by A. N. Wilson
Earlier in the century, indeed, the Tangata inhabitants, whose forebears had first settled the wetlands on which the city was now instructed, seven hundred years before the arrival of the British, had questioned the wisdom of building a city there at all. Their ancestors, centuries before a tall ship arrived in the sound and changed their destinies forever, disgorging men in the uniform of King George III’s Royal Navy, together with a naturalist – eager to dig up botanical specimens for shipment back to Kew Gardens – and an astronomer with instruments, and a cartographer, the Tangata headmen had found the wetlands rich in reeds, useful as building materials and for fabrics. They had caught fish there. And drifting on their rafts, gazing across Oka-kiri-sawa – what became Castlereagh Sound – its stupendous Pacific skies, its pink waters at sunset, its pale-fringed shore, they had sung their songs and invoked their deities. Here the Earth Mother Siyuta had felt the kickings of the angry foetus Mudu in her womb.
Since time out of mind, he had lain in her womb beneath the still waters of Oka-kiri-sawa. As she carried him, from Gooara-wey-wo in the north, with its snow-capped peaks, to the great granite gulfs of Hi-tula; from the fertile north-western plains of Bangi-fortu to the southerly silver sands of Mara-giwi, lapped by the Pacific, the Tangata had known that Mudu was disconcertingly stirring in his mother’s womb. From time to time, he kicked, and struggled to be born, though she wanted him to remain inside her, tied to her umbilical cord. It was said by those who composed the songs of old time, that from time to time, Mudu’s stirrings could be felt, however, and that Siyuta the Earth Mother cried out in pain, or even felt the pains of birth to be close at hand. The waters gushed in the warm geysers, near the great swampy moorland near the fjord-like headlands of Sama, and sometimes the earth itself shook.
Oswald Fish had known little or nothing of these things, though it is possible he had learnt them from Belinda, the tall, narrow-footed, springy-haired young Tangata woman with whom he so scandalously and openly took lodgings after the attachment to the chambermaid in the hotel caused him to pack his bags. They claimed they had gone north for a weekend and married, by special licence, in Carmichael. No one exactly believed this. He had, however, read not only the poems of Swinburne, which our Bishop, at the time, considered a quite unsuitable indulgence for a church architect, but also Sir Charles Lyell’s Geology. The Bishop, and the other clergy, found this knowledge on the architect’s part if possible even more offensive than his taste in verse, suggesting, as it did, scepticism about the processes of Creation itself, as described in the Book of Genesis. Fish knew, and did not hesitate to tell the Bishop, that to have built an entire city in the former wetlands was an act of incalculable hubris. He had written formally to his Church patrons to warn them that the Cathedral of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity would be safer with a wooden structure. In the event of a tremor, this would allow the stone-built structure around the wooden frame some room to sway.
The trustees who were supervising, and costing, the new building allowed themselves to be guided, not by the architect, but by the Bishop. He was a man of a self-confidence which his contemporaries had considered admirable. As a young man, he had been a master at Rugby School, going on, while still in his thirties, to become a headmaster himself, albeit of a less distinguished character than his old hero Dr Thomas Arnold, at a newly founded boarding school, where the boys endured team games, corporal punishment and very little in the way of intellectual stimulation beyond what could be found in the Latin histories. Even as a bishop, his reading, when he found time for it, would have been in the manly histories of Livy and Macaulay, rather than in the seedy incense-drowned imagination of Algernon Charles Swinburne which so entranced Oswald Fish.
When minerals were discovered in our Island during the 1840s, the large Pacific island had changed its character entirely, and it was now regarded, by the politicians and merchants of the Old Country, in an entirely different light. No longer merely a beautiful adornment to the British Empire, a fern-fringed Eden in the South Seas, doubling as a minor penal colony, as well as a place to which enterprising Britons could go to establish farms, it was now a source of wealth. There was copper, and there was gold. Although these were never, as it transpired, to be discovered in anything like the quantities which were later found in Nigeria or the Transvaal, there was an acceptance of the feeling that our Island must no longer be a place where the British farmers and their families could be expected to worship in charming wooden churches on the edge of their villages. Our Island was becoming a land of towns and cities. In Cambridge, the town furthest south in our Island, the Roman Catholics had built a church for their Irish navvies, Our Lady, Star of the Sea, the flamboyance of which amounted, in Bishop Suter’s eyes, to impertinence. In the small town of Blandford, which had been settled by people from Ulster, the Presbyterians had a chapel which was almost bigger than the Anglican church. Aberdeen had been an Anglican city since its earliest settlers. We have, to this day, the largest Anglican private schools – St Michael’s, the school for juniors, and St Augustine’s and St Hilda’s. There were six Anglican churches in our town before the Cathedral was built. The people of Aberdeen counted themselves lucky that the Catholics had made little inroad by the 1890s, but the Presbies were threatening an edifice as grandiosely ugly as the monster they’d built in Blandford. It was essential to show the flag, and neither the manly Bishop nor the trustees were having any truck with the decadent architect’s idea of a wooden-framed building.
Everyone knew about ‘Atalanta’. The Anglicans could not wait for their architect to leave them, and return to his dissipations in the Old Country. It disgusted them that he had chosen not merely to fornicate, but to do so with a young woman who did not even have the decency to be English. None of them believed for one second in the marriage certificate. The man was a dissolute monster, the woman no better than she ought to have been. Oswald Fish’s suggestion of wooden frames was rejected with the same manly vigour with which the Bishop would have defended the Thirty-Nine Articles, or the custom of beginning each day with immersion in a cold tub. To Fish’s idea that the new Cathedral be framed with pliable material, the Bishop was able to reply that other foundation had never man laid but Jesus Christ, the chief corner-stone. As for the architect’s ludicrous suggestion that an edifice built to God’s Glory, and to the honour of the Church’s supreme Governor, Queen Victoria, should be threatened by tremors – who ever heard such nonsense? It was faith that was required, not wooden frames. As for the suggestion that our Island had come into being as a result of the clashing of tectonic plates – some notion culled by Fish from Lyell’s Geology – the Bishop considered that, had it not verged on the blasphemous, it would have been laughable. The Cathedral was therefore built of stone.
The Bishop, moreover, had been reconsidering the design which Fish had submitted. True, the grey Gothic of the exterior was admirable, but was it not too restrained? Did not the city require a symbol of the supremacy of the Church by law established, a finger raised aloft to admonish the faithless and the nonconformists, in short, a tower surmounted in true medieval glory with a spire?
Fish did his best to resist the notion, but in the end, it is the customer who gets what his money demands. Fish warned them that such a structure would be unable to withstand any more shifts of those tectonic plates. They told him they were paying for a building, not for advice. The spire which he drew was indeed a glorious one, as was the tower beneath. The bells were commissioned from the foundry in Aldgate East in London, though it was some years after Fish left us that they were ready to be shipped out to the Island, blessed and hung in the tower. Belinda, the beautiful Tangata woman, was by then in her twenties. She was married. Her name was Mrs Wheeler. She had five children. She affected a dignified indifference to those gossips who claimed to see a resemblance between her firstborn and the by now absent English architect. When she first heard the changes rung from the tower, she had wept, just as her heart always swelled a little, when she ent
ered the sacred edifice, to see the Atalanta-like running nymph in the left-hand panel of the rood screen, an immortalization of a happy time, one which she considered beautiful, whatever the puritans and spoilsports might say. There are still old people in Aberdeen who met ‘Atalanta’, a tall old lady with a frizz of white hair and a jaunty felt hat, sometimes dangling with cherries or blossom. She continued to attend the Cathedral well into her nineties, dying in 1962.
Like I say, I used to go to the Cathedral with my mum, and like many Huias, I was brought up Anglican, but I’ve never been too sure what I actually believe. Nevertheless, there’s a kind of borderland in the mind between things we think as matters of fact, and things we experience as episodes of imagination. This is the borderland where Art flourishes. One of the things I really REALLY envy Digby is that she once met Iris Murdoch at Oxford. Murdoch did not believe in a personal God, but she believed we were living in something called the Time of the Angels, that there were, as it were, angelic presences, hanging over from the old days when the Christian religion was as solid and safe as earth before it was all shook up.
I like this idea. And I like the idea of Presences from the past, coming to haunt us, help us, inspire us. Is this what is going on in Four Quartets? I think so. Anyhow, I really like the idea of Oswald Fish, the architect of our beloved Cathedral. In my fantasy-life – and this is just from looking at the carvings and modelling and windows – I feel he was one of those really rare males, one who understood about women.
Liked them, for a start, which is an advantage not enjoyed by all the men I’ve ever known. You see, take Barnaby. OK, he’s a bit spoilt, because he has been the lover of Deirdre Hadley, our Green MP, and she is still in love with him, and I’m sure she’s told him he’s the best lover in the world, and for HER, he may have been. But my Love and I have talked about this, not in a nasty way, but with smiling, amused knowledge, and we are agreed. We think Barnaby’s idea of being a good lover is to make it last a long time. By ‘it’, he is simply referring to the simple tantric THING – just the shagging part, if one is being crude. He has not said this, but we both know. He thinks of all the rest of lovemaking as ‘foreplay’, and he probably thinks it is just something a bloke does out of politeness to get us in the mood. He does not realize that the whole THING is making love – the looking into one another’s eyes, the holding hands over the table, as we drink our last glass of wine, the embraces, the undressing, the stroking, the dancing, the kissing and tasting, all of it is making love. There are some people who think that when you go to church, you should banish all these thoughts. Apparently, Eleanor’s father Ronald was not one of them, and his daughter once told me about his wedding sermons in the fogbound West Midland towns. He would tell his parishioners – some of whom – she suspected – did not have her father’s love for the medieval Italian poet – about Dante Alighieri finding the love of God through the love of woman. He would sometimes tell them about the Albigensian Crusades. Cruel, desperately cruel, they had been, with such slaughter, all over the South of France, of the Cathars, who believed that the human body was wicked and that we are all spirit, and you get to the truth by denying the flesh. And however cruel the Church was in persecuting the Cathars, Ronald would say, they were right to attack the Cathars’ ideas, because Christianity taught that God had become human, and thereby sanctified the body. And in the marriage service, we were reminded of this, where it says Christ ‘adorned and beautified’ the marriage feast at Cana by his presence. ‘And,’ Ronald would say to his parishioners, ‘he adorns and beautifies your marriage with his presence, as you say to one another – With my body I thee worship.’ St Dominic was right to dispute with the Cathars. The body is sacred. By your bodily worship of one another, in sex, you make human souls.
Lesley Mannock used to say, ‘I don’t HAVE a body, I AM a body.’ And he and Ronald used to say the reason the Anglican Communion is tearing itself apart about homosexuality is because it has not understood the true Christian theology of sexuality of any kind. ‘With my body I thee worship.’ And all the distrust of the body, and fear of sex, and division of flesh and spirit, this was Gnosticism, not Christianity. And quite what the congregations made of it in the fogbound West Midlands, we do not know.
The trouble with this is it is very very difficult to believe. It is easy to say, but in practice, it is much easier either to be a pure materialist and think (whatever this would mean) that the body and the material are all that there is; or to be a Gnostic and to think that flesh and spirit are always at war. Most forms of Christianity, even those practised by St Dominic (who had so opposed the Gnostic Cathars), encouraged austerity, chastity and a distrust of the physical.
Perhaps this was true of Eleanor Bartlett, our Dean. Although, when conducting wedding services, she tried to reproduce her father’s theology – encouraging the couples to rejoice in their physical union, and to worship one another with their bodies – she actually shrank from the physical. True, she was married, and Charlie Nicolson was married. But even if this was not the case, she would have shrunk from a full sexual relationship with him. Indeed, the very fact that they couldn’t ‘go the whole way’ was presumably what made the flirtation a possibility in the first place.
Digby’s attitude to sex was harder to read. There she was, in Barnaby Farrell’s arms, but – she held back from what D.H. Lawrence calls this ridiculous dancing of the buttocks. But then, Digby and Eleanor were very different. Had to be. Their survival depended, in some ways, on their apartness. So, Digby, inside her, with a large part of herself, resented being in Aberdeen and wanted to become the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, or some such, whereas Eleanor was in love with Dad, and revered his life of ministry in obscure and fogbound places, and wanted to be like him, and regarded it as a privilege to be the Dean of a cathedral. There were so many other points of difference too. Eleanor fought uncharitable thoughts as soon as they arose; Digby did not check judgment. Winced, for example, at the way that Dionne Lillicrap, our Bishop, spoke; thought she was a waste of space, and allowed herself the reflection (privately, of course) that this was quite a lot of space. Eleanor was happy to be here, it made her think of her visits with her Huia mum; Digby sometimes looked out of her tower window and longed for old Europe, simply anything old, a Georgian drainpipe would do, whereas Eleanor? You know what? It was actually a relief to her not to be bothered by the clang and peal of bells from Oxford’s dreaming what’s their names.
Eleanor the tribal Anglican was sincere when she sang, O Lord open thou our lips. She thought that Plato was right, there was a world of value out there, a world of value and truth bigger than ourselves which religion helps us to contemplate. She did not believe it was possible that Bach or Hildegard of Bingen or T.S. Eliot were listening to nothing; she deemed their experience, translated into music and poetry, to be something real. Whereas Digby. She was a cynic about religion. She told that Tragedy class over and over again that tragedy is based on the contingency of value. Morality, or Ethics, are something we human beings make up for largely utilitarian reasons. We do so to make order for ourselves in a disorderly hostile universe. God, the gods, the Fates, the Furies, etc. are ways of describing the capriciousness of things. Tragedy is a way of giving a dignified response to the indignities thrown at us by Nature. Anyhow, that’s them – Digby and Eleanor Bartlett, and I was the only person who had quite seen this.
But I wonder whether they did not both respond, as I did, to Oswald Fish’s ‘angels’ in the Cathedral, to the Atalanta figure ever running, ever about to lose her diaphanous drapery; to the obviously feminine angels in the windows, to the Swinburnian paganism of the Cathedral’s décor. Maybe Atalanta, and the female angels, in this Time of the Angels, were guiding us all in ways we could not see. Guiding you and me, my Love, to Love and to Truth?
CHAPTER FOUR
WE NOW KNOW THAT DEIRDRE HADLEY, OUR MUCH-RESPECTED Green MP, had thrown herself into public life with especial vigour when her heart was broken. Br
oken by none other than Barnaby Farrell. But if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you about that a bit later. When I say that Deirdre is much respected, I really mean it. Even those who are in a different place politically recognize her courage, her total integrity, her intelligence. And she has been a wonderful MP since the Quake, helping her constituents in innumerable ways, like, for example, persuading local businesses temporarily to empty their warehouses on the edge of town and make the space available for performance-space, for schools, and so on; like chivvying to get central Government grants to speed up rebuilding of the hospital. She has also been a very practical helper – every spare hour has been spent dispensing tea and food in the temporary refuges which, for years after the big Quake, are still needed. This is not to mention her tireless, detailed work with lawyers pursuing the insurance companies who have been mean, or slow, in paying up to allow householders to rebuild or repair their properties; and, more exacting, and more dangerous, pursuing some of the dodgier property developers in their attempts to cover up their secret deals with Rex Tone, and, as we now know, with Dionne our Pontiff. So, the more I admire her now, the more I repent of how little I used to revere her when she was my English teacher at St Hilda’s. That isn’t to say she was a good teacher!
Hers was the only voice in our public discourse which consistently warned us about the dangers of a possible quake. Everywhere else on the Island people had been imagining for years that they would be affected by a quake on the scale of the disasters which have befallen San Francisco or Italy or New Zealand in the past. Hadley was the only person to argue that Aberdeen, because of where it was built, on the wetlands, was a prime site for a catastrophe.