Absolute Truths (2 page)

Our younger son Michael had commented during the Christmas
of 1964: ‘The prayer-group’s Mum doing her own thing,’ but our
other son, Charley, had said with his customary lack of tact: ‘Cyni
cal types don’t usually become mystical — I hope she’s not going
nuts.’ I gave this remark the robust dismissal it deserved, but it
did underline to me how uncharacteristic this new deep interest
in prayer was. I also had to admit to myself that although Charley
had been tactless in describing Lyle as cynical, he had not been
incorrect. ‘I always believe the worst,’ Lyle would say, ‘because the
worst is usually true’ – a philosophy which was repugnant to me,
but no matter how often I was tempted to criticise this attitude,
I always remembered her past and abstained. A disastrous love
affair in the 1930s had left her emotionally scarred. In the circum
stances I felt it was a wonder she had any faith left at all.

And now, having disclosed the disastrous love affair which Lyle
had endured, I must disclose just how far we were from being a
conventional ecclesiastical family. Lyle had been pregnant at the
time of our marriage, and our elder son was not, biologically, my
son at all.

I hate to speak of this skeleton in the cupboard, but as I am
engaged in painting a picture of my career, marriage and family
life in order to set the scene for
1965, I
can hardly leave a large
central section of the canvas unpainted. If I did, the events of 1965
would be to a large extent incomprehensible.

So let me now turn, with great reluctance, to the skeleton.

We had a code-name for this lover who had nearly destroyed
Lyle. It was Samson, a man ruined by his involvement with the
wrong woman. I had chosen this sobriquet in a rush triggered by
my loathing of the entire subject and had only afterwards reflected
that the choice automatically cast Lyle
as
Delilah, a lady who has
never received a good press. However, when I had voiced my
misgivings Lyle had said bleakly: ‘And what right have I to receive
a good press?’ – a question which had taken me back to the harrow
ing early days of our marriage when she had been recovering from
the most destructive aspects of the affair.

Lyle was my second wife. I had been married for three years in
my twenties to a pleasant, innocent girl called Jane whom now
adays I could recall with only the smallest twinge of anguish. We
had been fond of each other but unsuited, and our difficulties had
been unresolved at the time of her death in a car crash. Fortunately
I had managed to come to terms with this tragedy before I jour
neyed again to the altar in 1937, but although I realised Lyle was
curious to know more about her predecessor I felt no desire to
pour forth a torrent of information. Perhaps it was fortunate that
back in 1937 Lyle was far too bound up with her own unhappy
past to spare much time to speculate about mine.

Lyle’s affair with Samson had been conducted with fanatical
secrecy because he had been not only a married man but a distin
guished married man. In fact – and I hate to admit this but I do
need to explain why he was so vulnerable to scandal – he was a
clergyman. Of course clerical failures have always existed and of
course one must do one’s Christian best to be charitable to those
who break the rules, let the side down and drag the Church
through the mud, but I have to confess that Samson reduced my
stock of Christian charity to an all-time low. I knew I had to forgive
him for the damage he had inflicted on Lyle, but unfortunately
forgiveness cannot be turned on like a supply of hot water from
a well-stoked boiler, and this particular act of forgiveness had
remained frozen in the pipes of my mind for some time.

It was not until I returned from the war that I managed to
forgive him. At least I assumed I had forgiven him because I
realised I had reached the point where I was seldom troubled by
his memory. By that time he was not merely tucked away behind
a pseudonym, categorised theologically as a sinner who had to be
forgiven and thereby rendered
as
harmless as an exhibit in a
museum; he was also dead, a fact which meant the affair with Lyle could never be resurrected. Occasionally his name – his real name
– came up in ecclesiastical circles, but not too often, and as the
1940s drew to a close I realised I had consigned him to the com
partment in my mind which housed other obsolete images from
the previous decade: Edward VIII abdicating the throne, Jack
Buchanan singing, Harold Larwood bowling and Shirley Temple
dancing. The point about these people,
as
I told my spiritual direc
tor, was that I could think of them without pain; therefore, I
reasoned, if I had relegated Samson to this harmless group, I must
on some deep psychological level have forgiven him. The hallmark
of forgiveness is that it enables the forgiver to live painlessly with the forgiven.

Certainly by
1965
I was satisfied that I had not only forgiven
Samson but managed to convert his malign memory into a benign
force in my ministry. Indeed it was arguable that my reputation
as a bishop tough on sexual sin was the direct result of being
obliged to pick up the pieces after a catastrophic adulterous liaison.
The 1960s might have been the age of the permissive society, but
thanks to my encounter with Samson at Starbridge in 1937 I was
going to preach against immorality until I dropped dead or my
tongue fell out. After all I had endured, nursing Lyle back to a
normal life, no one could have expected
me
to endorse promiscuity
— but no one still alive knew now what I had endured in the early
days of my marriage, no one except Lyle herself and my spiritual
director, Jon Darrow.

I had had no trouble forgiving Lyle herself for this affair which
had already run into difficulties by the time I met her. It is easy
to feel compassion for someone one loves, particularly when that
someone is emotionally wrecked and verging on the suicidal. What
1 did find hard to endure was the fact that after we were married she could not love me as much as I loved her. This gradual reali
sation that she was still far more bound up with Samson than she
was willing to admit became so hard for me to bear that I was
more than willing to escape from my marriage once the war came.
Naturally I told everyone that I was volunteering to be an army
chaplain because I wanted to have a hand in Hitler’s defeat — and
this was no lie — but the whole truth was rather less palatable.
Nowadays, I dare say, I would have wound up in the divorce
court. So much for the permissive society! Young people refuse to acknowledge that there can be rewards for enduring the dark
days of a marriage; happiness is always supposed to be instan
taneous and any deferral is regarded as intolerable. Was there ever
such a flight from reality? No wonder the young resort to drugs
to ease their disorientation! They have never been taught to face
reality and endure it — or in other words, they have never been
taught how to survive. The permissive society is a phantom utopia
which promises perfect freedom and yet has all its adherents in
chains on Death Row.

The mention of chains reminds me of the three years I spent as a prisoner of war. That experience certainly taught me some lessons
about how to survive adversity, and when I returned home in 1945 I found the rewards of my long endurance were about to
begin. Samson was dead, Lyle was at last ready to be devoted to me
and a new era in my marriage had dawned. With relief I prepared to
live happily ever after, but did I? No.

I had had a tough time as a prisoner and I returned home with
my health damaged. I did manage to reconsummate the marriage,
but our efforts to produce another baby failed and tests revealed
my poor health was to blame, a diagnosis which did nothing for either my marriage or my self-esteem. Now it was Lyle who endured, Lyle who battled on, Lyle who was not loved as she should have been. She was saved from despair by the doctors’
belief that I would make a full recovery, but I languished, suffering
a reaction from my long ordeal and reduced to apathy by the well-known syndrome of survivor’s guilt. Finally an old friend of
mine, a doctor called Alan Romaine, took me aside and said: ‘You
will get better, Charles, but you’ve got to work at recovery — it’s
no good just sitting back and waiting for it to happen.’ He gave
me a diet-sheet, listing all the unrationed, nutritious foods I could
eat, and he dragooned me into taking up golf again, but I think
I was eventually cured not so much by exercise and good nutrition
as by his care and compassion.

Did Lyle and I then have our much-wanted third child and live
happily ever after? No. Lyle was by this time approaching the menopause and our daughter continued to exist only in our imaginations. Lyle became increasingly upset. I became increasingly upset. Meanwhile the two boys were big enough to be perpetually fighting, yelling and smashing everything in sight. The marriage limped on.

The reward for our endurance of this apparently endless ordeal
finally arrived when Michael followed Charley to prep school and
Lyle and I found ourselves on our own for two-thirds of the year.
It was then that the terrible truth dawned: we were happiest as a
childless couple.

I was so shocked by this revelation, contrary as it was to all the
modern Christian thinking on family life, that for a long while I
found myself unable to speak of it, even to Lyle, but eventually I
forced myself to discuss the matter with my spiritual director.

Jon reminded me that family life had not always been a Christian ideal. He also suggested that my duty was to be myself, Charles Ashworth, not some ecclesiastical robot who mindlessly toed the fashionable Church line on domestic matters.

I felt obliged to say: ‘But I can hardly preach on the joys of
being a childless couple!’

‘
You could preach on the heroism of those who feel called to
bring up other people’s children.’

I denied being a hero, but when Jon answered: ‘You are to
Charley,’ I was comforted. Charley’s idolising of me ranked along
side Lyle’s devotion as my reward for all I had had to endure in
the early years of marriage. Moreover this hero-worship by my
adopted son went a long way towards compensating me for the
difficulties I experienced with my real son, Michael.

And now, having exposed the less palatable side of my marriage,
I must nerve myself to describe the
effect on my sons
of the skeleton
in the family closet. I need to explain why
and
how they became
the young men they were at that time in February 1965, when we
were all steaming forward towards the abyss.

Of course I thought of Charley as my son. Of course I did.
I had married Lyle in full knowledge of the fact that he already
existed as a foetus, and I had accepted full responsibility for
him. I had brought him up. I had made him what he was. He
was mine.

Yet he was not mine. He was unlike me both physically and
temperamentally. I understood early on in his life why many adopt
ing parents go to immense trouble to find a child who bears some
chance resemblance to them. They need to forget there are no
shared genes. A benign forgetfulness makes life easier, particularly
when the child has been fathered by ‘one’s wife’s former lover.
Even after I believed Samson to be forgiven, living harmlessly in
the nostalgia drawer of my memory alongside Edward VIII, Jack
Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple, I could have
done without the daily reminders of that past trauma, but I taught
myself to overlook Charley’s resemblance to Samson and see
instead only his resemblance to Lyle.

The bright side of Charley’s inheritance lay in the fact that he possessed Samson’s first-class brain. This was a great delight to
me, particularly when Charley became old enough to study theology, and it made us far more compatible than we had been during
his childhood when his volatile temperament had persistently
grated on my nerves.

It had grated on Lyle’s
nerves
too. Lyle was not naturally gifted
at motherhood, and although she loved the boys she found it difficult to manage them when they were young. This lack of
m
anagement meant the boys became hard work for anyone deter
mined to become a conscientious parent – but I have no wish to
blame Lyle for this state of affairs; after all, life was hard for her during the war, particularly during those years when I was a pris
oner, and no doubt she was not alone in finding it difficult to be
the sole parent of a family. If I appear to criticise her it
is
only
because I need to explain why, when I returned home after the
war, I soon discovered that parenthood was no picnic. Probably one of the reasons why we both became so keen to celebrate the new beginning of our marriage by producing a daughter was the
belief – almost certainly misguided – that a little girl would be all sweetness and light, a compensation for the barbarity of our sons.

Another fact which exacerbated our complex family situation
was that Lyle was ill-at-ease with Charley. No doubt all manner
of guilty feelings were at work below the surface of her mind, but
the result was that she tended to escape from this unsatisfactory
relationship by idolising Michael. Charley resented this behaviour
and to prevent him being hurt I found myself paying him special
a
ttention. This in turn upset Michael, who became abnormally
demanding. Again, I have no wish to blame Lyle for triggering
these emotional disorders; she could not help feeling guilty about
Samson and muddled about Charley, but nonetheless the situation
was one which even the most gifted of fathers would have found challenging.

The final fact which aggravated our troubles was no one’s fault
at all and can only be attributed to the lottery of genetics. Michael resembled me physically but his intellect was dissimilar to mine,
and the older he grew the more incomprehensible he became to
me. It was not that he was stupid. He was just as clever as Lyle, but as he grew older we found we had nothing in common but a fondness for cricket and rugger. I minded this more than I should
have done, and when he embarked on a phase, common among
the sons of clergymen, of rejecting religion, I minded fiercely.
Meanwhile nimble-witted, intellectually stimulating, devoutly
religious Charley was ever ready to compensate me for Michael’s
shortcomings. Was it surprising that I welcomed this develop
ment? No. But Michael became jealous. He began to misbehave,
partly to grab my attention and partly to pay me back for favouring
the cuckoo in the nest. Michael thought he should come first. I
greatly regretted that he knew Charley was only his half-brother,
but once Charley had been told about Samson it had proved
impossible to keep Michael in ignorance.

I knew all adoption agencies recommended that an adopted
child should be told the truth at an early age, but I could never
bring myself to tell Charley. I had convinced myself that the truth,
an example of extreme clerical failure,
was
too unedifying to be
divulged to a child, but I knew that eventually I would have to
speak out and I knew exactly when that moment would come.
Samson had left Charley his library, the gift to take effect on
Charley’s eighteenth birthday. Samson’s widow was still alive, so
Charley did not inherit the money until later, but the books were
in storage, waiting to be claimed. Possibly I could have explained away this legacy as the generous gesture of a childless old man,
but there was a letter. I knew there was a letter because Samson’s
solicitor had spoken of it; he was keeping it in his firm’s safe for
presentation along with the storage papers. Lyle said I had to get
hold of the letter and give it to Charley myself. The solicitor hesi
tated, but after all, we were a clerical couple who could be trusted
to behave properly. The letter arrived.

‘
Steam it open,’ said Lyle, confounding his expectations.

We were at Cambridge at the time. It was 1956, the year before
I was offered the Starbridge bishopric, and I was still the Lyttelton Professor of Divinity. Charley was away at school but due home
on a weekend exeat in order to celebrate his birthday. We were
breakfasting in the kitchen when the letter arrived. I remember
feeling sick at the sight of Samson’s writing on the envelope, and
this reaction startled me. A communication from Edward VIII,
Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood or Shirley Temple would never
have induced feelings of nausea.

Meanwhile Lyle had refilled the kettle and was boiling some
more water for the steaming operation.

I did manage to say strongly: ‘It’s quite unthinkable that I should
steam open this letter,’ but Lyle just said: ‘If you won’t I will,’ and removed the letter from my hands. I was then told that after all I
had done for Charley I had a right to know the contents, and
somehow I found myself unable to argue convincingly to the con
trary. Nausea is not conducive to skilled debate. Neither is fear, and
at that point I was very afraid that my relationship with Charley –
that just reward for my past suffering – would be damaged beyond
repair by this potentially devastating assault from the past.

Lyle read the letter and wept.

I said: ‘it’s quite unthinkable that I should read a single word
of it.’ But I did. I read one word. And another. And after that I
gave up trying to put the letter down. As I read I automatically
moved closer to the sink in case I was overcome with the need to
vomit.

‘
It’s all about how wonderful you are,’ said Lyle, unable to find
a handkerchief and snuffling into a tea-towel.

‘How very embarrassing.’ This traditional public-school
response to any situation which flouted the British tradition of
emotional understatement was utterly inadequate but no other
phrase sprang to mind at such an agonising moment. The grave,
simple, dignified sentences skimmed past my eyes and streamed through my defences so that in the end I was incapable of uttering
word. I could only think: this is a very great letter from a very
Christian man. But I had no idea what to make of this thought.
I could not cope with it. Vilely upset I reached the signature at the bottom of the last page, dropped the letter on the draining-
board and waited by the sink for the vomiting to commence, but
nothing happened.

‘
Well, you don’t have to worry, do you?’ I heard Lyle say at last.
‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

I suddenly realised that this was true. Weak with relief I picked
up the letter and read it again. Samson had made no paternal
claims. My role in Charley’s life was affirmed, not undermined.
The writer assumed all responsibility for the past tragedy and said
he quite accepted that he had been unfit to play any part in
Charley’s upbringing, but he still hoped that Charley would accept
the books and later the money
as a gift.
They came with no obliga
tion to respect the donor. The writer realised he had no right to
demand any benign response. He wanted above all to stress how
immensely grateful and happy he was that Charley should have
been brought up by .. .

I stopped reading, folding the letter carefully and put it back in
the envelope. I did not want his praise. I did not want him offering Charley the kind of selfless love which expected nothing in return.
And above all else I did not want him making my wife cry and
reminding us both unbearably of the past.

‘
Very nice,’ I said. ‘Very sporting of him not to upset the apple-
cart.’ The dreadful middle-class banalities sounded hideously false
but at least they were safe. The next moment I said: ‘He’s got no business coming back like this. He should stay locked up in the
1930s where he belongs.’ That was not safe at all. That was a most
dangerous thing to say, indicative of some convoluted state which could never be allowed to see the light of day, but Lyle was coming
to my rescue, Lyle was saying: ‘We’ll lock him up again. Once all this is over we’ll put him back in the 1930s where he belongs.’

And that
was
that.

Or was it?