Leaving Alexandria Read online

  The graveyard of the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham is a shaded rectangle containing thirty-five simple gravestones, irregularly spaced. From the gap in the

  hedge

  XXXXXXX

  that

  XXX

  serves

  XXX

  as an

  XXX

  entrance,

  XXX

  the

  XXX

  arrangement

  XXX

  of graves

  XXX

  faces you like this . . .

  XXX

  XX

  X

  Apart from two erected recently, the stones are all covered in lichen and are hard to read, but I am able to decipher most of them.

  I pause before the ones I remember. Here is Father Peter Clarke, my old Cottage Master, an ardent pipe-smoker who grew his own tobacco at Kelham – inevitably called ‘Nobby weed’ – to amplify the community ration of an ounce and a half a week. He taught history to the boys in the Cottage, very boringly, it has to be said. In fact, I do not remember any stimulating teaching at the elementary level, which may be why so few of the boys who went through the Cottage actually made it to ordination. It is hard to blame the Society for this, however. I doubt if they had a single trained teacher in their midst. They probably assumed that any educated man could pass on what he knew if he tried hard enough. It seemed to work for me, probably because, while I am not a teachable person, I am quite good at learning for myself if my interest is ignited. The teaching in the Cottage bored me, but the ethos of Kelham stimulated my imagination, which was probably more important in the long run. And what I remember about Peter Clarke, whose gravestone I am now trying to read, was his kindness and droll sense of humour – and that funny chuffly voice. His stone tells me he died on 25 November 1987, aged ninety-one, ‘in the 65th year of his profession’. That means he was seventy-six when the Society left Kelham, which must have been tough for him, because he loved the place. ‘Profession’ relates to the ceremony, a bit like a wedding, at which a novice, whom we might think of as engaged but not yet married to the community, professed his vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, and committed himself to the Society till death.

  Each gravestone here tells how long the dead man had been professed in the Society. Most of the ones I remember were fortunate to die before the exodus from Kelham. I am particularly glad to see that Brother Edward did not live to see the move. He died in September 1965, aged seventy-eight, in the sixty-sixth year of his profession. Lay brothers in the Society, like non-commissioned officers in the Army, were the men who kept the system functioning. Edward was head gardener at Kelham, and a critic of sloppy work from the students. Since the Society hired no outside help, everyone pitched in to keep the place going. There were two types of work that no student escaped. ‘Departments’ were daily household chores, done after breakfast before study started, such as washing dishes, clearing up the refectory and sweeping corridors. ‘House lists’ were longer afternoon chores lasting a couple of hours, which might involve working for Brother Edward in the grounds, mucking out the piggery near Forty Acre, or scrubbing and polishing floors in the House. Two afternoons a week were dedicated to compulsory sport for everyone, football in the winter, cricket and tennis in the summer. The whole thing operated with military precision, though it was bells not bugles that summoned us to our duties. Suddenly I have an image of Brother Edward sitting on the big Atco motor mower, his spectacles glinting in the sunshine, going round and round the cricket pitch, getting it ready for the season.

  Here’s Brother Hugh. He died at eighty-one in 1957, while I was in Accra, in the sixty-first year of his profession. Hugh Pearson spent his life at Kelham, and was its indispensable handyman. A small, bent, scuttling figure, he was an authority on the Victorian plumbing system of the old house. He was known as ‘Shoosty’, because of the sibilant way he talked through ill-fitting false teeth – not that he said much, though he chortled a lot. Father Peter, who considered him a saint, once claimed that when there was a full moon his temper was vile.

  Here’s Father John Scutt. I remember him. He was a small, compact man, nimble on his feet. He taught us boxing in the Cottage, and gave us exercises to develop our biceps, feeling them at intervals to see how they were growing. I remember his verdict on mine after one examination: ‘Small,’ he said, ‘small, but hard.’ He died in October 1969, aged seventy-nine, in the forty-sixth year of his profession. Here is Richard Roseveare, the man I spent two years working for in Accra when he was bishop there. I am not sure when he left Ghana, as the Gold Coast became after Independence. Standing before his gravestone reminds me of Independence Day in Accra in 1957 and seeing Kwame Nkrumah hailed as the Great Liberator. Richard Roseveare, a great fan of Nkrumah in those blissful early days, later became critical of him as his megalomania turned him from freedom fighter into tyrant. That’s when Richard was forced to leave and return to Kelham. A commanding figure, it must have been hard for him coming back, especially since his return coincided with the crisis that led to the departure of the Society. Anyway, here he is. His gravestone tells me he died in April 1972, aged sixty-nine, in the forty-fourth year of his profession, and three months before they decided to abandon Kelham. He got out just in time.

  Stephen Bedale, died on 1 March 1961, aged seventy-nine, in the fortieth year of his profession. I revered him. He was Father Director while I was here. Tall, stooped, lean. The face of an eagle. ‘Far ben wi’ God,’ they would have said of him in Scotland in the old days. And he had family connections with Scotland, with Inverness, according to my fellow student Aeneas Mackintosh, who came from there himself. I would conjure up a difficulty when I was a young novice, just so that I could take it to him and watch him look piercingly at me as he spoke. I remember wanting to be like him: austere, holy – a saint.

  Implicit in all the devotional books I devoured at the time was the idea that sanctity was something I could achieve with practice: I could build myself into sainthood by my choices and actions. What I was actually good at was looking the part, staying in chapel longer than others and self-consciously cultivating what I imagined to be the unself-conscious demeanour of a saint. I thought that it would look like Stephen Bedale, before whose grave I am now standing. I think he liked me, the zealous young Scot. What would he make of me now, I wonder? Disappointed. He’d be disappointed in me. I hadn’t stayed the course. I’d drifted, and not just from Kelham, maybe even from the Faith itself. I stay with him longer than with anyone else here. I scrape some of the lichen off his gravestone. Dead fifty years, and I can see his face, hear still his dramatic asthmatic delivery as he lectured on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. An uncompromising man. Yes, he’d be disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in myself, despite knowing that – being who I am – I could not have done otherwise. I scrape off more lichen and move along.

  Here’s one whose funeral I clearly remember. Brian Sim’s gravestone describes him as an ‘associate’, the term used to describe students and former students who were not members of the Society. He died in November 1954, aged twenty-five. I had been back in the House for a year after National Service in the army, and I can remember how alarmed we became at changes in Brian’s behaviour as the Michaelmas term wore on. Normally reserved, he became uninhibited and talkative, before lapsing into a coma induced by a brain tumour. His death was a shock to the community, and he was given a full Society funeral, a solemn requiem mass that concluded with his coffin being shouldered out of the chapel by his fellow students, while we all chanted the Russian Kontakion of the Departed:

  Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy saints:

  where sorrow and pain are no more;

  neither sighing, but life everlasting.

  Thou only art immortal, the Creator and Maker of man:

  and we are mortal, formed of the earth,

  and unto earth shall we return:

  for so thou didst ordain, when thou c
reatedst me, saying,

  Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

  All we go down to the dust;

  and, weeping o’er the grave, we make our song:

  alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.5

  The whole community, about a hundred and sixty of us, including the boys from the Cottage, followed Brian’s body out of the chapel into the November mist drifting off the river, across the quadrangle, round the west side of the House onto Apostles’ Walk, to lay him in the earth. Fifty-five years ago and remembered now by me in the penumbral quiet of this graveyard in the middle of England. Suddenly, I feel cold. But I am not yet ready to leave. There is another grave I must find, another death I remember.

  I am pretty certain it was at Halloween 1950. I was well into my third year in the Cottage and was keeper of the Cottage Log or diary for that Michaelmas term. We had been informed that Father Kelly, the Founder of the Society, was dying. Even those of us who had never seen him in the flesh knew that he was still an important presence in the House, confined to his room on B corridor, looked after by student ‘batmen’, including Aeneas Mackintosh, the only other Scot at Kelham. A day or two before he died, a little printed card appeared in everyone’s place in chapel, containing his last message to us: ‘The angels will look after you.’ Angels were God’s messengers. The Society of the Sacred Mission kept its Patronal Festival on 29 September, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, because its work was training God’s message boys.

  Herbert Hamilton Kelly, also known as HK or the Old Man, who in old age looked a bit like George Bernard Shaw, was born in 1860, the third son of a Church of England vicar, described as a non-quarrelsome Evangelical.6 After Manchester Grammar School, he trained as an army officer at Woolwich, but increasing deafness made a military career impossible. While at Woolwich he had an Evangelical conversion, which prompted him to go to Oxford as the first step to ordination. Like some other geniuses before him, he did not fit the Oxford system – or any system, for that matter – and came away with a fourth-class degree in history, thereby justifying the rumour that Oxford gives plodders a third, while keeping the fourth for flawed brilliance.

  It took Kelly a while to find his purpose in life, but he knew always that it would involve organising the power inherent in community to achieve a great end:

  ever since I was a cadet at Woolwich studying the art of war, I had been haunted by the dream of organised power . . . every part, large or small, grappling with its ever changing and different problems by its own independent intelligence and yet concentrating its determination under disciplined direction upon the attainment of one simple and common aim.7

  The convoluted intensity of that passage says much about this complex man, who was always haunted by a sense of personal failure yet founded an institution that changed the lives of hundreds of boys and young men. Originally invited by the Anglican Bishop of Korea to train men for missionary work in the Far East, he was soon diverted into establishing a community that would, to quote the words of a Cambridge don at the time, ‘make clergy of the humbler classes’. Kelly was not romantically attracted to the monastic life for its own sake, as I was later to become, but he did think that a community of men, committed to the traditional vows of holding all things in common – poverty; celibacy, remaining unmarried so that they could concentrate all their efforts on their work; and obedience, the submission of their wills to a common purpose – was the best way to achieve the vision that had ignited his imagination. The Society of the Sacred Mission was inaugurated in 1893, as Kelly put it:

  to start a college which would train for the ministry young men with no money and no special education . . . I was expected to follow the customary system. I never dreamt of doing so . . . These men were going to be teachers of a faith, given in a Creed. This is said to be correct, and that incorrect, but I do not care about these words. I would rather ask, why is this doctrine vital, and that fatal, to a man’s soul and capacity to live? Someone said it was, and he ought to know. Very well, we must go to him, and find out why he found it so; then each man must look into his own soul, find in his own life its questions and difficulties, its perplexities and diversities.8

  The Society started its life in south London, and then moved from the distractions of the city to Mildenhall in Suffolk. When that was outgrown they found Kelham, dismissively described by Kelly in these words:

  it is Gilbert Scott insanity on the model – or rather a previous model – of S. Pancras Hotel – one endless waste of paint, gilding, granite columns, vaulted ceilings and the vilest gothic. Extravagant, tasteless, unfeeling. Every capital throughout the house carved elaborately and vilely – with the sole object of spending money.9

  HK always exaggerated, and there is little doubt that he came to love Kelham, though probably more for what was achieved in it, than for the setting itself. He called the community he had gathered together, which included boys and men from ‘the humbler classes’ as well as the professed members of the Society, ‘an idea in the working’, and it always had about it a sense of dynamic improvisation. Kelly had three characteristics that inhered themselves in the ethos at Kelham. A reverent agnosticism about all human claims, including morals; a tendency to teach and meditate in paradoxes; and a flippant attitude towards religion allied to a total commitment to the reality of God.10 It all came together here at Kelham, where it took root, flourished gloriously for several generations, began to fade, and then was pulled violently from this ground. All that remains now is this graveyard and his gravestone, which I have just come upon.

  Herbert Hamilton Kelly

  Called to his Rest

  31.X.1950

  Aged 90

  In the 57th year of his Profession

  I had remembered correctly: it was All Hallows’ Eve. I stand for a minute or two longer before making my way out of the graveyard back onto Apostles’ Walk. I am still not sure what it is that keeps pulling me back to Kelham, but I do know what it was that brought me here in the first place– a whole lifetime ago.

  I

  1940–56

  1

  CARMAN HILL

  My father always got up well before six. Sometimes, if I was sleeping in the kitchen, I’d watch him from the bed recess when he didn’t know I was looking. I would notice how quiet and economical he was in his movements. The kettle goes on first to make a cup of tea, which he drinks standing up. Milk, no sugar. He takes nothing to eat. Fills his pipe with the wad of Walnut Plug he’s rubbed up in his hands. Gets it going with one match. Then he stands looking out of the window, his left arm along his waist supporting his right elbow, his other arm upright, holding the pipe in his mouth with his right hand. I wonder what he’s thinking as he stands there motionless. It’s getting light. What’s he seeing? He turns, opens the door quietly. With a sudden pang I realise what a considerate man he is. The door snecks softly shut behind him. He walks swiftly down Random Street, left along John Street, right down Bank Street to the Leven, then north along the riverbank to the Craft.

  This is where he is from, the Vale of Leven, twenty miles north of Glasgow; but he’d been away a long time, walking the streets of Glasgow looking for work in what my mother always referred to as the Hungry Thirties. He’d try anything then to put something on the table for the five of us, including carrying his own weight in cheap coal up tenement stairs. It was the war that rescued him and brought us back to the Vale and his job in the Craft, the United Turkey Red factory in Alexandria. War work, he called it. To begin with we sublet two rooms in Bridge Street, but my mother importuned the house factors Burgess and MacLean to rent us a dilapidated old room and kitchen in Random Street. And we were happy there. Glad to be employed again, my father worked all the hours there were in the early years of the war, and we didn’t see a lot of him. I too was glad to be back in the Vale, back among hills. And walking them became a passion, a passion that never faded.

  It was my mother who started it. During the long double-summertime day
s of the war, she took me, my wee sister Helen and my big sister Gertie exploring the hills that surrounded us, and Carman was her favourite. We’d walk in through the woods of Poachy Glen, on the edge of Renton, till the path steepened on Millburn Muir and led us to the top, 800 feet up. From up there we could see in every direction, but my eyes always went north first, to Ben Lomond and the great loch over which it presided. At over 3,000 feet, it was massive rather than craggy, and from Carman it looked like a purple ziggurat. It sat halfway up the east side of the loch at Rowardennan, along the road from Balmaha, both stops on the voyage of the Maid of the Loch, the paddle-steamer that plied the loch throughout the summer months.

  By the end of the war the family walks had petered out. Years of energetic smoking began to tell on my mother; and Gertie, five years older than me, left school at fourteen to work in a chemist shop in Renton and moved out of my orbit. Helen, three years younger, sometimes came with me; but she had pals of her own to play with and didn’t always want to join me. I had pals too, but walking was something I preferred to do on my own, so even as a boy I was a solitary walker. Sometimes I went up Staney Mollan, near the loch at Balloch, or Pappert Hill over on the east side of the river; but most of the time it was Carman Hill I returned to, back to an early love. And it was always to the north I turned first when I got to the top, always to the Ben and its island-patterned Loch. Yet the view to the south was just as dramatic. The Leven met the Clyde at Dumbarton, a few miles away, and from Carman Hill I saw it coursing into the bigger river at Dumbarton Rock, a plug of volcanic basalt 240 feet high, and since the fifth century a fortress of the British Kingdom of Strathclyde – Dùn Breatainn. At school it always struck us as funny that Great Britain got its name from as dismal a town as Dumbarton. Turning to the south-west, I saw the river spreading itself into the Firth of Clyde as it flowed on into the distant sea. The Clyde was a majestic river, but she was a worker as well as a queen, and wherever my eyes followed her, up river to Glasgow or down river to Greenock, on a clear day I could make out the cranes of the shipyards that lined both sides of her banks. And I knew that down below me in a few hours, workers from Denny’s in Dumbarton and John Brown’s in Clydebank would be getting off the train at Alexandria. Bank Street would be loud with hundreds of men in tackety boots clattering home for their tea after a long shift in the yards. But the Vale of Leven had its own industries, drawn there by the river that gave the valley its name.