Diary

25 April 2009

Susan Hill opens her diary

Sighing at yet more eco doom-mongering, I sat in the shepherd’s hut making a list — Things That Have Improved. In my postwar childhood we visited relatives in industrial Sheffield, where people died at 50 of lung diseases. As a London undergraduate in 1960 I breathed the foul, sulphurous air of the last pea-soupers and got chest infections every winter. Those pollutions have gone, as have pavements filthy with dog dirt, and infant brain damage caused by leaded petrol. Many farmers are restoring hedgerows, councils stopped spraying verges, so wildflowers are back, and people are fined so much for stealing birds’ eggs that few now bother. I bet there’s more. Do cheer up.

On the other hand... I have been a lifelong Anglican. I love the Church of England deeply — its music, prayer book, buildings, and its unique ability to be a broad church, catering to many different shades of belief and tastes in liturgy within the same biblical, Protestant framework. I am no liberal, nor any evangelical either, yet I have always felt accommodated within that frame, so I feel as well qualified as any to complain now. Why do the present leaders not speak out — not about organisational trivia, politics or eco-lunacy, but about evil? Why are they so mealy-mouthed about the daily wickednesses perpetrated in our midst? Why do none thunder aloud that abusing little children is wrong, cruelty to vulnerable old people is wrong, torturing animals is wrong? Not politically incorrect, not inappropriate: simply always and everywhere wrong, wicked, evil and sinful. There now. I’ve said it even if they won’t.