Alfred’s reluctance to wear a cassock under such circumstances
was not, I think, solely or even principally, dictated by a desire not
to arouse any anti-Popish sentiments which some of his fellow members
might have harboured.
It was a question of coherence and personal taste. He
had reached sartorial maturity in the early 1920s, when gentlemanly English
Catholic priests wore clerical frock coats and black silk waistcoats.
Soutanes, like birettas, were essentially liturgical and domestic garments;
not social ones.
It was a black, straight-cut, narrow-skirted cassock
without monsignorial magenta piping or cincture, which he wore an inch
or so above the ankle, after the style of Fathers at the London (Brompton)
Oratory.
In any case, he believed that once one accepted membership
of a self-governing institution like a London club, then by definition
one also accepted that institution’s codes and usages even when, as in
this instance, they were unwritten. As he once pointed out to a friend
at the Travellers’ , who was intent upon an act of single-handed mutiny,
individual club members are not at liberty to follow only those rules
which are personally congenial to them. "What you can do, however, and
I urge you to do so, is to try to reverse this woeful decision at the
next House Committee Meeting".
Alfred’s outward tolerance of norms and notions which
potentially conflicted with his own convictions and sensibilities went
far wider and deeper than any conforming instinct. His toleration was
routed in the knowledge that human society is a divided house. He quietly
insisted, however, that such divisions were not of themselves necessarily
synonomous with acrimony. It was, fallen man, at once arrogant and pusillanimous,
who made them so. At our last meeting he rehearsed this thesis:
"Human folly and villainy are boundless because they
are intrinsic to our condition. But no one race or cultural tradition,
and still less one social class or government can be accused, even
Stalin’s, as being more inherently evil, or for that matter
better, than another. As always, my dear Peter, good and evil and
everything which flows from those two impulses, can only be appraised
in the context of individual choice".
Theology apart, this conviction was the fruit of Alfred’s
own human experience. Both as a man and as a priest he had dallied and
laboured in a thousand gardens.
****
King George V is described as having "spanned the centuries"
. Alfred spanned society; not admittedly the whole social arc, yet sizeable
segments of it. This had happened in the first place because of his own
many-faceted family and social background. While later, as a priest with
a wide cure of souls, it became more or less inevitable. He first spent
thirty-three years as Catholic Chaplain at Cambridge, and then thirty-two
in London continuing the same work which his retirement from Fisher House
in 1965 had only very temporarily interrupted. In all, a pastoral cure
which lasted five and sixty years.
That Alfred was, however, able to slip from one social
group or situation to another, without giving rise to suspicions about
his sincerity or provoking charges of superficiality, was the result of
an innate talent to empathise with his interlocutors. He also made people
laugh and indeed, love each other. Moreover, because they instantly became
the cynosure of his attention, he made people feel important too.
In such situations, while his mind delved, and his voice
evoked and wove before one, patterns of the past, his heart was living
for the moment – that moment – in which he made you his co-protagonist,
his fellow conspiritor. But at the same time one knew, or at any rate
one felt, that his soul was already walking in eternity. And this sensation
also contributed to the success of his personal relationships, for it
created in his interlocutors a feeling of security as well as the hope
that one day they too might attain a similar condition of spiritual serenity
and worldly detachment.
Loyal to his mother’s routine, which he had followed
since the placid, halcyon years at Mark Hall, Alfred used to say his Rosary
most evenings, between seven and eight. Whenever appropriate, his guests
at dinner would be invited to join him. Essentially of course a devotional
exercise, these occasions – and they were also precisely that: Occasions
– epitomised this evocative nexus of past, present and future time, which
was not merely the hall-mark, but the very corner stone of Alfred’s communion
with others.
Whether before the altar in his pocket-sized chapel at
the Travellers’, or by the library fire at Rose Hill, or on an early evening
train to Cambridge, saying the Rosary with Alfred was a social and pastoral
experience as well as a spiritual exercise.
In boyish tones more usually associated with an explorer
discovering a glacier or an oasis, an English Catholic bishop recently,
sound-bitingly declared:
"Shared prayer is for the Christian of today a new
and beautiful affair"
With respect to Your Lordship: it has always been so.
Ask the Benedictines!
****
Paradoxical though it may sound, it can be argued that
Alfred’s social success and ‘mobility’ was also a measure of his detachment.
He participated, enthusiastically or dutifully, in half a dozen or more
distinct, if frequently overlapping, ambiences, but he never wholly belonged
to any one of them. Neither kinsman nor close friend, Englishman or Spaniard,
scholar or beagler, aesthete or clubman could claim Alfred as entirely
theirs. As he once pointed out: "I am sociable not gregarious" , meaning
‘gregarious’ literally – one of a flock, a crowd. Under God, he was his
own man. He was also a priest with a covenanted obligation – ‘ut nullis
perturbationibus impediti , liberam servitutem tuis semper exhibeamus
officiis’.But if in the last analysis, he was the most independent and
private of men, he was seldom self-preoccupied or indifferent. Even at
his most aloof, Alfred’s charm never abandoned him for long. And his curiosity
was on occasions as proverbially feline as his affections were deeply-felt
and enduring.
Our own friendship, which had begun with such an erruption
of mutual trust and spontaneous affection, soon steadied. Apart from any
other consideration, there was a book to be written. It would become ‘my’
book, yet without Alfred’s contribution the enterprise could easily flounder.
Clear heads constituted a sine qua non, while warm hearts gave
us the emotional zest.
So, with the book’s gestation providing, as it were,
the splints for the strengthening bones of friendship, our task went ahead
with purpose and an ever more pronounced complicity.
Nevertheless, Alfred was not easy to get to know. He
was suave and friendly and familiar, but seldom intimate. He would tell
endless stories about himself – funny stories usually, and as often as
not shrewdly commented upon, but I had to glean for myself the self-knowledge
these anecdotes revealed. Even at his most genial and apparently confidential,
Alfred was also elusive. No doubt this was a question of character. But
his reluctance, or indeed his inability, to talk about his own feelings
and emotions directly was a matter of generation too. Upper class
Edwardian reticence was no mere pose: it had been a behavioural ground-rule.
‘One’ just didn’t. And while to some extent, Alfred shied against this
(though very quietly of course), he complied as well.
Fortunately, none of this seemed to matter very much.
With the result that our growing intimacy was almost never noticably impeded.
However, the difference of generation and social class existed, and the
outcome was as probably inevitable as I found it also "all very right
and proper" (a favourite Alfredian phrase). I became his pupil.
While our subsequent conversation-supervisions were possibly
for Alfred ‘ordinary admin’ – he had already spent a working lifetime
doing very much the same manner of thing - , for me they were a delicious
novelty. Because Alfred did not simply evoke and describe the past, as
for example had my grandmother had done (adding another, and magical dimension
to already charmed childhood), he explained its workings and justified
the religious and socio-political tenets upon which earlier orderings
of society had been based. In a phrase, Alfred provided intellectual cogency.
He made the past speak intelligibly, so that my own long-and dearly-held
opinions were at last given an ideological framework.
At same time, we laughed and joked a great deal, though
never I think, for sake of the thing. Alfred possessed a fine turn of
whimsy, but he eschewed frivolity. Rather, we laughed at some story or
remembered episode which illustrated or followed on from what we had been
saying. And this shared sense and style of humour enforced and confirmed
our mutual convictions. We were thoroughily at ease in each other’s company.
I was however, always conscious that there were intrinsic
limits to our friendship. It could probably not have been otherwise. The
most significant was the result of Alfred’s being a priest, and, especially,
a priest who had been trained and ordained in an age of church history
when detachment from the laity was still regarded as a sacerdotal virtue.
Although Alfred’s warmth and embullience, coupled with his talent for
making friends, tended to disguise the fact, he did in the last analysis
subscribe to this Pre-Conciliar ordering of relationships between a priest
and his flock.
This was never more apparent than when attending one
of Alfred’s Masses, however intimate the physical surroundings. In the
Travellers’ his chapel measured perhaps no more than ten feet feet by
eight. During those fleeting seconds in the Tridentine Rite when the celebrant
turns from the altar to face his congregation, hardly a flicker of recognition
would escape from Alfred’s far-away gaze. Just minutes earlier we would
have been chuckling over some gentle absurdity.
But once vested, Alfred the friend and counsellor seemed
to dissolve behind the veils of ecclesiastical propriety. Suddenly remote
and austere – shoulders flexed in a visible effort to correct their tendency
to stoop; the eyes hooded and shadowy; his long hands, blotched marble
replicas of themselves - , Alfred would celebrate the Sacred Mysteries
with all the inscrutable fervour of a Counter-Reformation prince-bishop.
Initially, this transformation unnerved me; presumptiously , I also felt
somehow rejected. However, I eventually realised that it was not principally
Alfred’s respect for traditional liturgical decorum which determined this
transformation, but was rather his own need to disconnect himself, as
it were, from his immediate surroundings, lest his earthly affections,
for those for whom he was saying Mass, might deflect his and indeed our
own attention from the workings of divine love, at a moment when one is
potentially most exposed to its saving grace.-
"I only hope, however", Alfred replied to me when I once
voiced these misgiving, after serving his Mass at which I had also been
his only congregation, "that my behaviour at the altar doesn’t appear
ostentatious or, Heaven forbid, ’put on’". As at the time I assured him,
perhaps somewhat backhandedly, that once one understood the reasons behind
his behaviour, then it couldn’t possibly be misconstrued, it seems only
right that here Alfred should be given the last word – his own:
"No-one can receive the sublime and awful grace of
the priesthood without fear and trembling. Some things lose their
awe with familiarity; not so the priesthood".
****
"Now, dear Peter, I want a full report about it all,
and whatever else you say, don’t leave out how you felt about the thing".
As a friend, Alfred’s interest in me and my doings was spontaneous and
wholehearted.
At the same time, he exerted immense emotional restraint.
There were times when I could practically ‘hear’ the questions he left
unasked. But circumspection had by then become a way of life, no longer
merely a rule of gentlemanly behaviour.
Nevertheless, whenever I confided in Alfred or sought
his advice, he would suddenly unwind, like the hands of a clock being
flicked backwards. And if as a man he was easily embarrassed, especially
where sexual matters were concerned (as inevitably they often were), as
a priest he was utterly undeterred. Indeed, he positively flouted that
circumspection of expression which otherwise characterised his dealings
with others. And this became even more marked when I asked Alfred whether
he would instruct me. "Of course I shall. You can’t imagine how long and
how hard I’ve prayed for this. We’ve been friends, more than friends;
but now… the sky’s the limit".
****
‘Truth alone is worthy of our entire devotion’. This
lapidary axiom of Fr. Vincent Mc Nabb’s, O.P:, was not only a sentiment
which found its echo at the very core of Alfred’s humanity , it transposed
into words the cornerstone upon which his entire priestly ministry was
based.
In many ways, Alfred was at his absolute best during
those hour-or-so sessions when he was preparing me to be received. He
was as charming and courteous as ever; but now the priest emerged fully
from the man, revealing the tempered steel of an intellect freed from
the social constraints, which giving or receiving hospitality imply. While
he displayed his usual patience and empathy, there was little else left
of the urbane prelate who smiled and demurred over the claret and candlelight.
Never a moment of self-deprecation – for indeed his ‘self’ was barely
a part of these proceedings – as he explicated not only the Church of
Rome’s fundamental dogmas, but also digressed, less austerely perhaps
but no less succinctly, upon the secular accretions of pious belief and
devotional custom. "For you see, Peter, as dogma encapsulates revealed
Truth, so pious beliefs flow from, and bear witness to, that same Truth.
Take for instance holy water stoops! When I was a child, the good Jesuit
fathers who came to Mark Hall from Farm Street would remind us that Holy
Mother Church had decreed that good Catholics were to dip their first
two fingers into the stoop and make the sign of the cross as soon as they
entered a church. It was, however, the older members of my family
who made sure that we performed this same act of devotion upon leaving
our chapel. A perfect example of the osmosis between the official and
the unofficial; between a rule of devotional homage and decorum laid down
by ecclesiastical authority, and a consequential act of piety invented
by the laity".
If Alfred’s style and manner of expounding the Catholic
Faith veered towards the idiosyncratic, the substance of his course of
Instructions was unerringly and implacably orthodox. "once you accept
the Incarnation as the cardinal and over-arching Christian mystery, then,
by God’s grace, you’re home and dry. Believe that, and, again by God’s
grace, everything else Holy Church sees fit to teach will follow on automatically,
and will not only make sense to your reason, but also your heart and soul
will know that Christian Truth embodies the essence of all sense".
Alfred’s approach was straightforwardly didactic. Assuming,
and in my case perfectly correctly, that anyone who asked for Instruction
wanted precisely that and not, for example, an exchange of theological
opinions, Alfred never asked me for mine. Rather: "if you’re not clear
on any particular point, tell me, and I’ll try to explain it in another
way".
This was in relief-making contrast to an earlier experience
when I had sought instruction. Then, the priest had kept asking me why
I wanted to become a Catholic, with the result that there were moments
when I almost felt that I was instructing him. This continued for several
increasingly fraught weeks, until the day I answered, or rather, ‘asked’
back.
" – Father shouldn’t it be you telling me
‘why’ I must … join your church?"
With Alfred holding and dealing the doctrinal cards,
neither I nor any other instructee risked such a sense of frustration
or disappointment. Alfred also made it clear that one was at total liberty
to interrupt his course of Instructions, or to withdraw from them altogether,
at any moment whatsoever. Moreover, there would be no discussion, or still
less personal offence or hard feelings on Alfred’s part. "I am a humble,
I hope, instrument in the hands of Almighty God; not some haughty viceroy
from the Heavenly Kingdom".
We would meet in his bedroom at the Travellers’, usually
between teatime and dinner.
The routine was reassuringly unvaried during those spring
and summer late afternoons (from May to October, 1977), with the linen
blinds drawn down and the room cocooned from the world in a golden penumbral
glow. The mingled aromas of furniture polish, dust and Pears’ Soap permeated
the warm, dry air. Alfred would sit in a high-backed leather armchair
with his sister Carmen’s old back-board resting across its arms. A foot
or so away, I perched less comfortably but as contented as a sand-boy,
on a rickety bedroom-chair with a Viennese straw seat. Alfred’s legs would
be stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. When he wasn’t reading
aloud from one of the books extracted from the little pile on the carpet,
his eyes would be usually closed, while he held his spectacles flat between
those long, quiet fingers.
With the surrounding silence providing a soft backdrop
for his low, rapid speech (Alfred murmured; never mumbled), he talked
with apparent effortlessness from start to finish, and certainly with
no interruption on my part. But although I was entranced, I was able to
register the points Alfred was making. Such was the spell he wove, that
one was both lulled, and yet as alert as any fox emerging from a winter
copse in hunting country.
Despite the agreeable surroundings and what many would
consider a highly rareified social context, Alfred’s narrative skills
caused the tumultuous realities of the first century A.D to break through
to the exclusion of all else. For although he read out passages from such
authors as R.H. Benson, Belloc and Chesterton, as well as Douglas Woodruff
and even Houseman and Eric Gill, to illustrate the Church’s social doctrine,
along with lyrical extracts from Bishop Challoner’s The Garden of the
Soul (1740) on questions of devotion, when he was recounting events
from the life of Christ he spoke with all the immediacy and barely suppressed
emotion of an eye-witness. In those moments, it was as if the long centuries
of an all-powerful Church were as yet to come. Instead, he transported
me, body and soul, to the very foot of the Cross, evoking first the tormented
deliberations of Pilate and the anguished flight of St. Peter from Temple,
the tears of Our Lady, and finally to the blood and dust of the Crucifixion
itself. He spoke with the sincerity of the suffering believer.
But as soon as we had finished the voice from the Judean
desert vanished – as if borne away by the same wind-devils it had previously
challenged. "Peter, if you’d go down to the Smoking Room and order us
two glasses of sherry, I’ll join you directly"
****
Coupled with Alfred’s ultimate reserve and, I believe,
to a certain extent underpinning it, was his sharp but invariably amused
understanding of English social nuance, and of the snobberies of class
and cadre in particular. He once for example told the Old Etonian scion
of an ancient Catholic house that if he really wanted his fellow parish
councillors to take him seriously "then you could make a start by not
calling the priest’s housekeeper ‘the Dame’ ". On another occasion, a
former member of his flock, who was loquaciously proud of his double first
and humble origins, complained to Alfred that both the staff and boys
of the major public school where he had recently begun teaching, treated
him with "disdain and suspicion". Alfred told him:
"Well, you ought really to know that in this country
academic achievement has never been synonomous as such with social
cachet. Just think of all those brilliant and richer than rich engineers
living in the Thames Valley who never make it to the Members’ Enclosures
at Henley or Ascot! In your own case, this is, as it were, doubly
true. And, er, dear boy, most people wouldn’t wear white socks with
that very pretty suit you’ve got on".
Alfred himself glided over these perilous acres of social
cat-ice with astute good humour, and with words of solace or warning for
those who sought them.
****
Alfred wrote little himself, but whenever he did commit
his pen to paper, he is not only a pleasure to read, but also a mine of
revelation. In his charming piece on the Trinity Foot Beagles for ‘The
Field’ magazine, he describes how his father "ever solicitous for the
welfare of his sons", had asked the tutor at Trinity, who had provisionally
accepted Alfred, to find an undergraduate who would go and stay with the
Gilbeys at Mark Hall in that summer of 1920, in order to give Alfred "a
final polish". Alfred continues:
"We were indeed fortunate in [the tutor’s] choice:
Ian Macpherson , an Old Harrovian and a distinguished oar. Finding
himself welcomed into a large family, given over to fox-hunting, Macpherson
advised that there was only one thing to do at Cambridge and that
was to beagle. He also had me proposed for the Pitt [Club] which was
then much more the centre of the beagling world than it is now and
very much more difficult to join from a school like Beaumont, which
had few connections with Cambridge".
While the tone here is mellow and suffused by affectionate
recollection, the inferences to be drawn stand out in an unrelenting silhouette.
The phrase "few connections with Cambridge" is a masterpiece of decorous
understatement .
Beaumont was in no sense of the term a ‘great’ public
school, and its ethos when Alfred was a pupil there could hardly have
been more remote from the greatest school of them all – Eton, whose Old
Boys formed the Pitt’s rank and file.
For all its dedication to hunting the fox, Alfred’s immediate
family was not landowning gentry (Mark Hall itself was rented). Their
prosperity was based on (the wine) trade. Rather, it was the magnitude
of their fortune, coupled with their gentlemanly tastes and pursuits which
had assured their acceptance into the society of rural Essex. Alfred’s
father was a member of the Carlton Club: not of White’s or Boodle’s. The
family was devoutly and stoutly Roman Catholic, but there were no recusant
forbears. No Elizabethan or Georgian Gilbey lay at rest in the chapel
at Mark Hall, or indeed elsewhere.
Of all this, Alfred was as aware in the early 1920s (when
it mattered far more), as he was seventy years later. Awareness did not,
however, lead to any discernable resentment. Returning late one evening
to the Travellers’, after having dined with the Earl of Gainsborough,
he murmurred amusedly "I’ve been living it up with my elders and betters
– most entertaining!" "With your ‘elders’, Alfred?" (He was 93 or 4 at
the time.) "Oh yes, of course". He was at once smilingly serious. " Old
in terms of lineage; much more important, you know, than actual age".
And blowing me a mischievous good night kiss, he slipped spryly round
his bedroom door which, as almost always, he had left conveniently ajar.
It was not though just Alfred’s degree of social awareness
which distances him in this article from the popular image of the ‘jolly
beagler’.
"Denny Abbey" he writes "arouses memories. It was
one the few stretches of grass over which we hunted and the great
bulk of the monastic church stood engulfed in a Georgian farmhouse,
looking for all the world like a Cotman painting. Now you may see
it pickled and purged of later accretions, lacking all mystery and
charm."
His knowledge of art and his sensitivity to architecture
were, after religion, two of the mainstays of a life which was dedicated
to the pursuit of religious truth, but which was also sustained by the
cultivation of beauty and excellence. Indeed, it was his aesthetic sensibilities
which ultimately set him apart not only from a broad swathe of the English
upper class, with whom otherwise he can be largely identified, but also
– it has to be said – from the overwhelming majority of later twentieth
century churchmen, Romans and Anglicans alike. "Who", Alfred once commented,
"commission their unappealing ‘church and parish complexes’ and are well-pleased.
So they can’t possibly be aware of the damage they are doing. Or can they?
One hopes not".
However, in this article for ‘The Field, Alfred’s comments
are so unobtrusive that they could virtually be overlooked by a reader
whose interests and enthusiasms lie elsewhere. In one respect, this is
a matter of literary technique. But it is also, and more importantly,
very much in character. For whenever Alfred succumbed to the infrequent
urge to put pen to paper, he wrote as he spoke – quietly but assuredly,
stylishly yet spontaneously and above all in a manner least likely to
offend or cajole.
****
In response to the charge of proselytism, Alfred told
one journalist: "Conversion? No. I’ve never done that. I receive. I instruct".
He could have added "I never instigate". On the same theme, he suggested
to another interviewer: "Call me when you are ready: human nature works
best that way". This policy of studied laisser aller not only informed
Alfred’s priestly approach to would-be converts, it also conditioned his
more purely social dealings. Take, for instance, heraldry – something
that had enthralled him since childhood. With me he never broached the
subject. I did once or twice ask him some specific question, which he
answered with alacrity and precision. We had other and mutual fields of
interest, and those we explored endlessly. I am sure, however, that had
I asked for a full-blown course of Heraldic Instruction, then he would
have obliged – and with even greater alacrity. Alfred never imposed himself,
unless as a priest he was under obligition to do so. Instead – welcoming
as well as merely recognising the rich conversational potential of the
variegated milieux in which he moved – he preferred to steer the conversation
towards subjects which the assembled company would be likely to find spontaneously
congenial.
What commanded Alfred’s intellectual attention and emotional
interest was that kind of free-ranging intercourse between individuals,
where anecdote mingled with comment, and flights of fantasy merged with
opinion and personal recollection. It was to this he was alluding when
he stood up in the Hall at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the conclusion
of a dinner to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his ordination and
recounted to those present that:
"This seems a singularly inappropriate occasion to
make the claim, but I am really a very private person: so what I should
have liked would not have been one dinner of 170 persons, but 170
successive dinners, at which I could have dined à deux with
each of you in turn. Then indeed we might have ‘tired the sun with
talking’.
The following week, we were drinking tea at the Overseas
League in St. James’s Place, and reading aloud the reports of the Trinity
dinner in the Catholic papers. Christopher Howse’s piece in ‘The Universe’
had particularly captured Alfred’s attention.
"Oh my goodness, did I really say that?" ‘One hundred
and seventy successive dinners…’; what a horribly greedy old man Father
Mac Murphy and his dear, good parishioners must be saying of me. I
am of course. Extremely greedy – and indolent too. Christopher is
naughty though, even if, God bless the boy, his intentions are always
of the best. Not much I can do about it now, I suppose. Except say
my prayers".
****
That between ‘Father Mac Murphy’ and Alfred there was
a social, cultural and presumably generational abyss, really goes without
saying. But there would have been no fundamental religious differences.
Their pastoral approach and the style and manner of their liturgical presentation
no doubt varied considerably, but they were both priests in the same Church:
the faith they preached and in whose name they prayed embraced them with
an identical promise. Two souls; one God. In the same way, the majority
of Fr. Mac Murphy’s parishioners will have moved in circles vastly removed
from the majority of Alfred’s friends and flock. However, both groups
- millions in the former, several hundreds in the latter – share a common
loyalty. The ethos of their devotions may differ, though not the content
of those devotions.
This century’s egalitarian and collectivist tendencies
have upset the previous formal hierarchies, and removed most of those
priveleges once sanctioned exclusively by birth or rank, but human societies
everywhere remain pyramidal. And England’s large Catholic minority has
proved no exception. So ultimately the distinctions, both real and imaginary,
between the worlds represented on the one hand by the average parish and
on the other by a university or a private chapel (and precious few of
the latter remain) are, religiously-speaking, as unimportant as they are,
statistically, inevitable. A myriad separate voices and different accents
singing in a thousand choirs which invoke, however, a single Mystery.
What does matter though, and which here concerns us intimately,
is how these distinctions were often wheeled out, and used against Alfred’s
priestly ministry. For there existed a body of opinion amongst some of
those who wrote about Alfred during the concluding decade and a half of
his life, which argued that he cared only and prayed only for those of
high birth and ample private means.
Anyone who knew Alfred even only moderately well would
be likely to query such an accusation. For those who knew him better –
and so very few of his true intimates were either seriously rich or, in
the traditional usage of the term, ‘well-born’ – the charge is an insult.
Considered generously, this is an erroneous reading based
on flawed logic and is as fatuous as proposing that Anglican archdeacons
love buildings and not people because their jobs centre upon the upkeep
of church property. To suggest that Alfred was a snobbish prelate who
carried out his priestly duties so assiduously only because his
flock were members of a ‘priveleged élite’, is to misunderstand
Alfred himself and to misconstrue his life’s work.
When in 1932 he was appointed Roman Catholic Chaplain
at Cambridge, he found there a ready-made society, in whose creation he
had played no part, nor ever was to. He was moreover under sacerdotal
obligation to provide this undergraduate flock, whoever they were, wherever
they ‘came from’, and whatever they were like personally, with as complete
a cure as ‘circumstances permit’. And this he did, for a hundred terms,
to the limits of his talents and personal fortune. Fortunately both were
considerable. So that when he left Fisher House, if there were members
of his former flock who rallied enthusiastically to the new incumbent,
others sought Alfred out in London and urged him to continue there the
cure of their souls. At the age of sixty-five, he took up their challenge.
He could so easily have slipped into sequestered retirement as his friend
and sometime Oxford counterpart, Mgr. Ronald Knox, had done some twenty
years earlier.
"But you see, Peter , I could no more have translated
The Bible than you, my dear Tertius,are going to persuade me to drink
a single drop more of this excellent champagne. They say Ronnie’s Latin
was better than Horace’s. Whereas I have no scholarship whatsoever. I’m
a bog-priest by comparison".
None the less, it is a charming though somewhat disconcerting
thought that Alfred might have spent the last thirty-three years of his
life (always assuming he survived the rigours and the relative isolation)
as resident chaplain at a boys’ preparatony school in deepest Suffolk.
Commander Peregrine Hubbard, the Headmaster of Moreton
Hall near Bury, and his wife Lady Miriam Fitzalan-Howard, extended their
well-meant invitation during the winter of 1966. "Alfred came here on
a day of intense cold, rather like today actually", Lady Miriam recalled
for me (in her none too warm drawing-room), when I visited the Hubbards
to see the school and to talk about Alfred. She continued:
"I think I realised right from the start that our
offer was not on. Of course Alfred was charm itself; he even stayed
to boys’ tea. You see, we both admire him so very much, and at the
time felt jolly sorry about how shabbily he’d been treated. Alfred
told us about the whole business, and said that the Cardinal had been
most courteous and correct. I daresay he was. But then Alfred never
does blame other people.
"He conquered me, you know, when I was teen-ager.
He used to stay with us in the north, on his way between Stoneyhurst
and Ampleforth. His beautiful table manners put my own to shame. He
could break a piece of toast into perfect halves without letting drop
a single crumb. But what I most loved was watching him peel on apple.
He produced from some invisible pocket a little silver folding fruit-knife,
like a well-bred conjurer."
When I told her that Alfred was still an impeccable peeler
of apples, the sister of England’s Earl Mashall hugged her wool-clad knees
and whooped with girlish glee.
"Do, do, please give Alfred our fondest love and
ask him to say a prayer for us. You will, won’t you?"
I did indeed; and Alfred was much amused by her recollections.
"Was she actually wearing a pair of rose-tinted spectacles while you were
talking together?", he murmured very sotto voce.
So Alfred did not rusticate in Suffolk; he stayed in
London, to welcome back his flock. As the years passed, and many of the
traditional practices of parish Catholicism passed with them, so the flock
multiplied, as increasing numbers of the disenchanted and disorientated
gravitated into Alfred’s new pastoral orbit. Had Alfred not been available
to receive them, it is more than likely that many would have been lost
to the Church. If there were those amongst them who were attracted as
much by the man as by the religion he represented – by his panache and
politesse, by his social aplomb and his serene yet implacable orthodoxy
- , Alfred himself was essentially indifferent about the reasons for his
popularity. He never courted it, but neither did he take it for granted
– "I am an instrument in the hands of Almighty God, that’s all". Or, as
Eamon Duffy puts it:" Alfred Gilbey was a man of disarming simplicity,
in whom social decorum blended indistinguishably into the life of grace"
As it was, he simply made himself as available as he could. There were
minds to be guided and souls to be nurtured.
Apart from the numerous invitations Alfred accepted to
solemnise marriages, officiate at baptisms and to celebrate Requiem Masses,
he also established his own regular pastoral and liturgical programme.
Two Masses each month at Farm Street, for which he sent out scores of
printed post-cards; a weekly Mass in his miniscule chapel at the Travellers’;
courses of Instruction by appointment, and Confessions "for anyone who
asks for them" as he told the Club’s porters. He also made it known that
most mornings he would be saying Mass in St. Wilfred’s Chapel at the London
Oratory in Brompton.
Alfred’s visits to the sick and dying were more frequent
than many realised. An urgent request would be relaid to him, and he would
respond as urgently, slipping hurriedly out of the Traveller’s, at all
hours of the day and night. Such calls on his time and waning physical
reserves obviously tired him. Simultaneously they refreshed his spirit
and sharpened his priestly resolve.
An emblematic instance of this occurred during the afternoon
which followed the culmination of the celebrations with which his family
and friends had wanted to mark his Ninetieth Birthday.
We lunched à deux and very quietly that Monday,
15th July 1991. Alfred was visibly exhausted. His eyes lacked
lustre, and closed more than once as his long head nodded heavily. He
only picked at his food, and left a second glass of claret untouched.
"Do forgive me, my dear Peter; not quite the thing today.
I’ve been telling everyone for a week what a lucky old man I am. And it’s
true: I am".
We finished, or rather didn’t, our meal and I went downstairs
to the Smoking Room, to secure us chairs and to pour our coffee. I waited,
but Alfred didn’t appear. Twenty minutes later, and now thoroughly worried,
I walked out into the Hall. I was just in time to see Alfred’s retreating
figure, with a lilt to his step and his head high, disappear through the
inner front doors, which the Head Porter was holding open for him. I hurried
up. "Grafton, what’s happened?" "’Happened’, Mr Gregory-Jones? The Monsignor’s
been called away. Someone’s had an accident Southwark way. He sent you
his apologies. He hopes to be back for dinner. Will you be booking in
as well, Sir?".
****
That there was a social as well as a spiritual dimension
to Alfred’s cure of souls was an added bonus for all concerned. With a
handful of his flock he had always shared a common social background.
But it was with many that he shared similar tastes and interests. As a
result, friendships were struck and cherished.
Alfred often entertained his friends: less frequently
did they manage to return his largesse. This was for no lack of
trying on their part. When it was practically always Alfred who got up
from the table, and extracted the company-sized, Barclays cheque book
from his coat-tails, as he strolled purposefully in the direction of the
cashier, his excuses were two. He was richer than most of us, which was
doubtless true enough – "I’d rather that my friends ate my money than
the State confiscate it when I’m dead". Second, that in his opinion he
was a better host than guest – "I usually end up misbehaving myself".
"This was of course a delicious fib. He was as gracious a guest as he
was a punctilious and generous host. None the less, Alfred could be stubborn,
even headstrong, over the matter of giving and accepting hospitality.
A day or two before he was to receive me into the Church (19th
October 1977), I invited him to be my guest at dinner once the great deed
was done. "Yes, I should love that; thank you dear Peter". So I booked
a table at ‘The Ivy’ – an irreproachable restaurant, yet one with echoes
of Edwardian raffishness. It seemed somehow wholly appropriate.
Immediately after my reception and First Communion, as
I was carrying the little glass and gilt cruets to Alfred’s room down
those perilous back stairs which protected his chapel at the Travellers’
from the wider world, Alfred, a few steps behind me, murmurred " I do
hope you’ll be able to join us all in the Coffee Room. This evening you
must have the best which this poor house has to offer". These words were
followed by a low, disarming chuckle, almost a wheeze. The party which
he had obviously planned so carefully could not have been more enjoyable
or fitting. Two nights later, we did, however, dine together, at ‘The
Ivy’, with Alfred as my guest. Headstrong, yes; but seldom vexatiously
so. All this and more was extra grist for the mill. It helped to make
Alfred’s work and his life in general more agreeable, and his friends
to learn the meaning of gratitude. It was not though the fuel which powered
the mill. For the mill ran on religion – on Trent wine and numinous discs
of imprinted rice bread, not on claret or roast woodcock. So to insist
otherwise – whether wilfully or ingenuously – is to confuse personal taste
and preferences with professional and priestly obligations; and ultimately,
to ignore the distinction between liking and loving. Alfred, the upper
class Englishman who admired beauty and respected excellence, most certainly
enjoyed the company of intelligent, personable and well-mannered men who
shared his own political, social and aesthetic outlook. But as a priest,
he took no notice whatsoever of social status, except to point out that
high birth and worldly possessions conferred neither spiritual privileges
nor a better bargaining position for heavenly rewards. He would sometimes
quote Ronald Knox on the subject:
"I am not going to decide whether the average Catholic
Mexican is what you [Sir Arnold Lunn] call ‘a better man’ than the
average Protestant Englishman. I do not know – I know which I would
rather go for a walking tour with, but that is not the same thing.
I prefer [my italics] Englishmen… but that is not going to
do them much good, poor dears, at the Day of Judgement"
Similarily, Alfred would point out that the rooms he
had furnished or embellished at Fisher House, or later at the Travellers’
and at Rose Hill, were no better morally than Father Mac Murphy’s
priest house and parish hall. He just happened to find the former more
to his personal liking–"altogether a different matter"
****
If then Alfred brought to his priest craft, and to the
environs where he practised it, the ethos and material effects of a rich
and conservative-minded gentleman–aesthete, how much had Catholicism,
in its turn, contributed to the person he was to become? "In a superficial
sense", Alfred once confided, "absolutely nothing. Otherwise, everything
– the whole works". At the time it was deepest frozen January, and we
were on board a bus to Towcester, on our way to a restorative lunch at
Easton Neston, after having spent a merry but damp and dusty morning in
the cellars of Bishop’s House, Northampton, reading letters from successive
Cambridge chaplains. "Until I went to the Beda", Alfred continued,
"and gave away all my pretty clothes, I was indistinguishable.
Only my family and a few intimates knew, or guessed, exactly how greatly
Holy Mother Church conditioned all my thoughts, and determined the
way I behaved. I am law-abiding by nature. But the awareness of mortal
sin was a far more effective deterrent".
He told one interviewer that even as a boy, he realised
that the England which he knew and loved and the Catholic church were
two aspects of the same civilisation, and that he wanted to increase the
communication between the one and the other. Or, as he told me that frosty
lunchtime, "to catholicize and to Englishize at the same time – I was
a very presumptuous boy indeed".
Alfred experienced few, if any, pangs of conscience as
the result of potentially contrasting loyalties. When, for example, Britain
declared war on Germany in 1939, if the Englishman in Alfred recognised
the tragic inevitability and the probable necessity of such a decision,
as a Christian priest he could only doubt its ultimate wisdom. These doubts
intensified when the Soviet Union allied itself with the British Empire.
Such misgivings were both religious and political. On the first count,
Nazi Germany had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Church, and
had broken or half-broken the treaties and concordats which it had signed
with the Holy See. But the Soviet Union had by 1940 persecuted and suppressed
all forms of Christianity within its borders – and was angling to extend
its atheistic hegemony. So how, politically-speaking, could Britain be
fighting in the name of freedom alongside a régime whose avowed
intent was its abolition, and yet retain any semblance of moral superiority?
In these circumstances, was Britain fighting a just war? Cardinal Hinsley,
Archbishop of Westminster, said we were. Alfred was less sure. At the
same time, both sides in the conflict were destroying, in ever increasing
numbers, the shrines and other landmarks of a thousand years of European
and Christian civilisation. James Lees-Milne sums up this point of view
with laconic and aching accuracy:
" Wednesday, 16th February 1944. News
has come of the bombing of Monte Cassino monastry. This is comparable
with the Germans shelling Rheims cathedral in the last war. No war-mindedness
can possibly justify it "
Nevertheless, during these and later years, Alfred soldiered
on, as it were: loving his religion and upholding his country. He could,
however no more condone the destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte
Cassino, than he could applaud William III’s victory at the Battle of
the Boyne. In the dining room at Fisher House (later, on the stairs at
Rose Hill), he hung portraits of the Stuart Kings – of those who reigned
and of those who did not. Firbankian impishness, Chestertonian nostalgia,
a decorous game of épater les protestants? Possibly, to
some extent, all three. Yet definitely not the cold-hearted gesture of
a Catholic Legitimist. As a child, Alfred’s Catholicism had been very
Spanish in flavour and practice, but after he left home and other influences
were exerted, it was reflected brightly through a looking-glass which
was cut and polished after the English manner. In about equal measure,
Catholicism brought to his Englishness an extra dimension of awareness
– ecclesia super partes. As far as he was concerned, his
religion and his nationality were complementary aspects of a single, yet
dual reality – ‘The Perfectly Normal Case of Dr Jekyll and Fr Jekyll’.
Whenever Alfred walked, or was being driven, past a Catholic church, he
always lifted his hat and inclined his head; he would do exactly the same
when passing the Cenotaph in Whitehall
****
" Oh Monsignor, what a thing!
The ‘ thing ’, or things, were Alfred’s pale and slender
legs. These were bare between the bottom of his shirt-tails and the black
bands of his suspenders – scarcely more than ten naked inches. "Oh yes
" came the swift mellifluous reply, " priests have knees. Or at any rate,
in my experience most of us would seem to have. " However, he darted back
into the bedroom of the set in Trinity where he was staying, leaving his
startled interlocutrix, Mrs Walne, standing agape in the middle of the
sitting-room. "A hopelessly hay-wire old watch " (as she later, carefully
explained) had brought her early to the appointment with her son, Victor.
Together with Alfred and Adrian Mathias, he was giving luncheon to Wilfred
Asciak and his daughter of the Progress Press in Malta, who were the first
publishers of Alfred’s We Believe by A Priest It was Degree Day
and Trinity was en fête. So it was more than fitting that Miss Asciak
kept her own pretty hat on throughout the meal. And when she smoked an
Egyptian cigarette afterwards, she put on her gloves first. Alfred was
deeply impressed. " Now I understand ", he murmured to me, why
Malta was awarded the George Cross! "
