We Sim-Jaegars are a widely scattered clan. Though born and educated in England I am now resident in Los Angeles with all the rights of a United States citizen. The Edinburgh Festival has twice drawn me to Scotland, yet I never dreamed I had a distant cousin there until a solicitor’s letter arrived “out of the blue,” as they say. It told me John Tunnock had died intestate, that I was his next of kin, and asked how I wished to dispose of his estate — some thousands of pounds in a savings account and a large terrace house in Glasgow’s Hillhead district. The current sale price of such houses was anything between half a million and a million. Furnishings, domestic appliances, ornaments, pictures and books had not yet been professionally valued, but a Glasgow agent of Christie’s (the well-known auctioneering firm) had written expressing interest in a stained glass panel representing Faith, Hope and Charity in the stairwell window, since records of the William Morris workshop indicated that it was designed by Burne-Jones. If I wished to view my cousin’s former property without residing in it (which was perhaps likely, given the circumstances of his death) I would easily find accommodation in a neighbourhood Hilton hotel.

This letter had clipped to it a Herald newspaper cutting dated three weeks earlier. It said that John Tunnock, retired schoolteacher, aged sixty-seven, had been found dead at his home in Glasgow’s Hillhead district, and the police were appealing to the public for information about anyone seen entering or leaving his home before the morning of Saturday, 28^th April. Attached to the clipping was a further note from the lawyer saying the police had taken all evidence the house could yield and no arrests would be made. He had ordered the removal of blood stains and the place was now thoroughly tidied and cleaned, all locks on doors were changed and a new up-to-date burglar alarm installed. He awaited my instructions.

Well! God knows I have all the money I need but a businesswoman can always use more. My investments are safe because I work closely with my brokers and lawyers — not that I suspect them of corrupt practices, but when professional men’s judgement is at fault (and no financial arrangement is ever flawless) they sometimes automatically ensure that the cost is borne by inattentive clients. This canny attitude brought me to Glasgow against the advice of American and English friends who said I would be in danger of criminal violence, and pointed to my cousin’s fate as a warning. My omniscient insurance advisor disagreed. Glasgow, he said, certainly had the greatest density of European poverty, ill health and crime west of the former Communist empire — in one district the average life expectancy was seventeen years less than that of those living in the Gaza Strip before the recent Israeli-Lebanese war — but the murder rate was still three quarters of that in most United States cities. Statistics show that in Glasgow’s Hillhead area a woman is marginally safer than in Beverly Hills, especially if she does not wear bright blues or greens while watching television football in crowded pubs. These colours, that sport, such pubs do not tempt me. To Glasgow I came.

Next morning at the Hilton hotel I had a business breakfast with the solicitor, Alasdair Gillies. He could tell me nothing directly about my cousin, never having met him. Legal documents in the possession of his firm, letters in the Tunnock family home had enabled him to trace me through a distant relation who had emigrated in Victoria’s reign. They had also revealed a family secret. John’s mother Griselda was youngest daughter of Murdo Henderland Tunnock, for many years minister of Hillhead Parish Church. Like her two sisters she never married. Unlike them she had left the family home, first becoming a typist in a local tax office before promotion in 1936 to a superior post in London. Four years later at the age of forty-one she gave birth to John, her first and last child. The birth certificate gives a line of unpronounceable consonants as the father’s name, gives his occupation as Polish naval officer, which seems improbable. Griselda brought her baby to Glasgow a week later, deposited him with her sisters (whose parents were dead) and returned to London. Soon after she too died, crushed by a falling wall while cycling to work after a night of heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe.

John’s subsequent life with his aunts seems to have been unusually cloistered. He attended Hillhead Secondary then the University of Glasgow, both near each other and less than ten minutes walk from the family home. He trained as a teacher at Jordanhill College, a short bus ride to the west, after that becoming a teacher, then headmaster of Molendinar Primary School in Robroyston, a longer ride to the east. He never owned a car. Mr Gillies suggested that his aunts “kept him on a very short leash”. They were his housekeepers until 1977 when he took early retirement to look after them, helped by house cleaners and visiting nurses. Before then he had holidayed with them in hilly or coastal parts of Scotland. The last aunt died aged ninety-seven in 1998, after which he seems never to have slept outside the family home. On week days his social life was mainly evening visits to Tennants, a pub at a corner of Byres Road where the usual clients were students, academics, several long-term unemployed and a few owners of small businesses who avoided declaring their earnings to the Inland Revenue. Here John was well known though his quiet ways drew very little attention. His main acquaintance was Francis Lambert, a retired university lecturer and more robust figure with whom John Tunnock gossiped and discussed crossword puzzles. On Saturdays and Sundays John walked briskly to pubs elsewhere, some in the city centre or south of the river or further east, seldom drinking more than a half pint of lager in each, and stopping at cafés for cups of tea or snacks. His visits to these places were not exactly predictable, but regular enough for people he met to assume he lived locally, though most of the pubs were over a mile apart. None of those he talked to thought him interesting or unusual before they heard of his death.

I brooded on this information, then asked if any of these pubs showed football matches on television? Had John worn noticeable colours? Mr Gillies understood more by my question than I knew it contained. The police had investigated that (he said) and found John Tunnock never wore team colours, supported neither Rangers nor Celtic, was neither Orangeman nor Fenian, Mason or Knight of Saint Columba. When asked what football club he supported Tunnock always said Partick Thistle, which in Glasgow is a code name for agnostic and might inspire contempt in Protestant or Catholic bigots but not murderous rage.

“Had he no sex life?” I asked. Apparently none before 1998, said Mr Gillies, but his diary indicated he had then “lashed out a bit”. I asked what that meant. He said I should read the diary to find out. I said his silence on the matter suggested dealings with prostitutes, or homosexuality, or paedophilia — the last now so notorious that one fears to show kindness to any child anywhere. What had the police discovered? Gillies told me that the women who cleaned his house said he was “a nice wee man who wouldnae hurt a fly or say boo to a goose.” He seemed not to have visited any pub on the night of his death. His cleaners found the body next morning on a staircase landing and a forensic report indicated he had died suddenly of a fractured skull about ten hours earlier, the fracture caused by abrupt contact with a step. There was no alcohol in his blood, though the state of the living room upstairs, together with fingerprints on glasses and bottles, indicated some kind of party with several individuals, one a drug user known to the police. He (Mr Gillies) had been privately informed that the drug user had confessed to pushing John away during an amorous struggle on the staircase when she tried to leave, a push resulting in his fall. The Crown Office had decided not to make a respected citizen’s sex life public by accusing the girl of culpable homicide, especially when a jury would almost certainly bring a verdict of not proven. Only Scots law allows this, which a cynic has suggested means, “Go away and don’t do it again.” The most famous beneficiary of this verdict is Madeleine Smith, charged with poisoning an inconvenient lover in 1857.

“Well,” I said, slightly disgusted with my cousin, “since you have the keys to his house please take me there.” I do not mention the address because houses tainted by suspicion of murder are harder to sell, but I found the surrounding architecture, gardens and parks pleasanter than many pleasant parts of London, because less grandiose. This did not prepare me for the interior.

The only part of John Tunnock’s diaries I have read mentions a robbery that deprived his home of expensive bric-a-brac. I doubt if I could have faced it before that robbery. The clutter of dark mahogany furniture with dark, slightly threadbare upholstery, dark oil paintings in thick gilt frames, heavily ticking pendulum clocks, glass-fronted book cases full of bound sermons seemed pressing in to crush me. The day was overcast. We switched on electric lights with frosted glass shades that had been converted from ancient gas fittings. Over tables in the main rooms were chandeliers that could be raised or lowered by adjusting a central brass cone-shaped counterweight. The lavatory was the biggest surprize. I had expected Victorian plumbing to be primitive, but here it was palatial, complex and gloomy in a way recalling Edgar Allan Poe. The vast bath was housed in a panelled chest ending in something like a sentry box with its own little vaulted ceiling. It had a dozen big brass taps, each with a label giving temperature, angle and force of a different spray. Their position suggested a servant was needed to turn them, a detail that struck me as weirder than the death on the staircase outside. The water was heated by gas burners under a tank in a wardrobe-like cupboard lined with what must have been asbestos. A smaller wardrobe-like structure in the living room had no visible doors but something like a glass porthole at eye level. Mr Gillies said this was the house’s most modern article, being a 1938 television set manufactured by John Logie Baird’s company. It did not work of course. There was no other television set, no telephone or record player. There was an upright piano with an unusually thick case: a pianola or (as they say in the States) a player piano operated by rolls of perforated card. A player could work it in person using pedals and stops, or switch on an electric motor to play it automatically. A stand like a huge wine rack held about three hundred rolls of work by composers from Bach to Gershwin, as I could see from labelled disks at the roll ends. There was also a radio in a two-foot-square cubical wooden case.

Despite my dislike of the place I saw it was a better example of nineteenth century interior decor than many in well-endowed museums. I considered offering it to Glasgow District Council to be maintained as a small local history museum, but Mr Gillies told me a similar house, more representative since not as opulent, was on show in a tenement near Sauchiehall Street, so Glasgow’s museum service would not want another. After careful consultation I decided to sell through Christie’s the Burne-Jones window and two dull landscapes I was told belonged to the Barbizon School. Through Sotheby’s I sold the most valuable furniture, including the Baird television set, the pianola with its rolls, and even the Edgar Allan Poe shower-bath. Through a local firm, West End Auctions, I sold everything else. Mrs Manning, owner of the firm, tells me the portraits of clergy and volumes of sermons will decorate a public house in Saltcoats called The Auld Kirk, in a building that was once indeed a Church of Scotland. These transactions will finally raise more cash than the million I expect for Tunnock’s empty eight-room-and-kitchen home.

John Tunnock’s papers were now all that remained to embarrass me. After old letters, receipts and bills were destroyed I had a mass of typescript and a large desktop notebook two-thirds full of undated entries in tiny, clear, almost sinisterly childish calligraphy. It would have been heartless to discard all that as waste paper, but what else could I do? The typed pages were historical novels, which I detest. I also dislike reading diaries, even those written for publication, and a sample of John’s miserable confessions made me think them unpublishable — I now know this idea is old-fashioned and out of date. On Mr Gillies’s advice I put the lot in a suitcase and left it at the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature office, with a letter offering a donation to the department of a few hundred pounds in return for an honest assessment of the contents. Did anything in these papers deserve publication? I asked. Would a publisher consider them a commercial proposition if I paid for the printing? Or would Glasgow University, which in 1962 had awarded John an honours degree in the Humanities, find room for these papers in its archives?

A fortnight later the head of the department, Alan Riach, sent a courteous and helpful reply. He thought the historical fictions well written and entertaining, but the one set in classical Greece lacked chapters connecting start and finish, the one set in Renaissance Italy was three loosely linked dialogues with neither beginning nor end, and the fictional biography of the Victorian clergyman had already been novelized by Aubrey Menen in a 1972 Penguin paperback called The Abode of Love. No reputable firm would undertake to publish such work by an author who was unknown, Scottish and dead. For the same reason no public archive would want them. If university and national libraries became repositories of unpublished fiction by unknown authors they would soon have no room for anything else. The notebook diary and notes for an autobiography were another matter. Their account of a life that had ended violently might interest a publishing house, especially if I paid part of the production costs and the book was introduced and edited by a known author. With my permission he would show the papers to Alasdair Gray, a writer who lived locally and, with some success, had edited and published the papers of a Glasgow public health officer.

It was thus that I met Mr Gray whose response to all John’s papers was enthusiastic. The diary and personal notes and historic fictions should be published together (Gray said) thus casting light on what he saw as a major theme, men in love. Tunnock, like many of his generation, was an old-fashioned Socialist and had at first planned the novels as a trilogy with a name suggesting the Marxist theory of surplus value, but had then changed it to something more frivolous. A better, more eye-catching and more accurate title would be Men in Love for it would connect Tunnock’s love life with those of his heroes, and balance them. The patriarchs of Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Victorian England loved their idea of truth or beauty or God more than any woman, but the women in Tunnock’s love-life had certainly ruled him.

“If you can call it a love life!” I said grimly, “I have known many men, but none like John Tunnock. If you manage to get his diary published along with the rest I insist the book be called John Tunnock.”

Mr Gray, not very graciously, seemed to accept this but said the final choice of title would probably be decided by the eventual publisher’s marketing department. He said that if I paid for the printing out of John’s estate the book, edited as he envisaged, would certainly be distributed by Bloomsbury Publishing of London, a highly successful firm that had done well out of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Mr Gray (who clearly has a high opinion of his own talents) said he would design and provide the book with decorative illustrations, “in colour, if the money stretches so far”. He indignantly refused my offer of payment for his editorial work because, “It is a privilege to be midwife to so unique a volume.” John Tunnock would never be a popular success (he said) but he would “claw back” something from Bloomsbury in royalties if I signed a paper granting him possession of copyright. This I was pleased to do.

He differed from Alan Riach, however, by insisting that I write the introduction, because his reputation as an occasional writer of fiction often led critics to doubt the value of his serious work. But Lady Sim-Jaegar (he gallantly declared) was both known in United States business circles and remembered in Britain as the glamorous wife of a popular American ambassador. My introduction would publicize the book better than anything by him if I described my discovery of the material and his editorial method: he would use the undated diary entries to introduce and connect the fictions, thus annoying purists but making the book more entertaining. He had also found a verse among the papers that would give the book a cheerful end, and as editor, he would provide notes explaining details that some readers might find puzzling.

“Footnotes or endnotes?” I asked. He said, “Marginal notes. I like widening my readers’ range of expectations.”

I saw no sense in that but let it go.^*

Writing this introduction has so saturated me in what seems a bygone era (though actually modern Scotland) that I am tempted to say that I now lay down my pen, satisfied in having done all I can for my unfortunate cousin’s memory. But I dictate these words to a secretary sitting with her wireless-enabled laptop on the sunny patio of my Los Angeles home. It only remains to add that the publishing director of Bloomsbury, or perhaps her marketing department, insists for commercial reasons that the book be called Old Men in Love, which is certainly more accurate than Alasdair Gray’s original idea. I will now do my best to forget John Tunnock while hoping that Mr Gray manages to “claw back” more money from the publication than he has led me to believe possible.

Beverly Hills, California

28 July 2007

Hunger and dread make sleep difficult within this seaside city but no lamps are lit at night: they would burn oil that is part of a precious, dwindling food supply. Above and around it myriads of lights glitter from the height of the Milky Way down to the dark fields outside the city walls, but the vast random constellations differ from evenly spaced lower lights which also flicker more, being watchfires of a besieging army.

By a hilltop fire a soldier huddles within easy reach of his short sword, round shield and heap of fuel. He dozes when the flames are high, wakens cold when they sink and, yawning, feeds the fire with sticks and handfuls of dry goat dung. He sometimes glances at a comrade standing on a low limestone ridge behind him. Both soldiers verge on middle age but the first seems younger, being thinner with a trim beard. His face, melancholy in repose, has fine lines suggesting many different expressions, for it is an actor’s face. The other soldier — short, pot-bellied, bushy bearded — is almost menacingly ugly, his partly flattened nose having the tip tilted like the snout of a small pig. With wide-open mouth and eyes whose fixity suggests total absence of mind he faces east to where a dark sea reflects the lowest stars.

Two more soldiers arrive on the ridge, the foremost carrying a bundle of branches. Jumping down beside the fire he drops them on the fuel heap and in a voice that sounds aimed at many people declares, “While scavenging yonder I bumped into one of our gallant Ionian allies. Like the rest of his nation he’s a bit of an idiot — you are an idiot aren’t you?” he calls to his companion who stands staring curiously at the ugly soldier. “Yes, a bit of an idiot but a thoroughly decent chap, also a farmer like me when he’s at home. He gave me a nip from his flask so I asked him back here for a bite and a heat.”

“He’s barefoot without a cloak,” says the Ionian, still staring at the ugly soldier, “and not even shivering.”

“O yes he’s tough! And given to fits like that, but only when there’s nothing else to do. How long this time?”

The question is for the seated soldier who mutters “Since the moon went down.”

“Is he religious?” asks the Ionian.

“Not more than the rest of us. Some folk say a lot less.”

“Because he looks…you know…a bit like the priestess on the tripod when the god goes into her.”

“It isn’t a god he’s got inside him. It’s a demon!”

“What kind?”

“A little one that gives him advice.”

The Ionian cups a hand behind his ear, brings it close to the ugly soldier’s chest and says slyly, “It isn’t doing that now. I can’t hear a word.”

“Leave him alone — it’s his way of thinking!” cries the seated soldier impatiently.

The Ionian climbs down beside the farmer who, having warmed his hands at the fire, rummages in a pile of satchels under the ridge. Pulling out a string of onions and grey lump of cheese he lays them on a flat-topped boulder, contemplates them gloomily, draws his sword and hacks the lump into smaller lumps. With a gesture inviting the Ionian to do the same he wrenches off and bites an onion and crams cheese into his mouth. They stand side by side for a while, stolidly chewing and looking downhill across lower watchfires to the dim walls of the lightless city. Perhaps exasperated by a coarse mouthful the farmer swallows it and growls, “Why doesn’t that stupid little state surrender?”

“Why don’t we pack up and go home?” says the seated soldier. “You tell him,” the farmer orders the Ionian who slowly clears his mouth then says, “I don’t go home because my government ordered me here. It sent me because it’s afraid of your government.”

“If that’s your attitude hand over that flask,” says the farmer grumpily. The Ionian brings a bulging goatskin from under his cloak. Seizing it by the neck the farmer loosens a cord there, tilts his head back, squirts a jet of wine into his mouth and swallows. Ignoring a hand the Ionian has stretched out for the flask he points the neck at him and declares, “You have just said a very ignorant thing. You referred to my government. I don’t have a government. I am the government your government is afraid of — I and all the free citizens of Athens. That city refused to pay us the tribute we need to defend Greek civilization. We discussed this defiance thoroughly and voted for war. That is why your government sent you and your kind to help the free men of Athens attack Potidia.”

“I voted against attacking,” says the seated soldier.

“So did he I believe,” says the farmer, indicating the ugly soldier with his thumb, “but you’re democrats so you obey the will of the majority, otherwise the Athenian state would fall apart.” He drinks again from the flask then murmurs to himself, “Good stuff,” still ignoring the outstretched hand of the Ionian who says, after a moment, “I heard that Pericles governs Athens.” “Nonsense! He’s rich enough to be useful so we elect him to do some important jobs and sometimes take his advice. We can get rid of him any time we like.”

“He’s been head of state for thirty years,” says the seated soldier.

“He’s not a tyrant! He’s not even popular! He’s a pompous, cold-hearted selfish snob who loves nobody but himself and a foreign prostitute! But he’s the best man for the job because he knows what we want and gives it to us.”

“If you ever visit Athens,” the seated soldier tells the Ionian pleasantly, “you will find everyone with prominent jobs are like those in any other Greek city — they are rich.”

“Blethers!” says the farmer hotly. “The rich have more time than the rest of us to do public work, but at every parliamentary session our president is picked from the electoral rolls by lot, so ANY Athenian citizen has a chance at being president. If the Alopeky District wasn’t here on military duty, tomorrow I could be president of Athens, or that stonemason, or a comic showman like you. Why are you grousing? Do you hate our political constitution? Do you want to live under another?” “No,” says the seated soldier.

In a following silence the farmer sees his companions watching the ugly soldier. Annoyed by the loss of their attention he says roughly, “Ignore him. He can stand like that for hours. He carves marble into statues and the twiddly bits on top of columns. You need toughness for that.”

He swigs from the bottle again and mutters, “Not very good statues. Too stiff and mathematical. Nothing at all when compared with the best modern stuff. The great statue of Athena on the Parthenon, seventy feet high. Sailing toward the city on a clear day you see the head in the golden helmet, the shining point of her spear come up over the horizon before you see anything else, and when you stand at her feet and look up…she breathes! No other nation in the world has a goddess like her.”³

Finding himself still ignored he taps the Ionian’s shoulder with the flask’s neck and says pleasantly, “Listen Ionian, I am going to cheer you up. I will prove to you. By dialectics. That your father. Is. A dog.”

The seated soldier sighs impatiently. The Ionian stares. The farmer ties the flask to his belt saying, “You’re a farmer like me so you have dogs at home, right?”

The Ionian nods.

“Think of one. One that’s had puppies but isn’t a bitch, right? Is that dog a father?”

The Ionian nods.

“Is that dog yours?”

“I said so.”

“Then that dog…must be your father!”

The farmer chuckles but the Ionian is not cheered up.

“Quackery,” says the seated soldier, throwing a branch on the fire. The farmer glares at him, growls, “What did you say, grocer-boy?”

“Quack-quack-quackery.”

“You are wrong. It is a dialectical demonstration of a misconstrued syllogism. I’ve learned from experts,” says the farmer with dignity, then asks the Ionian, “Know what an expert is?”

After a pause the Ionian says, “Someone who advizes a government?”

“Correct! But all the free citizens are the government of Athens so we have hundreds of experts! Hundreds and hundreds attracted by our wealth from all over Greece — experts in rhetoric, semantics, politics, history, physics, land measurement, sword fighting, wrestling and interpretation of dreams. They teach the rich for so much a lecture, but on warm evenings poor men like me…well, I’m quite prosperous really…on warm evenings clever men like me go to the marketplace where a lot of experts stand on the pavement lecturing each other! Wise men with a good new idea usually keep it to themselves and rent it out carefully a bit at a time, but their ideas seem to breed by being argued over, so if you stand nearby you can pick up all kinds of useful tips.”

“That bit about my dog wasn’t useful.”

“Not to you! Your state is either a tyranny or a plutocracy or a phony democracy where a ruling boss and his gang are elected every year or two, but in Athens even law courts are democratic. Anybody can prosecute anybody they want or defend themselves before a jury. When you’re doing that it’s very handy knowing how to twist words and do you see something moving and glittering between the first two watchfires there?”

He points downhill. The Ionian peers.

“That,” says the farmer, “is an officer on a tour of inspection and he’d better not find you this side of the hill.”

“O,” says the Ionian and pointing to the flask at the farmer’s belt asks, “Can I have back my…?”

The farmer says firmly but kindly, “I’m sorry lad. No.”

The Ionian leaves. After a moment the seated soldiers says, “You stole that wine.”

“Can I help it that I am a Greek?” cries the farmer, slapping his chest with his fist, “The blood of the great Odysseus flows in these veins and we know what a scoundrel he was. Like a drink?”

“No. Who’s the officer?”

“The Darling. Yes, The Darling,” says the farmer, looking.

The young man who joins them is so strikingly beautiful that the farmer stares frankly at him and the seated soldier turns away to avoid doing so. Though officers of the Athenian democracy mostly belong to the richer class not many dress to show it. This officer’s brilliant tunic and armour show it without inciting mockery because fine clothing suits him and he is popular. A slight lisp and hesitation in speech indicate a conquered stammer which most folk find charming in so masterful a man.

“Cheers,” he says, warming his hands over the fire. “Fourth Alopeky Distwict are you?”

“That’s right,” says the farmer boldly,

“How are you off for wations? Their quantity I mean, not quality.”

“Quantity’s all right. Any news?”

“Weports say they’ll soon be eating each other in that little city. Their Spartan fweinds seem to have abandoned them.”

“Like a drink?” says the farmer, offering the goatskin.

“Thanks.”

The Darling drinks, brushes his lips with a finger, then points and asks, “Why doesn’t that man move?”

“He often goes like that when on guard. He is — ”

“The stonemason, yes. I know about him. He visits parties given by my uncle’s whore.”

They watch the figure on the ridge for a while. The Darling says, “That mason is a fweind of Heavenly Weason.”

“Is any Athenian NOT a friend of heavenly reason?”

“I’m talking about Anaxagoras, the physics expert. We call him Heavenly Weason because he says the world was formed by heavenly…” (with an effort he manages to say) “…reason. And that’s why it’s weasonable.”

“Too abstract,” says the farmer shaking his head. “If the world is a solid ball like some people say then it must have been punched into shape by something tough. A physics expert! Is he one of those who say the sun and stars are made of the same stuff as the ground?”

“Yes,” says The Darling, drinking again.

“That’s idiotic! The ground doesn’t shine. The stars do.”

“What about meteorites?” asks the seated soldier.

“Well, what about them, grocer-boy?”

“My mother gave up the shop years ago,” says the other, standing and stretching his arms, “and how do you explain meteorites? Little lumps of white-hot iron that sometimes fall out of the sky, usually at night. The country folk call them falling stars.”

The farmer frowns. The Darling and other soldier grin at each other. The farmer suddenly snaps his fingers and says, “Criminal little beetles occasionally say something blasphemous about Almighty God so the Eternal Father uses a little tiny thunderbolt to squash them flat. So be very careful, you comedian!”

The comedian laughs, hugs him and reaches for the flask saying, “Give me a swig of that.”

The Darling hands it over, smiling and saying, “No wonder Athens is named after the goddess of wisdom.”

“Yes,” says the farmer cheerfully. “Not every nation has common citizens as wise as the head of state and his nephew!” The Darling stops smiling and a moment later says dryly, “I’ll leave you now. The sun’s coming up.”

All three look eastward. Under the brightening sky a tiny line of piercing golden light is widening along the sea-sill. As if talking to a friend the mason says, “Welcome great Apollo, God of Day, Light of Life, Giver of Harvest and Harmony.” These are the first words of the Greek hymn to the sun. The others recite along with him saying “Thank you for overcoming chaos, the dark and cold in your bright chariot. Give truth to your oracles, peace to your shrines, wealth and grandeur, wisdom and victory to Athens, her people and allies for ever. Amen.”

The mason stretches his arms, skips to exercize his legs, jumps down from the ridge. Taking the last onion from the rock he removes the withered outer skin, sits down and chews it with appetite. The Darling, having paused to watch this, says jauntily, “I thought you experts believed the sun was a ball of white-hot iwon bigger than Peloponnesia.”

The mason looks steadily at the beautiful young man, clears his mouth and says quietly, “When a body gives me warmth and beauty I want to thank him, whatever he’s made of.”

His shyly teasing tone is flirtatious. The Darling sees the farmer and comedian watching with amused interest. He gestures farewell and strides away.

“Hard luck old chap!” says the farmer, chuckling. “You’re too ugly for him.”

He reclaims the flask and rummages again in the satchels.

The stonemason finishes eating the onion. The comedian asks, “What did your demon say this time?”

“I’m to sell the stoneyard.”

“Give up your business? Why?”

“I don’t know. He gives orders, not explanations. He seems to have grown tired of questions that recently fascinated me. What is the essential substance of the universe? Water, as Thales thinks? The fire of Heraclitus? The single solid unchanging globe of Parmenides or the eternal indivisible atoms of our friend Anaxagoras?”

“I prefer the Pythagorean Brotherhood’s idea,” says the comedian, grinning. “They say numbers make the shape and sound of everything from the globe of the earth to the strings of the harp, twing twang twong.”

“How do such things influence our conduct?”

“They don’t. Only gods do that.”

“Not much! Eros, Mars and Dionysus can certainly drive us mad, but they let us act how we want if we respect their shrines and titles like our neighbours do. So if even gods do not teach us to be better men they are as small a part of earthly wisdom — as little earthly use as scientific theories of the universe.”

“Priests and poets need gods and experts need theories.”

“Yes, as a source of income, but the wisdom of the state — the wisdom that keeps us alive and comfortable — is in the skill of labourers and craftsmen, the abilities of weavers, smiths, sailors, merchants…”

“You need my skills most!” says the farmer. He has placed a loaf like a small boulder on the rock, has hacked it with his sword into three equal parts and is moistening them with the last of the Ionian’s wine. The mason nods to him, says, “True. And what unites all people in a healthy state is honesty and mutual trust, things taught by our mothers when we are tiny children, not by priests and experts.”

“Perhaps,” says the comedian, smiling, “ though my mother taught me it was right to cheat customers if they never found out. But why sell the stoneyard if there’s more wisdom, more virtue in being an honest tradesman?”

“I don’t know,” says the mason frowning and picking up his share of the breakfast.

“And how will you live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” says the comedian with a sudden air of great gaiety, “since Pericles introduced payment for parliamentary attendance and jury service it isn’t hard for an unemployed Athenian to scrounge a living.”

The mason twists his mouth as though tasting sourness but again nods agreement.

Nations and single people are only happy when feeling as good as their neighbours or even better. Five centuries before Jesus was born Israel was proud of having the one true God, Egypt of having the oldest history and buildings, Phoenicia the greatest merchant navy, Persia the biggest empire. Though lacking all these things Greece — especially Athenian Greece — had the first people proud of being most modern. Greek historians agreed that everything Grecian except the poetry of Homer and Hesiod had been shared with, or learned from, surrounding nations a century or two earlier, but the Greek states had so improved this borrowed knowledge that their governments, laws, town planning, art, medicine, philosophy, athletic games and ships that these were now the best anywhere. But like all other people, tribal or civilized, nomads or settled, ancient or modern, they knew funeral services make the dead less liable to haunt the living. Battles between Greek states were followed by a truce to let each side retrieve their dead and give them decent funerals.

The bodies of those killed in early warfare between the Athenian and Spartan leagues had been returned to their families for private mourning. The Athenian remains would now be publicly entombed in a cemetery beside the cliff of the Acropolis. Each electoral district had brought the bones of its dead in a single big coffin, and these now lay in a row beside an empty coffin representing bodies that had not been recovered. All would be placed in the mausoleum designed by Phidias, sculptor and master of public works, but first a speech must be made. In Athens no priest had more authority than a minister of state. Pericles, the state’s chief minister, normally avoided public speaking because many Athenians resented conspicuous men so much that they sometimes voted to banish them for that reason only, but today Pericles had to speak because his political programme was in danger. Anti-war speeches were increasingly heard in the marketplace, in parliament and in the comedies of Aristophanes. If he did not speak now, whoever did would be thought a mouthpiece he was hiding behind, or a politician bidding to replace him.

From the shadow of the mausoleum he saw what seemed all Athens assemble. Like every large Greek gathering outside parliament (which only men attended) it was dividing sexually. On one side were men not abroad on military service, and since many were abroad the wives, daughters and mothers on the other side were a larger crowd. Women could not vote — were supposed to be powerless — but Pericles did not doubt their influence and knew that among them anti-war feelings were strongest. For a moment he envied the leaders of Sparta where mothers were proud of sons who died fighting for their country, ashamed of those defeated in battle. He was relieved to notice the male side being increased by an influx of resident aliens — shipwrights, builders and experts who had found work in Athens since the United National Greek defence fund had been brought there from Delphi. The aliens, like women, could not vote but they certainly supported his war policy. His speech would have to respect every shade of opinion present without verging a fraction from that policy. He sighed, climbed upon a rostrum overlooking the crowd and coffins, then stood patiently until those who saw him fell silent. When silence was complete his firm, even voice reached everyone in his audience without seeming to shout.

“I will start by begging all the gods for help. May potent Zeus, fertile Ceres, earth-shaking Poseidon — may harmonious Apollo, lovely Aphrodite, swift Hermes, chaste Selena — may the wise virgin Athena who names our city and The Kindly Ones who guard it in their cavern under the Acropolis — let all these unite to stop me saying anything false or unsuitable.

“The death of these men we are mourning has deprived this year of its Spring. They have become like the gods — great beings we will never see again, but must never forget while holding them in the greatest honour and respect. But I cannot praise them without also praising the city that bred them. This Athens they died defending is unique.

“We call ourselves a democracy because we are not ruled by a king, or by the rich, or by a political clique elected every year or two. We rule ourselves, all the free men of Athens meeting daily or weekly to discuss and vote upon the business of the state. We make our own laws, gladly obeying the will of the majority. When a leader must be elected to do a special piece of business, what counts is not wealth but ability — nobody with great abilities is denied power because he is poor. And our private lives are as free and open as our politics! If our neighbour wants to enjoy himself in a way that is not our own we do not sneer or throw him black looks — we are tolerant, and friendly. Our homes and public buildings are comfortable and beautiful, but that has not made us soft. Our Empire brings us goods from all over the world, but that has not made us extravagant. In civilized living Athens is recognized as the teacher of the world. Our Spartan enemies are taught to fight from infancy. They do without all the good things of life, in order not to be afraid of death. Yet we, who enjoy every reasonable pleasure, fight just as well as they! We know that happiness depends on freedom, and freedom depends on courage. Which is why these men died. Their death has not made them greater men than you here who fought and still live. But let their bones remind us that this war must not end before we win it.

“Many grief-stricken folk are understandably angry with me. In arguing for war I voiced the will of the majority, but my voice was most outspoken. We knew then that we would lose sons, brothers, fathers, neighbours, yes! perhaps our own lives. And now it is happening and some have forgotten why we went to war. Let me remind you.

“Fifty years ago the Persian king, having conquered Babylon, Arabia and Egypt, decided to add Europe to his empire, beginning (of course) with Greece. He built a bridge of boats over the Hellespont and crossed it with the biggest army the world has ever seen. Greek states collapsed before that army while his mighty fleet accompanied it along our coasts — every Greek state surrendered to him except Athens. We knew that a great city is not made of houses, streets, temples: it is the people! The Athenian citizens went into their ships and fought back while the Persians in futile rage wrecked our buildings. Whereupon the rest of Greece, starting with Sparta, followed our example, and joined us against the invaders. The Gods also joined us — they were tired of Persian successes. They sent a storm that wrecked the enemy fleet. Asia retreated.

“It retreated, but only a strong Greek alliance can stop it returning. Every Greek state once knew that. Only one state is fit to lead that alliance: ours. Sparta did not want the job. The military class who rule it are too busy holding down their serfs to lead the united Greek nations. So the defence of Greece was handed to Athens by every Greek state, whether democratic or not. Ship-owning cities put their vessels under our command. Those without ships, or who do not want the trouble of maintaining a ship, pay us taxes to defend them — except one or two who take us so much for granted that they want us to defend them for nothing! Which is cowardly and unjust. They complain because we use part of the defence fund to rebuild Athens better than it was before the Persians demolished it. Yes, people who kept their own cities intact by surrendering to barbarians resent our magnificence. Are they right to be jealous? These dead men did not think so.

“To those who are not convinced I will put the argument differently. You rightly think our wartime sufferings may grow greater and still not bring us victory. Why should half of Greek civilization fight the other half for the right to tax some coastal cities? Let these cities join the Spartan alliance if they wish! Make peace! But if these small cities are allowed to leave our Empire you can be sure that three or four bigger ones will also abandon us. Making peace now will not end this war, it will lead to a bigger war on a larger front, a war we would lose. Making peace now means giving up our Empire. Some people, in a mood of political apathy or sudden panic think this a fine and noble thing to do. But it is now impossible to give up our Empire. It may have been wrong to establish it. It would be suicide to let it go. We have roused too much hatred in the states we are — ”(he pondered for a moment) “ — protecting. Which is also why these men died.

“It remains for me to say what the wise among you already know: we need not dread the warfare ahead while we, the free citizens, stay brave, cautious and united. Look at the hills surrounding us on three sides — see those rocky summits and well-farmed slopes planted with vines, olives and fig trees. Yes, they send our market delicious produce. But if Spartan armies were camped on every one of these hills our democracy could not be defeated, even if they camped there for years. Impregnable walls now join Athens to the harbour and the ships bringing us everything necessary to life and enjoyment. Athens still rules the sea as we did when ours was the solitary state that, with the help of the gods, saved European civilization from Asiatic barbarism. The courage and unity of our fathers made that victory. These dead men are their worthy sons. Let us entomb them with all the honours they deserve.”

Applause was not part of the funeral rite but a deep murmur in the crowd showed the speech was widely approved. As he left the rostrum young women pressed forward to clasp his hands, two with flowery wreaths they tried to put on his head. With upraised hands he prevented that, pointing to coffins they should adorn instead.

“A noble speech, Pericles!” shouted a stern voice from a group of older women, relatives of a famous dead patriot. “You deserve crowns of sweet-smelling flowers! My brother fought for Athenian freedom against the Persians and Phoenicians! You have led our brave men to destroy a Greek city that was recently our ally, and gained nothing for Athens but the corpses of our men and the hatred of fellow Greeks!”

“Then why add perfumes to a grey old head Elpenice?” he asked sadly, then hurried into the male crowd at its thickest.

Socrates, no longer soldier or mason, sat at home mending a sandal. Being skilled with edged tools he neatly sliced off the frayed end of a strap and cut threads binding it to the buckle. With an awl he pierced a line of holes in the strap’s clean new edge and prepared to stitch on the buckle, using a bone needle and strong thread from his wife’s sewing box. He knew the buckle should be both stitched and knotted to the strap, but how tie the knots? The other sandal would show. Bending to remove it from his foot he came face to face with a small boy playing under the table. The boy stared at him solemnly, a clay model of a little man in one hand, a model of a ship in the other.

“Boo,” said Socrates.

He placed the whole sandal on the table beside the other and studied the knots round its buckle, sighing slightly because they were intricate and because free Athenian males were not used to sewing. His wife, suckling their youngest child across the table from him, had been silent all day. He knew why she was angry, had not broken the silence between them because it would start an argument he could not win. He hoped to leave the house without argument, perhaps going barefoot, as many thrifty yet respected Athenians did. But that would provoke remarks from friends who thought him henpecked and knew he normally wore sandals. He gripped the needle and started stitching.

“You’re going out again,” said his wife.

“Yes, Tippy.”

“To the gymnasium again.”

“Yes, Tippy.”

“Where you will chat to a lot of pretty young men.”

“I talk to any who will listen Tippy, but beauty adds zest to conversations.”

“And from the gymnasium you’ll go to that prostitute’s house and mix with dirty sluts and foreign experts and rich young loungers like The Darling.”

“Yes, Tippy.”

“Get them to give you money!”

She stood, laid the baby in a cradle and put a bone ring between its gums. He murmured, “Surely the larder isn’t empty?”

“It will be tomorrow.”

“But market people trust you.”

“Yes, because I pay what I owe whenever I manage to screw money out of my famous, feckless, useless husband. O I hate being a poor man’s wife. Give me that.”

She sat beside him, seized sandal and needle and deftly worked with them, saying through clenched teeth, “I wish our slave had not died.”

“She was old, Tippy. You had to do more for her than she could do for us.”

“She stopped neighbours seeing that I am the only slave in this house. Their helpful little advices madden me even more than the worry of paying for food. ‘Get your husband into jury service! Get him into parliament — the pay is good and all he need do is vote,’ they say. ‘He’s pally with men who could get him a government job,’ they say. ‘A foreign embassy even. Think of the bribes he would get on top of his pay,’ they say. ‘He can’t do any of those things,’ I tell them, ‘his demon won’t let him. It wants him to do nothing but teach all the time.’ ‘What does he teach?’ they ask. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘He doesn’t talk to me about it, I’m just a stupid woman.’ And I laugh as if our marriage is a wonderful joke. Which it is not. It is not. It is hell. What do you teach those pretty boys you keep meeting?”

“I teach them not to be so sure of themselves, Tippy.”

“They like you for that?”

“The reasonable ones do.”

“Put on your sandal!” she said, handing it over. “Go to your pretty, reasonable friends. Get money out of them.”

The child on the floor, upset by her tone of voice, made a mewing sound and folded its arms comfortingly round her leg.

“Tippy,” said Socrates beseechingly.

She looked and saw his face so full of misery and love that, after biting her under lip, her own face took on much the same expression. In a voice mingling tears and laughter she said, “They call you the wisest man in Greece!”

“They know no better, Tippy. I can’t teach you anything because you only know facts.”

“Yes. Women can never escape from those.”

He bent down and buckled on his sandal, telling the boy quietly, “Please be kinder to your mother than I am.”

Soon after daybreak Pericles came to the Athenian port and for nearly three hours conferred with harbourmasters, dockers and seamen, occasionally scratching notes on a thin wax tablet backed by wood. He then returned to the city, striding swiftly uphill between two great new walls joining the port to the Athenian citadel. The sky was clear and blue, the air warm yet fresh, the big marketplace more than usually busy. He crossed it, entered the council chambers and stood in a corner of the big lobby, glancing over his notes but able to see those who entered or left. Most councillors were as familiar to him as he to them. He steadily ignored knowing looks from many who shared his views and enquiring looks from some who did not, but beckoned to his side one at a time new councillors whose opinions were not exactly known. He talked to them about revenues to be voted for dock maintenance, for equipping warships and for building new ones. Each councillor tried, usually successfully, to hide his elation at being singled out by the nation’s greatest statesman. He listened to them as carefully as they to him, giving different reasons for increased expenditure. He told a merchant it was needed to protect trade from barbarians and pirates — an arms manufacturer that it would maintain Athenian military supremacy — a landowner that it would reduce local unemployment — a patriotic farmer that it would spread democracy abroad. Pericles thought all these reasons valid but did not expect others to be so broad-minded. He ended each speech by saying how the expenditure would profit dealers in timber, metal, sailcloth, cable, earthenware and food. All councillors were chosen from the electorate by lot so only one of his hearers belonged (like Pericles) to The Few who owned big estates. The rest were from The Many, but all Athenians profited by some commodity the navy needed and his final appeal to the profit motive clinched every previous argument. By its fourth utterance Pericles was sick of that argument and almost sick of himself. He regarded Athenian democracy as an example to every nation, present and in future, so regretted that what most united his fellow citizens was greed. “You’re tired! Come and eat with me,” said the fourth councillor, pleased to see the great statesman show signs of weakness. He gestured toward the excellent restaurant where councillors dined at public expense and could entertain guests.

“Impossible. Goodbye,” said Pericles regretfully. He was hungry but always avoided flaunting his privileges.

It was now afternoon when most Athenians had lunched and were enjoying a siesta. He liked the streets at this time for there were fewer people to greet or stare at him. He ignored starers and answered all greetings with the slightest of nods: a manner that led some to call him Zeus or The Olympian, though he knew he had coarser nicknames. The only people he sometimes spoke to in the streets were sausage sellers — fast food peddlers thought socially inferior because they sold the cheapest parts of animals in a shape supposed to be used as dildos by sexually frustrated women and impotent men. From a market stall he bought two sausages and ate them sitting on a stool in the shadow of an awning.

“Where’s your man today?” he asked the sullen woman who sold them.

“On a bender.”

“Hm?”

“Getting sloshed out of his tiny wits by drinking with equally rotten mates.”

“A pity.”

She resumed a silence in which he calmly finished his meal then went to inspect public building work.

Which was no more his business than that of any other Athenian, but by listening to complaints of tradesmen, foremen, artists and architects he left most of them in a happier frame of mind. The walls of the new concert hall had been completed but not the steep pyramidal roof. Though designed by an acoustics expert it was the subject of jokes that amused the workmen but alarmed the architect who said, “A roof like this has never been built before. It may echo worse than the inside of Dionysus’ quarry.”⁴

“It didn’t echo in the model.”

“A wood and clay model, no matter how big, cannot accurately predict the acoustics of a vast building.”

“Then all you can do is build it,” said Pericles. “Remember that you’ll be praised if it sounds good, I’ll be blamed if it does not.”

He walked back to Aspasia’s house before sunset, brooding with some satisfaction upon the day’s events. As he passed a group drinking outside a tavern one of them bawled, “Pericles! Smy pal Pericles!”

Pericles neither paused nor looked aside. Behind him a stool was knocked over, then came stumbling steps and a yell, “Don’t you know me, Pericles? Have you no word for your pal the good old sau-sau-sausager? Sausagist? Sausalogistical expert?”

Pericles resisted an urge to walk faster. After a few more maudlin appeals the drunkard behind lost his temper and yelled “Onionhead! Onionhead! You think you’re the Lord God Almighty yet your balding head is shaped exactly like an onion! You damned Olympian onionhead who thinks he runs the whole city! — the whole empire! Nya! Onionhead!” Excited children and some interested citizens now accompanied the prime minister and his critic. They excited the sausage seller to a greater range of insult.

“Skinflint! Miserly skinflint! And the richest man in Athens! He spent so much money buying our votes with plays and processions that his sons had to dress like commoners! No wonder they hated his guts, the damned miser. Listen to me, Onionhead! Stop pretending you’re deaf! You’re a miserable, miserly, onionheaded skinflint and whoremonger! Yes! Whoremonger! You live with a foreign prostitute and kiss her every morning before going to work, you unmanly queer old queen! You rotten ugly onionheaded miserly skinflint whoremonger!”

The enlarging crowd accompanying them stimulated more insults in a louder voice.

“And an atheist! You believe a damned foreign physics expert who says heaven and earth were made by accident! You don’t believe in Zeus because you think you are Zeus! For nearly thirty years you’ve tricked us Athenians into letting you do what you like with us but you’re a guttering candle now, my friend! We’re beginning to see through you — our democracy now has a REAL spokesman in parliament! — Cleon, a man of the people who’ll soon sort out you and your foreign pals and foreign experts and that foreign whore of yours, the brothel-keeper! What a hypocrite you are, passing laws against poor bastards and living in a brothel with your mistress! No wonder your two wives divorced you! No wonder your first son was a rogue and the second an idiot and God killed both of them you onionheaded, foreigner-loving, blasphemous, hypocritical, miserly multimillionaire tyrant in commoner’s clothing! But you can fool nobody now, you indecent, whoremongering utterly incompetent war leader!”

The sun had set when Pericles reached the yard before Aspasia’s house and turned round. The sausage-seller fell as silent as the watchful crowd behind him. Pericles looked thoughtfully at the dark sky overhead. A servant came from the house and stood near him.

“The moon won’t rise for another hour,” Pericles told the slave.

“Fetch a lantern and show this citizen home.”

He turned his back upon a great explosion of laughter and applause and entered the house. The sausage-seller also turned and, facing the jeering mob, stroked his beard for a while then raised his hand in the parliamentary gesture requesting permission to speak. An interested silence followed. To the slave he cried imperiously, “Lead the way, boy!” and advanced upon the crowd with a grotesque expression of lofty disdain and a swagger that caricatured the stride of Pericles. The crowd, laughing, parted to let him through, a few humorists bowing low on each side.

Inside the house Pericles embraced Aspasia and stood a while with closed eyes and his cheek against hers, sighing sometimes because the past quarter hour had been a strain. She murmured, “A bad day?”

“A good one till near the end. Now I will wash. And then enjoy, please, you. And then can we eat and be intelligently entertained? Who comes tonight?”

“Heavenly Reason. And our greatest artist and greatest playwright and wisest man.”

“Our wisest man. You mean Socrates.”

“That’s what the Priestess of Apollo called him.”

“I wonder why. He was an honest though not great stone carver. He is certainly a brave soldier and talks amusingly, but he has done nothing else I know toward the welfare of the state.”

“You think The Oracle should have mentioned you.”

“I do.”

“You’re jealous of poor old Socrates!” she said, laughing.

“Yes. Thanks for letting me admit to a weakness. You’re the only one I can do that with. Anyone else coming?”

“The Golden Mean, High Anxiety and Critias.”

“Rich men should not come here,” he said wearily. “If The Many find out they’ll think The Few are plotting against them. And The Many will be right.”

“The Few are worried about Cleon. They say he’s now too popular, too powerful.”

“I wish they would leave their political worries to me who knows how to handle them. Please come to bed. I’ll wash afterwards if you don’t mind.”

The evening was less agreeable than Pericles wished because Alcibiades arrived and insisted on talking politics. Pericles listened with an air of polite attention that his nephew vainly tried to make serious attention. Socrates and Aspasia watched them from across the room. Aspasia said, “You love our Darling?”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe you can help him — I can’t because he doesn’t trust women. Yet he won’t grow up properly without the love of someone he admires. He knows it, too. Most of his lovers have been intelligent older men of good character, but he shatters them. After a week or two they grow servile and pathetic. So the only man he can admire is Pericles.”

“Who can only love Athens.”

“And Heavenly Reason,” she suggested.

“And you.”

She smiled, smoothing the dress over her breasts and murmuring, “I think so. I wish more women would come here, my girls are too few. I’ve asked our cleverest men to bring their wives but they won’t.”

“Housewife talk is mostly limited to household matters.”

“Yes, because Athenian husbands treat them like slaves. When a man’s friend calls on him, even during a meal, the wife retires to a back room with the children. Which is barbaric. No wonder the men here prefer boys and prostitutes.”

“In Sparta,” said Socrates thoughtfully, “boys and girls are educated by the state.”

“Educated to wrestle and fight! So Spartan women grow up as harsh and brutal as their husbands. But in Aolia the women walk the streets in brightly coloured gowns and meet in colleges where they practise every beautiful art from embroidery to poetry and love. Which is why the greatest Greek poet is an Aolian woman.”

“Sappho?”

“You disagree?”

Socrates said gently, “Some think highly of Homer.”

“A killer’s poet. The pains and glories of warfare are the best things he knows. But Sappho sang of the wounds love inflicts and love is the best thing of all.”

After a pause Socrates said mournfully, his eyes still on The Darling, “Yes.”

“Listen,” said Aspasia urgently, “His talks with Pericles always end badly. When that one stops he will go to the wine table to make himself drunk. Can you prevent that?”

“I’ll try.”

“Let me tell you how to woo him. You must — ”

“No no no. If my little demon won’t tell me how to do it nobody can.”

“The Oracle at Delphi says our war with Sparta will last thirty years,” said Alcibiades urgently.

“For once the Oracle may be right.”

“You cannot deny that the Persian Empire is in decline.”

“Maybe,” said Pericles.

“Not maybe. Certainly. A nation that conquers beyond its own natural boundawies must keep spweading and spweading because if it calls a halt it inevitably shwinks. Our people have halted Persian expansion so it’s time for a new world empire to awize. And if we twy we can make it — ” (he hesitated and with an effort said,) “ — Grreek. Because Gweek technology and social organization is better than anywhere else and Athens has the biggest fleet in the world!”

“You’re quoting one of my speeches.”

“Our democwacy can send an iwesistible fighting force against any countwy in the world!”

“Only one country at a time.”

“But with all Gweece behind us Athens could wule the Meditewanean — though not while we are fighting each other! A master strrroke of policy is needed to weld us into unity under Athenian leadership. A stwoke that must first take in Sicily because. .”

“My dear nephew,” said Pericles placing a hand on the young man’s shoulder, “That bright idea is a very old one. I had it when I was your age.”

“I wish I had known you when you were worth talking to,” said Alcibiades icily, shaking off the hand.

He went to the wine table and lifted a full flagon.

“You mustn’t drink that terrible stuff,” said a voice at his elbow. Startled he looked sideways and saw nobody at first, being a head taller than the speaker who, with a surprisingly strong grip, took the flagon from Alcibiades’ hand, tilted back his head and emptied the wine down his throat in one long continuous swallow.

“Now then,” he said, placing the flagon on the table with no sign of breathlessness and the air of someone getting down to business, “You look at yourself a lot in the mirror I hope?”

“Yes I do,” said the young man coolly. “Why do you hope that?”

“It should help you to become what you appear to be.”

“Which is?”

“Good.”

“You believe beauty encouwages virtue?” said Alcibiades incredulously.

“Yes! A soul that doesn’t fit its body is as uncomfortable as a foot that doesn’t fit its shoe.”

“And ugliness?” said Alcibiades, staring at the hairy face with the broken nose.

“Ugliness encourages virtue even more. If we don’t cultivate our virtues nobody will talk to us. . will they?”

Alcibiades smiled and relaxed a little. Socrates raised a forefinger saying, “Listen! Beautiful people envy your beauty, brave men admire your courage, clever folk respect your intelligence. This city dotes on you. Everything you do has become fashionable, from lisping to horse racing. And if you thought you would be like this for the rest of your life you’d kill yourself.”

“Yes. I want to be… grrreat!”

“I’m glad. But there are many false kinds of greatness. You must learn to discard those.”

“What do they look like?”

“I don’t know,” said Socrates, smiling and shaking his head. “I’m ignorant, I’m no expert. But you want to enter politics in a big way?”

“Yes.”

“And become a statesman like Pericles?”

“Not like Pewicles. You know how he wants us to win this war. ‘Fight the Spartans when we have to,’ he says, ‘but do it as seldom as possible. We’re wicher than them, so if the war lasts long enough they’ll go bankwupt first.’ How vewy wise! How abominably mean!”

In another corner of the room three of Athens’ richest men were gathered, each having discovered that Pericles would not speak to them. One was Theramines, nicknamed The Golden Mean, being a moderate politician who kept changing his political allegiances on grounds of political principle. Nicius, nicknamed High Anxiety, dealt largely in slaves. He was a cautious, successful general and diplomat whose wealth and political success had not incurred the envy of The Many, who regarded him with genial condescension because he was as full of superstitious fear as an ignorant peasant. Critias, a younger man, had inherited a big estate and was not yet eminent enough to have a nickname. He said, “Think of it! A stinking skin-merchant like Cleon leading the Athenian empire! It could happen.”

“He’s a free citizen like you and me,” said the Golden Mean mildly. “If he won’t see reason we should bribe him.”

“Bribing a demagogue is like pouring sacks of salt into the sea,” said High Anxiety glumly. “Twenty-five years ago The Few could get rid of Cleon through a quiet little street accident —” (he made an upwards stabbing gesture) “— The same thing today would start a revolt. Nobody’s property would be safe.” “We’re more civilized nowadays,” said the Golden Mean cheerfully.

“The Many are like spoilt children!” said Critias fiercely. “Pericles has given them far too much — full employment! Disabled workmen’s compensation! Pensions for widows and public sanatoriums. Nowadays you can’t even tell a slave from a freeman by the clothes they wear.”

“Sports festivals,” said High Anxiety, sighing, “religious festivals with drama and music. I’ve paid for a lot of that. Prominent men aren’t safe if they don’t make themselves popular.”

“Most social welfare is paid for out of the United Greek Defence Treasury — not from our pockets,” the Golden Mean pointed out. They brooded on that for a moment then High Anxiety said, “The refugee camp — have you heard the news from there?”

They had not. He told them that two days before some refugees had died of black putrescent swellings in the armpits and groin; Dr Archileos had attended them and had died that morning of the same illness.

“A plague,” said the Golden Mean slowly, “could compel us to negotiate peace with Sparta. I doubt if Pericles could survive that. He acts like a god but he’s not immortal.”

“The fates are tired of him,” said High Anxiety, “A sheep on his farm near Megera has given birth to a unicorn — a black ram with a single horn here —” (he touched the centre of his brow) “— instead of two. It was born blind in the early hours of the morning and died six hours later at the height of noon. You see what that means?”

The others smiled and shook their heads.

“It means Athens will be destroyed if it continues to be governed by one man. A well balanced state needs two leaders, one for The Many, another for The Few. Well, The Many have their Cleon. If you speak out for The Few, Theramines, you will get my vote.”

“And mine,” said Critias.

“You are more suited to that job,” the Golden Mean told High Anxiety, “since you read the omen that way. Has Heavenly Reason said anything about the unicorn?”

“Yes. He opened the skull and found the brain was distorted. Instead of two lobes like a walnut it had one that came to a point, like an egg. He said it was one of those freak births by which Nature sometimes produces new species. Most distortions are unhealthy so the brute dies, but when a new shape is useful to a beast it lives and gives birth to more with that shape. It’s useless arguing with Heavenly Reason of course. He may be absolutely right, scientifically speaking, but I believe Nature is governed by Fate so is full of warnings for us. The unicorn was born on Pericles’ farm so is obviously a warning to him.”

“What are you plotting, my fellow citizens?” asked Aristophanes, joining them.

“Do you think we’ll tell a popular political satirist that? Think again,” said the Golden Mean, smiling.

“Behold!” cried the dramatist, pointing to the couple at the wine table. “Our Darling is adding philosophy to his empire.” “I hope Socrates doesn’t suffer by it,” said Critias. “Nobody is better company — he’s amusing as well as wise.”

“Socrates suffer?” said the comedian chuckling, “He’s incapable of suffering. His demon protects him against attackers from every quarter of the compass.”

Socrates was saying, “So you feel able to advize the Athenian state?”

“Yes.”

“On shipbuilding? Or where to dig a new harbour?”

“Of course not. Shipwrights and surveyors know about those things. I would advize on the largest political matters — war and peace.”

“So you know the right times to go to war.”

“Yes.”

“And the right people to fight.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean by ‘right’?”

“I mean — ” said Alcibiades, paused, then sat down, pressing a finger to his lower lip.

“That’s not a hard question,” said Socrates helpfully, “What reasons do we give when we go to war?”

“We say we’re wesisting a wicked thweat, or haven’t been paid what we’re owed.”

“So when you advize people to make war you’re talking about justice? A war is right when it is just?”

“Not…always. Though when it is not just we have to pwetend it is.”

“Then you might advize the Athenian people to fight an unjust war?”

“Yes,” said Alcibiades boldly, “Because I love my land and her laws and any action which incweases her safety or power will seem wight to me!”

“Well said. And if a friend meant to increase his safety or wealth by killing or robbing a neighbour, what would you say if he asked for advice on the right time to do it?”

“You know what I would say,” said Alcibiades groaning. “But one citizen is not an entire state. What is bad for the first can be good for the second.”

“Hum. Tell me, which people do you admire most: those who risk their lives fighting injustice or those who increase their power by unjust fighting?”

“You know what I would admire most. Usually. Under normal circumstances.”

“But there are political circumstances when you would urge the people you love most to do the thing you admire least?”

“Yes!” said Alcibiades desperately. “Yes, because it is customawy political behaviour.”

Socrates, who had been leaning tensely forward in pursuit of the argument, clapped a hand to his brow and staggered back as if from a stunning blow.

“By Zeus I never thought of that! You’re right, you know. You argue beautifully. You’ve really driven me into a corner, Alcibiades. I don’t think there’s an answer to that one.”

His hearer stared at him suspiciously. Socrates said in a very ordinary voice, “So you plan to be one of those customary politicians? The kind that do what most people would do in their position? But didn’t you start by saying you wanted to be great?”

Alcibiades rubbed the side of his face ruefully while Socrates watched him keenly, kindly. Aristophanes the comic playwright had been listening to them for some time. With a forefinger he prodded Socrates in the chest saying, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with S.”

They looked at him enquiringly. He appeared to be slightly drunk which was not the case but enabled him to talk more freely at parties. He said, “Sssseduction. You, Ssssocrates are trying to sssseduce our Darling.”

“I’m hoping to make a friend of him.”

“No, you’re fishing for another disciple. All this man’s friends are his disciples, Alcibiades. You must have seen them around the marketplace. There’s a fat drunkard who makes money by telling rich folk that the goal of life is happiness, and a thin man in rags who says he’s a realist and would rather be dead than happy. There’s Chaerephon, a scientific democrat who investigates the guts of beetles and wants total equality of income, and Critias, that mine-owner over there who says only the rich should be allowed to vote. There’s even a cobbler who acts as unpaid secretary and writes down their conversations! A very peculiar crew.”

“What do you teach them, Socwates?” asked Alcibiades.

“Nothing,” he said smiling, “Nothing but what I learned from my mother, Phaenarete, the midwife.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She wasn’t a prolific woman. With my father’s help she made only one human being — ” Socrates slapped his chest “— but she helped a lot of others into the light who would never have opened their eyes without her, and aborted some that weren’t wanted. Have you heard of my voice? My demon?”

“Who hasn’t?” said Aristophanes.

“It’s nothing special,” said Socrates, ignoring him, “Everybody has one and it’s the best, the truest bit of them, but a lot of folk can’t hear their inner voice because of loud ideas shoved at them by friends and experts, greedy cliques and governments. Good ideas are a gift from God. He doesn’t send me any so I try to rid my friends of ideas that don’t fit them. I want to hear your voice, Alcibiades, telling me the fine godly things you really believe. But before I hear that voice you’ll have heard it first: inside yourself.”

“How do you rid folk of bad ideas?” said Aristophanes. “Do you use a flue-brush?”

“I use dialectics,” said Socrates, smiling at him.

Alcibiades stood up and told the comedian, “I’m going to a very different party from this one, but I want to see this ugly little wisest man again. May I, Socwates?”

“Please, yes.”

Alcibiades left. The comedian chuckled, helped himself to wine, said admiringly, “You really are a demon. I was trying to spoil your game but I helped you with it. I helped you with it!” “Have you money to spare, Aristophanes?”

The comedian produced a small leather bag, tossed it up and caught it overhand with a chinking sound.

“Can I have some?” said Socrates humbly. The comedian untied the mouth of the bag and held it out. Socrates removed four silver coins. His friend said, “Take more”.

“This is enough. A little at a time from a lot of different people stops them crossing the street to avoid me.”

“You’ll soon wish you had taken the whole purse because I am going to mock you in a play.”

“Why?”

“Because I am sick of clever buggers hanging about the market spouting smart ideas that leave ordinary, sensible people confused.”

“I am not a bugger Aristophanes and, as I’ve just said, I do my best to weed out what you call smart ideas.”

“Perhaps, but there are still too many clever buggers around and if I mocked the others they would sue me for libel. You won’t. Will you?”

“No.”

“Because your demon won’t let you!” cried the comedian, laughing.

“That’s right,” said Socrates sadly.

“The scope and end of learning is to allow perfection to distributive justice, giving everyone his due, procuring good laws and causing them to be observed: an achievement really generous, great, deserving the highest praise.”

— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

When a student of the Humanities in 1958 I intended to become a great writer. My ambition was as strong (I thought) as any that had driven Shakespeare, Burns or Tolstoy, but private efforts proved I was a poor versifier and could never be a playwright or novelist, being able to write brisk dialogue but incapable of inventing a plot. I was therefore only fit to become a historian, a biographer or blend of both in the manner of Plutarch. I did not at once try to write anything of that sort because the available material was of literature, religion, science and philosophy — the complete records of the human race, so any selection from them would be accidental if not harmonized by a mighty idea. Gibbon’s mighty idea showed the slow ruin of the Roman empire making room for the nations of Christian Europe and Arabic Islam. Marx showed all history as a struggle between social classes for the ownership of surplus wealth. My own schooling had described history as a forward march from an age when low-browed cavemen killed their meat with stone clubs, to my own time when every sane British adult could vote for the government of their welfare state which had achieved full employment, abolished abject poverty, and made good health care and education and legal justice available to every citizen. I did not doubt the essential truth of such big ideas, but knew I could write nothing worth reading unless excited by a big new idea of my own, or else by a new way of making an ancient truth look like new.

One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyle Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second university year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19^th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:

Florence, two thousand years after republican Athens, became a republic almost as wonderful. Unlike most cities when the Roman Empire dissolved Florence had not been ruled by a dynasty of war lords, so masterpieces of European literature were much later written by Florentine Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. The city was ruled by a parliament of craftsmen and tradesmen who excluded all noblemen, only admitting landowners enriched by trade. It imported silk from China, dyes from India, wool from England, turning them into rich fabrics sold all over Europe. This trade needed an international banking system, so the parliament of Florence was dominated by merchant bankers who manipulated the trade unions, priests and mass of people by a combination of bribes and by funding a high level of social welfare only approached by some neighbouring republics. The chief bankers were the Medici family who had branch offices in Milan, Venice, Rome, Geneva, Bruges, Antwerp, London; also agents in Baghdad and Constantinople. The Catholic Church still condemned capitalism as a sin but tolerated the Medici because they paid for bigger and better churches and monasteries which ran schools and hospitals. These splendid new buildings were designed and decorated by astonishingly fine artists born in Florence, and many attracted by its prosperity.

A wall of the Carmine Monastery was being painted with a brown rocky wilderness where hermits wearing Carmelite robes prayed singly or conversed in couples. Brother Filippo applied the colours while Brother Diamante ground and mixed them. These two had a dispensation that allowed them to run their painting business from a house outside the monastery, and over breakfast that morning Filippo had again blamed Diamante for insufficiently haggling down the price of market vegetables. Though unwilling to greatly anger Filippo (a dangerous thing to do) Diamante wanted to be slightly disagreeable. He heaved a deep sigh.

“Regretting what you paid for those tomatoes?” said Filippo pleasantly.

“I was remembering Brother Guido’s wall in the chapter house of San Marco,” said Diamante on a melancholy note.¹³

“Nothing regrettable there! Guido painted it excellently if we remember the over-abundance of saints, abbots and popes he had to include.”

“Yes, the preaching friars have many saints; we Carmelites, alas, only two.”

“Why alas? Their saints are all modern: our founders are in the Scriptures.”

“The other orders say the prophet Elijah and John the Baptist are as much their progenitors as ours.”

“They envy our antiquity,” said Filippo smiling pleasantly. “They are newcomers founded two centuries ago, more than a millennium after the Crucifixion. The Prophet Elijah was a Carmelite a thousand years before Jesus was crucified. John who baptized Him was a hermit on the slopes of Mount Carmel. We came through Sicily to Italy a century ago, but our first monastery is still in the Holy Land.”

“Other orders say our rules have changed so much since we came to Italy that our order is now as modern as theirs.”

“They are right to say so Diamante, but when facts are at variance with Truth we should cling to Truth.”

Diamante stopped mixing a colour, looked hard at Filippo and asked, “Is a fact not a truth?”

“Yes, but it is first of all a thing — a piece of our imperfect fallen world, therefore not perfectly substantial. Only truth is perfect, unchanging, eternal, Heavenly. On earth it is only found in our Holy Scriptures, in Catholic traditions, and in history. Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Donatello think it is also in geometry because measured designs help us make beautiful architecture and convincing perspectives. They may be right, but there is no doubt that Holy Scriptures, Catholic traditions and history support Carmelite antiquity. Forty years ago the Saracens broke into our monastery on Mount Carmel and martyred our brothers as they sang the Salve Regina. That is why the Virgin appeared to our Pope in a dream and told him that when a Carmelite dies, after only one day Mary Mother of God will visit him in Purgatory and escort his soul straight to Heaven. We can both take comfort in that, Diamante. Certainly I do.”

“You would doubt it if you were a Franciscan or Dominican.”

“Of course. And if I were a Turk I would doubt God’s Holy Trinity and Virgin Birth and be adorning the walls of mosques with patterns of coloured tiles. Instead I can paint God, His Mother, Son, angels and saints with bodies looking almost as solid, colourful and well-dressed as God Himself could make them. God is very good to me.”

Filippo was now applying paint to the robe of a tubby hermit who sat in a rocky cleft, hearing the confession of a handsome young man kneeling in profile. Diamante noticed that the older hermit was as tubby as Filippo and had his occasional sly smile. Unable to let the conversation end so smugly he murmured, “They say Fra Angelico will be beatified one day.”

“Unlikely. People qualify for sainthood by martyrdom, or miracles, or deeds of astonishing charity. Angelic John has achieved none of these.”

“But he has saintly virtues. He kneels in prayer while painting the Holy Family. Has never broken his vows of poverty. Or chastity.”

“Unlike me. But Brother Angelico comes from a rich family. Finding he did not want money and women he chose to join the Franciscans when a grown man. Aunt Mona made me a Carmelite when I was eight because she could not feed me. Poor soul, she could hardly feed herself. I do not envy Guido’s lack of appetite for some good things God places within my reach. I do not even envy Angelic Guido’s remarkable talent, for his work has taught me a lot. Apart from my master, Messy Tom,¹⁴ Angelic John is the best of the older painters. His weakness is an absence of various expression. ALL his holy figures are delicate, sweet and benign. Were it not for the energetic design, harmony of colour and masterly chiaroscuro his greatest works would make me feel I was facing a banquet of twenty courses marinated in honey. Think, Diamante, of that poor haggard ugly gap-toothed Magdalen made by Donatello! Think of Eve’s weeping, grief-distorted face painted by Masaccio in this monastery! It is the finest thing Messy Thomas ever did! Nobody can paint better than that.”

“The public prefers Angelic John.”

“Naturally. Among the vulgar public only those made ugly by suffering appreciate pictures of those also made Holy by it. But artists of talent — artists great enough to lead instead of follow vulgar taste — such artists will always come here to learn from the work of Messy Thomas and me. Angelico, despite great virtues, is a Gothic manuscript illuminator enlarged and modernized by the great examples of Florentine art, especially sculptures in bronze. The great paintings of the future will grow from we who are achieving in paint the spatial depth Donatello has mastered in his great door panels, and are learning even more from nature.”

“Yes,” said Diamante thoughtfully, “Your grief-stricken faces are as natural as old Giotto’s. And your Christ childs are very natural, sturdy little ruffians. And your virgins are always dressed in the height of fashion, which in young girls is natural I suppose.”

Fillipo looked hard at Diamante who said, without raising his eyes from colour grinding, “And the Medici appreciates Angelico as much as the public do. Perhaps more.”

“That shows Cosimo’s breadth of vision. He discovered Angelico years before I became a painter and now commissions work equally from us both. He prefers having me in his house because, unlike Angelico, Cosimo and I are sinners. Cosimo is the worst because his crimes are against nature. He breeds money out of money so like other bankers will finally sit in Hell scratching himself among the sodomites. I am only. . only. .”

“Avaricious?” murmured Diamante, “A fornicator? Forger?”

There was silence for half a minute in which Diamante braced himself for a wrathful explosion. Instead he heard Filippo warble in sing-song, “We have been companions since our novitiate Diamante! You have learned all you know of fine arts from me Diamante! Let us concentrate on our work Diamante! I promise not to say more about your foolish, ridiculous, extravagant, insane, unChristian expenditure on tomatoes.”

In a convent cell lent to him for a studio Filippo painted a young nun, Lucrezia Buti, lent to him as a model for his Virgin Mary in Glory. As usual he had begun the session by sinning with her carnally because, he said, that let him paint without the distraction of carnal lust. He had then worked for nearly half an hour in silence before she murmured between rigid lips, “Filippo, if I have a child?”

“Have you already missed a period?” he said, frowning and mixing a colour.

“No.”

“If God wills you a child,” he said, applying his brush carefully to the panel, “six or seven months will elapse before your appearance announces the advent. Plenty of time.”

“But Filippo — ” she cried.

“Don’t move! Imagine that I am the Archangel of the Annunciation. Imagine the little baby God is perhaps making in you. It is a wonderful thought, fearful also! What will people think? You are a virgin, and unmarried, yet the child will be God’s as well as yours, so He is bound to save you from harm. You know how God saved the Holy Virgin from scandal — He got old Joseph to marry her before she bore His Son. Wedding a jobbing carpenter must have been the first of her sorrows. You need not stoop so low.”

Between rigid lips she murmured, “I am afraid.”

He said cheerily, “Don’t be. You have me.”

“Not often.”

He stroked colour into the Madonna’s robe then said firmly, “When I have finished this you must leave here. I will help you escape on a holy day, a sacred festival when the Mother Superior is looking elsewhere. Come and live with me.”

“As your wife?”

“Of course not. I am a priest. STAY SERENE!” he shouted, “You are to be my Virgin in Glory, not my repentant Magdalene.”

“My convent will be dishonoured,” she said mournfully. “My family will be dishonoured.”

“Your noble brothers are not as rich and powerful as my friend Cosimo Medici. They made you and your sister Spinetta nuns because they could not afford dowries that would fetch you noble husbands. You will be happier when not quite married to me, a butcher’s son, yes, but also a great artisan and priest. There is room in my workshop for you and Spinetta also, if she too wishes to escape. A couple of women will be useful. Brother Diamante does his best but is not a good housewife.”

“This makes me weep, Filippo,” she said and wept, uncertain whether from sorrow or joy.

“Weep joyfully,” he urged, “Despair is the one sin God cannot forgive because it prevents repentance. He easily forgives other ones, even murder, which is a nasty big sin. Making babies is hardly a sin at all. In the beginning God commanded all his creatures to be fruitful and multiply. Stay serene Lucrezia!” he pled, but her weeping became sobs until he yelled, “Stay serene or I cannot paint you!”

With a great effort she mastered the sobs. For a while there was silence but for the soft strokes of his brush, then he said casually, “You will often be painted when we live together. There will always be a market for Virgins with your face and eyes.”

Lucrezia’s convent was a small one with only four other nuns. The house was of a kind later denounced by the republican friar Savonarola because of a grill in the door behind which young nuns sometimes stood flirting with young men in the street outside. On a day of Holy festival when the Mother Superior led out her Brides of Christ to see the Girdle of Our Lady displayed it was easy for Lucrezia and Spinetta to escape in the crowd.

A revolt by the nobility of Rome in 1434 forced a Pope (like several of his predecessors) to flee the city in disguize. For ten years Eugenius IV was a guest of Cosimo de Medici in Florence, usually residing in the Medici palace where he met Brother Filippo. In 1443 the support of foreign kings let the Pontiff return to Rome and soon after he commissioned an Annunciation from Filippo. Sometimes he relaxed while watching the painter at work and grumbling about his problems. One morning he said gloomily, “Strange times, strange times! I have healed the thousand-year-old schism between Roman Christians in the west and Greeks in the east. The Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus and the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismond recognized my supremacy, and now so does Emperor Frederick. I have signed agreements with Copts in Egypt and Nestorians in Mesopotamia, so Christians in Africa and Arabia will be restored to Roman Christendom. What do you think of that, my Pippo?”

“No previous Pope has done as much, my Pontiff,” said Filippo politely, “except Saint Peter, perhaps.”

“Has done as much on paper. Potentates sign agreements with me and go on doing as they please. Palaeologus signed because he needs me to organize a crusade to save Byzantium from the Muhammadans — they have cut his empire down to a circle of suburbs round Constantinople. But that damned remnant of the Council of Basel still supports Antipope Amadeus Duke of Savoy, who is not even a priest! Antipopes are always Antichrists! I cannot raise a crusading army from a schismatic Europe, so in a few years Constantinople will be conquered by pagans. The last of the ancient Roman Empire will be destroyed and Greek Christianity extirpated. O O O I detest the ambition that dragged me from my monastery. I weep tears of rage when recalling the profound peace I once enjoyed as a young monk.”

“Don’t return to your old monastery, my Pontifex Maximus,” said Filippo, chuckling. “A previous pope threw up the job because it was damning his soul so Dante describes him eternally racing round the outer walls of Hell, one in a crowd of souls hated equally by God and Satan. Continue being as good a pope as you can in these strange strange times and you need only suffer a few years in Purgatory.”

“More than you expect to suffer!” said Eugenius grimly.

Filippo stiffened the corners of his mouth to prevent a smile and with a modest shrug murmured, “Well, I am a Carmelite.”

A little later he wiped his brush clean, laid it down, stirred crimson powder into a pot of medium while saying, “Surely several Christian kings would join a crusade if your Holiness raised his own army to fight against Islam?”

“A papal army is a dissonant concept, both theologically and pastorally.”

“Yet Martin V, your great predecessor, defeated Braccio da Montone in the battle of L’Aquila and crushed Bologna by force of arms. He regained the lost papal treasury. The Papal States now dominate central Italy.”

“Pope Martin belonged to the Colonna family, chiefs of that gang of noble scoundrels who forced me to flee Rome twelve years ago. He enriched his relatives as much as he enriched the Vatican treasury, which is not inexhaustible. My only possible armies now would be lent me by French or Spanish kings whose troops would probably sack Rome while passing through.”

“Hire soldiers from outlandish nations who would only demand their soldiers’ wages — Switzerland, the Baltic countries, England and Scotland.”

“I say again, Pippo, our treasury is not inexhaustible.”

“Will your Holiness forgive the prattling tongue of a bird-brained monk who imagines a new way to make your treasury inexhaustible?”

“Speak, parrot.”

“In Mainz upon the Rhine there is a wonderful German engine with a lever which, pressed down once, stamps a sheet of paper with inked words more clear, regular and legible than the finest penman can write.”

“I know that very well,” said Eugenius gloomily. “Already German bishops are buying letters of indulgence in bulk from the engineers, each with a blank space for the name of the soon-to-be-forgiven, and room at the foot for the bishop’s signature and seal. Twenty good scribes working for a week in my chancellery could not write as many letters of indulgence as this engine stamps in an hour.”

“Then your Holiness should hire a German engineer to build this lettering machine in Rome, and announce ex cathedra that only indulgences signed by you and cardinals in the papal college are valid. The vastly enlarged revenue you received would never stop pouring in.”

“Do not tempt me, Filippo. I am a Venetian so no enemy of commerce, but I fear this clerical engine will effect the Church in unforeseen ways, just as gunfire (another German invention) is changing warfare. I will not use or ban or try to control these engines until I see clearly what their effect is liable to be.”

Filippo silently resumed painting. Eugenius said, “This picture has more domestic furniture than most Annunciations, also more browns. I suppose oil paint allows that. I am glad you have confined your usual wild forest to a narrow view through the arch.”

After more unhelpful remarks that Filippo ignored the Pope said, “God’s mother is not usually approached from the left.”

“Yes, entrance from the right is customary. My previous Annunciations have that.”

“You are trying something new.”

“Your Holiness perfectly understands me.”

Eugenius sighed and said, “Yes, Florentines must always be innovating. It produces brave new art but also heresy. Too many of your scholars learn Greek, study Plato, start doubting the theology of Aquinus and à Kempis. Nicolo Granchio is a splendid administrator.¹⁵ As my legate in Constantinople he persuaded Paleologus to meet me in Italy, which was not easy. Like several German priests he makes a surprisingly uncorrupt cardinal, neither simoniac nor nepotist, not an adulterer, sodomite or pederast, not even given to impatience or anger — my own worst sins. Yet he thinks Christendom and Islam could unite! How can a member of the Sacred College indulge such a cloud-cuckoo idea? Luckily he puts ideas into abstruse Latin jargon that hardly anybody understands. He tells me Muslims believe in the Jewish Old Testament as we do, that the Koran accepts the Virgin Mary as Christ’s Mother. It seems the Koran also says Jesus is a God-inspired prophet and forerunner of Muhammad! Blasphemy! Muhammadans who do not believe Jesus was God’s Only Begotten Son are as damnable as Jews who reject Him.”

“But not as damnable as atheists who call Moses, Jesus and Muhammad the three impostors,” said Filippo, adding with a long brushstroke a bright crimson plume to the archangel’s wing. Eugenius shuddered and said, “Your artistic confidence makes you dangerously jocose, my son.”

“You are right to reprove me, Papa, but Cardinal Nicolo is also right to think the Turks are not exactly barbarians. I was once the slave of a Turk.”

“How did that happen?”

“On a boating trip off Livorno I was captured by corsairs and sold with the rest of the crew in Morocco. My master, though pagan, was a man of humane and liberal views and my skill in portraiture entertained him. He certainly did not think all Christians would go to Hell. He quoted an Arabian poet who said that when our souls stand before the judgement seat of God we will find Him so infinitely merciful that we will gnaw our fingers in rage at the sins we might have committed on earth without offending Him.”¹⁶

“I see why that heresy delighted you,” said Eugenius, laughing. “But God’s mercy is only for the repentant.”

“I know that Your Holiness, of course I knew my master’s words were a blasphemy leading to the circle of Hell where schismatics are repeatedly hacked in two. But some Christians are over-obsessed with their sins and God’s judgement. When you consider the scope of His work — the great dome of the stars and clouds, the seas and snowy Alps, the brown and green and flowery lands surrounding our cities of splendid men and women, our glorious churches and palaces, rich markets of fruit, vegetables, meat, cloth, furniture and all other fine goods — why, it is perfectly obvious that God spends more time creating lovely things than he spends condemning bad ones.”

“You are making a God in your own image!”

“No father, I promise you, it is the other way round.”

Eugenius shook his head, rolling his eyes in an Italian way indicating despair and resignation.

And after more silence asked, “Are all your Virgins derived from the figure and face of the same woman?”

“I almost think so, Papa.” said Filippo, dreamily. “The Virgins I painted before I met Lucrezia must have been prophecies, because on seeing her in the parlour of that little convent I recognized her at once. Yes Father. Yes indeed, Holiness.”

“That is another Greek heresy,” said Eugenius, not severely. “Plato or perhaps Socrates (they are practically the same) said souls are eternal as God who made them, so birth is not the making of a new soul but a reincarnation, and those who love at first sight recognize their mates from an earlier life.”

“As you say, Father, a heresy. Only God knows how such miracles happen.”

“Brother Filippo, you are too amorous for a priest. I have power to dispense you of your clerical vows. You now have a son by your Lucrezia. Little Filippino will not be a bastard if I make you a layman able to marry her.” Filippo dropped his brush and stared at the Pope, open-mouthed and shaking his head in many small vehement negations. Then he cried, “Holy Father, you must not deprive me of my priesthood! My link with Holy Mount Carmel! My promise of release from Purgatory by God’s mother!”

It is queer how glibly I write speeches for folk whose language I do not know, and who painted wall pictures I have only seen in books, and were inspired by a Christianity in which I have no faith, in a land I have never visited. All of them are highly educated. How can I write convincing speeches for ordinary peasants, shopkeepers and craftsmen without going to Italy and learning the language?

¹⁷

Old Grindle’s Bookshop

Spittal Street, Tollcross

Edinburgh

2003

Dear John Tunnock Mate,

I call you Mate because that is a common English way of sounding friendly and I am English. Like you I am a middle-class Socialist of the Robert Owen-John Ruskin-William Morris kind, but would feel pretentious if I called you Comrade. Have just read your first chapters in Joy Hendry’s special edition of Chapman. Great stuff, Mate! I would not be saying this to a Glaswegian I have never met if I were not a bit drunk (Smith’s Glenlivet Malt) and moved almost to tears. I’ve read nothing so good since Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. Most writers are shy introverts with a very narrow experience of both public and private life, so learn about it by reading each other’s books. They usually compensate for this by inventing tougher, richer, sexier heroes than themselves. I ain’t referring to low-class fantasy heroes like Fleming’s James Bond but to historic figures worn like masks by better writers — Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Graves’ Claudius and our own dear Alan Massie’s Roman emperors. Your Pericles and Alcibiades are more believable because you confront them with convincing common citizens like your farmer and sausage seller and show through them how the greed of the Athenian Empire led it to destruction. This is relevant to continual wars started in eastern oil-bearing nations by U.S. presidents and our own dear Tony Blair, on the pretext of defending justice and democracy. Congratulations!

But (I must be very ve-e-e-e-ry drunk to say this to a writer I have never met) how can you keep this level of relevance in a book ending with an eccentric Victorian clergyman? As your prologue says, his century was an age of industrial and social revolutions. What can an Anglican priest getting rich by fooling wealthier people tell us about the British Empire in India, Africa, Egypt? About women and children slaving 14 hours a day in mines and factories? About the fight to legalize trade unions and Cooperative Socialism? I don’t want Who Paid for All This? to end by showing as little of the 19^th century as Bertie Wooster’s antics in Blandings Castle show the 20^th. If it ends like that you had better call your book Money at Play.

Instead of provincial England why not show the Golden Age of a third famous city much the same size as Periclean Athens and Medician Florence? A city whose main citizens became intellectual world leaders? Why not use late 18^th century Edinburgh? It had Hume, founder of modern philosophy; Adam Smith, founder of political economy; Hutton, who made geology a modern science; Boswell who wrote the first modern biography. Burns, a world-famous poet, was its honoured guest. These and many others of slightly lesser genius all knew each other socially.

Mind you, mate, I’m not pretending Scotland in those days was all sweetness and light. The landowners and merchants of Edinburgh and Glasgow owned cotton and tobacco plantations in Florida, Virginia, Carolina, and sugar plantations in Jamaica, so used slaves as much as English merchants. Scottish coal miners, like Russian serfs, had been their employer’s property for a couple of centuries under laws making it a crime to help them escape, and sometimes had iron collars riveted round their necks. In England the parliamentary system was managed on behalf of the aristocracy and rich merchants by several magnates; in Scotland it was managed by one, Henry Dundas, nicknamed The Uncrowned King of Scotland, being most recent in a line of uncrowned kings appointed by the London government. Fewer Scottish householders were entitled to vote than Englishmen in the county of Suffolk, and as nobody got a government job in Scotland without Dundas approving, the law courts, the county and town councils were completely Tory. He enriched his family and friends, normal practice then as now, and of course blocked all attempts at political reform.

But you need someone remarkable whose life reveals this society. Why not James Watt, born in Greenock, maker of musical and scientific instruments who turned engineering into a science that transformed the world? He and his apprentice Murdoch (who invented gas lighting) and partner Matthew Bolton were members of the Birmingham Lunar Society. So was Josiah Wedgewood. Bolton and Wedgewood’s factories anticipated Henry Ford’s production lines. These men were political radicals who supported the American colonists’ fight for independence, and welcomed the French Revolution.

Or take Thomas Muir, who Dundas thought the most dangerous man in Scotland. Surely you know about Muir of Huntershill? The Glasgow stickit minister¹⁸ who became an Edinburgh advocate? And started Scottish Friends of the People Societies demanding political reform? And talked with leaders of the French National Assembly in Paris? And joined the Society of United Irishmen? And was tried in Edinburgh for lending Tom Paine’s Rights of Man to a weaver? Was transported to Botany Bay, then escaped from there in an American vessel with the connivance of George Washington? After shipwreck and sea battles he was received back in Paris with acclamations by the French National Assembly. He would have been president of the Scottish Republic had the proposed French invasion succeeded, did you know that? Why so many rhetorical questions? It’s the Glenlivet talking.

Your excellent Prologue says your teachers discouraged prrronouncing the r in worrrds to stop you sounding Scotch. Has your education made you, like the Scottish Labour Party, indifferent to the land where you live? Are you writing with an eye on London and its book reviewers? I am not, alas, a creative writer, just an English historian in Edinburgh.¹⁹ Historians, of course, enjoy escaping into the past as much as fiction writers. Many are like Ibsen’s Dr Tesman who spends his honeymoon studying cottage industries in medieval Brabant and ignoring his fascinating wife. In a humble way I have tried to emulate Herodotus, Xenophon and Marx instead of Tesman and show how the nation where I live has happened. I also know that some fiction writers have done it better. Scott and Tolstoy’s greatest work was set a few generations before their own time, but the kind of people and class conflicts they described were and are still contemporary.

I must be daft as well as drunk to criticize an author I’ve never met for something he has not yet written, but believe me mate, your first chapters have enthused (oh God I hate that word but cannae think of another yes I can) have inspired me to this insolent diatribe.

My character was shaped by two gentle, unmarried women who mothered me from infancy, providing all I needed and almost all I wanted without a word of reproof or complaint. If I am not now monstrously selfish it is because I loved them as dearly as they loved me, so tried to save them from the trouble a dependent, growing boy might cause elderly women. This was usually easy as I only felt perfectly safe and happy at home with them. The unsatisfactory parts of my world were outside it. Each Sunday we attended services in the church where a grandfather who died years before my birth had been the first Minister of God. I enjoyed the hymns, had no objection to prayers but would have found the sermons boring had Nell, the youngest aunt, not fed me a chocolate cream or liquorice allsort or peppermint humbug whenever I fidgeted. Too much sugar rots the teeth so I was only given sweets during Sunday sermons, blissfully sucking while my eyes dreamily explored the great interior like a spacious lantern. The church had been modelled on the gothic Sainte-Chapelle in Paris so there was no pillar or gallery to prevent a clear view of the coved ceiling and tall stained glass windows. I was too young to consciously enjoy its beauty but now believe it enlarged my soul like all truly good things we meet when young.

But I stopped enjoying the Sunday schools held by a church elder in a comfortable part of the undercroft. She was a retired school teacher as kind as my aunts. She told us simple Bible stories chiefly about Jesus at first, but at the age of seven started teaching the early history of mankind and God’s chosen people with straight readings from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel and Kings. She omitted dull begat chapters and sexually explicit ones like Abraham’s fraudulent prostitution of his wife in Genesis chapters 12 and 20, but did not censor the genocidal wars by which the children of Israel replaced the original inhabitants of Palestine. I thought the Lord God who ordered the Israelites to “smite them, and utterly destroy them; and make no pact with them, nor show mercy unto them” was cruel and unfair. I said so. The teacher was a gentle soul. She told me the war was not a fight for land between Jews and those earlier settlers, the Ammonites, Midianites, Canaanites and Philistines; it was a “life-and-death struggle between truth and falsehood for the cultural development of God’s people”.²⁵ I asked what that meant. Becoming a little flustered she said God needed to order the slaughter of men, women and children who did not believe in Him, so that the Jews had a homeland where His son Jesus, Prince of Peace, could be born to preach the religion of peace for everyone. I did not then know that Christian nations had been as warlike as pagan ones, and had used the Old Testament for centuries after the crucifixion to justify the invasion and massacre of foreigners. But the teacher knew this, so skipped from the spread of Christianity by Saint Paul to the recent victory over Fascism by Britain and the U.S.A. She did not mention the essential help nations got from the atheist U.S.S.R. but said the German defeat was a Christian victory and had established a United Nations Organisation that would oppose warfare from now onward. Yet this explanation did not stop me thinking the Israelites had been cruel, greedy and unfair. I told my aunts so and Nell looked at Nan in a slightly guilty way. After a brief pause Nan her elder sister said firmly, “You are right to think that. Most of what the Bible says Jesus said should be believed. Some of the rest was written by poets as good as any you will find in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and some by propagandists as bad as any in Nazi Germany. But the Bible has so changed world history that nobody will understand that if they know nothing about it. But you need not attend Sunday school if you do not wish.” So I stopped going. Nan also said, “Nell and I are faithful members of the Church of Scotland because, though agnostics like most religious people nowadays, we are also old maids ruled by force of habits drilled into us by a rigorous parent. You need not come with us to church if you dislike it.” But I liked hymns, stained glass, also the sweets which I only stopped sucking when I lost my taste for sherry. I attended church with my aunts until they were bedridden.

At school my shyness and short, stout figure made me uninteresting to both pupils and teachers though I was scrupulously clean, always neatly dressed, and did well in all my lessons except physical training and sport. The clash between life inside and outside my home was shown in my schoolbags.

In the late 1940s the children of thrifty parents still carried schoolbooks in khaki satchels issued by the government to hold gas masks during the recent war, but in posh Hillhead most of us had cloth or leather schoolbags hung by straps from our backs. Mine was of shining leather which always looked new because on Saturday mornings Aunt Nell brushed it with shoe blacking, then polished with rags until it shone. I would have preferred a schoolbag stained by accidents like those of other pupils, but could not hurt her feelings by telling her so, and eventually insisted on doing that job myself, though not quite so efficiently. Aunt Nan handled our finances. When I started at Hillhead Secondary School aged 11 Nan replaced my bag with a pigskin briefcase. I foresaw the mockery it would bring but pretended to be grateful. Only our school captain and some prefects in the final year had briefcases, none as blatantly expensive and manly as first-year Tunnock’s. After the evening meal we called Tea or (if Nan and Nell had asked a friend to share it) High Tea, we usually sat in the drawing room, listening to the BBC.²⁶ At the end of my first Hillhead Secondary week I brought home the briefcase full of new schoolbooks, and asked for a table in my bedroom to do homework there in private.

“Why of course,” said Nell, but Nan said firmly, “No.”

We stared at her. After a solemn pause she said, “Homework certainly needs privacy. He must have the study.”

“Yes indeed,” cried Nell with enthusiasm and they conducted me there. The study was a room my aunts always kept clean but otherwise avoided, perhaps because their father had insisted on privacy there when writing his sermons, which seem to have been his only work when not conducting Sunday services. I had always assumed it was forbidden to me, though nobody had said so. They ushered me and my briefcase inside but stayed out, telling me to make myself at home and would I like a cup of tea in half an hour? but I wanted nothing before our usual supper together before bedtime.

“Well,” said Nell, “If you want something sooner, strike that twice and one of us will come running.”

She pointed to a brass push-bell on a massive, leather-topped desk. Looking strangely satisfied they left me there. Either then or later I heard Nan say it was nice to have a man working in the study again.

On first sitting down in the leather-upholstered swivel chair and spreading my schoolbooks on the desk I felt daunted by this ponderously furnished chamber, but soon came a feeling of ease and mastery because this place was wholly mine. I had no need to ensure privacy by turning the large brass door key in the lock because the aunts never entered without knocking and asking my permission. Nell only entered to dust and hoover once a week when I was at school. An elaborate ebony inkstand on the desk had a shallow little drawer in the base where I found keys unlocking the desk drawers and doors of glass-fronted bookcases. One drawer held a cut-glass tumbler and a stoppered decanter three-quarter full of brown liquid. In cupboards under the bookcases I found more of this liquid: five bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry and several dozen empty ones. Tasting that sherry did not then occur to me. In the following weeks I gradually found the delights of the bookshelves among a mass of very dull sermons.

The first discoveries were an early Encyclopaedia Britannica and an 1850 Chambers’ Conversationalist’s Lexicon with engravings (some coloured by hand) of improbable flying machines that could never have left the ground, wooden warships with side paddles and smoking funnels between masts crowded with sails, grotesque creatures, plants, castles, temples and cities. These pictures and fragments of text took me to a time when the U.S.A. and Russia traded in slaves and serfs, when Japan was closed to foreigners and maps of most large continents had big blank areas inscribed Terra Incognita. Then I found two volumes of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel illustrated by Heath Robinson, Balzac’s Droll Tales illustrated by Doré, Kraft-Ebbings’ Sexual Pathology with photographs. Most precious was a set of four tall volumes with ornately gilded leather bindings published by The Harvard Gentleman Scholars’ Press of New York in a limited edition of 150, each personally signed and numbered on the biblio page by the editor, Frank Harris.²⁷ The pictures alone must have made the cost immense: Ovid’s Art of Love was illustrated by Mantegna, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata by Aubrey Beardsley, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by Felicien Rops, Burns’ Tam O’ Shanter by William Bell Scott. I investigated the texts of these after sampling the illustrations, eventually reading all the Droll Tales and most of Rabelais, the latter in what I now know was Urquhart’s translation. The Harvard Gentleman Scholar volumes were a constant delight. The verses in the original tongues were helped by English prose translations and pictures which showed a lot of lively nudity.

Of course the translation of Tam O’ Shanter was needless. Any English speaker can easily understand it. I read Burns’ verses to learn the story behind Bell Scott’s outline drawings of the witch Nanny leaping and flinging about in her cutty sark, and enjoyed them so much that I tackled his complete poems which were also in Grandpa Tunnock’s library, beside Catherine Carswell’s 1920s biography of him. She had aroused the fury of admirers who sentimentalized him as a hard-working family man (which he was) by calmly and without censure naming his lovers and illegitimate children. These Burns books filled a big gap in my education because Burns was not mentioned at school where I learned verses by Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats — naytcha poems, the teachers called them, being careful not to pronounce a final r. The subject matter (daffodils, the west wind, sky-lark, nightingale) were certainly natural but not human. Burns’ poems are all about human nature. He loves it at its most fallible, so how could he be taught in schools? When I was a teacher I would have been sacked had I taught young children The Jolly Beggars’ chorus — A fig for those by LAW protected, LIBERTY’s a glorious feast! COURTS for cowards were erected, CHURCHES built to please the Priest. Burns is declaring that sexual love, after breathing eating and drinking, is the most essential human activity and the most enjoyable.

When I asked my aunts where people came from I was very very young but remember the guilty glance Nell always gave Nan when wishing her to speak for them. After a moment Nan said slowly and deliberately, “Everybody begins as something the size and shape of a tadpole. It floats in an elastic bag of fluid the size and shape of an egg and this bag is in a woman’s stomach. The bag stretches as the wee fishy thing gets larger, growing a human head, arms, fingers, toes etcetera. After nine months, usually, it hatches out of the mother’s stomach, just as chickens hatch out of eggs.”

“You mean babies break their mother’s stomachs open?” I cried, because one Easter I had been given a brown chocolate egg which, cracked open, contained a chicken made of white chocolate. Nan said, “Not at all! The narrow groove between the halves of a woman’s bottom continues between her legs to the point at which males. . men like you. . have a. .” (She hesitated and flushed slightly) “. . toot. Uretor. Penis is the adult word for it. Through this groove that only women possess the baby emerges in what is technically called birth. Births are seldom fatal but always painful. Many women like Nan and me choose not to give birth. We have never needed children because we have you.”

I brooded on this. The fact that other children had mothers and I had aunts had never before struck me as strange enough to need an explanation, but Nell cleared her throat and Nan immediately supplied one: “Your mother was a wonderful woman who left this house, toiling in a British government office until she gave birth to you. She then handed you over to us, returned to the service of her country in London and died bravely in a Nazi blitzkrieg. You should be proud of her. It has been our privilege to serve her by caring for you.”

Nell clapped her hands saying happily, “O good, well done Nan, that covers everything.”

I thought so too. After that my aunts often referred to my mother. The meals they made were so good that I have never enjoyed meals as much since they stopped cooking for me, but after that first mention of my mother they never served me with anything, not even a soft boiled egg, without telling me how much better it would have been if my mother had supplied it. She had also (they said) been much better than them at knitting, darning, washing clothes, lighting fires, handling money and schoolwork. My school reports gave me high marks. They would nod happily over them saying, “Yes, you have your mother’s brain.”

Years passed before I learned that babies needed fathers. I thought nature ensured half the animals born were masculine because women needed a breadwinner to support them by working in an office or factory, for in those days the only women I knew who worked for a living served behind counters in shops. The mothers of everyone I knew at school were housewives. In the Hillhead Salon I saw Tarzan and the Amazons which showed the jungle hero in South America where he is captured by a savage tribe of blonde white women, all wearing very little and in their early twenties. In those days I believed all films except Disney animations were based on truth, and decided a completely female nation would be possible if a natural fluke made the mothers incapable of giving birth to males, thus forcing the women to learn hunting. The necessity of fathers dawned on me when I was twelve or thirteen and too old to embarrass Nell and Nan with a question about a matter too delicate for them to have mentioned. When anyone asked about my parents I would say crisply, “Don’t remember them. Both killed in the London Blitz.”

Only when Nan and Nell were dead did I learn from my birth certificate that I was a bastard.

Through most of my schooldays boys and girls had separate playgrounds and sat on opposite sides of the classrooms. When five or six I started noticing the girls’ side contained someone fascinating — a girl who seemed better than the rest, and who I wanted to continually stare at and come close to, had that been possible. Her name was Roberta Piper. Nobody told me my desire for Roberta Piper was a weakness but I knew I would be mocked if I admitted it and hid this desire so completely that I am sure none suspected it. Slowly, from small signs, I realized most boys on my side of the class felt the same about Roberta Piper and were equally reluctant to admit it. We shared a general idea that girls were inferior creatures, why? I suspect we were trying to reject the power Roberta Piper and her kind had over us, without exactly knowing what it was.

In the summer holidays Nan, Nell and I always had a fortnight in an Aitch Eff guesthouse. Aitch Eff (I later learned) stood for Holiday Fellowship, an organization founded early in the twentieth century by middle- and working-class Socialists who wanted social equality for all and felt that sharing holidays was a step toward it. They leased big houses in mountainous and coastal parts of Britain where members enjoyed most of a good hotel’s facilities without paying as much, and where staff and guests mingled in a friendly way I thought natural and ordinary until years later when I stayed in a conventional hotel. In our second week at Minard Castle on Loch Fyne Roberta Piper and her parents arrived. When they sat down at the morning breakfast table Nell asked me, “What’s wrong?” I suppose because I was blushing or had gone pale. I whispered that the girl was in my class at school.

“How nice! Your little girl is in this young man’s class at school!” said Nell, and began a cheerful conversation with Mr and Mrs Piper who agreed with my aunts that Roberta and I should sit together. We did, which I both wanted and hated. I saw she was willing to chat with me but I could not say a word, my heart was beating too loudly and my face was too hot. “I’m afraid our young man’s terribly shy!” said Nan and all the adults treated this as an entertaining joke. I hated that and hated Roberta because she was grinning too. For the rest of the holiday I insisted on us eating at a different table from the Pipers, which the aunts thought a pity. I was then six or seven.

This hopeless, helpless, useless obsession with Roberta lasted through primary school. At secondary school she was replaced by someone it is pointless to name. These fascinating girls changed as we advanced from one year to the next, but among boys in my class there was a general agreement about which one she was. I sometimes heard bolder, coarser ones discuss her and speculate on who might “get her for a lumber”.³¹ By that time a new sexual distraction had entered my life: American comics.

Throughout Scotland and (I suspect) Britain most children’s leisure reading was printed by D. C. Thomson Ltd of Dundee. Each week before the age of ten we took The Dandy and Beano, jocular cartoon magazines with characters like Freddie the Fearless Fly, Lord Snooty and his Pals, an ostrich called Big Eggo and a kindly cowboy of immense strength called Desperate Dan, who lived in a land that was partly American West and partly a British suburb. These comics had a minimum of words, speech being printed in bubbles coming from people’s mouths. At secondary school age these were replaced by The Rover and Hotspur whose every double page had a serial adventure story in printed columns, with a single quarter-page illustration in black and white under the title. No girls, no women were in these stories which were about ordinary, believable boys like ourselves assisting detectives, explorers, athletes, soldiers or scientists. The aunts ordered these comics for me from Barretts, the Byres Road newsagent. I first saw American comics at school in the days following examinations, when our teachers were busy marking the papers and let us read anything we liked. Some students brought in these astonishing novelties: magazines with brightly-coloured pictures on every page, showing the adventures of super-heroic adults and villains with amazing powers and no children at all. Women among them had faces and figures like Hollywood movie stars but often wore less clothes. About sex the American comic publishers were as puritan as Thomsons of Dundee. They evaded it by showing violence instead. Fantastic punch-ups and explosive shooting matches were continuous, with much capture, bondage and torture. I had never before seen anything so exciting, except in Tarzan films. I instinctively knew my aunts would dislike these comics and that I should never bring them to the house, but fellow pupils had more than they could read at one time so I borrowed a few, after which Wonder Woman and Sheena the Jungle Girl drove Roberta Piper’s successors out of my head. With real girls I could only imagine chivalrous courtships leading to marriage, but there was no limit to what I could imagine doing to Sheena. I was entering the state described by a character in Albee’s Zoo Story, who says American men start using pictures of women as substitutes for reality, then use women as substitutes for the pictures. I only reached the second half of that state after the death of my aunts.

When exam papers had been marked my chances of borrowing these comics ended, for outside the classroom I was ashamed to look at them when others could see me. My pocket money would have let me buy many but I was appalled by the thought of a shopkeeper recognizing my vicious depravity as I pointed to an American comic or nudist health magazine and said, “That one please!”. I sometimes wished an atomic war would kill everyone in the world but me so that I could enter any of these shops and shamelessly gloat over all that excited me.

But drunk with sherry on this special Saturday afternoon I did the deed without an atomic war. In part of the Cowcaddens that was demolished in the 1970s I stopped before the right sort of shop and, with a thrumming excitement in my lower stomach, stared shamelessly at the covers of paperback books in the window. One called Love for Sale showed (from behind) a line of chained-together blondes wearing only knickers and high-heeled shoes, being urged across sand dunes by a man with a whip. Beyond the display I saw the back of a customer buying something. When he left the shop I hurried in, laid my briefcase on the counter and, looking away from the shopkeeper, pointed to Love for Sale and said, “That one please and. . yes, and also that. . and er, hm hm hm. .” (I pointed to American comics on racks along the walls) “. . I’ll take that and that and that and that too. I’m buying for a few friends.”

“It’s nice to have friends,” said the shopkeeper pleasantly. I was horrified to suddenly see she was a small woman a bit like Aunt Nell. With a face that felt red hot I flung down some pound notes, muttered “Keep the change”, zipped books and comics into my briefcase, rushed out and hurried home.

I found the aunts having afternoon tea with a friend of their own age and sex.

“How was Stewart and his mother?” said Nan as I looked round the door. Nell asked, “You look flushed, have you been running?” “Things went quite well,” I said, “In fact too well, that’s why I’m flushed. Mrs Doig insisted on pouring me a glass of that sherry you gave her and I’m not used to it. I’m going to lie down in the study for an hour or two. Please don’t bring me anything. See you later.”

In the study I turned (for the first but not last time) the door key that locked me in, then spread my purchases on the desktop and doted over them, masturbating three times in succession. After that, sick with self-disgust, I would have burned them in the study fire had the season been cold enough for one. Instead I locked them in a desk drawer and afterwards kept the key in my trouser pocket.

Perhaps a fortnight passed before an appetite for new pornography drove me out in search of another dirty bookshop, because I never bought from the same shop twice. After drinking all the sherry left in Grandpa Tunnock’s three-quarters full decanter I set out with my usual excuse of going for a walk with Stoory Doig, astonished that my aunts did not see how drunk I was. Before every full bottle of sherry had been drunk my pornography was nearly too many for the desk drawers. One wet Sunday I locked the study door, spread my furtive library on the hearthrug and went carefully through it, scissors in hand, cutting out pictures that most excited me and burning the rest — which reminds me what a strangely different world I and everyone else then inhabited, a world as different from 2005 Glasgow as 1954 was from the world of mid-Victorian encyclopaedias.

The rooms in nearly every British house were heated by an open fire burning in a grate inside a fireplace, a cavity in the thickness of the wall. The fire was fed with lumps of coal from a big brass jug called a scuttle on a tiled section of floor in front of the grate. In terrace houses the scuttle was filled from a small basement room called the coal-cellar; and in tenements from a stoutly made box called the bunker on the stair landing. Coal-cellars and bunkers were filled by men who carried the coal in on their backs in huge sacks from an open lorry that usually called once a month. Did each sack contain a hundredweight? Half a hundredweight? A quarter? I only know that twenty hundredweights made a ton and once, when older, I tried to lift a full coal sack and failed. The sacks came from a great heap of coal in a yard called a ree in Scotland. Everywhere people lived had a coal ree a few miles away except in parts of the Highlands and Islands where folk burned peat. The coal rees were on branch railway lines along which coal-burning steam locomotives brought trucks of coals from the mines, the last of which closed in Scotland four or five years back why am I going into all this? Before the 1960s almost any photograph of an inhabited British landscape showed a trail of steam drifting across. They were so common we did not notice them, did not even notice them vanish with the coming of electric trains. Glasgow made coal fires illegal around 1970 when it began losing its heavy industries. This put an end to amazingly thick winter fogs that had been killing folk with poor lungs for more than a century. This information is necessary to explain how I managed to burn so much paper without my aunts noticing. Even so, they would have smelled it had I not spread the job over two weekends. From then on I kept my special selection of cut-out heroines and suggestive pictures between the pages of Cruden’s massive Concordance of the Holy Scriptures.

For I had begun to find the words in the books and comics repetitive. The fantasies they inspired were quite separate from the great Rabelaisian-Balzacian-Ovidian-Aristophanic romance I dreamed of making me famous one day, a romance in which the women were princesses or witches, and free agents. In my perverse alternative story they were completely managed by very kind or cruel men, all powerful aspects of ME. The cover of Love for Sale indicated how they could be connected in a single narrative. I was not as insatiable as some Turkish sultans. After the paper holocaust the slaves in my harem dwindled to six with two permanent favourites: Jane Russell as she appeared in The Outlaw film poster (still a popular male sex-icon in the fifties) and Sheena the Jungle Girl. The other four were continually replaced through my fortnightly excursions in search of yet another dirty bookshop. The absence of these shops today is another sign of changed times. Pornography that was prosecuted as criminal in 1950 can now be bought in almost any shop, and things once illegal in print are shown and openly advertized in video films. Only child pornography causes public outrage now, and I would be remembering this phase of my life without shame were it not for Stewart Doig.

I hated lying to my aunts about him. It is also impossible to pretend something for a long time without making it come partly true. Three times a week or more I had to share a desk with Stewart and guilt led me to reply less and less gruffly when he spoke to me. Perhaps loneliness also inclined me to want a partner in crime. One day I muttered to him, “Listen, I don’t want to be seen talking to you —” (this opening was so brutal that I hastily added) “— you or anybody else here. I don’t want to be thought pally with anyone in this school or in sight of this school, but would you like to go a walk with me Saturday afternoon?”

He stared and nodded. I said, “Meet me at the flagpole in the Botanic Gardens at two, right?”

Again he nodded, open-mouthed. I bent my face close to the jotter I was writing in and muttered, “If you say another word to me before then I won’t turn up.”

What a nasty wee bastard I was.

We met at the flagpole and I took him for a walk along the disused railway line running from the Botanic Gardens down to the Clyde by way of two or three derelict railway stations linked by short tunnels. I was bringing him to a dirty bookshop I had found in Scotstoun, near Victoria Park, and meant to prepare him for that by discussing sex. This was almost impossible. Stoory and his mother belonged to a Christian sect called The Brethren who disapproved of sex. Instead we passionately discussed Evil, which Stoory thought started in the Garden of Eden when Eve, tempted by Satan disguized as a snake, ate God’s forbidden fruit that gave knowledge of Good and Evil. I argued that God was wrong to punish Adam and Eve for eating the fruit, as they could not know they were doing evil until they had eaten it. And since God had created the Satanic serpent it must have been His agent. In such discussions every answer to an objection raises other objections. The desire of Stoory and me for the last word kept us arguing fervently until at last we reached the shop where I halted and interrupted him saying, “Change the subject! Some of this must interest you. It interests most men and certainly interests me.”

He stopped, stared and began blushing, but as long as I stood there he could not bring himself to look away. This gave me confidence. I said, “In my opinion none of that stuff is very wicked — I buy some every week. My people don’t care what I buy with my pocket money. Will I buy you some?”

He shook his head slightly, meaning no, and perhaps even whispered “No”. I kept bullying him until at last he admitted interest in a photographic publication called Health and Nudism, with a cover advertising an article inside called Eves on Skis. More boldly than I had entered such a shop before I went in and emerged with Health and Nudism and much more in my briefcase. I handed over two magazines in a quiet corner of Victoria Park. He pushed the lower half of them down his trousers and covered the top half with his jersey, saying miserably, “My mum will murder me if she sees any of this.”

“Have you a bedroom to yourself?” I asked, suddenly worried. He had. I suggested he hide them under his mattress or a carpet. He said, “Maybe they could go behind the coal bunker on the landing. But then I couldn’t get looking at them. Please take them back John!”

I said implacably, “Certainly not”.

“Alright, I’ll try the carpet.”

We resumed our theological discussion and separated before reaching a conclusion. Stewart’s last sad words, “Are we going a walk next Saturday?” were answered by a lofty, “I’ll think about it.” O I was nasty, nasty, nasty. And when the aunts later asked (as usual) about Stewart I said, “Frankly, I’m finding him a dreary soul. I can’t stand the Old Testament religion he goes on and on and on about.”

Nan sighed and said, “Yes, religion does have a dreary side.” She went on to say something about the state of Israel being founded by modern Socialists, people nothing like the old Children of Israel because centuries of persecution by Christians and others had taught the Jews tolerance, so they would eventually treat Muslims within their national boundaries as equals, despite the enmity of those outside it.

This was on Saturday evening. I was only slightly worried when Stoory Doig did not come to school on Monday morning because he was often off sick. But he joined the class after lunch break and alarmed me because I saw he was avoiding me. The subject was science which split the class into groups of four or less at separate benches. Stoory and me had always shared a bench by ourselves, but today the teacher (we called him Tojo because he looked slightly Japanese) said, “Make room for Doig here,” and put him on the far side of the room so I had a bench completely to myself. This was unprecedented and noticed by the rest of the class. A little later Tojo, passing near, murmured, “Feeling lonely, Tunnock?”, with a glance that may have been whimsical but made my blood run cold. For the rest of the afternoon I expected every moment to be summoned to the headmaster’s office and receive half a dozen strokes of his Lochgelly tawse,³² three on each hand. I had never been belted but had seen it done to others, and hoped the pain of the first stroke would make me faint. Nothing of the sort happened. As I left to go home some boys overtook me and asked what was up between Doig and me? I said, “Ask him.”

They said, “We did and he won’t tell.”

I hurried away from them saying, “Neither will I,” and one shouted after me, “Don’t worry, we’ll find out!”

I passed that evening sick with fear and dread, refusing to answer my aunts’ anxious questions but finally yelling, “I can’t tell you anything.”

I locked myself in the study, removed my paper harem from Cruden’s Concordance, masturbated furiously several times, burned all of it while drinking the final bottle and a half of grandfather’s sherry, then managed to put myself early to bed without falling down. I slept so soundly that I either outslept a hangover or was still drunk when I wakened at the usual hour, for I felt bright and cheerful. I had no memories of the previous day until halfway through dressing they recurred like an ugly dream. At breakfast with Nan and Nell I tried fooling myself into thinking the whole business might have no further consequences, especially since the aunts said nothing about my queer conduct the night before. In the 1950s an efficient General Post Office delivered letters twice daily, the first delivery before breakfast. Between porridge and boiled eggs (ours was always a two course breakfast) Nan took a letter from an envelope, read it more than once then said, “John, your headmaster asks me to visit him at eleven o’clock this morning. Do you know why?”

This plunged me again deep into a nightmare that made intelligent thought and connected speech impossible. I muttered over and over with increasing violence, “I can’t tell you anything” or “I will NOT go to school today,” which alarmed them. Nell, the youngest, pled with me and wept, whereupon Nan said loudly and sternly, “Very well! You will NOT go to school today as usual, but you WILL come to school and see the headmaster with us!”

She had never spoken severely to me before. I could not argue back and later, sick at heart, walked drearily school-ward between them. On one side Nell attempted some feeble, encouraging chirps but Nan stayed grimly silent, gathering her forces for a conflict whose nature she could not even guess.

The headmaster had always been remote from boys he did not punish, always austere with those who were not good at sports. He greeted my aunts with grave politeness, leaving his office desk to do so and offering them chairs before it. I was not greeted at all and left standing. He sat down and told them, “I am sorry I have had to ask you here. We have never had trouble with John before, but he has now done something that the mother of a fellow pupil brought to my attention yesterday, denouncing it as downright wicked. She provided me with such evidence that I was reluctantly forced to agree.”

He paused. Nan said coldly, “What evidence?”

From a drawer in his desk he produced and laid on top Health and Nudism with its cover photograph illustrating the Eves on Skis article, and a number of Sheena the Jungle Girl with Sheena on the cover in a state that made me shut my eyes tight. I heard him explain that according to Mrs Doig, Stewart always told the truth when confessing his sins before going to bed, and had confessed that John Tunnock had led him into temptation and had thrust these vile publications upon him. The dreadful silence following these words was broken by Nan asking crisply, “John gave these as a present to poor Stewart Doig?”

“Yes, John persuaded Doig to accept this unmitigated filth.”

“Is that all?” cried Nan in a voice so loud with gladness and relief that I opened my eyes wide and saw her lean forward and lift Health and Nudism. After glancing quickly inside she put it back saying, “My dear sir, when we received your letter this morning John became so speechless with shame and horror that I feared he had made a girl pregnant, or been discovered in some act of adolescent homosexuality, or had publically exposed his genitals. Do you really believe pictures of undressed female bodies are unmitigated filth?”

“Of course not, but trading in pornography is filth.”

“John did not trade in these publications. You admit he gave them as presents.”

“It is no mitigation for a rich boy to gain no money while deliberately using his own to corrupt a very poor boy!”

“My dear man, you are in charge of a teaching establishment founded in Queen Victoria’s reign but this is 1954. You surely know that boys over the age of twelve have adult sexual organs and appetites. My nephew John is thirteen. In a tribal society he would be earning his living and selecting a mate in a year or two. Civilization makes that impossible. Our schools must fit young adults for modern life by suppressing their natural instincts, but you cannot expect to completely suppress them, especially when they are outside your school.”

She paused and stared grimly at the headmaster who sat with hands clasped tightly on the desktop, frowning and chewing his under-lip. A short silence was broken by Nell saying faintly, “In France, I believe …”

“Yes, be quiet Nell,” said Nan. “In France until recently brothels were licensed and kept free of disease by medically-qualified municipal inspectors, so unmarried youths with some cash could easily obtain sexual relief, often with parental approval. In modern Britain, alas, most adults are still too Victorian to teach their children the facts of sex. Nell and I are examples. We read Marie Stopes and D. H. Lawrence yet were too shy to tell our nephew John about the act of penetration and use of contraceptives. Your science teachers are equally reticent. I entered this office today fearing the worst and am glad to know John has only been purchasing aids to masturbation. Every woman who washes teenage boys’ underwear knows how often they masturbate. You must have done so when you were that age. There is no point discussing something so commonplace or making a fuss about it. Modern doctors now know it does not induce blindness or soften the brain.”

This speech made me realize there was some connection between the pale grey jelly with which I stained my underpants four or five times a week and the phenomenon of birth. After quite a long silence the headmaster pointed to the two magazines and in a distant-sounding voice said, “You think these aids to masturbation should be openly passed around among my pupils?”

“No. It was silly of John to trust poor Doig with them, but please bear in mind that this was on Saturday when the boys were not legally under your administration. He will not give such publications again to Stewart Doig or anyone else — will you John?”

“No! No! Never!” I almost shouted.

“Mr MacRae, I sympathize with the dilemma Mrs Doig has forced upon you. Her complaint cannot be ignored, yet a big fuss about it will be bad for the school. You know that last week a daft Church of Scotland minister made a story for the Glasgow Evening News by denouncing pupils of Glasgow Girls’ High School for conversing with boys during lunch hour in a Sauchiehall Street espresso café. A gutter journalist could keep such a story running (as they say), if he heard of this equally innocuous Hillhead Secondary boy’s misdemeanour. He would tell easily shocked clergy and parents about him and quote their reactions under headlines with shock and sex and horror in them. He would pester you for an opinion and if you did not say you had dealt with John by savagely punishing him you would be accused of being permissive — a cant word now current in the gutter press.”

“That,” said MacRae grimly, “is what I mean to prevent.”

“But you cannot possibly use the tawse on such a good, obedient, hard-working pupil as John who has never defied his teachers and the Hillhead rulings in any way at all. We have told John that if any teacher so much as threatens him with the belt he must walk out of the school and come home. If he does so we will send him to Kilquhanity³³ — a really permissive school — what a tit-bit for journalists that would be. I expect you will write to poor Stewart Doig’s mother saying you have taken firm steps that ensure John will never again lead Stewart or anyone else into temptation. That is all you need do. Let us now agree to forget this sorry business. Please treat these publications on your desk as waste paper for their sexual aroma is not open or clean. John has never brought material like that to Hillhead Secondary and won’t give it to anyone else. You have taught him a lesson he will not forget.”

The headmaster said abruptly, “Good,” and stood up. So did my aunts. He asked what class I should be attending. Maths, I told him. He said, “Go to it then. You have a remarkable aunt, John Tunnock,” — (adding with a polite nod to Nell) — “aunts, I mean. Don’t let them down again.”

I had always loved Nan but before this interview had thought her an ordinary old lady. I was so astonished and braced by her words that I said firmly, “Thank you Sir! Never again Sir!” I stepped up to the desk and held out my hand to him. After the briefest of pauses he held out his own. We shook, then he grunted, “Off you go Tunnock.”

We walked in silence from the Headmaster’s office until, turning a corner, Nell started laughing and said, “You were wonderful Nan.”

Nan said, “Yes, I astonished myself, especially with my lie about telling John to leave school if threatened with the belt. I’m glad you recovered your confidence at the end, John, but sorry your pal has let you down.”

I wiped what felt like a wide grin off my face and said firmly, “He is no longer my pal.”

They looked at each other and sighed because they thought I should forgive Doig’s honesty to his mother, but said no more about the matter nor ever spoke of it again. They must have known that discussing masculine inclinations with a male is useless. My purchases of pornography became rarer from then on. My erotic fantasies found enough to stimulate them in maturer literature and visits to the Hillhead Salon and Grosvenor cinemas. And ever since then I have loathed the taste of sherry and drunk alcohol cautiously.

But before going home that day I approached my usual classroom very dourly, knowing the teacher at least would know I came from the headmaster’s office and why I had been summoned there. I later learned that the whole school knew why: earlier that morning in the playground Doig had been surrounded by a crowd of urgent questioners and, unused to such popularity, had told everything. I entered the room halfway through a geometry lesson and the teacher fell silent in the middle of a sentence. By an effort I think I managed to look thoughtful, even absent-minded, as I walked between staring faces to an empty desk. From my briefcase I removed my Euclid and exercise book then sat with hands clasped on them (as the headmaster had clasped his) and looked enquiringly at the teacher who, with heavy irony said, “Have I your permission to continue, Tunnock?”

“Certainly, Sir! Certainly!” I said, and from that moment my reputation as a swot and a snob ended. Classmates who thought I had been savagely belted were astonished by my composure, the rest knew something unimaginable had happened. When questioned afterwards in the playground my only words were, “MacRae is not a barbarian. We reached an agreement and he dismissed the matter as a storm in a teacup.”

When several boys asked me to supply them with dirty books and offered to pay more than the purchase price I smiled thinly and said, “No no. Once bitten, twice shy.”

But how had two gentle spinsters born in Victoria’s reign (Nan 1897, Nell 1900) become so broad-minded without me noticing before the Stewart Doig catastrophe? The 1914-18 war must have changed them as it changed many others. When Nell heard a pipe band playing on the wireless she was inclined to weep. Nan told me privately this was because in 1914 young soldiers marched behind bands between cheering crowds from Maryhill Barracks to the train that would take them on the first lap of their journey to the Flanders slaughterfields. That kind of public jubilation cannot have lasted much more than a year, even though most British private businesses profited by that war. I do not know if Nell lost a sweetheart in it, but many young women of my aunts’ and Miss Jean Brodie’s generation were deprived of potential husbands and their faith in a God praised in churches because he had made Britain victorious. Jean Brodie became a Fascist but was exceptional. More folk turned to Socialism, my aunts among them. It had broadened their minds without changing their behaviour, hence my astonishment when Nan firmly dominated a Scottish headmaster. Being Socialists they were ashamed of having a house much larger than they needed, and living upon rents from two tenement blocks in Partick inherited from their father. Before 1939 this income let them employ a cook and housemaid. When these were directed into war-work they managed without, and like most middle-class folk after the war could not afford servants. Unlike many they never complained.

“I’m sure this exercize is good for us,” Nell would murmur with a sigh as she came home heavily laden from a shopping expedition, and Nan would say sharply, “Of course! It keeps us young.”

They always referred to my mother as a superior being because she had earned her own living, and also (I think) because she had borne a child. After my first week’s work as a teacher Nan said, “Me and Nell would be two useless old women if we had not helped to educate a useful man.”

Like many Scots in those days they believed teachers, doctors and Labour politicians were the noblest works of God because such people (they believed) strove to reduce ignorance, suffering and poverty. Perhaps what kept them attending Hillhead Parish Church on Sundays was their belief that Jesus was a Socialist. In their childhood before World War I there were many Scottish Socialist Sunday schools for Protestant children; also John Wheatley, though denounced by Glasgow priests, ran a vigorous Young Men’s Socialist Catholic Society. The 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher and everything that followed astonished and worried them. I am sorry I disappointed them by never marrying, glad I never again shocked or disturbed them after the Doig affair.

Soon after that I was invited to attend a school debating society where I began voicing my aunts’ Socialist opinions, and was strongly opposed by an equally vocal Tory, Gordon MacLean. I was his social superior because my home was in a terrace house and his in a Byres Road tenement. He was my social superior because one of the school’s best athletes, and I so bad at games that the physical training teacher let me miss them. In other subjects our marks averaged out equal: he was better at maths, science, geography: I better at English, Latin, history, and we were equally bad at art and music. Our homes being near we started walking to and from school together, discussing books, films, sex but avoiding politics, which we only enjoyed discussing before an audience. Gordon, handsome and popular, had a complicated love life. Though not a boaster he liked telling me about it as much as I enjoyed hearing him. He even asked advice, which I was wise enough not to give, but I mentioned precedents for his troubles in the life of Burns, with relevant anecdotes from history and literature. He maybe found this flattering but I did not mean to flatter. His dealings with attractive girls fascinated me as much as anything I had read about, because they were real, and I knew great writers must study reality as well as books.

I was resigned to not directly knowing attractive girls. They terrified me, making speech with them impossible until I was old enough to be their father. In their presence I kept my self-respect by an aloofness suggesting (I hoped) that I was thinking of better things. This was easy for a boy whose manners had been formed by the example of nice old ladies, and whose main education was from books that had stored my mind with my grandfather’s furtive man-of-the-world knowledge. Once in the street I passed two good-looking, giggling school girls. One rushed after me and said, “John Tunnock, my pal fancies you rotten. In fact she’d like you to shag her!”

I said, “Tell her she’ll grow out of it.”

I could be friendly and at ease with girls who did not attract me, like those behind the counter of a Co-op grocery in Partick where I usually shopped. One day a new assistant, a small plump dark-haired girl, served me in a surprisingly unfriendly way, head bent to avoid seeing my face and never speaking a word. When I went there next week the other assistants shouted, “Terry! Here’s John,” and let her attend me. I could not imagine why. Her behaviour was still unfriendly. The fourth time this happened she suddenly raised her head and with the manner of someone flinging themselves off a cliff said, “What do you do in the evenings?”

I saw a round, pleasant, pleading face with lipstick not efficiently applied. I said, “Not much,” and rushed away trembling as if from an electric shock. Terry found me attractive! I tried bringing her image into erotic fantasies and failed. She was too real. For nearly a year I visited the Co-op meaning to ask her out to the Salon or Grosvenor and each time the shock of seeing her struck me dumber than she was. I could not imagine what I could say about Burns, Rabelais etcetera to her that would interest Terry. I would hand her a note of the items we wanted and before leaving with them would mutter, “Thanks.” One day when I entered someone shouted, “Terry, here’s John!” and she came over and served me in a straightforward friendly way, like the other assistants, but perhaps with a slight air of triumph. She had grown out of me, and was happy to show it. I knew I had missed an opportunity. Forty years passed before there was another, though something else may have delayed my maturity.

The Holiday Fellowship guest houses where we vacationed had originally been the country seats of minor aristocrats or rich Victorian merchants, the sort of country houses that after World War 2 the very rich kept wailing that they could no longer afford because the Welfare State was forcing them to pay iniquitous taxes. Nan told me that when Britain became truly Socialist under Harold Wilson (a prime minister in whom she had faith for nearly a year) every great country house would be run by the Holiday Fellowship as guest homes for The People or the elderly. I loved them for their large, unkempt, usually neglected gardens and big libraries of books, none published later than the middle thirties. I also liked the custom of the staff, who were usually young foreign girls, sharing the guests’ lounge, quiet room and outdoor excursions when they were not working. Younger guests liked helping waitresses and kitchen staff clear tables and wash and dry dishes after meals, a custom mostly enjoyed by young unmarried males, among whom I was always the youngest. At Minard Castle on Loch Fyne one summer I became sweet on a couple of lovely German girls. Leni was tall, slim and dark haired. Ute was plump, blonde and not much taller than me so I fancied her most, though I never met her apart from Leni. I later realized they encouraged my friendship as a way of avoiding older, more sexually knowing youths, but they certainly encouraged it. Their questions disclosed that I meant to be a writer and they saw nothing incredible in that. Leni started talking about Goethe which I thought remarkable, because I was sure no Scottish teenage girls liked great writers. I remember a sunny day when the three of us climbed Ben Nevis at the tail of a walking party. They asked questions about Scotland and my answers naturally led me to quote various verses by Burns that seemed to entertain them. More questions drew from me details of his private life, which Leni said showed he was a free spirit like Goethe, then Ute said, mischievously, “And your sex life, John?”

I felt we were talking like unusually friendly equals so said promptly, “It hardly exists. I only discovered the connection between sexual intercourse and birth a year or two ago through my affair with poor Doig.”

“An affair? With a poor dog?” said Leni, grimacing incredulously.

“No! Dee — oh — eye — jee, Doig, a boy I knew.”

They wanted to hear about that so I told them. At the end both went into fits of laughter through which Ute said, “O you funny little boy!”

It would be wrong to say I felt she had slapped my face. I felt like someone happily using a band saw that in a split second takes off his hand. Shock would at first prevent pain, he would only feel astonished that his hand was lost for ever. My shock must have shown because at once Ute apologized, but the damage had been done. I turned and walked away downhill from these climbers so never saw the summit of Ben Nevis. I am told it is a rocky plateau, a field of boulders with patches of snow in odd nooks even in the hottest summers, and on a clear day like that one I could have seen every high summit between England and the Orkneys.

After finishing in the evenings I began trying to turn my fantasies and learning into a single continuous story, always burning the results because what I wrote was obviously the work of an adolescent schoolboy. These stunted efforts still made me more of a writer than our teachers, who gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thomas Hardy and only two books by Scots. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, set in the 12^th century, told how Norman conquerors and Saxon commoners are at last united as Englishmen — what a good lesson for a Scottish school child! Scott’s best novels have Scottish folk using local speech that teachers and examiners wanted us to forget. The other novel, John Buchan’s Prester John, told of a Scots minister’s son, working for the British Empire in Africa, who thwarts a black revolt planned by a black African who has fooled the white bosses by pretending to be Christian.

Gordon MacLean left Glasgow because his dad got a job elsewhere. I did not much miss him, having now other friends who also enjoyed discussing their emotional problems with an interested listener who seemed to have none. Before Gordon left he enlarged my political views without intending to. Hugh MacDiarmid’s son, a boy of nineteen, had been jailed for refusing to do his National Service,³⁴ because the 1707 Treaty of Union with England said no Scottish soldier could be ordered overseas against his will, and MacDiarmid’s son refused to fight for the remains of the British Empire in Kenya, Crete or Malaysia, Ulster and other places he might have been sent. Gordon and I agreed his attitude was ridiculous. We thought the Treaty of Union, having merged Scotland’s parliament with the English one, was now an obsolete document. We had no wish for Scottish self-government. Gordon believed Scottish people could not rule themselves; I agreed because Britain had achieved a Welfare State through the efforts of a parliamentary Labour Party founded by Scottish Keir Hardie. I also thought Scotland and England had equal representation in London — my general knowledge was good, but I had no head for numbers. Gordon explained that England had ten times more MPs in Westminster than Scotland, a fair arrangement (he pointed out) since England’s population had always been ten times greater. I at once saw that a minority of Scots MPs in the midst of England’s richest city must be constantly outvoted to benefit the southern kingdom. For many years this did not stop me voting Labour but from then on I began to see how the Union with England had warped Scotland’s institutions, especially schools and universities.

At Gilmorehill our lecturers were mostly Oxford or Cambridge graduates, some of them Scots.³⁵ They assumed ordinary students like me would stay in Scotland to teach the next generation what we had been taught, while brighter ones — their elite — would find work in England, former British colonies or the U.S.A. Bright Scots had been doing so for centuries, and bright people will want to please foreign masters by conforming to them, so the only tutor who mentioned Burns called him “a poor man’s Alexander Pope”. But they agreed that Wordsworth at his best, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats had not just been naytcha poets but (like Burns) had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of universal liberty, equality, fraternity. This enthusiasm was presented as forgivable but out of date, since Britain had now all the liberty, equality and fraternity it needed. I also learned that most great modern poets thought monetary greed had made life ugly. Ezra Pound turned Fascist because he thought only a dictator like Mussolini could make bankers fund important public works — Yeats wanted a nation where heroic landlords ruled admiring peasants — T.S. Eliot was nostalgic for the 17^th century Anglican Church where peace with God came more easily — Auden was a bouncy English public-school Communist, until World War 2 converted him to something like Eliot’s Christianity. Auden also said poetry made nothing happen and our professors agreed.³⁶

I remember one mocking Shelley for writing that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton had changed people’s minds more than kings, conquerors and lawgivers, therefore poets were mankind’s unacknowledged legislators. Shelley (said this professor gleefully) was an atheist, Socialist, pacifist and vegetarian, and none of his writings had persuaded anyone to become these; like other great writers Shelley had found the raw materials of art in the world around him, and what he made of them were fine poems without social consequences. I wish I had stood up and announced that Hitler, Stalin and every successful tyrant understood literature better than Auden and my professor because dictators banned and burned imaginative writing, shot or jailed poets, drove them to suicide like Mayakovsky, into exile like Brecht.³⁷ Instead I timidly pointed out that Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had social consequences — it had been banned in Germany and France because young men, disappointed in love, had copied Werther by shooting themselves.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said, chuckling, “Yes, emotional foreigners are unhealthily influenced by literature, but sane people are not. Good conversation, said Dean Swift, is life’s only sure source of happiness. I agree. We who have no interest in football find our happiest topics in books and art which are, after all, civilization’s finest blossoms.”

This thought-annihilating smugness did not silence me at first. I submitted an essay on Hamlet saying the plot was clumsily cobbled together in the hasty way Ben Jonson (a more careful playwright) deplored in Shakespeare. Hamlet is sent to England after stabbing Polonius but brought back just in time for Ophelia’s funeral by inexplicable pirates, pirates who capture his ship, let it sail on but return him to Denmark since the plot needs him there. Hamlet keeps postponing his revenge to the end of the last scene because Shakespeare, like all first class writers except Kipling, found the revenge motive too infantile to interest him, having sickened himself of it in his first and worst play Titus Andronicus. Of course all the Hamlet speeches are so entertaining that critics and audiences enjoy the play without question, accepting what happens as they accept the accidents of ordinary life. My tutor called me to his office and said, “Are you a Levisite?”

I told him I did not know what Levisites were.

“But you have read D.H. Lawrence’s opinion of Hamlet.”

“No!” I told him.

“Then where did this drivel come from?” he asked, waving the essay in my face. I said he had asked for an essay on Hamlet and I had written what I thought. He said, “You are here to learn — not think. Are you receiving a grant?”

Like most students in those days I was receiving a grant since the 1944 Butler Acts that paid the fees of working class students would never have been passed by parliament if the middle classes had not also benefited. The bastard said, “I do not see why my taxes should be used to support a student who does not understand the purpose of a university.”

I found this professor and others had written introductions to most of the plays and poems they examined us upon, so afterwards I pleased them by repeating their opinions without regard to the original texts. Luckily my main subjects were Latin and Greek where commentary was less important than accurate translation. I did so well in them that the Snell Foundation nearly sent me to Balliol, Oxford, where my life would have become very different. But I helped a fellow student write a very funny, damaging review of Professor Fordyce’s outstandingly bad edition of Catullus.³⁸ The review was printed anonymously in G.U.M. but Fordyce was astute enough to work out who the authors were, and had enough power in the Senate to make sure we had no chance of a high academic post in Oxford or Scotland.

One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyll Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second University year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19^th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:³⁹

A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other while smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials floated on the surface of the globes, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where red-hot or where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this world of ours was of gases no life could breathe: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. The world’s crust thickened. The surface cooled until rain water could lie there without being scalded into steam. At last a sea of water covered the world except where a rocky continent, thicker than the ground under the sea, rose above it near the equator.⁴⁰

The molten minerals under the Earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long submarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling up through volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by the weight of colder water over a mile-deep above it. In the hottest depths, in a broth of dissolved chemicals, droplets started circulating. They grew larger when they touched and merged with similar droplets, but when this made them too big for their skins they split in two and went on separately. Such droplets evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish them and help them reproduce, having motive power to reach for them. The evolution from these chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory. It has to happen first in deep water because in those days lethal ultra-violet sunlight penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine depths the sun’s rays and Earth’s heat were reduced, yet still strong enough to generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life on Earth before today.

Tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals in the earliest sea, then bigger ones started also feeding on the smaller, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose above the sea, mixed with the atmosphere above and began screening out the lethal ultra-violet rays. This let larger living things evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen until the air above was two per cent oxygen, which let a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering rivers, lakes, swamps, plains in the first great continent. Lichens, mosses, fungi were followed by primitive insects and those segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper Earth, fluid and solid, came to hold living things of every size — plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the oceans, — crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil, — herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land, — spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere. It is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy first continent.

The Earth’s interior moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in the molten rock under the solid crust always moving huge plates of crust apart on one side, and ramming them together on the other. Mountain ranges are raised when one plate is forced over another, then rain, wind, frost and lichen starts wearing the mountains down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens and valleys, rivers wash grit onto plains, spreading it and mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new soil. Meteor bombardments killed great sections of zoo-sphere through sudden global winters and ice ages, spreading seas have drowned them, the world’s shifting crust has covered them with new rock making underground layers of coal and metal, reservoirs of oil and gas. The world’s subterranean currents broke the earliest continent into smaller ones and drove them so far apart that they joined again on the other side of the world near the south pole. This again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though not in the order we know them at first. Some of the oceans between them widened, some narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying India collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest and youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of more ancient mountains.

When the Atlantic was a much narrower sea, the North American and Baltic landmasses had offshore islands with the same geology: granite, the world’s oldest rock, and granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff, which is called metamorphic. The Eurasian landmass edged up from the south west, with offshore islands made of mainly sedimentary rock: chalk, clay and limestone. Slow convulsions jammed the north eastern islands together and rammed them onto a larger, more level coalition of the southern islands, creating an archipelago visited in the 4^th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Nearly sixty years before Christ’s birth it was invaded by Romans who learned most of their science from the Greeks and Latinised the name into Britannia. This happened because an unusual beast had appeared half a million years earlier.

Different thinkers have called Homo Sapiens a featherless biped, a tool-using animal, and “the glory, jest and riddle of the world”. We are the only creature who drink when not thirsty, eat when not hungry, and take twelve years or more to become adult. One year old humans totter on unsteady legs when horses of that age walk, gallop and feed themselves in open fields. One year old birds have hatched, learned to fly, mated, built nests and begun feeding their own children because birds, bees, ponies etcetera mostly act instinctively; human instincts are so weakened that our actions have to be learned through imitation of adults (starting with mum and dad) who act differently from each other. This forces self-conscious choice called learning upon us, hence our prolonged immaturity. Adults are usually compensated for this by being ready for sexual intercourse all year round. Conscious choice has made us capable of new inventions — lighting fires, shaping sharp-edged tools, and sewing needles — so since homo sapiens learned to stand upright and use our hands in Africa we have kept a common body pattern by changing our minds, habits and societies. The Arctic ice cap once expanded south until most of Britain and adjacent lands were under a mile-thick layer of it. This thawed, retreated and returned, altering climates and sea levels. Other species were killed off or survived by evolving different bodies and instincts. Our kind survived by killing other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skin into tools and clothing. As we spread around the globe some details of our physique changed a little. Hunters in the frozen north grew paler and plumper, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height grew to six feet or more. Poor food supplies made us dwarfish, led to immigration, warfare and murder, for we lacked the instinct that stops other beasts killing helpless members of their own species. Settled farmers on Chinese plains grew extra inches of gut to draw more nourishment from their rice, yet they too are of the same species as Inuits in Alaska, Pigmies in the Congo, Cleopatra, Robert Burns, Mahatma Ghandi and Condoleezza Rice. The big differences between races, nations and tribes come from folk learning to live in very different landscapes. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled and most ancient nation. A smaller, equally self-centred nation was made by layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though a similar language.

Like all efficient imperialists Romans divided lands they invaded along natural borders. They called the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia. Albion was very woody and marshy but had few natural barriers impeding the march of Roman legions. The tribes of Albion that joined to fight those were defeated, then the level parts of the south British mainland (all Albion except Wales) were planted over by Roman camps. These were connected by well-built roads to each and to Londinium, Britain’s first big city. The camps were sited in fertile places and grew to be centres of still-thriving towns: Bath, York, Lincoln, Carlisle and other cities with names ending in chester or caster. The broad, fertile, generally level nature of Albion with its road network explains why it fell quickly to later invaders after Rome pulled out — first fell to Saxons and Angles who renamed it Angle-land or England, then to King Canute’s Danish empire, then in 1066 to the Norman French. It explains why London-on-Thames became the capital of the English state, and why the the Bishop of Canterbury has been the High Priest of England since 598, and why England had only two universities in market towns near London until 1828.

Any map shows Scotland’s difference from England what it originally was — several different islands jammed together. They are so narrowly joined that the Romans found it convenient to wall Caledonia off. Scotland’s grotesquely irregular coastline shows the tip of the most southerly peninsula is only twelve miles from the Irish coast; the nearest neighbour on the European mainland is Norway, with the Orkney and Shetland islands like stepping stones between. Inside Scotland’s ragged coastline the glens and plains are so separated by highland sea-lochs and mountain ranges, by lowland moors and firths, that cultivation produced very little surplus wealth before the mid 18^th century. The natural barriers made conquest of the whole impossible for invaders, and a united Scotland almost impossible for the natives. It was four kingdoms, each an unstable union of fiercely independent clans, each with a capital city on the rock of an extinct volcano. Dumbarton (meaning Fort of the Britons) was capital of Strathclyde, a mainly Welsh-speaking kingdom that included Galloway and the west coast down to Barrow in Furness. Edinburgh was capital of a nation in east Scotland, south of the Firth of Forth and partly English-speaking, for it had been part of Northumbria before Duke William conquered all England up to the Tyne. Fife and the north west, with much of the Highlands, belonged to a people called Picts whose language is unknown and whose capital was on Craig Phadraig, Inverness. The Scottish king’s nation, Dalriada, had its capital on Dunadd in Argyllshire, where the Scots tribes, Gaelic-speaking incomers, had arrived from Ireland. It is also pertinent that Shetland, Orkney, and Sutherland for centuries belonged to Norway and there were Scandinavian settlements all round the place, though that was also frequent in England.

In days when kings were hardly anything but warlords, King Kenneth mac Alpin of Dalriada gave the Caledonian clanjamfrie the name of Scotland by conquest of some neighbours and alliances with others. That Scotland continued as a nation, however, is an English achievement, because ever since then the government of the bigger, richer nation tried and usually failed to make Scotland one of its counties — a kind of Cornwall or Yorkshire. Scotland’s people have never been more than a tenth of England’s, so why did England’s far greater military power fail to incorporate us before Oliver Cromwell’s brief success under the Commonwealth? Why did Scotland’s three centuries of being Scotlandshire never quite destroy her independent culture? Why is she at last bound to win the same freedom as Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Iceland from Denmark?⁴¹

Robert Louis Stevenson gave the simplest answer when he noted that Gaelic-speaking Highlanders regard English-speaking Lowlanders with a suspicion the Lowlander is inclined to return unless both meet in English company where they at once feel like blood brothers. Why? There are many partial answers. One is the comparative poverty ensuring that for centuries the Scots gentry, whether Lowland lairds or Highland chiefs, did not speak wholly differently from their lowly employees, unlike England whose chief officials still speak a mandarin dialect learned in expensive private schools like Rugby, Marlborough etcetera. Around 1370 a French traveller visiting Scotland thought it remarkable that if a knight rode his horse over a Scot’s grain field an angry peasant ran up and cursed him. No peasant dared do that in rich lands where the nobility had hundreds of workers so could have one flogged or hung without loss of income. Scots aristocrats were mostly too poor to damage crops on which they and their peasants depended. In the late 19^th century Robert Louis Stevenson was dismayed by how completely his English friends behaved as if their servants and other low-class folk did not exist. Such national differences may be thought obsolete relics, and should be forgotten. This book will explain otherwise, not by inflaming anti-English sentiment, but by showing how local conditions have created a unique culture, so a separate government has always been required by those who share this land, these conditions.

The following chapters explain how Scottish people’s land, rocks, soil distribution, mineral resources, waters and those great potential dynamos the sea lochs, ensure that all who live and work here come to feel part of it like the Irish who came to found Dalriada and later fled here from the potato famine — the Anglo-Saxons who escaped across the border from Duke William and Margaret Thatcher into the Lothians — Jews driven here by Czarist and Nazi pogroms — Italians by the phylloxera epidemic that destroyed their vineyards — Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and other former subjects of the British empire, together with refugees from wars Britain has fought since then and who are now wickedly labelled asylum seekers. I believe that all who stay to live, work and vote here will invigorate this nation that has always been a colloquium of different people, as every sane nation must be.

Near the start of the 19^th century there was a brief truce in the commercial warfare that France and Britain had fought from the reign of Queen Anne to the Battle of Waterloo. Gilray, a popular artist, depicted two statesmen enjoying a little supper, their meal being the world laid out like a big plum pudding on a table between them. At one side small swarthy Napoleon enthusiastically sliced western Europe onto his plate with a sabre; on the other Britain’s Prime Minister, tall, thin, pointy-nosed William Pitt, quietly helped himself to most of the rest of the globe. In 1815 Napoleon’s empire ended at Waterloo but the British King George III still nominally ruled Ireland, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, India, many Chinese and African ports: also Hanover, a German state that was his family’s homeland. The British Empire was now the richest and biggest in the world, without a single competitor, but the British did not yet trust their monarchs enough to give them the title of Emperor. Poor George was now incurably mad so the Prince Regent performed the crown’s few legaly required ceremonies. In 1816 Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was first performed, and Jane Austen’s Emma and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan were published.

Widdicombe Crescent, Bath, was then a terrace of smart houses in that most aristocratic of British holiday resorts and here a little boy had a pain in his side. It brought tears to his eyes and sweat to a brow he pressed against the cool glass of a window. Behind him a doctor told his widowed mother that he could help the boy no further: cold compresses had brought no relief; purging and reduced diet had merely weakened the lad; so had bloodletting which must not continue, despite the temporary alleviation it induced.

“I will give drops to ensure he sleeps at night, Mrs Prince. I could give more tincture of opium to reduce his pains when wakeful, but more will stupefy him. I fear that, like older people, he should learn that pain must be lived with.”

“I have told him so many times, Doctor, but he seems to want me to bear it for him. Two other sons, three daughters and a paying guest leave me no time for that,” said his mother.

“There are physicians in Bath who charge higher fees, Mrs Prince, but none I can honestly recommend. In London you might find one who would prescribe opening him surgically —” (the boy whimpered; they glanced at him) “— I do not advize it. If he were female and older his pains might be due to hysteria, which is incurable. As things are I advize you to let nature take its course.”

The doctor left. Without turning the boy said in a small voice, “Mamma, let me go to Miss Freeman.”

“You spent most of yesterday with her, Henry.”

“She helps me. She’s nice to me.”

“I would be nice to you too if I had nothing else to do all day, but we will go to her since you insist. And remember, she is a papist. You must pay no attention if she talks to you about the Pope, or confessors, or transmutation, or other foreign things.”

They went upstairs and on the first floor landing tapped a door; it was opened by a plump, hectically flushed young woman wearing a black dress and thin gold necklace with small pendant cross.

“I dislike troubling you again Miss Freeman, but the doctor is helpless and Henry loves being with you — ”

“ — I love to have him — ”

“But you too are an invalid Miss Freeman!”

“Which is why Henry and I understand each other. Come here Henry James.”

She held out her arms. The boy ran into them and pressed his face to her stomach. She caressed the back of his neck, smiling fondly and saying, “Leave us Mrs Prince, we will refer our troubles to Jesus.”

As the door closed she drew him to a chaise longue beside a small table on which lay an open box of chocolates, a Bible and a standing ebony crucifix. Fixed to the crucifix with gold-headed pins was a white ivory figure crowned with gold thorns. She sat down asking, “Where does it hurt Henry James?”

“Here,” he said, kneeling at her feet, pressing his side with one hand and clasping her knee with the other.

“Yes! That is where the cruel Romans thrust their spear into the flesh of Lord Jesus on the cross — ” (Her fingertip touched the side of the ivory figure.) “ — do you see the wound? He must have felt as you do.”

“Did he?” said the boy staring.

“Worse! See those nails through his hands and feet and the crown of cruel thorns. And Jesus was God’s beloved son.”

“But I’m not, why should I be hurt?”

“Because,” Miss Freeman gently whispered, “you are an evil little sinner, Henry. But another sinner much worse than you, a wicked robber was crucified beside Jesus, and loved Him, and that night the robber sat in Heaven at God’s right hand.”

“I’m afraid of going to Hell, Miss Freeman.”

“Where you will go Henry, if you don’t love Jesus.”

“How can I love anybody when I’m hurt?”

“That is how God tests our love, Henry. You must forget your wicked fleshly body Henry. You must think only of Christ, and how he desires you. Listen! This is what Christ is saying to you. . and sit beside me, Henry.”

He sat on the sofa, leaning against her side, staring at the chocolates.

“You may take one,” she said, lifting and opening the Bible at a page marked by an embroidered ribbon, “Listen Henry, listen. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.”

“I’m not a sister Miss Freeman, I’m a brother,” said the boy indistinctly, for he was chewing.

“I know that, Henry, but when God — who is also Jesus — loves somebody he talks to them as if they are women, even when they aren’t.”

“Why?”

Miss Freeman, slightly puzzled, said, “Perhaps because women are. . usually. . more lovely than men. I’m not sure. So just listen Henry, and remember, Christ is really speaking to you in the words of Solomon, that great wise king. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honey comb: honey and milk are under thy tongue. . Is that not lovely Henry? — ” (she stroked his hair) “— and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. Leb. . a. . non. What a delicious word!”

She sighed happily. The boy said drowsily, “I’m feeling a lot better, Miss Freeman.” She said, “So am I. Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”

Nearly twenty years later the wallpaper in that room had been changed twice and Miss Freeman was white-haired and stouter. She lay on the chaise longue with closed eyes still smiling fondly, her head resting on a flowery big cushion, her feet on a smaller one. Henry James Prince, a pale young man with a careworn, patient face, sat on an easy chair nearby, one leg flung over the other to support the Bible. He was soberly dressed and reading out a favourite passage in a low, sweet but unemphatic voice that allowed full value to the beauty of each word.

“Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor,” he said. “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two roes that are twins. Thy neck is like a tower of ivory, thine eyes are like the fish-pools of Heshbon; the hair of thine head like purple; the King is held in the galleries. How fair and pleasant art thou O love for delights!”

Miss Freeman sighed, opened her eyes, clipped to the bridge of her nose the pince nez she now needed to see things near her and said, “O Henry James, I’m glad your mother is letting you train for the church at last.”

He closed the Bible and placed it on the table by the crucifix saying gravely, “She would not have done so were you not paying the fees. She thought that having one son a clergyman was sufficient.”

“But everything about you speaks of God! Your voice, your manners, your. . hands.”

He smiled, clasping the hand she stretched out to him and saying, “You’ve forgotten my soul, Martha.”

“No I haven’t,” she said tenderly, “and your new clothes suit you wonderfully.”

Said the principal, “Welcome, gentlemen, to St David’s College, Lampeter. We don’t know each other yet, but when we separate four years from now I hope we shall be firm friends.”

He was middle aged, robust, bland, ruddy and stood, teacup in hand, his back to a sideboard supporting an arrangement of silver plate. On the wall behind hung framed engravings of the Holy Family by Raphael and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam; before him was a room of new students. Some wore dark clothes and seemed uneasy with the teacups and saucers they held; a few wore more fashionably-cut clothes with notes of colour in the waistcoats, and these students held their tea things more nonchalantly. Henry James Prince, though most soberly dressed, handled cup and saucer with the ease of the more obviously fashionable.

“Ours is not a venerable institution, gentlemen,” said the Principal, “and maybe some of you regret that your parents or guardians could not afford the fees demanded by Oxford. Speakin’ as a former senior wrangler I can honestly say that you are better off here. Oxford is now infested by sophistical vipers who have turned against the mother who bore them — the Church of England — and degraded themselves to the worship of saints, angels, fumigations and all kinds of unmanly rot. You’re well out of it.

“A dangerous age, gentlemen! Mad messiahs are springin’ up like mushrooms. Meanwhile the leaders of the rabble are barkin’ ‘Reform! Reform!’ like a lot of rabid dogs, as if unemployment, high prices and occasional starvation among the masses are things a government can cure. But I mustn’t bore you with politics. You don’t want that, hey?”

He cocked his head, smiling at the audience who mostly smiled back and murmured agreement.

“You’ll find this excellent walkin’ and climbin’ country, gentlemen, and we have a very decent little trout-stream in the grounds. So study hard, and learn how to pray and preach and perhaps learn to practise what you preach, hey?” — (Another pause for smiles and amused murmurs) — “But gentlemen, don’t neglect the body God gave you. Mens sano incorpore sane. A healthy mind and healthy body will help you avoid the pitfalls of papish superstition on one side and the blue devils of Methodist fanaticism on the other. And a word of warning. Many of you are Welsh so know how quickly gossip travels in rural areas. I do not want to hear of anyone drinkin’ in a local pothouse before he has learned to carry his liquor like a gentleman.”

Nothing in the Principal’s speech had amused Henry James Prince and the widespread approving response left him feeling lonely. The first lectures and the communal evening meal left him lonelier still. He went despondently to his room. Though as small as a monk’s cell it was plainly but sufficiently carpeted, wallpapered and furnished. A small fireplace had a grate with coals laid above sticks and papers. He knelt on the hearthrug, lit the fire and was about to continue kneeling in prayer when someone tapped the door. He opened it and saw a young man with a creased, leathery, solemn face who said, “Good evening. My name is Arthur Rees. My room is next door.”

“Henry James Prince,” said Prince, bowing slightly. “Would you care to take tea with me?”

“Yes thanks,” said Rees entering, “but what I’d like most is a word with you. We seem the oldest of the new lot.”

“I am twenty-six,” said Prince closing the door. “I trained as a doctor before deciding to come here. Please sit down.”

He placed a kettle of water on a hob attached to the grate and poked the fire. Rees said, “I was a seaman.”

“Indeed?”

“A sailor in peril on the deep. Trivial danger of broken bones and drowning of course, but I encountered worse perils. Know what I mean?”

“I suppose you refer to sins. As a doctor I have encountered most forms of evil, Mr Rees, so know the sin most dangerous to seamen. Not drunkenness, eh?” asked Prince, smiling thinly. “Not drunkenness, no. O no.”

“Since you are obviously earnest about your soul’s salvation I am very pleased to meet you.”

Prince brought utensils from a corner cupboard and made tea. As they drank it Rees said, “If you will allow the question, Mr Prince, what brings you here?”

“Many things, Mr Rees. As a child I was taught to love God by an unusually sincere Christian. Then my medical work in London and Bath showed me how little can be done to help sick bodies, how much is not done to help sick souls. I also became very ill, nearly died last year and was advized to recuperate through rest and a change of air. I went north and lived for a while with my brother — he is a vicar at Shincliffe, near Durham. This experience shocked me more than my recent surgical operation! No doubt in London and Bath I had met many infidels, but the churches where I worshipped were always well attended. My brother’s church was never more than a quarter full. The colliers in his parish openly despized it. They drank deep, swore loudly and fought hard. Their Sunday mornings were chiefly spent in brutal fisticuffs that continued quarrels begun in previous Sundays. Men loved their puppies more than their wives, who were regularly beaten as often as the men got drunk. Their employers were no better, for such gentry spent the Sabbath shooting, fishing or riding to hounds. I wish I could say that my brother’s parishioners hated him for being a true Christian. Alas, I cannot say so. The Church, I saw, stood in dire need of sincere priests. Something I could not deny urged me to become one. That something — I hope and pray — was God’s Holy Spirit. What brought you here, Mr Rees?”

“My sins.”

“O?”

There was a silence then Rees added, “I fear I am more naturally vicious than most men — certainly most of my appetites are vicious. By frequent prayer I hardly ever indulge them, but have known for years that my one chance of salvation is in coming closer to God. None of the ministers I have so far met have brought me closer. By saving every spare penny I can now pay the fees of this college which may teach me to come closer.”

“May I shake your hand, Rees?” said Henry, and they shook hands warmly.

Then Rees asked diffidently, “What’s your impression of the other students, Prince?”

“I am vexed by their levity, Rees. God forgive me if I’m wrong but some seem educating for the stage rather than the pulpit.”

“Dry bones! Dry bones the lot of them!”

“God can give life to dry bones,” said Prince, reprovingly.

“Yes, we must pray for that.”

“Will we pray for it now?”, said Prince, staring at him. Rees, nodding, smiled radiantly back. Prince chuckled and nodded also. They knelt facing each other on the hearthrug, half a yard apart, heads bowed, hands clasped on stomachs. In a low voice Prince asked, “Shall I begin? After The Lord’s Prayer?” “Yes, after The Lord’s Prayer.”

They said that prayer in unison and then, with Prince leading, spoke alternately as the spirit moved them, begging Almighty God to give special help to the moral state of the college, to its Principal, its lecturers, its students and, lastly, to themselves.

At first their prayers had no obvious effect. All students observed a decent gravity during communal prayers, services and lectures, but between these facetious levity was the most obvious mood. The tutor of Greek, despite a dry manner, did not discourage some levity in his classroom. He said, “Thucydides now describes the sporting customs of the Spartans. Will you translate Mr Rees? Egoom-no-they-san tay protoy kai —?”

With much hesitation Rees said, “They were the first also who. . stripped themselves and. . pulling off their clothes in public, anointed themselves with fat for, for, for athletic exercizes. Whereas. . formerly. . even in the Olympic Games the wrestlers used to fight wearing. . exontes, exontes. .”

“Skirts,” said the tutor, “Girdles. Belts.”

Hurriedly Rees muttered, “. . used to fight with belts round their loins which shows that the primitive Greeks lived like the barbarians of the present day.”

“Yes,” said the tutor urbanely, “The custom of sporting nudity was started by Orsippus of Megara, who accidentally lost his girdle in the Olympic stadium and consequently won the race. Greek notions of barbarism you see, were in some matters the reverse of ours. You look as if you wish to say something, Mr Prince.”

“Yes. Can you tell me sir how knowledge of Greek depravity will help our study to administer Christ’s Gospels?”

“I can. You are here to learn the original language of the Gospels, Mr Prince, which was first written in Greek. But it was written by Jews whose Greek dialect, though adequate, was provincial, and to understand a language well it is always wise to start by studying those who wrote it best. You should therefore learn to construe Aristotle and Thucydides before giving your minds to the less definite subject of pastoral theology. Anything pernicious you acquire from these great writers and reasononers is your responsibility, not mine, and so Mr Prince please translate what Thucydides says about early cities, piracy and the foundations of capital.”

After a pause Prince said in a low voice, “I will not.”

“Oho! It goes against your conscience, sir?”

“Sir, it does.”

“Well, being an Anglican Christian I have no wish to martyr anyone. Mr Thomas, since Mr Prince will not or cannot oblige me, will you?”

Mr Thomas did.

The discipline of St David’s College was meant to be tighter than at the old English universities but the staff were tolerant former Oxford and Cambridge men who let through most students who paid their fees and subscribed to the thirty-nine articles ratified by the English Protestant parliament of 1571. Other students came to admire Prince and join him and Rees in private prayer meetings. This offended nobody at first.

One evening the Principal presided at a dinner where wine was served. Conversation grew louder, laughter more raucous, Prince and Rees remained the only students whose gravity was not impaired. At last the Principal rose to his feet and called for attention. Waiters deftly, assiduously topped up wine glasses in the silence and short speech that followed.

“The Epicureans among you may have noticed that our dinner this evening was perhaps more to their taste than usual, hey? A little more lavish, hey?” — (there were murmurs of “Yes yes”, “Indeed”, “Hear hear”) — “I cannot pretend not to know that rumour has spread the reason for this festivity. Yes. This morning my wife presented me with a little daughter and I am pleased to inform you that the infant and her excellent mother are in the pink of condition. She is to be christened Maria Augusta Ollivant. Are your glasses fully primed? Then please be upstanding, gentlemen, to drink a health to Maria Augusta Ollivant.”

Everyone but Prince stood up, glass in hand. Rees, staring open mouthed at Prince, slowly put his wine glass down. Others took longer to notice Prince, the Principal being last. He stared hard at the seated figure then said softly but distinctly, “Mr. . Mr, er. . Mr Prince, will you not drink my daughter’s health sir?”

“Dr Ollivant,” said Prince loudly, “I would rather pray for your daughter’s soul. I will gladly go down on my knees to do so here and now! Yes, here and now!”

He pushed his chair back and knelt on the floor with hands clasped on table edge and chin resting on them, then jerked his head back and cried, “I call upon the rest of you to join me! I really think it will be best.”

The company stared and buzzed at each other. Rees, torn between normal manners and Prince’s example, compromized by sitting down. After an astonished moment the Principal again spoke quietly but distinctly.

“Mr Prince, we said grace at the start of our meal. It would be impious to mingle prayers with our wine.”

“That was not Christ’s opinion, Dr Ollivant.”

There were murmurs and cries of “Shame!” and “O come now!” until the Principal said fiercely, “Stand up sir and tell me why you refuse to drink my daughter’s health.”

Prince stood and waited for silence before saying, “I have a low opinion of what the world calls good health, sir. As a doctor I have watched at the bedside of many dying sinners. In a few cases their last moments were their holiest. I have often been very ill, and have lost blood in a painful operation, and I know that nothing in this world is dependable except an abject faith in God. That is why I wish to be a clergyman. I find that as my health improves I grow proud, carnal, independent. The flesh becomes mighty in me, I feel I will never die. Tonight most of us here — perhaps you too Dr Ollivant — have forgotten you are going to die. You forget that the eye of an angry God is upon you, following you with a vengeance that you can never escape! Yet you are training to be priests or are priests already! Will you not join me in praying for the soul of a newborn child? Yes, and for the soul of every one of us?”

He knelt down as before — Rees also knelt down — while a murmur of protest that began near the end of his speech became an uproar. The Principal silenced it by announcing, “You are excused this company, Mr Prince, and so is anyone else who cannot reconcile Christianity with the friendly customs of English gentlemen.”

Prince stood up, bowed to the Principal and walked out. Rees and four others followed. George Thomas, a dandy student who had hitherto been foremost in joking about Henry James Prince and his followers, caused most astonishment by muttering an inarticulate apology and hurrying out after. The Principal said dryly, “There seems to be a little college inside our college.”

But Anglican tolerance was such that the careers of students in Prince’s meetings in no way suffered, for in due course those who attended were, like others at St David’s College, free to promote their kind of Protestant Christianity among the lower classes around Lampeter where Methodism had a strong foothold and Roman Catholicism a feeble one.

B^R. PRINCE’S JOURNAL;⁴⁴

May 7^th — Glory be to Thee, O God! A day to be much remembered. The 7^th May two years ago (1834) the Lord in Mercy delivered me from the bondage of Satan at half past four in the evening after many months of dreadful suffering under the conviction of sin and the temptations of Satan. When I deemed I had committed the unpardonable sin, in an hour of extreme agony Christ was revealed to me by faith, and my soul found peace in an instant.

Was enabled this day to declare my religious principles boldly before the college. The —— had given wine to drink his infant’s birth. Speeches were made. I called upon them all to unite in prayer for the child’s spiritual happiness. Afterwards pride strove hard for establishment; a day of darkness, deep darkness. I am far from God and in deep misery. Was much helped in exposition to my little congregation.

June 14^th45 — A strong east wind was blowing today which always exerts a pestilential influence upon my flesh, but I had to visit a poor woman half dead in body and wholly so in spirit. My appearance alarmed her at first and even the announcement of my name, which she had heard from Arthur Rees, failed to reassure her. Gasping for breath she said her husband was not at home and asked if I could not wait till evening. I examined the sputum in a bowl beside her chair, felt her pulse, asked her to breathe deep while listening to her chest. I then asked if she knew she was dying of consumption. Between coughs she nodded agreement. I asked if she was not afraid. She said no, she knew that Christ would save her. I asked how she knew that. She said, because she felt comfortable in herself. She knew she was a sinner but thought she was not a very bad one. The Reverend Mr Griffiths had spoken to her so she did not need me. I said, “Your priest has made you comfortable in your self and you think this the work of God?”

She said, “Yes I’m at peace sir. Thank you for calling but I don’t need you.”

I told her what the Scriptures say about false peace: From the prophet even unto the priest everyone dealeth falsely. For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly saying “Peace! Peace!” where there is no peace. I told her Jeremiah was speaking about clergy who lead their flocks to Hell by dealing slightly with their conscience. I said I had come to deal with her hardly. She stared at me and said, “I will not go to Hell sir! I am not afraid to die!”

I told her that many consumptives feel this sensation of comfort before their end but it is a fleshly delusion, and it is a fearful thing to fall in to the hands of an angry God. She said, “God be praised he will never abandon me!”

I told her that only the poor in spirit enter the Kingdom of Heaven, whereupon she declared her spiritual poverty with a vehemence only pride could inspire. I told her so. She screamed, “I am not proud. I am Humble! Humble! Humble!” which brought on such a violent fit of coughing that I had to support her back and hold the bowl while she retched into it. After this she lay down exhausted and I pointed out that God would save her if she loved him utterly, but she was in peril because she still loved herself. Weeping she said that, if she was wrong, surely God would show her? I said he was showing her through me.

June 18^th — Tonight, by the grace of God, another addition to my little congregation, and I believe a firm one. Since my declaration at Dr Ollivant’s banquet George Thomas has come to it twice only, praying almost inaudibly, otherwise maintaining a silence throughout our discussions that showed the spirit in him was still weak indeed. He came an hour late tonight and surveyed us with his back against the door and an expression I can only call sarcastic. We did not rise from our knees. He said, “The Lampeter Brethren! The Lampeter Brethren!” and chuckled. I asked if he was drunk. He said, “Not very. In vino veritas you know,” and asked if he should leave. I said, not if he had something to say.

He said that in some ways he admired us. He didn’t object to our Principal riding to hounds because there was nothing in Holy Writ against killing foxes, but Ollivant was too fond of money. He was Rector of two parishes, and angling for a third, and his work here meant he hardly visited any. Then he said, “But Prince, you are an abominable fellow. Abominable.”

At this Rees told Thomas he had better leave. I said “No, stay Thomas,” (standing up to face him) and, “Abominable, yes, carry on.”

He then said I kept suggesting people were not humble enough and I had the pride of Lucifer. I thought only of myself — how could I help people if I didn’t love them? I wanted fellow students in this prayer group because through prayer I could master them without liking them. That was also why I searched out poor dying men and women and plagued their last moments. It was not gentlemanly. It was not nice. He had no wish to be offensive but it was not nice.

I had difficulty silencing the protests of the others but they listened when I told them that Thomas was right about me. I am cold-hearted. My mother and sister have idolized me and given me all they can but I do not love them. They are the kind of church-goers who have never experienced God, and the fact that they will go to Hell does not dismay me as it should. The only human creature I much like is an elderly Catholic lady who taught me to pray from the heart, but I love her less than I love Jesus, and my love for Jesus is feeble indeed. Sometimes I feel close to him and swim serenely in an ocean of living, liquid love. But after an hour of this Holy Communion with the bridegroom of my soul I feel, not that God is good and glorious, but that I am good and glorious. And at once I am cast down and have to lie many weeks before the gate of Hell without one drop of Heavenly moisture to wet my tongue. Yes, my pride is like Lucifer’s. I need honest friends to show me the detestable body of my wicked will. That was why Thomas had been sent here tonight by God. Could Thomas not see that? Would he not join us in a prayer for the salvation of my soul and the souls of my spiritual brothers here assembled? For the souls, if he wished, of all the college?

He said he could hardly refuse a request like that, and knelt and joined us, heart and soul, I verily believe.

June 20^th — I returned today to my dying penitent. Her husband opened the door and tried to deny me entrance. He said his wife was very ill and I had made her terribly unhappy. I told him she needed me. He said violently, “You will not cross this door sir!”

She heard his voice and screamed, “O David let him in! Let him in David.”

He hesitated and I entered.

At once she began telling me she was a great sinner and much afraid of dying. She incessantly asked me, “Shall I die? Am I dying? Has God answered your prayers? Will he forgive my sins? Are you sure?”

The anguish of her mind became intolerable. Some perspiration appearing on the body she thought to be the forerunner of death, and jumping out of bed she dashed herself naked upon the floor, crying and shrieking in a most horrible manner. She called for leeches, blisters, bleeding to save her life, and then cried for prayer, Bible, sacraments to save her soul. And at last I dared to feel that it was indeed the hand of the living God who was shaking her soul and preparing it to receive his overwhelming grace. At last she lay still and exhausted in bed, her husband standing amazed at the door, biting his knuckles. As she stared into my eyes I asked if she recognized me? She nodded. I told her I thought she was now ready to meet God. Her mouth was moved by something like a smile. I asked if she loved him? She whispered, “I love God and I love you.”

1837

Sept. 24^th — The Spirit having moved me to fast for several days, I feel the power of the flesh very much in respect of appetite: I frequently prefer a piece of bread and cheese to God. I discern distinctly that I am a beast — earthly, sensual, devilish; also that the world, all that is seen, is outside of God. The whole world lieth in the devil, but I am of God. Lord deliver me from self, and let my will be so wholly swallowed up in Thine that Thou mayest become my Self. Amen, and Amen!

My health continues very precarious. Deemed it to be the will of God that I should not complete the College term; wrote for a certificate of exemption; the authorities readily consented. It is wonderful how God disposes the hearts of others toward me. Am to return to Bath on Wednesday with Mother who will take me up when her carriage passes through Lampeter: her plan to visit cousins (which would have made that impossible) is now put off. Truly, God is “wonderful in working”. When the promptings of a man’s heart affect the purposes of Jehovah, He makes a way for them. I have done with plans, purposes, intentions, I am a mere instrument, in the hands of The Divine Architect, for the building of His spiritual temple.

Oct. 5^th — Have been shaken over the grave by an attack of dysentery attended with extreme pain, tendency to fainting, with a fluttering pulse above one hundred, and a clammy skin, that I thought it not improbable that I should die in a few minutes. Like one hovering between life and death I took a hasty review of my past — the whole appeared like one long, uninterrupted sin. How wonderful is the wisdom of God: had this taken place at Lampeter, I should have died without the diet and close attention that has barely kept life in me, even here. Save me, O Lord, from my most subtle, persevering, ever present and most deadly enemy, my self; blot out my sin with Thine most precious blood. Cleanse my polluted soul with Thine own indwelling holiness! Amen, and Amen.

Nov. 29^th — The lord has been conducting my soul through clouds and darkness, and has convinced me of my entire impotency, to a degree I could scarcely conceive. My soul has been like a waste and howling wilderness, dark, barren, hard, and desolate; my Heaven was brass, and my Earth iron; and my soul seemed only fit to be the habitation of dragons, and a court for screech owls. Self was bound hand and foot in the midst of this unadulterated misery; corruption raged. I could see neither light, nor grace, nor God; could neither think, nor reflect, nor turn to God, nor recollect myself. My soul was driven to an extremity I could not turn to the right hand nor to the left. All doing was come to an end; it was a time of pure suffering: yet I was in perfect peace for my spirit was abiding in God, and dwelt in “a peaceable habitation”, even while the hail came “down on the forest”.

I visited poor Y. last week; he had been ill three weeks. The door of the house was locked, so that I was obliged to clamber in at the window. He was alone in his miserable hovel, sitting shivering over a small fire, with a few potatoes and his Bible. The poor fellow had just been passing through a fiery trial, during which he was sore pressed by Satan to destroy himself: Hell seemed open to him, Christ far away, prayer almost impossible: he wandered about in agony and terror for many days until comfort gradually returned. He was much in the Spirit when I saw him, and very changed in character — though haughty, proud and independent spirit had sunk into the gentleness and meekness of a little child; he could not open his mouth for shame; he prayed and so did I: it was a good time; I felt God to be in the room, and found much communion of spirit.

Y. was converted many years ago; his conversion was remarkable, and attended, at first, with great alarm, and subsequently, with full reconciliation, and much joy and love. Some years afterwards — about nine years ago — he was prevailed upon to take more liquor than he could bear, under the influence of which he was tempted by others, and actually committed fornication. The result was a total departure of his former peace, great anguish, fear of hell, and an accusing conscience. He has never known settled peace since, through he has sought it with many tears, but has been a mourner all his days. And not withstanding his outward diseases, which have been severe, he has scarcely ever known what it is to have the light of the Lord’s countenance shine upon him since the days of his iniquity. Surely, sin is indeed an evil, and a bitter thing; or, as he says, “God will not let His people have sin cheap.”

Dec 6^th — This day my beloved Mother in Christ consented to become my wife.

“This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.” How peculiar has been our intercourse; how remote from everything that could have led me to anticipate such a result as this. God has been wonderfully preparing us for each other, without our entertaining the least suspicion of what He was about. As I walk upon the downs with my dear Martha I am happy to find that, though I love her dearly, she is not the supreme object of my affections for I love God and Jesus Christ infinitely better. He reminds us that the other is a creature, and I feel that if God were to make over the whole universe to my absolute control, there is an appetite for Jesus which only He could satisfy. He calls me to walk with Him and be perfect.

1838

Dec 10th — Yesterday I saw myself so exceedingly wicked that I felt I had done M. an injury in asking her to marry such a wretch, and ought to ask forgiveness for doing so. Then I suffered, for about two hours, intense agony from toothache, during which I was enabled, through grace, to cleave unto Jesus inwardly, and find enjoyment in Him. I could bless Him for my pain and thankful that He allowed me to suffer in anyway to His glory. O self, thou are my bitterest, most implacable and cruel enemy! Why does’t thou pursue me so, even to the very gate of Heaven? For thou cans’t not enter it.

Am returning to Lampeter. I do not go here or there; but God takes me up and puts me down just where He pleases. He gives me grace and strength to preach the Gospel from the sofa and armchair as effectually as from the pulpit.

183?⁴⁶ — Yesterday I had arranged to walk with Rees and Thomas into Swansea. Today they came into my room when I was asking the Holy Spirit whether or not I should take an umbrella and had received no clear reply. I told them that perhaps God did not choose that I visit Swansea. Rees asked me if some matters were not too trivial to refer to Almighty God. None, I told him. He said he was quite sure God did not mind him visiting Swansea. I bade him goodbye and he left. Brother Thomas chose to remain. I told him that my mother in God, my Catholic friend Miss Freeman, had written to tell me she is being baptized in to the Church of England. He agreed that as we are engaged to marry this is splendid news, then suggested that, since we were staying indoors this afternoon, we might construe Aristotle together. I told him God’s spirit did not move me to study the classics. Christ did not choose scholars to spread his word, he chose ignorant fishermen. The Holy Spirit taught them what to do and say: will teach us also, so I would not prepare for the examination. He said, “I loath the classics too — they keep referring to beastly natural functions as if they were ordinary. But if we don’t pass the exam we won’t be ordained clergymen — we’ll be as cut off from the Apostolic Succession as any Methodist or Quaker. How can you get over that?”

I told him that problem could be left in the hands of God.

1839

April 12^th — The east wind usually makes me dreadfully ill. It has blown steadily for three weeks, but God gave me faith to believe it would not injure me, nor did it, though I went out in it daily. Yesterday my faith failed, and the wind being strong and the sun hot I expected to be laid up when Lo! the wind shifted to the North. I have no doubt that God gave me special faith and then took it away when it was no longer needed. Nor do I doubt that I, through faith, subdued the east wind to the glory of God.

June 7^th — Today Dr Ollivant announced what he said would come as a relief to many. Queen Victoria’s coronation will soon be upon us. With that in mind he had petitioned the Archbishop for a remission of the approaching examination. That remission had now been granted. All students are therefore to consider themselves as having passed. Many outside the circle of the Brethren burst into unseemly applause. Only those proud of their scholastic merit were disgruntled. Only Thomas, formerly a doubter, looked at me with full understanding of this miracle. I fear that Rees, like many others, thanks God for it but thinks Ollivant mainly responsible!

July 16^th — On Tuesday, July 10 was married to my beloved M. Truly I may say of Thee, O my God, “This is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes.” I never discerned the Lord’s hand so distinctly in any event of my life, than I do in my union with dear M. He has abundantly confirmed my trust in His wondrous condescension and tender regard for His dear, though undeserving, children. With respect to my health I may say I know not when I felt so well as I did on the morning of my marriage. God is allowing me rest and quietude, with some relaxation of the outer man to confirm my health with a view to more effective future duty, either in doing or suffering. As I walk and drive about the Downs with dear M., enjoying the fine air and doing nothing, I feel how utterly contemptible life would be if the object and end were nothing better than enjoyment; indeed had not the Will of God called me to this life I would feel it were no life. I seem no better than a vegetation. O how truly miserable must be those who live to be happy.

Aug 15^th — I protest that I die daily. My inward life is undergoing a gradual destruction. I perceive life lies substantially in the will; and only Spirit of God can destroy the will, the iron-hearted will of man, keeping it in a state of continual crucifixion, cutting asunder soul and spirit like a two edged sword. O Love. Whose life is the Light of Thine unsullied truth, it is Thou art that “devouring fire” — Thou art those “everlasting burnings” of eternity. O, who shall dwell with Thee?

Oct 28^th — I have had no permission from God to write this journal since I made my last entry. It would not be possible, if indeed it were lawful to describe the marvellous work God has been carrying on in my soul in the last seven weeks. I have passed through the middle of self, and now, at length, come out at the other side into God.⁴⁷ God has answered my prayer and condescended to teach me Himself by His own Spirit. For the last two and a half years this journal has been penned under the guidance and Spirit of God within me, faithfully recording the long and toilsome journey from the creature up to God. Though the expectations behind my prayers were almost unbounded, yet God, in answering them, has done exceeding abundantly more than I could either ask or think. I, being routed and grounded in love, can comprehend the breadth, and depth, and length, and height of Christ’s love and can say in all sobriety and seriousness “I am filled with all the fullness of God.” Unto Him in the church of Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end Amen! Amen! and Amen!

— These Amens are the last words of Henry James Prince’s published diary. In the three years it covers he had introduced his sister to Arthur Rees, at first his closest friend at Lampeter, and they had married. No entries refer to these events. When he gave his manuscript to the printers twenty years later his sister and Rees had no place in this spiritual autobiography.

Before leaving St David’s College as an ordained clergyman Henry James Prince visited the Principal for the customary exchange of farewell civilities. Dr Ollivant, though glad to be seeing this troublesome former student for the last time, offered Prince a glass of wine and no flicker of annoyance changed his bland, ruddy face when the offer was quietly refused. Standing aside his hearthrug he said, “I wish you joy of your curacy, Prince. Charlinch, eh?”

“Charlinch, near Bridgwater.”

“Rural and secluded. I thought you would have preferred a busy parish in an infernal manufacturin’ town where you would have had scope to evangelize. Agricultural congregations are brutish and dull rather than vicious and lost — Charlinch doesn’t even have a public house. But the rectory is quite large, I believe. I hope Mrs Prince did not come to you empty-handed, I know you are not a rich man.”

“Her fortune is sufficient for us,” said Henry quietly.

“Good. Good. The Church of England is like the British Army: you can’t go far in it without money or connections. Sam Starky, your rector, is well connected. Nephew of Lady Alicia Coventry, related through her to half the nobility of England. If not exactly a foot-hold it is a good toe-hold, if you know how to climb. I was impressed by how adroitly you set up your own little establishment here — The Lampeter Brethren, no less! Enthusiasm was thought a disease of the labourin’ classes when I was young. Our aristocracy were nearly all atheists, though it was bad form to say so — they knew the Church of England was needed to hold the rabble down. French aristos were open atheists and look what happened to them! But times have changed, Prince. Yes, nerve and imagination can work wonders. However, Starky is a sickly fellow, a valetudinarian if not exactly a hypochondriac, always takin’ the cure at waterin’ places and south coast resorts. I doubt if you’ll ever actually see him.”

There was a brief silence in which Henry was about to take his leave when Ollivant said abruptly, “You are a good soul and mean well, Prince, so I am moved to offer advice. I hear that — apart from readin’ a few heady mystics — you despize erudition.”

“The disciples Jesus called were not erudite, Dr Ollivant.”

“Quite so, but then Jesus instructed them, and He taught those ignorant fishermen so well that by their eloquence the whole Roman Empire was at last converted.”

“And by the miracle of Pentecost, sir.”

“O yes. Tongues of fire from Heaven givin’ everyone the gift of tongues. Well, we must not look for that miracle nowadays, for if we do it will turn us into lunatics, charlatans, or dupes like poor Edward Irving. He prayed for the gift of tongues and got it with a vengeance! Hysterical women where he preached started babblin’ nonsense until they and their supporters took Irving over and made a new religion of him — The Catholic Apostolic Pentecostal Church, no less! A church that rejects the doctrine of Original Sin. The Church of Scotland must be glad they excommunicated him before that happened. The Churches of England, Rome and every decent non-conformist sect would have done the same. Irving saw the error of his ways before he died but fools rich enough to know better still keep Catholic Apostolic churches goin’ strong, not just in London and Edinburgh but France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. They must think they’re buyin’ places in the Kingdom of Heaven. Any danger of you goin’ Pentecostal, Prince?”

Henry slightly smiled and slightly shook his head.

“Good. Now, I have no wish to hurt your feelin’s but I hear that compared with your impromptu prayers, your sermons are, shall I say — less adequate?”

“I have had little pulpit experience, sir.”

“Most of us are shaky at the start. I certainly was. On preachin’ my first sermon before a Bishop I tried to impress him by sayin’ it all without notes. Result: young Ollivant dries up halfway through and stumbles as fast as he can into the blessin’. A disgustin’ performance. I see you pull a wry face at the word performance. Is that because it suggests play actin’?”

Henry nodded.

“No matter. An honest intelligent clergyman can learn to do better from the theatre. Well, the Bishop was a good old soul and a relative of mine. Over dinner afterward he said what I have never forgotten and will now pass on to you. Every old rectory and vicarage in England, said he, has a shelf of sermons, the best of them written by great clerics who founded the Anglican church when English prose was at its best, as is proved by our prayer book and the King James authorized Bible. Read those sermons. Memorize passages whose truth and beauty strikes you. Of course, you have six days a week to write sermons of your own, but few vicars of Christ preached as mightily as Latimer, for example. When your pulpit eloquence falters you should find support in the words of men who were (dare I say this to you Prince? Yes. .) men who were wiser and wittier than you will ever be. I put that to you, Prince, and leave it with you.”

“Thank you sir. Good day,” said Prince. He stood, bowed slightly and turned to the door. Before reaching it he heard Ollivant chuckle and turned enquiringly.

“Forgive me Prince, but I’ve remembered somethin’ funny. Know anythin’ about Carlyle? Thomas Carlyle?”

“No sir.”

“I’m glad. He’s a Scotch Radical pamphleteer who’s all for the French Revolution. London society tolerates him because his wife is both pretty and witty. In their younger days the Carlyles and Edward Irving were so close that the present Mrs Carlyle nearly became Mrs Irving. A pity she did not. She has since been heard to say, If Irving had married me there would have been no gift of tongues. Good, isn’t it haha? If Irving had married me there would have been no gift of tongues. I am sure Mrs Prince is also a sensible woman.”

Charlinch lay in a valley between dark green wooded hills, the fields on lower ground divided by thick hedges and narrow winding roads. The village, never large, had shrunk smaller around 1800 when the chief landowner enclosed the common, evicted smallholders and let their fields to richer farmers. It was now a crossroads with cottages housing families of ploughmen, a shop that was also the Post Office, a dame’s school and a small, dilapidated church on a hill. The dilapidation had happened because local gentry who owned carriages now attended larger churches further away. The churchyard had become a wilderness of overgrown plots with broken and sinking stones. There was a path through it to the adjacent rectory which was large and well-built, in a garden with high walls sheltered by trees. Here Brother Prince began his new life as a country priest under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and here his forty-five year old wife spent the unhappiest months of her life.

The rectory was rent free, well furnished, well carpeted, with cupboards of fine linen and bedclothes. This was fortunate as the curate’s stipend was small. Income from Martha’s investments let them hire local women as cook, house-maid and laundry-maid, but they could not afford a housekeeper and Martha had no experience of household management. She saw rooms were not being thoroughly cleaned, that Henry’s shirts were badly starched and clumsily folded, that under-cooked cutlets and over-boiled vegetables were served on stone-cold plates, but could not tell her servants how to do better — they seemed to understand her instructions as little as she understood their dialect. She might have resigned herself to these misfortunes had they not hurt Henry. The Spirit guiding him accepted badly-served food and badly-laundered linen as minor forms of crucifixion, but his wife knew how much better his mother managed a household so his almost inaudible sighs, sometimes with eyes closed in prayer, struck Martha like rebukes. Pains she had patiently suffered in Widdicombe Crescent worsened. One night after a dinner where both had eaten only a few mouthfuls she openly wept. He sat by her, patted her hand, said in the soft, remote voice habitual with him, “Perhaps you should send for mother.”

Mrs Prince arrived in an irritable mood that she hid from her son but not from her daughter-in-law. She spoke severely to housemaid and laundry-maid, dismissed the cook, hired in her place another local woman and severely lectured her also before returning to Bath. For a while the house was managed a little better, though not much better. Martha still had cause for tears, Henry for sighs and silent prayers, and his sufferings had a more than domestic cause. Despite marriage he found Charlinch an even more miserable place than London where, a lonely medical student, his fastidious nature had excluded him from the rude conviviality of social equals. At Lampeter he had made friends and visited people who recognized his spiritual authority: Charlinch was a whole parish of souls to be saved, yet he could persuade none of their deadly peril.

The Anglican prayer book, printed by Royal Command, dictated the church services in words carefully composed to exclude radical politics and personal remarks. Only the sermon gave a chance of impressive speech, and Henry failed to impress. His pulpit overlooked a floor boxed into pews rented by the wealthiest and most respected local families, each box with its own little door. Labourers and servants sat on benches between or behind these. There was a gallery for singers and two parishioners who played a cornet and a bassoon. When Henry announced the sermon’s text in his clear sweet voice he saw his listeners compose themselves for a state resembling slumber, even if they did not close their eyes. He could have wakened the nearest at once by talking straight down to them, but his words must reach everyone including many who were more haggard, worse dressed and (when their mouths opened for responses and hymns) more gap-toothed than any congregation he had seen. Words he uttered with passionate conviction had no visible effect on anyone.

That Dr Ollivant had foreseen this was not consoling. The rectory study had many bound sermons but, “I will not mouth the words of dead men.” Henry told himself, glaring at them. He knelt and begged God to let him speak with the simplicity of a little child, and the simple words came, but had no effect, even when spoken in the parishioners’ homes. Nobody in Charlinch was of higher social standing than Henry so the farmers’ wives were at first delighted with his visits. They served him afternoon tea and when asked about the state of their souls assured him that these were quite all right. When he told them this was unlikely and insisted on more heart-felt answers they turned resentful or embarrassed. Most took it as an insult that he wished to confer with their servants, and when he said poorer folk also had souls to be saved the faces of their employers indicated doubt. In Welsh Lampeter he had enjoyed several passionate dialogues with sick or dying people and, compared with them, the Somerset natives seemed pagan. “If God don’t want my soul after all he’s put me through,” said an old labourer, crippled by arthritis and lying between blankets stained by his bed sores, “He may do without it.”

“Hell fire! Hell fire!” whispered Henry.

“Can’t be worse than this,” said the man, “but give me a sup of gin or brandy and I’ll gladly hear you tell me all about hell fire till the cows come home.”

The school children could chant the Lord’s Prayer and parts of the Shorter Catechism in unison, but no matter how intensely he lectured and questioned them they answered with monosyllables or giggles or dumb grins. At length, having prayed to God for guidance and receiving assurance that God wished this, Henry told the schoolteacher he was abandoning her pupils until they asked for him. He visited two consumptive little girls in their home until their mother told him to stop frightening them. When he ignored her she fetched her husband from a nearby field who expelled Henry with threats to fling him out. Henry told the man’s employer, suggesting the labourer might allow Christ’s ministry if threatened with dismissal. The farmer said, “I couldn’t do that sir. He may be stiff-necked but he’s an honest worker.”

“I do not ask you to dismiss him but to threaten him with dismissal.”

“Too risky, sir. He’s so stiff-necked he might take offence and leave me, and bein’ widely known as a honest good worker he’d have no trouble gettin’ employment elsewhere.”

Henry’s only happiness now was in writing to his Lampeter Brethren, some still at college, some of them curates like himself. His letters asked searching questions about the state of their souls, discussed their replies in detail, contained prayers and exhortations applicable to their weakness and troubles. He mentioned the sad state of his parishioners but not his own unhappy state. One of the Brethren, inspired and consoled by his letters, suggested making a book of them. Henry borrowed back the best, copied them out with improvements, raised money by subscriptions from the Brethren and had them printed in Bristol. Copies posted to Church of England magazines were kindly reviewed. This modest fame did not lessen his grief at the state of Charlinch parish. Martha was increasingly troubled by backaches with hot and cold flushes, swollen limbs, and constipation alternating with diarrhoea. Henry prayed to God that these were not symptoms of incurable dropsy. A doctor summoned from Bridgwater comforted him slightly by diagnosing sub-acute dropsy, and prescribing a strict diet, laudanum drops and rest. Martha returned to stay with his mother in Widdicombe Crescent until her health improved, but it never improved. Henry remained in Charlinch to hope, pray, correspond with the Brethren and conduct services that seemed spiritually fruitless.

In the fourteenth month of his curacy came a letter postmarked Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. It said: Dear Mr Henry James Prince, or if you will forgive this impertinence, Dear BROTHER Henry James Prince, I must see you as soon as possible since no merely written language can express my feelings, my gratitude. I, my wife and sister are coming with all possible haste to visit you in the rectory, our old family home. Expect us on the evening of the day after you receive this epistle. Ever, My Very Dear Sir,

Yours in the Lord,

Sam Starky.

This, from the rector Henry had been told he would probably never see, was encouraging. He ordered fires lit in the four main bedrooms, two of which had stood empty since Martha left. He ordered sheets and blankets to be aired, beds to be made, the house thoroughly cleaned for the following day. Though he had never reproved the servants they were slightly in awe of him, even more in awe of the returning rector whose father they remembered and who was nephew of a Lord. By the following afternoon the rectory was in a cleaner, neater state than Henry had ever seen. He watched the maid set a tea table, suggested improvements, retired to his study. For a while he stood at a window allowing a view of the crossroads. After two or three carriages had passed he sat down and tried to concentrate on a vague but inspiring chapter by the German psalmist, Gerhard Tersteegen. Only on hearing approaching hoof beats did he go to the entrance hall and stand, hands folded meekly before him, waiting for the housemaid to open the front door. She did, and when three people entered he bowed, saying softly, “Welcome.”

“Hello!” said the foremost visitor, removing his hat and extending a hand, “Sam Starky! Are you indeed —?”

Henry murmured, “Henry Prince,” and shook the slightly moist hand of a man who seemed breathless and excited.

Starky was tall and not much older than Henry and wore dark expensive clothes of fashionable cut, only a white neckcloth suggesting his clerical status. His handsome face had the nobility of a marble bust, perhaps because it was so pale. His manner was excited but oddly evasive. He clasped Henry’s hand longer than usual without looking straight at his face. Henry saw that here was one who knew he needed guidance. “This is my belovéd wife,” said Starky gesturing to a woman who appeared to be all a prosperous and respected husband in those days could wish: pretty, well dressed, submissive and slightly alarmed at meeting someone new. Henry bowed to her. “And here is my dear sister Julia,” said Starky. “We find in her a tower of strength.”

“I am reading your Letters to the Lampeter Brethren, Mr Prince,” said Julia with emphasis suggesting approval. While the maid helped Mrs Starky remove her bonnet and shawl Julia removed her own in a way that showed she was thoroughly at home.

“I am honoured,” said Henry. “I regret that my own wife is not here to receive you all. A liver ailment has taken her to recuperate at my mother’s home in Bath. Shall there be tea after the maid has shown you to your rooms? Tea and something to eat after you have had time to wash and settle in?”

“Yes,” said Julia, “that will be thoroughly welcome when my dear sister-in-law has had a little rest and I have supervized unpacking. But I know Sam cannot wait for a word with you.” With the keen eyes of a natural housekeeper she watched a servant carry in a box and portmanteau. Henry said to Starky, “Let me take your hat.”

Starky stared at the hat in his hand as if astonished to see it then cried, “ O no no no no no!”, and hurriedly placed it with his overcoat on the hallstand saying, “Julia is right. I must speak with you alone for a while.”

“Certainly. Of course,” murmured Henry and led him to the study.

With a gesture he invited Starky to take an armchair by the fire but, “No no no no no, you sit. I am overwrought. I must pace about a bit,” said Starky. Henry settled down with elbows on armrests, watching his visitor across fingertips placed together in the shape of a tent.

“Pardon my agitation,” said Starky abruptly, “You have been my curate here for fourteen months, and I am a stranger to you. But you are no stranger to me!”

“Yes?”

“Miracles still happen, do they not?”

“It is blasphemy to doubt it.”

“You have performed a miracle. And another miracle is, that you do not know it.”

“You will tell me of it,” said Henry quietly.

“A fortnight ago I lay very ill at Ventnor, and in the morning the nurse told me I would not live until night. At noon the post brought me a letter from a clerical friend in Bath with a printed slip of paper which he prayed might be read to me before I died. The words described how a man may know he believes in Christ.”

“Ah,” said Henry.

“When the reading was done I asked the preacher’s name and only then heard he was you, my curate. I thanked God he had sent such a pastor to my flock. I felt very happy in mind, said the last few words to my wife and sister, and lay back to depart in peace.”

“But did not die,” said Henry mildly.

“Yes! My pulse beat quicker, my tongue was loosened, strength returned to my limbs and — I am here.”

He stood suddenly still and gazed open-mouthed at Henry who, smiling, rose to his feet and held out his arms. Starky stepped between them and hugged Henry passionately. Henry’s embrace was more paternal. When he lowered his arms Starky moved away whispering, “It is wonderful!”

“May I call you Brother Starky?” asked Henry softly.

“Please!” said Starky with a vehement nod, “To be accepted as one of the Lampeter Brethren is an honour I hardly dared pray for.”

“Then sit down Brother Starky,” said Henry in a louder voice than Starky had yet heard from him, “It is now your turn to listen and mine to render up accounts of my service here.”

“Eh?”

“Sit down, if you please.”

Starky sat with mouth slightly open while Prince stood before him, hands clasped behind back, saying grimly, “You thanked God for making me pastor of your flock. I confess to not dealing well with it. I am a bad pastor.”

“How so?”

“For more than a year I have laboured in Charlinch Church, school and homes and found only a disobedient and gainsaying people. I have told them how much they need Christ’s salvation; I have exhorted, I have begged those who see they need guidance to visit me here for instruction and prayer. Shall I tell you how many have answered that call?”

“Please do.”

“Three.”

“Horrible! Horrible!”

“And these three are from neighbouring parishes, not from Charlinch. But for these three I would have quit this place when my wife’s illness forced her to leave a fortnight ago — the very time when you were miraculously cured by my words. God has preserved us both for this meeting. His Holy Spirit must have work for us here in Charlinch.”

“What work can it be?”

“You are my rector,” said Prince gently.

“But I have not conducted half a dozen services since I was ordained. This living is mine because my father had it. I fear I have been a poor, woefully formal Christian.”

“Christ loves the poor in spirit, brother Starky, and did not a certain prayer convince you of His power?”

“Yes! I believe your prayer cured me in body and soul. Before it, the slightest unexpected chill induced pulmonary qualms, fever and coughing that kept me in bed for weeks at a time. You have made a new man of me. . ”

“Not I,” said Henry. “The Spirit through me gave you a new and cleaner birth.”

“And you say it has work for us here?”

“The Spirit has work in Charlinch for us both,” said Henry, with total certainty.

Next Sunday the young rector’s return to his parish ensured a large church attendance. The rectory pew that had stood empty since Martha left held that morning Mrs Starky and Julia. Henry James Prince sat before the pulpit at a desk formerly used by a parish clerk who had announced hymns, psalms and led the singing. As usual Henry wore the black Doctor of Divinity gown with white neckbands, worn throughout the eighteenth century and still favoured at Lampeter; but Oxford divines were making Roman vestments fashionable again so Starky, though Cambridge educated, emerged from the vestry dressed as his congregation had never before seen, in a flowing white surplice over a dark ankle-length cassock, both of which suited his tall, fine figure and statuesque head. He chanted prayers and led responses in tones as gentlemanly as Prince had used but more monotonous. Unlike Prince he preached his sermon from notes, sometimes pausing to look down at the pew where his wife and sister gazed back with ardent, approving smiles and the desk where Henry sat staring hard at the floor between his boots. Before the final blessing he announced, “Our dearly belovéd brother in Christ, Henry James Prince, will on Tuesday evening hold his usual Bible study group in the rectory and on Friday evening his usual prayer meeting. I cannot too strongly exhort all who care for the welfare of their souls to attend these meetings.”

Walking back to the rectory Starky said gloomily, “The service went well on the whole, but I am a poor preacher.”

“You should not have used notes,” said Henry mildly.

“I could not have spoken without them — I would have dried up.”

“Spiritual dryness is a condition the Spirit recognizes. Such dryness invites the Spirit to water it. Preaching from notes shuts the Spirit out.”

“You really think so?”

“I really do.”

“Henry may be right about that, Sam,” said Julia, “I think I see what he means.”

“Please Henry,” Starky pled, “let me use notes again at the evening service — I would fear to enter the pulpit without that prop.”

“You must do as you will, my dear brother Starky,” said Henry sadly. At the evening service Starky preached very haltingly, but the Tuesday evening study group was joined by a milkmaid, a road mender and a farmer who, with the three Starkys, trebled Henry’s audience and the fervour of its mood. The farmer was the one who had refused to threaten the stiff-necked labourer with dismissal. He said, “I was wrong not to do as you bid sir. I see I was wrong, but it’s too late now for me to do right. Brackley’s daughters are dead and gone to Hell I suppose. He is mainly to blame but I too am damnable, I suppose. I should have tried to make a way for you, and I did not.”

“But you are contrite!. That is a blesséd thing, it means you are at last on the right path. You make me very happy,” said Henry, warmly shaking his hand.

At the next Sunday morning service Starky announced the text for his sermon, stood chewing his lower lip for a while then said unhappily, “I confess to all here that I, Samuel Starky, am a sinner like yourselves, of the Earth, earthly. In this church you should hear nothing speak but God’s Holy Spirit. Alas, alas, Sam Starky’s words are not fit for your ears so I will now pray silently that the Holy Spirit descend and use my voice as its instrument. I know at least nine souls who will also pray for that, and I humbly beg the rest of you to pray for that also.” He clasped hands and closed eyes. Those in the rectory pew and six others in the church did the same. A majority looked at each other in perplexity and as minutes passed started whispering in voices that grew to a conversational hum. At last Starky opened his eyes and said brokenly, “The Holy Ghost has not accepted my petition. I will petition Him again at the evening service.”

After removing their robes in the vestry Starky and Prince joined Mrs Starky and Julia and then went outside through a loudly gossiping throng, some puzzled, some amused. Most fell silent as the rector and his company emerged leaving the voice of an old man with his back to them declaiming, “Boy and man I have happily slept through a parcel of sermons so I don’t like this dumb parson who why is you nudgin’ me?. . Ah.”

On entering the rectory Starky said, “O please, Brother Henry, please conduct the evening service! I am not able, indeed I am not.”

“Dear Brother Starky, I will not conduct the evening service because your inability to preach is more effective than anything I could say.”

“Impossible!”

“Not impossible — certain. Before you returned here my sermons were heard without unease and without murmuring. I spoke to them honestly, but The Spirit did not dictate my words as it does when I speak to willing ears. I should have publicly awaited The Spirit’s coming as you are doing, but now your silence in the pulpit is more effective than mine will ever be.” “And tonight, Sam, you may have better luck,” said Mrs Starky. “O no dear! Luck is a pagan deity!” said Julia, “We must continue to invoke God’s help through prayer.”

She looked to Henry who rewarded her with a smile and nod.

The evening service passed like the morning one, except that Starky’s distress was greater. But attendance at Prince’s Bible study group rose from nine (counting the Starkys) to seventeen, and nineteen attended the Friday prayer meeting. At the next Sunday service Starky, having announced the sermon’s text, sobbed aloud then begged concerned Christians to follow him across to the rectory and help him pray that he receive the power of the Holy Spirit. Over thirty of the congregation followed him there while Henry conducted the traditional service, minus sermon, to just before the final blessing, then paused and waited. Soon after Starky and his followers rejoined the congregation and Starky, in a stoical, monotonous voice, brought the service to the traditional end. “How brave you were dear,” said Mrs Starky as they returned to the rectory.

“Heroic! That is the word,” said Julia.

“The Lord chastens who He loveth,” said Henry calmly, “He is chastening you, Sam! Be assured, dear Brother Samuel, that The Spirit cannot desert one as humbled as you have become. It is biding its time, which must now be very, very near.”

A miserable smile was Starky’s only reply.

Next Sunday the congregation was swelled by an influx of curious visitors from neighbouring parishes. Some were dissenters who had heard that a Church of England rector was about to turn Methodist, Baptist or Quaker, others wanted to enjoy the antics of a mad parson. In the morning service Starky’s plea for the Holy Spirit to descend on him was a despairing yell answered from the back of the church by jeers, laughter and clapping, along with many indignant shushing sounds from elsewhere.

“I cannot conduct another service, Brother Prince! You must do it for me at Evensong,” groaned Starky as they returned to the rectory, arm-in-arm with Henry on one side and his wife on the other.

“You can. You will. I know you will.”

“Hear hear, well said Brother Henry! We all know you will,” said his sister stoutly.

“You’ll feel better after lunch, dear,” said his wife.

The Evensong congregation was like the morning’s at first, apart from Starky’s conduct of the service being more lost and halting than ever. At sermon time he ascended the pulpit and stared out for almost half a minute, open-mouthed, wide-eyed and visibly sweating, then said with difficulty, “Belovéd. . dearly belovéd brothers. . and sisters. . I will read the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. If the Lord is pleased to speak by me. . then He will. If He will not I must hold my tongue because I will not, I cannot speak for myself.”

He then read out quietly but clearly, “Awake, thou that sleepest; and arize from the dead; and Christ shall give thee light,” and with no change of voice said, “Wise men tell us that this world of ours is a great globe hurtling round the Sun, spinning like a huge cannonball as it goes yet holding on its surface oceans, mountains, cities, you, me, all of us. What a terrible thought!”

After a brief pause he added urgently, “Why are we all not sick with dizziness? What stops the bodies of you, me, everybody on this planet being flung out by this whirling wheel of a world into boundless space? Scientific men say our bodies are held here by a force called gravity, a force pulling everything down toward the Earth’s centre, a centre where many imagine Hell to be. But Hell cannot be inside the Earth because the Earth is a mortal body that will die and pass away! When it does only Hell will remain here and it will be eternal. These bodies of ours also must and will die — as we all know — but they contain immortal souls that will not and cannot die, as most of you forget. O you poor, poor souls, think how frantically you will beg for death when death is no longer possible! When the last trump sounds, the sky rolls up like a scroll, the stars fall like ripe figs, the world vanishes yet ye are resurrected! Where will you stand when there is no ground to stand upon? I tell you, you will not stand, it will be impossible! Some of us, thank God, will be drawn up easily and gladly into the eternally happy companionship of Jesus Christ our Lord, in the Kingdom of Heaven for which he created you all, and into which he invites you all, and where all who gladly accept His loving invitation will certainly go. But the vast majority of you who are refusing that loving invitation will exist with no ground beneath your feet — exist in eternal torturing darkness, without light, without hope of light. . without hope of anything, ever!

“Not many of you have been in one of Her Majesty’s new improved prisons where the inmates break stones with heavy hammers, trudge for hours on end over treadmills, stagger with big iron cannonballs round a yard from one heap to another whenever a warder blows a whistle. In return they are allowed just enough food and sleep to keep them alive for the duration of their sentence. How like most people’s life on Earth that is! Has anyone here never been sickened by toil? And come to the end of the day’s drudgery feeling exactly where they were at the start? And wakened next morning to a life they must lift and go on carrying like an almost unbearable burden? Such are the lives in Queen Victoria’s new improved prisons, but he who protests against this punishing labour must endure worse. That man is taken down a dark tunnel through several thicknesses of wall and locked in a tiny cell without windows or light. Bread and water is passed to him through a tiny opening by someone he never sees. The silence here is so complete that only by muttering or yelling or scraping his heels on the floor may a man know he is not struck deaf, and he has no way of knowing he has not been struck blind. Five days of this punishment turns the strongest criminal into a gibbering lunatic, yet he has merely disobeyed a human, prison governor. How much more dreadful must be the imprisonment of we who disobey the governor of the universe! Awake, thou that sleepest; and arise from the dead; and Christ will give thee light! Do you not fear to disobey that call? Why will you not leave this earthly prison house by taking steps toward joining Christ in his Holy Kingdom? The punishment I described never lasts as long as a week! God’s spell of solitary confinement will never end. The punishment I described is mental, but on the last day to your souls all-horrible alone-ness will be added a resurrected, undying body of flesh whose every inch, inside and out, will be gripped and crushed by a scorching mass of unendurable — but eternally to be endured — agony.”

This start of Starky’s sermon blended ideas he had heard from Henry with ideas from the notes he no longer used, but all were strongly combined and fluently uttered. The Spirit possessing him did not rave or shout, it spoke of Heaven solemnly yet joyfully, and spoke of Hell with such pity and distress that men hearing him dropped their heads upon their chests or gaped, amazed, at sobbing wives. Most women wept and one or two shrieked. Children clung to each other. Starky’s wife and sister and all who attended the evening prayer groups looked up to their rector with tears of joy while Henry, at the pulpit foot, smiled with calm satisfaction. A deep silence following the sermon was broken by a choirboy in the gallery suddenly guffawing until the bassoonist clouted his ear. Starky ended the service with a calm, firm authority he had never before shown.

Rector and curate retired to the vestry and gazed at each other for a moment before disrobing.

“You are now a mouthpiece of Almighty God, Brother Starky. Your trumpet blast is the opening of a new spiritual era.”

“You were right, master! You were right! The Spirit at last descended,” said Starky happily.

“You must not call me master, Brother Starky — only Christ is our master.”

“Yes but — please forgive me! — brother places us on an equal footing. I am not, I cannot be on an equal footing with you. It would be falsehood for me to pretend to it my dear, dear master.”

Henry brooded a little then smiled and said, “Call me Belovéd.” “O I will,” whispered Starky, “ I will.”

A very happy group returned to the rectory through a crowd of awe-struck gazers.

“Yes, we will all call you Belovéd, Brother Henry,” said Julia, “Won’t we dear?”

Mrs Starky could only nod, being too happy to speak.

From now on Starky conducted Sunday services without faltering. Those who had come from other parishes to mock him no longer came, some who had come out of mere curiosity remained to pray. His sermons never again caused such wild reactions as that first and most inspired one, but his congregation remained large, and interested with many who responded fervently to the services. On the following Sunday he announced that our Belovéd Brother Henry Prince had been directed by the Lord to say, that if any persons would send their children to the schoolroom later that evening, he would lecture to them. About fifty came. In a pamphlet published in 1842 — The CHARLINCH REVIVAL or, an Account of the Remarkable Work of Grace which has lately taken place in Somersetshire — Henry described what happened in the schoolroom:

The words spoken were at first very solemn, but in a few minutes the Holy Ghost came on the minister with the most tremendous power, so that the word of the Lord was really like fire. About twenty of the children were pierced to the heart, and appeared to be in great distress, but the bigger boys still continued unmoved, and some of them even seemed disposed to laugh. In a short time however the word reached them, too, and they were smitten to the hearts with the most dreadful conviction of their sin and danger: it appeared as if the arrows of the Almighty had pierced their very reins. In about ten minutes the spectacle presented by their schoolroom was truly awful: out of fifty children present there were not as many as ten could stand upright: boys and girls, great and small together, were either leaning against the wall quite overcome by their feelings of distress, or bowed down with their faces hidden in their hands and sobbing in the severest agony. For some time after the minister ceased to pray, they continued where they were, not weeping, but literally deeply wailing. They expressed their desire henceforth to forsake their sins and pleasures, and seek the Lord.

It would be impossible to express in words, the awful sense of God’s presence and power felt by those who were in the schoolroom on that occasion. Four or five obtuse ploughboys were sobbing as though they had the hearts of women. Three of those most deeply smitten were hardened reckless boys, whom the minister had been obliged long before to turn out of the school, after which they used to come to the church and sit opposite the minister, and make faces at him as he was preaching the most solemn and affecting truths. Often he looked from his pulpit on these boys where they were grinning at him, and said in his heart, “What can God bring these boys here for? Surely he cannot intend to convert them.” Now only one was altogether unaffected: this boy stood upright, with a vacant stare of stupid astonishment on his face, in the midst of the children who were weeping around him, as though God had permitted him to come there to contrast between one on whom the word did not take affect, and on those whom it did.

Henry’s prayer meetings for adults in the rectory were often as passionate for he could be eloquent, with small, willing audiences.

After a sermon in December that year Starky made a peculiar announcement: “Christmas is nearly upon us — a joyful yet solemn time for all true Christians mindful of our Saviour’s coming, and who are willing to receive him. Our Belovéd Brother Prince and I will conduct the Christmas Eve service with prayer, fasting, exhortation and psalms from six o’clock to midnight, and the Christmas Day service, along with Holy Communion, from nine in the morning till nine in the evening, or later, if the Spirit so wills. We realize this will not please a majority who regard the Christmas Holy-Days, alas alas alas! as an opportunity to eat, drink and be merry, and the Yuletide services as pauses for digestion before again joining the revels. We do not wish those who view Christmas in that light way to attend our services. The time has come to make a separation between the concerned and the careless, the wheat and the chaff, sheep and goats. For three months God has been calling the faithful of this parish to him. A great many have answered that call and, though not yet converted, are struggling along the pathway to conversion. These will be heartily welcome. Our Christmas services can do the rest of you no possible good so please do not attend.”

Before most of his hearers had grasped the sense of this announcement he resumed the words of the prayer book, praying that, “At Christ’s second coming to judge the world, all present will be found an acceptable people, in the sight of Him who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end, Amen. O God, our Father in Heaven; have mercy upon us miserable sinners.”

Roughly half the congregation repeated the response to that while a few started whispering and buzzing. Speaking louder to overcome their noise he cried, “O God the Son, Redeemer of the world; have mercy upon us miserable sinners.”

The buzz became a clamour as many protesters stood up, looked round and spoke to each other. Starky shouted, “O God the Holy Ghost. .” before his voice was drowned by uproar. The concerned part of his congregation stayed kneeling and responding so loudly that their voices almost overcame the tumult of the rest and certainly greatly increased it.

So in Charlinch Church in 1841 Christmas Day was celebrated exactly as the rector and his curate wished, and as Henry later described it: The whole body of believers spent this day in fasting and prayer. It was a blesséd day: twenty-six believers, unaccompanied by any of the unconverted, met at the Lord’s table, and truly, the Lord Himself was present with them. The King sat at His table, a soft and loving Spirit pervaded all the people, and the Spirit knit all their hearts together into one. Can anyone resist the conviction that this is God’s work? If it be not His, whose work is it?

By 1842 the Royal Mail penny postal service was running smoothly, and over breakfast one morning Henry received a letter from his mother in Widdicombe Crescent saying that Martha’s health was much, much worse. He went at once to Bath leaving Starky to conduct the evening meetings and Sunday services, for he was now able to do both. A fortnight later Henry returned to the rectory in time for he and Starky to receive a messenger from the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who introduced himself as the Bishop’s chaplain then said, “We are sorry to hear your wife has been very ill, Mr Prince.” “No longer, sir. It is true that she suffered terribly at the end, but that is no longer the case. Martha Prince is now perfectly well and happy, in a better world than ours.”

“I am glad she is in a better world, but sorry that you are bereft of a helpmeet in these difficult times.”

“Why do you think the times difficult, sir?”

“Because you and your rector are both making them difficult for your Right Reverend Father in God, George Henry Law. He is now a very old man. Letters of complaint from your Charlinch parishioners have alarmed him extremely. I arrived here two days ago to investigate these complaints and find good cause for them.”

“What cause have you found?”

“Mr Starky, you have forbidden the Evensong service to many respectable Christians. Prominent farmers, dealers and artisans are now ordering their wives and servants not to attend any of the Sunday services. Women are threatening to leave husbands who will not go to Mr Prince’s prayer meetings and enraged husbands are threatening to kill wives who do go to them. Children are quarrelling with parents, servants with masters while the ungodly look on, laughing and hooting because they find these scandals highly entertaining. This is not Christianity. Christ is the Prince of Peace.”

Henry sighed and looked at Starky who murmured, “Christ said I come not to send peace; but a sword, for I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her — ”

“Yes yes, we know that, but Christ was referring to the sword wielded by Roman persecutors. He never rejected any who came to hear Him. You must allow all in Charlinch to attend Evensong. Those who pay life rent for pews are entitled to them under the law of the land.”

“Alas, our small church has no room for all who wish to hear God’s word from Brother Starky’s lips,” said Henry.

“That is because you have been poaching — attracting people from other parishes.”

Henry and Starky stared at each other but said nothing.

“I have a mandate from the Bishop to withdraw your licences to preach unless you, Mr Starky, stop excluding any of your own parishioners, and Mr Prince leaves Charlinch forthwith.

What do you say to that?”

“But!” pleaded Starky, “But! But does the Bishop not know the strength of Belovéd Brother Prince’s following? The Lampeter Brethren are not a negligible body. If our Belovéd is excommunicated by the Church of England, others too may leave.”

“Bishop Law threatens no one with excommunication. Mr Prince is free to seek more useful work in a different parish, if it is also in a different diocese. Will he do so?”

Henry said gloomily, “Does the Bishop really want Charlinch church to be a place where people once again come for a nap on Sundays?”

“I will not answer that question. I insist on you answering mine — will you leave Charlinch?”

Starky looked appealingly to Prince who said, “Before answering I must consult with The Spirit in prayer.”

“Do so. I will call for the answer tomorrow. Good day.”

Henry sat silent for a long time not responding to Starky’s few, timidly spoken words: “The Church of England, I fear, is governed by very worldly men. . If The Spirit wishes, of course, my family connections can easily place you in another parish. . Or will it command us, Belovéd, to defy the Bishop and leave the Church of England?. . If it does we will surely be able to continue in the rectory for a while because my father built it. . Several Anglicans have left the Church recently by turning Catholic. . Of course the incomes of me, my wife and sister will easily support us all, that is certainly a comfort and yet. . Many Scottish ministers so detest the patronage of landlords that they threaten to break away and found a Free Church. .”

“I must pray for guidance alone, Brother Starky,” said Henry, and went to his room.

The Starkys had never doubted that Henry’s amazingly unruffled composure came from God. He had told them his strange life story: that his mother in God had been a Catholic who taught him to love Jesus from the Bible; that she had persuaded his bodily mother of his priestly vocation; that four years ago she had become Anglican and joined him in holy wedlock before suffering at his side in this then faithless parish. They knew Martha’s death must have disturbed him more deeply than he had shown, and when he joined them in the drawing room later his air of wild distraction frightened them.

“My brother and sisters in Christ! O how I need your help,” he cried, weeping, “Is it possible that I am the most selfish, the most deluded of men? Can Satan — not the Holy Spirit — have led me into troubling this peaceful English parish? Has my inordinate pride deluded me and you and half a respectable Christian congregation? O say it is not so! Or else say, say, say that it is!”

He knelt down and raised clasped hands looking from Starky to the women and back. They clustered round him with soothing sounds from the women soon silenced by Starky’s ringing words: “Do not torment yourself, Belovéd! It is now my turn to reprove your lack of faith. By their fruits ye shall know them, declare the Scriptures. How can the fruits you have borne through the Lampeter Brethren and through me be Satan’s work? Satan cannot bring infidels to God, or heal the sick, or make active, experimental Christians out of worldly, formal ones. Remember that you are a Branch of the Tree of Life — that man called Branch whose fruit gives eternal life. Has the death of your belovéd Martha made you doubt your divine vocation? But she loved you and had faith in you, a faith you must not betray. Please get up.”

“I want to believe you dear, dear Sam,” sobbed Henry, still kneeling, “But The Spirit has commanded something so unexpected and strange — so outrageous to what worldly people think right — that I fear it cannot be obeyed.”

His listeners stared at each other, bewildered. Starky said, “The Spirit is surely not asking you to commit a crime!”

“Not a crime, no. What it commands breaks no human law and it is surely not sinful in the eyes of God.”

“Then who will it harm?”

“None, but a great many will be shocked.”

“If what the Spirit commands is not sinful, the Spirit must be obeyed,” said Starky, “What does it command?”

In a strangely timid voice Henry asked the women, “Do you agree with Brother Samuel?”

They agreed vehemently. Henry whispered, “Julia, the Spirit commands me to marry you.”

Julia’s mouth fell open. For several seconds, as the others gazed, the blood left her cheeks very pale, then returned in a blush that spread to her throat, ears and forehead. At last she nodded and said, “Since the Spirit commands us, yes, Henry. Yes my belovéd Henry. Yes, my belovéd Prince.”

He sighed deeply, said, “You have removed a great burden from me,” stood up and began drying his face with a handkerchief. Mrs Starky said faintly, “But I suppose the wedding need not take place very soon? Need it? There will be the usual year or so of mourning before it is solemnised.”

Henry said, “Dear sister — dear all of you, I am tired. The Spirit has wrought mightily in a feeble body. For the past week I have hardly slept. Tomorrow morning we will talk of what should be done in light of the Bishop’s mandate. It may be, indirectly, a message from God who requires me — having planted the seed of The Word in Charlinch — to sow it elsewhere. But now I must rest.”

He was about to leave but something in Julia’s face made him pause and raise her right hand to his mouth by the fingertips. He touched the back of it very slightly with his lips then said, “You realize that our marriage will not be of the flesh, but pure, and of The Spirit?”

Julia, blushing again, murmured, “Yes — O yes.” He went to bed.

Henry and Julia’s wedding very soon after Martha’s death shocked or amazed many and amused some (though Sam Starky conducted it). The couple bore these reactions meekly as they had married for the glory of God, not for earthly profit. One of Starky’s relations gave Henry the parish of Stoke in Suffolk, where his Father in God was Dr Allen of Ely, a bishop friendlier than Law of Bath and Wells toward a new breed of evangelical clergy. Meanwhile Starky remained rector of Charlinch and obtained as his new curate George Thomas, one of the early Lampeter Brethren.

Two years later Henry, with Julia’s support, had raised such a storm of annoyance in Stoke that Dr Allen summoned Henry to the episcopal palace and said, “What are we to do with you, Mr Prince?”

“Who does Your Lordship signify when he says we?”, murmured Henry.

“By we I signify the Church of England by Law Established, the Church you have studied to join, and which has made me your unhappy Father in God.”

He sighed. Henry waited. Dr Allen pointed to a desk saying, “That heap of letters contains more complaints than I can properly answer. Once again you are promoting domestic and social strife.” “May I remind Your Lordship of Christ’s own words? He said Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace; but a — ”

“Yes yes! May I remind you of Shakespeare’s words? The devil may cite the scriptures to his advantage.”

“Is it devilish of me to prefer the words of Christ to Shakespeare’s, Your Lordship?”

“No, but I assure you Christ’s words nowhere entitle a priest to exclude Christians from his services.”

“A Christian, Your Lordship, is someone who does more than chant words in unison. Services are a senseless mockery if not performed by hearts experiencing new birth through The Spirit, after which, says Jesus, the wheat must be divided from the chaff, the sheep from the goats.”

“He was speaking of the last days of mankind — the time of the general resurrection. Do you believe we are living in these last days?”

Henry did not reply.

“Will you persist in excluding parishioners from your services?”

“I will do as the Holy Spirit commands, Your Lordship.”

“Might it occur to you, Mr Prince, that in the Church of England the Holy Spirit commands you through me, your Bishop?”

Henry said nothing.

“If you do not concur I must withdraw your licence to preach in English Episcopal Churches.”

“Your Lordship will do precisely what God allows you to do.”

“If that is all you have to say, you may leave.”

Henry bowed and left.

This interview and its outcome had been foreseen and had stimulated Julia’s practical intelligence. She said, “The advowson of Stoke is still in our family’s gift. My baronet uncle will appoint one of the Brethren in your place here also, no matter what Dr Allen wants, so the best of your followers in Stoke will not be lost to us. Who would you like to choose — O Belovéd forgive me! — Who would the Holy Spirit choose in your place here?”

“Lewis Price, I suppose.”

“That will make him very happy. Shall we now discuss the new situation with Sam, since he is similarly placed?”

Henry nodded agreement. He had come to believe a saying of Thomas à Kempis, that silence is usually wiser than speech.

Complaints to the Bishop of Bath and Wells had continued after Henry and Julia left Charlinch because Starky and his new curate, George Thomas, were ardent Princeites, as some of the Lampeter Brethren were now being called. Most people in the Church of England thought their appointed clergymen adequate, but Princeites believed Henry — at first or second-hand — was essential. His Charlinch followers flocked so closely around Starky and Thomas that the rest, feeling excluded, at last persuaded Bishop Law to withdraw Starky’s licence. Thomas lasted longer. His popular sermons so increased Prince’s Charlinch following that when the Bishop eventually expelled him too nearly half his congregation also left. They now worshipped God in a Princeite farmer’s barn renamed the Charlinch Free Church. Here Thomas and Starky conducted services while a curate from a neighbouring parish led Sunday services in the established Charlinch church. Starky retained the rectory, so here he and Henry and their wives conferred.

“Things are working out wonderfully well, Belovéd!” said Starky. “We who have left the Church of England for conscience’ sake must now be as many as the first few Christians who separated from the Jews. With your following in Stoke and elsewhere we may soon be as many as the Children of Israel who followed Moses into the wilderness!”

“We have not left the Church of England Brother Starky,” said Henry firmly, “The Church of England has left us, or some of us. Our faith is unchanged. I have told the Lampeter Brethren this by letter. It is an important distinction.”

“Most of the Brethren are still Anglicans,” said Julia, “We should not needlessly estrange them.”

“You are quite right — I stand rebuked,” said Starky happily.

“Another wonderful thing is the better class of people joining our free church — not just milkmaids, road-menders and inferior farming people but people with money and land and respectable professions. We have a civil engineer with the Bristol and Exeter Railway!”

“The men are mostly bachelors and the women spinsters or widows,” said Mrs Starky. “I sometimes feel quite strange, being one of the few married people.”

“The engineer is Brother William Cobbe,” said Starky, “His sister, Miss Frances Cobbe, is the well known writer on social problems. He is so devoted to us that he has drawn plans for our very own church building and will pay for the construction! A site has been found for it only two or three miles away by Brother Hotham Mayber, a lovely spot at Spaxton Bottom where he owns land.”

Henry said thoughtfully, “At Stoke there is also a wealthier class of people among my faithful.”

He was silent for a time. The rest waited patiently until The Spirit moved him to say, “I must meet Brothers Cobbe and Mayber at Spaxton. But it is time, Brother Sam, for us to spread the Word of God to fresh pastures in less rural places.”

Which happened. Henry and Julia moved to Brighton where he rented a hall to preach in; Sam and wife went to Weymouth and did the same.

These pleasant seaside resorts contained many who had retired from cities like London where their money had been made, and where polluted air and water reduced life expectancy, even among the rich. Most of the retired were no longer young and often worried about the health of their bodies and souls. Those who overcame the first shock of attending Princeite meetings (which diverged more and more from traditional Anglican services) found unusual comfort in them. At least once a week Starky joined Henry in Adullam Hall, Brighton, or Henry joined Starky in a Weymouth tavern where they rented a room. Instead of the usual sermon they stood side by side making short speeches, turn and turn about. Their passionate duet first said all mankind was living under a dreadful impending catastrophe, then offered listeners a mysterious escape route.

Prince might begin by saying sadly, “What a beautiful thing was the human body when it came fresh from the hand of the Maker! Even now it is a noble thing, though it is but a temple in ruins! But in Eden it was bright with the beautiful image of God; it bore on its noble front the name of Him who made it, and man was the honoured link between Spirit and matter, Earth linked to Heaven by his living soul, united to Earth by his living body. His eye, his ear, his taste, his touch, his smell, his skin, his every sense was conscious only of good. Because Adam was a creature of sense rather than thought. Eve also. Their senses were alive in God, giving them the bright sun and the heaven in its clearness, the flowers in their sweetness, the streams in their gentleness. All these were mediums by which their Maker ministered to them as flesh.”

Starky said, “Adam, Eve and we their children would be living in eternal happiness to this day, as God wished, but that subtle serpent Satan tempted them to doubt God, yes, doubt God who had told them they would die if they ate fruit giving knowledge of good and evil! For to know evil is to become evil. They doubted God’s word, ate that fruit, were ashamed of their nakedness, and thought to hide themselves from God’s eye. Yes, doubt and knowledge and thought brought us all to sin, shame and death. So at last God took another woman — a virgin in Nazareth, Judaea — and made in her flesh Jesus Christ through whom the souls of believers will be redeemed. But where does that leave our bodies?”

“Look on the human body now!” cried Prince, “Look at those shrivelled anatomies of once human men, women and children starved by the failure of the potato crops in Holland, Belgium and Ireland! But why look so far? London is now the largest, richest, most scientifically governed city in the world and capital of an empire ruling, in every continent, a full quarter of the world’s people. Yet poisonous sewage has turned the Thames into the foulest river on earth. On its banks great lords and senators sitting in the Westminster Palace can hardly stand the stink, yet know not how to cure it. At night gas candelabra light up every London lane, street and public building but what does that light reveal? Filthy and turbulent mobs!”

“Look into any hospital,” cried Starky, “Into any prison — workhouse — factory — sweatshop — gin palace — tenement — slum. Are not even the mansions of the wealthy repositories of misery and sin? Can you see among so many weak and unhealthy bodies, so many painful forms of torn humanity, the lines of beauty and the mark of God? What do you see in all this? Death reigns. Death reigns. Need it always reign?”

“It shall not always reign!” cried Henry, “We have been sent by The Spirit to offer you redemption of the body!”

Then with alternating quotations from the Old and New Testaments he and Starky showed that God would now destroy most mankind as he had done before in the deluge that drowned all but Noah and his family; but here in England another family of the faithful would be made immortal if they cleaved to someone sent by God to save them.

“That pure Vessel of the Holy Spirit stands among us!” cried Starky, “But it is not yet time to utter his name.”

“Those who have ears to hear, let them await in readiness and soon they shall hear,” said Henry, “And believing, they will receive eternal life. Amen, Amen and Amen.”

In little more than a year Brighton and Weymouth, Charlinch and Stoke had each a hive buzzing with expectant Princeites. There was even a cluster of them in Swansea, where one of the Lampeter Brethren had let Henry and Starky preach to his congregation. Princeites who knew what they expected could not be counted because they discussed it in low voices and groups of two or three. In 1846 Henry was five years older than Jesus when He entered Jerusalem. Henry’s followers might have begun to doubt his Heaven on Earth had he not started building it by first gathering the most devoted into one place. As Brighton was a notorious haven for weekend adulterers he and Julia joined Sam and Mrs Starky in Belfield Terrace, Weymouth. To an adjacent house came Harriet, Agnes and Clara Nottidge, daughters of a London merchant who had retired with his family to Stoke. There the three sisters became such ardent Princeites that they had followed Henry to Brighton. In Belfield Terrace they joined the Princes and Starkys for breakfast and morning prayers, also for evening prayers and supper. Henry now commanded enough spare rooms to house all his richest followers and occasionally those with businesses outside Weymouth, but who occasionally needed strengthening by close contact with him. Two of these were William Cobbe and Hotham Mayber.

“I call our Belfield houses Agapemone,” he told them, “which is Greek for the dwelling place or abode of love. Here even we who are husbands and wives live in perfect spiritual harmony and happiness, quite free of fleshly sin because we are brothers and sisters whose only parent is Almighty God. But this little abode is the seed of something larger — a great estate with a mansion that can comfortably accommodate at least thirty gentry with as many servants. There must be gardens around the mansion and space for it to be made larger if that is needed, also an extensive home farm with cottages for labourers and other servants. You, Brothers Cobbe and Mayber, are of all men the most practical who have faith in me! Through you God has chosen the site of his New Jerusalem. Brother Mayber, that land you gave to our free church at Spaxton Bottom — can more be obtained?”

Mayber smiled and shrugged saying, “Apart from cathedrals, army barracks, royal palaces and dockyards there is no part of England that cannot be bought for ready money. The land at Spaxton is good agricultural land so cannot be bought cheap, but it has no mineral deposits and is far from any railway line, so will not be unusually dear.”

“There is a house near the church?”

“Yes, and unoccupied, but it is not much larger than Charlinch Rectory.”

“Brother Cobbe!” said Henry, “Survey the land round Spaxton Bottom, mapping buildings and farmlands needed by our estate. Consult with Brother Mayber in deciding its extent. The house near the church must be enlarged by adding wings. Design it beautifully. You are building God’s final earthly home.”

Stroking his beard thoughtfully Cobbe said, “We can do all that, Belovéd. I can ensure the mansion has gas lighting with every modern plumbing facility. But such building may cost almost as much as the land itself. Will Mayber and I offend the Holy Spirit if we ask — in all humility — for you to name purchase prices and construction costs we should not exceed?”

“The Holy Spirit is not offended by your question,” said Henry, smiling, “because it does not hear it. The Spirit merely requires you to survey the ground, map the estate and design a house fit for the Lord of All the Earth and His followers. The Spirit asks Brother Mayber to begin negotiating the purchase. Do not doubt that the Spirit will provide what we need to complete God’s Holy Work. Let us pray.”

They knelt with him in prayer then, glad and determined, went to do as he said.

Then Henry sent letters inviting all the Lampeter Brethren to a special conference in the Weymouth Royal Hotel, to stop them losing contact with each other. The mood of this well-attended meeting was at first cordial because so many Brethren were glad to meet again. They found themselves among many they did not know: excited, fashionable ladies and gentlemen, and common people in their best Sunday clothes. The Reverend George Thomas started the business of the day by mounting a platform and proposing that Henry James Prince be elected chairman, since he had called the meeting. Nobody opposed that; the motion was carried by a great show of hands. Henry mounted the platform and sat gravely behind a table there. From the floor of the hall Lewis Price now moved that George Thomas be the minutes secretary, a motion also seconded and accepted without opposition. Thomas, producing a notebook, mounted the platform and sat beside Henry who called the meeting to order and asked Brother Starky to open it.

Starky began by saying it was an overpowering honour for him to speak first, because of all ordained Lampeter Brethren he was certainly the last and least, having studied divinity at Cambridge — not Lampeter. For most of his life he had been a sick man, a wholly formal Christian, and a completely useless priest. He described at great length how his Belovéd Brother Prince had miraculously restored him to health and the love of Jesus, then described at greater length the mighty works of The Spirit in creating Charlinch Free Church and other wonderful Christian congregations in Stoke, Brighton and Weymouth. It was plain (he said) that an even mightier Work of the Spirit impended, and he demonstrated this with biblical quotations from the start of Genesis to the book of Revelations. But this Work must be wrought through a human instrument and where would such a Vessel of The Pure Spirit appear? Surely not in the corrupted Catholic Church, mighty and widespread though Rome still was. Surely not in the Churches of Czarist Russia and Greece, or the fragmented Protestant sects of Europe and America; nor could this saviour stand high in the Church of England, which was ruled by very worldly men. This Vessel could only appear among the Lampeter Brethren. He ended by saying, “I, Samuel Starky, firmly believe — indeed, I know — that this Vessel, this Man we call Branch foretold in the Scriptures, is among us here now. I hereby move that this meeting call upon that Man to reveal himself! Who will second my motion?”

Starky’s words excited all his listeners except Henry who sat behind the table with folded hands and downcast eyes. A great number now gazed at him, their right arms straining above their heads and shouting, “Yes yes!” “I second that!” “Hear hear!”, but most of the Lampeter Brethren present stared around as if lost or looked enquiringly at each other. The chairman raised his head, then his hand and there was silence. He said, “Does anyone oppose that motion?”

“May I say a few words?” said a voice from the floor. “Certainly,” said the chairman.

“Thankyou, Brother Henry. You will know that I am Laurence Deck, who attended our old college at Lampeter. You invited me here to discuss the present state of the Lampeter Brethren, and I am delighted to find us surrounded by so many from Brother Starky’s south coast congregation and probably your own. You did not ask the rest of we Brethren to bring members of our congregations, probably because we live far from Weymouth and our congregations are mostly too poor to travel. My accent tells everyone here that I am Welsh, and we Welsh greatly admire England’s love of fair play. I ask every honest English man and woman present, is it fair for them to help three or four priests outvote a larger number, simply because that larger number have brought no followers?”

Deck sat down. A murmuring that had started during his speech now broke out into cries of, “Nonsense!” “Pedantry!” “Turn him out!”, yet whispering in the audience showed many quieter voices were discussing his words. On the platform Starky and Thomas looked appealingly to the chairman who again sat with downcast eyes until another voice from the floor said, “Brother Henry, I am Arthur Rees from Sunderland in Northumbria. May I speak?”

“Certainly,” said Henry.

“When Brother Starky says a Vessel of the Holy Ghost may be among us, does he refer to Christ’s second coming?”

“Eh. . yes! I do! But in The Spirit!” cried Starky, then added hastily, “And in the body too. . of course. . also in the body.”

“Thankyou for being so clear,” said Rees. “True Christians should always expect Christ’s second coming at any moment, for if we do not we may miss it, as the foolish virgins missed the bridegroom in the parable. That is why we Christians have been expecting Christ ever since His resurrection. But can we be sure His second coming is now so very near? Brother Starky says the world has grown as wicked as when God drowned nearly everyone in Noah’s flood, but is not the world today, with its many admitted evils, better than it was in the days of the Emperor Nero? Or before the Protestant Reformation? I agree with him that many Church of England clergy are worldly men with worldly motives, but do not agree that there are no pure-hearted Christians outside the Lampeter Brethren. In other churches there are many pure believers. I myself am thinking of joining the Baptists. .”

This caused a muffled commotion in which a woman screamed, “Shame!”, then tried to look as if she had not. Rees cried, “Surely we should only do what Jesus commanded! Let us love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and minds and our neighbour as ourselves! Let us even love neighbours who ignore us, mock us or treat us as enemies! God still wants Christians to love and serve fallen humanity, especially if we are priests.”

He sat down in a sudden, respectful silence which lasted some seconds before hands were raised by many eager to speak. The chairman suddenly looked up and in a strange sing-song that disconcerted everyone chanted, “Brother Deck again has the floor.”

“I d-d-do not wish to suggest anything of-of-of-offensive to Brother Prince and his followers,” said Deck, confused by the strange voice that singled him out but swiftly mastering his stammer, “I only suggest that Brother Starky’s motion is prem — is premature. Let all the Lampeter Brethren and their congregations watch for signs that Christ is returning or has returned, because surely these signs will be miracles that none who see them can doubt, and that no show of hands, no counting of heads can set in train. I move that all in the Lampeter Brotherhood correspond with each other, perhaps using our minutes secretary, Brother Thomas, as a kind of central post office. If any of us encounter a miracle showing that Christ has returned, let him share that news, not confine it to one circle of ad-ad-ad-admirers.”

“Let Brother Deck’s commands be obeyed!” Henry almost screamed in his peculiar new voice, “This meeting is now at an end! Amen, Amen, and Amen!”

He swiftly left the platform and room, followed closely by Starky, Thomas, Julia, Mrs Starky and Rees. The remaining Lampeter Brethren and Princeites were so confused that they mutteringly left the hotel without more public discussion.

A fortnight after the Royal Hotel meeting Arthur Rees and Laurence Deck called on Prince at Belfield Terrace, Weymouth. He received them as he received all visitors nowadays, Julia seated on one side and Starky on the other. He arose as Rees and Deck entered — murmured a welcome — shook their hands warmly — sat calmly smiling as the visitors, on a sofa facing them, exchanged remarks about the weather with his followers. Suddenly Rees said wildly, “O Brother Prince, I do not know how to start saying what we are here to say!”

“Yet say it.”

“This letter in my hand — Brother Deck has also received a copy — purports to be minutes of our last meeting of the Brethren. It is not! I doubt if Brother Thomas wrote a word of it!”

“He wrote every word of it,” said Prince mildly, “I know this because he wrote down what The Spirit dictated to him through my lips. The voice was mine but the words were God’s. Brother Thomas then made a copy in his own hand while Sisters Julia and Starky made other copies. The Spirit directed that Thomas’s manuscript epistles be posted to you and Deck. The other copies went to the other former Brethren.”

“Who are as shocked as we are! The only Lampeter Brethren it mentions as present are you, Starky, Thomas and Price!”

“Because we were the only Brethren present in heart and soul. You and the rest were not. You heard Brother Starky knocking at the door of your hearts, begging you to open and admit salvation through the Holy Spirit’s love. You preferred to shut it out.”

“O Brother Prince! O my dear, dear Brother Henry!” cried Rees, starting to weep.

“Are we brothers?” murmured Henry.

“Yes! Brothers in God from the moment we first confessed and prayed together in your room at St David’s College, Lampeter, brothers-in-law since I married your sister!”

Henry said absently, “I regret that. There is still enough fleshly inclination in my heart to regret that you are no longer, in truth, my brother.”

He closed his eyes and kept them shut until Rees and Deck left the room.

“Brother Prince — for I insist on still calling you so — ” said Deck, “This letter lies when it says the meeting ended with everyone present unanimously voting you to be the Redeemer foretold in the Bible.”

“That letter tells a truth you did not see, and cannot see because you are blind.”

“But it stands to reason! —”

“I am not reasonable, Deck,” Henry interrupted smoothly, “If I fell so low as to reason with you I would become the old, selfish, fleshly Henry Prince you once knew. I would have to agree with you. But that Henry Prince is dead. I am now as a little child who says only what The Spirit wishes. Sometimes I hardly understand what it says through me, but I know it is eternal damnation not to believe it.”

Deck stood up saying, “Rees, we had better leave,” but Rees begged, “Let me try once more! Henry, on our way here yesterday we stopped in Brighton where I questioned some who have heard you preach. .”

“You were spying, in fact,” said Julia.

“I was enquiring. One said you and Starky claimed to be the two witnesses of Revelations, another that you call yourselves the Prophet Elijah and the Holy Ghost made flesh. Is this true?”

Henry said, “I am not permitted to reply”.

“We do not say we did, neither do we say we did not,” Starky explained.

“O my poor Brother Henry!” sobbed Rees, standing up, “You were the best of us at Lampeter — the purest, bravest and most truly humble. O what has turned you into such a dreadful, such a silly creature?”

At this impiety Julia and Starky stared aghast at Henry. One of his eyes may have flickered open and shut, otherwise he did not move for two or three seconds then whispered, “Get thee behind me, Rees. Get thee behind me, Deck.”

Julia stood up saying coldly, “I will show you out, Mister Rees, Mister Deck. Our Belovéd carries many heavy burdens. You have failed to add another.”

Shortly after returning to his family in Sunderland Arthur Rees received a letter with a south coast postmark, addressed to him in an unfamiliar hand. As was then common the envelope was fastened with a circular blob of sealing wax, but remarkably big, and black instead of the usual red. He broke the seal and took out two sheets of thick, good-quality paper called mourning card, because printed with a black border for people sending news of a death or funeral. The first card had these words written large in the unknown hand:

Henry called the faithful to a second meeting in the Weymouth Royal Hotel, a meeting so important that Lampeter Brethren who had not shown themselves unbelievers were ordered to come. Julia visited Swansea and explained the urgency of Henry’s summons to the Princeite clergy there, but Rees and Deck’s influence was such that only one of them attended beside Henry and Starky, Thomas and Price.

The platform at this meeting had an easy chair at the back with two upright chairs nearer the front, one on each side. Henry sat in the centre with the absent look he now always wore when not speaking; Starky sat to his left, Thomas to the right. They began the meeting by standing together with Henry behind them.

“Dearly belovéd brothers and sisters in God,” said Thomas, “you are about to hear a sermon, but not an ordinary sermon from an ordinary preacher.”

“We are sent to you from the courts of Heaven,” said Starky, “From the bosom of eternity, to proclaim the second coming of Our Lord.”

“His coming is nigh!” said Thomas.

“Very nigh!” said Starky.

“Very nigh indeed!” said Thomas, and together they cried, “Behold He cometh!”, and moved apart, sitting down again as Henry stepped forward.

And quietly asked, “Who am I who stand before you? I am Brother Prince. Who is Brother Prince? Is Brother Prince. . God? Only very foolish or very wicked people can ask such a question. I’m a man like yourselves, a vessel of clay. But God, for his own purpose, has emptied out this vessel and filled it with mercy: mercy for all who will drink of it. Look well upon me! In me you behold the love of Christ for fallen humanity.

“I am here to speak of the redemption of the body, by which I mean, its deliverance from the power of Satan, who is the author of all evil, whether it is sin in the soul, or disease and death in the body. All evil, I say, including headache, stomach ache and toothache. Jesus Christ came to destroy Satan in the soul of man, but his blesséd Gospel made no provision for the flesh, which is God’s greatest enemy. But you are flesh! You are of the earth, earthy! Behold, He is coming to judge the Earth! Believe me, the bridegroom already stands outside the door! O, how will you bear it when you behold Him?”

Suddenly he cried aloud, “I will tell you — You will not bear it! You will burn, like chaff, in the fire of his unending love, which you will feel as eternal torture if you now reject His mercy!” He paused for a moment then said, quietly again, “But do not the Scriptures say we shall be changed, those of us who are alive and await the coming of the Lord? Behold, declares Isaiah, the prophet, Behold, I create new Heavens!

“That prophesy is being fulfilled. The day of judgement has come. God is creating the new Heaven through me: Brother Prince. Be glad therefore, and join me in that which I create, for behold, I build the New Jerusalem, rejoicing! At Spaxton in Somerset an Abode is arising, an Abode where those of you who leave their houses, wives, husbands, parents, children and lands for My sake will enter and live for ever in the Pure Enjoyment of the Love of Angels! But do not tarry. God still sits in his Mercy Seat, but not even I — a Branch of the Tree of Life whose fruit I bear for you — not even I know how soon He will leave it, consigning to eternal darkness all who linger outside the gates. When the world is burning into ashes, and the sky is melting in the fervent heat, what use then will be your flocks and herds? Rank and state? Property and capital? Shares, dividends and financial securities? Do you hope to ride on horses to the throne of grace? Or drive in carriages to the judgement seat? Sell what thou hast is the Divine Injunction to the called. Will you stand on the edge of doom and dispute the Words of God? Or will you, at the end of the Christian era, do as did all who answered Christ’s call at the start of it? — Join with those who, believing in Him, entered the Peace of God and His heavenly kingdom by giving up to Him everything they had?”

Henry retired to his seat, obviously exhausted by the passionate working of the Spirit in him. Nothing he had said was wholly unexpected — his audience had heard some of it before from Starky, Thomas, Price and the Belovéd himself — yet an intense murmuring arose and subsided as Starky and Thomas again came forward.

“Our Abode of Love,” Starky announced, “Shall be known as Agapemone.”

“At the back of this hall,” said Thomas, “Brother James Rouse, our attorney, has opened the Book of Mercy where he will register the names of those willing to enter the Agapemone by giving their All to it.”

Said Starky, “Only your intention will be recorded today, as the legal transfer of property to our Abode will take a little longer. I and Brother Thomas will be foremost in setting our names there.”

He and Thomas left the platform together and strode side by side to the back of the hall where Julia, Mrs Starky and Price waited to sign their names.

In Belfield Terrace that evening donations indicated in The Book of Mercy were compared with the estimated costs of the estate. Henry’s seven most faithful followers discussed these while he, wearing quilted dressing gown, velvet smoking cap and slippers, lay back in an armchair and only spoke when a final decision was needed. The book registered the following: –

4 clergymen (not counting Henry) — Thomas, Starky, Price and the Swansea Curate

a civil engineer — William Cobbe

a landed proprietor — Hotham Mayber

a surgeon — Arthur Mayber, Hotham’s brother an attorney — James Rouse

7 fund-holders — 3 Nottidge sisters and Mayber’s 4 sisters

2 annuitants — Julia and a widow called Paterson

3 farmers, 1 with five hundred acres employing thirty labourers

a twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of Mrs Paterson

9 house servants, one of them male

6 laundresses

2 dressmakers

3 helpers in stables

3 carpenters

a mason

a groom

a post-boy

a shoe-maker

a tailor

“An excellent beginning — really excellent,” said Starky, “Though, alas, the All our brothers and sisters are willing to donate is less that the amount our greater Abode requires.”

“Because some are not donating their All, like we in this room!” said Julia sharply, “Our lawyer James Rouse is withholding a very great deal. His income must be much larger than he admits — he says nothing about the savings or the value of his properties. Which of us should speak to him about that?” she asked Henry. He murmured, “Nobody, as yet.”

“It would be unwise to estrange him,” said Mayber, “while he is drawing up deeds of gift for signature by our Belovéd’s other followers.”

“Then what about the Nottidge girls?” demanded Julia, “Each offers the thousand a year interest on her capital, but not the capital itself.”

They glanced toward Henry who said quietly, “Do not worry; the Lord will provide. Show me the plans again please.” Cobbe laid them on his knees saying, “The church at least is completed, apart from the spire.”

“It needs no spire,” said Henry, “It needs, however, a conservatory or at least a corridor joining it to the main residence.”

“What a good idea!” cried Mrs Starky, “Because, you know, we can then go back and forth to divine service quite untroubled by the weather until. . until. . ”

She frowned uncertainly. Thomas suggested, “Until time stops, eternity begins and the weather is as heavenly as God will make it?”

“Yes! That is exactly what I meant.”

“I too look forward to that blesséd day,” said Starky, “though I am sorry for the doomed multitude who will never enjoy it.”

“You should not be sorry, they will have brought it on themselves,” said Julia.

A few weeks later Starky told the Nottidge sisters that the Spirit required them to travel with him, Henry and their wives to view the work going forward at Spaxton. They went by coach into Somerset and stopped in Taunton where the Princes and Starkys rested at Giles’ Hotel, the three spinster ladies at the nearby Castle Inn. Early next day Henry sent for Harriet. She put on her bonnet and crossed to the Giles’ Hotel where he received her kindly but solemnly. In the presence of Julia and the Starkys he explained that it would be for the Glory of God if she married his young friend, the Reverend Lewis Price. Harriet blushed and agreed. Henry bade her return in peace to the Castle Inn and lock this secret closely in her heart. This she did.

Then Henry sent for Agnes, a less biddable woman. In a voice as kind as he had used with her sister but more solemnly he said, “Agnes, God is about to confer on you a special blessing; but ere I tell you what it is, you must give me your word to obey the Lord and accept His gift.”

Agnes gave her word after the slightest of hesitations. Henry said, “In a few days you will be united in marriage to our Brother George Robinson Thomas.”

Agnes, confused by the news, cried out, “In a few days?”

“Such is God’s will.”

“But — but — but I have relations to consult, legal settlements to make!”

“You need none of these things. You must not think of the world, but of God.”

“But my mother must be told!” Agnes pleaded.

“God is your father and mother,” said Prince.

“But lawyers take time. . ”

“Why do you want a lawyer, dear?” asked Mrs Starky, looking up from her knitting.

“Well. . for the children’s sake.”

“You will have no children!” said Prince, patiently. “Your marriage with our Brother will be spiritual only; your love to your husband will be pure, according to the Will of God. And now,” he added more warmly, “take tea with us, Agnes, and know that this blesséd moment is a happy one.”

Later in the day the two sisters dined with the Princes and Starkys at the Giles’ Hotel where they met their new fiancés, Thomas and Price. Two days later Clara was similarly engaged to William Cobbe. The three sisters now wished to return to their mother’s home in Stoke for a while, but Henry said God forbade that and also forbade them to tell anyone by letter before the marriages. Meanwhile Harriet and Clara willingly signed their fortunes over to Henry. Agnes refused, but finally signed an agreement that her husband Thomas could invest her property in their joint names. All these details were arranged through communal prayers led by Henry. A fortnight later the three marriages were solemnized in Swansea by one of the Brethren, Starky giving the brides away and Henry looking on.

By these means eighteen thousand pounds of Nottidge money was added to the Agapemone fund. Continuous inflation during the twentieth century has made it almost impossible to convert such a sum into a modern equivalent — in those days servants who ate and lodged with a family were often paid a pound a year or less. Postal rates may give another clue. In Victoria’s reign an early Socialist had organized the Royal Mail to deliver any letter in Britain for the price of a penny stamp. It was a first class service — there was no second class. In 2006 a first class stamp costs 33 pence, but multiplying the Nottidge £18,000 by 33 would still be too little, for in Britain’s pre-decimal days a pound contained 240 pence. By a conservative estimate Henry acquired by these three marriages more than a million modern pounds sterling, which was a fraction of what he got from other followers when income tax was so small and such a recent innovation that important statesmen (Gladstone was one) proposed abolishing it. The estate was now perfectly solvent.

Henry called Julia and the Starkys, Thomas and Price, Mayber and Cobbe, “my seven-branched golden candlestick”. One evening, after calculating all the moneys transferred to Henry’s account, an awestruck silence befell them. Mrs Starky broke it by saying, “Well, Belovéd, you must now certainly have your own carriage and pair.”

Henry had hitherto hired a carriage when he needed one. Owning a one-horse carriage was then a mark of middle-class prosperity: a carriage and pair signified a much higher social standing.

“No!” cried Julia, “A carriage and four! With outriders! Your dignity demands it, Belovéd.”

The idea astonished and excited nearly everyone present — a carriage drawn by four horses was seldom used except by royalty and lords travelling in state processions. If it occurred to the horsemen present that a carriage and four would need unusually skilful management on the twisting roads of southern England they did not say so. When, with a slight chuckle, Henry asked, “What is the sentiment of this meeting toward Sister Julia’s somewhat audacious suggestion?” they all smiled, delighted that the Spirit was allowing their Belovéd to unbend in a joke.

“Yes, you must have a carriage and four Belovéd!”, cried Starky, “It is owed to the Spirit moving you!”

“Hear hear!” cried the others so Henry, amused yet resigned, murmured, “If I must, I must.”

Julia and Mrs Starky devized sober yet eye-catching suits of livery in two shades of grey for the Belovéd’s coachman and footmen. These were cut by Samuel Tricksey, the Agapemone tailor, a small man who fancied himself as a jockey. To stop the harness tangling at sharp bends he gladly rode one of the foremost horses when Henry drove outside Weymouth. This splendid equipage astonished commoners who had seen nothing like it and annoyed gentry who thought it a vulgar display of ill-gotten wealth.

One day Henry urgently summoned George Thomas to the Weymouth Agapemone, and Thomas answered that he could not come at once as he and Agnes were going on holiday to his mother in Wales. Henry had not met such disobedience since his days as a Charlinch curate and had never before found it in Thomas, one of the earliest Lampeter Brethren and also the preacher on whom, after Starky, he most depended. Thomas was obviously now under his wife’s bad influence. When the sinful couple came to Belfield Terrace on the way back from Wales they were put on trial before Henry and Julia, Sam and Mrs Starky. The main accusers were Agnes’ sisters and their husbands. Thomas had never been rebuked by Henry before. He wept, knelt on the floor, confessed his sin and begged forgiveness. Agnes stared at him in astonishment tinged with contempt that struck the rest as open defiance. Thomas leapt to his feet and cried out in as terrible a voice as he could manage, “Agnes! I command you to obey henceforth the Spirit of God in me, made known to me through our Belovéd servant of the Lord!”

Agnes crept to her bedroom in a house that felt more like a Spanish inquisitor’s jail than an abode of love.

Worse followed. Harriet, Agnes and Clara had a younger sister Louisa, a woman of forty who still lived with their widowed mother and was also heiress to a big slice of their father’s fortune. In the next few days Agnes realized Louisa was being invited to join the Agapemone too, so began writing a letter advizing her not to come. In a commune privacy is almost impossible. Thomas found the letter and showed it to Henry. When Agnes went to her bedroom that night her husband stood in the doorway and said, “You are lost, Agnes. From now on any room where I am is locked against you, is an empty room as far as you are concerned. Go and beg for a sleeping space from one of the female servants in the basement or attic. You will not find her so easy to corrupt as you have corrupted me once, but never again! I have repented and have been forgiven. You have twice defied the Servant of the Lord and now can never be forgiven.”

Next day Agnes was left in Belfield Terrace with two servants when Henry, Thomas and other chief Princeites went by carriage to Spaxton, where a row of cottages had been made habitable for them. A week after that a letter from a servant at Weymouth told Henry that Agnes was certainly pregnant. Thomas wrote to her at once, commanding her to go and live with his mother in Wales. Instead she returned to her own mother’s house near Stoke where she gave birth to a son a few months later.

Louisa Nottidge, despite the sufferings of her sister Agnes, despite the opposition of her mother and other relatives, came to live in one of Henry’s completed cottages at Spaxton. One evening a carriage arrived containing her brother, a clergyman-cousin and a stranger who turned out to be a police officer. They said they had come to take her home because her mother was ill. She refused to believe them so was forced into the carriage, fighting and screaming, and driven to a private hospital near London where she was locked up as a madwoman. Harriet, Clara and their husbands could get no news of Louisa’s whereabouts from her mother. After eighteen months Louisa managed to send word of the madhouse address to William Cobbe, her brother-in-law. Cobbe applied to the Commissioners of Lunacy who investigated, found imprisonment was damaging Louisa’s health, that she had religious delusions but was otherwise sane. When freed she legally transferred all her property to Henry and returned to the Abode.

The Spaxton Agapemone was then complete and the one in Weymouth abandoned. There is no record of how Henry finally entered the great new Abode but surely he did it splendidly, going with Julia and the two Starkys in the carriage and four down long lanes through woodlands, two liveried footmen seated behind, and in front beside the coachman on the box, a postillion blowing a long horn to herald the Belovéd’s approach. I imagine as outriders beside the carriage all the Agapemone male gentry — three clergymen, two Maybers, William Cobbe and the attorney Rouse. A groom rides one of the foremost horses because the tailor — Samuel Tricksey — is now the Agapemone gateman. At the sound of the horn he appears from his gatehouse, above which is a tower with flagpole and flag bearing the Agapemone emblem: a lamb, lion and dove on a bed of roses with the motto Oh, Hail, Holy Love. From now on this flag will be flown whenever Henry is at home. As Tricksey and a servant open the gates for the carriage please imagine the Old Hundredth struck up by a mighty cathedral choir and organ: –

O enter in his gates with praise;

Approach with joy His courts unto;

Praise, laud, and bless His Name always,

For it is seemly so to do.

For why? the Lord our God is good;

His mercy is for ever sure;

His truth at all times firmly stood,

And shall from age to age endure — as carriage

and outriders canter up a drive to a front door where all the servants are ranged on each side of the front steps, with the ladies of leisure at the top. Henry and companions leave the carriage; his entourage dismounts. Grooms lead carriage and horses away to the stables as Henry leads everyone else into the house with a radiant smile that seems to shine on all while focusing on none.

Maybe an hour or two later we see him in the Agapemone church. It has no altar, lectern, pulpit or choir stalls. The only religious symbols are the lamb, lion, dove and roses in the stained glass windows. The interior is furnished like an opulent Victorian drawing room with a large red ottoman sofa in the chancel where the communion table normally stands. On this Henry comfortably sits, right leg cast over left knee, and addresses the gentlefolk standing before him.

“Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,” he says sweetly, “today we have entered Jerusalem with psalms of praise and now the Day of Judgement is past. The Angel has left the Mercy Seat, and we, the Blesséd, are gathered into the bosom of God. From now onwards psalms, prayers, sermons and services are at an end, and we will live for ever surrounded by all that can delight the eye and satisfy the sense. Only one ceremony remains — that great manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s love for the Body by which he redeems it from sin and death. And just as Satan started the fall of the old earth in Adam’s flesh — that is, in Eve, who was living earth — so will God restore the earth by creating a new consciousness in the flesh of a woman once again. It behoves the virgins among you, therefore, to adorn yourself and await the coming of the bridegroom. The hour is nigh!”

“Very nigh indeed!”, said Starky, smiling and nodding on Henry’s right with Thomas on the left. Henry stands, places a hand on each of their shoulders and tells the rest, “My witnesses will summon you when the time is right.”

He clasps his hands on his chest and leaves, the company parting to let him through. Most of those present, especially the ladies, are left in a state of whispering confusion.

Since Henry, as always, used the language of King James’ authorized bible nobody is sure how far his speech is metaphorical. Though four of the women present are legally married and all but one are middle-aged, all are or claim to be virgins. This is too delicate a matter to discuss so Fanny Mayber says, “Sister Julia, what does Belovéd mean when he tells us to adorn ourselves? I have some jewellery, of course, but. .” She falls silent, confused. Three years before all Princeite women were told to sell their jewellery and give the money to Henry. Most did. Julia says kindly, “None of us, I am sure, should try to outshine the rest. Any personal adornment that has been accidentally retained should be shared equally with all of us, but it will be easier if we wear nothing that is not ordered new for the occasion. And whatever we wear, let it be white.” A kind of thrill goes through the ladies as Annie Mayber murmurs, “Belovéd seemed to suggest His final manifestation would be a kind of wedding.”

“Bridal veils?”, suggests someone.

“With chaplets of white roses?”, breathes another.

Julia is the only one among them who can sometimes ask Henry direct questions. She brings them word that bridal attire will be appropriate for all and no expense need be spared. White silks and satins, white velvets, laces and gauze are ordered from London, also the latest pattern of bridal gown. In less than a month the Agapemone dressmakers make nine gowns for women of several ages, shapes and sizes. Mrs Starky and Fanny Mayber have the finest dress sense and unselfishly suggest adjustments that show their sisters’ figures to the best advantage. When all are satisfied with their bridal gowns Henry announces the day of the final manifestation, which takes place before the congregated faithful on the sofa in the Agapemone church.

The ceremony is described in a pamphlet called The Little Book Open — The Testimony of Br. Prince concerning what Jesus Christ has done by His Spirit to Redeem the Earth: In Voices from Heaven. Henry published it in 1856, five years after the his Manifestation. A long preamble explains why God required it, then says. “Thus the Holy Ghost took flesh in the presence of those whom He called as flesh. Out of this one lump of clay — dust of the ground, living earth — flesh — He, the Great Potter took one piece to make it new. He took flesh — a woman — in their presence, and told them it was his intention to make it one with him, even as a man is one flesh with his wife. He consulted nobody’s pleasure in doing this but his own. He was not influenced by what others might think or say. And he took it with power and authority as flesh that belonged to God, and was at his absolute disposal. In taking it he left it no choice of its own. He did not take it because it loved him, for it did not — but because it pleased him to set his love upon it. Yet he took it in love; for having taken it his manner in it was such as flesh could know and appreciate as love. He kept it with him continually day and night. He took it openly with him wherever he went, not being ashamed of it. He made its life happy and agreeable by affording it the enjoyment of every simple and innocent gratification. Thus he made it one with him, and made it new flesh. He created it a new consciousness”.

Which means he began by raping the youngest virgin in the presence of the others (including his legal wife) and the Agapemone gentlemen. She was the daughter of the widow Paterson, a girl of fifteen. Her mother, as devoted to Henry as any other Princeite, had died a few months earlier of what doctors called consumption but Henry called doubt. He told the others, “She erred, so God took her”, which explained the matter. Female fashions in 1851 make his rape hard to imagine. Paris dominated these fashions more than nowadays, and French fashion was ruled by the wife of Napoleon’s nephew. She was a handsome Spaniard who loved ballroom dancing so popularized the crinoline to hide her pregnancies, for it covered women’s bodies from waist to feet in a circular whalebone cage a yard or more across at knee level, under a skirt descending to the ground. This fashion was denounced from pulpits, mocked by caricaturists and heartily complained of by most men, especially those who travelled in railway carriages and small horse-drawn buses, yet it triumphed for nearly two decades. Fashionable women liked it for the same reason as the French Empress; poorer women because, in days when Britain’s overcrowded industrial cities had no public lavatories for women, it let them urinate in streets and parks without noticeably doing so. Unless the Agapemone bridal gowns were unfashionably designed only an expert in historic costume can perhaps explain how Henry got through Miss Paterson’s crinoline. If his pamphlet is true he treated her afterwards with as much kindness and consideration as any devoted Victorian husband. There is now no way of knowing his wife Julia’s feelings. Neither she, he or anyone left word of them.

Not doubting he had done as God commanded, Henry wrote a description of his Great Manifestation in the third person (like Caesar describing his Gallic Wars) and published it, and sent Starky and Thomas out to preach it in Bridgwater and London. He must have changed his mind about God finally closing the gates of the Abode to everyone else, and was ready to let in new believers and (if they came in sufficient numbers with sufficient money) perhaps greatly enlarge the Abode of Love. That did not happen. The Bridgwater meeting was a failure and the best account of the London meeting is in a September 1856 edition of The Times:

Hepworth Dixon was a journalist, novelist, editor and one of those busy, worldly, free-thinking yet discreet men who, in a phrase fashionable in late 19^th century England, were said to have gone everywhere and done everything. In the Baltic provinces of East Prussia — in Salt Lake City and Oneida Creek, U.S.A. — in England at Spaxton Bottom he noticed communities who had scandalized public opinion by practising new kinds of marriage. He investigated these communities and, in a two volume study called Spiritual Wives showed how they differed from highly sensational accounts in the popular press. His book was published in 1867. Here is his description of a visit to the Agapemone:

“No stranger is admitted into the Agapemone,” says Murray’s Handbook.

“The Abode of Love,” said Sir Frederick Thesiger, speaking as a prosecuting council, “is a family consisting of four apostate clergymen, an engineer, a medical man, an attorney, and two bloodhounds.”

“The Agapemone”, says Boyd Dawkins, the latest lay writer who has paid attention to this subject, “is surrounded by a wall from twelve to fifteen feet high.”

These statements are untrue. The Saints who are gathered at Spaxton have audacities and heresies enough without being charged with these idle tales.

As your carriage rolls from the quaint old streets of Bridgwater into the green country lanes, you seem to pass from the age of Victoria into the age of King Alfred. Saxon Somerset was, I fancy, as green and bright, with corn-sheaves on these slopes; stone homesteads, snug with thatch, upon these knolls; with village towers and spires among the trees; and with a slow but sturdy population, like those of Spaxton and Charlinch. The road is bad, the mire is deep, the descents are sharp. The lanes are sunk below hedges of thorns and briars, so that an unfriendly invasion would find it no easy task to push their way from town to town. Pull up the horses on the brow of this hill. The scene is beautiful with the beauty of western England. In front springs a dome of corn-field, crowned with the picturesque nave and tower of Charlinch church. At the base of this hillock flows the soft wooded valley towards Over Stowy, a place renowned in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what, in this valley at our feet in the winding lane on our left, is that fanciful group of buildings; a church to which the spire has not yet been built; a garden, cooled by shrubs and trees; a greenhouse thronged with plants; an ample sward of grass cut through by winding walks; a row of picturesque cottages on the road, a second row in the garden; high gates by the church; a tangle of buildings in the front and rear; farms, granaries, stables, all of the crimson with creeping autumnal plants? That group of buildings is the Agapemone; the home of our male and female saints.⁴⁸

In a few seconds we alight in front of the Abode of Love. The large gates are closed, but a side door stands ajar. The man who drives me seems surprized — he too had been told that no one is admitted into the Abode of Love. Once in his life, however, he had been taken into the stables by a groom who was proud of his horses, as he might very well be, since they had come from the royal stud. My driver tells me with a shudder that the strange people in the Abode play billiards on a Sunday in their church. He does not mind a game of nine-pins in the ale-house yard with other poor fellows on Sunday afternoons; but that is very different from gentlefolks hitting ivory balls in a church. As I entered by the open door a gentleman in black came from the house and shook my hand. This was the Rev. George Robinson Thomas, once a student of St David’s College, Lampeter, afterwards a curate at Charlinch, then a witness for Brother Prince and now First of the Agapemone’s Two Anointed Ones. His figure was tall, spare and well made, crowned with an intellectual head and pair of sharp blue eyes in a face no longer youthful, but whose every line showed he had been a scholar and preacher. Such was the gentleman known to me from report as the husband of Agnes Nottidge, the hero of an ale-house comedy, and defeated party in a scandalous court case.

Thomas led me into the chief room, which I saw at once was a church. Three ladies were seated near a piano at which one of them was playing. My name was mentioned to them; they curtseyed and left, their own names not having been pronounced. One of them, as I afterwards found by a lucky guess, had once been Julia Starky, daughter of a clergyman with high standing in society and of high repute in the English Church. She was now the second wife of Brother Prince but not, then or afterwards, made known to me by her married name.

After the usual remarks had been made about the fine morning and pleasant drive, I mentioned that the Agapemone farm — or farms? — were reputed to be the best managed in Somerset. Thomas said, “Under the old dispensation some of our Brethren were farmers. Would you like to visit Brother Prince’s room?”

I said I should first like to ask him four or five questions. He bowed, and bent himself to answer; but seemed ill at ease while we remained alone. Our talk was now and then broken by the entrance of some sister who slipped into the room, listened for a moment, then went away. I began to see that it is not the habit of this place to allow any brother or sister to hold private conversations with a guest. Each Saint appears to keep watch upon his fellow. Prince may dwell apart and hold himself accountable to none, but his people only speak in each other’s presence, moving in pairs, trios, and septets. I was soon struck by the fact that I was never left alone with either man or woman, a thing I never experienced in the homes of either German or American Saints. If we lounged in the lovely greenhouse, took a turn in the garden, idled about the stables and offices, either Sister Ellen, Sister Annie, or some other lady would slip in quietly to our side, and take her share in any talk that might be going on. In short, some sister kept me in sight and hearing until I drove away from the Abode of Love.

I first asked the reason for the high wall that Professor Dawkins says surrounds the estate. Thomas said, “There is no such wall. Dawkins may have got the idea from an equally mistaken local guide book. Soon after coming here we had a short length of wall built on the road-ward side of this church, to stop neighbouring rustics gazing in at us through the windows. They used to do that.” “Why do you keep bloodhounds?”

“We have none now but once we needed their protection. On several occasions we were physically assaulted by neighbours. In public.”

“Did you not seek redress through the courts?”

“Yes. We were awarded a farthing damages. It is now said that anyone can knock down four of us for a penny.”

Thomas cut short my four or five questions by leaving the room. In a minute he returned to offer me food — a cup of coffee, a biscuit, a glass of wine. Being fresh from my early meal and cigar I was declining his offer with thanks when his way of pressing his little courtesies struck me as like the manner of an Arab sheik, who offers you bread and salt, not simply as food but as a sign of peace. “Let it be a glass of wine.”

A woman brought in a tray with biscuits and two decanters; one of good dry sherry, the other of a sweet new port. She laid them on a table, bid me help myself and left. For half an hour I was left alone with these two bottles in the church.

Yes; in the church; lounging on a red sofa, near a bright fire, in the coloured light of a high lancet window filled with rich stained glass; soft cushions beneath my feet; a billiards table on my right; oak panelling round the walls; and above my head the sacred symbol of the Lamb and Dove, flanked and supported by a rack of billiard cues. This room, I knew, was that in which the Great Manifestation had taken place; that mystic rite through which living flesh is said to have been reconciled to God. Lovely to the eye, calming to the heart, this chamber was, and is. A rich red Persian carpet covered the floor, in contrast with the brown oaken roof. Red curtains draped the windows, the glass in which was painted a mystical device, a lamb, a lion and a dove — the lion standing on a bed of roses, with a banner on which these words are inscribed,

OH, HAIL, HOLY LOVE!

The chimneypiece was a fine oak frame of Gothic work, let in with mirrors. A harp stood in one corner of the room; a large euterpean in another.⁴⁹ A few books, not much used, lay on the tables — Young’s Night Thoughts, a Turner Gallery, Wordsworth’s Greece and a few more. Ivory balls lay on the green baize as if the Sisters had been recently at play. The whole room had in it a hush and splendour which affected the imagination with a kind of awe. How could I help thinking of that mystic drama in which Brother Prince had played the part of hero, “Madonna” Paterson the part of heroine? I was suddenly surprized by the feeling of being closely watched from very near. Yes! A face was pressed against the lowest part of a window opposite, the face of a small child with large, sad, questioning eyes. It disappeared as the First Anointed One returned.

“Do you work and play on Sundays?” I enquired.

“We have no Sundays,” he replied; “all days with us are Sabbaths, and everything we do is consecrated to the Lord. Will you now come in to see Brother Prince?”

“Oh, yes,” I answered softly; and the keeper of the Seven Stars and the Seven Golden Candlesticks led the way.

“Good day sir; I am glad to see you; take this chair,” said a gentleman in black, with sweet, grave face, a broad white neckcloth, and shining leather shoes. He had come to meet me at the door; he led me quietly into a luxurious parlour, and seated me in an easy chair beside the fire. The room was like a lady’s boudoir; the furniture was rich and good; the chairs were cosy; and the ornaments were of the usual kind. I had come to Spaxton from a country house; and nothing in the room appeared to be much unlike what I had left behind, except the men and women.

Prince sat in a semicircle of his elect; one brother and two sisters on either side, the Rev. Samuel Starky on the far left, the Rev. George R. Thomas on the far right. Starky, eldest and whitest of my seven hosts was a tall, stout man of sixty-one years, with mild blue eyes, a little weak and wandering in expression. His name was well known in these Somerset dales and woods, among the gentry of which the Starkys had always held their heads very high. Next to Starky were Sister Ellen and Sister Zoe; next to Thomas were Sister Annie and Sister Sarah. Two of the four ladies would have been thought comely in any place and one was very lovely. Sister Annie was a fine model of female beauty in middle life; plump, rosy, ripe; with a pair of laughing eyes, a full red cheek, and ripples of curling dark brown hair. Some softness of the place lay on her as on all the rest; hush in her movement, waiting in her eyes, silence on her lips. She was the only woman I saw at Spaxton who seemed in perfect health.

The second lady, Sister Zoe, was one of those rare feminine creatures who lash poets into song, who drive artists to despair, and cause common mortals to risk their souls for love. You saw, in time, that the woman was young, and lithe, and dressed in the purest taste; but you could not see all this at once; for when you came into her presence you saw nothing save the whiteness of her brow, the marble-like composure of her face, the wondrous light of her big blue eyes. She sat there, nestling by the side of Prince; in a robe of white stuff, with violet tags and drops, the tiny streaks of colour throwing out into relief the creamy paleness of her cheek. But for the gleaming light in her eye, Guercino might have painted her as one of his rapt and mourning angels. I do not know that I have ever seen a face more full of high, serene, and happy thoughts; yet gazing on her folded hands and saintly brows, an instinct in my blood compelled me, much against my will, to think of her in connection with that scene which had taken place in the adjoining church; the strangest mystery, perhaps the darkest iniquity of these days; through which Prince asserts, and Thomas testifies, that God has reconciled living flesh unto Himself. Of the other two ladies I shall only say that Sister Sarah is young and tall, and Sister Ellen about fifty-five years old. I was not told what names these ladies had been called in the world outside.

Wishing to learn if Sister Zoe and “Madonna” Paterson were one, I asked by what name I should speak to her.

“Zoe,” she replied.

“But think,” I urged; “I am a stranger; how can I use that sweet, familiar name?”

“Pray do so,” answered Zoe; “it is very nice.”

“No doubt; if I were here a month; meantime it would be easier for me to call you Miss — ”

“Call me Zoe,” she answered with a patient smile, “Zoe; nothing but Zoe.”

Looking toward Prince I said, “Do your people take new names on coming into residence, like the monks and nuns of an Italian convent?”

“Not like monks and nuns,” said Prince; “we do not put ourselves under the protection of our saints. We have no saints. We simply give ourselves to God, of whom this mansion is the seat. At yonder gates we leave the world behind; its words, its laws, its passions; all of which are things of the Devil’s kingdom. Living in the Lord, we follow His leading light, even in the simple matter of our names. They call me Belovéd. I call this lady Zoe, because the sound pleases me. I call Thomas there Mossoo, because he speaks French so well.”

I never got beyond this point with the Saints. When bidding them goodbye I said to Zoe, holding her hand in mine, “May I not hear some word to know you by when I am far away?”

“Yes; Zoe,” she said, and smiled.

“Zoe. . what else?”

Her thin lips parted as if to speak. Was the name that rose to her lips. . Paterson? Who knows? With her fingers linked in mine she turned to Prince, and whispered in melting tones, “Belovéd!” Prince told me in a voice of playful softness; “She is Zoe; you must think of her as Zoe; nothing else.”

The gentleman called Belovéd by his followers is fifty-six years old, spare in person with the traces of much pain and weariness on his pale cheek. His face is very sweet, his manner very smooth, his smile very soft and the key of his voice is low. He has about him something of a woman’s grace and charm, and in his eyes which were apt to close, you seemed to see a light from some other sphere. As we sat before his warm and cheery fire he seemed at once rapt into his own dreams. When the sound of voices roused him he crossed his hands upon his black frock,⁵⁰ put his shiny shoes on the rug and bore a luxurious part in a long, singular conversation.

“You hold,” I asked him, “ that the day of grace is past?”

“We know it is; the day of judgement is at hand.”

“You expect the world to pass away?”

“The old world is no more. God has withdrawn us from it.”

“How many are you in the Abode?”, I asked.

“About sixty souls in all.”

At this moment a manservant, dressed in sober black came into the room. I said, “You count the domestics in that number?”

“Yes. They are all members of our family and share its blessings.”

“Do you take the service needed in the house, each in turn, like the Brethren and Sisters of Mount Lebanon?” (I saw a faint smile ripple on the servant’s face.)

“Oh no,” broke in upon us Sister Ellen; “we do nothing of that kind; our people serve us; but they do it for love.”

“Do you mean that they serve you without being paid?”

The only reply to my question was a laugh from the lady and a grin from the domestic.

“Among these sixty inmates, how many are male and female? How many are young, how many grown up?”

“The sexes are nearly equal,” answered Thomas, “there are no children.”

“None at all?” I asked, thinking of the Great Manifestation, and what was said to have come of it.

“You do not understand the life we live here in the Lord. Those who married in the world aforetime now live as though they had not. We are as the angels in Heaven and have no craving after devil’s love.”

“What do you wish me to understand as devil’s love?”

“Love that is of the flesh — all love not holy, spiritual, and of God.”

“Have I not just seen a child through the church window? A little girl playing on the lawn?”

Prince seemed to be dreaming again. Thomas said with deep emotion, “She is a child of shame — a broken link in our line of life — Satan’s offspring in the flesh.”

A look of anguish clouded all their faces except Sister Zoe’s, whose sweetly serene countenance was quite unmoved.

“The work of that time,” put in Sister Ellen with a sigh, “was the saddest thing I have ever known. For a whole year we lay in the shadow of death, and near to hell; but God wrought out His purpose in us. It was a bitter time for all but most for our Belovéd.”

Poor little girl!

“Your rule of life is now — a rule of abstinence?”

“It is the rule of angels,” answered Prince. “we live in love, but not in sin; for sin is death and our life in the Lord is eternal.”

“Yet surely all men die?”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “they have mostly done so; but death is subject to the Lord in whom we live. We shall not die. We have no such thought.”

“But some among you have passed away; Louisa Nottidge, for example?”

“Yes, some erred and the Lord took them; but many examples do not make a necessary rule. If I saw the valley outside our Abode choking with ten thousand corpses, the sight would not convince me that I too would one day die.”

“Where do you put the departed ones?”

“Some are buried at the farm, some rest under the green lawn. We think that all bodies not saved eternally by Christ go back into the earth from which they sprang.”

“But you are all growing older! As more of you drop away you will be forced to see that death will come.”

“Not so,” said Belovéd, “we will never expect death. Death is a word that belongs to time.”

“But everyone lives in time.” “You live in time. We do not.”

“You see the sun rise and set,” I urged, “you know that yesterday was Friday, that tomorrow will be Sunday; that springtime passes and the harvest comes about.”

“Well, yes,” said Belovéd in a pitying tone, “we feel the flow you must take as your measure of time. It is no sign of change to us, who dwell for ever in the living God.”

Such is the Abode of Love. A dozen ardent clergymen, smitten with a passion to save souls, possessing power to warn and softness to persuade, after various grapplings with the world have left their posts and shut themselves up in a garden where they muse and dream, surrounding themselves with lovely women, eating from rich tables, pretending that their passions are dead, and waiting, in the midst of luxury and idleness, for the whole world to be damned!

Is this all? No; not quite all: in the meantime the reverend gentlemen play a game of billiards in what was once their church.

To the end of his life the Reverend Henry James Prince kept a strangely ageless look that attracted new followers as the original ones died. In 1892 he converted to his faith another equally charismatic Anglican priest, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, then aged thirty. In London Smyth-Pigott repeated the Prince story of fifty years earlier by gaining a large congregation with a core of professional men (stockbroker, chartered accountant, tax collector, civil engineer, architect, master baker) and several hundred ardent female admirers. Like Prince’s early followers these combined to build for Smyth-Pigott and Prince a unique church, but much larger and more splendidly ornate, in what was then known as the “muscular Gothic” style. It was called The Ark of the Covenant, on Rookwood Road, Hackney. The cathedral-like spire is visible for miles around, and the beautiful stained-glass windows are designed by Walter Crane. This church opened with a service of dedication attended by Brother Prince in 1896. Every seat was crammed with eager followers, apart from some allocated to the press and public. After the dedication Prince finally retired for the last time to his Agapemone at Spaxton, Somerset.

In the last year of the 19^th century the chief Agapemone housekeeper sent word that the impossible seemed to be happening: Brother Prince was dying. Smyth-Pigott hurried to the bedside and found Henry almost unable to speak, but according to the few people present his last word was spoken to this, the most powerful of all his disciples. The word was “Belovéd!”

What follows is described by Kate Barlow, Smyth-Pigott’s granddaughter, in her book about him and how he prolonged the Agapemone into the 20^th century –

“Prince’s followers were confused, appalled and frightened by his death. When others had died it had been easy to dismiss their parting as a failure on their part, but Brother Prince? Surely not. It took all my grandfather’s considerable skill to soothe the confused faithful and at the same time get the old man laid to rest in the garden of the Somerset Abode of Love in what I was to know as Katie’s corner.”⁵¹

The jurors’ hubbub is interrupted by an official striking a gong, ringing a bell or smiting a board with a mallet. Silence begins to fall as our old friend the farmer, looking like any other venerable citizen, stands up in front of the presidential chair while Anytus and Socrates settle into chairs on each side of him, Socrates sitting comfortably with hands folded on top of the stick between his legs.

PRESIDENT: Men of Athens, the trial is starting! Will that gaggle at the back please shut up? Worse than women some of you. Alright Anytus. State the charge and give your reasons. (He sits.)

Anytus, standing up, speaks calmly, clearly.

ANYTUS: Socrates is a criminal, firstly by not believing in the Gods of our nation; secondly, by preaching a false God of his own; thirdly, by corrupting our young men. If you agree with me then you must also agree that the proper punishment is death.

Men of Athens, we all know Socrates. He’s a charming old fellow, an eccentric, knows the richest men in Athens and dresses like a scarecrow. He’s seventy, a widower remarried with a grownup son and two infants, yet the people he loves most are attractive young men. Most of us were children when he gave up his business and became an expert. He stood about the public places like the others; he talked enthusiastically like the others; he acquired followers just like the others; but he never gave public lectures and nobody knew what he was expert at. The other experts were wise about something — politics, medicine, arithmetic, the stars. Socrates mentioned these but didn’t seem specially keen on any. Most of us thought him an ambitious simpleton, a fool who wanted to be wise but didn’t know how to do it. There was a joke at the time: “What is Socrates wise about?” Answer: “He’s wise about wisdom.” Then one day a disciple of his asked the oracle of Apollo at Delphi who was the wisest man in Greece and the oracle said “Socrates” –

Socrates starts shaking his head from side to side.

ANYTUS: — The joke stopped being funny then, it had become the truth. Why are you shaking your head Socrates, don’t you agree with the oracle?

SOCRATES: The oracle did not say that. A friend of mine asked if anyone in Greece was wiser than me. She said “No.”

ANYTUS: But you agree some people are wiser than others?

SOCRATES: Yes.

ANYTUS: So you must agree that a few must be wiser than the rest?

SOCRATES: Mm. . Yes!

ANYTUS: Of that few two or three will be wisest of all?

SOCRATES: (gravely) I’m afraid you’re right.

ANYTUS: Have you ever been in the company of two or three equally wise men, Socrates? Wasn’t one always wiser than the others? And wasn’t he always you?

Some laughter in court.

SOCRATES: (clapping his hands cheerfully) Well done Anytus!

ANYTUS: (smiling thinly) Charming isn’t he? I agree with the oracle. Socrates is the wisest man. And where does he get his wisdom? His followers say he hears a demon, a voice within his brain or heart or belly — exactly where do you hear it, Socrates?

SOCRATES: I don’t know Anytus, I’m not hot on anatomy.

ANYTUS: (fiercely) Never mind! That demon, that voice is your god, Socrates and beside it the eternal Father of Heaven and lesser gods of our nation are — not your enemies for a man takes his enemies seriously — they’re toys; our gods are toys to you, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

SOCRATES: Well –

PRESIDENT: Wait a minute! Anytus, is that question rhetorical or do you want it answered now?

ANYTUS: Let him answer it in his defence speech.

PRESIDENT: If you direct rhetorical questions to the jury in future you’ll make my job a lot easier.

Anytus nods and addresses the jury, starting quietly.

ANYTUS: If a man lives among us with an extra, perhaps divine source of wisdom how should he use it? I say he should use it to instruct and help people. All the people. If he sees our laws are wrong he should seek to change them by speaking in parliament. If he has friends — and Socrates has many — he can be made a magistrate or ambassador because our democracy has always been able to use superior intelligences. But Socrates prefers to teach special people. Look at his disciples over there! Yes, there’s a ragged coat or two among them but most are rich and half are very young. And what does the Socratic demon teach these rich young men? It teaches them about goodness. Goodness fascinates Socrates like a beautiful child fascinates a pederast. He can’t leave it alone. Mention love, justice, courage and he’s on to you at once. “What is love? What is justice? Are they good? Is goodness not sometimes a badness? Are the things we call bad not sometimes very good indeed?”

Well, I’m no expert, I’m an Athenian citizen who loves his city, so I’ll remind you of the effects of this teaching on rich young men who heard it. Not long ago we lost a great war and a great empire by the treachery of that man’s darling pupil. The Spartans destroyed our democracy and set up a bloody dictatorship of our richest citizens. Three pupils of Socrates were among them and the richest of all was head of it! Never mind! Democracy has been restored and that man is continuing to spread his evil wisdom. Let us hear how he does it. Can I call a witness Mr President?

PRESIDENT: (looking at a paper in his hand) Yes, but I must ask the court to refrain from demonstrations of disapproval. We’ll never get at the truth without some intelligent self-restraint. You’re all Athenians, so show it.

ANYTUS: (loudly) Alcibiades!

Murmurs from the crowd as Alcibiades strolls on stage. Forty, still strikingly handsome in semi-military dress, he stands at ease with fists on hips, facing the jurors and looking slightly amused. He does not look at Anytus who is a little way behind him and equally ignores Socrates, who watches him wistfully.

ANYTUS: I want to summarize your political career.

ALCIBIADES: Why? Evwybody knows it.

ANYTUS: A few have short memories. We used to call you the Darling of Athens. You were the nephew of the great Pericles, and a rich playboy, and a popular war leader.

ALCIBIADES: (ruefully) Long, long ago.

ANYTUS: At the height of the war, when Athens and Sparta were about to sign a peace treaty, you got it rejected by telling both sides a pack of lies.

ALCIBIADES: (sighing) I was ambitious.

ANYTUS: Ambitious, yes. You tricked us into invading Sicily. You led a gigantic army out there which ought to have been defending our empire at home.

ALCIBIADES: Yes, it was a gamble. (smiling) Think how wich we’d have been if we’d won!

ANYTUS: How could we win? You turned traitor and deserted to the Spartans before we even engaged them! Our army was. . (shakes head and shrugs, helplessly). . destroyed. Massacred. Except for the few who were allowed to surrender and become slaves. A few still trickle back to us sometimes. Cripples, with brands on their brows. From the quarries of Syracuse.

Silence in court has almost the pressure of an explosive uproar.

ALCIBIADES: (coolly) I wish I had led that army. It could have won.

ANYTUS: You deserted to the enemy!

ALCIBIADES: Nowhere else to go, old boy. Your lot — the majority party — were sending the police to awest me.

ANYTUS: (loudly) On a charge of heresy! We had proof that you and a parcel of rich young degenerates had been acting obscene parodies of the most sacred ceremony in our religion. The ceremony. . (suddenly, in a low voice). . the ceremony of the mothers.

Over-loud murmurs and cries of disapproval from many jurors the president shouts:

PRESIDENT: Silence! Silence in court!

ALCIBIADES: (out-yelling everyone) Yes it was all twemendous fun!

Shocked silence ensues. Alcibiades turns and looks at Anytus.

ALCIBIADES: What has this to do with Socwates?

PRESIDENT: Tell him, Anytus.

ANYTUS: Socrates was your teacher.

ALCIBIADES: (shrugging) He did his best.

ANYTUS: He was your lover?

ALCIBIADES: If you mean, did he love me? (sighs) Yes, he was like most people in Athens then.

ANYTUS: I think he corrupted you.

ALCIBIADES: (with a pleased grin) Are you talking about sodomy?

ANYTUS: Partly.

ALCIBIADES: (enjoying himself) I see! Well, speaking as a part-time sodomite I’m afwaid I found Socwates disappointing. You may wemember that my good looks in those days were. . wemarkable. (sighs) Never mind. Late one evening I invited him home for a meal. We ate, I sent the slaves away and he talked about beauty, love, wisdom. I was beautiful, he was wise and loved me, so I pwetended to be dwunker than I was. I undwessed and thwew my wobe over both of us. (histrionically) “Do what you like with me!” (matter of factly) You know the sort of thing. But he went on talking about beauty, love and wisdom until I fell asleep. When I woke next morning I might have been sleeping with my father. Yet he loved me, I knew that.

SOCRATES: (who has become cheerful while listening) I still do, Alcibiades!

ALCIBIADES: (still ignoring him) Doesn’t help.

ANYTUS: Did he corrupt you in another way?

ALCIBIADES: (too quickly) Not intentionally.

ANYTUS: Explain that.

ALCIBIADES: (after frowning thoughtfully then smiling suddenly) No.

PRESIDENT: Explain it, Alcibiades! That’s a court order.

Alcibiades, chuckles, shakes head. Socrates raises a hand.

SOCRATES: Can I say something, Mr President?

PRESIDENT: If it’s to the point.

SOCRATES: Forget this trial, Alcibiades. If I’ve hurt you I want to know how. Please tell me about it.

ALCIBIADES: (looking at him for the first time) Here?

SOCRATES: (smiling) This may be the last time you ever see me. Did I once really harm you?

ALCIBIADES: (not bitterly) Yes, vewy much. Before meeting you I thought I was going to be a gweat man. I had vewy foolish confused ideas about how to do it but they were common ideas — most young men have them — and if I’d stuck to them I’d have become an ordinawy politician and militawy leader doing the usual amount of damage and being highly wespected for it. But you made me despise what other people think. When you were talking I felt above all that. You were like wine to me! I knew myself when we were together. When we were apart I was sure of nothing. Well, I’ve often been dwunk but never been alcoholic. I’ve often been in love but never dependent. That’s why I stopped seeing you. It hurt both of us, I suppose –

Socrates smiles and nods.

ALCIBIADES: — I think it hurt me most. After that I knew the only uncommon thing about me is my. . (he makes an effort). . courrrage. Nobody has ever doubted that. I’ve astounded the world with it. Yes, I’ve given people something to talk about. Otherwise I’ve been completely useless.

ANYTUS: And now you’re a common pirate.

ALCIBIADES: (amused) Not common at all. I wun a pwivate shipping concern under the pwotection of the Persian Empewor. He’s a close fwiend of mine. For the time being. (to Socrates, softly, but with an effort) I’m sorry.

SOCRATES: (earnestly) You should have seen more of me, Alcibiades.

ANYTUS: Alcibiades has just made it clear that he would have been happier and a better man if he’d never seen you at all.

ALCIBIADES: (to Socrates, tenderly smiling) I’m afwaid he’s wight.

SOCRATES: (smiling and sitting down) You should have seen more of me.

ANYTUS: You can go, Alcibiades.

Alcibiades leaves the stage and sits where he can see what follows.

ANYTUS: (to the president) There could be a lot more trouble with the next witness.

PRESIDENT: (consulting his paper) Yes, I see. (loudly to the whole court) Listen you lot, listen everyone. We are trying Socrates today. Socrates. Nobody else. Our feelings about the witnesses are irrelevant and should be kept in check, so I am going to ask a favour from each one of you, especially ones with brains in their heads. If a neighbour interrupts proceedings with violent expressions of vocal disgust, gently remind him of his dignity as an Athenian juryman by punching him in the throat, will you?

Laughter in court and some cries of “Yes!” “Alright!”

PRESIDENT: Say it a bit louder, I’m hard of hearing — (Louder cries of agreement) — Good! Otherwise I have to stop the trial. I mean that. Come on Critias, come on.

In dead silence Critias takes the floor, an urbane big whitehaired business and military man.

ANYTUS: (pointing at Socrates) You were a follower of that man?

CRITIAS: I learned a lot from him, if that’s what you mean.

ANYTUS: (nodding) About politics?

CRITIAS: (nodding) It was my business. It is supposed to be every Athenians business, God knows why.

ANYTUS: What did Socrates teach you? We all know what you went on to do, so don’t try to hide what you believed.

CRITIAS: I certainly won’t. Socrates demonstrated, again and again, that we can trust a builder to build, a tradesman to trade and a doctor to heal, but we cannot trust a parliament to govern.

ANYTUS: Why not?

CRITIAS: Because parliamentary skill is all in the mouth. Socrates wanted nations ruled by the best people for the job.

ANYTUS: We all want that, Critias. The problem is choosing them. So Socrates was opposed to democracy?

CRITIAS: He was opposed to slackness, evasion, incompetence and passing the buck. Of course he was opposed to democracy.

Socrates scratches his head. From the jurors comes a rising murmur of disapproval.

ANYTUS: Thank you for being frank. Besides being an aristocrat, a general and a tyrant, you once wrote a play. In it a character said that even if gods did not exist, wise politicians would prop them up like scarecrows, to frighten people into obedience. Did you get that from Socrates?

CRITIAS: Of course not. Politicians have always known that, which is why you are charging Socrates with heresy. You are propping up the gods of the state in order to stay in power and silence your critics. . the clever ones, not most people.

ANYTUS: (vehemently) I believe in the gods! I love the people!

CRITIAS: (amused) And probably most people believe you believe, Anytus. They may even believe you love them. I have fallen from power, I don’t need to pretend.

PRESIDENT: (roughly) Less of the clever stuff, Critias.

ANYTUS: (shouting) Didn’t you write that the Spartan system of government is the best in Greece? And isn’t that the opinion of your master Socrates?

CRITIAS: No. I praised it as the most stable government in Greece. It has lasted two centuries without change so it must be. They also breed the bravest soldiers, one reason why they defeated us. Every Greek knows that.

ANYTUS: No wonder they turned you into our dictator!

CRITIAS: Nonsense, the Spartans are practical men, they wouldn’t trust someone because he’d written something. An agreement with a parliament isn’t worth the paper it’s written on so they signed a treaty with people from the best Athenian families, having made them the government. I became leader because I was the best manager of men among them. Don’t blame Socrates for that. Blame my ancestors. They made me what I am.

ANYTUS: We know how you managed men! Thirty of your best people put fifteen hundred of our people to death without trial.

An uproar of boos, yells and hisses. Critias glances humorously at Socrates as if to say “We understand the mob, don’t we?” Socrates ignores him, frowning thoughtfully. The President stands up.

PRESIDENT: (bellowing) If you don’t!. . Stop this din!. . I will end!. . The trial!. . Now!. . And nobody will get paid!

Many start making “shush” sounds. Uproar lessens, stops.

PRESIDENT: Thanks for your support citizens. The man’s a bastard but we need him to get at the truth. (he sits) Socrates, have you any questions for your. . pupil?

SOCRATES: Critias, you and I often talked about politics so tell the court the truth. I criticized the democracy for pursuing a war we could never win. I also praised the Spartans for the care they took to educate their young. Did I ever praise a government that killed and robbed its own people?

CRITIAS: (grimly) No, I had to learn the practical details for myself.

SOCRATES: Mm! (he sighs) Do you remember ordering the arrest of Theramines? It was six years ago, in this council chamber.

CRITIAS: Yes. (sarcastically) Would it help you if I reminded the court of what happened?

SOCRATES: It might.

CRITIAS: You and a couple of friends got between the condemned man and the police, shouting that Athenians should not kill one another and asking the crowd to help you stop that arrest. Of course the chicken-livered majority stayed clear. If I had been longer in power I would have had to get you killed, too. You criticized my regime, you disobeyed it and that was illogical! You obeyed the orders of a democracy you despised, why inconvenience a friend who was doing the best possible thing?

SOCRATES: What does best mean, Critias?

CRITIAS: Preventing civil war. Everyone wants to forget the conditions in which my party took power. We were managing a conquered and bankrupt state. In other cities the working classes would have starved or emigrated or sold themselves into slavery, but not the free men of Athens! They had been spoiled by two generation of cheap food, full employment, pensions for the disabled and free theatre tickets. Pericles was to blame. He paid for all that out of the Empire. We had no Empire and our workmen had forgotten how to suffer. To prevent rebellion our dictatorship needed money, and fast. We sold the new harbour at a tenth of the building cost. We confiscated the wealth of rich foreigners, then the wealth of rich tradesmen, then the wealth of our critics. Who squealed, or course. So we executed them. Nasty! Very nasty! But we restored the economy and kept Athens intact.

ANYTUS: You kept your fortunes intact! And enlarged them! And you were already our richest citizens!

CRITIAS: Your crowd profited! When you saw our brutal, necessary, unpopular work had stabilized the economy you started a civil war with us, won it and grabbed the credit and the benefits.

SOCRATES: Has this argument anything to do with me?

CRITIAS: Not much. Your notions led me into politics but they were no good once I arrived there.

SOCRATES: (placidly) Thank you, Critias.

ANYTUS: Yes, thank you, Critias! The jury will note that Socrates led you into politics but stayed firmly outside them.

SOCRATES: (placidly) Bravo, Anytus.

Critias retires.

ANYTUS: I thank God that Alcibiades and Critias — the traitor and the dictator — are figures from the dead past. Which doesn’t mean they won’t come back — if we aren’t very careful. Meanwhile, since most of us have sons, let us see his effect on a young fellow of today. (yelling) Come here Phoebus!

From the edge of the group of Socrates’ friends a thin, dishevelled figure detaches himself and slouches onto the stage. He bows mockingly once or twice to the jury then hunches his shoulders, folds his arms and looks up sideways at his father with a mixture of fear and obstinacy.

ANYTUS: Tell the jury what you feel about me.

PHOEBUS: (gently) I. . I hate you, Dad.

ANYTUS: (nodding) Tell the jury why.

PHOEBUS: You’re a rich man, Dad. You could afford to give me a horse. Why should I work in your stinking tannery handling their hides?

ANYTUS: I did that when I was your age. Tell them why you hate honest toil.

PHOEBUS: I’d rather. . learn, yes learn about. . things.

ANYTUS: (glaring at Socrates) What things?

PHOEBUS: Reasons, mainly. Why make shoe leather if I haven’t exactly found what feet are for? Walking, of course, everybody knows that but walking where? Nobody really knows where they’re going or what living is for. I want to see more life before I make a living. The sons of rich men usually do. Beauty, geometry, tragedy, racehorses, you can afford to give me some, why don’t you?

ANYTUS: (harshly) And Socrates?

PHOEBUS: I love him as much, almost, as I hate you. (he laughs uneasily) He doesn’t jeer when I say things but I mostly just listen. Anybody can do that, nobody has to pay. He’s very like me. He knows you dads and bosses and bullies are a lot of shams. That’s why you’re afraid of us. He thinks a lot, but he doesn’t take thinking seriously, he listens to his demon, like I do. Though he’s luckier than me. My demon says some very nasty things. (he shivers) He drinks too, does Socrates, wine by the bucket and never gets drunk, they say. Just like me. None of you have noticed I’m drunk. Have you? Couldn’t have. Come here. Otherwise (to Socrates, quietly) would you ask him to let me go home?

Socrates makes a small gesture of appeal to Anytus, who continues glaring at him stonily. Phoebus looks pleadingly to his father, then the president, then the jury who he addresses wildly and feebly.

PHOEBUS: Men of Athens, what is matter? Why is there pressure? Single uniform unchanging solid concentric whirlpools of energy, Socrates is calm about that because nothing matters, money, clothes, work, people, politics, Gods are all filth to him that’s why he’s calm, no? (he looks at Socrates) — Not now. Now he’s looking calm but I can see he’s not. Why have you stopped being calm, Socrates? (aghast) Are you starting to think I’m dreadful too?

ANYTUS: (desperately yelling) Do you want to ask the witness any questions?

Socrates looks with deep pity on father and son who both now look gaunt and dishevelled.

SOCRATES: (gently) Let him go home Anytus.

Anytus waves his hand and Phoebus stumbles off. With an effort, Anytus brings his emotions under control and addresses the jury.

ANYTUS: I have one thing in common with my son. My appearance here is unattractive. I am asking for the death of a cheerful, vigorous, charming, charming old man but you know I’m not bloodthirsty. I drew up the act of oblivion by which nobody in Athens is punished for his political past and that act is still in force. I called Alcibiades and Critias to remind you of the sickness Socrates is spreading around him even now. It is doubt — doubt of the great simple truths our mothers and fathers taught us — respect for God and respect for law. If this doubt is wisdom; it is evil wisdom which cannot come from God because it destroys ordinary people’s understanding. Those who have heard him argue know what I mean. By steps which seem so sensible you can’t remember them afterwards he brings you to admit that nothing you’re sure of is right. A paralysis creeps over your brain. Mature citizens know what to do, they leave him and don’t come back. But if you’re young you’re in danger. Young men attract him and he attracts them! This numbing of the thinking process, this rational destruction of reason releases the demon in them, the demon which is normally held down by the laws of God and the laws of our state. So, as you have seen, the brave young soldier becomes a reckless traitor. And the practical businessman becomes a ruthless tyrant. And weaklings become selfish, shameless parasites and spongers. As for his intellectual disciples, once again, look at them! Look at that. . crowd! (he points) Our great comic playwright described them — “They disagree with each other but have one thing in common — they fit in with nobody else.” Socrates is now going to speak to you. Don’t let his charm distract you from what you know already. Don’t let his eloquence make you forget what you have seen here, just now! (he points at Socrates, who stares back in astonishment) I fear that man, because I honour God and love civilization! I ask you to defend Athens, her religion and her sons by silencing him.

Loud, civilized applause. The president has been greatly impressed by Anytus’ peroration.

PRESIDENT: Your turn Socrates. Defend yourself.

Socrates stands, leans sideways on his stick and scratches his head.

SOCRATES: I don’t know, men of Athens, how that speech struck you but it convinced me, before I remembered the chap Anytus was supposed to be denouncing is me. He didn’t. He warned you against my eloquence, I’ve got none, that’s why I hardly ever pipe up in parliament. This is my first speech to such a huge number, and please don’t worry about my famous charm. Perhaps I could charm you all if I had more time but Athenian trials are rapid affairs. In Sparta, now, a trial on a capital charge takes two or three days –

Some disapproving murmurs and one cry of “Boo!” from the jurors.

SOCRATES: (snapping fingers) Blast! I shouldn’t have said that! Mr President, you see what a child I am in legal matters: please tell the jury to forget I said something good about Sparta!

PRESIDENT: (rolling up his eyes and sighing) Just defend yourself, Socrates.

SOCRATES: (humbly) I’ll try. I was pleased to hear Anytus say some true things about the days when I was a young fellow of forty and regarded, quite correctly, as a simpleton who wanted to be wise but didn’t know how. What turned a tongue-tied stupid stonemason into the famous, extraordinary me? How did a National Service private with a habit of sleeping on his feet become the money-grubbing pederast you’ve seen caricatured on the stage by my pal Aristophanes: the menace to civilization who terrifies Anytus; the buffoon of Athens, as some folk call me; the wise man of Greece — if you’d rather believe Apollo, God of sunlight and harmony? That isn’t a rhetorical question. Shall I answer it?

Someone yells “Get to the point!” Socrates nods, sits on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling and says in an ordinary voice:

SOCRATES: Alcibiades made me a philosopher. I met him in the army at the start of the war and I loved that beautiful man. I wanted to fascinate him, delight him, give him something great to remember me ever afterwards by. And I had nothing to give. Nothing at all. (he stares at the palms of his hands) A stonemason. Ugly. Shy. Until I spoke to him. And then I was inspired. (he looks at the jury) Love inspires us all, of course. It gives some people the strength to support a husband, a wife, a family for years and years and years. Love never made me as strong as that — I support my wife and children on handouts from friends — but the love which makes others strong made me see things clearly, yes it did. Anytus says my wisdom is evil, that’s daft. If I do evil then what Anytus calls my wisdom is only cleverness — there are many clever men in Athens but I’m not one. Only love could have taught me the wise trick I played on Alcibiades. I had nothing of my own to attract him so I gave him back the lovely thing he was giving me: the vision of his own true splendid self.

ANYTUS: (loudly and coldly) Toady! Sycophant! Arselicker!

Disapproving cries of “Yes!” “That’s right Anytus!” “Boo!” from the jurors, during which Socrates rises and stumps cheerfully up and down before the stage.

PRESIDENT: You’re out of order, Anytus!

SOCRATES: No he isn’t, I like a bit of friendly badinage. But he’s missed the point, as usual. I couldn’t make Alcibiades love me for ever by flattering him — (he points to Alcibiades with his stick) — by the way, you still love me, don’t you?

ALCIBIADES: (laughing with appreciation at the show) Yes!

SOCRATES: (laughing and smiling) Yes! (to the jury) You see, arselicking or flattery, as some people call it, is praising a man for something he’s proud of. It can never please for very long because we all know, in our hearts, that we are only proud of the rubbishy bits of ourselves — the parts we would be better off wothout. A short while ago Alcibiades stood on that very spot — (points with stick) — and very solemnly told us his uncommon courage had astounded the world. And nobody laughed! I was so amazed that I couldn’t. (points stick) Him? Alcibiades? Courageous? Because he gambled with an army and lost it? A gambler can’t be brave! If he wins people are fascinated. If he loses people are fascinated. Either way he gets what he wants, which is people saying, Oo aren’t you wonderful, oo aren’t you wicked! Alcibiades the daring gambler is rubbish! Just rubbish! The true Alcibiades I love knows it — when he listens to me. I love him because he’s lonely and desperately humble. The men of Athens praised him because he was wild and glamorous. Who flattered him, you or me? Fancy putting a child of twenty-five in charge of an army then blaming him when he runs away!

ANYTUS: He was not a child! We followed him because he tricked us! He made us think his allies were rich by showing treasure chests full of broken pottery with a layer of gold on top!

SOCRATES: You must have been very keen to be fooled if you were fooled by a schoolboy prank like that. I honestly thought a democratic majority would have more sense, but when my darling stood up in parliament and announced his grandiose cheeky, world-conquering scheme most of you acted like a Persian Emperor gone gaga. Instead of laughing at him you idiots voted for him!

Loud cries of annoyance from jurors. Socrates climbs on stage again, raises a hand, and shouts at them: —

SOCRATES: Men of Athens, were you blind? Did you not see where Alcibiades’ talent lay? He gave me a new kind of wisdom which I have given to the world. Throughout Greece clever professors are calling me the father of moral philosophy — Alcibiades was father. I’m the mother of moral philosophy. Of course like many fathers he refused to acknowledge the child, but I blame you idiots for that –

Protesting cries become uproar. Socrates climbs up on his chair and points with his stick.

SOCRATES: (yelling) Men of Athens, I accuse you of seducing, corrupting and perverting my darling! If you’d left him with me he would have become a philosopher, which is what everyone should be, because. .

The jurors’ vocal reactions drown his words. Many boo and shout, many are laughing, many argue vehemently with neighbours. Socrates stands on the chair, both hands folded patiently on the stick-handle, waiting to continue. The president has left his chair and stands conferring with Anytus. Anytus turns to the jury and raises his hands for silence. It gradually happens.

ANYTUS: (sternly) Yes, men of Athens, we are all disgusted by the cynical, facetious abuse that man has heaped on us. But we are here to judge him, and judges should be calm.

PRESIDENT: (huffily) A man must be heard before we condemn him. That’s the law. (he goes back to his seat)

ANYTUS: (reasonably) Outcries only make the trial last longer. Save your anger till it’s time to vote and then show what you think. It’s your vote that matters. (he sits)

SOCRATES: Thank you for that friendly speech, Anytus. (climbs down and wipes his brow) Phew! (to the jury) You had me quite excited there. I could never be a politician — too emotional. (he sits on chair) Well, when Alcibiades left me — for you lot — O, I was depressed. I didn’t realize I’d become a philosopher. Love for him had untied my tongue and let me think aloud. I thought all that would stop now. It didn’t! I discovered I could talk to anyone — pretty young boys, ugly old men — anyone! I’d acquired a gift. But I swear by the great God of Heaven that I did not know I was being wise, I thought I was just finding out what people thought. Those I spoke to kept coming up with astonishing ideas, and saying they had learned them from me. (he chuckles) I’ve never had an original idea in my life! They wrote books, too, and the critics blamed me for those as well. Anytus mentioned Critias’ attack on democracy; he should have mentioned Kairafon’s defence. Kairafon said he learned that from me and the dictators banished him. Anyway, one morning as Homer puts it “A thunderbolt descended from the blue Aegean sky.” (spreading his arms wide) “News from Delphi! Oracle’s Astounding Revelation! Nobody in Greece is wiser than Socrates!” (drops hands, suddenly really puzzled and worried) Nobody wiser than me? But friends, I am like other people! When love and friendship inspire me I have glimpses of beauty and goodness; otherwise there is nothing in here — (taps chest) — nothing but a little voice which sometimes says “No. Don’t do that.”

Socrates ends the following long speech from the centre of the floor.

SOCRATES: Of course in the middle of a crowd like this I enjoy feeling as good as anyone else: but alone I am sometimes. . terrified by the thought that there is nobody in the world superior to me. I wanted to prove that oracle wrong so went straight to the top. I visited a great and noble statesman whose name — I shall not disclose. He was twice divorced, lived with a foreign prostitute and had a bald head which came to a point like the dome of the new music-hall. His head embarrassed him, so you see him in public statues wearing a helmet like Agamemnon and Achilles wore when the Greeks fought the Trojans, and why should he not? In warfare he was a better general than Agamemnon who, by Homer’s account, antagonized his bravest officer, and better than Achilles who spent most of the war sulking behind the lines. .

PRESIDENT: (exasperated) You’re supposed to be defending yourself man, not praising Pericles.

SOCRATES: (as if puzzled) Is that what I’m doing? I’m sorry. This statesman ruled Athens for thirty years because the majority party thought he was defending them from the greed of the rich, and the best people thought he protected them from the many. He kept both sides happy by plundering our allies under the pretext of defending them from Persia, and many folk still think that the goodness and beauty of Athens was all his doing. But when I asked him how men could learn to be good his answer — when I stripped away the trimmings — was “Vote for me”. About virtue that great man was as stupid as I am — in fact stupider, because he thought he was wise and virtuous. I tried to explain his curious mistake and he got very cross. So did his friends. They stopped inviting me to their houses.

Now a great scientist lived in Athens at that time, a foreigner from Ionia who we nicknamed “Heavenly Reason”. (points forefinger) You condemned him to death for heresy, didn’t you? You shouldn’t have. He really did worship God, but where a peasant sees the maker of the universe as a mysteriously angry old man chucking lightning around, Anaxagoras saw him as a heavenly energy driving streams of atoms to resolve their friction by electrical discharges of an occasionally lethal nature. That made no sense to me, but when this old chap spoke about it his eyes opened wide and stopped focusing — he was as full of reverence and wonder as a priestess on a tripod. I said “Master! Teach me wisdom please”. He showed me his big new map of the heavens. Very pretty it was, hundreds of circles with the sun in the middle instead of the world. He said “Believe this. It is true.” “All right”, I said, “But I live in Athens. How can Athenians become better men?” He said “Study the stars. When men appreciate the vastness of the heavenly harmony, they will forget their petty differences and harmonize with each other.” He thought that answered my question. I disagreed.

For the last twenty years I have used my little bit of genius to examine men who were thought to be geniuses all the way through, and all I’ve found are people clever at their job. In everyday life they are as ignorant as shopkeepers, labourers and slaves. Apollo is right! We’re complicated, we Athenians — kind to animals at home and killing innocent families in lands which want nothing to do with us. I believe God likes me to spread uncertainty, I won’t stop doing it. And of course, a lot of rich young idlers follow me around because they like seeing their elders looking uncomfortable. They imitate me too, and anyone who’s exposed as a bit muddle-headed and inconsistent — (and who isn’t? I know I am) — blames me instead of himself. And any politician who starts losing votes blames me instead of himself. And any father whose son doesn’t love him blames me instead of himself. (he is near Anytus and looks at him) Tell me, Anytus. If I am a danger to the youth of this city, what men are good for them? Who teaches them virtue?

ANYTUS: All of them. Except you.

SOCRATES: All of them? (he glances, puzzled, at the jury) Will you explain that?

ANYTUS: I will. Other teachers talk to the people in crowds: you speak to them in small private parties. You say this is because you lack eloquence — a lie. The jury have heard you now and know you lied. You deal with us in ones and twos because we are weaker that way. When a useful citizen is separated from others and examined on his wisdom of course he does badly. Taken separately we are ignorant and selfish, as you easily prove. But when we co-operate our small bits of knowledge become a wisdom surrounding and supporting everyone — even you, who are too vain to notice it. Through democracy we feed, love and defend each other, we stand up, look at the stars and salute the Gods, that isn’t ignorance. Joined in society we teach our children to serve themselves by serving others. Some teaching comes from experts but the best teaching is the example of ordinary citizens. The only man who teaches nothing but wrong is the one who stands outside society and beckons.

Cries of approval from some jurors.

SOCRATES: Anytus, I am the most sociable man in the state! The streets are my clubrooms. I talk to anyone.

ANYTUS: It’s easy for the parasite to stump up and down, gather an audience of two or three and teach it to sneer at the majority he depends upon. Your questions split us up. When we doubt our small store of traditional wisdom we cannot act together. Society lives by actions, not by puzzling over demoralising questions. You are a criminal because you are a demoralizer!

SOCRATES: (staring at him) The only one?

ANYTUS: The main one! (he points at the disciples) If society shuts your mouth these people will close theirs.

Louder cries of approval.

PRESIDENT: (loudly) Now then, a little patience please, we’re getting to the end.

SOCRATES: (thoughtfully) Anytus, before you spoke of shutting my mouth you were almost talking intelligently. I like the idea of this great wise giant called society. Can he instruct me? Where can I hear his voice? It surely wasn’t that braying sound I heard a moment ago. .

Loud boos and hisses from jurors, silenced when Anytus raises his hand, shaking his head.

SOCRATES: (smiling). . was it?

ANYTUS: The voice of a society is in our laws. Laws made and voted for in parliament by the people.

SOCRATES: I don’t contradict that voice, Anytus. I’ve never broken that law. No law forbids a man saying what he thinks.

ANYTUS: Another voice of society is public opinion revealed through a legal action — this legal action. I tell you that Athens is sick of you.

SOCRATES: So you are the voice of Athens?

ANYTUS: The vote will tell us. If the majority are for you I must pay a very large fine.

SOCRATES: That hardly seems right when you’ve only said what you sincerely believe. (loudly) Mr President, let’s have the voting. (stumps over to his disciples waving stick at the jury and shouting) I hope there are philosophers among you lot.

The jurors engage in arguments and conversations. The president consults the paper in his hand. Two court officials mount the stage and stand, one on each side of him.

PRESIDENT: Will three friends of the accuser and three of the accused kindly join the tellers?

The official on Socrates’ side is joined by Plato, a handsome young aristocrat; by Crito, who is a fat, bald, comfortable-looking person; by Aeschines, a haggard working-class intellectual. The three who join Anytus are all middle-class. The president, paper in hand, comes to the front of the stage where he can most closely dominate the assembly. A gong, bell or board is struck loudly. The crowd falls silent.

PRESIDENT: Attention. I’m going to read the charge again. Socrates opposes the Gods of the Athenian state, sets up a false god of his own and uses it to corrupt young men, right? You’ve all seen enough today to make up your minds about this so I want no swithering. When I give the word all free men who agree with that charge will raise their hands and keep them up till I say so. No half lifting a hand and looking round to see if you’re in the majority. If you’ve doubts, give the accused the benefit of them. We’re doing a parliamentary job today so there must be no idiotic don’t knows. Citizens who think Socrates guilty will now raise their right hands.

Many jurors at once raise their hands and then a great many. Anytus paces restlessly back and forth beside his chair. Socrates sits back in his with thoughtfully pursed lips. A few of his disciples glumly imitate his calm, the rest are frankly worried. Court officials, after counting hands and conferring with assistants, confer with each other. One writes figures on a card, gives it to the President.

PRESIDENT: Hands down. Four hundred and seventy eight of you support the charge. That means four hundred and twenty one disagree and Socrates is guilty by a fifty eight majority. The guilt of the accused having thus been proved, we must now vote for an appropriate punishment. What do you propose, Anytus?

ANYTUS: (facing the jury) You know what I want. Socrates must be silenced and death is the one sure way of doing it. But if he proposes banishment instead, and you vote for that, I will be satisfied. Either way Athens will be rid of him. You have seen him treat this trial as a joke! He has treated you, a jury representing the whole Athenian state, as a joke. This moral philosopher thinks the legal process of a democratic state is a laughing matter. So if he suggests it, and you prefer it, let him leave here for his beloved Sparta, or even Persia where most of the enemies we banish find a home. He’s a famous man! Every city which hates ours will welcome him. But not for long, I think. Only the democracy of Athens could have borne such a man as long as you have. I propose the hemlock. (He sits down)

PRESIDENT: Your turn, Socrates.

Socrates has sat smiling and shaking his head while the three disciples who helped the teller have tried to persuade him of something. He stands and moves to centre stage saying: — SOCRATES: Banishment. Banishment. No you won’t get rid of me that way. (faces jury with hands folded on stick) Anytus is right: only a democracy could have put up with me. I am a democratic growth and at my age I refuse to be transplanted. I profited by our laws so I will die by them, if that is what you want. But the law requires me to propose an alternative to capital punishment so by rejecting banishment I will have to propose a fine. I can’t possibly pay more than I have here. Here it is in my pocket — one minae — not a coin of great value. Will it do? (holds it out in palm of hand)

Jeers and catcalls from jurors. The President covers his eyes with his hands. Plato from the side of the stage starts desperately waving his hands and shouting.

PLATO: Socrates!. . Men of Athens, I propose –

SOCRATES: (loudly over Plato’s voice) Men of Athens, my young friend here wants to tell you that he and other rich pals of mine will pay the state a large fine on my behalf. I won’t tell you how much because it might tempt you into perverting the course of justice. But for me to propose a fine of even one small coin is an admission of guilt so I withdraw that offer, and before I make another let me say something about Anytus, who I have heard with more sympathy and respect than he will ever believe.

Anytus regards our country, doesn’t he? as a giant man whose strength is the strength of everyone in it and whose wisdom is as great as all our intelligences put together. And it could be that. If we truly loved each other it would be that. But we don’t work together, we compete — the rich with the poor, businesses with businesses, trades with trades, sex with sex. We have only truly co-operated when at war: at war with Persia or Sparta or small states sick of us taxing them. When not at war our peace is more like the fixity of wrestlers with holds on each other too tight to be broken. So instead of Athens being a vigorous intelligent giant MAN it is like a huge fat horse with rheumatic joints which likes lying all day on the hillside listening to its stomach rumble. Anytus called me a parasite, I agree. I am a very special kind of blood-sucker, a gadfly sent by God the Father — who loves you — to sting your fatty complacency and goad you into healthy mental exercize. You need me. I need you. While I live I will not be silenced, so I propose the following punishment. For the rest of my life let me dine in the council refectory next door to this chamber, eating free of charge. Olympic athletes have that privilege — give it to me. My job is more important. That is my final offer.

He goes back to his seat and sits down with folded arms. A storm of hissing and jeers has arisen from most parts of the council chamber. The president stands up, says loudly, —

PRESIDENT: Will the tellers please go to their places. .

The hissing continues.

PRESIDENT: (distressed) Please shut up. I’ve got something to say that may be out of order but I’ve got to say it. . listen here!

Silence falls.

PRESIDENT: Isn’t there an explanation for Socrates’ very peculiar attitude? Isn’t there something lacking in him (taps brow) up here? That’s what I think. He seems to have no sense of self preservation. Might that be a reason for. . preserving him?

Socrates is highly amused. Several jurors shout “Out of order!”

PRESIDENT: (shrugging) Just an idea I had. Alright. Those who want the death penalty raise their right hands.

A forest of hands are immediately raised. The counting process is carried out as formerly, though there can no be no doubt of the verdict. Socrates looks absent-mindedly out over the jurors’ heads, his mouth open as when we first saw him on the hilltop. The President, sighing, addresses the court.

PRESIDENT: Anytus wins by a hundred and forty nine majority. That means five hundred and twenty four of you want him poisoned with hemlock, three hundred and seventy five would rather see him fed at public expense. Is there anything you want to say, Socrates, before we have you jailed? (louder, noticing Socrates still seems absent minded) Socrates! Have you any last words for the Athenian public?

SOCRATES: (rousing himself) Yes, quite a few.

He sits up and talks placidly at first, later becoming animated in a very ordinary way. He is now the only perfectly happy man in the court.

SOCRATES: Do you remember what the old physicist Anaxagoras said when the Athenian people condemned him to death for heresy? He said, “Nature has done that already — and them too.” (he chuckles) But a third of you don’t want me dead so I’d like to cheer those good friends up a bit. Dying won’t hurt me. A man is only badly hurt by his own bad actions and death now may do me good. I’m seventy and still intelligent, but in a few years I might have gone stupid and started setting bad examples, like many old people do. Remember too that mine will be a civilized execution. Instead of being left to rot in a dungeon or nailed to a cross I will die among friends, drinking painless poison while at rest in a clean bed. As for after death, nobody alive knows anything about it and it’s stupid to fear what we don’t know. Death is either endless, dreamless sleep — a remarkably good thing as all people who can’t sleep know — or something different that is equally good. If our souls are immortal and live after our body dies they must have lived before it was born, so we have all lived many lives, died many deaths and will continue doing it. May I remind you that Hell is not part of every religion? Greeks only started imagining it when we began working slaves to death in our silver mines. I haven’t exploited anyone so I’m not worried.

Now some words of comfort to you who want me dead. One day most of you will be sorry you voted for it, and when that time comes please don’t think you were very wicked or unusually stupid. Folk who think that are as mistaken as those who think they’re very wise and good. Just remember that when you thought you were freeing Athens from a dangerous enemy you were really losing a useful friend. And smile, rather sadly, at how ignorant you were but don’t get upset! You will only have “enthroned me” — as Homer says — “in death’s impregnable castle.” I think that’s all I want to say.

He turns round, sees two officials waiting to arrest him, turns back to the jury with raised arm.

SOCRATES: Stop! I’ve remembered something. Come here Aeschines. (Aeschines, notebook in hand, approaches) This worthy fellow has for years been trying to write down everything he hears me say — that young fellow Plato has started doing it too. They think they can become philosophers by studying my words, but they can’t. We can only be philosophers by studying ourselves. No great cleverness is needed, I proved that. What you do is look carefully into yourself and think hard about what you see there. The only help you need is the good-humoured conversation of friends who don’t want to flatter you. Men of Athens! Men of Greece! Men of the World, don’t let philosophy become a thing experts lecture on — if that happens it will lose all value, become just another tool people use to get money or social promotion. The only true philosopher is the honest lover. Remember that. No, DON’T remember it, discover it together with others. Goodbye. No! Stop a minute! (scratches his head) Jail is a bit like hospital and a whole month will elapse before my big operation. I will be delighted to receive visitors with a taste for dialectical conversations about truth, beauty and goodness. Handsome young men will be specially welcome of course, but I don’t need more than one in a company of five or six. Nobody will be turned away on grounds of age, appearance or low income. And as usual, there will be no charge. Thank you.

He turns and walks off stage between the officials followed by Aeschines, Plato and other disciples who surround and obscure his cheerful, animated person. The President mingles with the jurors who start drifting towards an anteroom where they will be paid. Anytus, having been congratulated by friends on the success of his action, sits for a while, brooding on how the issue of the trial will affect forthcoming elections.

Witnesses were not called at Athenian trials and none of the important witnesses I have described could have attended the trial of Socrates in 399 BC. Alcibiades had died five years earlier, murdered by enemies after betraying so many people that nobody knows who hired the assassins. It may have been Critias who died a year later, in battle against the restoration of Athenian democracy. The name of Anytus’ son is not recorded but was almost certainly not Phoebus. He is said to have liked Socrates more than his own father, but may not have been the neurotic wretch I invented to show the bad effect of a strong, original thinker upon a weak one.

It is a pleasant fact that the restored Athenian democracy prospered without its empire for centuries after the trial of Socrates. It lived up to Pericles’ boast of being a school for other nations, though soon after Pericles died the Athens of his day was thought a golden age. Romans who made Greece part of their empire studied Greek poetry, philosophy, art and science in Athens which seemed their strongest source. Many schools of philosophy flourished there, Idealist and Cynic, Academic and Realist, Stoic and Epicurean. All claimed Socrates as their founder. Statues of him were erected in public places.

If I knew Greek well enough to understand the plays of Aristophanes he would have had a bigger part in my story, being as great an original genius in drama as Socrates in philosophy. His plays are great poetry, like Shakespeare’s, and satirize every aspect of life in his day: Olympian gods, the mighty dead, the Athenian state, its politicians and celebrities. He understood the democracy so completely — it understood him so well — that he successfully caricatured it in The Wasps as a daft old man who has to be locked up by his son because he prefers parliamentary politics to minding his own business. When Cleon, a tanner like Anytus, became popular by a vulgar display of bad parliamentary manners, Aristophanes showed him being pushed out of office by a sausage-seller whose manners were even worse. No good actor could be found brave enough to perform as Cleon on stage so Aristophanes acted the part himself. During the war with Sparta his comedies constantly, wittily denounced it. No government, democratic or monarchic, has since allowed such freedom to a great satirist.

The Greek empire Alcibiades dreamed of leading was made real by Alexander, young king of Macedonia, the Greek state closest to barbarism. He conquered all Greece, Palestine, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and part of India. He died at the age of thirty-three and his generals dismembered his empire. The Romans later reconquered much of it, adding on Italy, Spain, France, the Balkans and south Britain. Then the Roman empire split in two, the eastern and richest part being ruled by emperors with a bureaucracy speaking Greek. In the 1322^nd year of the Christian era that part was conquered by an Islamic empire that renamed the capital city Istanbul. It ruled what is now called Turkey, Greece and most of the Balkans until 1864 when Greece got independence under a constitutional monarchy whose capital was Athens. In World War 2 it was conquered by the Third Reich, a German empire that held it for three or four years, after which the constitutional monarchy was restored. In 1967 a left-wing government was overthrown by a military coup aided by the United States. This dictatorship lasted until 1974 when Greece got back a form of parliamentary democracy with Athens still the capital.

Nowadays the securest nations have elected assemblies acting as their governments. None would have appeared democratic to Athenians who believed democracy was impossible in big nations, since in a vast population the influence of a single individual hardly exists, if he is not very rich. Plato said the ideal state should have 5,040 citizens, a number divisible by all numbers up to 13 except 11, thus making subdivisions of populace easy. Aristotle preferred solid things to ideal numbers and said the best size of nation was one with borders visible from a high point in the centre. The quarter-million people in the Icelandic Republic would have seemed unmanageably vast to democrats before the days of radio, telephone and cheap swift transport. But in small democracies (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Holland, New Zealand) goods are still shared best. I hear the Irish Republic is a better place to live since a hierarchy’s hold on it loosened. Even before then hardly anyone in the Irish Republic wanted to be ruled again by the London parliament, hence Brendan Behan’s words:⁶³

The sea, the sea, the blesséd sea!

Long may it flow between England and me.

God help the Scots, they’ll never be free.

He may turn out to be wrong. The Scottish general election next week will show us. Surely at last some of Scotland’s faithful Labour party voters will see Blair, Brown and his crew had become Thatcherite Tories when they came to power? That is why the English money market let them come to power.

Schoolteacher, writer.

born 1940

died 2007

JOHN SIM TUNNOCK died on 28th April as the result of a fall in his Hillhead home. He was for many years a well-known figure around Glasgow’s Byres Road, having lived in Hillhead all his life. After attending Glasgow University and Jordanhill Training College he was first a teacher, then headmaster in Molendinar Primary School, Robroyston, accepting early retirement for family reasons in 1977. A life-long bachelor, his literary hobbies made him a contributor to Chapman, the Edinburgh-based literary magazine. His funeral service at the Linn Crematorium was attended by a few close friends, among them Dr Francis Lambert and the lawyer, Angela Mullane. His only surviving relative is in the U.S.A.

In his introduction to the 2007 reprint by Canongate of Gray’s first book, Lanark, William Boyd says that years before the publication in 1981 it had a Scottish reputation as “a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day. . an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s Ulysses — such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.” Boyd is referring to the early seventies when he was a student at Glasgow University. I was then a young lecturer in English at the Adam Smith Teachers’ Training Institute, Kirkcaldy, and had encountered Lanark through the publication of two early chapters in a short-lived but influential quarterly, Scottish International. Finding some of my students impressed by what they thought “the novelty” of that sample I wrote to the editor, Robert Tait, pointing out how much these chapters owed to Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published three years before, and the first magic realist novel to be noticed internationally. Scottish International did not print my letter but Gray certainly read it. Shortly before Lanark was published in 1981 he sent me a proof copy and letter begging me to return it with any critical remarks I wished to make. “The severer the better!” he wrote. “I promise to take account of them, and acknowledge your contribution.”

This request seemed honest so I honestly replied, saying (among other things) that the only apparent reason for combining two very different narratives in Lanark was the author’s assumption that a heavier book would make a bigger splash. I also noted several misleading and unjustified ploys in a so-called “epilogue” between chapters 40 and 41. On receiving a final copy of the book I found my criticisms had moved Gray to change his book in one way only: he had separated my strictures and added them as footnotes to his “epilogue”. But he certainly acknowledged me as their author! The novel’s success in Scotland led to smiling colleagues congratulating me on my part in it. Lecturers from other colleges began greeting me with surprise because they had thought me a figment of Gray’s imagination — thought the footnotes a device to deflect criticism, not voice it. Gray had lured me into a trap. That I really exist has led those who know this to see me as Gray’s dupe or stooge, thus irrevocably damaging my career. Since the mid 1980s it has been obvious that my Cambridge First will never lead to a more important teaching post, and that only retirement will let me escape from Fife. This has left me with a strong but unenchanted interest in Gray’s work.

In February 2007 I received a parcel through the post and, opening it, had a déjà vu experience that almost set my hair on end. It was a proof copy of Old Men in Love and letter from Gray profusely apologising for the bad effect of Lanark upon my career, which had been the opposite of his intention. Old Men in Love (he wrote) was a chance for us both “to set the record straight”. He invited me to review it, at any length I liked, with any other of his books. He promised to publish this review as an epilogue to Old Men in Love without comment or alteration, and since this novel would be his last (for he is seventy-two and in poor health) I could be sure of having the last word. This smooth invitation was obviously Gray’s way of obtaining another critic-deflecting device. I have accepted it with open eyes, believing that a cool statement of facts will let me at last indeed “set the record straight”.

The attention that Gray’s first novel Lanark received in Scotland is not surprising. A small country of about five million souls will make the most of what literature it has, and Lanark appeared in 1981 when northern universities urgently needed such a book. For nearly two centuries Scots literature had been taught as a branch of English. The post-war increase in Scottish national feeling finally made it a separate university course with only some twentieth-century poetry worth lecturing upon, and hardly any fiction. England had H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Greene and Orwell, but the only well-known Scottish author was a thriller writer, John Buchan. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow England has had a great tradition of great literature showing its social breadth. The nearest Scots equivalent since Burns, Hogg and Sir Walter has been a line of dour working-class novels set in depressed local communities. Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901), Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair (1934) were the best and William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975) the most recent. When Docherty received the Whitbread award Scots critics hoped McIlvanney would go on to produce something new and surprising, but McIlvanney, tired of high critical attention and low royalty cheques, turned to crime thrillers and left a gap in modern Scots literary courses that Lanark filled perfectly.

In the first place it was very big, combining several genres with a short linking story. One half was in the Scottish depressed working-class tradition, enlivened by elements from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The other half was a Kafka-esque pilgrimage mingled with science fiction. They were linked by a Borges type of story, a fantasia on memory, and the whole was welded together by devices that began to be labelled Postmodern in the 1980s, most of these being in the so-called “epilogue”. Here, like Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Gray described himself inside his book, writing it. He put in a large index of authors he had plagiarised, except for Fowles, and named many friends and acquaintances in a west of Scotland literary clique that east coast critics had begun to call “the Glasgow literary mafia”. He disarmed criticism yet further by enlisting me, as I have described.

In 1981 senior academics had just started lecturing on popular culture, so by ostentatiously blending fairy tale, science fiction and horror film elements with liftings from twentieth century authors most fashionable with academics, Gray boiled them into that 560 page postmodern stew, Lanark. The epilogue with my edited footnotes persuaded critics that the author was as smart as themselves. Favourably reviewed by the London press, Lanark was short-listed for the Booker prize, and two years after publication was on the curriculum of Scottish literature courses. Since then most studies of contemporary Scots literature suggest Lanark began a new Scottish Renaissance, without exactly dating the old one.

Between Lanark and Old Men in Love Gray has published eighteen books, none more than normal length. They consist of:

Two realistic novels involving sadomasochistic fantasies,

Four books of short stories (one shared with his friends Agnes Owens, James Kelman),

Two satirical novellas about young Scotsmen in the London media world,

Two science-fiction fantasies, one set in nineteenth-century Glasgow, one in a war-games future,

Three pamphlets urging Scots home rule, the last written with Professor Adam Tomkins,

Two histories of literature,

Two collections of verse,

One autobiographical pamphlet published by the Saltire Society,

One play script.

The novels and stories above are mostly prose versions of forgotten plays written between 1967 and 1977 for early television, radio and small stage companies. He admits this in epilogues usually headed Critic Fuel which, like the one in Lanark, defuse criticism by anticipating it. Since Lanark he has frequently given interviews suggesting his latest work of fiction will be the last since he has “no ideas for more”. These efforts to hold public attention have succeeded in Scotland, though most critics at home and abroad agree that his most pornographic novel, Something Leather, should be forgotten. Even so he has received a more than fair share of critical attention in two Festschrifts.

The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), and Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations (British Library, 2002). The second is not a Scottish production, but like the first nearly every critic in it is Scottish and about half are friends of Gray, some of them close friends. Both books have a multitude of Gray’s illustrations, which proves Gray had access to the proofs, so must have overseen the texts. A cool, serious appraisal of Gray’s work cannot be found in them or, I believe, anywhere in Scotland, but they show why he has a following among bibliophiles — those who enjoy books for visual and typographical reasons quite separate from their literary value. Before appearing as a novelist at the age of forty-five Gray had not only failed as a dramatist, but as a commercial artist, portrait painter and mural painter. By bringing visual showmanship to book production he has contrived, with illustrations and jingling rhymes, to make the jackets, blurbs, boards, typography, layouts and even errata slips in his publications more entertaining than the main texts. Not since William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories has an author so controlled the appearance of his books, often varying them from one edition to the next, allowing collectors to always find something new. The two festschrifts are no doubt useful guides to these parasites on the tree of literature.

But outside academia and bibliomania Gray’s reputation is fading. Younger folk find more up-to-date working-class realism in Irvine Welsh, better science-fiction fantasy in Iain Banks. The minority interested in brazen Postmodern obscurantism find Gray’s Lanark far surpassed by James Kelman’s Translated Accounts (published 2001). Of all his works only Lanark has never been out of print, but here — and finally, claims Gray — we have over a hundred thousand words of his very last novel.

Henry James said H.G. Wells made novels by tipping his mind up like a cart and pouring out the contents. At first Old Men in Love seems to have been made in the same haphazard way, but some research in the National Library of Scotland shows it is stuffed with extracts from Gray’s earlier writings. The two big historical narratives are from television plays commissioned by Granada in the 1970s. The Greek one was broadcast in a series called For Conscience’s Sake, with Christopher Logue in the part of Socrates. It extensively plagiarised Plato’s Symposium and passages in Plutarch. For a Queen Victoria’s Scandals series Gray then plagiarised Henry James Prince’s published diaries and Hepworth Dixon’s Spiritual Wives. He refused to let his name be attached to the broadcast because a producer or director had changed the script in ways he disliked, after which British television had no use for Alasdair Gray. The archive has three typed dialogues for a TV play about Filippo Lippi that was never commissioned, so Old Men in Love has only three Florentine chapters. These rags of forgotten historical plays fill nineteen chapters.

The rest are stuffed with a great deal of half-baked popular science tipped in from Gray’s 2000 anthology The Book of Prefaces, also political diatribes from pamphlets published before three general elections that were victories for New Labour. These diatribes were and are protests against the dismantling of peaceful British industries and the welfare state, a process that has made Gray and many other professional people richer. The description of an anti-war march was written for The Herald in February 2003, then added inappropriately to The Ends of Our Tethers, a collection of tales printed in 2004. (It may be no coincidence that Will Self describes a similar protest march in The Book of Dave, published 2006.) Like most Scotsmen Gray thinks himself an authority on Burns, so we find an essay about Burns mostly published in volume 30 of the 1998 Studies in Scottish Literature, edited by Professor Ross Roy. The most shameless padding is in chapter 17 which reprints verbatim a section from chapter 8. The marginal note signposting this obviously invites readers to think it a charmingly eccentric Shandyan device, but Laurence Sterne’s typographical stunts in Tristam Shandy are never more than a page long. This repetition is beyond a joke.

Three literary ploys try to unify the whole rag-bag. The Introduction uses the text-as-found-manuscript invented by Scott for his Tales of My Landlord novels and afterwards plagiarised by Hogg, Pushkin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Gray in two earlier novels. From Scott also comes the printing of portentous quotations as epigraphs, some genuine and some pseudonymous, a device run to death by Pushkin, Poe, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling. All but the introduction are cynically sandwiched between references to the 2001 Trade Center atrocity and May 2007 Scottish election in order to give the whole thing spurious contemporary relevance. When all the above is discounted we are left with the dreary tale of a failed writer and dirty old man, who comes to a well-deserved end through an affair with a drug-dealing procuress. This story is neither tragic nor funny.

The best criticism of Gray is to quote his own and believe it. In an 1990s epilogue to Something Leather he says all his stories were about men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, and the transformation often ended in death. He adds that knowing how his talent works shows it is defunct because imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. After that Gray published nine more fictions with this hackneyed plot, Old Men in Love being the last. The four old men are all versions of Gray in fancy dress, with the Socratic collision homosexual, and though this novel may indeed be his last I cannot simply dismiss it (as Allan Massie dismissed Gray’s 2004 The Ends of Our Tethers) by calling it a collection of scraps from a tired writer’s bottom drawer. Neither the blurb which Gray lured Will Self into writing nor the egoism of the text will repel empty-headed fans of these egregious authors. Many may fall under the influence of its sinister propaganda for Scottish Nationalism and Socialism.

Far too many have forgotten or never known that the German acronym for National Socialism is Nazi. Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen, first performed in Dublin 1902, was a bad poetic play that annoyed orthodox Catholics but scandalously excited Irish Nationalists. After the 1916 Easter Rising Yeats wondered if his play had stimulated rebellion among “certain men the English shot”. From their comfortable studies plausible authors often give murderous lunatics high-minded excuses for atrocities. Old Men in Love cunningly avoids Hugh MacDiarmid’s rabid Anglophobia; but as Billy Connolly, the New Labour Party and all respectable defenders of the 1707 Union point out, racist hatred of the English is what the Scottish lust for an impossible independence feeds upon. This book should therefore not be read, or if read, swiftly forgotten.

Goodbye, Mr Gray.

Sidney Workman

17 Linoleum Terrace

Kirkcaldy, June 2007

1 Mastermind is Tunnock’s invariable nickname for Francis Lambert, who in the 1970s achieved some fame through BBC television by doing well on a general knowledge quiz show called Mastermind.

2 This sentence introduces Brunelleschi in Vasari’s The Lives of the Great Artists translated by Julia and Peter Bondanella in the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

3 The farmer may be exaggerating the height of Athena’s statue by Phidias. A popular website says it was only 12 metres or 38 feet high.

4 Dionysus’ quarry was a cavernous space called The Ear of Dionysus, because there was a point where the owner, without being seen, could hear every word spoken by slaves working there.

5 Chapman: A Scottish literary magazine founded in 1970 by Walter Perrie but edited since 1976 by Joy Hendry.

6 No name, no pack drill is British Army slang suggesting namelessness ensures freedom. Pack drill is punishment any senior officer can impose on a soldier of lower rank, but only if he knows the soldier’s name, rank and number.

7 Blackhill: a Glasgow housing scheme built in the mid 1930s, known as a Slum Clearance Scheme because folk from the poorest areas of central Glasgow were put into it. The school where Tunnock had worked was there. The scheme was notorious for its high level of crime so was mostly demolished in the 1970s and given another name.

8 This quotation is from Antigone by Sophocles.

9 Davidson’s Runnable Stag is in many anthologies. T.S. Eliot was influenced by his Thirty Bob a Week. Hugh MacDiarmid, 18 when Davidson’s body was left by the tide on a south coast beach, said it struck him like, a bullet hole in the lands-cape, God seen through the wrong end of a telescope. In The Sign of Four Holmes gives Watson The Martyrdom of Man, saying “let me recommend this book — one of the most remarkable ever penned.”

10 Polis is Glasgow phonetic dialect for police.

11 Spud is demotic for potato: a popular article of British working-class diet, usually served boiled with meat or fried as chips. Being commonplace yet comfortably nourishing, it is sometimes used as a mild term of endearment.

12 Heraghty’s is a public house on Kilmarnock Road about a mile south of the Clyde.

13 Brother Guido, christened Guido di Pietri, received the monastic name Giovanni da Fiesole, but is better known as Fra Angelico, 1387–1455.

14 Messy Tom is an English translation of Masaccio, Italian nickname of the mural painter Tommasso Guidi, 1401-28?.

15 Granchio, better known as Nicolaus Krebs of Cusa, was the best Renaissance philosopher. He rejected Aristotle’s doctrine that mathematics deal with large and small things by saying everything was infinitely divisible in the eyes of God, so all size is relevative. Also that only God was eternal and infinite with His centre everywhere and limits nowhere — so the world and everything else was contained by God, and never at rest.

16 Vasari says that when a slave in North Africa Filippo interested his owner by sketching him in charcoal, the Muhammadan never having seen a portrait before. Eventually Filippo was ransomed and returned to Florence by way of Naples.

17 This letter was stapled to a page of John Tunnock’s diary between the last entry and the next. The writer is a left-wing historian and literary critic who taught at the Universities of Sussex and Nairobi before settling in Edinburgh, and author of The People’s War: Britain 1941–1945 and Revolutionary Empires: English Speaking Empires 1400–1780s.

18 A stickit Minister is Scots for a student clergyman who fails to qualify.

19 Calder is here over-modest. He is a competent poet with three published books of verse, the first of them translations of Catullus into Lowland Scots.

2 °Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great tells how King Fred’s Prussia was about to be conquered by a trio of nations when the Russian Czarina died, at which Fred’s other enemies made peace with him. Goebbels was reading this in 1945 when he heard of President Roosevelt’s death. He rushed to Hitler with the good news that history was repeating itself, and though Russian troops were in the suburbs of Berlin, Britain and the U.S.A. would now join Germany to fight the U.S.S.R. (The top Nazis believed the U.S.A. was mainly fighting them because Roosevelt was a Jew.)

21 This long dash indicates the only friend of John Tunnock who has refused permission to let their name be printed.

22 This demonstration was on February 15^th 2003.

23 Protestants instead of protesters may be a hint that anti-war protesters are heirs to the traditions of the 15^th century Reformation.

24 This story is Drinking Coffee Elsewhere from Z Z Packer’s collection of that name published by Canongate, Edinburgh, 2004.

25 This quotation is from the Bible for Today edited by John Stirling and published by Oxford University Press in 1941.

26 Many Glasgow families called the evening meal tea or high-tea, and called the mid-day luncheon, dinner. Tea was usually eaten when the wage earner came home around 6 o’clock, and contained a large main course followed by a variety of biscuits and cakes and several cups of tea.

27 From Chambers Biographical Dictionary: HARRIS, Frank (1856–1931), British writer and journalist, born, according to his autobiography, in Galway, but according to his own later statement, in Tenby, ran away to New York at the age of fifteen, became boot-black, labourer building Brooklyn Bridge, and worker in a Chicago hotel, but in 1874 embarked upon the study of law at the University of Kansas. About 1876 he returned to England and entered the newspaper world. Perhaps the most colourful figure in contemporary journalistic circles, an incorrigible liar, a vociferous boaster, an unscrupulous adventurer and philanderer, with the aspect and outlook of a typical melodrama ‘Sir Jasper’, and an obsession with sex which got his autobiography, My Life and Loves (1923-27) banned for pornography, he had a great impact on Fleet Street as editor of the Fortnightly Review, Saturday Review, Vanity Fair and of the Evening News, which became under his aegis a pioneer in the new cult of provocative headlines and suggestive sensationalism.

28 Stoor is demotic Scots for dust or muck, so Stoory means dirty.

29 See note 26.

30 Kelvin Aqueduct, Maryhill: architect Robert Whitworth, built at a cost of £8509 in 1787-90, 400 feet long and 70 high, then the largest canal aqueduct in Britain. Four rusticated arches of 50 feet carry spandrel walls horizontally arched from the massive cut-water buttresses needed to contain the waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal.

31 Lumber: Scottish demotic verb, meaning to intimately caress late at night in the back yards of homes to which a girl’s boyfriend would be denied entry by her parents, therefore also a noun for a girl thus caressed.

32 Tawse of extra hard, thick leather manufactured in Lochgelly, Fife.

33 Kilquhanity a boarding school, in a country house near Castle Douglas, was run on pupil self-government lines by John and Morag Aitkenhead, a kindly couple. Their discipline did without punishment. Their example was A. S. Neill’s English boarding school, Summerhill.

34 After World War 2 healthy men over 18 years were conscripted into the British Armed Forces for two years until 1958, when the British empire was nearly extinct. Those who refused conscription for political reasons were jailed. Roughly 10,000 refused on religious grounds and were not penalized.

35 Glasgow University stands on Gilmore Hill.

36 This statement is in Auden’s Elegy for W. B. Yeats. Tunnock mistakenly assumes that one short quotation sums up a great poet’s whole attitude.

37 Scott’s Heart of Midlothian led to Scots law ending concealment of pregnancy as a capital offence; Melville’s Whitejacket led to the USA navy abolishing flogging.

38 Glasgow University Magazine mocked this edition of Catullus’ poems for omitting all explicitly sexual verses.

39 This and the next two paragraphs are identical with three in chapter eight, the Prologue.

40 Tunnock acquired the knowledge in these first paragraphs from Dr Chris Burton of Glasgow University’s Department of Geology.

41 This is the only complete chapter in a chaos of scribbled papers, news cuttings, copies of extracts from other people’s work. These were raw materials of a book intended to explain Scotland’s part in the first Crusade, its lack of an archbishop in Catholic times and Calvinism; also its present place in the international financial war machine. A report on unused mineral beds (chiefly coal) were mixed with prophecies that in 2020 or earlier, bankers will combat oil famine by hastily exploiting nuclear power and mutated crops. This will make everything catastrophically worse until folk see that their only hope is in small co-operative Socialist nations. The next diary extract explains why this huge work was abandoned.

42 All animals are sad after sexual intercourse.

43 The funnel was on The Waverley, the last Clyde-built passenger steamer. The research tower is currently the tallest structure in Scotland (127 metres) and the only one in the world designed to revolve round a static pylon to which it is hinged, allowing visitors a splendid 360 degree view over the city. It has been static since 30 January 2005 when 10 people were trapped for 5 hours half way up in the lift.

44 Twelve of the following fifteen dated diary extracts are in words Prince published, but Tunnock shortened by removing many phrases about the beauty of Christ’s love and Prince’s evil nature and the sinfulness of the human soul. Three marginally noted entries are partly John Tunnock’s invention, but use phrases from other entries.

45 The last three 1836 entries are partly fictional, the dates wholly so. Tunnock synthesized them from events and phrases found in Dec 17^th 1837, May 24^th, June 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd 1838, Feb 17^th 1839 of the published journal.

46 Tunnock has not given the date of this entry, nor have I found it in the turgid pages of Prince’s published journal. But Hepworth Dixon refers to the umbrella incident, so I have no doubt it could be found.

47 Many mystics have described this “dying to the self”. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle describes it as passing through “the everlasting No to the evelasting Yes”.

48 Dixon here makes the town-dwellers’ usual mistake of thinking the country as he saw it had always been like that. In 1867 it had been created by acts of parliament about sixty years earlier. An England where cultivated land was separated by commons (wildernesses where anyone could build a shelter, snare a rabbit, fish a stream, keep a beehive, graze a horse or goat) had been replaced by a countryside of densely-hedged fields and landed estates guarded by spring mantraps and signs saying TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

49 Euterpean — a machine with revolving cylinders that played symphonies and opera overtures.

50 Frock here means Frock coat, knee-length and thinner than an overcoat, worn instead of what is now usually called a jacket.

51 The Abode of Love: a Memoir by Kate Barlow, issued by Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 2006.

52 These lines of the Bob Dylan song are misquoted.

53 Greek: enthusiasm.

54 The second policeman is a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

55 Furor scribendi — Latin for writing fever.

56 This was Robert Lowe, Liberal chancellor of the Exchequer and wholly opposed to democracy in Britain

57 Outsourced is postmodern slang for run more cheaply in foreign lands.

58 This festival, was started by local town councillors and business people acting unofficially, helped by Michael Dale, former Edinburgh Festival Fringe organiser.

59 As editor I have been obliged to omit several of Tunnock’s remarks that I have been advised would make me actionable at law.

60 Since 2003 this building has been called the Oran Mor Arts and Leisure Centre.

61 Professor Moignard teaches classics in the University of Glasgow, does not drink in Tennants, but was Tunnock’s neighbour in Hillhead.

62 This day must be Monday 1^st or Tuesday 2^nd of January.

63 These words are misquotations from a song in Behan’s play, The Hostage.

ALASDAIR GRAY, born in 1934, is a painter certificated by Glasgow Art School. Unable to live by one art he became jack of several and Old Men In Love is his 19th book. In The Dublin Independent Lawrence Sterne says it will swim down the gutter of time with the legation of Moses and A Tale of A Tub. Says Urquhart of Cromarty in The Scots Magazine, Relish the cheese — like brain that feeds you with these trifling jollities. Dr Samuel Johnson in The Rambler writes, Never has penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment been so happily disguised. Sidney Workman in the Epilogue says This book should not be read. In this blurb Alasdair Gray writes Old Men in Love is bound to sell well because everyone now feels old after 25, so all youngsters are interested in what comes next.