Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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fortune which enabled me to serve him as he required – and what he required, I had no doubt, was that I should fight slipshod thinking by defending the faith in a manner which was tough-minded and intellectually rigorous. St Augustine and St Athanasius, I often told myself, would have been proud of me.
I was proud of me, although of course I had far too much spiritual savoir-faire to do other than shove this secret opinion of myself to the very back of my mind. By 1965 I was too preoccupied by my current battles to waste much time visualising my future obituary in The Times, but on those rare moments when I paused to picture my posthumous eminence, I saw long, long columns of very dense newsprint.
God stood by and watched me for some time. Then in 1965 he saw the chance to act, and seizing me by the scruff of the neck he began to shake me loose from the suffocating folds of my self-satisfaction, my arrogance and my pride.
II
In order to convey the impact of the catastrophe, I must now describe what was going on in my life as I steamed smoothly forward to the abyss.
1965 was little over a month old, and we were all recovering from the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, an event which had temporarily united in grief the members of our increasingly frivolous and fragmented society. For people of my generation it seemed that one of the strongest ropes tethering us to the past had been severed, and ’the old order changeth, yielding place to new’ was a comment constantly in my thoughts at the time. Watching that winter funeral on television I shuddered at the thought of the inevitably apocalyptic future.
However, I had little time to contemplate apocalypses. As one of the Church’s experts on education, I was required to worry about the government’s plans to scrap the 11-plus examination and establish comprehensive schools; I was planning to make a speech on the subject in the Church Assembly later that month, and I was also framing a speech for the House of Lords about curbing hooliganism by restricting the hours of coffee-bars. My involvement in current events of this nature required in addition that I brooded on racism – or, as it was called in those days, racialism – and marvelled at the state of a society which would permit a play entitled You’ll Come To Love Your Sperm-Count to be not only performed in public but actually reviewed by an esteemed magazine.
I remember I had begun to think about my Lent sermons but Easter was late that year, Good Friday falling on the sixteenth of April, so the sermons had not yet been written. In my spare time I was working on a book about Hippolytus, that early Christian writer whose battles against the sexually lax Bishop Callistus had resounded throughout the Roman Empire; at the beginning of my academic career I had made a name for myself by specialising in the conflicts of the Early Church, and before my accession to the bishopric I had been Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.
At this point may I just rebut two of the snide criticisms which my enemies used to hurl at me? (Unfortunately by 1965 my fighting style had earned me many enemies.) The first was that academics are unsuited to any position of importance in what is fondly called ‘the real world’. According to this belief, which is so typical of the British vice of despising intellectuals, academic theologians are incapable of preaching the faith in words of one syllable to the proletariat, but this is just crypto-Marxist hogwash. I knew exactly what the proletariat wanted to hear. They wanted to hear certainties, and whether those certainties were expressed in monosyllables or polysyllables was immaterial. Naturally I would not have dreamed of burdening the uneducated with fascinating theological speculation; that sort of discourse has to be left to those who have the aptitude and training to comprehend it. Would one expect a beginner at the piano to play Mozart? Of course not! A beginner must learn by absorbing simple exercises. This fact does not mean that the beginner is incapable of intuitively grasping the wonder and mystery of music. It merely means he has to take much of the theory on trust from those who have devoted their lives to studying it.
Having demolished the idea that I am incapable of communicating with uneducated people, let me go on to rebut the second snide criticism hurled at me during my bishopric. It was alleged that as I had spent most of my career in an ivory tower I was ill-equipped for pastoral work. What nonsense! The problems of undergraduates sharpen any clergyman’s pastoral skills, and besides, my years as an army chaplain had given me a breadth of experience which I would never have acquired in ordinary parish work.
I have to confess that I have never actually done any ordinary parish work. The training of priests was more haphazard in my youth, and if one had the right connections one could sidestep hurdles which today are de rigueur. In my case Archbishop Lang had taken an interest in me, and I had spent the opening years of my career as one of his chaplains before accepting the head-mastership of a minor public school at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven. Not surprisingly this latter move had proved to be a mistake, but even before I returned to Cambridge to resume my career as a theologian, I felt that an appointment to a parish was merely something which happened to other people.
I admit I did worry from time to time in the 1930s about this significant omission from my curriculum vitae, but always I came to the conclusion that since my path had crossed so providentially with Archbishop Lang’s it would have been wrong to spurn the opportunities which in consequence came my way. I was still reasoning along these lines in the 1950s when I told myself it would have been wrong to spurn a bishopric merely because I had sufficient brains to flourish among the ivory towers of Cambridge. (Indeed if more bishops had more brains, the pronouncements from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords in the 1960s might have been far more worthy of attention.)
I did not turn my back on my academic work when I accepted the bishopric. Indeed as I toiled away in Starbridge I soon felt I needed regular divertissements to cheer me up, and this was why I was nearly always writing some book or other during my spare time. I dictated these books to a succession of most attractive part-time secretaries, all under thirty. In 1965 my part-time secretary was Sally, the daughter of my henchman the Archdeacon of Starbridge, and I much enjoyed dictating the fruits of my researches to such a glamorous young woman. It made a welcome change from dictating letters on diocesan affairs to my full-time secretary Miss Peabody who, although matchlessly efficient, was hardly the last word in glamour. My wife quite understood that I needed a break from Miss Peabody occasionally, and always went to great trouble to recruit exactly the right part-time secretary to brighten my off-duty hours.
My wife and Miss Peabody kept me organised. I had two chaplains, one a priest who handled all the ecclesiastical business and one a layman who acted as a liaison officer with the secular world, but Miss Peabody guarded my appointments diary and this privilege gave her a certain amount of power over the two young men. I classed this arrangement as prudent. Chaplains can become power-mad with very little encouragement, but Miss Peabody ensured that all such delusions of grandeur were stillborn. Miss Peabody also supervised the typist, recently hired to help her with the increased volume of secretarial work, and organised the bookkeeping.
In addition I employed a cook-housekeeper, who lived out, and a daily cleaner. A gardener appeared occasionally to mow the lawns and prune any vegetation which acquired an undisciplined appearance. From this list of personnel it can be correctly deduced that Starbridge was one of the premier bishoprics, but if I had not had a private income to supplement my episcopal salary I might have found my financial circumstances tiresome, and we were certainly a long way from those halcyon days before the war when my predecessors had lived in considerable splendour. Alex Jardine, for instance, had kept twelve indoor servants, two gardeners and a chauffeur when he had been bishop in the 1930s. He had also lived in the old episcopal palace, now occupied by the Choir School, but despite the loss of the palace I could hardly claim I was uncomfortably housed. My home was a handsome Georgian building called the South Canonry which also stood within Starbridge’s huge walled Close, and from the upstairs windows we could look across the Choir School’s playing-field to the tower and spire of the Cathedral.
‘I’m glad the trees hide the palace from us,’ Lyle had said on our arrival at the South Canonry in 1957. She had lived at the palace before the war as the paid companion of Bishop Jardine’s wife, and the experience had not always been a happy one.
Lyle was my wife, and I must