Absolute Truths (5 page)

IV

I confess I took some time to adjust to being a bishop. In fact I
even went through a phase of thinking I had made an appalling
mistake and that my manipulation out of Cambridge had been the
work of the Devil after all, steering me into a deep depression
which would render me useless to God. I did recover from this
neurotic suspicion and I did eventually settle down, but for a
long while I pined for Cambridge, particularly for the intellectual
companionship of my colleagues.

However, there were compensations. I found that in my new
life there was less venom directed at me and more respect – in fact
there was no venom at all. Although arguments between Christians
can be extremely heated, people do usually refrain from being
venomous to a bishop. In the bitter feuds which periodically ruffle
the surface of academic life, no one is exempt from venomous
attack, least of all professors of divinity whose very existence rep
resents an affront to the atheists.

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 suc
cessor, 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 Starrnouth, the large port on the south
coast, and I streamlined the diocesan office in Starbridge by prun
ing 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 arch
deacons, 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 grati
fying 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 God
less’, 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 inter
est 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 o
f 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 sen
sible fathers are glad when their sons discover that girls arc 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. Natur
ally 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 pam
pered 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 ro 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 ro 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.’