Letters to a Sister

by Constance Babington Smith

  I only heard half the lona service182 last night, as I had to go out to supper. I hope it was good, as good as last time. I hear the Kirk is very much annoyed by Dr MacLeod, he is so High, and so unlike their dear John Knox, and they suspect him of wanting to take bishops into his system. Perhaps later on he will go where bishops are, since they won’t be allowed where he now is.

  There was such a rude and unjust article in the 5. Express about the C. of E. Did you see it? It was by a peer.183 He says the difference between clergymen and laymen is that they only work one day a week instead of 5 or 6. He obviously knows nothing about it. He calls the Te Deum ‘the Tedium’, and thinks all clergy very dim and worthless, and that the only way of waking the church to life would be to ordain women. I suppose there will be a lot of answers, if anyone thinks it worth answering. I think those rude attacks and false statements do a lot of harm among ignorant people.

  The Bp of Tewkesbury was in London for the week-end, which was very nice. He came to tea with me on Thursday, and on Friday I went to confession, and on Sunday went to hear him preach in a Royal Chapel,184 then drove him to Paddington, so saw a nice lot of him altogether. When I talk to him, I am always converted; a pity it doesn’t happen oftener. I hope he converts all the Glos. clergy. I think there are a lot of these very converting priests about the place, actually, only one doesn’t always come across them. A young Oxford man told me last night that there are a lot of Moslem conversions in Oxford just now. When I said I wondered what the attraction was, he said he thought it was largely anti-women. They want to worship in a church where any women there are are in galleries behind grilles, instead of outnumbering men on the floor, as in Christian churches. They have even got into Pusey House now, which used to be sacred to men, in Oxford. Now women undergraduates go too. A pity men are so annoyed by women in the mass….

  [The end of this letter is missing]

  11 August, [1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  I have now looked thro’ my birthday present,185 and find it full of good reading, both known and unknown to me. There are several William Laws, tho’ none from my favourite works of his, but all are good. I have counted the days up to my birthday and yours. Your reading (Day 206) is on Belief and Doubt. Mine (213) is by Keble, and is called ‘To a Lady in her Sickness’, and is about the lady’s dullness and dryness, which Keble thought was because she wasn’t feeling well. Today’s is good, from the Theologia Germanica. I ought to write the dates in, as it is hard to count every time. Is it Leap Year, because this would put each day later, of course? It would be an interesting occupation to compile such a book; there is room for many more such. One could do it as a sideline, whenever a piece of religious or moral writing struck one, without sparing much time from one’s regular work, and gradually one would have collected 365. I think I should give more attention to particular days than Baillie has; in fact, I should do it round the church year. We might collaborate in it, to get it done faster, as our earthly time gets short…. Thank you so much for this book, I am delighted with it, and how nice to get a post-birthday present….

  The new parking rules which the Ministry of Transport is meaning to bring in soon have been published.186 It will be very expensive to leave one’s car in the scheduled streets of which Hinde Street is one. 6d. for [the] first hour, 1/- for two hours, after that 10/-, so that 2½ hrs will cost 11/-. I think there will be too much revolt by motorists to let them bring it in; people without garages who live in London will be ruined; and the garage rents will be put up even higher, of course, when people will be so eager for them. Those circularised are asked to state their objections in letters to the Ministry, and no doubt every one will. I am lucky to have a garage, tho’ it will be a nuisance putting it in there every time I have had it out, then getting it out again, as my mews gets very crowded with cars & lorries. What the new rules will do, I hope, is to prevent those outside London from driving up every morning, parking in some street while they go to their offices and shops, and not going home till 6.0. Hinde Street is now full of such cars. If the cost will be 11/-daily, most people won’t do it; train & bus would cost them much less. But Londoners will be in a fix. Perhaps it will drive many Londoners to live in the country.

  I am getting more and more interested in N. Shute’s On the Beach, and am longing to know if the radio-active disease will get to the people in a few months. They are all planting trees, buying things for their future lives, and going on as usual. The disease has the symptoms of cholera, but is incurable, and you die in a few days. I won’t tell you what happens.

  It was v. nice to see you on Friday, looking so smart in your spotty dress, but you must dye your hearing-aid cord blue or navy.

  V. much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 14 August, [1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  Many thanks for yours, and for Race Relations.187 I will send them something. But, after hearing the Bishop of Jo’burg,188 I feel that African race relations have got past anything money can do, and can only be improved by mutual good feeling and justice….

  I hope you managed to hear the ‘Brains Trust’ at lunch time. It was quite good. All but Violet Bonham Carter were far too tolerant of Trades Union violence—as she said, they seem a privileged class. All this violence is very dreadful. And why on earth are homicidal maniacs allowed to leave their hospitals ‘on parole’ and murder children without being caught, then return to their hospitals still free to take walks? Do you think that poor little boy189 was killed by the same one who murdered the little girl and boy lately?190 But, from tonight’s Evening Standard, it seems that his uncle Colin is under suspicion. Perhaps he is known to be mad, tho’ not shut up. But wouldn’t his relations have known that? How dreadful madness is!…

  I suppose I should choose ‘Love one another’, as the essential Christian approach. Certainly not ‘Come unto me all you that labour’, like that lazy schoolboy.

  I think I shall read Enigma, Arnold Lunn’s book about M.R.A.191 I think its aims are to encourage more thinking about goodness—the four virtues—and to make people aim at them more vigorously, and think they are all that matters. I am interested that a R.C. should approve of it so much….

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  25 August,[1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  Here is yesterday’s Times sermon. Also the second bit of Old Age from the Church Times.192 I think it might suggest more pastimes for the old—raffia work, painting, sketching, patience, compiling anthologies of their favourite quotations, etc., etc. But perhaps the whole book does. I may take to sticking scraps, pictures, etc., on a screen, when too old to write. There are endless sedentary pursuits which are amusing & soothing.

  I see there is supposed to be a R.C. plot to convert England to the Church by radio. It seems there are a great number of them in useful places on the B.B.C. and TV, who are prepared to allow as much R.C. religion as they safely can, and it is all aimed at conversion, the R.C. Radio Guild says, not merely for their own flock. I wonder what effect it will have. It will be interesting to see. I hope it will be a counter-attraction to the Evangelical school. That is the school of Christianity I would least rather see getting popular, tho’ I suppose it does encourage right conduct. Middle and High Anglicanism will never, I fear, do much conversion here; it seems, like Liberalism, too much of a middle way, and what people like are extremes. I suppose I shall hear next week at Oxford how international Lib: is getting on.193…

  I have been reading Maisie Ward’s The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, volume 2, called Insurrection and Resurrection? 194 about the death of the Modernist movement, in which her father195 took a great interest, but was on the whole against it. Tyrrell, Von Hügel, Abbé Bremond, and other Modernists come into it. M.W. says the movement is now quite defeated. I wonder if it will ever rise again. The R.C. authorities are so careful about it that when a French book about ‘The Religious Thought of Von Hügel’ was pub
lished some years ago, the English version196 had to have all the parts about Modernism cut out; as this was one of his major interests, it must read oddly. But he had to be made out absolutely orthodox.197…

  Did you hear the discussion between two educationists the other day on public schools?198 Both thought that a good education was too important to be bought for one’s children when many parents can’t afford to. I wonder if it is really more unfair than other advantages for one’s children being bought. This idea of exact equality is growing….

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 [4 September, 1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... I got back from Oxford on Saturday, seldom having heard so much hot air blown off in 4 days. Foreigners really are very airy. They propose resolutions like sending telegrams to Russia telling them to get out of Hungary, and think they have proposed something useful. However, they enjoyed meeting other Liberals, and enjoyed talking and seeing Oxford, which was looking very lovely in sunshine…. I stayed at a nice hotel near Magdalen (where the conference was), with a pleasant staff, and a schoolboy doing porter’s work for the holidays, who told me how pleased he was to meet me, as they had been doing me (among other literature) at his school, so he was eager to carry my suitcase upstairs. I talked to Dr Micklem,199 but hadn’t time to ask him about the Congregational Church. I must consult him later. Today I lunched with Douglas Woodruff, the editor of The Tablet, and discussed the R.C. Church 1922-37, about which of course he knows a lot. I discuss the C. of E. with Susan Lister… and others. I do know something about M.R.A. and Quakerism, of course…. But Douglas Woodruff tells me that it [Moral Rearmament] is now out of bounds for R.C.s so they can’t go any longer for holidays at Caux.200 It is silly of the Pope, as apparently it sent R.C.s back to their church duties when they had grown neglectful.

  I have been reading a novel in which a wife’s husband, an artist, disappears during the war and is reported killed, and she presently marries again and has two more children, and after 11 years she hears from Italy that her first husband has been living in the house of an old countess, blind, but she can’t keep him any more. What would you have done? And what would be right to do? What she & her second husband agree to do is that she should go out and live with him, with her two elder children, leaving the 2nd family with the 2nd husband. She loves the second one best. I think I should have divorced the 1st for desertion, as he had deliberately given himself out for dead, being tired of his old life. He was quite a bad & selfish man.

  I am now reading Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor, which is amusing, about a bad but best-selling novelist. I have Ivy Compton-Burnett’s new one,201 which I will bring. I also read Behold your King, by Naomi Mitchison, the story of Good Friday, vivid, but has faults of style. I’m glad to see that it rejects the idea of Mary Magdalene as a harlot, for which there is no evidence at all.... I must now go out to hear Edith Sitwell read her poems, to restore an old R.C. chapel in a country house, the only chapel in England where Mass has been said continuously for over 400 years.202

  V. much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 15 September, [1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... Yes, I go to Oxford [again] tomorrow, till Monday... but I may come home on Sunday evening, very likely, as I have Monday engagements. The latest of these is an evening reception on a Turkish ship, to which the Embassy has invited me. I think it wise to keep in with Turkey, so shall very likely go to this. I like to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness—not that they are more unrighteous than most other governments, and less than some we can think of. I prefer to keep in with them all….

  On Sunday I attended 10 o’clock Mass at [the] King’s Weigh House203—a nice service, very like ours in words, but the minister, Dr Daniel Jenkins (a very learned man, I am told) celebrated in a black gown only, and stood facing us, and no candles on the altar, and of course no crucifix. A very small congregation, about 6 or 7, I should think, all communicants, including me.

  I must go to some other services there sometime. I have been reading a book about Congregationalism; they say they began in 1185 [sic], which seems strange.204 I have started a new group, called Inter-communionists, which I hope you will join. I shall make my communion in all the non-Anglican churches near me which have it at a possible time; in time I may even work up courage for St James’s round the corner, but at present I feel that would be bad manners as they wouldn’t let me if they knew.

  The thing is not to hide the fact that one is (probably) Anglican, in the Nonconformist chapels, or it would be useless as propaganda; I mean, I behave exactly as I do in an Anglican church, so that anyone noticing it would think ‘I see Anglicans communicate with us. We ought to communicate in their churches too.’ So gradually it will become common form on both sides, and the fences will lapse.

  I agree with the Wolfenden Report. I don’t like to see these unseemly goings-on in the streets, it looks very ugly & common.205 I don’t in the least mind grown men in private doing as they like together—why not?206 The whole business, homo & hetero, seems, when one thinks of it, a little unseemly, but the whole animal race appears to be so made that it seems to be an essential part of love (anyhow for males), though one may feel, with Sir Thomas Browne, that it is a pity nature did not invent ‘some nicer way than this of coition’.207 But we are as we are, and love is what it is, and it seems it can’t only be kept for reproduction purposes.

  I think sitting up part of the night might be all right if you really slept and rested for a corresponding time in the day—but would you? Otherwise, it would be much too tiring; even for me.

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 20 October, [1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  I enclose some religious reading for you, from Church and Sunday Times. (Ignore the Byron poem, which is carnal not spiritual.)208 Do you think any of the other animals will ever evolve into thinking and potentially religious beings? There really seems no biological reason why man should be alone in this. I don’t know what scientists say about it; I must ask Julian Huxley, whose special thing is biology.

  I handed the jazz Mass cutting to Fr Harris after church, but I fear he won’t try it.209 He said he had heard it performed, and decided that it would shock the congregation, who are many of them old-fashioned. I told him it would attract a quite new congregation, young and skiffle-minded.... I said he ought to be avant-garde from time to time, as the old will die out and there must be a new generation to take their places. He said he would talk to the organist, Dr Latham, about it. But we are rather stick-in-the-mud at St Paul’s. St Thomas’s [Regent Street] (Patrick McLaughlin’s church) was far more experimental….

  I will post you Vol 1 of The Early Church,210 if you’d like to read it. Then Vol 2 when you’ve read it.... It is interesting, but one doesn’t, I found, want to read it all, there’s so much apocryphal literature described, not all worth study. I like the account of the Gospels and their origins.

  I am just off to the Tate Gallery to see the paintings by chimps.211 I have found Manservant and Maidservant 212 and will bring it for you to look at, to see if you know it or not. I think it is one of the best, much better really than The Father and his Fate, which is almost too impossible in plot.

  Very much love….

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 30 October, [1957]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... I had been just going to write to say that unfortunately I can’t come this week, as I have the Cranford Folk Mass on Friday evening, and on Saturday have to draw the lottery at a St Paul’s sale. Anyhow it would have been difficult to come, as I suddenly have to do a longish Spectator review of a Life of Jowett213 by Monday, so ought to work all the spare time I have till then. I am looking forward to the Folk Mass. It won’t be very perfectly done, as the performers aren’t much, nor the musical instruments, in
fact I think they will only use a piano; but the congregation will join in, when they pick the tunes up, which people are v. quick at doing, mostly, and I shall get the idea of it. I will report on it.

  I heard the Dick Sheppard programme,214 but thought, as there are so many recordings of his voice, they should have had some; his voice and manner of preaching was so charmingly characteristic, and no one else could possibly convey it. No, he hadn’t a lot of common sense, tho’ more than one might think, and could be very shrewd, especially about people. As to being like Christ, certainly his love and understanding of people was, and his power of sacrifice, but less judgment, no doubt. He would never have abused the Pharisees in that violent way that I’m sure Christ didn’t (the Evangelists must have put that in, being themselves annoyed with the Pharisees). Dick would have asked them in to drinks and made friends with them and been calling them all by their Christian names in a minute or so, and would very likely win some of them round to his point of view, tho’ of course many would have strongly disapproved and disliked his ways, as people did the Peace Pledge Union.215 Dr Matthews216 and he were very fond of each other, though so utterly different. His pacifist programme was firmly based on what he kept repeating, ‘I must not kill my brother’, and the consequences of it had all, however terrible they might be, to be subordinate to that. I thought at the time, and still think, he was right, whatever the outcome might have been, and might be now. But he was quite often ill-judged in his methods, and worked himself to death of course. He was unique, I think, and it is nice to have known him….