To Nazare and FFFIX.

Rounding Cape St Vincent.

Will the 'Anna M' make it home this year at all? At the moment it seems doubtful. We had a straightforward passage from Olhao to Nazare, but by the time we arrived she was leaking too badly to go on our way northwards. Now she is on the concrete. She also has her engine out. Ger has flown home to make sure Scamp is not forgetting him. Anna is quite pleased with her new gaffe. Joe is sad, his sailing so curtailed. 

Tough times in the Executive Suite!

However, once one can get at that leak, it may not be very hard to fix it. It is just beside the port rear engine mounting, where there are 2 or 3 cracked ribs; so no matter what one did with it in the line of caulking, it would not last until they are fixed. Meanwhile, once that engine space is cleaned up, it will be another Ryanair flight for me!

'Home', in a photo given me here in Nazare by Dodi Stiller.

Herewith the IXth despatch 'From the Fractal Frontier'.

There was more to that devastation than the tragedy of Dom Luke. In the community at Downside I had encountered an eccentric and intelligent bunch of monks, of very varied character. As my housemaster in Barlow there was firstly Fr John, with a scar in his cheek from a German bayonet; he had made a dramatic escape from a pow camp back to England. He was shy, kindly and straightforward. After two years, he was succeeded by Fr Raphael; here was a representative of the post-war generation, bright but 'uncooked' by the war and not quite realising yet how difficult the changing times were becoming. Of those who taught me religion before Dom Luke, there was Christopher the artist (who then left Downside itself for the parish in Liverpool, and like most of my friends, subsequently left the community), Oswald the Jungian psychoanalyst (who died of a heart attack before long), Illtyd the theologian (a brilliant scholastic but rather dry for a schoolboy). 

There was also quite a substantial Irish presence in the community, most of whom I think had hoped to form the basis of a new foundation near Gorey in Co. Wexford, which however did not happen. They brought a colourful dimension to the place, and included a West Cork man by the name of Leander Donovan, whom I only got to know through my dear friend Ken, he being a fully fledged member of the Irish contingent, that unfortunate little tribe who were packed off on the old Inishfallen to receive a 'superior' education, albeit Catholic, in a foreign land. Dom Leander however impressed one as actually being a real monk, as well as being great fun, malapropisms and all. By now a pattern had become established in my life, of having Irish friends and being attracted to their country.

What did the monks all have in common? If one is to become a Benedictine monk in modern England, it is unlikely that one will think very highly of the 'consumer society' and its values. I imagine they mostly had a more or less obscure hope that they were educating youngsters who might help to find a new direction, but there were very different notions of what such a beast might look like. After all the Second Vatican Council was promising to renew the Church, though such a promise was already looking problematic. Could it have anything to do with, for
instance, finding a way forward for 'Catholic Ireland'?

As for Downside, the divisions in the community found inadequate expression in such matters as the use of the vernacular in their liturgical office, such tensions being dumbed down into the familiar narrative of conservatives v progressives. In the aftermath of Luke's death, the more articulate of the enfants terribles in the community were despatched to join Sebastian and Christopher in the Liverpool parish; best to let them go and start their brave new world up there at St Mary's in the docklands, a good long way from Downside, but funnily enough, kind of on the road to Ireland!

I was soon hitching up that new motorway to visit them. It was a shock to find little interest at Cambridge in such matters that engaged me so profoundly, and to be expected to go back to the business of studying literature in a purely superficial fashion, from the outside, an author a week and an essay at the end of it – just learn to churn out the expected dope, four essays in three hours when it came to the exams! 

Sebastian introduced me to such books such as 'Deschooling Society' by the American Jesuit Ivan Illich, which confirmed the sense I had that the 'training' of conventional education was positively sinister in some of its effect; it actually schooled one in the 'disassociation of sensibility', in the atrophy of one's personal consciousness, with a resultant side-lining of our own personal creativity and conscience with regard to whatever tasks may be required of us. As far as I was concerned, Luke had gone down fighting that sort of stuff, and whatever else I was going to do, I was not going to fall in with it.

I managed to coast through part 1 of my degree, in French and Spanish, mainly on what I had learnt at school. It was easier in Spanish than in French, as I was less deeply engaged with Spanish literature, so I got a 2:1 in it. However I baulked at churning out the old stuff with regard to some French writers who had really interested me. In one exam paper, of the four essays in three hours variety, I settled for offering one decent essay. They gave me a third, which was I suppose nice of them. It was after all a more constructive kind of protest than what the lads in Paris were up to, hurling cobble-stones at les flics, some of them getting their own heads bashed in for their trouble!

There was only the one place where the turmoil in my head could be expressed and understood, and that was St Mary's in Liverpool. The first time I made the journey there, fresh air (or whatever it was that blew in from the Mersey across the dusty streets) had only penetrated the stuffy ecclesiastical gloom of the parochial house on the top floor, where Sebastian and Christopher were installed. It was wonderful to find myself listened to and understood there. Shortly afterwards Sebastian was made the parish priest, and they were joined as I have mentioned by three young monks, enfants terribles or otherwise described as flower children, Peter, Anselm and Kevin.