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Thursday 20 November 2008

And Another Thing

When the corridors of power echo to the strains of ‘Nil nisi bunkum’

In 1956 I attended one for that delightful and shadowy figure Colonel Aylmer Vallance, who taught me how to write leaders. This, too, was at Golders Green, and again made notable by a ludicrous incident. The needle on the gramophone which behind the scenes was playing ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ by Bach, got stuck, and it seemed an unconscionable time before someone located the wretched machine, and the endless repetitions ceased. Kingsley Martin, who had got on badly with Aylmer, was most distressed. Being a superstitious atheist, and an egotist, he imagined that the mishap was somehow aimed at him, by Aylmer’s spirit, in revenge for slights and snubs, and in his uneasiness he emitted what we all called his ‘dying camel noise’. Then, in 1960, came Nye Bevan’s cremation, a non- denominational mishmash conducted by a moth-eaten old cleric of uncertain sectarian bias. As the somnolent affair drew to its weary close, he suddenly announced, in a surprisingly loud voice: ‘Let us Pray!’ There was a moment of superb confusion. The atheists remained grimly seated. The Catholics knelt. The Protestants slumped into that half-seated, half-kneeling posture I call ‘the heretic’s crouch’. And the Jews stood up and put their hats on. How Nye would have laughed, as I did. But his relict, Jenny Lee, was not amused.

Since those days I have attended innumerable such occasions, not counting religious ones. In some I have been a participant to the extent of giving the memorial address. This can be a daunting test, not so much of one’s oratory as of one’s morale. When my old friend Hugh Fraser died I had to speak of him from the main pulpit of Westminster Cathedral, an enormous edifice which makes the Abbey, by comparison, seem tiny, and is difficult to heat adequately, the architect, John Francis Bentley, not being much interested in such matters since he was really a designer of church furniture and sacred vessels. The day I spoke, England was in the grip of an intense frost — it was a period when the fashionable climate worry was not Global Warming but the New Ice Age. I was not wearing an overcoat, thinking it would be awkward, just a black three-piece suit; and I trembled with cold. There came into my head a passage in one of the letters of Sydney Smith, Canon of St Paul’s, in which he described how cold it was preaching beneath its dome so that fragments of his homily froze instantly as he uttered them, drifting upwards, ‘only to unfreeze in more genial weather, several weeks later, and surprise the congregation to hear pious exhortations and dogmatic assertions issuing from remote corners of the vaulting’.

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