Coasting (24 page)

My father showed me what he was working on now. In the old days it had always been some promising new cadet branch of the family; more honest Somerset yeoman farmers, Staffordshire tradesmen, army officers, minor gentry. Not any more. He was digging up the ancestors who would have gone to any lengths to avoid having their portraits painted—our criminal past. Reading between the lines of the shipping records of Guernsey and Southampton, he was piecing together an account of how our Channel Island connections had engaged in smuggling, privateering and the slave trade. We were respectable no longer. Rapine, plunder, fiddling the books and dealing under the counter ran in our blood. I saw the whole thing as a delicious smack in the eye for General Sir Edward and Cousin Emma.

My father was preparing a twenty-thousand-word paper on the subject for a scholarly journal of local history. He had shoe boxes of index cards listing dates of sailings, rigs, tonnages, harbor dues, prizes, cargoes. Little twelve-ton luggers, which had slipped out of port under cover of night in filthy weather in the 1760s, had succeeded in escaping the attention of the revenue men only to find themselves caught in the act by my assiduous father.

“This is going to land me in hot water,” he said happily. “The good people of Guernsey like to think that they never ever dealt in slaves. I’m afraid I’ve got news for them.” He settled his whisky glass on top of a precipitous stack of old copies of
New Society
, stretched his long legs out over half the width of the room, and talked of family villainies.

There were two men in my father’s chair. One was my contemporary; a cheerful plain-clothes, bearded, radical de-bunker. I could only see the other, a far older man, if I squinted hard. His gaunt cassock fell in shiny folds around his knees; his lips were tight-reined, his shaven chin was pumice-gray, and his forehead was rippled in a permanent
frown. While my father talked I tried and failed to get the two men to coalesce into one person, but they wouldn’t go.

In 1959 my father would no more have voted Labour than he would have denounced God from his pulpit in St. Mark’s. Now there was a red Labour Party poster taped to the drawing-room window. The Aldermaston marches had always been the symbolic High Ground over which we fought in the breakfast-table war.

“Do you honestly think,” my father said from twenty miles away and a millennium ago, “that the British Government—or any other ruddy government, for that matter—is going to take serious note of the views of a rabble of spotty adolescents?”

Now it was my father who marched while I paid lip service to the cause but stayed away because I couldn’t face the crowds, the officious marshals with their bullhorns, the day lost to work.

Both my parents were busy in their new life. My mother was teaching English to the Hindustani-speaking wife and daughters of the grocer on the corner. My father, though he had retired form his parish, still held office as Rural Dean of the city and was battling against the “diehards” of the diocesan “establishment.” He was at present in “a bit of hot water” because he was disposing of a redundant Anglican church in Southampton to the Sikhs, who needed a temple. This had given him a nasty twenty-four hours in the national press, whose reporters had portrayed my father as a trendy vicar bent on selling off England’s national heritage to a bunch of pagan immigrants.

He went on demonstrations, against the Bomb, against government cuts in the social services. He conducted funerals, on a free-lance basis, at the local crematorium. He tracked down new blackguardly relatives in the archives. In their spare time he and my mother were plotting an epic holiday through the pages of an atlas: they were going to go camping and bird-watching in the socialist republics of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Extraordinary
. But it was not really so extraordinary: my father was only keeping in tune with his Church and his
times. He was certainly a very different character from the man I’d known in the 1950s; but the character of the Church of England had changed just as dramatically in the same twenty-five-year span.

In my childhood, the Church had been as grayly, fundamentally English in its texture as limestone country, fog, or boiled beef and cabbage. Originally it had been an ingenious construction, put together by apostate intellectuals and lawyers toadying to the interests of the Crown. Its mixture of conscientious Protestantism and bureaucratic convenience had settled through the centuries like sediment accumulating at the bottom of a pond. All its power lay in its invincible sluggishness. The dank smell of must, mildew and old bones which clung to its buildings had worked its way into the antique and desiccated finery of its clergy—the soutanes, birettas, surplices, stoles, copes and chasubles which used to fill a trunk in the parsonage box room. There was the same smell in the men’s voices, in the way they pronounced the word “God” with a distinctively Anglican, urbane, bored sigh, so that it came out as “Gard,” as if the Creator were a somewhat tiresome retired Major with whom they were on nodding terms. Even in the 1950s, these men were able to behave as if their Church were the fulcrum around which English life revolved. After each World War, their congregations dwindled further, but it was the growing millions of conspicuous absentees who were thought eccentric, not the Church. The C. of E. had weathered lots of passing fads before; it would survive the influence of Television and the habit of lying abed on Sunday mornings just as it had survived the assaults on it of Cromwell, Wesley, Darwin. Its sheer sluggishness helped to guarantee its eventual well-being; it was too torpid to change, or even to diminish in its importance. It was on a level with the monarchy: England wouldn’t be England without it.

I can still hear their complacent, piping voices coming from behind the drawing-room door. “Ah, yes, poor soul.” “Hmmmmmmmmmm …” “Yars.” “Old Mrs. Tickeridge, you know.” “Yars—case for the moral-welfare worker,
rarlly.” Their vicarages and rectories were, like ours, secluded from the world by such a quantity of shrubbery that all alien ideas simply got lost, like golf balls, in the protective tangle of green.

Their congregations went on getting smaller. The old, piping clergymen died, but too few young men turned up to take their places. The cardboard thermometers which stood outside almost every church, registering the progress of the roof appeal, got stuck at a few hundred pounds. The roofs fell in, the thermometers wilted in the rain and the figures (painted on them by vicar’s wives from one end of the country to the other) turned into indecipherable splodges of color.

The Church might just conceivably have withstood all of this. What it couldn’t take was the effective demolition of its traditional parishes. The very word parish conjures up the sort of place you might see on a biscuit tin or the box of a jigsaw puzzle, with a green, a pump, a duckpond, a rosy-cheeked postmistress, a general grocer, a butcher, a pub and, right in the center of things, St. Barnabas or St. Mark’s or St. Aidan’s. Just out of the picture, beyond the cottage gardens with their hollyhocks and hardy annuals, the Vicarage stood, twice as big and twice as important as the doctor’s house up the road.

It wasn’t quite like that in the 1950s, but there was still a sufficient resemblance to the picture to keep up the illusion of the Church’s claim to stand at the heart of English village life, as well as the larger illusion that England was a country based on the village, not on the city. But the cities were gobbling up the villages on their outskirts. New roads meant that villagers could nip into and out of the towns for their shopping and amusements, while townees could invade the villages as overnight and weekend residents. The bakery, the butcher’s, the haberdasher-cum-ironmonger’s went broke, and their premises were converted into cottages for outsiders. The pastureland behind the church was sold off and became a maze of crescents of prefabricated houses with Costa del Sol balconettes and carports. By 1970, no one, not even the vicar, could persist in seeing the parish as
the small, self-contained microcosm of England. It wasn’t small, it wasn’t self-contained—and by 1982 its rosy-cheeked postmistress would be running the Video Club from the Post Office and doing a nice trade in snuff movies and lacy erotica at £1.00 a night with Sundays free.

Then there were the new parishes. In 1966 my father moved from a village which was just still a village to a gigantic building site on the edge of Southampton where twenty thousand people were stacked in concrete towers, filed there by the city council for future reference. It was a lonely, ugly, bald, impoverished and godless place. There was no center or direction in it. Its broad roads spoiled a fertile valley with their idle, nowhere-to-nowhere, sprawling loops, like the handwriting of a retarded child. There were two chemist’s shops, where women queued at the counters with prescriptions for heavy sedatives. My father went on his pastoral rounds by way of spray-gunned elevators, a bewildered shepherd in search of a lost flock. One year, I counted his sheep for myself. Of twenty thousand parishioners, thirty-six, or it may have been thirty-seven, people turned up for church on Christmas Day. They looked old, pale and shell-shocked.

So did my father, and so did the Church at large. There was a lacerating irony even in its name now. Whatever else it may have been the Church of, it was not the Church of
England
anymore. It was almost as far out on the margins of modern English life as the Poetry Society or Rastafarianism—and it was on the margins that the Church regrouped.

No longer a national church (except in the fond daydreams of the most unobservantly pious), the C. of E. settled for being a sect. It was a very big sect indeed, with cells of dissenters spread throughout the world. It had money, influence, palaces, meeting places. It was organized on the lines of a huge corporation. The Archbishop of Canterbury looked foolish and irrelevant when he spoke for England, but he still represented an enormous, if scattered, constituency. If you tried to view it as the focal point of English life, the Church was pitifully enfeebled; but as a lobby of Christian feeling and opinion it was intimidatingly powerful.

Quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1970s, the Church of England became a church of troublesome priests and troublesome bishops. For the first time since the Restoration, a constitutional rift was beginning to open up between Church and State. Clerical commissions produced critical reports of Government policies on housing, social welfare, defense, wage control and the white-supremacist regimes in Africa. In the 1950s the smart cliché about the Church of England was that it was the Conservative Party at prayer; now the Church was attacking a Conservative Government with at least as much effect as the official parliamentary opposition. At the beginning of the Falklands expedition, priests had refused to bless guns and battleships; in churches, prayers were being said for the Argentinian as well as for the British forces, and the phrase “just settlement” was being widely substituted for the word “victory.”

My father was part of this revolution and had been transformed by it. I had seen him as a High Anglican ritualist—the last man in an empty church, raising the Host to the sparrows in the rafters, with the candles blowing out and the hassocks growing mold in the pews. In fact he had emerged as a dissenter, a hot-water man, in a Church which had itself been reinvigorated by getting into hot water.

That evening Mrs. Thatcher appeared on the nine-o’clock news. Her lips were pursed in a tight bud of resolve; her upstanding sheaf of hair looked as if it were sustained not so much by blow-drying as by the force of personal electricity. She was talking in her Britannia voice.

My mother glanced up at the picture for a moment and said, “That woman”; then, “I do wish somebody would bump her off.”

“Oh, come on, really,” I said, and set to lecturing my mother on the democratic process. It was one of those infuriatingly reasonable lectures, grimly parental in tone and full of on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-that. Listening to myself, I heard the wittering accent of a 1950s cleric in full cry, but couldn’t stop. My father stared over the top of his half-moon spectacles at the plummy curate who had invaded his drawing room. We seemed somehow to be all the wrong way round.

“I was just speaking figuratively,” my mother said.

“Well, figuratively speaking, I suppose
I
wish somebody would bump her off too. With a ballot box.”

“That was what I meant,” my mother said.

I slept thinly in a narrow bed, a son’s bed. The lights of slow-moving cars cruising the streets for prostitutes intermittently lit the room. My parents’ strange new world of Sikhs, sailors, call girls, piracy and protest was altogether too adventurous to sleep through.

In the morning my father showed me the walled garden at the back of the house, where a vine was nailed up to the brickwork. It was the last week in April, and one had to look carefully to spot the curlicues of green which were breaking free of the sagging bundle of dry sticks.

“We should get a few gallons of wine from it this year, if we have any summer at all. Next year, though …” He spread his arms in a gesture which conjured a curtain of greenery around the yard, with sunlight filtering through the leaves and the grapes hanging overhead in opaline clusters, big as bull’s-eyes—a vision of renewal, plenty, convivial pleasure. The young vine at the end of the garden was an infinitely happier symbol than the spiky parsonage hedge.

It is a mistake to let a priest go on a boat. Maritime lore has it that priests bring bad luck, because their chief purpose on board ship is to perform burials at sea. So if you do have a priest on hand, leave him ashore.

I argued that my priest was at least semi-retired, and therefore only half a threat to the voyage. One has to take risks sometimes. My parents and I sailed from Lymington in
Gosfield Maid
.

It was a foolish thing to do, as I realized within minutes of leaving the quay. In front of the popping gas fire in Southampton, whisky in hand, I had been a bit too eloquent about both the hazards and the enchantments of my own new life. Much had been made of the natural magic of navigation, of tides and tide races, of heavy weather when
the sea scowled ferociously at the boat, of the trancelike passages of reflective solitude. As the level sank in the bottle, I changed from the son my parents knew to someone who combined all the essential properties of Joshua Slocum, Captain MacWhirr and a Guernsey slaver.