Rotting Hill (34 page)

    I left Blatchover’s beautiful church with regret. That night I passed at Meldrum not far away, and from that place drove over next morning to visit a clergyman of a very different type from the Vicar of Blatchover, yet equally, if not more, unconventional. It is this clergyman, the Reverend Matthew Laming, and the story of his rebellion, which are the subject of the present chapter. It is far more usual to find a contemporary clergyman agreeing with the powers that be, than to find one in active opposition. Matthew Laming is not unique, but he is one of a small number of country clergy attempting to stem the socialist tide. It is only worth while putting this episode on record because it demonstrates how futile any such resistance has become. It seems to me I am ideally suited to report objectively this conflict between a centralizing Government and a dissident country clergyman. For my part the English village is only a pathetic relic; it depresses me rather, so there is no sentiment to bias me
there.
Then centralization is not a thing to which I personally am averse. Further, I regard centralization as quite inevitable—which is of some importance. On the other hand I admire this resister: and many of his beliefs I share—his attitude to war, for instance, is almost identical with my own. I meet very few people in England who think intelligently about war. Most stick their chests out. Perhaps the best way to give an idea of Laming’s quality would be to quote from the editorial of the Meldrum Deanery Magazine, which is from his pen. We have Dick Bartleton with his primitive interpretation of Christianity, and then Rymer elsewhere, with his highly personal version of the same religion; Laming is quite distinct from either of these—not primitive at all, holding more to the traditional substance of the Catholic Church: but in Laming’s case, a minority economics of a most violent kind complicates his traditionalism, and, at the moment, causes him to occupy a far more revolutionary position than the popular leftism of Dick Bartleton. Yet in both his case and Dick’s the aggravating cause and prime incentive is Christianity.

    Here then are the passages from the editorial, headlined “Remembrance”, for it is a short sermon for Flanders Poppy day.

    “We misuse this solemn season unless we make the effort to reflect on some of the causes that produce the catastrophes. ‘What is the use of experience if you do not reflect?’ Anatole France’s
L’Ile des Pinguins
had a great sale in France about 1908, but the lesson of the following extract was not understood: ‘These are doubtless,’ replied the interpreter, ‘industrial wars. People without commerce and industry are not obliged to make war but business people must perforce have a policy of conquest. Our wars increase in number, necessarily, along with our productive activity. When one of our industries cannot dispose of its product you have to make a war to open new markets. Thus, this year, we have had a coal war, a copper war, and a cotton war. In Third-Zealand we have killed off two-thirds of the natives in order to force the remainder to buy umbrellas and braces.’ The endeavour was made between two wars to explain why industries are unable to dispose of their products in the home market, but counter-efforts were made to suppress rather than to spread the truth that the chief reason was the restriction of buying-power.

    “Murder, after all, is repellent to the Christian conscience, but through some natural or injected perversity it is too readily assumed that mass murder is justifiable and that any analysis of the causes of mass murder deeper than those of a hysterical press is indecent and irrelevant to the Church’s work. Yet Christian ethics are no more
confined
to the Seventh Commandment (against adultery) than the American Constitution is
confined
to the Eighteenth Amendment (against alcohol).

    “Here are some lines written in 1938 on ‘The Silence in Britain’. The author believed it would be the last Silence:

    ‘A million of our dead to make us free,

    Whose dying marked the path of usury.

    Eight thousand million pounds they cost to kill

    Eight thousand pounds per man each grave to fill…

    And on that scale full interest we’ve paid:

    Six thousand million pounds in twenty years,

    Cash value of the Nation’s blood and tears.

    As tribute from war’s wild and bloody reek

    Each corpse still yields them seven pounds a week.’

    “As the old fallacies are readily embraced by almost every politician, as the effort to stamp out small villages goes almost unchecked, as the ‘first fruit and flower’ who might put things right have been destroyed, the commonwealth defence system is liquidated from within and from without.” He concludes as follows:

    “The issue is put candidly by a well-known critic and reformer: ‘It is clear beyond question that the gates of hell are wide open, and the torrent of evil will sweep away anything not
intrinsically
stronger than evil.’ We need to search our own consciences to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil and to turn our backs on tainted public ‘servants’ and tarnished principles that have bedevilled our land for so many, many years—the architects of ruin.” The passage continues: “You know that long-distance air-pilots mark on their course-charts the ‘point of non-return’—where you must go on, because you can’t return to your base. The devil has passed the point of non-return and we had better recognize it.”

    Now of course this extract consists mainly of quotations. It is perhaps a vocational trick, but it is a method to which the Reverend Matthew Laming, Vicar of Ketwood, frequently has recourse. He will conceal himself in a cloud of quotations, in the way a clergyman’s admonitions reach us in the form of a hail of judgements picked out of sacred texts. It is
his
voice, but the words are those of the saints and prophets, and of God Himself.

    But there is another thing. Laming has no desire to say, “This is what I think, this is what I say.” It is what IS that interests him, not what is Laming’s, what a multitude of elect witnesses from the past and in the present day recognized as real. Such is the nature of his speech, for he is quite a modest man, and not interested to set up a personal mind: he prefers a common currency. He is a priest, that is enough for him. And in his principal work so far (unpublished, for it is one of those books which publishers recoil from at the impact of the first sentence and upon first sighting the subject-matter in the Contents page),
The English Church and Usury,
it is as a priest he writes. He is sometimes an almost embarrassingly unassuming man. He is no Prince Hamlet, to use a phrase of a contemporary poet, just a quiet background gentleman, coming on the scene with a deeply courteous aloofness. Then from this secondary figure, destined for silence it would seem, proceed to issue words—many words. These words lay bare the roguery of practically all the leading characters. This is not a Thersites act at all: this anomalous background gentleman in a quiet undertone carries on a shocked soliloquy. None of the other characters pay any attention to him. So in his writing he most exactly talks to himself—and perhaps to posterity. For one day I expect, his history of Usury may be unearthed, in a world grown liberal once more; a faded text, in the by then almost invisible typescript. I am supposing that it will come into the possession of a historian. “History” will not, of course, to the men of that time signify a fairy-tale of the past, composed as a department of propaganda, but be a matter of impartial factual research, as disinterested and unbiased as an ethnological treatise. Let us go a step farther with this imaginary historian of the future, and say that he has just completed a massive work, the title of which is to be
Causes for the Eclipse of the Christian Nations of the West.
It might well be that after perusing Laming’s typewritten analytical account of the origin and development of Usury, this poor man would consign to the dustbin what he had written.

    Here we have been assuming among many other things that to our historian of a distant future none of the Social Credit material of the past forty years is available. I hope I shall not be seeming to tone down my estimate of Laming’s book if I say I am not claiming that it is a master-work. After all it is but an enlargement of a university “thesis”. It is the subject-matter which is of such overwhelming significance, that alone is what would attract the historian, more especially when, as in this case, it is handled with exceptional skill. Finally, this is not to be understood as saying that I subscribe to the social theories of the “Creditors”, or regard the solution they favour as valid, only that the
condition
to which they persistently call attention appears at least as blood-curdling to me as it does to them.

    The word “usury”, it must be realized, does not refer to that minor nuisance, the trade done beneath the familiar sign of a trinity of brass balls. The Banks and Insurance Companies, the coiners of false credit, the whole of the iniquitous Credit system, is what is involved—the chairman of your bank is an arch-usurer. And somewhere stands the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth. Obviously what Debt has done to ruin our civilization cannot possibly be exaggerated. A great War means a great Debt. And there is now so vast a mountain of Debt that we merely exist in order to pay it off, which, slave as we may, day and night, we can never do.

    In the editorial I have quoted we saw the gates of Hell wide open, and out of them streaming the legions of the Fiend. “We need to search our conscience,” he says, “to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil.” Evil is admittedly strong: have we in our moral nature enough of evil’s opposite to overcome this enormous onslaught rushing at us out of the gates of Hell? That is the question. Up to a point, only, is “evil” for Laming what it is for Dick Bartleton. And I am sure the latter would be apt to welcome as a Saviour what in Laming’s eyes would be the Fiend. Their resemblances and differences are equally striking, the simple—not to say
simpliste
—contrast of the rich man and the poor man—the Haves and the Have-nots would hardly suffice as a complete picture of the ills of the world for Laming: though (in the above quotation) the instigators of the coal wars, the copper wars, and the umbrella wars are the same as they would be for Bartleton. There, their villains would be the same villains. Laming is interested in many more things than the other and he worries about many more things. In the end, his economics do become hostile to any cut-and-dried “working-class-in-power” theorists. That is not because the working-class is not in his heart: but talking about that
exclusively
is a way of banishing so many other questions.

    I stayed at “The Maid’s Head” at Meldrum that night, having arranged for a car to call at ten, for the five-or six-mile drive to Ketwood. During breakfast a man at a neighbouring table addressed some remarks to me, and after a little he said he was a farmer. His farm was in Northampton. He had just returned from a holiday at Bournemouth. And now he had somehow got to Meldrum—perhaps sightseeing, hoping to see the famous Caves. It transpired that he was fond of music. We are all of course devoted to it—except when someone in the next flat turns on a radio—which is mostly off and on all day—and music is certainly the
noisiest
of the arts. But this man played himself.

    His instrument was the violin which he practised from two to six hours daily. I asked him if he had any stock. No, he had no stock. “Not a horse?” At the word horse this musical farmer’s big red shiny face (oval in shape with a small dark moustache) acquired an expression at once surprised and disgusted. “No, I would not have a horse on the place,” he told me. When I asked why, the main reason seemed to be because it was an animal. Horses had to be fed and cleaned, at awkward hours—in the early morning for instance. A hired man had to get to the farm before anyone else was up if one had a horse (while one was still dreaming in a Heal bed of Beethoven Quartets) and the hired man didn’t like it either.

    It was a new experience for me encountering prosperous middle-aged farmers, with oiled hair but tight and ungainly clothes—far from their farms, drifting around the countryside
en touriste
with a favourite pet hound and (doubtless) a violin-case.

    As to the driver of the car who took me to Ketwood after breakfast—a man of robust intelligence—his views on the modern farmer were extreme in character and communicated with great readiness. There was nothing he could find too bad to say about the modern farmer. When I enquired if there was much
stock
in these parts he exclaimed derisively: “
Stock?
” No, he said, no young farmer would have anything to do with stock. They did everything, the farmers of today, on their backsides on a machine. Sowing, reaping, hoeing, harrowing, ploughing, was all done with a machine. As to the combine harvester, there is no more criticised implement, and he had plenty to say about that. Only signing a cheque couldn’t be done with a machine—and that was all the work a young farmer ever did, and it was as much as he could manage.

    Rymer had insisted that
the farms must be run as factories.
Since the poetry of farming has vanished, or is vanishing, anyway, it does not seem to matter very much if collective farming is introduced at once. It would, of course, be more economic. I would never sacrifice poetry to economics. But since there is no poetry! To this, however, Laming would not agree, though he confirmed that the young farmers were very averse to having stock. Those large work-making quadrupeds, horses and cattle, were universally unpopular in this neighbourhood. But my driver was an almost Ruskinian “reactionary”: of the new-fangled schools the Government were introducing he disapproved as much as did Laming, though no doubt for different reasons.

    Ketwood Vicarage is not screened from the road. The front door was open and the sound of the car’s arrival brought to the door a small shirt-sleeved reddish man—with the general working-class appearance imposed on a class whose stipend amounts to the earnings of a not very lucky railway porter. How much better, this, than the well-heeled patronising cleric of the past, who treated his villagers as if they were villeins and he a medieval abbot.