by A. N. Wilson
Eleanor Bartlett, professionally, was committed to this belief. She sat in the decanal stall in the Cathedral, wearing her cassock, surplice, scarf and Oxford MA hood. Above her head, carved Victorian angels, evidently women fancied by Oswald Fish, did the dance of the seven veils.
Stately, plump Bishop Dionne Lillicrap was in the pulpit.
The Earthquake was 7.5 on the Richter scale, said Dionne with some emphasis.
If you dressed up Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego in bishop’s rig and shoved a pair of specs on what breeding had allowed him in the way of a nose, there would have been a distinct resemblance between pet and owner. But Eleanor, who thought all our doings without charity are nothing worth, never allowed herself to think that way. It was something which Digby once said to me.
7.5. Just think about it. Just think about the scale of damage that has caused in some other parts of the world – in California, or in Aquila, or nearer at home here in the Pacific. We have been spared. We have been . . .
A long pause. Another difficulty, when it came to colleagues, was to restrain involuntary considerations of their appearance. Would it be possible to take Bishop Dionne’s utterances more seriously if she went on a diet? Yet, like the stones of Oxford in Auden’s poem, Dionne seemed utterly satisfied with her own weight – and indeed with everything else about herself.
It was a Civic Service of Thanksgiving. Rex Tone was there, wearing his mayoral chain of office over the collar of his shiny dark blue suit. The leaders of the other parties in our local Council were there. Deirdre Hadley was treating the Bishop’s sermon as if it was a party political, which in a way it was, and shook her blonde-grey hair in disbelief at what was being claimed. When she returned to the Parliament Building in Carmichael, Deirdre expressed the view that Bishop Dionne was seeking Divine Sanction for the interference in our economy by unaccountable property speculators and billionaires from South-East Asia. It got huge coverage in The Press. Many of us Aberdonians felt that Deirdre should have been more loyal to her native city; should have shared in the general optimism after our miraculous deliverance from utter destruction. You did not need to have done a course on Greek tragedy to see she was the Cassandra of the set-up.
Rex would respond testily to Deirdre’s remarks that this inference was ‘entirely unacceptable’, and that the Green Party was discredited by such a piece of unsubstantiated mud-slinging. They were just playing politics with people’s fears. But the Greens stood by Deirdre’s words.
. . . spared, said Bishop Dionne. We have been spared. Spared for a purpose. For make no mistake – that is what we are here in this Cathedral today to do. To thank God. To thank God that our beloved city has been saved. And to ask God – what next? What is Your plan for the future? For Aberdeen?
We could so easily have been wiped out. But that wasn’t God’s plan for us.
It fascinated, but also horrified Eleanor, that Bishop Dionne had been granted these insights into the Divine Mind. Could not Dionne see that, if there were another quake, and if it were more destructive than this, we should have to come to terms with what the Deity had meant by it? Was Dionne suggesting that the people of Aquila, who had been killed in some numbers in their quake, and whose entire medieval city, a place of much greater beauty than Aberdeen, had deserved to be wiped out? And if they did not deserve it, why had God done this to them?
But, you know something?
Dionne had changed gear into her chummier, confiding tone. The high Pontiff had become everyone’s favourite agony aunt.
God doesn’t want us, in our Thanksgiving, to just be looking backwards. That’s not the Christian way of saying thank you to God. Not AT ALL. The world thinks saying thank you is saying thank you for something that’s already happened in the past. Something that’s OVER.
Eleanor tried to stop herself thinking that this would seem fairly logical on the world’s part. The Pontiff had paused in a way which recalled the rhetoric of primary-school teachers. She looked around, and it would not have been surprising had she asked the listeners to raise a hand and tell her if they knew what ‘over’ meant.
No. Not for us Christians. For us, thanksgiving is looking forward. What am I always saying? I make no apology for repeating it today. We are a Community of Outreach. Where are we reaching out to, now, after this deliverance? What does God want of us – not yesterday – but tomorrow? Does He want this city to be forward-looking or backward-looking? Does He want this city to seek new ways of reaching out to people in the Chinese community, for example? Or does He want us to put up the barriers? Is that what God wants? Does He want us to retreat into a little parochial world all of our own, very cosy, very comfortable? Or does He . . .
Eleanor tried not to remember Deirdre’s placard about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being bred to choke. She also tried not to remember that sentence of Goethe, a favourite of Digby’s, of the danger of choking, through the repeated chewing of moral and religious absurdities. Eleanor always felt that Goethe was maybe a bit dangerous. You should go easy on the Germans if you are trying to preserve Christian belief. Digby was nowhere to be seen, of course, during the service. She never made her presence felt in church.
Eventually, Dionne stopped, and Eleanor was able to check the flow of her thoughts. The choir, in particularly good voice, sang one of Stanford’s finest settings of the Te Deum. The calm Apollonian harmony of the Chosen Frozen at prayer soothed, numbed, obliterated some of the aftershock of Dionne’s infelicitous words. Josh Nicolson’s angelic, piercing treble reached the top C as he trilled:
All the earth doth worship thee, the Father Everlasting.
When it stopped, and the minor canon began the prayers, everyone in the Cathedral could hear Penny Whistle, singing his songs outside in Argyle Square. One of the pleasant features of attending services at the Cathedral was that, in all the quiet bits, you could always hear Penny Whistle, with his huge repertoire of lyrics.
We focus our minds, said Bob, the minor canon, in gratitude to God. Bob’s voice, even when amplified through the mike, is reedy and weak. Penny Whistle’s voice is a powerful bass baritone. If he had been trained, and had a different set of chances, he could easily have ended up as the definitive Wotan . . . I wasn’t listening to Bob’s prayers. Penny Whistle spoke, or sang, for me:
Now when we’re out a-sailing,
And you are far behind.
Fine letters will I write to you
With the secrets of my mind.
The secrets of my mind, my girl,
You’re the girl that I adore,
And still I live in hope to see
The Holy Ground once more.
CHAPTER SIX
UNUSUALLY, ABERDEEN WAS COVERED IN SNOW NOT LONG after that first quake. We tend to have mild winters on the Island by European standards, but that one was really freezing, for two or three weeks, which made it a total pain for those whose electricity and heating was up the spout, and whose shitty insurance companies weren’t coughing up. Winter did NOT keep us warm, whatever my darling’s favourite poet may have thought. But eventually, winter faded. The lovely Island spring came, and the Bougainvilleas were drooping their wonderful cascades all over Prince Alfred Parade; and our little garden in Harrow was a Samuel Palmer, frothing apple blossom. Then came the hot summer of February. We were a hardened, post-Quake people now. We did not believe Rex Tone’s bullshit about it never happening to us. Some of us – even the Dean, but we mustn’t jump ahead of ourselves here with the story – were not even too sure that the Creator – who had, after all, sat back when the good people of Aquila were totally zapped – had a specially soft spot for Aberdonians. What kind of Mad Inventor-Creator would that be when he’s at home? We’d all come to believe Deirdre’s warnings that another one was inevitable; that it was not a question of IF but of WHEN. A quake of 7.5 was huge, and we’d survived it without fatalities. There had been earthquakes in other parts of the Island ever since it was settled. But now we, in Aberdeen, had been close to an epi
centre of a quake which, if it had been any closer, could have wiped us off the map.
During and after the first Quake, we all drew together, no question. Within an hour of it happening, like I said, students had organized, via social media, working parties to come and clear the mud and liquefaction out of people’s paths and driveways. Those whose houses had been badly damaged were offered accommodation, often by their neighbours. There was a real feeling of the Second World War and everyone pulling together. And none of us believed Bishop Dionne that God had singled us out for special blessing, not one of us, but we were grateful nonetheless that we had been spared.
Island Breakfast kept us informed. As always, Cavan Cliffe, far more than the Bishop (or the Dean), started each day for us, focused our thoughts, helped us get a perspective on things. It was our umbilical cord, tying us to mother truth.
Cavan Cliffe, five foot in her socks, and on the chunky side, took her exercise whenever possible by rowing herself to work in the middle of town. Cavan’s face, clever and lived-in, looks at you very directly, and often laughs. If you are one of the very many people she likes, and who like her, this is what makes her an instantaneously attractive person. If you are a politician, or a poseur of some other kind, and you are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, Cavan’s laugh is destructive – destructive of pretension. That’s why over a million people, over a quarter of us, tune in to Island Breakfast.
On that show, she has been talking straight, relaxed, jolly, clever, just as she would talk to you across the breakfast table, for the last thirty years. When she started doing it, she was a young cub reporter on The Press and the radio work was a sideline. She still writes for The Press, but the radio work has now taken over very largely. She’s an institution.
I know I’m biased, but I’d say that Cavan represents everything that is good about Huias. There’s no side to her, but she isn’t brash or coarse. She’s a subtle person. In spite of her very heavy schedule of work, she keeps up her reading. She’s the best-read person I know. She never interviews a politician without really doing her homework – so, for example, if you were trying to bamboozle the listeners about some environmental issue, or with some question of farming, you would find that this short, plump, completely urban woman knew as much about genetically modified crops or soil erosion as many of the experts. When she interviews poets or novelists, she shows a sensitive awareness of what they are up to. She’s done a lot to silence the philistines in discussions about modern art, drama, experimental theatre, music.
That morning, the blossom on Mum’s apple trees had gone, and the Aberdeen Permains, still as small as walnuts, had appeared on the boughs of her orchard. When Mum and Dad moved to Harrow, they fell in love with the little house with its wooden verandah-porch. What’s more, they could afford the rent, and most people rented in those days. (After they divorced, Mum bought the house.) Harrow in those days was a run-down neighbourhood, with a lot of Irish working-class families, and houses with outside toilets. By a kind of economic inevitability, however, young couples like my parents gravitated towards this place. They were the baby-boomers, they’d not been alive to see their dads and uncles leaving the Island on ships, some of them with their horses, to fight for the Empire. (Dad lost two uncles in the Second World War, one in Italy, the other in Africa; Mum lost three of her uncles, and her dad. From 1945 onwards, her family had been nearly all women.) All that was in the past, and they were the new, post-war generation, more laid-back, less convention-bound than their parents, not especially religious (though still overwhelmingly Anglican), readier to accept a loosening of the orthodoxies. Nothing too dramatic. That’s not the Huia way. We’re a small-c conservative bunch. But long before the so-called Sexual Revolution had actually been announced, Mum’s generation did not think the skies were going to fall in if you got divorced, or if you were gay, or if you had an abortion. And they were easier about class. All four of my Huia grandparents would have shuddered at the idea of living in Harrow. My dear! Irish! But the house Mum and Dad fell in love with was pretty, as was the whole rackety neighbourhood. The small houses, some of them wooden, some stone, but with clapboard facing, had river- or meadow-frontage. The school buses passed along the main road – Adelaide Highway – which is only a ten minute walk from our front gate. After a few such families had come to live here, it became ‘desirable’; and after five or ten years, it became so desirable that the property speculators moved in.
Those who had not been lucky enough to get divorced and buy their own home found that their landlords had subtly changed. They found that instead of their house being owned by Miss Jones or Mr Smith, it was owned by something called Galt Investments.
Galt owned one of the bigger properties, not far from us, as it happened. It had a swanky two-car garage, a tennis lawn and big herbaceous borders. It must have been built before the other houses – in the 1890s, say – and belonged to a prosperous sheep-farmer who had decided he needed a city property, or maybe the owner of one of the bigger stores in Balfour Street. Anyhow. Eventually, Galt’s tenants all got letters which were in effect notices to quit.
Enter stage left my much-mocked English teacher Deirdre Hadley, with her stick legs and her little denim sunhats adorned with CND and Friends of the Whale badges. It was Badley Dreary, and her lodger, a young man called Barnaby Farrell, who got us all organized. They were the ones who had been down to the planning office and found out that Galt Investments had obtained permission to build a big hotel on the riverbank. They were aiming to demolish about twenty of our neighbours’ houses, and the small wooden church, St Luke’s, where I was baptized. Our garden would have abutted the back wall of the hotel, so we’d have got all the cooking smells from the kitchen, and the exhaust fumes of ‘parking facilities for up to 100 cars’. (I quote from the glossy brochure which Galt Investments had printed at the time.) It would have ruined our neighbourhood completely, and driven all the young families away into the further suburbs, far from schools, and shops and other amenities.
It was a long battle, with endless late nights with lawyers, giving their advice cheap or for free; endless hearings of planning committees and public inquiries. Galt Investments had all the big guns, businessmen and lawyers from Carmichael, on their side. Deirdre and Barnaby just had guts, determination and patience – and most of the population of Harrow. They won. We owe it to them that we have our little house, with the porch that Cavan and my dad fell in love with six years before I was born, with the apple trees (Aberdeen Permain are juicier but crisp like a Cox). We’ve let the tufty grass grow into a sort of meadow, which slopes down to the banks of the Windrush where Cavan keeps her little rowing dinghy. I’m at my bedroom window waving to her. It’s not quite six in the morning. The light is just coming up, a lovely hazy yellow light which catches the dew on the lichen; the drops on the apple twigs reflect the light of dawn, shimmer like jewels. From the branches of the trees, grey and white Island robins, and tomtits, and little silvereyes are twittering. In the wet grass, almost metallic in that morning light, you can see the dark green footprints of Cavan’s trainers. She wears a white tee-shirt, black and white check trousers, and a baseball cap. With her right oar, she pushes away from the jetty, which she and I built ourselves, and her little skiff goes into town.
Now I’ve waved her goodbye, and I’m offstage for the rest of this scene, I’ll go into the past tense.
With decisive, strong strokes, she passed hundreds of back gardens, saw old men smoking as they gazed at the water, through upstairs windows, routine matutinal scenes – men shaving, school-kids brushing their teeth, impatient brothers, clutching towels or washbags, shouting at their sisters through bathroom doors for being too long in front of the mirror, through downstairs windows, families having their hurried breakfasts before work and school, mother putting packed lunches into plastic containers and yelling at their teenaged sons for losing the car keys. These are all the worlds we leave behind before we go to work, the worlds which
go on inside us all, even when they’ve vanished; the world where the kitchen table exists because we scrub it. Down the towpath stretched the long redbrick walls of Fenton’s Brewery, then on the opposite bank, the cemetery, and the tower of St Hugh of Lincoln. (Eleanor had great fun Skyping her father about the ‘goings on’ in St Hugh, which had been taken over by fervent evangelicals. They had dug a small swimming pool in the back of the nave where they baptized converts by total immersion. As far as could be discovered there was no liturgy, as Eleanor and her father would have understood the term, of any kind, though they had something called Toddlers’ Praise and Messy Church on Tuesdays.) Many of the buildings Cavan had passed so far were marked down by the God of Earthquakes for a shake-up. From now on, the buildings she saw were those actually doomed: the garages on the distant ring road, the wide expanse of Prince Alfred Parade, the Winter Gardens, with their elaborately glazed roofs and ornate orangery, the lumpy neo-classical art gallery, the even lumpier Presbyterian church, the dome of the RCs, the white-and-plate-glass geometry of Rex Tone’s Convention Centre and the almost identical Civic Centre (what the rest of us still want to call the City Hall), all these the God of Earthquakes had marked down for complete destruction.
Beyond the large, ugly car park on the edge of Leicester Square, the Windrush snaked beneath pretty cast-iron bridges, where the Victorian lamp-posts had recently automatically switched off with the coming of day. To her left was the great Arch of Remembrance, inscribed with all the campaigns where Huias had lost their lives in the two world wars – MESOPOTAMIA, EGYPT, BURMA . . . And here too were the names of battles – DARDANELLES, PASSCHENDAELE, MONS, TOBRUK, ANZIO – where boys from hilltop sheep farms, and grizzled seamen from the many whaling stations which lined our coasts in those days, had been sent out to fight other people’s battles, to fight with amazing bravery, and never to come back. Beyond the grandiose memorial, the river twisted. Some parents were already waiting for the big public school to open – what had been the High School but which had been renamed by Rex Tone Opportunity Two. (Opportunity One was what had been the primary school, further into town up the Westminster Highway.) Past the school, and now, on one side of the river, were the buildings of Banks University’s Law Faculty, and opposite this complex of buildings was the four-storey white-stuccoed 1950s nondescript building which housed Island Radio. Cavan stood up, wobbled a little, as was inevitable when getting her bearings in a small boat, humped her knapsack over her sturdy shoulders, and tied the boat, which had Little Ingrid painted on its prow, in its usual place.
