My Name is Legion

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘The things Musso had done there, love, you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Gordon winced, either from an agony of mental recollection or from the torture caused by bulbous red feet and arthritic hips.

  After a long pause, he said, ‘You’d go to the quartermaster and say, “I didn’t lose no billycan – if I hadn’t put me kit down a moment sooner I’d have caught it the same as …” ‘ His face contorted and he made short inhalations of despair. ‘Eeeh! Eeh! Oh! Colin, he were called. He were a funny one. No lip, mind. But even the sergeants had to laugh at him.’

  Gordon never reached the point of any narrative, never filled out a generalization with a comment specific to the case. Rachel never did hear what he had seen in Abyssinia to confirm his horror of the Italian fascists. Colin, who presumably got blown up by a mine or a grenade, though alluded to more than once, was never explained.

  Kitty Chell, Rachel’s best friend of student days, was dead. She mourned her friend. Listening to Gordon, she began to guess what it would be like when she was older, when her head would fill up with a whole gallery of the dead, who came in and out of the shadows, often more real than the living.

  Gordon lived almost entirely in this twilit mental world. She had visited him three or four times before she knew that he recognized her. Clearly, he did more than this. He had been thinking about her. He had drifted into one of his interminable ramblings about desert warfare. Then he said: ‘We never had any time to think of what was going on in Europe, like, where many had it so much worse. I mean, we’d no idea what you lot was going through.’

  At first, she had supposed that by the phrase ‘you lot’, he had meant the women on the home front, the Londoners surviving aerial bombardment; but his eyes, those rheumy, bloodshot old eyes, had suddenly met hers with tearful tenderness. He opened a toothless mouth and smiled, rubbing his stubbly chin. Somewhere inside this old skeleton was a man who had once been her age, who had known young friends, who had been in love, who had nursed hopes.

  ‘Not till we saw them newsreels at the end of the war. In the camp we was, waiting to be demobbed. We’d come home. The Slade camp it were, near Oxford and there were these big … The Brigadier, he come in and spoke to us before the show, kind of thing. Magic … magic lantern … Before they switched it on, he said … the Brigadier, he said to us, “Now you’re going to find this shocking” … And then his voice went all quiet, like, and he says, “Maybe it shows what we’ve all been fighting for, only we didn’t know it” … And then he said, and I’m not religious but I’ll never forget it, the Brigadier said, “God have mercy on us.” ’

  She knew then that he was talking about the newsreels of the liberated concentration camps, of the walking skeletons of Belsen, the mountains of skulls, shoes, teeth that those films revealed. Was it so obvious, even to this man who had, until this juncture, seemed so totally self-absorbed, that she was Jewish? She was both mildly annoyed, as she always was when people took it for granted that she was Jewish; and at the same time deeply moved.

  In the ordinary texture of English conversation, there was so much maddening anti-semitism, ranging from feeble jokes at school to the airy assumptions by so many journalists and enlightened liberals that all sensible people supported the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East. These things enraged Rachel precisely because they were so unthought, so unconsidered; they were in the simplest sense of the word prejudices. But there was also this other thing about England, that since the time of Cromwell it had welcomed Jews, and while they were only in numerical proportion a tiny part of the population, the Jews had played an important and valued part in English life. That, presumably, was why one of her great-grandfathers had come to this country from Belorussia, and why another grandfather had come here from Poland. There was in England, as well as much casual and unthought anti-semitism, a strain of real reverence for the Jews, based, ultimately, she supposed, on religion. (Her English mistress at school had told Rachel, when they were ‘doing’ Paradise Lost, that the author of the great English epic was theologically closer to Judaism than to Christianity and that he had sometimes attended the synagogue in Creechurch Lane.)

  After this almost tearful exchange about the newsreel in 1945, Gordon became one of Rachel’s special friends.

  She had been living in Father Chell’s vicarage for nearly a month.

  Like everyone in England who read a newspaper, Rachel Pearl had grown up with an awareness of Vivyan Chell. Liberals of her parents’ generation could remember his story. He had gone to Lugardia with the British Army, and after some form of religious conversion, he had become involved in the Zinariyan resistance movement. He had gone as a soldier and become a monk. Rachel’s parents and their circle were not much minded to love either monks or soldiers. In his books and broadcasts, however, Father Vivyan had spoken very directly and educatively about the post-colonial situation. He seemed to have serious and interesting things to say about Africa – above all, about Africa standing on its own feet, and developing in its own way without having to ape the political and economic systems of Europe.

  After he had joined his order of monks (and Rachel was so hazy about these things that she had always half supposed that he was a Roman Catholic), Chell had openly identified himself with the resistance fighters of Major (as he was then) Joshua Bindiga. That had been in the heady days when Bindiga had claimed to be in favour of Freedom for All.

  For a while, Father Vivyan had been the only European in Zinariya who was able to retain the respect and confidence of all sides. The old whites hated him and regarded him as a traitor to their cause. But they also saw that he was a completely straight, honest figure, who had been an officer in the British Army, and that he would be useful to them, trying to retain a toehold of white influence in the newly formed all-African government. This was something which Chell resolutely refused to do. (Lennox Mark was the only white man cunning enough to ‘buy’ Bindiga.) Chell’s influence in the newly formed African country was different from Mark’s. Lennie was a wheeler-dealer. Chell was open, and candid. Lennie wheedled his way into positions of hidden power. Chell had authority because he appeared genuinely to want to renounce power. (After a month in his house, Rachel understood this better, feeling in Chell the contradictions of a man who wanted to follow a spiritual path of self-denial, but who was in fact heavily addicted to the exercise of personal influence.) Chell had also, in those early days in Zinariya, remained able to speak to the many Muslims in the country. Hitherto, the Christian missionaries had maintained a position of bigoted hostility to Islam. But when General Bindiga made his historic and very public conversion to Islam – with a display of a number of wives on the balcony of the Presidential Palace in Mararraba – Father Vivyan had preached a sermon at the Holy Redeemer church in which he told the congregation that the Muslims were cousins in faith, the sons and daughters of Abraham. (Since occasionally attending his services in Crickleden, Rachel had heard him tell the congregation of the Shrine of Our Lady that the story of the Virgin Birth was to be found in the Qur’an as well as the Bible; Rachel found his religious beliefs puzzling, even repellent, but this did not stop her being under his spell.)

  He had not been slow – she could remember Kitty talking of this, and Monty, Vivyan’s brother had spoken of it during their kitchen chats at Throxton Winnards in happier days – to denounce Bindiga. As soon as Bindiga formed his shady connections with international business, and began to exploit the profits of the copper mines, Chell’s condemnation had been loud and consistent. On visits to England, he had frequently tried to remind a largely indifferent British population of the horrors which Bindiga was perpetrating. He spoke of an opposition imprisoned or sent into exile, of journalists and university lecturers disappearing by night, of villages despoiled and whole populations massacred in rural areas. Chell – Uncle Viv, Kitty had called him – had been at times the lone voice denouncing these crimes. Monty used to say that it was a miracle that his brot
her had survived in Zinariya, without either being bumped off or sent into exile like the cranky Professor Galwanga.

  Thus had Rachel Pearl heard of Vivyan Chell and of his doings. He had never, though, been to the forefront of her mind. It interested her that he was the uncle of her closest friend at Oxford – but, then, many things about Kitty had interested her.

  Kitty’s funeral had been a turning point. Rachel had found herself talking to the priest after the service. Some of the words he had spoken during his sermon had made no sense to Rachel (these had been the words about God). There had been, nevertheless, a powerful sense of Kitty in what he had said. He had not merely described his niece, he had in some strange way actually evoked her, summoned her up. Rachel had only been living in his house for a month, and she had already formed the impression that there existed a strong spiritual kinship between uncle and niece: that Kitty’s waywardness and love of danger and insistence upon her own terms in life were all qualities which he had in abundance. It did not surprise Rachel to learn that Kitty had sometimes gone to kip down in sleeping bags in the south London vicarage and befriend tramps and vagrants. (Rachel had always known, and been puzzled by the fact, that Kitty retained her religious belief.)

  So, when she decided that she needed to start a new life, Rachel had decided upon impulse to make her way down to Crickleden, not really knowing what she would find when she got there. She had not telephoned in advance to announce her arrival, or to ask permission to come and stay. She had simply turned up, with one overnight bag. The monk had been coming out of the front door into the rain as she turned into the drive. The shanty-town effect of bedraggled tents and grotty camper-vans was not exactly what she had expected. At the funeral, he had been wearing the semi-medieval garb of his religious order; the image it left in her mind was of French abbeys and cathedrals, visited on holidays with her parents, of pale Normandy sun streaming through lancet windows, of whitewashed aisles, of an indescribable sensation of peace. (These French churches gave her the closest to what she had imagined to be ‘a religious experience’.) Father Chell in his robes, speaking of her dead friend in a medieval church, had summoned up such a world, and she had perhaps half supposed that the place in south London where he had described Kitty coming to stay from time to time was some kind of monastic establishment, breathing a similar orderliness and calm. The tall figure who came to greet her on his tarmac wore jeans and a jumper. The mess, and the noise, coming from the camper-vans, the young children running out into the rain, to be called back in raucous voices by Albanian women, the scuffed front door of the house, the packing-cases and the disorder had all seemed at first like an affront. She quickly came to feel that this, precisely, was what they were: though not an affront to herself but to the World on whom Vivyan Chell was waging war. Christ asked his followers to take up their weapons against the World, the Flesh and the Devil. It was in his defiance of the first of these enemies that Vivyan seemed so remarkably clear. It was much more than a bohemian rebellion against the supposed values of his own class. His household, with its floating population of ‘hopeless cases’, and its variety of somewhat earnest helpers (these included two rather terrified-seeming monks sent by the mother-house at Kelvedone), was making a statement about England. It was saying: ‘These people – the asylum seekers, the homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely and the odd – what are you doing for them, oh glorious liberal democracy?’

  Until coming to Crickleden, Rachel Pearl would have accounted herself ‘right wing’ in the political spectrum. That is, she distrusted any forms of ‘political improvement’. She found the economic theories of Karl Marx entirely unconvincing; and those societies which had tried to put them into practice had created hells without historic parallel. Even those nations which had merely adopted milder forms of socialism than those advocated by Marx had created restrictions on individual liberty without, it seemed to Rachel Pearl, advancing either individual dignity or material prosperity. The disadvantages and cruelties of a society such as the United States where the Free Market was allowed to operate freely were obvious in terms of urban squalor, poverty, sickness. An economically free society was one where you had to arm the police. But this, it had always seemed to Rachel, was entirely preferable to any of the alternative methods of ordering society yet devised by the human race.

  Almost as soon as she arrived in Crickleden, her perspective on these things radically altered. She did not become ‘lefty’ – the word she always used for collectivism. But she became an out-and-out sceptic about the values of a free society. She realized the simple and obvious fact: that when she had been forming all her political views, from the safety of her parents’ house in Barnes, or from school or from Oxford, or from her office in the Legion or from her flat bought for her from L.P.’s expense account, she had done so from the perspective of someone with money. ‘The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy’ was one of the phrases she liked to quote from the philosophers when she was an undergraduate. (Like ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’, it was one of those phrases from Wittgenstein which made you sound deep if you said it, but which did not require any understanding of philosophy as such in order to grasp it.) It now seemed to her that his distinction between the worlds of the happy and the unhappy was a self-indulgent one. The crucial difference in the world was between those who did and did not possess money.

  Rachel knew that by the standards of almost all human beings throughout history she was a person who was quite extraordinarily privileged. Except for a few self-imposed hardships when on holiday, or on school camps, she had hardly ever known a day when she had been hungry. Water supply, opportunities to drink safely and to wash adequately, and heat had always been available for her without her thinking about them.

  Christ called his followers to sell all that they had and give to the poor; to deny themselves, to take up their crosses. These were words familiar to Rachel from her reading of literature. She had dipped into the Gospels, though she had never read one of them through. But she had never encountered a human being who had decided to live as if these injunctions were literally true. ‘Blessed are the poor’ … ‘The poor have the gospel preached to them!’ … These texts were crucial to Vivyan’s vision of the world; dispossession was at the core of his spirituality. She realized after only a few days that her pampered, comfortable existence – not just hers, that of Western humanity itself – made her, us, strangely vulnerable; that to be dispossessed and to survive gave those who did it tremendous power. A few, a very few, such as Vivyan Chell did it deliberately. Most did it out of necessity. The boys in his house who had fled Zinariya, having been forced to work on cocoa and tobacco farms for no wages; the Irish vagrants; the Albanian refugees, had not made some grand anti-bourgeois gesture by possessing nothing. They were poor because they were poor, and they were not poor as the English working classes were poor – struggling to live in a council flat on the dole. That was poverty, all right, compared with what Rachel had been used to, but it was not the absolute poverty which so many of Vivyan’s friends had encountered: real empty bellies; and in the case of the Africans and the Albanians, the experience of living without clean water or even on occasion without water at all.

  ‘As having nothing, yet possessing all things’ – these were the words which Vivyan used to murmur about their struggle.

  She had begun to see the vicarage and its raggle-taggle encampments less as one eccentric clergyman’s attempt to do something about the poor than as a paradigm of the world’s agony and its future. What she saw was far from reassuring. She valued the order and the cleanliness of her upbringing; the quiet of her parents’ house, the soothing possibilities of knowledge which it brought: time and space for reading, for playing the cello, for conversation. The world-disorder shadowed forth by Vivyan Chell’s strange holy-pirate kingdom was one where seemliness and space were taken from us. It reminded her of the household in the film of Dr Zhivago after the revolution, when t
he formerly graceful interiors had simply been invaded and inhabited by those who needed a roof over their heads.

  When she had arrived, Vivyan had expressed pleasure but no surprise.

  ‘Hello! I’ll put your bag in my room for the time being … nothing valuable in it, is there?’

  She’d said no, because she did not want him to think her a rich airhead who had brought trinkets into such a place. In fact, she had hidden a watch in some rolled-up tights. It was not an especially valuable watch – it cost about five hundred pounds. L.P. had given it to her. By the time Vivyan had finished showing her round the house, the church, the garden, the watch had disappeared. It was her first lesson in communal living and she had said nothing about it.

  He had taken her almost at once to the church, told her the story of the medieval shrine, told her about Bishop Guiseley and his order of monks, walked her up and down the aisles.

  ‘Make free of this place,’ he had said in his drawly voice. ‘It’s not for you at the moment – you probably feel it will never be for you. Fine. But don’t feel excluded. Come to mass sometimes to see what we’re up to. Stay away if you can’t stand it. This is my centre of operations. It’s the engine room. Plenty of people can sail the ocean without once visiting the ship’s engine room, but if you’re interested, this is it.’

  That was all he’d said about religion, though from time to time he responded to her questions on the subject, not by direct speech but by thrusting a book into her hand. He’d lent her Bonhoeffer’s Ethik, which she had half admired, having heard the story of its author, and Simone Weihs Waiting on God, which she had liked less.