Towards the end of my time in Chicago I preached in one of the Episcopal churches in the city. After the service I was approached by a distinguished-looking man in a three-piece suit. He introduced himself as Roger Moore, Senior Warden of the Church of the Advent in Boston, and he wondered if I could spare him thirty minutes. We found a café. He took out a packet of fragrant, moist Edgeworth tobacco, from which he packed and lit his pipe. He was an unhurried man of serious demeanour. A lawyer. Would I be prepared to fly to Boston next week to meet the search committee of the Church of the Advent, which was looking for a new rector? They had heard about me, hence his flight to Chicago to hear me preach. They wondered if I would at least meet them to help them in their search. At the most it would take twenty-four hours out of my life. And I would get to see Beacon Hill for the first time. He told me it was certainly worth a visit. Intrigued, I agreed. I flew to Boston a few days later. I had, in fact, seen Beacon Hill before, without realising it. When I’d gone to a movie in Santa Fe in June 1968 during my visit to the South-West, I had seen Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. I had noticed the elegant red brick terrace, the old-fashioned gas lamps, the Maple trees that lined the street on which Thomas Crown lived, and I had liked what I had seen, not knowing that it was Beacon Hill in Boston. I had admired the old-fashioned graciousness of the streets I had seen in the movie. I liked it even more now that I was here in its midst. They put me up in the Somerset Club on Beacon Street, facing Boston Common, and it was there I met the search committee. It was the beginning of a period of painful uncertainty in my life. Maybe the soundtrack of the movie and its song about the windmills of the mind had been auspicious.
They did not formally offer me the post on that day, nor did I say I was interested in applying for it, but they were obviously giving me the once-over, and seeds of unrest were sown in my restless mind. I got back to Edinburgh the following week. Jean met me at the airport. On our way back to Lauder House I mentioned the quick visit to Boston. It hoisted a flag of unease in her mind. She did not want to move back to America. Fine. I wasn’t really interested either. They were only picking my brains.
But they did not go away. Roger Moore came to see me in Edinburgh, and claimed afterwards that he nearly froze to death in our guest room. The overtures unsettled me, but I was unsettled, anyway. I had been at Old Saint Paul’s for twelve years. One of my minds loved it and could never imagine leaving it. Where would I be without these hours in this mysterious building that confronted me with a presence both given and withheld? My other mind was restless, ambitious, excited by the prospect of a return to America and an unpredictable future. I think it was the unpredictability that got to me. In Scotland I could pretty much see what lay ahead. Laurie had stayed his whole life at Old Saint Paul’s. He was married to the place and only death had separated them. One of my minds longed for that level of stability and commitment. Faithful unto death. But my other questing, restless mind wanted adventure, the new, the unexpected. More strangely, it wanted the unknown. A move to Boston would tear up the script and I’d have to improvise a new one. A new movie to star in! A future presentation! Later that summer of 1979 they invited me and Jean over to see them. It was hot and humid in Boston. Jean disliked it. I was intrigued, but still uncertain. So it went on for the rest of that year. It was not till the following March, when I made my third visit, that the deal was struck, and I decided to accept the position that had by now been offered to me several times. I announced my departure to Old Saint Paul’s, and immediately felt heart-sick.
After our farewell from Jeffrey Street at the end of June in 1980, we spent the summer at our cottage near Dollar in Clackmannanshire, before our move to Boston in late August. Jean’s parents had helped us buy Pathend Cottage in 1970, and it became as indelibly imprinted on my heart as Kelham and Old Saint Paul’s. It was 200 years old, on the lovely tree-lined lane that led down to Muckhart Mill. The cottage faced away from the lane, and sat comfortably in its own garden high above the River Devon. A huge cypress tree at the back door gave it dignity and grace. Tall as the steep old house, on a windy day the tree flickered and ruffled and rejoiced. There was something of the sentinel about that tree. I loved coming over the hill above the cottage with the children after a walk and seeing it guarding the entrance. We would play a wayfarers game. I wonder if good people live in that white house beside the green tree, I’d ask. I wonder if they’d be kind to wandering strangers like us. Let us go down and see. We’d make our way down the hill, through the field, over the fence and into the cottage, where the woman of the house would have tea and home-made scones ready for us, with pots of her own wild raspberry jam waiting on the table. We spent part of every summer at Pathend, and the children often brought schoolfriends to stay. The parishioners also made constant use of the place, and it became something of a country annexe to Jeffrey Street. We swam in the river, hiked in the hills, cycled the country roads, picked wild raspberries, and read books and played games in the evening. I particularly loved it in autumn when we would snatch a few days while the leaves were falling and the rosebay willow herb’s flowers were turning to silver wisps. Jean’s father loved it, too, and wrote a poem about it.
After the city streets, a country lane,
After the noisy world, the quiet hills.
Instead of tramping feet, a running stream:
Instead of troubled hearts, the gift of peace.
Beyond the paths that wander without end,
I turn to you – my hearth, my home, my friend.
But we were going to lose it, too. We did not know whether our move to America would be for ever, but we knew it would be for years, and there was no way we could manage the cottage from across the Atlantic. So we sold it, but we arranged to stay in it for that final wistful summer. Soon enough, everything was for the last time. The last visit to the Pow Mill Milk Bar for their famous bacon rolls. The last visit to the butcher in Dollar who made his own haggis. The last walk down past Muckhart Mill and up the hill beyond. The last stroll along the edge of the river in the field next to Pathend. The last swim in the river itself at our favourite place, where you could do about twenty strokes before hitting the rocks. The last supper. The last drive up the lane into a new future.
The new owners were due to move in on the morning of our departure. Our remaining pieces of furniture in the cottage had all been claimed by friends and parishioners, and they were to be collected that same morning. Hours before our departure there was a flash flood of rain, and water poured through the back door down the narrow passageway into the kitchen. We used all our towels to soak up the water. The new owners turned up with their furniture while we were still carrying our furniture out of the cottage into the garden where it waited in the rain, covered in tarpaulins, to be picked up by those who wanted it later that day. Somehow, thanks to Jean’s genius for planning, we got through it all. Along with Kip our dog and Tizer our cat, we loaded ourselves into the car that was to take us back to Edinburgh for the weekend before our Monday afternoon flight to Boston. No one spoke as I negotiated the car up the lane. We got to the huge beech tree where the lane bent towards the road. That was the beech tree we’d slung a rope over for a swing years ago. It was hanging there as we passed. Under that beech tree was the barbed wire fence on which Sara had impaled herself one summer afternoon when she was very young. We were nearly at the road when Mark, in the back seat with his sisters, tried to stifle a sob. That set us off. We all wept uncontrollably. I was leaving Alexandria again, and this time I was dragging my family with me.
12
BOSTON COMMON
Beacon Hill in Boston is one of America’s oldest urban neighbourhoods. It lies immediately north of Boston Common and Boston Public Garden. It is bounded on the south by Beacon Street, on the north by Cambridge Street, on the east by Somerset Street, and on the west by Storrow Drive, close to the Church of the Advent itself, where it sits on what is called ‘the flat of the Hill’ close to the Charles River. Maybe it i
s significant that I never properly oriented myself in my new abode. Because Lauder House faced north in Edinburgh, I could never rid myself of the feeling that 135 Mount Vernon Street faced the same way, when it was exactly the other way round. Though I spent four years resolutely facing the wrong way in Beacon Hill, I liked the feel and touch of the old neighbourhood from the very beginning. And it was old. Around 1800 a group of entrepreneurs known as the Mount Vernon Proprietors undertook to subdivide the south slope of Beacon Hill for mansion houses set on parcels of land of an acre or more. Not many of these were built, however, and in the following years developers covered the rest of the Hill in attached Federal-style row houses or terraces that opened straight onto the sidewalk.78 They give Beacon Hill a cosy yet elegant feel, and the brick sidewalks and flickering gas lamps add to the charm of the neighbourhood.
It was under lamplight and along those brick sidewalks I led Kip on her evening walk the warm and sticky August night of our arrival in Boston in 1980. Outside our new front door I turned right and headed down Mount Vernon to Brimmer Street, where the roots of the maple and flowering pear trees caused weird undulations in the sidewalk. The Advent filled the corner of Mount Vernon and Brimmer Street, a dignified rather than a dominating presence. While Kip sniffed the railings, I stood back and looked at the church I had been called to serve. It looked comfortably at home where it sat on the flat of the hill. We continued along Brimmer to Pinckney Street and back along Charles Street, the main drag of the neighbourhood, packed with interesting shops and restaurants and fast-food joints, such as the famous Paramount, which was just round the corner from the Rectory. Charles Street on its way out of Beacon Hill goes between Boston Common on its east side and the Public Gardens on the west. Smelling grass and what it promised, Kip dragged me into the gardens, the scene of the children’s picture book, Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey, the story of a pair of mallard ducks who decide to raise their family on an island in the lagoon in the gardens. After that first exploratory turn round the gardens on the evening of our arrival, it became a favourite walk for me and Kip in the brief time that was left to her. I did not imagine during our walk that night that she would not survive her first winter in Boston, or that I would almost immediately begin to regret the restless mind that had taken us away from Scotland.
There were layers to the regret I fell into. The most obvious was straightforward homesickness, and it was felt by all of us. I found Mark in tears one day. What’s wrong, son? ‘I just want to go round to Chessel’s Court to play wi’ ma pals,’ he said. But it was Jean’s homesickness that was deepest and most despairing. In spite of the joy of being near her sister Margaret and her nephew Steve, who lived in Boston, she ached to be back in Edinburgh. So did I. But I was also excited by the challenge of finding my way in a new parish, and I did not anticipate any great difficulty in doing so. Like Old Saint Paul’s, the Church of the Advent was a historic Anglo-Catholic parish, so how difficult could it be to move from one to the other? As different as America is from Scotland, and then some, as I was soon to discover. What I had not reckoned on was the enormous cultural divide between Scotland and America, a divide that only becomes obvious when one emigrates.
Apart from relatively trivial differences in the way we use a common language, the substantial difference between us is captured by the paradox of American social culture. It was, I was to discover, an intensely political culture that opened the leaders of every institution to constant challenge from its members. This meant that almost anything could become a source of dispute, as the rights of challenge and disagreement were asserted. This is what makes American institutions at every level profoundly democratic and self-adjusting, at the price of constant confrontation and discontent. At the parish level, this often leads to situations of strife and breakdown in the relationship between pastors and their congregations, the flipside of which is the eagerness with which Americans participate in group life at every level. Americans believe in belonging as passionately as they believe in believing. The shadows on this astonishing democratic energy are the conformism and outbreaks of group-thinking that regularly afflict the nation. Some of these viral social epidemics are more irritating than dangerous, but American history is also dark with witch hunts and lynch mobs, and its soundtrack is loud with the hectoring tones of demagoguery and its humourless cousin political correctness. It is as if America suffers from an auto-immune deficiency disorder that attacks the antibodies of scepticism and irony, which are there to protect us from the toxins of social hysteria and group-rage. Studying in America, vacationing in America, marrying an American, all of which I had done, had not prepared me for the shock of difference I felt when I moved there to live and work. At forty-six I was too old to make the transition easily, but it might have helped had someone prepared me for the jolt and disorientation of the move. As it was, under my confident exterior, I felt as if I were walking in a fog through which I could not quite discern the measure and proportion of things. Or it was like moving underwater, with all the distortions and delays that medium imposes. To find myself, with little in the way of preparation, responsible for a large and significant institution like the Church of the Advent, in what I was slowly coming to recognise was a very foreign country, was something I only gradually realised had disturbed and unsettled me at a deep level. Looking back, I am grateful to the Advent for the scene shifting that went on in me, but at the time it was disorienting.
Though the congregation was established in 1844, eleven years after the beginning of the Oxford Movement, the church itself was not completed on its present site in Brimmer Street till 1894. It is a glorious Victorian Gothic building whose architect was John Hubbard Sturgis. Though much larger in scale and less florid in decoration, it is physically reminiscent of William Butterfield’s All Saints Margaret Street in London. It is built on hundreds of wooden piles driven through the landfill of Back Bay down into the clay bed beneath, and capped with granite to form the bearing stratum.79 Architecturally, it feels completely at home in its place on the flat of Beacon Hill, where ‘it broods beautifully beside its brick neighbors, hardly noticeable until one arrives a block or so away, although the graceful broach spire is a landmark from the top of the Hill or across the river’.80 Much as I admired it, I did not fall in love with it. I was like a man who had left one woman for a more handsome and wealthier rival, only to discover that he was still in thrall to the one he had deserted. I recognised objectively that the Advent was a wonderful building, though I always preferred the exterior to the interior. I was particularly moved by the way it lifted itself straight out of the brick sidewalk on Mount Vernon Street before opening onto the garden on the corner with Brimmer Street. When I go to movies set in Boston I still eagerly watch to see if I can catch a glimpse from the Cambridge side of the Charles River of that beautiful spire standing above the warm cluster of terraced brick houses on the flat of the Hill. I was not so moved by the interior of the church, though I recognised that it was a magnificent setting for great liturgies. The sanctuary is dominated by an enormous reredos in pale Caen stone, which I found chilly after the warm gold of Old Saint Paul’s, though it was rendered vivid at Christmas when it was decorated with banks of scarlet poinsettias. The Advent was a building that delivered itself completely and proudly to the beholder and held nothing of itself back. It was at its best when it was full of worshippers, and the choir and sanctuary were alive with robed choristers, acolytes and clergy, as the high mass was celebrated. I slowly began to realise that the difference between the church on the elegant level of Brimmer Street in Boston and the church on the dingy slope of Carrubber’s Close in Edinburgh was that the Advent’s power lay in withholding nothing, while Old Saint Paul’s power lay in the fact that it withheld so much.
And it was what was withheld that I began to miss. I had loved Old Saint Paul’s most when it was empty. I loved the Advent most when it was full. Empty, the Beacon Hill church was like a theatre waiting for the stalls to fill and
the curtain to lift and the performance to begin so that it could come to life and be itself again, like an actor who is only at peace with himself on the stage. Old Saint Paul’s was most itself when it was empty, most alive to me when nothing was going on in it except its own brooding and remembering. The contrast may have something to do with the fact that Old Saint Paul’s has always been kept open so that people can drift in, sit awhile with the building and its memories, and drift out again. Churches that stay open unclose themselves to the sorrows of humanity and alchemise them into consolation. And not a cheap consolation. Just as artists reconcile us to our ills by the way they notice and record them, so open churches console us by the way they accept the unreconciled aspects of our natures. This is a mystery the godless poet Philip Larkin acknowledged in his poem, Church Going.81 Almost in spite of himself, he recognised that ‘the ghostly silt’ of a church can exercise a strange power over those who visit it. Silt is the perfect word. It suggests the slow silent accumulation of pain and regret, and their distillation into memory and mercy. Because they have heard it all, these serious houses on serious earth. Into their ‘blent air’ generations of the wretched have whispered their compulsions, and not always in hope of having them removed, but simply to experience the relief of naming them. Churches not only bear the memory of our dyings, they also carry the knowledge of the helplessness of our failings. They are a haven for the homeless woman whose destitution is obvious, muttering to herself over there in the back pew; but they also accept the moral destitution of the confident man sitting in the dark chapel, gazing at the white star of the sanctuary lamp, heavy with the knowledge of the compulsions that have dominated his life and refuse to leave him. Here both are accepted in their helplessness. There is no reproach. Churches do not speak; they listen. Clergy speak, unstoppably. They are ‘randy’ to change, challenge or shame people into successful living. Church buildings that stay open to all know better. They understand helplessness and the weariness of failure, and have for centuries absorbed them into the mercy of their silence. This is grace. Unearned undeserved unconditional acceptance of unchanging failure, including biological failure, our last failure, our dying. The unclosed church is the home of the destitute and the dead. And since we will go on failing and dying, some of us will go on gravitating to these places that do not shut themselves against our need.
Leaving Alexandria Page 22
