Sailor's Return and FFF XVIII.

Sailor's return.

Ger photographing his favourite creatures.

Leaving the 'Anna M' to the tender mercies of Alec, not to mention the care of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré, I'm back on Sherkin; to the bright skies and fulsome growth of Ireland at the height of summer. The big deal now is to get the new room plastered and finished, on the outside at least, while the weather is in it! Fiona and I are also looking forward to a lovely get-together shortly, as we celebrate fifty years together, so between the jigs and the reels, we're busy as bees!

Ger plastering.

FFF XVIII Somerset. So, we had moved from London to our cottage on the Mendips, just within sight of that big Abbey tower. For a while I went on with the job in London, up on Monday  morning, back on Friday evening; then I took the plunge, abandoned the idea of a career in journalism, and got a job on a dairy farm with a large herd (for those days) of pedigree short-horns.

I worked under Baz the dairyman, who knew every one of three hundred or so cows by name, and immediately spotted it if something were wrong. I helped with the morning milking and the chores and then had the afternoons to myself. It was a privilege to work with Baz; I felt his kind would hardly be around much longer. The herds would get even bigger, the computers would be tracking the animals, and the human input would be more and more robotic. It all works splendidly until it doesn't, but how such trends can be reversed, short of disaster of one kind or another, is hard to see.

Fiona and I were inspired to a considerable extent by the Bevan family, with whom Fiona had been friendly in her teenage years. Roger taught music at Downside, while with Molly had fourteen children. Molly fed them largely with her own produce, and she introduced us to goats, poultry and so on. We started our own herd of those somewhat cantankerous but excellent and endearing creatures, well, when they weren’t getting in the vegetables or munching Fiona’s plants or flowers!

Ger Cullen helped us to master them, and his wife Sylvie and brother Geff helped us clueless people to learn the ways of country living. Ger was our binman, and I suppose they were amused at the young hippies who wanted to learn the old peasant ways. Most afternoons I would take the goats browsing on the long acre, the broad verges of the lane that led to Cranmore woods, and then on into the woods. They were owned by the Forestry Commission, but had quite a lot of scrub along with some fine hardwood trees.

I had to learn how the goats, though with minds of their own, sometimes damned obstinate ones, were in fact amenable to control. One had to ‘plug in’ to their inbuilt herd sense, and lead them rather than attempt to drive them. Still one had to be firm and make them realise who was boss. Actually it’s great training for anyone with pretensions to lead human beings! I had some blissful times in those woods. One moment in particular has always stayed with me, when the sun came out brightly shining through the myriad water drops on the trees after a heavy shower. It was one of those moments when, while totally caught up in physical matter, one finds it transformed, brilliantly and intensely alive in the world of spirit.

Fiona and I started to make delicious goats’ milk yoghourt, and wondered if we could do so commercially. We used to sell small quantities in Bath, 18 miles away, along with milk, cottage cheese and vegetables, but could not see our way to producing enough to make a living. The idea of it was frankly enough to give one a nervous breakdown, especially with the small bit of land we had. It was the subsistence living that made sense, if only one could find a way of bringing in the necessary cash!

We made an attempt at community living with the Hosies from Liverpool and also Jeremy Cross, who taught economics at Downside, but we did not have whatever mysterious thing it is to make a success of it. I came to the conclusion that community living is a gift that has to happen, when it is going to, in its own way and time. I particularly did not like the idea of trying to set myself up as one of those charismatic ‘leaders’ of a community. I started to get that ‘shut in’ feeling, what with the land around us being bought up by quarries for hard-core, and also being now too ‘under the shadow’ of Downside, and missing the sea.

We bought a boggy bit of land across the lane in front of the house, and by digging out the bog and damming the little stream that went through it, made a large pond, which we kept ducks beside. It improved the prospect from the house considerably, and I began to think of a little property development. Next thing we learned from the local paper that the Council were threatening to make us destroy the pond - we hadn’t got planning permission and maybe if the dam broke it would flood the village! This was ridiculous, and I was able to make this clear to the television crew who turned up. However the hippies with the long hair and Fiona’s long skirts and the three babies and goats and so on made a great story altogether!

So anyway the Council backed down, not without a wee man turning up and saying ‘he was very concerned about the new development over the road’. I looked at him blankly, not having a clue what he was on about, and repressing the temptation to say something facetious like ‘what, the block of flats’? It turned out he was referring to the gate I had made for access. Well, it all got sorted out in the end, and to this day you may find ‘Joe’s Pond’ on the Ordnance Survey May. I am glad I made some positive contribution to old England! Meanwhile huge chunks were being taken out of the surrounding country for hard core, while most of the land had been bought up by the quarry companies. It all added to my sense of being in a land which was occupied by the Enemy.

With Jerry’s help and also that of Rory Dunbar, we built a new kitchen and generally improved the cottage, and eventually sold it at a good price that enabled us to move on with a few quid again. Fiona went on missing that cottage for a long time though, while I was yearning for more open country and the Atlantic coast. We bought a caravan and hired a van and moved, goats and all, down to Penberry near St David’s in Pembrokeshire one month of May, working there for a season picking new potatoes. Still, Ireland beckoned me on across the water, where the culture held more interest for me. I wanted to know what my rather vague and intellectual English Catholicism really had in common with that of Irish peasants, if any such people still survived! And could their culture find a way of meeting the challenges of modernity?

*For more about our Somerset neighbours, see:
http://gannetswaysailing.blogspot.ie/2016/01/last-post-in-hardy-country.html

On the Dream Side, FFF XVII.

Every decent boat has a story, one might almost say is a story; the men who built them, the dreams they started with, the people who sailed in them, the adventures they had are all woven together with those bits of wood. Yes bits of wood, for there's really not much chance of weaving anything into one of your hard synthetic hulls! But of course there is the decline too that is part of being alive and which synthetic things just try to ignore, pretending to do away with all that tedious maintenance, until they are just scrapped. At this stage, my old boat is fighting for her life, but she'll get through. There's plenty enough life in her yet to see me out, I think. Happily, boats have a similar life-cycle to human beings!

New ribs at last!

It's that old fractal frontier again though, as I wrestle with the difficulties of getting things done. This Alec Lammas who is doing the job reckons that 'Portugal is the land of broken dreams!' He reckons that's why he likes it too; 'it's what makes it so real'. Well I'm still fairly confident that he is being real about this job, but the time frame is being sadly stretched! At least we can chat about boats and people who we have in common, always intriguing to discover. In this case there is Graham in the Peel Castle and John Clouet on Guernsey, both of whom Alec knows, and he has sailed in the Leenane Head since she was bought and converted by a Breton guy.
She was a Zulu, a class of boat built for the Congested Districts Board at the time of the Zulu war, in the Isle of Man I think. I remember watching cattle being slung out of her in Cleggan, in the days when she was old Paddy O'Halleron's cargo boat, in and out to Inishbofin. I fished a couple of turbot seasons around those parts. The grassy sward round Cromwell's Castle provided a good spot to sort out nets that had got horribly twisted in a storm. Talk about dreams! I remember offering Paddy 'a penny for his thoughts' as he watched a hoard of young back-packers come up the steps on the old stone pier at Cleggan. "I was thinking of watching islanders come up those steps with their shoes tied around their necks, and them going walking as far as Derry to get a boat to Scotland and the tatty hockin'."

Well there's one good thing about this lark today; it's very simple and congenial living in the Anna M even without her saloon, and in this little boatyard of Nazaré.

Strange terrain of the dunes to the southward

It's warm but not too hot and I have a fine tent over the cockpit and its table; the fractal frontier could hardly come any better. Even if I am damned alive about the job in hand, the memories come welling up for these dispatches!....

While Fiona and I were living in London, moving to Somerset and having two more children, the Downside situation rumbled on. Peter, Kevin and Anselm were back in residence there, though Sebastian had gone to the States. Our other special friends, among that last generation who had held out a promise for the future of the monastery there, were Tom and Clem, and also Rod and John near our own age. They all left in the end. It was of course part of the much bigger crisis of Catholicism world-wide, not to mention the world itself!

In England a deal had been struck since the penal days of violent repression. ‘Keep it to yourself, religion is a private matter’. If it helps you to lead an upright life, without running foul of society in general, that is fine and you will be left alone. But meanwhile, whatever about the Catholic Church, English society at large had found itself in trouble. In trying to make sense of our faith, we needed also to address that society; indeed we did (and do now more than ever) have something urgent to say to it, something big, and it had seemed just possible that Downside could provide a basis for doing so.

My own idea at least continued on from the kind of project we had contemplated at Liverpool. We did not have a clear agenda, but I thought we could gradually move away from the Public School, post-imperialist one, in favour of a place where young people of all backgrounds could spend at least a year considering where they and their world might be going, and maybe developing alternatives to what was on offer.

When I was born in 1946, Britannia was bloodied but unbowed. Her Empire had survived the war, and indeed there was perhaps a more general confidence that she brought Goodness to the world, leading the benighted peoples to the Light. Now that such an attitude was being severely called into question, some folks had to try to figure out rather more clearly what the Light actually is, beyond mouthing slogans about ‘democracy’ and so on, or succumbing to the compulsion to wage endless futile wars allegedly to promote it.

Behind this political crisis lay the even more fundamental multiple crises of capitalism and technology, and of the whole culture of the industrial world. Catholics were inclined to think it back at least to what Freidrich Heer, in his book The Intellectual History of Europe, described thus: ‘The inner European struggle first crisis in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the national languages superseded Latin and with it the ancient, Catholic metaphysics and grand form.’

There existed a particularly Catholic temptation of trying to go back to that past. There were also plenty of other fantasy worlds that one might envisage escaping to. Many of our contemporaries employed drugs to try to find an alternative to what is considered the ‘real world’ of business and power politics, competition, ‘getting on’ and warfare. We however had glimpsed other possibilities, and although we ‘dropped out’, we eschewed those drugs. We were trying to realise the belief that Christ really did offer another way, and not just on the personal and individual level, but in all aspects of human life, even the economic and political ones!

It was time to reaffirm, as even the official Roman Catholic Church had by now done with the Second Vatican Council, that salvation, ‘the Good’ or whatever you called it could not be simply applied to poor brute humanity from the top down, by one imperialistic system or another, be it whatever mixture of the transcendent or the worldly.

In the case of the British Empire, this mentality, while losing credibility, found a new lease of life by hitching itself onto the American one. Not of course that this called itself an Empire. Part of the special complication of our times is that we have become too sophisticated to give things like that their proper names. A sense of history and of where names come from is largely lacking; the old folk cultures were more informative. Admittedly one should beware of labelling things, but surely it is helpful to recognise the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or Anglo-American culture as Calvinistic? Heer shows how Calvinism also eventually infected Catholicism through Jansenism. It has often been hard for people to keep faith with the goodness of God and of creation; it was especially so in the conditions of the nineteenth century.

I like to think of myself as a simple man, trying to find his was through the jungle of reality with a few basic truths. I hope I do not oversimplify when I say that Western civilisation emerged within the ‘Caesaro-Papist’ kind of imperialism, but when this became over-stretched, the nation state was erected as the new bearer of salvation. This was done most successfully by Calvinism, which also managed to salve the consciences of the rich as they put the people through the hell on earth of famine, industrialization and Dark Satanic Mills. The tender Mother of God was squeezed out of men’s imaginations, only a few backward peasant girls still had room for her, and helped Catholics not to forget her!

Now we have got to adapt to a world in which the nation state in its turn can no longer cope, mothers and fathers alike are all over the place and the rich don’t appear even to have any coherent thoughts beyond their own power and money, but meanwhile those Dark Mills have to be done away with and a new harmony with nature and with each other has somehow to be found.

The Austrian Professor Heer, as anyone who reads that book of his which I referred to above will understand, was far from a sentimental Romantic type. He managed to get himself imprisoned by both the Nazis and the Communists in his time. However he most elegantly  sets out some of the above problems, in words that very much resonated with Fiona and myself.

‘Modern society is constructed out of prohibitions and compulsory demands, which are all more or less abstract and which offer far less freedom for good cheer and happiness than the customs of the old world did. It was easier to laugh and sing and dance in the old society, because people were tied to each other by flexible, tangible bands. Men could be cheerful in the fields, because they trusted nature. They knew that everything in the world and the world above was animated. As Walter von der Vogelweide called his walking stick Herr Stock, so they gave names to cows, trees and objects. A few names for houses and the names of boats are all that remain of the old world. Everything else has been stripped of its living dignity and reduced to mere matter.

'Two characteristics marked the ancient community’s healthy relationship to its environment: a strong sense of colour and form and a highly developed communal memory. When the industrial revolution invaded the village, the people very soon lost their sense of colours and forms. The local handicrafts began to disappear and the fine regard for design which had been part of their houses and tools died out. The marvellously firm colour compositions of the local folk costumes were also conspicuous manifestations of the communion of man in his community with nature and things. Inorganic and unsuitable houses were placed in the midst of the village. Girls lost the firm taste for what is beautiful in the forms and colours of their wardrobes. At the same time the people lost their memory….’

Yes indeed, and he wrote that in about 1950! I added to myself, even if they still put names on boats, for the first time ever men are making them inorganic and on the whole more and more ugly, but we haven’t got back to the sea yet…. We were still struggling with the idea of trying to mount a response to such problems at Downside, though more and more it had the feel of some kind of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast or of Kafka’s Castle; an incoherent maze of a place whose denizens had lost their way. Despite the soaring neo-gothic abbey church, with its tower still etched on my imagination, my favourite part of the sprawling buildings was actually the stone-yard, with its practical old buildings and workshops. Amidst its heaps of building materials, it also boasted an old-fashioned printing press and a fine astronomical telescope; this happy combination was much more to my sense of sanity than the acres of playing fields for rugby and cricket.

It could only have happened at Downside; during WWII a Fleet Air Arm plane on a training flight actually crashed into a crowd of boys while they were watching cricket, killing nine of them. This tragedy still lurked in the memory of the place when I was there. At least it did have a communal memory for it to lurk in, but I do wonder if there is anything left of it today, and if so, whether all this that I have been writing about has any place in it? I observe that if a community loses its history, it loses also its future!

By now we had been living a while nearby, and I used to enjoy long conversations with Peter, who managed to survey the disintegration of our dreams with penetration but also humour and charity all round. He had come close to being elected Abbot, but it hadn’t happened. Lucky for him, maybe! He went teaching in an ecumenical theological college in Birmingham. Kevin went off to marry a dear French teaching nun whom he had met at Liverpool, and another school had the benefit of their dedicated service. Sooner or later all our friends in the community left. Peter Tom, Paul and Anselm had an outfit going in Wales for a time, where they tried to finish the education of lads with problems who had been thrown out of mainstream schools. It didn’t last. Anselm reared a family while teaching adults in Liverpool, but I won’t run ahead with his story. Perhaps the very best that may be said for all of us is summed up in the last paragraph of Heer’s great book:-

‘Language is being reborn in the work and suffering of a few silent individuals. Out of their struggle, a handful of words will emerge, which will be Europe’s contribution to the One World which has begun to take shape on all the continents of the earth. A few words will be a great gift. In them a thousand years of experience will be condensed. They will bear the knowledge and conscience of European man to all mankind. They will be the harvest of a millennium in which men have listened to the WORD, tried to understand it and to answer when it has spoken.’
I wish, but it does sound rather grand! Fiona and I, now that Bella and John had joined Luke, had a mighty struggle on our hands, with little room for grand ideas. If I could only make her happy, rear our children well, and lead some kind of authentic life, I felt I would be doing well. I had made a start in re-educating myself after all that heady stuff. Still, one has to hang to a basic orientation, or one will surely come to grief. How about addressing the problem from the other end, bottom up?

The Igreja de São Gião, behind the dunes, has quite a shelter; someone seems to have a dream for it! It is said to be Visigothic, VIIth century, and on the site of a Temple to Neptune.

Still Chancing Away, and FFF XVI, London.

Nazare from beach near the Porto de Abrigo.

It's just as well this is a good place to be, because like most good places, things just doddle along at their own pace. Northerners who push their weight around are not likely to get on well, for all their complaints about lazy, corrupt etc locals. As I see it, they are neither particularly lazy nor corrupt, but they do tend to have a different approach to work and how things should be organised in general. We Europeans would do well to try to understand what is going on!
        At least when it boils down to English v Portuguese attitudes, I think one basic difference is that like most northerners the English more or less came to accept their state as a kind of church, which provides the basis for all legitimacy. Anything which bypasses state structures is therefore labelled as 'corrupt'. The Portuguese on the other hand are inclined to regard the state as more or less a necessary evil, especially when it comes to organising things that they think can be done better on the basis of personal relationships, be they within families or communities.
        Northern Europeans tend to divide all human activity into specialised units, that can all be regulated and taxed by the State. Actually Germany and France seem to be even worse than England in this respect. They call this 'efficiency' or something. Each little speciality has to have its exclusive qualifications. One ends up in a prison of regulations and taxes. As our French Sherkin Islander has it, 'En France ils sont tous en prison!' 
        It's a great pity when this attitude gets to be identified with the EU, because there is no good reason why it should be. We actually need to debunk the State somewhat. Subsidiarity is the answer, always taking decisions at the most basic level possible. However this can only work if the genuinely big decisions are taken well in hand at their appropriate level, in a way that certain well-known democracies have been failing dismally of late. Subsidiarity is the only way the ideal of democracy can be saved, grounded in personal responsibility at the level of communities where people actually know each other, but with effective overall direction. 
        The notion that democracy is achieved by the simple fact of being able to vote for one person or another through a ballot box, persons that one has no real relationship with nor means to hold accountable, is really little better than voodoo.
        Meanwhile this outfit where I am working in Nazare is a 'northerner's' nightmare. It is owned by the State, but is open and minimally regulated. Nonetheless, though somewhat tatty, it is liveable and it works. Well, eventually; we shall see! At least it is full of people 'doing their thing'; and how I enjoy the simple fact that fishermen, yachties and all sorts are dodging along together with very little friction or anxiety as far as I can see.  And they are mostly 'chancers' and Jacks of All Trades I should say!
 

Netters

  

Trawlers

Boarding pots.

Someone's idea of room for the future?

From the Fractal Frontier, XVI, London.

Joy was teaching at the Lycée Française de Londres, and found me some supply teaching there. It was nice to be working in a sane environment, but nonetheless I decided that teaching was not my thing. I then got a job through a Slant/Cambridge friend at the Catholic publishing house, Sheed and Ward. I would mostly sit in a little office correcting proofs, with the odd bit of excitement when it came to discussing a book or writing blurbs. After a couple of months I moved on to a job as a reporter on the Catholic Herald, mostly in its office on Fleet St.

It was now summer, 1969. We (Fiona, Luke and I) had moved into a flat in Southwark, so in dry weather I would walk to work, past Waterloo Station and over the Thames on the walk-way beside the railway bridge, and so on along the Embankment. The gulls on the river put me in mind of the sea, before I plunged through a few more streets laced with diesel fumes, and found my desk in the office, smelling strongly of stale tobacco smoke. It is incredible to think now, how we used to work in a haze of the beastly stuff! Not that I didn't contribute myself; if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! But I did give it up a few years later, when I started to feel the effects of it on my chest.

Somehow or other I got to go to Northern Ireland, a day or two after the British Army was deployed on the streets there. Slant came up trumps again, and I had a contact in 'Free Derry', so I headed there and was duly given an arm-band to pass freely. One young Bernadette Devlin was in full flight, newly elected as an MP, and I got to listen in on the budding 'revolution', even to join in a little in their debates. It was heady stuff, and inspiring in its way. I went on to Belfast and to Protestant areas too, though that was scary. Merely being a young English reporter was suspect, and he certainly would not admit to working for a Catholic paper, not indeed that it was clear to me what they had to fear, on either count!

The truth was that they had a bad conscience. They knew, as well as everyone else who cared to acquaint themselves with the facts, that the Civil Rights marches had been savagely set upon, and the B Specials had been on the rampage with their Saracen armoured cars, shooting up the Catholic areas. I saw bullet marks right beside a school. The barricades had been thrown up in self-defence and terror. When the army was deployed, the troops were initially very welcome there, out of pure relief.

The great British public meanwhile were mainly getting the message that the Army was being deployed to subdue some rioting Republicans, but that it would only be necessary for a few weeks. Being thus misinformed, they did not have to bother with the underlying reality, though even to a green young man such as myself, it was obviously not true that the troops would be home again quickly. You may have thought that the Catholic Herald with its office in Fleet St was ideally placed to correct that view of things. Not so. By the time my copy had been cut, changed round and head-lined, it was unrecognisable, and in no way challenged the establishment narrative.

'What is truth?' asked Pontius Pilate, though the answer was standing right there before him. It is hard to know which is the most alarming: those who maintain that their own outlook, unexamined and unquestioned, in fact constitutes 'the truth', or those who in effect deny that there is any such thing! And yet we more or less expect this of our politicians, and go on voting for them anyway. But perhaps it is the Establishment media, the BBC, the New York or the Irish Times and so on, who are the more pernicious offenders, with all their claims of objectivity. Watch out whenever someone says, you can't say that!

That every perspective has its limits should go without saying, and that does not invalidate it; but let us 'own' it. Once we recognise and acknowledge it, we have the chance to examine it and modify it. Facts, especially physical ones, indeed make good starting points, provided one realises that there are different ways of looking at them. The more complicated the facts, the greater the need for reference points to validate them, for a narrative to interpret them. A society with no reference points, no shared narrative, is hardly a society at all; those who claim to do without them are simply in denial.

I say to the atheists of this world, who say they do not believe in God, well what about Truth, can you believe in that? If they say no, well then I might propose they go sailing the sea. But if they say they can, I shall ask how much do you believe in it? Would you be prepared to give your life for it? A question indeed that not any of us can altogether answer until we have to, but we might aspire to do so, or at least envisage such a possibility. But to die for an abstract concept? A poor fate! Can we really give ourselves to anything less than another person? How about the person who actually claimed to be 'the Truth'? He also claimed he would be with us till the end of time!

If journalism boils down to telling people what they want to hear, or what some powerful interests want them to hear, then the society it is informing is in dire trouble. You may say that this is just the human condition, but it remains true that some societies can take more of reality aboard than others, usually after periods of great suffering. When things have been reasonably ok for a long time, delusions are inclined to build up. It has taken longer than I expected for British society to find itself in serious trouble as a result of its gross delusions, but it is getting there!

Fiona and I both felt we did not want to rear a family in London, and I'm glad we did not have to. Fiona was left a few quid from her Granny that enabled us to buy a cottage in the country. It will be said we were just lucky; but we also remembered my mother's side of that old argument with Dad; if you put your faith in God, he does look after you!

Wooden Boats in Nazare and FFF XV.

An old bit of Anna M's ribs.

They say that what the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over. Well it's been a bit of a revelation to get the engine and fuel tanks out of the poor old Anna M, and thus to see the condition of some of those vital bits of wood that hold her together! But what with my physical presence and some dosh, Alec Lammas here in Nazaré is cranking into action. He's great, but one of those busy and imaginative types that one has to work at to keep them engaged!

Alec at his toils!

At least the conditions here are just about ideal, warm but not too hot, and with a fair amount of cloud cover. The boatyard is an open, easy-going place with a sense of community about it, and the living is easy. The principal activity around us is fixing wooden fishing boats, that seem to come here from all round the coast; I find this very congenial!

Interesting saw!

Sempre Com Deus!

Anna Legge is feeding us both on her vegetarian food with a budget of Eur50 a week, though this does not include the dry goods and booze already in the boat. It will be interesting to see how we get on with it, but so far so good!

From the Fractal Frontier, XV, Liverpool Days.

I was totally untrained and no doubt far from being a competent school-teacher myself, but Peter Harvey also worked at the Archbishop Whiteside School, and with Mrs Musker, a superb and highly experienced teacher who was the head mistress for the girls, fought a losing battle for change. The failure to see a way forward with those deprived lads was much bigger than our own. To have done so, one would have had to be able to envisage a future for them that neither involved ‘qualifications’ nor the dreams of football or rock-star glory. They could hardly all be Beatles!

Fiona and I had grappled with a similar problem at the Simon Community the summer before. It was one thing to get people off the streets and get a bit of reasonable food into them, but what then? We had briefly attempted a more sustainable kind of community, with Rory and a few of the less dysfunctional residents, trying to earn a living together by cleaning windows and what-not. We had learned quite a lot about the problems of addiction, also that we both needed to live in a place that was at least reasonably beautiful! But we did forge some wonderful and enduring relationships too, especially with the monks at St Mary’s, who had mostly been away studying when I had been at Downside.

Beyond our wrestling with the particular heritage of Dom Luke, these times could be said to have been generally defined by the controversy over Pope Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which he reaffirmed the traditional teaching about artificial contraception. It had been first published while I was still at Cambridge, causing great upset in the Catholic chaplaincy there. Now, over a year later, the English version was published. I was with Father Sebastian protesting on the steps of Liverpool Cathedral, and as a ‘Catholic teacher’ on Radio Merseyside. Of course the media had a field day with it.

It was to be several years before I would admit that I had been largely wrong, when after three children Fiona and I found that contraception blighted our sexual relationship, and it also sunk in how right the Pope had been about its effects on society in general. Under the enthusiastic leadership of the West, artificial contraception has been preeminent in the destruction of traditional cultures and values throughout the world. However, there is no going back; we already realised that a truly catholic, that is universal, culture was meanwhile trying to be born, and we were trying to imagine it.

The Popes too have been working on it, as witnessed particularly in John-Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and more accessibly in Francis’ Amoris Laetitia. Even as D.H.Lawrence put it back in the '30s, 'the Popes know more about sex than an army of sex therapists.' The trouble is that the latter, in keeping with most modern culture and its way of compartmentalising reality, do not see much moral difference between the sexual act and, say, enjoying a bottle of fine wine together. The Popes on the other hand see it in its transcendental beauty, as God's gift to a couple within marriage; this is the union of two persons with immortal souls that can only be properly consummated in the love of God, by their being incorporated into Christ. Any lesser union can only be achieved with a loss of integrity. It is perhaps supremely by this realisation that married couples are brought to the knowledge of God.

Father Sebastian maintained that the new deal would have to be ‘flesh-assertive’. It had been too often forgotten that being celibate does not absolve one from the necessity of doing something with one's own sexuality. This however calls for a more acute actualisation of its transcendent possibilities, different to that of married people. How Sebastian was wrestling with it may be seen in the book that he wrote around this time, if my memory serves, that was called ‘No Exit’. Towards the end of his life he came out about his own homosexual proclivities, which I'm afraid complicated the situation even more for him.

Some of us meanwhile were fumbling around with projects to acquire a place in the country where we could further the ambition of developing a way of life outside the conditions of the ‘rat-race’. I came home one day and found a gang of the local lasses watching Fiona making a maternity dress. She was getting big, and soon the lads would be shouting up at our flat "Did the baby come yet?" We were sorry we could not do more for them! We thought of starting a community to help inner city kids, especially for those Scottie Road lads. The baby came, a son, and we called him Luke. There’s nothing quite like having a child for concentrating the mind! Fiona and I visited a large country house and grounds with Ken Hosie from the adventure playground and his new wife Angela, when Luke was ten days old. Some of the Downside ones were also interested, but the relationship with the mother house would have needed to be sorted out before that was going anywhere!

Our minds were also turning towards subsistence living, along with alternative and home education. I got a job on a building site while we tried to find a way ahead. I figured that the two basic necessities of life are shelter and food, and the more one can learn about them, the better. Along with that of the St Mary’s ones and the Hosies, we enjoyed the support of my brother-in-law Martin’s family over in Birkenhead. By no means all of the Irish immigrants to Merseyside had ended up in hopeless situations!

Martin’s parents had had little in the line of education or employment opportunities, intelligent though they were. Martin senior had had to spend years as a ticket inspector on the buses, but he was steady and good-humoured, and he and Mary had forged a warm family life. With the help of the Christian Brothers the children had thrived, and Martin junior went on to university, where he met my sister Joy, and a career as a geologist. We however weren't getting anywhere and became the 'rats leaving the sinking ship', again in Sebastian's words. We eventually went down to stay with Joy and Martin in Croydon, much appreciating their warm support, while I went looking for a job in London.

Sebastian I should say had been a huge influence and a very good friend to us. He was shortly to go off to embark on a career as a university chaplain in Boston, USA. He reckoned I would do better to go looking for a career in America, but I have to say that I'm glad I did not take him up on that one! He retired back to Downside and died there a couple of years ago, R.I.P.. The other four Downside monks at St Mary's all eventually left that monastery, all except Peter to get married; but you shall be hearing more of them!