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!