Leaving Alexandria Read online

  Also by Richard Holloway

  Let God Arise (1972)

  New Vision of Glory (1974)

  A New Heaven (1979)

  Beyond Belief (1981)

  Signs of Glory (1982)

  The Killing (1984)

  The Anglican Tradition (ed.) (1984)

  Paradoxes of Christian Faith and Life (1984)

  The Sidelong Glance (1985)

  The Way of the Cross (1986)

  Seven to Flee, Seven to Follow (1986)

  Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty (1988)

  The Divine Risk (ed.) (1990)

  Another Country, Another King (1991)

  Who Needs Feminism? (ed.) (1991)

  Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death (1992)

  The Stranger in the Wings (1994)

  Churches and How to Survive Them (1994)

  Behold Your King (1995)

  Limping Towards the Sunrise (1996)

  Dancing on the Edge (1997)

  Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics (1999)

  Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity (2001)

  On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? (2002)

  Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004)

  How to Read the Bible (2006)

  Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition (2008)

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

  www.canongate.tv

  Copyright © Richard Holloway, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Grateful acknowledgements are made to Anvil Press for ‘Missing God’ by Dennis O’Driscoll (New and Selected Poems, 2004); Bloodaxe Books for ‘Heaven’ by A.S.J. Tessimond (Collected Poems, 2010); Carcanet Press for ‘The Two Parents’ by Hugh MacDiarmid (Complete Poems, Volume I); David Higham Associates for ‘Mutations’ by Louis MacNeice (Collected Poems, Faber & Faber); Faber & Faber for ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ by T.S. Eliot; and The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and The Society of Authors as their representative for ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 073 6

  eISBN 978 0 85786 075 0

  Lorna and Gillen

  For another day

  Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world.

  2 Timothy 4:10

  Come, come, whoever you are,

  Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving,

  It doesn’t matter.

  Ours is not a caravan of despair.

  Come, come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.

  Come – come yet again, come.

  Rumi

  As one long prepared, and full of courage,

  as is right for you who were given this kind of city,

  go firmly to the window

  and listen with deep emotion . . .

  to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

  and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

  C.P. Cavafy

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It has been observed recently that editing books is a dying art, but that is far from the case at Canongate. Though I sometimes wearily resented the extra work involved, the attention Nick Davies brought to his reading of my book and the careful suggestions he made about how I might improve it have resulted in a far better book than it would have been had I been left to my own devices. I am most grateful to him – as I am to Octavia Reeve, who, at the copy editing stage, made some helpful suggestions as well.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Graveyard

  I: 1940–56

  1. Carman Hill

  2. Place of Sacrifice

  3. The Fall

  4. The Side Door

  II: 1958–67

  5. Tenements

  6. Angel of the Gorbals

  7. Broadway

  8. The Absence

  III: 1968–84

  9. Thirty-Three Steps

  10. Coming Through

  11. A Double-Minded Man

  12. Boston Common

  IV: 1986–2000

  13. New Cloth

  14. Drifting

  15. Leaving Alexandria

  Epilogue: Scald Law

  PROLOGUE

  THE GRAVEYARD

  If you come this way, not knowing where to look for it, you will probably walk past the graveyard. It is hidden behind a high and impenetrable hedge of yew that looks as if it had been designed to keep out casual visitors. No sign points the way in, and when you succeed in finding it, it looks more like an untidy gap in a thicket than an official entrance. When I was here as a boy, a lifetime ago, the way into the graveyard was wide and clear. It had to be, because this was where we brought our dead in solemn procession to lie in this earth, and here they lie still. The leaflet published by Newark and Sherwood District Council calls the path that takes you there King Charles Walk, because of the tradition that Charles I strolled here while he was held at Kelham Hall in May 1647, after surrendering to the Scots during the Civil War. When I lived here 300 years later, we called it not the King’s but the Apostles’ Walk, after the clipped yew trees, twelve on each side, which lined the way. We knew the story of the house, but we weren’t much interested in what had happened here before our arrival, so intent were we on our own purposes. Kelham Hall was by then the mother house of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an Anglican religious order that trained uneducated boys for the priesthood in a monastic setting that was its own world, self-sufficient, entire unto itself. Hoping to be a priest one day, I had been sent here at fourteen from a Scottish back street, and I fell in love with the place and the high purpose it served. After a probationary term in civvies, we were dressed in black cassocks and blue scapulars that set us apart from life outside the great oak gates of the old hall. Our life was military in its discipline and dedication, but it was also full of kindness and laughter. It is the laughter I remember as I walk here again today, taking the path I took so often then, now given back to the memory of the broken king. Change hurts. Or is it deeper than that: is it Time itself we mourn? Time has certainly wrought painful changes here.

  The Hall in which Charles was held was rebuilt in 1728 by Bridget, the heiress of the Sutton family, the original owners. When the house Bridget built was gutted by fire in 1857, her descendant, John Henry Manners-Sutton, commissioned George Gilbert Scott to build him a replacement. Presented with what Mark Girouard described as ‘an empty site, a compliant patron, and what seemed a long purse’,1 Scott went to work, and the present Hall was built between 1859 and 1862. The building Scott erected was a smaller, less manic version of Saint Pancras Hotel in London, built a few years after Kelham, and its hard red brick and surprising silhouette still dominate the flat Nottinghamshire landscape for miles around. When Manners-Sutton died in 1898, the mortgage on the property was foreclosed and it came into Chancery.

  In 1903 the Society of the Sacred Mission acquired it as their mother house, where they trained boys and young men for the priesthood. In the 1920s, to accommodate increasing numbers, the Society added a new quadrangle, including a massive chapel, the outline of whose hu
ge dome added a softer note to Scott’s jagged skyline.2 Internal difficulties within the Society, and the external pressure of Church of England politics, led to the closure of the college in 1972, and the Society left Kelham. Purchased by them in 1973, it is now the headquarters of Newark and Sherwood District Council, who use the great chapel as an events venue, described in their publicity material as the Dome. When they sold Kelham, the Society retained possession of their graveyard in the grounds, and members of the gradually diminishing order can still elect to be buried there. In their leaflet, Newark and Sherwood District Council describe it as the Monks’ Graveyard. Coming across it unexpectedly must be like coming upon a corner of a foreign garden that has been set aside for the burial of British residents, and feeling a pang of sorrow that they are so far from home. Though the graveyard does not feel entirely forsaken, it does feel hidden now, which is maybe why I always have difficulty finding it when I make one of my pilgrimages here.

  I arrived at Kelham in 1948, aged fourteen, from a small town in the west of Scotland called Alexandria. Knowing little of its past and nothing of its future, the great house, given over to its sacred mission, seemed to be a place of timeless order whose life would go on for ever. Though I thought I wanted to stay here for ever, in the end I spent only six years at Kelham. In 1956 the Society sent me to West Africa to be secretary to the newly appointed Bishop of Accra, a member of the order and the last white man to hold that office. I was meant to stay for two years and then return to my studies, but I never did make it back to Kelham. While I was in Africa I withdrew from membership in the Society, so it was to Scotland I returned when my time was up in Accra. I had been wearing a cassock for years, and had no other form of outdoor clothing, so I got a streetside tailor in Accra to run me up a suit. Wearing this, I came back to Britain in March 1958 on a noisy old cargo ship, and headed, shivering in the cold, for Scotland. Yet Kelham continued to haunt me, and I dreamt about it for years. When the Society departed in 1972, and the place was taken over by the Council, I would turn up and wander disconsolately around the house and grounds, as though looking for something I had left there and could not find. During my visits in the 1980s and 1990s I was able to do this on my own, but security was tightened in the 2000s and on my last visit I had to be conducted round the house by a guide.

  The advantage of having an official tour was that I was able to get into the Cottage, the servants’ quarters of the old Hall, used by the Society to accommodate the boys who had been admitted for preliminary training for the ministry. The Cottage refectory was the way I remembered it, but the dormitory had been carved up into a warren of small offices and it conjured up little sense of what it had been like when thirty of us slept there, windows open in all weathers. Father Peter was Cottage Master throughout my time, and what had been his room was still intact, though now shared by four officers of the Council. The ground floor of the House, where adult students and members of the Society resided, was largely unchanged. Because of the disaster of 1857, the new house Scott built was designed to be fire-proof, so all the rooms on the ground floor were rib-vaulted in stone and brick, and the corridor and staircase floors were of marble, tiles or cement. The public rooms on the ground floor of the old Hall had not been altered by the Society during its seventy years’ residence, though they had been adapted to different purposes. The carriage court, at first used by them as a chapel, became the Society’s refectory, the dining room and drawing room became libraries, the billiard room a lecture hall, the morning room an office, and the grandest room in the house, the music room, became the common room. With a cathedral arcade and triforium gallery down one side, and an enormous hooded chimneypiece on the other, it managed to be both grand and cosy at the same time.3 This was the domestic heart of the community. Newspapers were kept here, there were easy chairs, and a log fire burned in winter on high days and holy days, when the usual routine was eased slightly. None of this has altered much, probably because these are the rooms that are hired out for weddings and other functions by the Council.

  I said little as my guide showed me round, though she must have been aware of the emotions that were charging through me. She said that few old students ever visited Kelham now, and I was the first in a long time. It was the visit to the Great Chapel that undid me. Dedicated in 1928, it is a huge space, sixty-two feet square in the clear, with four superb arches supporting a massive dome sixty-eight feet high, the second largest concrete dome in England, leading Father Hilary – one of the younger members of the Society – to claim, not entirely facetiously, that:

  We give our life

  We give our all

  Inside this great big tennis ball.

  Designed to instill a spirit of sacrifice and devotion in those who were summoned by bells to worship there several times a day, the chapel does not feel comfortable with its new purpose as an events venue, mainly because the dome overwhelms everything below it that does not acknowledge its own reach for transcendence. But that was not what did me in. Aware that I was holding back tears, my host led me into the narthex, which now contains the bar used during dances and other events in the Dome, wondering if I could solve a puzzle for her. There was a little door on the west side, just off the stairs to the gallery, which issued out onto the drive to the main gate just opposite the Fox Inn. Did I know what it was for? I shook my head, unable to speak. But I did know. This was the door through which a member of the Society left for work abroad, after a short service called missionary benediction. He would kneel on the step of the sanctuary, under the great rood arch, to receive the Director’s blessing, and then he would walk alone to the door and into whatever the future held. I went through that door in March 1956, into a taxi that took me on the first leg of my journey to Africa, the final verses of Psalm 121 still echoing in my head:

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

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

  There was a going out, certainly, but there was no coming in again for me, except this insistent returning to what is now an empty shell. I thanked my guide and made for the walk King Charles took on his last night here, the same walk that used to be taken by a member of the Society of the Sacred Mission to his grave, carried on the shoulders of students, in the certain knowledge that the sacred purpose of this place would endure long after they were dust.

  The path takes you south away from the Hall, with the River Trent on your left to the east, though you can’t see it from here through the trees. At the end of the walk, down some steps, is the orchard, tangled and neglected now, though still bearing fruit, as trees do long after there’s no one left to eat it. Though they fed us well at Kelham, I was always hungry and grateful for the windfalls that lay on the ground beneath these trees many autumns ago. A remembered scrap of verse from Helen Waddell increases my melancholy.

  When I am gone

  And the house desolate,

  Yet do not thou, O plum tree by the eaves,

  The Spring forget.4

  Beyond the orchard, the walk intersects with another path. Turn right and you come out at the playing fields; turn left and you get to the Trent and Forty Acre, a great meadow along the side of the river. Father Peter used to come here every day to fill in a meteorological chart he kept. Sometimes, when he had to be away from Kelham to hear the confessions of the nuns at Belper, I did it for him. He left me a picture book of clouds, and I would go into Forty Acre to identify the formations and enter their names in the logbook. Apart from his interest in recording the weather, Father Peter used it as an opportunity to teach me a bit of Latin. In his chuffly pipe-smoker’s voice, he’d point out that clouds were classified by using Latin words to describe their appearance as seen from the earth. I haven’t thought about it for years, but I can recall the four basic types: cumulus from the Latin for heap, stratus for layer, cirrus for a curl of hair and nimbus for rain. Looking up into the alm
ost cloudless July sky today, I see a few wisps of white: cirrus. Remarkable what sticks.

  It is hard to get into Forty Acre now, unless you bushwhack over a ditch and an ugly snarl of fences. It was a park to us and the place we went to swim in the Trent. Swimming was only permitted if there was a qualified life-saver present. I passed the test by going into the water with another student, flipping him onto his back, placing his hands on my shoulders, and pushing him towards the bank while I did an awkward version of the breast stroke. No one drowned during my time, but I wouldn’t have been much good to anyone in real trouble.

  It was an early example of being theoretically qualified to do something I was actually incapable of performing, something that has been a bit of a theme in my life. From somewhere, I have been afflicted with the gift of confidence, of appearing to be knowledgeable about something I am actually making up as I go along. My improvisations were based less on knowledge than on self-confidence allied to an easy fluency with words. I can see now that I spent a large part of my life winging it, and that some of the things I made up, some of the roles I tried to fill, I did because I admired the idea of them. The toughest lesson life teaches is the difference between who you wanted to be and who you actually are. And it can take a whole life to teach it. Funny, where a meditation on my incompetence as a life-saver has taken me.

  The hard thing about coming to this place is glimpsing the young man I was fifty years ago, brimming with ideals, taking this same walk, earnestly conversing with a companion – and completely unaware of the spring and drive of his own character and where it would lead him. He thought then he had chosen a high road and would walk it to the end, whereas I know now that roads choose us and what they unfold before us is not the person we want to be, but the person we already are, the person time slowly discloses to us. Yet in spite of trying to learn this lesson, I still regret roads not taken. Is that why I keep coming back here? Am I trying to discern the outline of an alternative past, the most futile of pursuits? What is certain is that I am so far into my own head at the moment that I am not paying enough attention to what’s going on around me; so I have come too far and passed the graveyard. I turn back down the walk, identify the untidy gap in the tall yew hedge and enter.