Rotting Hill (38 page)

    I suppose that our quixotic vicar left that meeting with some comprehension at last of the reality of village life in England in mid-twentieth century and some recognition not only of the power of the Welfare State, but of the absurdity of expecting anyone to back you up, except for an excited moment or two, in your defiance of authority.

    The quotations will not, I hope, have been found too fatiguing. All this minutiae, if it can be tolerated, provides one with a close-up as it were, which is invaluable for the student but rather irksome to the general reader. I have taken this risk because of the necessity in such a case to provide convincingly factual data. Should we, or can we, in the twentieth century, have a religion? Can the amateurish, infinitely latitudinarian English Church—allowing, as it does, every idiosyncrasy in its priesthood, so that we find in its ranks everything from a Marxist to a papist—can so doctrinally flaccid and obligingly adulterated a faith—can so go-as-you-please and teach-as-you-like unmilitant an institution as the Church of England, do anything but read the burial service over religion, and keep its grave in a decent condition? It is the Church of England itself that has emptied its churches.

    In Laming and Dick Bartleton we have a vigorous type of priest. The first stands for institutional Christianity: the second for the Christianity of the early Church. The second would echo the injunction of St. Augustine to purge your heart of all human affection, love of mother or father, love of family, love of your friends. These emotions must be eradicated: in their place will be abstract Man. And here is the difference between St. Augustine and the Vicar of Blatchover. The former would install God in the place vacated by Mother, by Family, by Friend. The latter would install Man, as symbolized by the State. The Vicar of Blatchover is, I should say, a very honest and good-hearted man, and there is no reason not to add a devout man. The only thing at issue, in the present context, is whether he is an efficient priest. His kind of mind, or rather his type of faith, may not furnish the best material (I suggest with due humility) for the priestly calling.

    There is institutional religion, of course, and there is religious experience and religious feeling. Institutional religion is a technique for enabling a certain teaching to survive, that is all. The Catholics have been the great masters of that technique. When I read the other day how the Pope had dealt with the question of whether the Holy Mother of God ascended to Heaven as flesh and blood or not, I reflected how excellent the Catholic judgement is. For, of course, he answered, “Yes, as flesh and blood, dressed in the costume of a carpenter’s wife of the period.” In a similar case an Anglican Divine would have reflected how absurd the carnal account would sound to the average bank clerk or stockjobber and would have answered, “No, of course not. She left her mortal envelope on earth.” Yet it seems obvious if you star the Resurrection of the Dead as a major article of faith there must be no obliging modifications to satisfy protests on the score of “unlikelihood”. All effective institutions, determined to
endure
at all cost—like Russian Communism, for instance—do not
debate.
No arguments could make them alter a syllable of their doctrine. If you worship a Blue Cow you disregard the standard criticism, to the effect that in the natural order there are no cows of that colour. What is more, it makes it easier for the believer, the colour being an improbable blue. This is not a paradox. The
blueness
gives the imagination something to bite on, as it were, and with religion the imagination is the high faculty involved.

    The “truth” of the imagination is, of course, quite different from the “truth” of physical science. A Church attempting to assimilate its truth to the truth of the slide-rule is what we have witnessed in England.

    To summarize what I have wished to say: that to endure, an institution cannot be too rigid. The inviolability of the Family is a major doctrine of Catholicism: there any concession would be impossible. The Family is, or was, a microcosm where age, not youth, rules; it was from that fact that it derived its great importance for the Church. Now my point is that the Vicar of Ketwood is the type of
institutional
clergyman able to appreciate the only terms on which a creed can survive, or rather the only technique that insures endurance. But although his action at Ketwood was a model for what a village priest should do faced with the closing of the village school, there were several small matters he had lost sight of, or had never seen. One was that the village is now, in England, only a name. Then the Family he so rightly set himself to defend, no longer exists—or at least not in the way that in the first instance made it an object of such interest to the Church. I think the fact is that Laming had taken action to protect something which his grandfather or great-grandfather had sold, or had been too sleepy to notice was being removed piecemeal.

    For anyone who has lived in America, where on Sunday the churches are crowded to capacity, England is now almost a country without a religion: I cannot accept Rymer’s theory that in a village where the only people ever present at divine service on Sunday are the Vicar and his family, the rest of the inhabitants being good-Christians-who-do-not-go-to-Church, the Christian religion flourishes. I cannot believe in good Christians who never visit the church at the end of the village street. Although it does not follow that the people who fill the local church in the U.S. are all good Christians, the efficacy of liturgical disciplines appears to me obvious.

    Two world-wars in rapid succession have hurried the end of Christianity in England. Socialism, as time passes, melting into communism, will take religion’s place in the form of a brotherly millennium—a heaven on earth for good socialist boys and girls, and a hell-on-earth for the wicked (
vide
slave-camps, salt-mines, etc.). In place of Christ there will be men-gods like Stalin or Hitler, a High God being dispensed with. But that is taking the long view: it may be a decade before matters go as far as that. Meanwhile, it is difficult to see how Christianity can live, if only for a moment, except by some heroic measure. One that recommends itself to me, is that all the churches, vicarages, bishops’ palaces, etc., be closed.

    The clergy would then become a missionary army, as friars, I suppose: poor but impassioned men, tramping from village to village, and filling the cities with their prayers and curses. I have mentioned above how the Bishop of Halchester recommended his clergy to refrain from any serious twisting of the Lion’s tail. But having turned its back upon its empty churches and worldly possessions, the Church could if it wanted to nearly twist the old Lion’s tail off its rump. The prisons would be so full of obstreperous friars that there would be no room for the normal delinquents. For it is quite certain that if any sincere Christian expressed his views at the street corner and at the market place concerning
any
government he would find his way into the lock-up. But probably as the time is so short now before the extinction of all religion has been consummated, it would be better to continue to pretend that there is a religion. So long as men can be found to live a retired country life at about five pounds a week, or for the same sum lead a far less secluded one in a populous suburb, to keep the churches there, since the money involved in the servicing of a national Church would be put to some un-christian use by whatever government received it!

    A final word regarding the Reverend Matthew Laming. The last I heard of him, he was to interview the Principal of the London College of Divinity. That signifies, I think, that his pastorate at Ketwood is coming to an end, and he will temporarily, at least, find himself in a more theoretic field. The
Meldrum Deanery Magazine
will have less unconventional editorials, the village of Ketwood will prepare to fade away, according to the wishes of the new urban-minded rulers of England, the parents following their children to some approved centre, but repudiating the functions of “The Parent”. The probably ill-made village houses will quickly drop to pieces, and the vicarage become the week-end residence of some suburban spiv.

    Meanwhile, wherever Laming goes, it will seem that the clock has been put back and Anglican Christianity will be seen displaying a Roman energy; and if ever he should come to wear the mitre and leggings of a bishop, an entire diocese would be mobilized on Ketwood lines. A head-on collision with the State would immediately ensue. The Church would be disestablished, its funds sequestrated.

    But the time required to realize this glorious climax, Laming’s career having but just begun, will no doubt be denied him by some Apocalypse.

    I went up the hill, up Rotting Hill, to the rot camp, near the top. One needs some exercise, and this is where I prefer to take it. It is not that they have a monopoly of the rot in the camp, but it is where the rot flowers, the rot of Rotting Hill.

    This is in a manner of speaking the Fun Fair of the Hill. I met Blossom on her way from market who gave me a brilliant decent smile. She is a plump flower of the Cornish Riviera, a walking Matthew Smith. I loathe thin flowers and her luxurious bulk breasts the waves of Rotting-hillers, flowing around the fish shop and the butcher’s counter. Seen in the shops, she is like a figurehead of a gallant ship, a Saxon Queen perhaps, moving irresistibly, gently cleaving the surging mass. She is my toast in her sky-blue mackintosh.

    I approached Colquhoun. He was stooping over a book in an untidy book-tray. I said “Hallo, what book?” He turned with some shyness towards me. “I was looking at a guide book. It is out of date.” Colquhoun is not at all himself: I feel that he stagnates, there is something the matter. I know him very slightly and can only guess at what is adversely affecting him. He has been excluded from the Festival of Britain, he has not been invited to send a picture and he feels very bitterly this strange slight. Of the Hillworthies who are creative I place him first. I passed on and saw a kilt. This was MacBride, wittiest of Hillmen, swinging his kilt along without consciousness of the anomaly. He had an apprehensive eye upon Colquhoun whom he had seen handling a book. A few nights before MacBride and his inseparable companion had been sitting at a table in a public house. The kilt was not visible so I gathered, and his rich Scottish idiom was to be heard as he told Colquhoun a story of a trip to Wigtown. “The marn went aroond the heel, and then came back wuth eet,” is the kind of way he talks. Several men at the bar hearing this strange music cocked a Britannic ear, one more especially. This latter eyed MacBride with undisguised xenophobia. “The bloody Irish are bloody well everywhere.” But the man he was addressing had caught sight of the kilt beneath the table. “They’re Jocks, Harry, they’re no bloody Irish.” “So they are. Good old Jocks,” he vociferated, the minstrelsy of Harry Lauder warming his Brixton heart. But the popularity of this kilt had little effect upon MacBride, who said to the first man: “If you have anything you wish to say why do you say it to heem, why not to me!” What happened afterwards I was not told: but I reflected that a kilt might be a safeguard, among people whose dislike of all foreigners grows, though the kilt seems to dispel their mistrust.

    Roy Campbell passed and he raised his large coffee-coloured hat. He walked as if the camp were paved with eggs, treading slowly, putting his feet down with measured care. ’Tis his war-wound imposes this gait on him of a legendary hidalgo. He was followed by a nondescript group, some say his audience. I noted a poetaster, a photographer, a rentier, and a B.B.C. actor. He is the best poet for six miles or more around. But he suffers from loneliness I believe. He is like a man who rushes out into the street when the lonely fit is on him and invites the first dozen people he meets to come up and have a drink. He led his band into “The Catherine Wheel”.

    As he was about to enter there was an incident. A small old lady in a bonnet appeared suddenly, shooting out of the Jugs and Bottles, seemed to get her ankles entangled, and fell. She was clutching something bright, I believe a new half-crown. Campbell stooped with the grandiose stiffness of a lay-figure, and lifted the disreputable old marionette to her feet. Saluting her majestically with lifted headpiece, he proceeded on his way into the tavern.

    I had not gone far before I was met by the stupidest man on the Hill. He intercepted me near a rifle range, with targets representing Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini. I picked up a rifle and killed the Führer several times. Ironically observing my marksmanship, Mr. Stupid said, “Poor Hitler!” I put down the rifle. “I take a pot at all mass-murderers, whether sanctimoniously democratic, ‘heroically’ military, or bloodthirstily proletarian.” “Oh, you do, Lewis. Very comprehensive. Why aren’t you more up to date!” he asked the man. “You should have Uncle Joe, you know.” The man said in a hoarse undertone, “Ah, Uncle Joe and ole MacArthur too. I don’t make them, guv’nor.” The stupidest man on the Hill looked at me slyly, as though to say, “I know how hard it is for you to bear me!” It is a kind of joke between us. He knows his power and knows how I fear him. He released me with a playful tap.

    Having left the stupidest man I proceeded to the Borough Reading Room, where my playmate Arthur was in dark communion with the scribbling war-hounds of the United States, in the pages of an expensive monthly. As I passed he nodded gloomily, I nodded brightly back. After examining the advertisement columns of a half-dozen newspapers with a view to finding a second-hand dictaphone I left, discovering Arthur outside the swing-doors grimly replacing his spectacle-case in his overcoat pocket, as if displeased with the optician who had provided him with these aids to seeing, as he was with the printed page which they had enabled him to read. He blew his nose with a purgative blast.