smooth and almost beardless, with a suggestion of light emanating from it.

  I was surprised the first time I heard him speak. I expected a high voice. Instead I heard this creamy baritone that was so unexpected I wanted to hear him laugh. I can’t remember anything he ever said, but I can remember how he said it. He had none of the faux intellectuality of a lot of the other students. He didn’t think of himself as clever or bright or with anything particularly interesting to say. He was sideways and quirky in his angle on things, and there was something absolutely right about his take on people. No phoniness. Nothing posed. Utterly himself. I was bewitched by the completeness of the man, the oneness of the inner with the outer, the physical beauty that perfectly expressed his sweet and unexpected strangeness. It would be wrong to say that he did not have a man’s body, though it would be truer to say that he did not yet have a man’s body. He had the beautifully unformed body of a boy, neither soft nor hard, neither male nor female. He was a year ahead of me, yet I felt a century older. I was intensely drawn to him, yet his beauty reduced me to incoherence. For what could I do with such a feeling? It reduced everything else to emptiness. I don’t think I wanted to possess him physically, or not in any sense I understood or could express. All I wanted was to be with him or at least be near him. Actually, I wanted never to be anywhere else. Since this was impossible, my life became a kind of mourning. As the weeks passed I withdrew into dejection. If I could not be with him always then I must just be by myself. Increasingly, I was. Life at Kelham was busy, but it did allow time to hang out with friends, to walk with them, share a joke, gossip. I became a ghost to all of that, wandering round the edges. When I wasn’t reading gloomy Russian novels, I took it on myself, uninvited by anyone in authority, to do extra gardening jobs in the grounds, cutting weeds, hacking at overgrown bushes, raking gravel paths, anything that used up energy, though nothing ever turned off the ache of wanting to be with him, only with him.

  I didn’t know how he felt about me. He must have known about the impact he had on people, must have known that they flirted with him, that he flirted back. He never flirted with me, though sometimes when I came out of the woods in which I was brooding and approached him he would smile with delight, though I was always too awkward to stay around him for long. These inconclusive encounters were almost as painful as my long silent absences. Then, though I can’t remember how it came about, it was agreed that we would take our two weeks’ summer leave together in Cornwall, ending with a visit to his widowed mother in Plymouth. We would hitch-hike south, taking our time, stopping at bed and breakfast places along the way. It was late August, and drivers were inclined to stop for two men in cassocks. I was quietly happy just being with him. We had the kind of ease in each other’s company that allowed us to be silent when there was nothing to be said or when neither of us felt like speaking. The rosebay willowherb, flaming by the roadside, was beginning to send its seeds into the warm autumn wind. The drivers who picked us up chatted inconsequentially, asking us what religion we were. I hardly noticed. We got to Cornwall on a Saturday evening and found it hard to find a place to stay. One friendly B&B proprietor told us it would be busy everywhere in Polperro that weekend, but his cousin a few miles out of town on a farm sometimes took people in. Would we like him to phone? It was a three-mile walk through lush green countryside. The farmer’s wife gave us high tea when we arrived, after showing us the room. It was the only one they had available and would we mind sharing the double bed? We accepted the arrangement and took a walk over the fields after the meal. We were supposed to wear our cassocks everywhere in public, but was this public? We left them in the room and walked in our shorts and shirts.

  After the walk we decided to head for bed. It had been a tiring day, with a lot of hiking between lifts. To my surprise, he suggested that we should sleep on different sides of the top sheet. I was already under it, so he got into bed on top of it, under the blanket, thereby creating a frail yet absolute barrier between us. I was puzzled by his insistence, but didn’t question it, didn’t ask why it concerned him. I had not figured that in bed one plus one can sometimes equal one. We did not enact that arithmetic, but I sometimes wonder what would have followed had we done so All I know is that my need for his presence was not assuaged by our days together. Back at Kelham I plunged into the old sadness and started again to wander disconsolately round the edges of the community, so much so that the Warden called me in to see him.

  The Warden was a man given to watching. When he sat in his place on the high table during silent meals his eyes always seemed to be surveying the refectory like a searchlight playing over a maximum security prison. They were deep-set eyes, appraising, discomfiting. I had been aware that they had been on me for some time. After the summons, I knocked on his door on B Corridor and he told me to enter. Ah, Dick, he said, Dick, I’ve been watching you. He wondered why I, cut out to be a leader, absented myself from the life and politics and rhythm of the place. He mentioned another student, a man who was well respected, a man who more than pulled his weight in the life of the community, a man others looked up to. I could be like that. Had it in me to be a personality about the place. Instead, I kept to myself, did not engage, wandered about like a wraith. They were grateful for the extra gardening and labouring I was doing round the place, but it was unimportant, would get done anyway. It hit me. I knew it was true. What he did not do was ask why, to probe the helpless love that had overwhelmed me. I wonder if he knew the reason and was scared to explore it. I admitted the symptoms but said nothing about the cause. I gave assurances. I would engage with others again, become part of the family. I tried. I was around more. I loosened up a bit and tried to engage with others. I knew I was being watched.

  Then, not long after my session with the Warden of the College, I was summoned to a meeting with the Father Director of the Society. He told me that Father Richard Roseveare, Provincial of the Society in the South African Province, had been elected Bishop of Accra in the Gold Coast in West Africa. He wanted the Society to send him a priest to be his personal assistant. None was available, so they proposed to send me. It would be for two years, after which I would return to Kelham and continue my studies in the Novitiate. I would have to prepare myself for the post. I would be expected to deal with the bishop’s considerable correspondence, so must teach myself to type. Brother Noel, the Kelham Secretary, would give me a Pitman’s typing manual and access to a typewriter. I had six weeks to master it. They would also send me for driving lessons in Newark, because that would be useful, too. What did I think?

  I was excited. Another part to play – the dedicated young missionary. ‘Here am I. Send me.’34 I don’t know what was in their minds in proposing this move. Was it a make-or-break tactic? Get him away from that emotional entanglement – not that it had ever been mentioned. A lot wasn’t mentioned, by them or by me, or maybe they would have had second thoughts about sending to Africa a young man struggling to crucify his own insistent libido. I
left the Director’s room, immediately got to work with Pitman’s and mastered touch-typing. Typing this now on a computer, I remember the big sit-up-and-beg Underwood I hammered away on for weeks in the Kelham office, the old Business Room on the ground floor of the Manners Sutton establishment. Typing was a skill I developed quickly. Unlike driving. On my test in Newark I ran the driving school’s car into the corner of a baker’s van and was failed on the spot. Back at Kelham I enjoyed describing the white face and shaky hands of the examiner.

  The day of my departure came around quickly. I was to take the train to Liverpool and spend the night in a B&B near the docks so that next morning I could get on board the Elder Dempster ship that served all the West African ports from Freetown to Lagos. On a March morning after breakfast I followed the community into the Chapel for my missionary benediction. Because I was leaving for foreign service, I was the only man in chapel without the blue scapular over his cassock. I was called forward by the Director, who was standing in front of the altar on which Father Kelly said they sacrificed young men. I knelt in front of him while the community sang Psalm 121 in poignant plainsong.

  I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help.

  My help cometh even from the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.

  He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.

  Behold, he that keepeth Israel: shall neither slumber nor sleep.

  The Lord himself is thy keeper: the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand;

  So that the sun shall not burn thee by day: neither the moon by night.

  The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: yea, it is even he that shall keep thy soul.

  The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in: from this time forth for evermore.

  The Director blessed me. I stood, and pulled back my shoulders. The Director smiled at me. I turned and walked, alone, under the great dome, across the expanse of polished black rubber out of the Chapel into the narthex. I turned right and made my way through a little side door on the east side.

  Outside, a car was waiting for me, already loaded with a trunk full of books for Bishop’s House Accra and my few possessions, including two white cotton cassocks suitable for the tropics. We drove down the drive, through the great oak gates, and took a right over the bridge onto the road to Newark. I turned in my seat and looked back at the remembered 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 it fell from view, as I was taken towards Africa and my future. But it was not to be the future I thought God had intended for me. This was certainly my going out from Kelham; but there was to be no coming in again. It was to Glasgow I would return when the time came.

  II

  1958–67

  5

  TENEMENTS

  I had a strange awakening after my first night in Abbotsford Place. Everything around was quiet that Saturday morning. I could sense that no one else in the street was up, yet I was sure the sound of singing had wakened me. Then I heard it again, coming from the back court. A strong voice, singing one of Scotland’s sad songs.

  Ca’ the yowes to the knowes,

  Ca’ them where the heather grows,

  Ca’ them where the burnie rows,

  My bonnie dearie.

  Collected by Robert Burns, it is a folk song sung to a tune that breaks the heart, and it was echoing off the back walls of Abbotsford Place that chilly morning. I pulled my curtains aside and looked down into the back. He was standing beside the midden, head up, eyes closed, singing his heart out in a rich baritone. And he was a striking figure. An old man. Tiny, under five feet I guessed from up here on the third floor, wearing a tweed suit and waistcoat, well worn and old-fashioned. ‘Perjink’ is the term in Scots that best described him, and the sound of the word carries its meaning. Why was he there and what did he think he was doing? It was too early for busking, and it was a daft place to do it, anyway. Was he mourning something in his past? Was he lamenting the slow dying of Gorbals, performing a Kontakion for a death foretold? Later I discovered that no one else on the stair heard him. I was up early. I heard him. I can hear him still. Every time I look at a photograph of a backcourt of one of Glasgow’s vanished tenements I hear him again.

  Maybe I heard him because I knew that back courts were mystical places. A week after I moved in there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, a wee boy handed me a cheque made out to me for £27, my stipend for the month, which had found its way into my waste paper basket by mistake and out into the bins at the back. I had myself played lucky middens as a boy, hunting for discarded treasures in other people’s rubbish. I was glad Glasgow children were still doing it. The boy whooped down the stair with a half crown in his pocket, and my pay cheque was soon deposited in the Bank of Scotland.

  Children played everywhere in Gorbals, but the back court was their real kingdom. The backs had been originally planned as drying greens, with brick sheds against the far wall for the ashes of the coal that burned in fireplaces all over the city, the smoke from a million lums blackening the buildings and filling the air with a soft deadly sweetness. There was nothing green in the back courts of Gorbals in the second half of the twentieth century, but the packed earth and rusty remains of the posts on which they had once slung the drying lines offered endless possibilities to the imaginations of children.

  They appealed to my imagination too. I’d been born in one of Glasgow’s tenements, so they were in my DNA. My mother also came from them, and she had been orphaned in one of them. Sometimes I thought I saw her as a child in these streets. And from somewhere came a memory of the two of us, my small hand in hers, hurrying anxiously along a road flanked by pubs and pawnshops. Whether it was us I don’t know, but the image contained its own truth. On these streets there was a lot of weeping and leaving, as well as a lot of laughing and forgetting. It was children who brought the laughter and sometimes the forgetting, children playing on grey streets in their mothers’ hats and shoes, singing out: ‘Wait till she sees this, but . . .’ I had been on my way back here a long time and hadn’t known it. It could have been to another street. In fact, it could have been to anywhere in Glasgow, a city packed with tenements, four storeys high, black with soot and bright with life, but it was to this spot, to this room in a flat used as a day nursery for Gorbals children. Which is why it was quiet that Saturday morning as I stood at my window looking into the backcourt, listening to the wee man singing. Who was he? Why was he singing to a sleeping street?

  I dressed and sped quietly down the stairs, scooped and worn by lives sunk away in the years, past the assertive ugliness of gang slogans scrawled on the walls – ‘Cumbie Ya Baas, Tong Ya Baas’ – through the close to the back. He wasn’t there. I ran to the front of the close into the street. It was empty, except for my neighbour Lilias’s green van Jemima and my motorbike parked at the kerb. It had rained in the night and the black surface of the roadway glistened, reflecting the long stretch of tenements on the other side, marching south in an unbroken line to Cumberland Street. The original sandstone of the terrace was discernible only through streaks in the soot, but the row was still handsome and solid-looking. The railings that once defined the tidy gardens in front of each address were gone, and the gardens were patches of mud outlined by the jagged remains of low walls. Six elegant gas lamps survived in the street, three on this side, three on the other, lit by a lamplighter before darkness fell, testament to what had once been a distinguished address.

  At the end of the eighteenth century a couple of builders had lured the middle classes of Glasgow to a new suburb on the south side of the Clyde, a quick walk from the city centre. The aristocratic names on the grid of streets they built testified to their ambitions for the area: Bedford, Norfolk, Cumberland, Oxford, Cavendish. The vision of
the Laurie brothers was never fully realised, but the area remained a prosperous district till well into the nineteenth century. Abbotsford Place was built in 1830, a four-storied terrace of large apartments, with a mews for horse carriages round the back. It had gone well down in the world by the time I stood outside number 10 that Saturday morning, wondering how my mystic balladeer could have disappeared so completely. I needed rolls for breakfast, so I went over Bedford, the cross street between Abbotsford Place and South Portland, to the dairy at the corner. South Portland Street ran up to the river that defined the northern boundary of Gorbals:

  . . . the real Clyde, with a dishrag dawn

  it rinses the horrors of the night

  but cannot make them clean . . .35

  It was raining steadily as I took the rolls back upstairs and put the kettle on for tea. Maybe it would be over by the time I left for the Vale in the middle of the day. I had a plan to discuss with my parents. Bernard would be moving into his last term at the Academy after the Easter holidays, with a place at Glasgow University secured for the autumn. Why not let him join me in Abbotsford Place in another room in Lilias’s nursery? It would take the pressure off them and get Bernard used to Glasgow. A few months commuting to the Vale wouldn’t be a problem in the better weather. That was the plan we agreed to, and Bernard joined me in Gorbals at the beginning of the summer holidays.