Mystical Paths (2 page)

This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. AngloCatholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.

‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.

‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’

There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.

God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.

IV

I must now say something more about my father in order to flesh out this lethal relationship which was developing between us as my psychic career went from bad to worse. This particular path which led to the crisis of 1968 needs to be examined in more detail.

By the time of the Debbie débâcle my father was very old. Born in 1880 he had been sixty-two when I had arrived in the world, and so every year of the 1960s was bringing him closer to his ninetieth birthday. By the time the Christian Aysgarth affair began in the spring of 1968, two years after the mess with Debbie, he was nearly eighty-eight.

Being over eighty was very difficult for my father because he finally had to face up to the fact that he was old. Previously, having excellent health and a strong will, he had avoided this truth by cantering around like a man twenty years his junior, but at eighty he was felled by a prostate operation and although the physical problem was successfully treated the psychological consequences lingered on. Old age now stared him in the face. My father was livid, then deeply depressed, then livid all over again. With his strong will unimpaired and his brain untouched by senility he regarded his body’s enfeeblement as nothing short of traitorous. Looking back I can see he was secretly frightened – not of death, which in his faith he could face with courage, but of dying without dignity. My father was a proud man. He always used to say that his pride was his biggest weakness. The thought of his body decaying in a humiliating fashion while his mind remained sharp enough to suffer every indignity to the full was intolerable to him.

I could sense all these secret fears and hidden rages, but I · was too young then to understand the full dimensions of his psychological ordeal. All I could do was make renewed efforts to keep him happy. I had already realised that nothing should be allowed to worry him and impair his health; in consequence as he had wrapped his psyche around mine, keeping the Dark at bay, I had wrapped my psyche around his, keeping the Light alive, and gradually a sinister interlocking had taken place until we were like Siamese twins joined at the psyche. No wonder I now felt I would be unable to survive without him.

I suspected my mother had always feared my father and I might wind up in a muddle, and that this dread had stimulated her robust attitude to our psychic gifts. She was quite prepared to believe they existed, but she was determined that they should never be allowed to triumph over her resolute common sense. Early in their marriage my father had embarked on a short but disastrous ministry of healing, and I think this experience had made her nervous about any exercise of the ‘glamorous powers’, those gifts from God which were so susceptible to corruption.

She had been my father’s second wife, his first marriage having begun and ended before he had embarked on his career as a Fordite monk. This first marriage had been unsatisfactory, but my father’s big love affair with the monastic life had lasted 23 for seventeen years before he had been called back into the world at the age of sixty. My father had been at first ambivalent about this return, but since the call had been judged genuine by his superior there had been no alternative but to obey it. Two muddled years had followed during which he had married my mother. She had eventually sorted him out, and before he had embarked on a successful career in theological education they had produced a son, Gerald, who had died at birth. I had arrived on the scene seventeen months later.

I could never make up my mind whether little Gerald would have been a bigger bore alive than he was dead, but I had no doubt that I resented the effect his memory had on my parents. They were shockingly sentimental about him. There was a grave in the churchyard which had to be visited. His birthday was never forgotten. As a child I thought this behaviour was all quite idiotic and I was very rude about it to Nanny. I liked being an only child. It was bad enough having to share my father with the two children of his first marriage, both of whom were well over thirty years my senior and lived many miles away. To share him with a sibling close to me in age and on the spot would have been intolerable.

Fortunately my parents had no more children after I was born, and by
₁₉₄₅
my father was running the Starbridge Theological College. To cope with the huge influx of ex-servicemen who felt called to train for the priesthood once the war was over, he opened an extension of the College at our manor house in Starrington Magna. I can clearly remember the students – the ordinands, as I soon learnt to call them – pounding across the lawn on the way to our private chapel in the woods. I became their mascot. Some of them even gave me their sweet ration. No wonder I wound up spoilt rotten by the time I was five.

However, all good things come to an end, even life as a pampered mascot. In 1950 when I was seven – eight at Christmas – the last of the exceptionally large intakes of theological students achieved ordination, the College extension at our home was closed and my father, now seventy, retired from his position as Principal. My mother had looked forward to this day because shehad cherished the belief that he would then sink into a quiet life and she would see more of him, but she soon discovered that he was becoming busier than ever. As a monk he had won a reputation as a spiritual director, and now that he had fulfilled his call from God to steer the College through the difficult post-war years, spiritual direction reclaimed him full-time. Hordes of people turned up for consultations. He led retreats, wrote copious letters, made himself constantly available to those seeking counsel. My mother and I became somewhat overlooked but we never doubted that he loved us. The problem was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day.

Then in 1957 when I was fourteen, my mother suddenly died. My father was almost killed by guilt. For a long time he could barely speak. His longest silence was: ‘I didn’t make enough time for her,’ and I knew, reading his mind, that in his grief and remorse he wanted to die too.

He promised me that he would never commit the sin of taking his own life but I remained terrified that his health had been fatally undermined. He became a recluse. He did eventually resume his spiritual counselling on a modest scale but he conducted the work almost entirely by letter. Meanwhile I had become what Matron at school called ‘strange’ and my father had to drag himself out of seclusion to make special arrangements for my care. That was when Aelred Peters had been recruited to sort me out. Eventually plates stopped smashing themselves in the Abbey kitchens and inkpots stopped overturning themselves in unlikely places. Staggering home for the school holidays I hoped for further help from my father but instead found myself obliged to grapple with his continuing bereavement.

I would sit with him for short periods of complete silence. Sometimes we stroked the cat together. My father always had a cat and the cat was always a tabby. After the death of my mother’s cat William (annexed by my father after his marriage), he acquired Whitby the Second (died young of a kidney complaint), Whitby the Third (run over aged ten) and Whitby the Fourth. Whitby the First, a companion of my father’s monastic years, had left a potent memory behind him and had been the hero of countless bedtime stories narrated to me by my father in the nursery. · When my father began to talk again it was the cat he spoke about. ‘Whitby’s very fond of you,’ he said suddenly in the midst of one of our long silences. ‘That’s because you’re like me, good with cats.’ Then he paused before adding: ‘You’re really very like me, Nicholas. Very like me indeed.’

Unsure what to say I at first remained silent, but gradually it dawned on me that he was wrestling with some profound temptation. In an effort to be sympathetic and encouraging I then said: ‘Great. So what are you worried about?’

The invisible wrestling-match continued. My father pursed his lips and rubbed his nose and fondled the scruff of Whitby’s neck before he at last managed to say: ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you but Francis always said it would be better for you not to know.’ Francis Ingram, a Fordite monk, had been his confessor.

I never hesitated. ‘But Francis is dead,’ I said, ‘and everything’s changed. You do exactly what you want, Father. You do whatever makes you happy.’

And then he told me the most extraordinary story.

V

He had seen me in a vision well over a year before I was born. He had seen me, aged three or four, in the garden of the Manor and had realised at once that I looked exactly as he had looked at the same age. Afterwards, during his struggle to interpret the vision, he had been tempted to believe God had given him the promise of a replica-son in order to cheer him up for the difficult times he had endured since leaving the Order, but Francis Ingram had later disputed this self-indulgent interpretation, and in fact my father had firmly believed that no parent should expect or desire his child to be a replica.

‘But nevertheless ...’

Nevertheless my father, longing for a son who shared hisinterests, had been unable to stop himself finding the vision irresistibly attractive.

‘And then, Nicholas ...’

Then, when I was three and a half the vision had been enacted in reality and my father had fallen in love with it all over again.

‘It was in ‘946,’ he said. ‘Neville Aysgarth was visiting the Manor — Archdeacon Aysgarth, as he was in those days. As he crossed the lawn to join us, Nanny called your name from the terrace and you ran away to meet her — and I realised my vision had been replayed. I was so stunned that at first I could hardly hear a word Aysgarth said. I could only think: it’s all come true. I have this son who’s exactly like me and it’s all according to God’s plan. Although of course,’ said my father quickly, ‘I did realise you weren’t a replica. Not exactly. Not quite. But nevertheless ... It’s extraordinary how like me you are! I’ve been telling myself I’ve nothing to look forward to now Anne’s dead, but that’s not true, is it? I’ve got
you
to look forward to, Nicholas. I shall so enjoy watching you live my life for me all over again — that’s to say, I shall so enjoy watching you develop into the man that God obviously wants you to be. You won’t be a replica, of course — never think that I want a replica, but —’

But he did want a replica. I could see he longed for a replica. And what was more I could see the thought revived him, entranced him, gave him not only a new interest but the will to live which would ensure his survival.

‘— but one can’t deny the very exceptional likeness between us,’ he was saying, ‘and why shouldn’t that be a comfort to me in my old age? Francis said I should never tell you about the vision because you might start believing you had to be a replica, but you wouldn’t think that, would you, Nicholas? Francis was wrong. On this point I know best — I know you’ll reverence my cherished vision as a gift from God, just as I do, and so therefore it can’t possibly have a malign effect. I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right. I know it.’

Proud, arrogant, ancient, miserable and misguided, he glared at me in a pathetic plea for reassurance.

Taking his hand in mine I said: ‘Of course you’re right, Father. You always are.’

No doubt my mother would have made some very robust comment at that point.

But my mother was no longer there.

VI

The next holidays I returned from school to find that a cottage was being built for my father in the grounds by the chapel. He said it would make it easier for him to be secluded. Then he said I could visit him whenever I wished because I was quite different from everyone else and he didn’t find my presence a strain. As an afterthought he added that he couldn’t bear to go on living at the main house now that my mother was no longer there; he’d never liked living there much anyway; his middle-class upbringing as a schoolmaster’s son had ensured he had never felt at ease in my mother’s county setting.

I was stunned. My father, educated on scholarships at public school and university, had appeared to fit neatly into my mother’s world. I had had no idea he had such a chip on his shoulder about class. I knew, of course, that his mother had been a parlourmaid, but my own mother had said how interesting that was and what a remarkable woman my unknown grandmother must have been to succeed in marrying ‘above her station’, so I had accepted my grandparents’ mésalliance as merely an unusual piece of family history. Now for the first time I saw that my father also had married ‘above his station’ and it occurred to me that my parents’ marriage too had been, in a less obvious way, a mésalliance which had caused problems.

I was still recovering from the shock that my father had never felt at ease in the home I loved when he began to explain to me his plan for ensuring that my inheritance was properly looked after: he intended to let the Home Farm and found a small religious community which would run the house and tend the grounds.

I disliked this scheme – though I said nothing for fear of upsetting him – but as time passed I realised how clever the plan was. Not only did I never have to worry about the property but I never had to worry that my father was failing to take care of himself when I was away. The members of the Community tended the garden, looked after the house and worshipped my father whenever they weren’t busy worshipping God. Their devotion was my passport to a normal life unburdened by abnormal anxieties.

I finished school, went up to Laud’s, my father’s old college at Cambridge, came down with my degree, dabbled disastrously with voluntary work and dabbled disastrously with Debbie. My father was still living as a recluse in his cottage, but now in 1966, nine years after my mother’s death, he had come to terms with his loss and his biggest problem was the old age he hated so much. But I could see he was looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.

I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin of pride to think I could flirt with the Gnostic heresy and get away with it. In vain I told my tutor that the Light and the Dark were code-names which I used to describe a reality which for me was as true as any reality acknowledged by a logical positivist. My tutor said I should beware of mysticism as mystics so often got into trouble with the Church.

The Church was exalted as a sort of idol. Enormous emphasis was put on teaching what was liturgically correct. Church history was taught in stupefying detail. A heavy-handed, outdated biblical theology still ruled the roost, the academic successor of the neo-orthodox thunderings of Karl Barth. Radical theology was ignored — and this was 1966, three years after John Robin-son’s Church-shattering blockbuster
Honest to God!
But the College refused to admit any shattering had taken place; the idol was not allowed to be chipped or cracked — or even renovated. Robinson was dismissed as ‘misguided’ and ‘no theologian’. There was certainly a case for propounding criticisms such as these, but I thought Robinson’s ideas, misguided or not, should at least have been debated. And I didn’t like this rampant ecclesiastical idolatry. What’s the Church anyway? Just a man-made institution. It’s God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that are important. I’m not saying we don’t need a man-made institution to deal with worldly matters. Obviously we do. And I’m not saying (in defiance of Anglo-Catholic ideology) that the Church has no numinous value and that holy traditions are unimportant. Obviously it has and they are. All I’m saying is that setting the Church up on a pedestal and worshipping it is wrong.

I also took a dim view of the way the College staff played down mysticism as they converted theology into just another academic subject such as history or English literature. Theology ought to be alive, vivid, related to real life, not a system debated by intellectuals. Did the mystic Julian of Norwich have a theology degree? Of course she didn’t. But she knew God. She had ‘gnosis’, special knowledge. She saw visions and she KNEW. But if she’d been unfortunate enough to attend that Theological College in the 1960s, the only vision she would have had would have been a vision of the bliss which marked the end of term.

Of course I couldn’t tell my father what a travesty the College was. Having run the place so successfully in the ‘forties he would have been deeply upset to know how far it had gone downhill. I learnt to keep quiet at College too because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was ‘unsuitable’ and trying to boot me out. One ordinand did say: ‘I think we should have courses on pastoral work and discuss things like sex,’ but he didn’t last long. Sex was the great unmentionable among the College staff because no one had the guts to discuss ethical issues realistically. As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the twentieth century when one ofits most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past.

My boredom eventually produced the inevitable result: my interest in sex, damped down by the Debbie débâcle, began to revive.

I may have given the impression that I was formidably promiscuous but in fact by the standards of the mid-’sixties I was almost staid. My habit of going steady with one girl at a time — and usually only seeing her once a week — was my way of paying lip-service to my father’s belief that men should try to be more than mindless animals, so before the affair with Debbie I had changed girlfriends no more than once a year. However now, goaded on by the mind-blowing boredom of College life, I traded them in every six months. Doreen was a waitress at The Copper Kettle, Angie was a salesgirl at Boots and Tracy, like Debbie, was a little dolly-bird typist.

Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.

At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.) On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.

This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?

Why indeed.

But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.

If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.

I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.

There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double life no longer. The second was that I had begun to suspect my father had intuited what was going on with the result that he was becoming ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant: This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.

So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?

The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower- arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.

‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’

Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.

‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’

I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in
The Times
yet.’

Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.

A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.

At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.

I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.