Absolute Truths

This lack of venom in my new job made committee work less tiring. I was also soothed by the deference shown to me whenever I ventured into the Palace of Westminster to attend the House of Lords or whenever I made a visit to one of the parishes in my diocese. But being a revered figurehead can be a lonely business and the dark side of all the deference was the isolation. Looking back I can see that this was when my marriage entered a new phase of intimacy and interdependence: increasingly I found that in my daily life I could only be my true self, relaxed and at ease, with Lyle. Of course I could also be myself with my spiritual director, now only twelve miles away at Starrington Magna, but Jon had become a recluse after his wife’s death in 1957, and although I did visit him regularly he never came to Starbridge. Apart from my wife I was on my own in that gilded cage of a Cathedral Close.

At last I pulled myself together. Realising that moping for Cambridge and bewailing my loneliness was all very self-centred, spiritually immature behaviour, I managed to stop thinking about myself and start thinking instead of how I could best serve God – a move which meant I poured myself into my work as I embarked on a massive programme of reform.

I started with the Theological College. It had begun life in the nineteenth century as an independent institution, cushioned by an endowment which permitted only modest fees to be charged, but in the twentieth century mismanagement and rising costs had brought it under the control of the diocese and the bishop was always one of the governors. I not only increased the diocesan grant which supplemented the now almost worthless endowment, but I also pushed the diocese into taking out a loan so that the premises could be improved and expanded. My fellow-governors, long accustomed to dozing at meetings of the board, were stunned by my activities but no one dared oppose me; they realised that no bishop of Starbridge had ever been so well qualified as I was to pump new life into that place, and besides, when I produced the evidence that showed the institution had become a moral disgrace they were so shocked that they almost fell over themselves to give me carte blanche.

I took a similar line with the diocese itself, which was also in a most sluggish and decayed state. My predecessor as bishop, I regret to say, had reputedly died of inertia. In the 1930s Alex Jardine had set the diocese alight with his dynamism, but after his retirement the authorities had taken fright and appointed mild-mannered nonentities to the Starbridge bishopric with the inevitable, enervating results. Dr Ottershaw, Dr Jardine’s successor, had at least allowed himself to be organised by an efficient archdeacon, but Bishop Flack, my immediate predecessor, had made a disastrous archidiaconal appointment and the diocese had become slothful. How quickly men become demoralised when their leaders fail to be crisp, conscientious and hard-working! At least my years in the army had taught me that particular lesson. Having woken everyone up by shaking them, metaphorically speaking, until their teeth rattled, I embarked on a plan of radical reorganisation.

All this took much time and kept me very busy. I appointed a suffragan bishop to manage Starmouth, the large port on the south coast, and I streamlined the diocesan office in Starbridge by pruning the bureaucracy which had mushroomed during the days of Bishop Flack. In addition to all this high-powered executive activity, I had to find the time to visit parish after parish in the diocese in order to preach, confirm and tend the flock in my role as spiritual leader. And as if all this activity were not enough to fell even St Athanasius himself, I was soon serving on committees at Church House, the Church of England’s London headquarters, and toiling at sessions of the Church Assembly. The last straw was when my turn came to read the prayers every day for a short spell in the House of Lords.

Dashing up to London, dashing around the diocese, dashing from committee to committee and from parish to parish, I began to wonder how I could possibly survive, but propped up by a first-class wife, a first-class spiritual director, two first-class archdeacons, a first-class suffragan bishop and a first-class secretary, I finally learnt how to pace myself, how to delegate, how to spend most effectively the time I allotted to private prayer and, in short, how to avoid dropping dead with exhaustion. After a while, when I began to reap the benefits of a more efficient diocese, life became less frenetic. But not much. No wonder time seemed to pass so quickly. Sometimes the days would whip by so fast that I felt as if I could barely see them for dust.

This arduous professional life, which became increasingly gratifying as I earned a reputation for being a strong, efficient, no-nonsense bishop, was punctuated by various awkward incidents in my private life, but fortunately Lyle and I, now closer than we had ever been before, managed to weather them tolerably well. Charley was no longer a problem. He recovered sufficiently from the agony of his eighteenth birthday to do well in his A-level examinations and I did not even have to pull a string to ensure his admittance to my old Cambridge college. He then decided to defer his entry until he had completed his two years of National Service. At first he loathed the army, finding it ‘disgustingly Godless’, but soon he was saved by his ability to speak fluent German, and he wound up working as a translator in pleasant quarters near Bonn. Having survived this compulsory diversion, he at last began to read divinity at Cambridge. Here he was ecstatically happy. Glowing reports reached me, and after winning a first he proceeded to theological college – but not to the one in Starbridge; I was anxious that he should have the chance to train for the priesthood far from the long shadow I cast as a bishop. To my relief his desire to be a priest never wavered, his call was judged by the appropriate authorities to be genuine and eventually he was ordained. It was a moment of enormous satisfaction for me and more than made up for the fact that I continually found Michael a disappointment.

Michael had not wanted to move to Starbridge. He thought it was the last word in provincial boredom, and we were obliged to endure sulks, moans and tart remarks. Later he developed an interest in popular music, already a symbol of rebellion among the young, and began to attend church only mutinously, complaining how ‘square’ it all was. Recognising the conventional symptoms of adolescent dislocation I kept calm, said little, endured much and waited for the storms to pass, but to my dismay the storms became hurricanes. Michael discovered girls. This was no surprise, particularly since he was a good-looking young man, and all sensible fathers are glad when their sons discover that girls are more fun than cricket, but I was concerned by the girls in whom he chose to be interested and even more concerned when he showed no interest in drinking in moderation.

He managed to do well enough at school to begin the training to be a doctor, but before long he was asked to leave medical school, not because he was incapable of doing the work but because he was incapable of avoiding fornication and hard drinking. Naturally I was concerned. I was also, as Lyle well knew, furious, shocked, resentful, embarrassed and bitter. She somehow managed to stop me becoming wholly estranged from Michael, and she somehow persuaded him to promise to reform. Jon suggested that I might make more time to talk to Michael, since such a move would make it unnecessary for him to behave badly in order to gain my attention, but I disliked the idea of being bullied by bad behaviour into reorganising my busy timetable, and I thought it was up to Michael to pull himself together without being pampered by cosy little chats.

‘My father never pampered me,’ I said to Jon, ‘and if I’d ever behaved as Michael’s behaving he’d have disowned me.’

‘But I thought you realised long ago that your father had actually made some unfortunate mistakes as a parent! Do you really want to treat Michael as your father treated you?’

I was silenced. Eventually, working on the theory that Michael was a muddled, unhappy young man who needed every possible support as he struggled to find his balance in adult life, I told him he was forgiven and promised to do all I could to get him into another medical school, but Michael merely said he now wanted to be a pop-singer in London.

Unfortunately by this time National Service had been abolished so I could not rely on the army to knock some sense into his addled head. I tried to control my fury but failed. There was a scene which ended when Michael announced: ‘Right. That’s it. I’m off,’ and headed for London with the small legacy which he had been left by my old friend Alan Romaine, the doctor who had ensured my physical recovery after the war. Lyle extracted a promise from Michael that he would keep in touch with her, so we were able to tell everyone truthfully that he had gone to London to find a job and we were looking forward to hearing how he was getting on.

‘I’m sure it’ll all come right,’ said Lyle to me in private. ‘What he’s really interested in is the stage, and he’s so handsome that he’s bound to become a matinée idol.’

I was too sunk in gloom to reply, but Lyle’s prediction turned out to be closer to the mark than I had expected. Michael became involved with a suburban repertory company and quickly decided that his talent was for neither singing nor acting but for directing and producing plays. He stayed a year with the company but then announced that the theatre was passé and that television was ‘where it was at’ (a curious American phrase currently popular among the young). To my astonishment he succeeded in getting a job at the BBC.

‘You see?’ said Lyle. ‘I told you it would all work out in the end.’

I found it so pleasant to be able to tell all my friends that my younger son now had a respectable employer that I decided the time had come to offer Michael the olive branch of peace, and writing him a letter I offered to take him out to lunch at the Athenaeum when I was next in London. A week later I received a card in reply. It said: ‘Athenaeum = Utter Dragsville. Take me to that bar in the House of Lords, food not necessary, I drink lunch.’

I did not like this card at all but Lyle said Michael was only trying to shock me and there was no reason why he and I should be unable to down a couple of sherries in the House of Lords bar while we tried to make up our minds whether we could face lunching together in the dining-room.

We met. Michael, who had clearly been drinking, ordered a double dry martini. I let him drink one but drew the line when he demanded another. He called me an old square and walked out. After that, relations remained cool between us for some time.

‘He can’t last long at the BBC,’ I said to Lyle. ‘He’ll get sacked for drink and wind up in the gutter.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Lyle, and once again she was right. Michael continued to work at the BBC and even obtained promotion. Obviously I needed to give our battered olive branch of peace another wave. By this time we had reached the end of 1964 and I invited – even, I go so far as to say, begged – him to spend Christmas with us. I had hoped he might telephone in response to this fulsome invitation, but another of his terse little cards arrived. It said: ‘Xmas okay but don’t mention God. Will be arriving on Xmas Eve with my bird, the one Mum met when she snuck up to London to see my new pad. Make sure there’s plenty of booze.’

‘Oh God!’ said Lyle through gritted teeth when she read this offensive communication.

Making a great effort to seem not only calm but even mildly amused I said: ‘I don’t understand the ornithological reference.’

‘It’s his latest ghastly girl. She’s American.’

‘You never mentioned –’

‘She was too ghastly to mention.’

‘Well, if he thinks he can bring his mistress here and bed down with her under my roof –’

‘Darling, leave this entirely to me.’

Michael did spend Christmas with us at the South Canonry, but the girl was ruthlessly billeted by Lyle at one of the local hotels. Michael wore no suit. He did not even wear a tie. He was never dead drunk but he was certainly in that condition known to publicans as ‘nicely, thank you’, an inebriated state which fell short of causing disruption but was still capable of generating embarrassment. My enemy Dean Aysgarth, on the other hand, was constantly accompanied to a variety of services by a veritable praetorian guard of well-dressed, immaculately behaved, respectable and charming sons. If I had not had Charley to cheer me up I might well have expired with despair.

However, Lyle had been working hard behind my back, and on Boxing Day Michael sidled up to me with a penitent expression. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just want you to know that my new year’s resolution will be not to get on your nerves. Can we bury the hatchet and drink to 1965?’

We drank to the coming year.

‘I’ve decided that 1965’s going to be a great time for the Ashworth family,’ said Michael, coming up for air after downing his martini. ‘I prophesy no fights, no feuds and absolutely no fiascos of any kind.’

Michael had many gifts but I fear prophecy was not among them.

THREE

‘I am going to set before you one of those standing themes that always ought to be preached about: the relation between the sexes … And if we achieve no other aim, we shall at least show sympathy with those who are concerned to manage the most baffling and the most ungovernable part of their instinctive nature.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968

Said or Sung

I

Having completed this portrait of myself, my family and my professionally distinguished but privately turbulent life – having, in other words, set the scene for my third catastrophe – it is now time to describe the crises which battered me in rapid succession towards the edge of the abyss.

‘Do you remember,’ said Lyle, taking the telephone receiver off the hook one afternoon early in the February of 1965, ‘how miserable we were when we were forced to face the fact that our third child was never going to exist?’

‘Vividly.’ I was in an excellent mood for it was a Monday, and Monday was my day off. As Lyle severed our connection to the outside world, I sat down on the bed to remove my shoes.

‘And do you remember,’ pursued Lyle, drawing the curtains and plunging the bedroom into an erotic twilight, ‘how you said God might know what was best for us better than we did, and I was so angry that I hurled an ashtray at you?’

‘Even more vividly.’

‘Well, I just want to say I’m sorry I hurled the ashtray. We would never have survived a third child.’

‘Does this belated enlightenment mean you’ll stop feeling queasy whenever anyone cites the quotation: “All things work together for good to them that love God”?’

‘No, I still think that’s the most infuriating sentence St Paul ever wrote – which reminds me: why have you taken to writing it over and over again on your blotter?’

‘It calms me down when someone rings up and wastes my time by drivelling on about nothing.’

‘It wouldn’t calm me down,’ said Lyle, removing the counterpane from the bed as I stood up. ‘I’d just want to grab a gun and shoot St Paul.’

Whenever possible on my day off I played golf, but on this occasion bad weather had ensured that I stayed at home. The winter so far had been very cold. There had been blizzards in January, and although a dry spell had now been forecast there was as yet no sign of it beginning in Starbridge. I had spent the morning working on my new book about the early Christian writer Hippolytus and the sexually lax Bishop Callistus, and my glamorous part-time secretary Sally had taken dictation for an hour before returning home to type up her notes. Sally had been wearing a shiny black coat, which she had told me was made of something called PVC, and tall black leather boots which had appeared to creep greedily up her legs towards the hem of her short purple skirt. After viewing this fashion display the sexually lax Bishop Callistus would undoubtedly have dictated some weak-kneed thoughts about fornication, but since I was anticipating an intimate afternoon with my wife, I had been able to say to Sally with aplomb: ‘What an original ensemble!’ and deliver myself of some intellectually rigorous thoughts about Hippolytus’s theology. There are times when I really do think the case for a celibate priesthood is quite impossible to sustain.

Lyle and I were now alone in the house. Our cook-housekeeper had gone home at one o’clock; the chaplains had disappeared to their nearby cottages after a quick glance at the morning post to ensure there was no crisis which needed my attention, and Miss Peabody, who shared my day off, was no doubt doing something very worthy elsewhere. The house was not only delightfully quiet but delightfully warm as the result of the recent installation of a central heating system, an extravagance paid for out of my private income and now periodically triggering pangs of guilt that I should be living in such luxury while the majority of my clergy shivered in icy vicarages.

‘Isn’t the central heating turned up rather high?’ I said conscience-stricken to Lyle.

‘Certainly not!’ came the robust reply. ‘Bishops need to be warm in order to function properly.’

I thought Hippolytus would have made a very acid comment on this statement, but of course he had not been obliged to endure the numbing effect of an English February. Fleetingly I pictured Bishop Callistus toasting himself without guilt in front of a brazier of hot coals as he planned his next compassionate sermon to adulterers.

Our bedroom at the South Canonry faced the front of the house, and from the windows we could see beyond the huge beech-tree by the gate and across the Choir School’s playing-field to the southern side of the Cathedral: the roof of the octagonal chapter house was clearly visible above the quadrangle formed by the cloisters, and beyond this roof the central tower rose high above the nave to form the base of the spire.

‘Why are you gazing glassy-eyed at the curtains?’

‘I was thinking of the Cathedral beyond them. Since you’ve just apologised for throwing the ashtray at me all those years ago, let me now apologise for wanting our bedroom to face the back garden when we moved here.’

‘Thank you, darling. But of course I realised that was because you were slightly neurotic about Starbridge at the time. Imagine wanting to face a boring old back garden when you had the chance to face one of the architectural wonders of Europe!’

I laughed dutifully at the memory of this foolishness.

In contrast to the tropical temperature generated by the new heating system the bedroom presented a cool, austere appearance. The modern furniture was white; my wardrobe and tallboy, inherited from my father, stood in my dressing-room next door. Lyle had chosen the white furniture, just as she had chosen the ice-blue curtains and the wintry grey carpet. At first I had thought: how cold! But soon I had realised that the coldness became erotic when it formed the background for Lyle’s collection of nightwear. Lyle had never adjusted her wardrobe to her advancing years. Having kept her figure she had no trouble buying exactly what she liked, and what she liked had changed little since I had first met her. During the day she wore simple, elegant suits and dresses in chaste, muted colours and looked like a very exclusive executive secretary – or perhaps like a grand version of the lady’s companion she had been in the 1930s when she had run the palace so efficiently for the Jardines. But at night the air of propriety was discarded and amazing creations foamed and frothed from the ice-white wardrobe. Then indeed my pity for the celibate bishops of the Early Church knew no bounds.

‘What would I do,’ I said as I slid between the sheets, ‘if you weighed twelve stone and wore flannel nightgowns and had hair like corrugated iron?’

‘Die of boredom. And what would I do if you were bald and paunchy and looked like an elderly baby?’

‘I’m sure you’d find some stimulating solution.’

An amusing interlude followed. I find it curious that it should be so widely believed that no one over sixty can possibly be interested in sexual intercourse, and I find it well-nigh scandalous that so many people today still believe that Christianity is against sex. Christianity has certainly experienced bouts of thinking that there are better ways of occupying one’s time – in the Early Church, for instance, when the end of the world was believed to be imminent, procreation was inevitably regarded as a self-indulgent escape from the far more urgent task of saving souls – but today it is generally recognised among Christians that sexual intercourse is good. It is the abuse of sexual intercourse which causes all the problems and which prompts Christians like me to speak up in the hope of saving people from being exploited, tormented and wrecked. At Cambridge my undergraduates had nicknamed me ‘Anti-Sex Ashworth’, but no sobriquet could have been more inappropriate. I may be an ardent moralist but I put a high value on sex – which explains why I am an ardent moralist. I detest the fact that this great gift from God is regularly devalued and degraded.

‘St Paul should have had sex regularly,’ said Lyle later as we lit our cigarettes.

‘Why have you got your knife into St Paul all of a sudden?’

‘He was beastly to women and queers.’

‘That’s a highly debatable statement. If one takes into account that some of the Epistles weren’t written by him –’

‘What would St Paul have said to the woman in my prayer-group who broke down last week and told us her son was deeply in love with another man?’

‘I’m sure he’d have been extremely kind to her.’

‘But she doesn’t want mere kindness, Charles, least of all for herself! She wants her son to be accepted, particularly by the Church. She says: is it right that a promiscuous homosexual can confess to an error and receive absolution while two homosexuals who practise fidelity in a loving relationship are barred from receiving the sacrament?’

‘She’s mistaken in assuming that a promiscuous homosexual would automatically receive absolution. I certainly wouldn’t absolve anyone I thought intended to continue committing buggery in public lavatories.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Also I don’t think you should lose sight of the law of the land. Homosexual acts are illegal. You surely can’t expect the Church to condone law-breaking en masse!’

‘But what are ordinary, law-abiding homosexuals supposed to do, Charles, if they have no gift for chastity? After all, most heterosexual men find chastity quite beyond them – how would you yourself manage if I ran off and left you on your own?’

‘I’d run after you and haul you back.’

‘What fun! But seriously, Charles –’

‘Oh, I freely admit I’d hate to be celibate. But that doesn’t mean God’s incapable of calling me to such a life and it doesn’t mean either that I’d be incapable of responding to such a call if it came. By the grace of God –’

‘– all things are possible. Quite. But Charles, are you really saying that the Church has nothing to say to these people except that they should regard their homosexual inclinations as a call to celibacy?’

‘The Church has plenty to say to everyone, regardless of their sexual inclinations. And let’s get one point quite clear: the Church is not against homosexuals themselves. Indeed many homosexuals do excellent work as priests.’

‘Yes, but they’re the celibates, aren’t they? What I want to know is –’

‘My dear, I have every sympathy for anyone, heterosexual or homosexual, who’s severely tempted to indulge in illicit sexual activity, but the Church can’t just adopt a policy of “anything goes”! Any large organisation has to make rules and set standards or otherwise, human nature being what it is, the whole structure collapses in chaos!’