Through a glass darkly – 145

Hedgehogs have never been a major part of my life. In our early days in Paris, Susie and I had a hedgehog that regularly visited our [first floor] garden. In the very hot summer of 1976 we fed the animal with stale baguette and milk [a big mistake – See below]. And the hedgehog left fleas which then attached themselves to us and our young kitten Myosotis. A decade or so later we occasionally had hedgehogs our garden in Duns. Guscott, our border collie, would circle them curiously and them prod them very cautiously with his paw. Here in Edinburgh we frequently have foxes in the garden, even two or three at a time. But we have only once seen a hedgehog.

Sarah Sands: The Hedgehog Diaries

Sands’ book, sub-titled A story of Faith, Hope, and Bristle, begins when she and her grandson find a poorly hedgehog in her garden in Norfolk. They take the animal to a hedgehog sanctuary on the outskirts of King’s Lynn. Emma painstakingly picks maggots off with tweezers and flushes the animal with a warm saline solution. The hedgehog is called Peggy, and Emma agrees that when she has over-wintered with a foster family she can return to Sands’ garden in the spring.

This encounter takes Sands on a journey of discovery. She discovers that Rory Stewart’s most watched speech on YouTube was about hedgehogs. Stewart points out that hedgehogs long predate human beings, and were around 56 million years ago. He tells her that hedgehogs are a safe way of taking the sound and fury out of social media. Rowan Williams is another hedgehog enthusiast; one of his Desert Island Discs choices was The hedgehog’s song by the Incredible String Band. He applauds the hedgehog’s practical desire to get on with the next job in hand. A prosaic virtue. Hedgehogs like dolphins and otters speak to us of what is precarious. “We get hedgehogs when there is a balance of nature, a co-existence with our environment rather than a domination or destruction of it.” Hedgehogs have managed to outlive roads, dogs, strimmers and pesticides, but they are now an endangered species.

But to say that Sands’ book is about hedgehogs is like saying that Moby Dick is about whales. While Peggy is recovering with a foster family, Sands’ 92 year-old father has suffered a heart attack and is coming towards the end of his life. His heart can be managed with drugs, but no other treatment is possible. This is COVID time.  Her father moves to a local nursing home. “Am I going home ?”, he asks. Sands and his family visit him in the nursing home, lying in bed looking a bit like Francis of Assisi. He sips protein drinks through a straw, and has given up reading The Times. The local vicar visits regularly. [This is rural Norfolk.] He is eagerly looking forward to watching Six Nations rugby on the television, – and then sleeps through it ! “I am so idle these days”, he says. [I slept through the first 10 minutes of England v. Ireland the other day.] Sands recalls the Archbishop of Canterbury telling her that the essence of ministry is “holding the hands of the dying”.

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 [Susie’s birthday], a Beatrix Potter exhibition opened at the Victoria & Albert museum. When Potter’s first love, Norman Warne, the son of her publisher died, she married a vicar’s son and they farmed 400 acres and 2 flocks of sheep in the Lake District. The sketches for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle were made on a holiday to the Lakes in the summer of 1904. Her drawings are anatomically accurate, but with Mrs Tiggy-Winkle wearing a quaint little pinafore. Her second source of inspiration was Kitty Macdonald, a Scottish washerwoman whom they employed at their house in Perthshire. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is both thorny and tender, wild and tame, powerful and defenceless. Sands evokes Derrida who saw the hedgehog as a metaphor for poetry. And who was a great advocate of animal rights. He believed that animals suffer, and that humans cause their suffering. With Mrs Tiggy-Winkle the twist comes at then of the story; when Lucie wants to say goodbye she has disappeared; and is seen “running running up the hill”. And is now revealed as nothing but a hedgehog.

Hedgehog rescuer Emma is frustrated by well-meaning people. They wait too long to bring in ailing hogs. And they feed them  with bread and milk though they are lactose intolerant. When they hibernate they live off their fat. Hibernation is an extraordinary state; more than sleep and less than death. Sands speaks to a Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford. Who describes sleep as “taking absence from the world”. The distinction between life and death is hazy, as when humans are kept artificially alive. Are people who die in their sleep aware of passing from life to death ? Sands notes that those who are close to death are often thought to be mentally clearer and calmer. An Astronautical Conference declared that, if there is to be interplanetary travel, we need to learn how to encourage crew members to hibernate. So that humans would require less energy and less food, and would produce less bodily waste.

The sick hedgehog Peggy is ready to be returned to the wild. It is the right temperature [12ºc] and she is the right weight [892g]. Sands puts Peggy carefully in her new hide in the garden. And in the same night her father dies. Peacefully. By his bed is a copy of the Compline prayer: “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep … “ Her father had prepared the order of service for the funeral. And Sands reads his words about the departure of the pink-footed geese back to Iceland.

Sands’ friend Jane Byam Shaw brought up her son Felix as a nature lover. When he was 14 he died unexpectedly on holiday in France. After his death Jane, who is not religious, bonded with butterflies and with hedgehogs. She set up hedgehog highways in her native city of Oxford. And found that helping hedgehogs helped her cope with her grief. In 2019 Ben Goldsmith’s 15-year-old daughter Iris died in a vehicle accident. He withdrew to his farm and wondered how he could live. Rainbows and wild birds and Iris’s pony were a source of comfort. It was nature that gave him purpose and solace. His brother is Zac Goldsmith, the Environment Minister. Zac Goldsmith says we should nurture hedgehogs, which are a symbol of hope. We need to invest in creating hedgehog highways. 

In Wind in the Willows, two baby hedgehogs live peacefully with kindly Badger and the Mole and the Water Rat. And Badger serves them oatmeal porridge for breakfast. “It is a story of home and hearth, of bacon for breakfast, and afternoon buttered toast by the fire and hierarchies of native wildlife …”. In the real world badgers are one of the few animals that happily munch up hedgehogs, as they do wasps’ nests and baby rabbits. Dogs often bark at and chase hedgehogs, but not aggressively. Hedgehogs are a sign of harmony with nature. But there can be difficult issues. Two decades ago some 600 hedgehogs were culled on the Uists [in the face of strong protests], as they were said to be guilty of attacking the eggs and chicks of Arctic terns and other wading birds.

Sands scatters her father’s ashes in a place he loved, under a tree where stone curlews nested. And wild geese flew overhead. [At my brother’s interment in May 2022 we heard the song, not recorded, of a lark rising.] “My father’s faith was that nature was an embodiment of the divine, and that here he is as part of Creation, earth to earth”. As she sits on the South Uist she imagines her father  with her, wearing his binoculars, absorbed by nature. And now he is “absorbed by nature, as for all of us flesh is grass”. She remembers the words of the Bidding Prayer, for “all those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light”. And she returns home to Norfolk, deeply content to find a hedgehog by her pond.

Envoi

It’s a lovely book. Thoughtful, and not too long. Bereavement is something that we will all face, sooner or later. As Christians we lean heavily on our Easter hope. Our conviction that there is something beyond life on this earth, even if the latitude and longitude and the temperature of that place are unknown. We rest on Jesus’s promise to his disciples that we shall see him again, that in his Father’s house there are many rooms, and that we shall be reunited in some mysterious way with those whom we love and have lost. Those who hear this message for the first time at funerals often struggle with it. Sands does not appear to have any clear Christian faith. But she seems to find solace in her sense that all shall be well with the world. And that hedgehogs can be a symbol of this wellness.

February 2025

Through a glass darkly – 144

Trump’s re-election is a mystery to me and to many European social democrats. [I would say ‘liberals’, but I am no longer sure what the word means.] We all know that he is a a self-obsessed egomaniac. And that he is a serial liar. And that he is a serial abuser of women. And a rather shady businessman. With a strangely orange face. But he also seems to have a very limited understanding of the world and a very limited vocabulary. When Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde challenged him at the traditional service in the national cathedral, asking him to “have mercy on the people in our country who are scared right now”, and on immigrants and on those now threatened with deportation, Trump’s response was that “she’s not a nice person … … not very good at her job”. Which is the language of a peevish five-year-old. The sermon was probably the only critical comment that Trump heard on his first full day in office. And I thought the Bishop should be commended for “‘speaking truth to power’.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian, born into a reform Jewish family in Washington DC in 1964. She specialises in the history of Communism and in the history of central and eastern Europe. She speaks Russian and Polish as well as English, she is married since 1992 to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and cabinet minister [currently Minister for Foreign Affairs], and she has had Polish citizenship since 2013.

I first came across her through her book Gulag: A history of the Soviet prison camps which won a Pulitzer prize in 2004. Gulag traces the history of the camps, beginning with Lenin and the Solokvi prison camp, through the construction of the White Sea canal, to the great expansion of camps under Stalin doing the Second World War. The book looks in detail at the brutal lives and deaths of the inmates; their arrest and interrogation, the all too frequent incidents of starvation and disease, and the circumstances of their deaths. Applebaum draws on the diaries and writings of camp survivors, of whom Solzhenitsyn is the best known. I took the book on holiday to Majorca about 15 years go, and it is a grim read.

After our time in Kyiv in 2021-22 I read Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine [published in 2017]. It is another grim read. The book tells the story of the Holodomor [literally ‘death by hunger’], also known as the Ukrainian famine, which killed several million Ukrainians in 1933-34. Applebaum contends that the famine was man-made, and that the famine was deliberately engineered by Stalin in order to eradicate the Ukrainian independence movement. [Other historians have argued that the famine was a consequence of the Soviet dash for industrialisation and the over-rapid switch to collective farming.] The book won Applebaum the Duff Cooper prize [for the second time], and contributed to the decision of the European Parliament to label the famine a genocidal act against the people of Ukraine carried out by the Soviet government.

Iron Curtain: the crushing of Eastern Europe

Iron Curtain [published in 2012] is about the crushing of Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War. A.N. Wilson [not necessarily a reliable guide] says it is “the best work of modern history I have ever read”. The book concentrates on the three countries of Hungary, Poland, and East Germany; very different countries in terms of their economic and political history, but which had all experienced constitutional government and democratic elections.

Applebaum reminds us of the chaos of Eastern Europe in 1945. By the end of the Second War huge armies and vicious secret policemen had marched back and forth across the region, each time bringing political and ethnic changes. The city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. When the war ended it was called L’viv, was no longer in eastern Poland but in the western part of Soviet Ukraine, and the majority of its Polish and Jewish prewar population had been murdered or deported. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the notion of national sovereignty for any of the nations of Eastern Europe, and strove to eliminate their educated elites. Of the 5 and a half million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. [Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933.]

We tend to think of the last phases of the war as a series of liberations. But it certainly didn’t feel like that for the defeated Germans, and especially not for Berliners. Yes, Soviet soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration and extermination camps, and they emptied Gestapo prisons. But Germans remember very well the looting, the arbitrary violence, and the mass rape which followed the arrival of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers were shocked by the [relative] material wealth of Eastern Europe. Liquor and ladies’ clothing, furniture and crockery, bicycles and household linen were stolen from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states, and shipped back home. No private car was safe. Factories and industrial equipment were systematically dismantled and shipped back east. The Red Army was brutal and powerful. And no Allied Government was in a position to influence what the Red Army did in the occupied lands.

The post-war leaders who emerged in these countries, Ulbricht in East Germany, Bierut in Poland, and Rákosi in Hungary, were all [in the jargon of the time] ‘Moscow communists’, trained in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. By contrast the ‘international Communists’, who had spent the war in western Europe or in North America, were all suspect, as revisionists, or bourgeois deviants, or Trotskyists. But party members who had survived the arrests and purges and confusion of the 1930s now emerged as true fanatics, totally loyal to Stalin and to Soviet policy.

Following on the heels of the Red Army came the creation of a new secret police force, always modelled on the Soviet pattern, the NKVD. Secret policemen were trained in the arts of persuasion, bribery, and blackmail; they convinced wives to spy on their husbands, children to inform on their parents. Military tribunals dealt with suspects, courts without lawyers or witnesses. The Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and at Buchenwald are now pressed back into service to incarcerate tens of thousands of NKVD prisoners. Prisoners were not systematically killed, but many died because they were ignored and malnourished and forgotten. The Soviet Union promoted ethnic cleansing across the region and there was widespread anti-semitism. Large numbers of Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and to North America and to Palestine.

The Soviets were totally opposed to the institutions of a civil society. Artistic and cultural groups of all kinds, both for young people and for adults, were banned if they were not affiliated to Communist party organisations. In post-war Warsaw young communists descended on the YMCA  and smashed jazz records with hammers. Scouting, which had surprisingly strong roots in Eastern Europe, was looked on with suspicion by the authorities, who sought to diminish its influence by bringing it under state control. Similarly the Hungarian People’s Colleges movement, which sought to promote communal living, democratic decision making, folk dancing and singing in rural Hungary, was destroyed by the authorities. Applebaum notes” “The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition for their citizens’ passions and talents”.

High Stalinism

By the end of 1948 the Eastern European Communist parties had forced through enormous changes in the new People’s Democracies. They had created  from scratch the secret police. And they had eliminated any opposition parties. But the socialist paradise was still far away. 

The churches were subject to harassment and worse. But religious leaders remained as a source of alternative moral and spiritual authority. In East Germany the state introduced the Jugenweihe, as a kind of secular equivalent to confirmation services. In Hungary monasteries were closed at short notice. In Poland Catholic elementary schools were progressively phased out. In Hungary Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested and imprisoned. In 1949 Stalin had decreed that the Communist parties should work actively to recruit priests as informers, and to drive a wedge between  Catholic churches in the eastern bloc and the Vatican. 

Applebaum’s book contains amazing photos of the all-female construction brigade working on the new steel mill at Sztálinvaros – Stalintown. This town was unique in Hungary, but one of several ‘socialist cities’ in the People’s Democracies, each founded around vast new steel mills, part of a comprehensive attempt to jump-start the creation of a true totalitarian civilisation. The design and architecture of the new cities was to reflect a socialist blueprint; there were to be no beggars and no periphery. In spite of high intentions the cities rapidly became lawless slums. Nowa Huta adjacent to Krakow was the first Polish city to be built without a church. In 1959 the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla [later Pope John Paul II] celebrated an outdoor mass in a field where he had applied for a church to be constructed. Applebaum sees Nowa Huta as a symbol of the failure of totalitarianism in Poland; “failed planning, failed architecture, a failed utopian dream”. 

By 1951 there was no longer anything that resembled an opposition party in eastern  Europe; no active opposition, no armed opposition. But there was a passive opposition which took the form of jokes and graffiti and unsigned letters. Youthful discontent was fuelled by American radio, broadcast from Luxembourg or from West Berlin. Teenage rebels, known in Poland as bikiniarze, developed a taste for jazz and an envy of American consumerism. Between 1948 and 1961 an estimated three million people [out of a population of 18 million] left East Germany for the West. Many of them because they thought they could make more money.

In the fullness of time Stalin died – in March 1953. A subsequent revolution in Berlin was brutally suppressed with Soviet troops and T-34 tanks. Three years later an uprising in Budapest provoked a second Soviet invasion. But the suppression of the rebellion led to a significant change in the perception of the Soviet Union by Western Communist parties and their sympathisers. The French Communist party fractured, the Italian party broke with Moscow, and the British party lost most of its members. Any lingering rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union was over.

Envoi

Yes, it’s all history now. But some questions remain. Why did the socialist system produce such dire economic results ? Why was the Communist propaganda so unconvincing ? Might more liberal measures have prevented the [eventual] revolutions of 1953 and 1956 ?

 And there are lessons to be learned. In February 1956, Nikita Krushchev stood before the 20th Party Congress and denounced the ‘cult of personality’ which had surrounded the late Stalin:

“it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behaviour. Such a belief about a man … was cultivated among us for many years”.

The speech literally killed Bleslaw Bierut, the Polish leader who was present at the Congress, and died there of a stroke or heart attack, presumably brought on by shock.

In an age of resurgent demagogues, we would do well to heed this warning against the cult of personality. [Think Trump and what some wit has labelled the Nerd Reich.] And we need to learn to value both the democratic process, and the institutions of civil society which serve as a defence against totalitarian regimes. Whether of left or of right.

February 2024

Through a glass darkly – 143

My diary says that we are going to Grenoble this week, for another locum job. But we’re not going. Which I’m sorry about. Partly because St Marc’s is a diverse and welcoming congregation. Partly because Grenoble is an attractive city, surrounded by snow-topped mountains. [A city where our daughter Joanna lived for a year back in the 1990s.] And partly because this mobility problem [an arthritic hip] probably brings to an end a decade of locum work within the Diocese in Europe.

ICS conference, Beatenburg, 2013

You could say it is all [Bishop] Robert’s fault. At an ICS conference at Beatenburg, near Interlaken, in the spring of 2013, he asked me if I had any plans for life after retirement from Lyon. Specifically if I might be available for work in chaplaincies in Europe. As a result of that conversation I subsequently spent 18 months at Holy Trinity, Brussels, in 2013-15.  Robert Innes was then the Chancellor [Senior Pastor] and John Wilkinson the Canon Pastor, and I enjoyed the new-to-me experience of working in a chaplaincy team. Which began most days with Morning Prayer in the church building. At which we were joined one day by Archbishop Justin and his wife. Susie’s old friend Liz kindly lent me her house in Etterbeek, as she was away living in Switzerland; and I had an opportunity to get to know a city [Brussels] and a country [Belgium] which I had only previously passed through on the way to somewhere else.

In those days I was a bit obsessed with questionnaires. So I set up meetings with as many of the congregation as possible, and used a questionnaire to have structured conversations about their faith journeys and involvement in church life. Some of the conversations took an hour, some were much longer. The longest as I recall took all day. In the end, after 150 interviews, with help from a statistically literate member of the congregation, I produced a detailed church profile. But for me the richness of some of the conversations was of more value than the raw data.

Baptismal candle, Holy Trinity, Brussels, 2014

It rained a lot in Brussels. In Ibiza where we did a holiday chaplaincy later in 2015 it didn’t rain at all. We enjoyed the beaches and enjoyed swimming, at least until Susie was stung by a jellyfish. But the  chaplaincy model which had been launched in conjunction with Young at Heart package holidays, with chaplaincies organising Songs of Praise events in hotel lounges on Sunday afternoons, was past its sell-by date. Susie and I hovered around holiday companies’ Welcome events like time-share sales reps. And attendance at Sunday services was disappointing. 

Notre-Dame, Paris, 2016

In 2016 I made a brief trip to St Michael’s, Paris, as a substitute for James Buxton who was ill. [ “I’m a substitute for another guy … … “]. It was my first visit to St Michael’s since I had passed through in pre-ordination days back in 1983. And I had the pleasure of getting to know Alyson Lamb, the then chaplain, whose early death last year was a great loss. Later that year we spent ten weeks in Strasbourg, staying in the chaplaincy flat in the centre of town. The congregation  worships in a Dominican chapel close to the university. For many churches there is a strong feeling that the ‘Golden Age’ lies in the past, and my recollection is that Strasbourg were struggling to  find their way alongside some newer and more dynamic English-speaking churches. [But a glance at the church website suggests that the church now is again flourishing.]

Early in 2017 Susie and I made our first visit to Chantilly, following the departure of Nick Clarke. It is a welcoming congregation, worshipping in what looks and feels like a rural English parish church. With a purpose-built chaplaincy flat and church centre next door. The church and the plot of land on which it stands were a 19th century gift from the Doc d’Aumale, a fabulously wealthy anglophile who had inherited 66 million lives and the estate of his god-father the last Prince of Condé. From the late 19th century there was a substantial English-speaking community in Chantilly, many of them connected with the horse-racing industry.

Chateau, Chantilly, 2017

We made further visits to Brussels in 2017 and 2018. Liz had sold her house in Etterbeek, and the church found us accommodation in apartments linked to members of the congregation. It is always easier going back to places. At Holy Trinity I knew where the key was kept, which was invaluable for the early Communion service. Paul Vrolijk had succeeded Robert Innes as the senior Chaplain, but many of those whom I had interviewed in 2013-14 were still in place.

The first of several visits to St Marc’s, Grenoble, came in the summer of 2019. Grenoble is an attractive city in south-east France, surrounded with a succession of snow-capped mountains. I knew this congregation a little in Roy Ball’s time, but more recently the church had struggled a bit against a newer American-led congregation. St Marc’s is made up of a handful of long-term British expats. a sizeable group of Africans, mainly from Nigeria and Cameroon, and a clutch of PhD students from a variety of different countries. We did two spells at Grenoble in 2020, preached for them on line during the COVID lock-down in 2020, and returned for what looks like a final visit in February-March 2024. Returning home to Edinburgh late on Easter Day.

All Age Worship, St Marc’s, Grenoble, 2024

Further afield we spent Advent and Christmas 2020 with the congregation of St Nicolas, Ankara. The congregation worships in a chapel within the Embassy compound, which means that entry is tightly controlled. It was a complex situation as there had been big group of Iranian refugees in the previous year, but rifts and tensions and aggressive behaviour had led to all Iranians [and Russians] being banned from the compound. Celebrating Communion with a group of Farsi-speaking Iranians in a chapel in the former French Embassy was a very moving experience. We were also delighted to have an opportunity to spend a couple of days in Istanbul, a city which I first visited as a hitch-hiker more than fifty years earlier. And also to visit Konya, the Iconium visited by Paul and Silas in Acts 14, but also the home of Rumi [of the Whirling Dervishes], the Sufi poet and mystic

When the COVID lock-down eased, we were able to spend Advent and Christmas 2021 at Christ Church, Kyiv. In Ukraine we were well out of our comfort zone, but we were warmly received by Christina, the church Warden, and by Kate Davenport, then working in the British Embassy. During our time there I was pleased to baptise the young son of one of the military attachés, Tam, a gunner from Fife. And we took the opportunity to visit Lviv, formerly known as Lwow, a delightful, historic city in the far west of Ukraine. Tam assured me that Russia did not need to invade Ukraine, but the Russian troops invaded a month after we left. And suddenly the city from which we had just returned was all over the television news.

Christmas Day, 2021, Kyiv

In the autumn of 2022 I was back in Chantilly again, following Sarah’s departure. This time it was just me as Susie was in Wycombe with our daughter Joanna who was severely ill. Queen Elizabeth died while I was in Chantilly, and we held a memorial service which was very close in time to the funeral of the long-serving Church Treasurer. [And then very sadly Joanna died too. A loss with which we continue to struggle.] Early in 2023 I had the pleasure of baptising two teenagers.

Baptism at St Peter’s, Chantilly, 2023

After Easter 2023, as we came towards the end of our locum work, we returned to Ankara. During our time there I was asked to judge a scone-making contest at the Embassy Coronation Garden Party, something for which theological college signally failed to equip me. And during the past fifteen months we have made final return visits to Chantilly and to Grenoble.

Ankara congregation, 2024

A decade of locum work around the Diocese in Europe has exemplified Jesus’s words “in my Father’s house there are many rooms”. It has been a rich experience. I am immensely grateful for the hospitality we have received; in particular from Peter and Carole Ludlow, and from Susan Hudson, in Brussels; from James and Julia Howes, and from Ann and Alain Bouchardon, in Chantilly; from Christina and her family in Kyiv; from Stefan and Kaska Michaelis in Ankara; and from Zaz and Jean-Claude in Grenoble. And I have enjoyed hearing some of the stories of a wonderfully diverse group of people in this amazing diocese.

Vicar for hire

I am quite happy worshipping here in Edinburgh on Sunday mornings, in St Peter’s, Lutton Place, and in the nascent Newington Trinity. But I continue to miss the particular dynamic of these gathered, multi-cultural, multilingual congregations around Europe.

January 2025

Through a glass darkly – 142

Susie and I were married on Saturday, January 11th, 1975. It seems a long time ago. I had just started working in Paris for Oxford University Press, and had travelled up from London on the train the previous day. Susie had given up teaching in Oxford the previous summer, and had been living at home for a few months and working for Richard Demarco, the Edinburgh artist and promoter of the performing and visual arts. The night before the wedding I had a drink with Clive in Lesley’s Bar on Causewayside, the last time that I was there. Peter, my younger brother and best man, was travelling from somewhere in Germany, fell asleep and missed a late night train connection, and had to be collected from Waverley Station early on the morning of the wedding after coming up from London on the sleeper.

Weddings were much more basic in those days. We were married in Mayfield Church by Bill McDonald at 12.00 midday. The organist surprised himself by being able to play When I’m Sixty Four while we signed the register. There was a reception at a hotel up towards Fairmilehead which is no longer there. Susie and I were away in time to catch the 4.00pm train back down to London, where we were staying overnight on the way to Annecy. John Akast, a friend from primary school, and more recently a High Court judge, joined us on the train. I suppose he thought that we would like to have someone to talk to ?

On Saturday, our 50th anniversary, we went out to breakfast. Susie had carefully chosen a bar/restaurant in the former Royal Infirmary, now redeveloped as The Quarter Mile. But their ovens were down. So we ate in a Turkish cafe across the road. [Formerly Ollie Bongo’s for cognoscenti of Edinburgh cafes.] The waiter was a third year Computer Science student from Istanbul. I told him that I was first in Istanbul, as a hitch-hiker, in 1964. He told me that his father was born in 1965. Later we were in Marks and Spencer’s, and a nice girl at the check-out gave us a bunch of tulips.

We were in Mayfield Church again yesterday morning. Except that it is now becoming Newington Trinity. The first hymn, by Timothy Dudley-Smith, was highly appropriate:

Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided,
urged and inspired us, cheered us on our way,
sought us and saved us, pardoned and provided:
Lord of the years, we bring our thanks today.

I wore my wedding suit, a double-breasted, burgundy velvet suit with slightly flared trousers [from Simpsons in Piccadilly]. It attracted some comment, and I was assured that I could get a good price for it on Vintage. “Don’t give it to a charity shop”, people said. And after church we enjoyed an excellent lunch with eight close friends at Blonde on St Leonard’s Street.

Susie and I have been assembling some photos. Here are a few photos from down the years. There are hundreds of others !

Honeymoon, near Annecy, January 1975

Dinner, Grand Canal, Venice, summer 1975

Woodstock garden, 1984

ICS summer chaplaincy, Quimper, 2008

Retirement, Edinburgh garden, 2015

Snake Canyon, ? Colorado, 2016

Kyiv, Christmas Day, 2021

Best wishes for 2025 to all [both ?] my readers.

January 2025

Through a glass darkly – 141

We spent  Christmas at Homelands at Lundin Links, enjoying time with Craig and Amelia and Eloïse, and the hospitality of Jan and Colin and Kitty. It was mild and dry, and our room looked across the links golf course to the coastal path of the Firth of Forth.

Remembering the Sixties

October 1962 is where the book begins. [It ends 600 pages later with the funeral of Winston Churchill in January 1965.] In the Observer Penelope Gilliatt praised Sean Connery in the newly released Dr No for playing James Bond as a gentle send-up “full of submerged self-parody”. But Philip Larkin went to see it in Hull, “a pretty poor film” with Connery “a cross between an out of work Irish actor and an assistant lecturer in physics”.

At Highbury little Bangor City lost 1-2 to mighty Napoli in the European Cup Winners Cup. Sir Keith Joseph, the newly appointed housing minister, told the Tory party conference in Llandudno that the current rate of slum clearance was 600,000 to 700,000 houses a year, and that he was pinning his hopes for future housing targets on industrialised [or system] building. One party delegate, Mr J. Addey of Huddersfield, insisted “our cry should not be slum clearance, but central heating and hot water for Coronation Street”. John Osborne wrote a diatribe in Tribune about the Common Market, “a desolate affair of obsessive shopping and guzzling”. Sussex University opened the doors of its modern and very expensive buildings, designed by Sir Basil Spence, at Falmer outside Brighton. A member of the University Grants Committee later reflected: “if only we had looked after the Spences, the pounds would have taken care of themselves”.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited the new BMC [British Motor Corporation] plant at Bathgate in West Lothian, and hailed it as a new chapter in Scottish industrial life. Alf Ramsey from Ipswich Town became the new England football manager. He was enthusiastically greeted in the Daily Express as “a man with a mind like a combination of a camera and a computer … …a man able to persuade a camel that it is really a Derby winner”. Love Me Do entered the hit parade at number 27, and the Beatles made their first television appearance, shown only on Granada. At midnight on October 22nd President John F. Kennedy announced that Soviet missile sites had been irrefutably detected in Cuba. Two days later 500 demonstrators clashed with the police outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The Cuban Missile crisis seared itself into the memory of young people. “I remember walking to college [Ealing Art College]”, wrote Pete Townshend, aged 17, future rock star, in his diary, “and thinking , ‘This is the end of the world, I am going to die’. I was actually a bit pissed off when nothing happened”. 

The book is David Kynaston’s A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65, which I have been reading on loan from the Fountainhall Road library. Kynaston is a cricket lover and social historian, and the book is one of a series, Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling the story of Britain from Clement Attlee’s election in 1945 to the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The book is a pot pourri of stories and news items culled from a wide range of sources, including unpublished diaries from the period. It revisits familiar events – the Cuban Missile crisis, the Big Freeze, the assassination of JFK – while at at the same time bringing glimpses into the lives of everyday people living through those years. Kynaston traces an anti-Establishment mood epitomised by the BBCs controversial That Was The Week That Was, first broadcast in November 1962, fronted by the [then unknown] 23 year-old David Frost with a classless accent and an ambitious hair-cut. Other recurrent themes include the shifting nature of the Welfare State, slowly becoming more responsive to the needs of its users, and the rise of consumer culture, marked by the arrival of the Habitat chain and of brutalist shopping centres like Birmingham’s Bull Ring [opened in January 1963, demolished and rebuilt in 2003]. 

I was 17 in October 1962, a would-be historian at Christ’s Hospital, acknowledging a poor set of A level results that summer, and working slowly towards Oxbridge entrance exams the following autumn. My history teacher was Michael Cherniavsky, a medievalist, a White Russian, the product of Westminster School and Balliol. He affected double-breasted, chalk-striped suits, spoke with a slight lisp, and gave his historians a great deal of intellectual curiosity. He was a Humean rationalist, and probably voted liberal. Which made him practically a Commie in the eyes of some of his fellow members of staff.

He would have encouraged our enthusiasm for TW3. And he would I think have been sympathetic to the views of Morris Carstairs, professor of Psychology at Edinburgh, whose 1963 Reith Lectures had the overall title This Island Now [taken from an Auden poem]. In his third, Sunday evening lecture Carstairs asserted: “I believe we may be mistaken in our alarm over young people’s sexual experimentation … … It seems to me that our young people are rapidly turning our own society into one in which sexual experience, with precautions against contraception, is becoming acceptable as a sensible preliminary to marriage; a preliminary which makes it more likely that marriage, when it comes, will be mutually considerate and mutually satisfying experience”. Reaction to the lecture was explosive, from both the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council and the Salvation Army, and from readers of the Daily Telegraph. [Morris Carstairs and his wife, who were friends of Susie’s parents, came to lunch with Susie and me in Paris just over a decade later. But I don’t recall discussing any of this stuff.]

Susie and Morris Carstairs, Fountainhall Road, Edinburgh

The 1964 election

1964 was election year. Harold Wilson was the 47-year-old grammar school boy and former Oxford academic who had been one of the youngest ever Cabinet ministers in 1947, and who had easily beaten the impetuous [loose cannon] George Brown to become leader of the Labour Party in January 1963. “Able but dangerous” was Macmillan’s verdict on Wilson.  Macmillan himself was now on the sidelines after prostate problems, and the Tories were led by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, characterised by Wilson as “the fourteenth Earl of Home”, a patrician Old Etonian, landowner, and former cricketer from the Scottish Borders, who had renounced his peerage the previous year and won a by-election at Kinross. Like my brother Paul I was a member of the Putney YS [Young Socialists], a group that had [as I recall] been banned from the party for IS [Trotskyite] leanings. Together we had campaigned, effectively as it turned out, for Hugh Jenkins [not Roy Jenkins] to become MP for Putney. I remember attending an election rally at Wandsworth Town Hall and, when Wilson arrived late as was normal, the YS liaison officer, Tony Booth [father of Cherie Blair] got up and made a wonderfully intemperate speech about hanging bankers from the nearest lamp-posts.

October 1964 began with riots in the television room of Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow, and on the streets of  Belfast sparked by Ian Paisley. Gallup gave Labour a 4% lead in the polls, and a fired-up, semi-sober George Brown made an effective party political broadcast. In Brixton John Major took on speaking engagements for the Tory candidate whose voice had given out. Robert Maxwell roared round the villages of the nascent Milton Keynes in a red Land Rover, telling anyone listening that “I like you am a council house tenant”. In Chester the Labour agent, John Prescott, despaired of his fruity-voiced, Old Etonian candidate Anthony Blond. Nicholas Fairbairn campaigned in Edinburgh Central looking every inch a Tory in a square bowler and a double-breasted waistcoat with a great gold watch fob. The Labour candidate in East Fife was the 26-year-old solicitor John Smith, just two years after winning the Observer debating competition mace. In Poplar the Tory candidate, Kenneth Baker, made the Conservative case to a quizzical docker and was met with the question, “Mate, what have I got to conserve ?” In Smethwick the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, standing against the somewhat aloof Patrick Gordon Walker, put immigration clearly at the centre of his campaign. And stickers and leaflets with the racist message “If you want a n—- for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour” appeared on the streets.

By polling day Joe Coral had Labour at 9-4 to win, and the stock market suffered its worst fall [5.5%] for many years. Turnout was a respectable 77.1%, down on 1959 but up on 1955. Election Specials on both BBC and ITV were overwhelmingly male affairs, and the Canadian analyst Robert McKenzie announced “We’re in for a hard day’s night”. Smethwick went to Peter Griffiths with a 7.2% swing to the Conservatives. Captain Robert Maxwell was in at Buckingham. Harold Wilson had a highly increased majority in Huyton. Shirley Williams was in at Hitchin. Ted Dexter lost in Cardiff. Robin Day interviewing Barbara Castle, hoarse after campaigning, told her that her voice reminded him of Lauren Bacall. At 3.58am there were shots of Wilson going to the Palace to kiss the Queen’s hand. Labour were back in power after thirteen years in political exile. But it was a close-run thing as they finally had an overall majority of only four. 

The end of an era

“Sorry, old cock” were the immortal words of Reggie Maudling to the incoming Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, who discovered a trade deficit running at £800 million, twice what had been expected. A week later Callaghan’s emergency budget increased social expenditure, pensions and benefits, and promised to introduce a corporation tax and an amplified capital gains tax. “I think the most frightening thing”, wrote Virginia Potter in her diary, “is that we have two Hungarians [Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh] as economists behind Wilson and Callaghan – Expect they are Communists !”. Through November 1965 the country moved into a full scale sterling crisis. The threat of devaluation was only averted by a $3 billion dollar credit from foreign central banks. Churchill’s imminent  ninetieth birthday was celebrated by the BBC with a variety programme, scripted by Terence Rattigan and presented by Noël Coward. It was the last classic episode of Wednesday evening’s Z-Cars scripted by the great John Hopkins. Carry on Cleo opened in Leicester Square, and on BBC 2 Terry and Bob made their first appearance as The Likely Lads. A week before Christmas the House of Commons, after an emotional eight-hour debate, voted by 355 votes to 174 to abolish capital punishment for all types of murder.

“Churchill lies dying”, wrote Phyllis Willmott in her diary on Friday, January 22nd, 1965, “And even though I barely noticed the man at his finest hour – he always seemed to overdo things in the eyes of the full-blooded younger me – there is a sense of history’s leaving in his dying.” On Monday 25thThe Times devoted its front page to the news [of Churchill’s death] rather than advertisements for the first time since the Great War, while the Daily Telegraph had black-edged columns. Enormous numbers of people queued in the bitter cold to see Sir Winston’s body lie in state in Westminster Hall before a funeral in St Paul’s cathedral. “I say aren’t they going it for the funeral !”, commented Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, “It’ll be like the Duke of Wellington, won’t it”. Richard Dimbleby commented characteristically [fruitily] on the funeral procession, speaking of “its richness, it’s colour, and its pride, and its intense solemnity and feeling and love.” After the service a launch took the coffin to Festival Pier, from where it was taken to Waterloo station and onwards by train to Bladon, adjacent to Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Why Waterloo ? And not Paddington ? It was said to be Churchill’s own decision, to be one in the eye for General de Gaulle, who was present as one of the distinguished foreign mourners.

The following weekend [Sir] Stanley Matthews, at the age of fifty, played his last match for Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. He was the oldest footballer to play in the First Division. Stoke beat Fulham 3-1, and at the end of the season, 33 years after first playing for Stoke, he reluctantly hung up his boots. “Churchill and Matthews: the passing of two mid-century icons”, writes Kynaston. “The end of a post-war era ? Yes, in some sense undeniably.”

Envoi

I have derived great pleasure from this book. It is short on analysis, and long on memories. It is tempting to try and tie in some of these events with what was happening in my own life; a final twelve months at CH, writing about Anti-Fascism in the English Public Schools, 1933-39 for a Trevelyan scholarship, working for 6 months at County Hall at the south end of Westminster Bridge, hitch-hiking to Istanbul and back, starting on what turned out to be three largely idle and unprofitable years at Balliol. But I threw away all my remaining [and not very exciting] diaries prior to 1988 a year or so ago. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley at the start of The Go-Between. That is not entirely true. Peter Griffiths’ campaign in Smethwick in 1964 finds echoes in the racism of some of the nastier current Tories and their friend the unspeakable Farage. And  the present Labour government’s inability to kick-start economic growth is reminiscent of Labour’s inability to improve the country’s economy in the autumn of 1964.

Here in Edinburgh it is snowing lightly on New Year’s Day. I wonder what the year ahead might bring. And i want to pray for hope and optimism, and for a whole host of people and places.

January 2025

Through a glass darkly – 140

Books, books, books

I’ve read 95 books during this past year, according to my omniscient MacBook. And I may well push on into three figures over the next ten days. It’s nothing to be proud of; Susie complains that I always have my nose in a book. The truth is that, because of a troublesome hip, I have been walking less since the end of the summer. I’ve not walked round Arthur’s Seat since October, preferring in recent weeks to walk lower down in the park alongside the loch towards Duddingston. And my smart attache case of painting things sits reproachfully, unopened in the hall.

Most of the books I have read this year are either biographies and memoirs, or twentieth century and military history. With a mixed clutch of novels. Some history. And a very little theology.

The disappointments

Roland Chambers’ The Last Englishman was a disappointment early in the year. Arthur Ransome [b.1884] was a strange man: best known as the author of Swallows and Amazons, and a further 11 books in the series published between 1930 and 1947, all set in a pastoral idyll in the Lake District between the wars.  Ransome was initially a publisher and jobbing journalist, who from 1913 to 1924 lived and worked in Russia and the Baltic States. He was thus a witness to the Russian Revolution, was on intimate terms with many of the leading Bolsheviks, and married [a second marriage] Trotsky’s secretary. He had close links with MI6, and was suspected of spying by/for both sides. Yet this book, which I found in OXFAM, is a surprisingly dull book.

From the same shop, I found Michael Jago’s John Bingham: The man who was George Smiley. John Bingham [b.1908] was a journalist, a moderately successful novelist, and agent runner for MI5 1940-45 and again 1950-69. In 1960 he became the 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook in County Mayo. He was dumpy, unremarkable, with thick glasses, easily lost in a crowd. He was also a skilled interrogator with strong conservative, ethical principles. From 1958 he was [briefly] a colleague in MI5 of [my hero] John le Carré, and undoubtedly the model for George Smiley. Bingham’s wife, Madeline, hugely resented le Carré’s writing success, while John’s books languished. But John Bingham was more tolerant, while deploring le Carré’s negative presentation of the security service. Again the underlying story is promising, but the book is dull.

From the shelves of the apartment in Grenoble, I read three early books by P.G. Wodehouse. Something Fresh, Summer Lightning, and Heavy Weather, published between 1923 and 1933. I think the Jeeves books are great fun. But these three, slight books, featuring the pig-loving Clarence. 9th Earl of Emsworth, and the eccentric bunch of visitors at Blandings Castle, are mannered and distinctly unfunny.  Heavy weather in fact.

My least favourite book of the year was Touching Cloth, a ‘confessional’ memoir by a 30-year-old “priest and writer”, Fergus Butler-Gallie. The focus is on his curacy in a working class parish in the Liverpool Diocese, offering an irreverent take on church life. It won rave reviews in The Times and elsewhere. I found it arch, irritating, and unfunny. He is now Vicar of Charlbury in the Oxford Diocese, a few miles up the road from Woodstock where were lived in the 1970-80s..

Old favourites

Early on in the year I re-read two early volumes of Arthur Koestler’s memoirs, Arrow in the Blue and Scum of the Earth. These books were published in 1954, and I first came across them in the CH library more than 60 years ago. Arrow in the Blue takes Koestler from a Jewish family background in Budapest to a Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he was heavily involved in a Zionist Burschenschaften and in Zionist politics. On April 1st, 1926, he set out penniless for Palestine. In September 1927 he became Jerusalem and Middle East correspondent for the Ullstein newspaper group. In 1929 he moved to Paris. Shorty afterwards he transferred to Berlin, and in December 1931 he joined the Communist Party. A fascinating journey across a different world. Scum of the Earth sees Koestler in France in 1940. He is arrested in Paris, and interned with a mish-mash of European anti-Fascists in the interment camp at Le Vernet.

During the summer I spent hours in our summer house turning the pages of Richard Crossman’s three volumes of Diaries of a Cabinet Minister. I met Crossman briefly many years ago, and found him arrogant and difficult. The diaries are exhaustive and exhausting. And sometimes funny.

Now that Archbishops are in the news, I re-read Owen Chadwick’ life of Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974. It is an excellent biography. Chadwick traces Ramsey’s life: Repton, Magdalene, Cambridge, and Cuddesdon; parish ministry and Lincoln Theological College, 1928-40; Professor of Theology at Durham and Cambridge, 1940-52; Durham and York, 1952-61; Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-74. He was appointed contrary to Archbishop Fisher’s advice. I also looked again at Michael De-la-Noy’s book on Michael Ramsey. This short [240 pp] sketch by his onetime Press Secretary emphasises Ramsey’s personal qualities; his physical clumsiness; his lack of small talk and social skills; his penchant for long silences. Lots of good anecdotes. He comes across as loveable; prayerful; and completely bonkers !

Not all books in chaplaincy apartments are unrewarding. In Chantilly I found and re-read William Dalrymple’s book From the Holy Mountain. Dalrymple follows in the footsteps of John Moschos, a sixth-century monk, from Mount Athos to Upper Egypt, visiting a variety of Eastern Orthodox congregations; and learning how they have lived with their Jewish and Muslim neighbours. He visits monastic communities in eastern Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. They are all suffering from civil war and factional violence. Today the journey would be quite impossible.

Highly recommended

On the recommendation of [Bishop] Richard Holloway I tracked down a copy of Edwardian Excursions: from the Diaries of A.C. Benson. Arthur Benson [1862-1925] was the eldest son of Archbishop Edward Benson and his eccentric wife Minnie. AC Benson was educated at Eton and King’s Cambridge; subsequently taught at Eton, and was a don and then Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He knew a huge number of people in late Victorian and Edwardian England; and kept an enormous, unpublished diary of several million words. It is a charming, privileged, rather bitty book. These extracts mainly concern travels in England, by bicycle and cross-country train, between 1898 and 1904. Edited by David Newsome, onetime headmaster of Christ’s Hospital.

In a different world and a different century, I read with great pleasure Rory Stewarts’s Politics on the Edge.  Stewart was born in Hong Kong in 1973; educated the Dragon School, Eton, and Balliol. Gap year in the Black Watch in 1991. Foreign Office in Indonesia and Montenegro 1997-2000; sabbatical to walk across Iran and Pakistan, 2000-2002; Iraq and Afghanistan 2003-2008. Academic in the USA, 2008-10. MP for Penrith, 2010-19. At Harvard Michael Ignatieff encourages him to become a doer’, not just a commentator. This is a detailed account of his 10 years in politics, as a Tory back-bencher, minister, and leadership candidate. It is an excoriating account of British [and Tory] politics. He has just failed to become the Chancellor of Oxford University.

For cricket-lovers my most enjoyable read of the year was David Foot’s Beyond Bat and Ball. Foot is a West Country journalist and cricket writer, perhaps best know for his slim life of Harold Gimblett, the fast-scoring Somerset and England opening batsman who took his own life. Beyond Bat and Ball is a beautifully written collection of eleven portraits of [what you might call second rank] cricketers. Including that village cricket enthusiast Siegfried Sassoon, who was a modest performer for and patron of the Heytesbury cricket club, where my grandparents lived latterly.

After our return from Chantilly earlier in the year I read two more of Donna Leon’s Brunetti books. She writes beautifully, and the books are instantly evocative of a city I love. Towards the end of the year I have been re-reading Evelyn Waugh with much pleasure. The early novels are a bit thin. But both Decline and Fall and Scoop have some wonderfully funny scenes.

Looking ahead

By the time we get to January I hope to have finished reading Anne Applebaum: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56. It has been sitting on my shelves since we were in Kyiv, and A.N. Wilson says “It is the finest history book I have read”. But like other books on that part of the world, it is a rather grim read. Roughly in the same part of the world I hope to get round to reading Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, which I was given for my birthday last July.  Finkelstein’s father came from Lviv, in western Ukraine, so I guess it will have something in common with Philippe Sands’ wonderful East West Street. 

I’m also looking forward to reading Anthony Beevor: The Battle for Spain, which I found in an OXFAM shop in Stockbridge recently. [And maybe looking again at another dozen or so books on the Spanish Civil War.] In the Shelter shop in Stockbridge last week I also found a copy of Richard Holloway’s most recent book [his last, last book !] On Reflection: Looking for Life’s meaning. It’s obviously a suitable title for one’s eightieth year. And I am deriving huge pleasure from A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 by cricket lover and social historian David Kynaston. Borrowed from the Fountainhall Road library. Of which more another time. The book, not the library.

Envoi

Christmas is suddenly less than a week away. We were delighted to see Jem here in Edinburgh, sadly on his way to Dougal’s funeral down in Duns. I went down to Duns with him and there were a lot of people in the Parish Church. A sombre occasion. And next week we go across to Fife to meet up with Craig and the girls and some of Craig’s family.

December 2024

Through a glass darkly – 139

Advent 2 How long ?

I very rarely put anything consciously religious on this blog. So, as a corrective, here is more-or-less the sermon that I preached at St Peter’s, Lutton Place, last Sunday morning, the second Sunday in Advent. The readings were from Malachi 3 and Luke 3. It was the first time I had preached there since All Saints Day, 2021. The photos of the church are by David Healey.

Prelude

As Sue said at the start of the service, today is the 2nd Sunday of Advent, the season of preparation for Christmas, the coming of the Word made Flesh. As we saw last week, Advent is both about looking back and looking forward. It is about looking back to the Incarnation, the first coming of Jesus, whose birth we will celebrate on Christmas Day. But it is also about looking forward to Christ’s Second Coming, the Eschaton, the Last Days.

For the benefit of any visitors or anyone who is very short sighted, I am not the Rector. Who is a significantly younger man. And who is currently away on sabbatical leave, probably in a warmer climate. But in homage to Nick, I’d like to tell you about the first West End musical I ever saw. Back in the summer of 1959 at Her Majesty’s theatre in London.

It was West Side Story. Which as you know is the story of Romeo and Juliet transposed to Upper West Side, New York in the 1950s, amid gang warfare between the Jets and the Sharks. In Act 1, Tony, the best friend of Riff, the leader of the Jets, sitting as I recall on top of a step-ladder, sings Something’s Coming. He has not met Maria. But he has become disillusioned with gang warfare and looks forward to a better future. He is leaving the Jets but agrees to to go to a dance that evening. The Dance in the Gym.

Could it be ? Yes, it could

Something’s coming, something good, if I can wait

Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is

But it is gonna be great … …

Who knows ? Its only just out of reach

Down the block, on a beach

Maybe tonight, maybe tonight

Maybe tonight, maybe tonight

I have never seen this song in a Christian hymn book. But it is obviously suited to Advent. Essentially it is about a sense of anticipation, of waiting. But with an edginess, a sense of foreboding. But the question then is What exactly ? And, above all, When ?

How long, O  Lord … is the great cry of Advent:

*  before there is peace in the Middle East ?

*  before there is an end to the war in Ukraine ?

*  before nations learn to live in partnership and peace ?

*  before God’s Kingdom comes upon us 

Or, closer to home:

  • before I see my grandchildren again ?
  • before I can get a hospital appointment ?

Malachi 3: 1-14  God’s messenger

Malachi is an unfamiliar book to many of us. [Though this passage recurs next year; it is the Old Testament lectionary reading for February 2nd, the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.] The book is probably anonymous, as Malachi means ‘my messenger’ in Hebrew. There are two main themes: the failures of priests, 1:6 – 2:9; and the failures of the people, 3: 6-12, in their religious duties. [NB Older men are criticised for discarding their ageing wives in order to marry attractive young foreign women ! But I don’t think that is an issue here at St Peter’s.] The prophet foretells the Day of Yahweh, the Day of the Lord, which will purify the priesthood, consume the wicked, and secure the triumph of the upright. The book probably dates from around 450 BC, after the Babylonian exile.

v.1 The coming of the Lord will be preceded by his messenger

v.2 no-one will be able to resist the day of his coming

v.3 he will be like the refiner’s fire; to refine and to purify

The image is of God as a smelter of ore. So here is God in the foundry. The pot heats up and into it he dumps the ore. [The people ?] And up to the top floats all the slag – all the bad stuff. And God skims it off with a ladle. A little at a time until its all gone. And what is left? Pure gold! Beautiful, precious, shining yellow perfect gold – 24 carat!

On that day all the proud and evildoers will be set ablaze [v.19].

But God knows his people, whose names are written in his book, and he has good things in store for them.

Luke 3  John the Baptist

As Christians we believe that Malachi’s prophecy is fulfilled [partially fulfilled] in the coming of the enigmatic figure of John the Baptist [the Baptiser].  John is in some ways a bridge between the Old and New Testaments; he lives on the edge of the desert, dressed in a coat of camel hair with a leather belt. He eats locusts and wild honey. And his message is that people need to repent [turn their lives around] and to be baptised for the forgiveness  of their sins

 Isaiah 40  A message of comfort

The Old Testament quotation in Luke 3 is not from Malachi, but from Isaiah. Who is the great prophet of Advent and Christmas; who offers us a vision of the greatness and the majesty of God without parallel in Scripture, with the possible exception of the book of Revelation. 

Isaiah stands with the Jewish people in exile in Babylon, far from their homeland, from the Jerusalem Temple, and seemingly far from their God. And his message in Chapter 40, the passage quoted in our gospel reading and following, is one of comfort for God’s people:

  • comfort, comfort my people [v.1], who are bruised and potentially broken
  • their time of punishment is over  [v.2], coming to the end of the Babylonian exile
  • make straight a path in the desert  [vv.3-4] We are familiar with Presidents and important people riding in impressive motorcades; in black limos with police outriders. In ancient times slaves would create a kind of desert highway for the emperor. So too for the arrival of God among his his people. [When the Edinburgh City Council fills in all the potholes, will we know that the Lord’s return is imminent ?]
  • tell the messengers to cry out  [vv.8-9] The watchmen who keep guard on the city walls are to be on the alert. It is their job to rouse the people; to proclaim to them “Here is your God”.
  • for God is coming [vv.10-11] Not just in power, as any mighty prince …  But like a shepherd, gently gathering the flock in his arms.

But these verses were written [and Isaiah is notoriously difficult to date] perhaps 500 years before the birth of the Messiah. It was a long wait for the people of Israel. From the prophecies of Isaiah to the narrative of Luke 3 is perhaps 500 years; as remote from us today as are the Battle of Bosworth Field and the accession of Henry Tudor. [And Wolf Hall which will be on our television screens again this evening.]

Luke 3  John the Baptist

vv.1-2 Herod the Great died in 4 BC; the kingdom was divided between his 3 sons. Archelaus was deposed for misconduct; Judea was ruled by Roman procurators, one of whom was Pontius Pilate.

vv.3-6 John the Baptist is a prophet in the OT tradition.

Sees himself as fulfilling the prophecy of Deutero-Isaiah.

John’s essential task is to prepare the way. Something in common with Isaiah, from whom he quotes in our Gospel reading. His is in effect “a voice of one calling in the desert, Prepare the way for the Lord”.

But his tone is rather different from Isaiah. Where Isaiah chose to emphasise the Messiah as a bringer of comfort, here John’s emphasis is on the need for repentance. Which is not just a matter of saying Sorry. But more a turning around of lives. A determination to start living life in a new way. 

vv.7-14 His message is one of coming judgement. As we will no doubt see next week. The need for repentance. For changed behaviour

v.15 The people are wondering: Can this be the Messiah, the Christ ?

Preparing people for the coming of Jesus ? Is this the right way ?

How can we in today’s post-Christendom, and largely post-Christian, culture help people to focus on, to prepare for the coming of the Messiah ? It is a question with which church leaders are struggling. [When they can get their minds away from historic child abuse.]

The secular world merely throws money at the Christmas preparations. As one cynic comments: ‘Using money we haven’t got to buy presents they don’t want for people we don’t much like.’ Against that the church tries to insist that Advent is a time for quiet; for contemplation of the bigger things; for repentance; and for prayer. But I am not convinced that John the Baptist’s message of condemnation is the right model for our times.

Preparing people for the coming of Jesus ? cont.

Denis Lennon, the best week in, week out preacher I’ve ever heard, used to say … ‘There are always [very odd] people who like to go to church to be condemned for their sins.’ But I’ve never thought that was my job, the preacher’s job. I think there is a better way to point people to God and to Jesus.  It is our task, our calling, our privilege as Christian men and women to model something of the nature of Jesus, of his integrity and his goodness and his compassion. And its is our task as a Christian community to model something of Christian love and forgiveness. And to help people to see that there is a better way of living. Better than lying politicians and greedy bankers.

I want this Advent to hold in mind a bigger picture.

I want to have in my mind and my prayers this morning the 80 year old Ukrainian man, living 8 kilometres from the Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, in a house damaged by shelling, living with a wife who has dementia;

I want to have in my mind and prayers the 50 year old Palestinian woman, four of her children killed by the Israeli defence force, she hasn’t seen her husband for eight months; and she and her remaining children are now homeless and hungry;

I want to be aware of my Edinburgh neighbour whose much loved child has been taken into a hospice, and may not live until Christmas Day.

And I want to pray for them in the words of my favourite Advent hymn.

How long before You drench the barren land?
How long before we see Your righteous hand?
How long before Your name is lifted high?
How long before the weeping turns to songs of joy?

Lord, we know Your heart is broken
By the evil that You see,
And You’ve stayed Your hand of judgement
For You plan to set men free.
But the land is still in darkness,
And we’ve fled from what is right;
We have failed the silent children
Who will never see the light.

But I know a day is coming
When the deaf will hear His voice,
When the blind will see their Saviour,
And the lame will leap for joy.
When the widow finds a Husband
Who will always love His bride,
And the orphan finds a Father
Who will never leave her side.                                                              

How long before Your glory lights the skies?
How long before Your radiance lifts our eyes?
How long before Your fragrance fills the air?
How long before the earth resounds with songs of joy?

© Stuart Townend 1997

How long ? Maranatha. Come quickly, Lord.                                      

Amen

December 2024

Through a glass darkly – 138

The trivial round: 1

It has been freezing cold in Edinburgh in recent weeks. Our lives have been much enriched by a new walk-in shower and the purchase of an electric blanket. Which makes it easier to go to bed on cold nights. But harder to get up on cold mornings. I hobble around the park and along to Duddingston Loch leaning on a stick. And we had an excellent cross-town bus excursion down to Cramond village by the edge of the Forth.

And discovered a very good new cafe.

Black Mischief

I have been continuing my reading of Evelyn Waugh’s books, taking them in chronological order. Following the breakdown of his marriage to She-Evelyn, Waugh travelled widely, both in England and overseas, making a reputation for himself as a journalist and travel writer. In October 1930, although he had no knowledge or experience of Africa,  he travelled to Abyssinia to cover for several newspapers the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie. After the coronation Waugh travelled on to Zanzibar, and then by stages across central Africa and the Congo before returning by ship from South Africa. His travels were recounted in Remote People [published in 1931], which highlighted the unpredictable nature of African life. His impressions oscillate between wild excitement and deep depression.

Black Mischief, published in 1932, also leans on the Abyssinian experience. The primitive cruelty, treachery, and cannibalism of Azania are confronted by the young Emperor Seth’s commitment to Modernity and the New Age. The British-educated Seth wants to put his Oxford degree to good use by dragging this primitive country into the twentieth century. And in this endeavour he is assisted by Basil Seal, an upper class chancer and contemporary at Oxford, and by the slippery Armenian trader Mr Krikor Youkoumian. Other characters include Sir Samson Courteney, the ineffectual Head of the British Delegation, and his romantically inclined daughter Prudence;  General Connolly, a former Irish game warden, now Head of the Army; Connolly’s local wife, known as the ‘Black Bitch’; and Monsieur Balloon, the French freemason Consul.

Azania is not Abyssinia, but is based rather on Zanzibar. And Seth is certainly not a portrait of Ras Tafari, the new Emperor, who appears in Waugh’s travel writings as an exotic but enigmatic figure.. Where Haile Selassie was seen as a distinctly African figure, proud to be the only independent native monarch in Africa, Seth is wholly divorced from his African culture, a fervent believer in the concept of ‘Progress’. Waugh portrays Seth as a man with no discernible religious faith, who is confronted by a world of treachery and fear. The spy scuttling away from the door is a recurring image in Black Mischief.

The book was written in a stop-start manner, partly at the hotel at Chagford, partly at the Lygon family’s country seat at Madresfield, as Waugh juggled an increasing number of journalistic and reviewing commitments. It was published in October 1932 and attracted hugely varied reviews. Favourable reviews in the Spectator and the Telegraph and the Listener found the book original and well-written, with an increased seriousness, and tinged with Eliot’s Waste Land vision of western society, an unsentimental pessimism. But other reviewers were unconvinced, using word like vapid and fatuous. James Agate in the Express wrote: “‘this book is an extravaganza … I assume that Mr Waugh’s plan was to think of an island of cannibals to whose vile bodies he could add Lottie Crump’s clientele out of an earlier novel. The book will be deemed wildly funny by the intelligentsia, and there is always a chance it is too clever for me.”

I don’t recall what I made of this book reading it some sixty-plus years ago in Lamb A dayroom. But these decades later I find the book funny but slight. An insubstantial work, easily read and discarded. And I surprised too that Waugh has not been denounced for his casual [but period] use of the nigger word.

A Handful of Dust

In December !932 Waugh set out [by himself] for British Guiana, a then little-known outpost of the British Empire. He knew nothing about the country, and on the outward voyage suffered alternating panic attacks that the trip might be either suicidally dangerous or tediously uneventful. After a dull Christmas Day with the Governor, Lord Denham, Waugh travelled up-country with a middle aged, creole district commissioner. Much of the next three months travelling in Guiana and Surinam, and Brazil, were a profound disappointment; Waugh knew and cared nothing for the flora and fauna of the jungle as they made their way by dismal stages from one ‘rest-house’ to another.But the journey provided a memorable encounter for his next novel. In 1946 Waugh wrote that “A Handful of Dust began at the end. I had written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner …”. Shaken by a fall and suffering from exhaustion, he arrived at the ranch of Mr Christie, a five-star  religious maniac, almost totally isolated in the jungle, and one of Waugh’s rich treasury of eccentrics.

A Handful of Dust, published in 1934, marks a transition between Waugh’s early comic novels and his later, more substantial fiction. Tony Last is an English country squire living with his wife Brenda and their eight-year-old son John Andrew at Hetton Abbey, their ancestral home. Tony is inordinately proud of the family home, and is oblivious to Brenda’s boredom and John Andrew’s waywardness. Tony is unaware when Brenda starts an affair with the dull and poor John Beaver, and when she spends time with him in a flat rented from his mother, a fashionable interior designer. Brenda’s friends fail to fix Tony up with a mistress; John Andrew is killed in a riding accident; and Beaver and Brenda’s brother lean on Tony to provide a divorce and a divorce settlement which would force him to sell the family home. At which point Tony finally shows some character. He refuses the financial settlement, and goes travelling for six months in remote parts of the Amazon basin. Abandoned by his incompetent guide Tony is rescued by Mr Todd, the eccentric owner of a remote ranch. He is held against his will by the illiterate Mr Todd, and forced endlessly to read the novels of Dickens to him. Mr Todd astutely diverts a European search party, fobbing them off with Tony’s wristwatch. Back in England, Beaver loses interest in Brenda when it is clear that no money will be forthcoming;  Tony’s social circle assume that Tony is dead, and Brenda marries Jock, one of Tony’s friends.

The book incorporates several autobiographical elements. The story of Tony and Brenda’s marriage reflects the breakdown of Waugh’s own marriage, and Brenda’s casual affair with Beaver echoes She-Evelyn’s infidelity. Waugh had married in December 1928 Evelyn Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere. Her parents were strongly opposed to the marriage, and thought that Waugh was a disreputable character with no money and disreputable friends. The two Evelyns married anyway, but within a few months She-Evelyn told Waugh that she had fallen in love with John Heygate, an Old Etonian and mutual friend, and that she wanted a divorce.  [And that she had never loved him. And had only married him to get away from parental oppression.] An attempted reconciliation failed, and after lengthy ecclesiastical proceedings the marriage was annulled a few years later.  Tony’s bewilderment in A Handful of Dust reflects Waugh’s own nagging regrets and sorrow about Evelyn Gardner’s behaviour.

Waugh had travelled extensively in South America in 1932-33, and several incidents from these travels appear in the novel. [And also in Waugh’s travel book Ninety Two Days.] Tony’s fate in the jungle was first used by Waugh in a short story of 1933 called The Man Who Liked Dickens. And, he later wrote, he wanted to explore how the prisoner had got here.

As Martin Stannard, author of a full and magisterial two-volume life of Evelyn Waugh, notes, A Handful of Dust is widely regarded as Waugh’s masterpiece. It was chosen by the Book Society as Book of the Month, but the reviewers were not wholly convinced by the book. Cyril Connolly for one complained that [what he  detected as] country house snobbery was evidence of Waugh’s failing powers. One of the problems was that Waugh had already published a version of the book in five monthly instalments, with a different ending in which Tony returns from the jungle; so the story may have come across a something bit stale. My own feeling is that, while there are some gloriously funny scenes, such as Tony and Jock getting drunk in The Old Hundredth, and Tony’s comic outing to Brighton with the tart Milly as ‘proof’ of his adultery, the lead characters are only two dimensional. Tony is a prig and a bore, and Brenda is shallow, unimaginative wife. Yes, Waugh has written a moral book, a depiction of life without religious belief. But the characters don’t engage me, and I don’t really care that much when the marriage falls apart. 

The trivial round: 2

We had a day of heavy snow last weekend. But it soon melted. And we have had much less rain than down south. My CH schoolfriend Pete came to stay on Tuesday night, driving up from Gloucestershire; and we had a real Senior Citizens’ [Old Farts’] conversation about broken nights and living with diabetes and energy bills. It is cold enough for Susie to override the heating on a regular basis. For complicated reasons we haven’t had a gas bill for months. Which makes me fear that we shall be in a Debtors’ Prison early in the new year. Meanwhile we had a day out with Mike and Wendy down in Stockbridge yesterday, a village atmosphere and a galaxy of charity shops. I bought a very clean copy of Anthony Beevor’s big book on the Spanish Civil War for £5.00 in the Stockbridge OXFAM shop. And we had a good lunch and mulled cider in a new cafe.

Scoop

In August 1935 Waugh returned to Abyssinia to report on the Italo-Abyssinian war for the Daily Mail. According to his fellow journalist William Deedes, Waugh thought that Abyssinia was “a savage place which Mussolini was doing well to tame”. In Abyssinia Waugh saw little of the fighting, and complained that his fellow reporters were not up to the standards of his friends at home. His trip led to two books: Waugh in Abyssinia [published in  1936], which Rose Macaulay described as “a fascist tract”; and the novel Scoop [published in 1938] in which the central character, William Boot, is loosely based on William Deedes.

Scoop opens with a wonderful set-piece account of a morning chez Lady Stitch, clearly based on Lady Diana Cooper. She along with Diana Guinness [née Mitford, later Mosley] was one of the cool, upper class beauties to whom Waugh was deeply [but chastely] attached at the time. [Diana Cooper’s husband, Duff Cooper, a Tory MP and cabinet minister, loathed Waugh, whom he thought a social climber and parvenu.] Through Lady Stitch’s patronage, one Boot is sent to Abyssinia,  renamed Ishmaelia, as a war reporter. Through confusion of name, instead of Lady’s Stitch’s protege John Boot, a fashionable young novelist, they send his second cousin, William Boot, a dim writer of nature notes from an eccentric family of landowners in deepest Somerset. Much humour comes from this confusion. William Boot is another innocent abroad to whom things happen.

Once upon a time.I thought Scoop was the best of Waugh’s early novels. It pokes fun mercilessly at Diana Cooper, and at Lord Beaverbrook on whom the newspaper magnate Lord Copper is clearly based, – and who had a long-lived dislike of Waugh; and a variety of ‘Special Reporters’ who accompany Boot to Ishmaelia. These reporters vie with each other in inventing stories about a country of which they know very little, and wholly by chance William Boot gets the sensational ‘scoop’ of the book’s title.

Now I am less convinced of the quality of the book. It was a long time in gestation. partly because Waugh had a great many distractions. He had secured through his faithful agent A.D. Peters a lot of profitable journalism; he had married Laura Herbert, a cousin of She-Evelyn in December 1937; and he was seeking to establish himself as both a country landowner and a Roman Catholic apologist, roles which could be mutually antagonistic. The books starts more strongly than it ends. Brigid Brophy, reviewing a Uniform Edition of Waugh’s books in 1964, found Scoop “a mere, though entertaining, after-flutter of the fine imaginative flight which had produced Black Mischief”. Waugh himself writing in 1957 said that the book was “a light satire of modern journalism”. If we are going to rate Waugh as a major novelist, it will have to depend on his latter books, Brideshead Revisited [published in 1945] and the Sword of Honour trilogy [published between 1952 and 1961]. I’ll have another look at them. But it may not be until after Christmas.

November 2024. 

Through a glass darkly – 137

A shrinking world

As autumn turns to winter it has been a quiet few months. Susie and I limp around, as if preparing for a Senior Citizens’ three-legged race. We had a day down in Berwickshire at the beginning of October, when I was preaching in Fogo. An old village church and a welcoming congregation. And then an enjoyable weekend in Belgium for the Men’s Retreat down at Maredsous. And more recently I had a day out in Berwick, using up an LNER credit voucher which was about to expire. It was lovely walking the ramparts before having lunch at The Maltings. But other than that we haven’t been further than we can walk – which, sadly, is not as far as it used to be !

Waugh and Isherwood

As we think in a desultory way about trading down to a smaller apartment, I look at my books and start to carry small bags of them to the OXFAM shop.When I was much younger I thought that Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood were the two best English writers of the first half of the twentieth century. As the years roll by Isherwood has gone down a lot in my estimation. I read some of his stuff last year before putting the books out to OXFAM, and although I likeMr Norris changes trains and Goodbye to Berlin, I don’t really rate anything that he wrote after he and Auden left for the States in 1939. With Waugh it is the other way around: I think highly of Brideshead Revisited and Men at Arms, but I used to have reservations about his earlier work. So – I thought it was time I looked again at some of these books.

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, the son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and younger brother of Alec Waugh, a popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing, a monastic, Anglo-Catholic institution, high up on the South Downs, and at Hertford College, Oxford, a small and undistinguished college, where he read Modern History. At Oxford he made a new circle of friends. Through Terence Greenidge, an eccentric fellow undergraduate, he was introduced to the Hypocrites Club. “By the time I joined it was in process of invasion and occupation by a group of wanton Etonians who brought it to speedy dissolution. It then became notorious not only for drunkenness but for the flamboyance of dress and manner which was in some cases patently homosexual”. During his Oxford years Waugh was involved in student journalism and won a reputation for decorative drawings and bookplates. They were years of excessive drinking and homosexual crushes, and he subsequently destroyed his Oxford diaries.

The years between Evelyn Waugh’s coming down from Oxford in the summer of 1924 and his secret agreement to ‘She-Evelyn’ in the winter of 1927 were probably the unhappiest stretch of his life. He had no settled job or ambition. He spent two terms on the staff of a prep school in North Wales [the inspiration for Llanabba in Decline and Fall]; and taught, until he was sacked for allegedly assaulting the matron, at a school for backward boys at Aston Clinton. His insecure employment record was accompanied by an unsatisfactory social life. At Oxford his principal emotional attachments had been to other male undergraduates. After Oxford he led an intense social life, at first with friends from Oxford and later among the Bright Young People, a name invented by the newspapers in 1924. This was a shifting group led mainly by girls; Elizabeth Ponsonby, the Jungman sisters, Diana Guinness and Olivia Plunket Greene, a disconcerting, secret girl with who Evelyn fell in love. A feeling that was not wholly reciprocated.

Decline and Fall

Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928, is the story of Paul Pennyfeather who is sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour. [After being debagged by a bunch of upper class hearties following a drunken dinner of the Bollinger Club. It sounds like Christ Church.] The innocent Pennyfeather  finds a job teaching at Llanabba Castle, a very minor public school on the Welsh coast. The school is populated by a bunch of eccentrics: the Headmaster, Dr Augustus Fagan, and his daughters, Dingy and Flossy; his colleagues, the red-haired, one-legged Captain Grimes, not quite a gentleman; and the wig-wearing Prendergast, a former vicar assailed by Doubts; and the mysterious butler, the fantasist [Sir Solomon] Philbrick. 

Parts Two and Three of the book have a darker feel. Pennyfeather is to be married to the glamorous and extremely rich the Hon. Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the mother of one of his pupils at Lanabba. But there is a hitch in the wedding preparations when he is arrested in connection with Margot’s Latin American Entertainment Company. His Oxford friend Potts had been the League of Nations chief investigator into an international prostitution ring. Pennyfeather is sentenced to seven years penal servitude in Blackstone Gaol while Margot decamps to Corfu. The prison regime suffers at the hands of the self-regarding social reformer Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery. Prendy who has found a new career as prison Chaplain has his head sawed off by a religious maniac to whom Dockery has misguidedly given a set of carpenter’s tools. At Egdon Heath prison Pennyfeather re-encounters Grimes, now serving time for bigamy. Margot, now Viscountess Metroland, smuggles gulls’ eggs and other delicacies into prison, and comes to visit Paul, a difficult meeting for them both. But through the influence of her new husband, the Home Secretary, Paul is enabled to disappear [‘die on the table’] at Cliff Place Nursing Home. Worthing [Augustus Fagan M.D. Proprietor.] A resurrected Paul returns to Oxford, with a Calvary moustache, to Scone College to read Theology. And is visited by his former pupil Peter, now a member of the Bollinger Club.

Decline and Fall was thought a rather licentious book by the standards of the day. There is a clearly suggested homosexual relationship between Captain Grimes and the boy Clutterbuck; there is stress on Peter Pastmaster’s prettiness, making him attractive to his mother’s lovers; and there are references to a ‘knocking shop’ and the Welsh predilection for sheep shagging. The book was under contract to Duckworths, but their reader wanted to insist on major cuts and corrections. Waugh was outraged, and took the book to Chapman and Hall, his father’s firm. They too demanded significant changes, but the book was published in September 1928. Contrary to popular myth it was not an immediate best-seller. But the book sold steadily, much helped by an enthusiastic review by Arnold Bennett in The Evening Standard; “A genuinely new humorist has presented himself in the person of Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall is an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire, which in my opinion comes near to being first rate … I say that this novel delighted me.” The book had reached its fourth impression by October 1929 [each printing probably being 2,000 copies.] On the strength of the book, Waugh encouraged his agent A.D. Peters to present him to newspaper editors as the ‘personification of the English youth movement’.

Vile Bodies

Vile Bodies, published in 1930, introduces us to a kaleidoscope of characters, prominently featuring the Bright Young Things. We meet most of them on a cross-Channel ferry in the opening chapter. Father Rothschild is an omniscient and well-connected Jesuit, travelling with a false beard and six new books in six different languages. Mrs Melrose Ape is a travelling evangelist chaperoning a troupe of performing [but worldly] angels. Agatha Runcible and Miles Malpractice, busy strapping each other’s tummies with sticking plaster, represent the Younger Set. The twin sisters Lady Fanny Throbbing and Mrs Kitty Blackwater represent an older generation. They have mislaid the sal volatile. The Leader of his Majesty’s Opposition lies in his bunk in a coma, dreaming of Oriental ladies with golden limbs and almond eyes. Adam  Fenwick-Symes is a young writer, engaged to be married but impecunious, returning with his newly completed manuscript from Paris.

These characters reappear and interact in a series of set pieces, mainly set between Park Lane and Bond Street. Adam’s engagement to Nina Blount is an on-off affair, dictated by the precarious state of his finances.. There are two wonderful accounts of his visits to Nina’s wealthy father, a crusty and deaf old colonel who lives in Buckinghamshire and has a passion for the cinema. Adam succeeds Lord Balcairn as a gossip writer for the Daily Excess. But loses his job which then goes to Miles Malpractice. Adam and his friends go off to the motor races, but Agatha Runcible is wrongly installed as the spare driver and crashes her car into a market cross in a neighbouring village.

In the public mind, the Bright Young People were notorious for their parties. “Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties”, says Adam Fenwick Symes; “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as  someone else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, the parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting parties in Paris … all that succession and  repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …” Though Waugh himself was on the fringe rather than at the centre of this world.

Vile Bodies was an instant success and secured Waugh a position as a young writer to be noticed. It was widely reviewed, though not always with enthusiasm. Arnold Bennett complained that the book was structurally incoherent; St. John Irvine called it “appalling … a hateful book”; Frank Swinnerton thought it was “bogus”; and Edward Shanks saw it “less of a novel than a revue between covers”. But there was a roar of approval from younger writers and from the gossip columns. Ironically Waugh came to be viewed as a spokesman for the Bright Young Things, whose behaviour he depicted. But there is an undertone of malaise and disillusionment, a vision of the relentless decline into barbarism. In the sombre final scene Adam sits on a splintered tree-stump amid a landscape of desolation in “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”.

I read these books when I was at school about fifty years ago. When I almost certainly missed the satirical nature of Waugh’s writing. When I look at the books now, I find the writing is witty, the plotting ingenious, and many of the characters vividly entertaining. The early books sold well enough, and enabled Waugh to be offered a lot of well-paid journalism. Much of which he seems to have despised. Where does that leave Waugh as a writer ? On the strength of these early books, he is a gifted writer of the second rank.  And after that ? I’m currently trying to track down a copy of Black Mischief, and I’ll  look at that and at  A handful of dust and at Scoop in the coming weeks. And maybe thereafter Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Meanwhile there are leaves to rake up in the garden. And we are going to Glasgow for the day at the weekend. And I am at last on the Orthopaedics waiting list for hip surgery. But I’m not holding my breath. The current waiting time is said to be a bit over two years.

November 2024

Through a glass darkly – 136

Back to Maredsous

Maredsous is a Benedictine abbey in Wallonia, in southern Belgium. It was founded as a priory in 1872 on the initiative of Beuron Abbey, a major Benedictine house in Germany, and was raised to the status of an abbey by Pope Leo XIII in 1878. Since 1926 the abbey has been awarded the title of a minor basilica. The abbey occupies a spectacular position on land donated by the Desclée family, wealthy Belgian printers and publishers. It is built on an enormous scale in a neo-Gothic style, designed by the architect Jean-Baptiste de Béthune.

Like many Belgian abbeys, the number of resident monks has diminished in recent years. The abbey provides teachers for an adjacent school, it functions as  a conference centre and retreat centre; and it sells Maredsous cheese and Maredsous beer. The cheese is made in their own dairies, but the beer is now brewed under licence by a brewery in Flanders. The cafe and shop in the adjacent Visitors’ Centre attracts some 500,000 visitors a year.

Men’s Retreat 2024

For a decade or more there has been an autumn Men’s Retreat for men from Holy Trinity, Brussels, and from the Brussels German-speaking Protestant church. Numbers have varied from about a dozen to thirty. The prime mover in organising this annual retreat is my friend Armin Kummer. I have been involved with this retreat since 2014, when it was held at St Andrew’s, Zevenkirken, a Benedictine abbey near Bruges in Flanders,  and when the theme was Journeying with God. Subsequent themes have included Rock and Roles: Men’s Spirituality; Sanctuary; and Living with the Psalmist. There are workshops, spaces for reflection, meals with the monks, a long Saturday afternoon walk in the countryside, a film, and Communion on Sunday morning. The Saturday night films have included Grand Torino, On a clear day, Pride, and Brassed Off.

This year we were back at Maredsous. I flew with RyanAir from Edinburgh to Charleroi [aka Brussels Sud], was grateful for cheerful assistance at both airports, and took the Flibco bus up to Brussels. Where I was warmly entertained by John and Susie Wilkinson. Who filled me in on life at Holy Trinity, where I spent 18 months with them after [initial] retirement in 2013-15. Both my previous parishes, Christ Church, Duns, in the Edinburgh Diocese, and Lyon Anglican Church, had been single charges; so Holy Trinity, Brussels, working with [now Bishop] Robert and John, and a mix of readers and students on placement, was my first experience of team ministry

The retreat was a little earlier than usual, the second weekend in October. There were sixteen of us, predominantly from Holy Trinity. The theme was once again Living with the Psalms. Much of the administration and heavy lifting was done by Richard, who had driven across from Cheltenham. We looked at groups of psalms in terms of cries for help; at psalms seeking guidance and of reorientation; and at songs of praise. The participants then wrote their own psalms, some of which were used in our Saturday evening service of Compline, and some in our Sunday morning Communion service. The film this year was Marvellous. I have been co-leading this retreat with my German friend Armin Kummer, for a decade now. And I think this will have been my last year. [Though I recall saying that last year !] If it is, then I will miss being back at Maredsous in a year’s time. But there is talk of bringing the retreat to Scotland. We shall see …

After the Communion service and lunch on Sunday most folk rushed off to Brussels to vote in local elections. And Richard kindly gave me a lift up to Charleroi, where I was staying overnight. It is a rather depressed, post-industrial town with a hollowed-out centre. Surrou/nded by a confusing network of motorways and elevated dual carriageways. The traditional industries of coal-mining and steel-making have long been in decline. I walked a  bit around the centre, trying hard to find a restaurant that was open. The hotel felt a bit sybaritic after the Spartan decency of the Maredsous bedrooms. After a copious Novotel breakfast on Monday morning, I was driven up to the airport by a Roman Catholic taxi-driver from the Congo. Waiting at the airport I made a start on Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh. Which seems very promising.

The Diocese of Aberdeen

In contrast to the Men’s Retreat, the Church Times does little to encourage my faith, specialising as it does in photographs of bishops and accounts of historic abuse cases. [Though I should make it clear that these are two distinct features.] But even so I was a bit shocked by their story about the latest proceedings in the Dyer case [Church Times, 11 October 2024].

The Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, the Rt Revd Anne Dyer, has been suspended from office for the past few years pending disciplinary proceedings against her for discrimination and abusive behaviour. The disciplinary tribunal was to have been held in September, but had been postponed at the request of her legal team. Now the Scottish Episcopal Church Procurator, one Paul Reid KC, has decided not to proceed with the prosecution. From personal experience I would never count on a senior lawyer and the House of Bishops to make good decisions. But dropping the charges against Bishop Anne on the grounds that the tribunal would be too stressful for the complainants, without taking the trouble to consult them, beggars belief.

It is more than three years since Professor Torrance wrote a considered review of events in Aberdeen and Orkney; and concluded that the Bishop had lost the confidence of a number of priests in the diocese, and that she should be granted a period of sabbatical leave and then step back permanently from the post. This story has dragged on far too long, and we recall that Bishop Anne was initially imposed on a reluctant diocese by the House of Bishops. Now that she is returning to her old job, albeit as damaged goods, I am very glad not to be serving in Aberdeen.

I haver written along these lines to the Church Times. Who may or may not publish the letter. And I guess I am not the only person dismayed by this story. But I appreciate that many worse things are happening elsewhere in the world. 

October 2024