Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  I’m not claiming that my genitals were unaffected by this mental intoxication; a grand passion combined with an enforced chastity hardly results in a eunuch’s detachment. But I had no hesitation in resuming the habits of adolescence in order to maintain a tolerable degree of tranquillity. So much rubbish has been talked in the past about this sort of behaviour that rational statements by clerics are almost nonexistent, but personally I believe masturbation need be no more sinful than contraception. It entirely depends on the intent of the perpetrator. If one adopts contraception merely to neutralise the risks of fornication, then of course it must be wrong; if one adopts it to preserve one’s wife’s health, then it must be right. A similar distinction can be made between masturbating in order to avoid a healthy relationship with the opposite sex and masturbating to save oneself from sliding into dementia while battling towards the altar, and if anyone thinks I’m behaving like a Modernist heretic when I state this fundamentally moral opinion, all I can say is: too bad.

  Did I spend much time thinking of Grace while all this feverish activity was going on? I did not. One of the most useful aspects of my grand passion was that it blotted out all I could not bear to remember. On the first anniversary of my bereavement I forced myself to go alone to the cemetery and lay flowers on the grave, but I found the experience so unendurable that although Nanny took the children to the grave occasionally, I never accompanied them. At first the children mentioned Grace’s name often, but this spontaneity ceased when they discovered I was unable to talk of her. I had to remove her photograph from my study. I sent our double bed to the Red Cross and slept on the divan in my dressing-room. I could never even enter the bedroom we had shared. Once I heard Nanny say to Primrose: “It’s the grief,” but she was wrong. It wasn’t grief which paralysed my tongue and put parts of the vicarage out of bounds. It was the guilt I was unable to face.

  Fortunately grand passion and hard work created a continuous diversion from past tragedy, and soon the war became another welcome distraction as the tide began to turn against the Nazis. After the fall of Tobruk came the victory at El Alamein. After the losses of D-Day came the capture of Berlin. It was then, as Churchill entered the bunker of his adversary and sat at last in Hitler’s battered chair, that my hidden ministry began to take an unprecedented amount of my time, the ministry I seldom mentioned because I feared it might taint my career: my work among the German prisoners, bitter and despairing, cynical and demoralised, at their camp on Starbury Plain.

  The camp had been opened early in 1943 to house officers graded as C (Nazis) and C+ (Super-Nazis); contact with British civilians was forbidden. However, after the Normandy invasion in 1944 the huge influx of prisoners meant that the camp had to be reorganised. The Super-Nazis were sent north to Caithness, officers were admitted from Grades B (seemingly neutral but possibly still Nazi) and A (Pro-Allies), and a contingent of Other Ranks (all grades) was also admitted to act as orderlies. Still no contact was permitted with British civilians, but after the lynching of a Grade A man it was admitted that the Grade C’s were out of control, and a second reorganisation took place.

  Three Grade C’s were hanged for their part in the lynching, while the culprits who escaped the gallows were shipped off to Caithness. Then a new commandant was appointed to run the camp, and by chance he happened to be not only a devout Christian but a friend of Dr. Ottershaw.

  Colonel Laker was immediately faced with the fact that there were no qualified German priests or pastors among his prisoners. These pre-war clergy, serving in an atheist army, had been unable to be chaplains in any acceptable sense, but once in the camps many of them proved keen to revert to their calling. However at Starbury Plain the intake of prisoners had never included a Catholic priest, and of the four Protestant pastors one had died soon after admission, one had been sent to Caithness after the riot, one had had a nervous breakdown and one had lost his faith. As Colonel Laker remarked to Dr. Ottershaw during a visit to the palace, the flock was quite untended. A usable German pastor had been applied for, but sane, devout non-Nazis were highly prized by their captors and the commandants tended to hang on to them. In the interim (proposed Colonel Laker) could the Bishop possibly send an English clergyman who could hold a service for the Grade A’s and the few Grade B’s who might deign to turn up? (It was assumed no Grade C would go near an English clergyman.) War Office permission had been sought, and in these difficult circumstances a refusal was not anticipated.

  Since the other Archdeacon, Babbington-French, was still saying that the only good German was a dead German, I was asked, just as I had always feared, to play Daniel in this den of German lions.

  I hated it. I did my best, but my best seemed abysmal, and I found it hard to bear the humiliation of having my weakness for pastoral work so brutally exposed. Here I could no longer hide behind my talent for administration; it no longer mattered that I was a successful archdeacon, because now I was in a situation which required a missionary, someone with the guts to fight for Christianity right in the front line. There were times at the beginning when I used to be physically sick before I visited the camp. Could any reaction have been more cowardly and inadequate? I despised myself. Later I fought off the nausea but used to shiver from head to toe. Revolting! I continued to despise myself. Later still I conquered the shivers and stopped wasting emotional energy despising myself, but I went on thinking what hell it was to be quite such a failure. I felt as if my nose was being repeatedly rubbed in the mud.

  Eventually to my relief a new German pastor turned up, but he proved useless and Colonel Laker out of kindness transferred him to Featherstone Park, the camp which had just begun to specialise in retraining the German clergy; after their years as Nazi soldiers even the good men tended to be disorientated and demoralised, no matter how much they wanted to return to their calling. Again the camp on Starbury Plain was without a pastor. The Commandant asked me to keep calling. The Bishop asked me to keep calling. The War Office extended my pass. There was no way out.

  I slogged on.

  After a while I got involved with the men and didn’t mind so much. The Grade A’s in fact became very civil and as the war drew to a close the Grade B’s began to abandon their sullen neutrality. Finally when the war ended I found myself even talking to the Grade C’s, not only the ones who tried to commit suicide but the ones who went mad, clinging to the belief that the German surrender was a lie, a product of the Allies’ propaganda machine. But as the British pored over the photographs of the cheering crowds in Whitehall, of the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, of the great London landmarks floodlit after six years of darkness, of the service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul’s, all the Germans were shown pictures of their ruined cities, the captured U-boats, the vast enclosures of prisoners and the surrender at Lüneburg Heath. Arrangements were also made for them to see film of the concentration camps. The Grade C’s said the film had been made in Hollywood. The Grade B’s were silent. Only the Grade A’s, it seemed to me, could make any attempt, no matter how inadequate, to articulate the sheer pulverising horror of being German in that May of 1945.

  “So it’s finished,” said my favourite, Hoffenberg, a very plain young man, awkward and ungainly but with a quick mind which deserved a university education. “Führer, Fatherland, Fantasy—all finished, nothing left, nothing but ruins and shame and guilt and hopelessness—no, don’t try to console me, Mr. Aysgarth! We’re in the darkness where your Christian light doesn’t shine, and there’s no Englishman alive who could possibly understand how we feel.”

  I said only: “Aren’t you forgetting there’s one Englishman who always understands? Who wants to go to Germany as soon as possible to preach the Christian message of hope in the ruins of Berlin? Who’s dedicated himself to the task of helping the German churches take their place in a reconstructed Europe? Who speaks out again and again for suffering people, regardless of their nationality, in a world ravaged and brutalised by war?”

  Hoffenberg shed a
very small, very pathetic tear. I hated this side of my ministry. The sight of a man overcome by emotion always makes me want to bolt in the opposite direction, but of course I stayed with Hoffenberg, and at last I heard his simple answer: “Who else but the Bishop of Chichester? Who else but George Bell?”

  By 1945 Bell was the most famous churchman in Europe. He was the man whom the politicians found intolerable but whom no civilised democracy could afford to silence; he was the voice of conscience and humanity, the voice of an idealism which no horror could ever obliterate and no evil could ever destroy. Passed over for the Bishopric of London in 1939, he was rejected for the Archbishopric of Canterbury when William Temple died unexpectedly in 1944. “Bell should go to Canterbury,” I had said to Dr. Ottershaw, but we had both known it would never happen. Bell had disqualified himself long since by criticising the Government whenever they found it politic to ride roughshod over Christian principles in the pursuit of victory, and in the February of 1944 he had driven the final nail into the coffin which contained his hopes of future preferment. With a courage which I had found almost inconceivable he had risen to his feet in the House of Lords to condemn the Government’s policy of saturation bombing and remind the nation yet again of the other Germany which existed beyond the swastikas: the Germany of the persecuted, the suffering and the innocent. Bell was doggedly anti-Nazi, but no one was more mindful that not all Germans were Nazis and that Nazism itself was transcended by the brotherhood of man.

  “Bell’s wasting his breath,” I said tersely to Dr. Ottershaw after Bell had committed professional suicide by condemning the policy of saturation bombing. “No one wants to be reminded of the other Germany—when one country’s fighting another country to the death it can’t afford to see the enemy as anything but an evil monolith.”

  “Then isn’t it all the more important for our moral survival,” said Dr. Ottershaw gently, “that someone should remind us innocent people are dying in Germany as well as in England?”

  But I was too confused about Bell to reply. Indeed sometimes my feelings seemed so intolerably complex that I could not even read his speeches in The Times. However—and this was very strange—I found I could always talk about him to my Germans. After all, whenever I entered that camp I ceased to be the successful Archdeacon obliged to avoid discussions of controversial bishops, and as I struggled, just like any other ordinary unknown chaplain, to communicate with my flock I would use Bell as a Trojan horse to penetrate the hostile citadel of their minds. Here at last I could confess my admiration for Bell’s courage; here at last I no longer had to suffer in agonising silence whenever he was battered by the forces of antagonism which he inevitably unleashed.

  “Here’s a great man speaking for humanity!” I would declare with passion to my Germans, although later that same day I could only bring myself to say offhandedly to Dr. Ottershaw: “It’s such a pity Bell will never be more than Bishop of a dull little town in Sussex.”

  “Ah!” said Dr. Ottershaw at once. “But all the persecuted victims of the Nazis care nothing for the internal politics of the Church, do they? They can’t spell Canterbury and they’ve never heard of York, but every one of them’s heard of Chichester—and every one of them talks of George Bell.” He paused before adding mildly: “It’s a question of values, isn’t it? Whenever I read one of George’s speeches I can always imagine him saying to himself like Luther: ‘Here I stand! I can do no other.’ ”

  “Of course—better that he should stand up for his beliefs and remain in Chichester than keep his mouth shut and go to Canterbury,” I said at once, anxious that my superior should not find my values wanting, but privately, to my shame, I hoped I would never be trapped in a position where I had to pass up a great prize in order to echo the famous words of Martin Luther. I knew then exactly why Bell could wreck my equilibrium with such ease. It was as if he held up a mirror to me, and whenever I glanced in that glass I saw how far I fell short of his outstanding spiritual power. This insight was so painful that sometimes I longed to smash the glass by whole-heartedly condemning him in public, but I never did. Outside the camp I merely continued my policy of keeping silent about him as far as I could while I struggled with my conflicting emotions, and towards the end of that May in 1945 it was a relief to turn aside from him at last in order to concentrate on my marriage.

  By V-E Day the preparations for my wedding were well advanced. I had expected war-time shortages to reduce the dimensions of the society wedding which Dido demanded, but her detestable father, reaching deep into his pocket and using his influence to surmount the difficulties caused by rationing, confounded me by plotting a celebration of almost pre-war sumptuousness. I could sense his relief that his youngest daughter was finally getting off the shelf, but I became increasingly worried about the prospect of a flashy wedding and feared it might raise disapproving eyebrows among the churchmen who mattered. Finally I was so concerned that I confided my anxiety to Dr. Ottershaw.

  “But my dear Neville,” he exclaimed warmly without a second’s hesitation, “how can anyone hold you responsible for the fact that Dido’s local church happens to be St. Mary’s Mayfair? And how can anyone expect you to restrain Mr. Tallent from running wild afterwards at Claridges?”

  This generous approach to the revels reassured me, but as soon as I had stopped worrying about the churchmen who mattered, I found myself worrying—not for the first time—what my children would think of their father’s extraordinary transformation into a society bridegroom.

  It was a subject which greatly disturbed me.

  7

  Since my first meeting with her, Dido had always taken care to stay away from Starbridge during the school holidays. At first I had not realised this absence was deliberate; because of wartime circumstances it was hardly surprising that our long courtship had been conducted mostly by letter. Later, when I realised she was avoiding the children I had raised the matter with her, but she had always insisted that the meeting should wait until we became engaged. She had reasoned that because the children were deterring her from agreeing to marry me, any meeting would affect her ability to consider the problem with rational detachment.

  At first I accepted this decision but when I came to suspect that Dido was merely using the children as an acceptable excuse to postpone marriage, I realised that her determination to avoid a meeting was rooted in her fear of failure: she was afraid the children would compare her unfavourably with their mother and dislike her. I sympathised with this fear, which did indeed represent an unpalatable reality, so I never attempted to force a meeting, but when we became engaged in early March I at once invited her to the vicarage to see the younger children. Sandy was the one child she had met, since he was young enough to be always at home during her rare visits to Starbridge, but Primrose, who was now approaching her eighth birthday, attended a day school in the Close and had been easier for Dido to avoid.

  The meeting appeared to be a success. Dido departed in good spirits and Sandy commented graciously that it would be nice to have a real mother again, just like everyone else.

  “She won’t be your mother,” said Primrose, “and besides, everyone knows stepmothers are always perfectly horrid.”

  My heart sank. This was exactly the reaction Dido and I had both feared. “I’m surprised you should say that, Primrose,” I said, knowing I could not let the remark pass without censure but taking care to use my mildest voice. “Since Dido was so anxious to be friendly, I think you’re being a little unkind.”

  Primrose, unaccustomed to any word of criticism from me, promptly burst into tears. But worse was to come. The next day, before visiting James at his prep school in Salisbury, I travelled to Winchester to break the news of my impending marriage to Christian and Norman. I took them out to lunch. Naturally I had planned the entire meeting with military precision. The main course was allocated to a conversation about life at school. Then as soon as I had given the order for pudding to the waitress, I embarked on the speech which I had car
efully prepared and memorised. For perhaps thirty seconds all went well. Then the metaphorical curtain tried to rise. If I had been one of those misguided people who believe in spiritualism I would have thought that Grace’s ghost had joined us at the table.

  I broke off. The two boys, curiously alike in their resemblance to my father, regarded me with an unflawed politeness. Somehow I managed to drag the curtain down again but to my fury I could feel myself blushing. “Good heavens, what a hash I’m making of this!” I exclaimed, trying to hide my agonised confusion beneath a burst of jovial bonhomie. “The truth is I’m so excited that I hardly know whether I’m coming or going!”

  They both smiled courteously and waited in silence for me to continue.

  “Well,” I said, “possibly you may be quite surprised that I wish to remarry. In fact you may well be very surprised indeed. But it’s really better for a clergyman to be married.”

  “You’ve already said that, Father,” said Norman.

  “Ah yes, so I have.” I finally found the correct place in my script. Taking a deep breath, I declared: “Nothing, of course, will ever alter the fact that your mother and I enjoyed sixteen years of the most perfect married life. In my eyes she was the most wonderful woman in the world—and that explains why I now feel I must marry someone quite different. I wouldn’t want my second wife to impinge in any way on such cherished memories.”

  They continued to look at me in silence. Then Norman stole a glance at Christian and Christian idly began to examine his fingernails.

  “Dido has many fine qualities,” I said as I watched Christian’s expressionless face, “and she’s very anxious to be friends with you. It is my earnest hope—” I broke off again. That sounded too pompous. Unfortunately prepared speeches so often do. “I hope very much that you’ll like her,” I resumed rapidly. “She may feel a little awkward with us all at first, but I know I can rely on you boys to act like gentlemen and try hard to make her feel at home in our family.”