by David Lodge
At about the same time as the Pope’s postponement of a decision on birth control, another event occurred which for many people placed a much greater strain on religious belief of any variety.
It was a wet autumn, and the rain fell heavily and unremittingly, especially in the valleys of South Wales. At Aberfan, a small mining village near Merthyr Tydfil, a large coal-tip, a man-made mountain of mining waste, became waterlogged, honeycombed and sodden like a gigantic sponge. Springs and rivulets oozed from its sides and ran down into the valley below. No one took much notice. On Friday, 21 October, at 9.15 in the morning, just after morning prayers at the village Infants and Junior School, the tip became critically unstable, and with a thunderous, terrifying roar, as though the constipated bowels of the Industrial Revolution had suddenly opened, a colossal, obscene, evil-smelling mass of mud and stones avalanched into the valley, sweeping aside everything in its path, and burying the school, with some hundred and fifty children and their teachers.
The school was due to break up at midday that Friday to begin the half-term holiday, and had the landslide occurred a few hours later, and destroyed an empty building, it would have been called a miracle in the popular press; but as it did not, it was called a tragedy, the part, if any, played in it by God being passed over in tactful silence. On the following Sunday, prayers were offered throughout the land for the bereaved, for the rescue-workers and (in Catholic Churches) for the departed souls of the victims, but few ministers of religion took up the theological challenge of the event itself. One of them was Father Brierley, preaching at the 9.30 mass in his new parish, a dull market town in a flat landscape that seemed almost scandalously safe that weekend.
The traditional response of Christians to catastrophes such as Aberfan, he said, was to regard it as some kind of punishment for man’s sinfulness, or to accept it unquestioningly as the will of God. Both reactions were unsatisfactory. For if it was mankind’s sinfulness that was being punished, it was totally unjust that the punishment should fall on these particular children and their families. And if it was the will of God, why should we not question it? If God, as Christians believed, was everywhere in the Universe, then He must be prepared to take responsibility for everything in it, and accept the anger and bitterness he aroused in the hearts of men at times like this.
The Biblical text that was most relevant was the Book of Job, the story of the virtuous man who was suddenly visited by the most appalling afflictions – his sons and daughters killed, his prosperity taken away, and his own body afflicted with loathesome sores. Why did God allow this to happen? Job himself could not understand it, and was unconvinced by the arguments of the pious who tried to reconcile him to his fate. He felt utter despair and alienation from God, and while never denying God’s existence, had the courage to challenge God to justify himself:
“Yes, I am a man, and he is not; and so no argument,
no suit between us is possible.
There is no arbiter between us,
to lay his hand on both,
to stay his rod from me
or keep away his daunting terrors.
Nonetheless, I shall speak, not fearing him:
I do not see myself like that at all.
Since I have lost all taste for life,
I will give free rein to my complaints.
I shall let my embittered soul speak out.
I shall say to God, ‘Do not condemn me,
but tell me the reason for your assault.
Is it right for you to injure me,
cheapening the work of your own hands?”
When he had finished reading this passage, Austin Brierley looked up from his notes and surveyed the congregation. He saw the usual blank, bored faces, a few with their eyes closed, some perhaps actually asleep, mothers with babies in arms anxiously watching their fidgeting older offspring, a man going surreptitiously through his pockets for change to be ready for the Offertory collection. He didn’t know quite what he had expected. Tears? Shocked expressions? Heads eagerly nodding agreement? Not really, but he felt disappointed that the response was as flat as on any other Sunday. He hurried to his conclusion.
Eventually, God had spoken to Job, and Job submitted to his superior wisdom and power. The words that convinced him would not, perhaps, convince a modern Job. They would certainly not convince the parents of Aberfan. But that was not the point. The point of the story – which was, of course, a myth, a poem – was that God only spoke to Job because Job complained to God, gave free rein to his complaint and let his embittered soul speak out. We should be less than human if we did not, this dark weekend, do the same on behalf of the victims of Aberfan.
At lunch, the Parish Priest asked him casually if he planned to repeat his sermon at the evening mass.
“Yes, why? Did anyone object to it?”
“Well, I did hear one or two comments passed after the nine-thirty. It seems to have upset a few people.”
“Good,” said Austin Brierley. “Someone was listening, then.”
“You’re a queer fellow, Father,” said the PP, digging into his apple crumble. “What good does it do, making people doubt the goodness of God?”
“What are we, then, his priests or his public relations officers?” said Austin Brierley fiercely, and immediately apologised.
“You’re looking overtired, Father,” said the PP kindly. “You could probably do with a holiday.”
“I had a holiday a couple of months ago.”
“A retreat, then. Or perhaps you’d like to go on a course of some kind.”
At about the same time that Sunday, Edward and Tessa were driving along the M1 on their way to the baptism of Dennis and Angela’s fourth baby, which had arrived safely, if a little early, at the beginning of October. The rain fell heavily, and cars that passed them threw up great fountains of spray which lashed the windscreen and temporarily overwhelmed the wipers. It had stopped raining at Aberfan, their car radio informed them, which was some small blessing for the rescue workers, still shovelling wearily at the millions of tons of mud. (Adrian was not among them, though on hearing the first news of the catastrophe he had thrown tools into the boot of his car and driven nonstop to South Wales, only to be turned back by the police at Abergavenny; there were more than enough volunteer diggers from the local mining communities, better qualified for the job than himself, the police gave him to understand in the kindest possible way, and only vital traffic was being admitted into the disaster area. So the heroic gesture eluded him once again.) So far, the car radio informed Edward and Tessa, one hundred and forty bodies had been recovered.
“Please turn it off, Teddy,” said Tessa, “I can’t bear to listen. And do slow down.”
“I’m only doing fifty,” said Edward, turning off the radio.
“I know, but these conditions are so treacherous.” Tessa was not normally a nervous passenger, but she felt there was malice in the elements today. Her three children, strapped to the back seat, and the fourth in her womb, seemed terribly vulnerable. She feared for some cruel accident, a skid or collision that would overwhelm them all like Aberfan. “What a day!” she exclaimed, for the sixth time. “I wish I hadn’t decided to come. I should have stayed at home with the children and let you go on your own. It will be too much for Angela, so many people.”
“Dennis said she was in great form. Apparently the delivery went very smoothly. He was boasting terrifically about having watched the whole thing. Seemed to forget I might have witnessed one or two births myself.”
Dennis and Angela’s new house was part of a middle-class housing estate still under construction on the outskirts of a small Warwickshire village. The houses, detached and semi-detached, in four basic designs, stuck up rawly from unturfed, rubble-strewn garden lots separated by wire-mesh fences. There were puddles and mud everywhere. It seemed impossible to get away from the physical ambience of Aberfan. And inside the house, in the lounge, a television screen flickered with monochrome pictures of the wall of s
ludge, the weary, mudstained figures of the workers, the numbed, grief-stricken faces of the watching mothers. Tessa’s two oldest children immediately seated themselves in front of the set, which was being watched by Dennis’s parents.
“I think it’s terrible,” said Dennis’s mother. “The way they show everything on television these days. It’s not right, interrogating people who’ve just lost their children.”
“There’ve been a lot of complaints about it,” observed her husband.
But neither of them seemed to think of turning the television off – as though the transmission of harrowing pictures were a natural force, like the landslide itself, which had to be borne as long as it lasted.
Dennis offered Tessa and Edward a cup of tea before they all set off for the church. “Ange is upstairs, getting the baby ready,” he said. “Go up if you like.”
“Becky, come and see the new baby,” said Tessa, anxious to get her away from the TV and its morbid pictures. Edward, sipping his tea and nibbling a biscuit, took her place, his attention irresistibly drawn to the screen.
“Ghastly, isn’t it?” said Dennis. But there was no real horror in his voice: he was still high on the experience of the birth, which he had found extraordinarily moving, and the pride of his own part in it, for which he had been commended by the midwife. The tragedy of Aberfan could not penetrate this private euphoria. He was also childishly delighted with his new house, and couldn’t rest until Edward had been shown round it – the modern, fully-fitted kitchen, the separate utility room for washing machine and deepfreeze, the big garage with his workbench and power tools already installed, the downstairs cloakroom and second loo, the upstairs bathroom with shower and four good-sized bedrooms, in the largest of which they found Angela and Tessa sitting on the edge of the divan bed, chatting, with the new baby lolling between them on a clean nappy.
“So this is our godchild,” said Edward, stooping over the baby. “How is she?”
“An absolute angel,” said Angela. “Never cries. I have to wake her up to give her her feeds.”
Edward’s hands lightly caressed the child from her cranium to her feet. He took the tiny hands in his and turned them this way and that, tickled the infant’s toes and offered her the knuckle of his little finger to suck. Tessa could tell that something was worrying Edward, that he was spinning out the conversation with the fondly smiling Angela while his fingers and eyes probed. When they got back to their car to drive to the church she said, quietly so that the children in the back would not hear, “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
Edward turned on the car radio. Music flooded the car. A familiar voice with the accent of Liverpool sang:
Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear, No one came near …
“Ooh! Beatles!” cried Becky, already hooked on pop music at seven. She clapped her hands in delight.
“Downs’ Syndrome,” said Edward.
“Oh, my God. Are you sure? She doesn’t look like a mongol. The eyes –”
“You can’t always tell from the eyes. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure. There are more reliable indications – markings on the hands, for instance.”
“And they have no idea?”
“Evidently not. The doctor must have spotted it, even if the midwife didn’t. Too scared to break it to them, I suppose. Sometimes the parents don’t find out for months. Years, even.”
“Oh, my God, how awful for Angela.” Tessa clutched her own swollen belly. “What causes it?”
“An extra chromosome, it occurs at conception, nobody knows why. Older women are more at risk, but that wouldn’t apply to Angela.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “Or to you.”
She smiled wanly, acknowledging that he had read her thoughts correctly. Edward did not mention the theory that the Safe Method might be responsible for such congenital defects, and was able to conceal his own alarm at this extra piece of confirming evidence. In fact, both of them were queerly and horribly relieved that the affliction had fallen upon Dennis and Angela, for it somehow made it seem more likely that they themselves would escape unscathed. All day, Tessa had felt that there was some malice in the air, still unsated by Aberfan. Now that it had struck, had shown itself, she felt less threatened.
But the baptism was an ordeal, and she could not forbear to weep as she held the infant’s head over the font, and the water splashed on to it, and the child gazed back into Tessa’s eyes without uttering a single cry. She was named Nicole, after a French pen friend Angela had kept in touch with since childhood. “Wasn’t she good?” said the grandmother afterwards. “Not a murmur!”
“Are you going to say anything?” Tessa asked Edward in the car going back to the house.
“I must. I’ll suggest a paediatrician should have a look at the child. I’ll have a word with Dennis before we leave.”
“Dennis will take it harder than Angela,” said Tessa.
“You may be right, but I must tell him first.”
After the tea and cakes, while Tessa was getting their children ready for the return journey, Edward asked Dennis to show him how the sander attachment worked on his power tool, and Dennis led the way to the garage. Edward followed, feeling like an assassin with a loaded gun in his pocket.
I did say this wasn’t a comic novel, exactly.
4
* * *
How They Lost the Fear of Hell
AT SOME POINT in the nineteen-sixties, Hell disappeared. No one could say for certain when this happened. First it was there, then it wasn’t. Different people became aware of the disappearance of Hell at different times. Some realized that they had been living for years as though Hell did not exist, without having consciously registered its disappearance. Others realized that they had been behaving, out of habit, as though Hell were still there, though in fact they had ceased to believe in its existence long ago. By Hell we mean, of course, the traditional Hell of Roman Catholics, a place where you would burn for all eternity if you were unlucky enough to die in a state of mortal sin.
On the whole, the disappearance of Hell was a great relief, though it brought new problems.
In 1968, the campuses of the world rose in chain-reaction revolt, Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and the civil rights movement started campaigning in Ulster. For Roman Catholics, however, even in Ulster, the event of the year was undoubtedly the publication, on 29 July, of the Pope’s long-awaited encyclical letter on birth control, Humanae Vitae. Its message was: no change.
The omniscience of novelists has its limits, and we shall not attempt to trace here the process of cogitation, debate, intrigue, fear, anxious prayer and unconscious motivation which finally produced that document. It is as difficult to enter into the mind of a Pope as it must be for a Pope to enter into the mind of, say, a young mother of three, in a double bed, who feels her husband’s caressing touch and is divided between the desire to turn to him and the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. It is said that Pope Paul was astonished and dismayed by the storm of criticism and dissent which his encyclical aroused within the Church. It was certainly not the sort of reception Popes had come to expect for their pronouncements. But in the democratic atmosphere recently created by Vatican II, Catholics convinced of the morality of contraception were no longer disposed to swallow meekly a rehash of discredited doctrine just because the Pope was wielding the spoon. Of course, if the Pope had come down on the other side of the argument, there would no doubt have been an equally loud chorus of protest and complaint from the millions of Catholics who had loyally followed the traditional teaching at the cost of having many more children and much less sex than they would have liked, and were now too old, or too worn-out by parenthood, to benefit from a change in the rules – not to mention the priests who had sternly kept them toeing the line by threats of eternal punishment if they didn’t. The Pope, in short, was in a no-win situation. With hindsight, it is clear that his best course would have been to procrastinate and equivocate
indefinitely so that the ban on contraception was never explicitly disowned, but quietly allowed to lapse, like earlier papal anathemas against co-education, gaslighting and railways. However, by setting up in the glare of modern publicity a commission to investigate and report on the matter, first Pope John and then Pope Paul had manoeuvred the Papacy into a dogmatic cul-de-sac from which there was no escape. The only saving grace in the situation (suggesting that the Holy Spirit might, after all, have been playing some part in the proceedings) was that it was made clear on its publication that the encyclical was not an “infallible” pronouncement. This left open the theoretical possibility, however narrowly defined, of conscientious dissent from its conclusions, and of some future reconsideration of the issue.
Thus it came about that the first important test of the unity of the Catholic Church after Vatican II, of the relative power and influence of conservatives and progressives, laity and clergy, priests and bishops, national Churches and the Holy See, was a great debate about – not, say, the nature of Christ and the meaning of his teaching in the light of modern knowledge – but about the precise conditions under which a man was permitted to introduce his penis and ejaculate his semen into the vagina of his lawfully wedded wife, a question on which Jesus Christ himself had left no recorded opinion.
