classical ministry of deliverance which involves the rite of exorcism, but unfortunately – yet again – the need for it exists whether I happen to believe in it or not. Over the years I have come to the reluctant conclusion that a little holy water sprinkled by my representative in a ‘haunted’ place can do no harm and often produces a more peaceful state of mind in those who have complained about the disturbance to their local clergyman. (Naturally one never lets the story get to the press.) On the exorcism of people I have more negative views, but luckily the demand is so rare that my natural distaste has seldom been put to the test. Psychiatric treatment for those tormented is obviously the best solution, but honesty compels me to admit there are cases where the practitioners of orthodox medicine have no effect whereas a skilled exorcist, backed up by a prayerful Christian community, can achieve a healing. Jon regarded this as such an obvious truth that it hardly needed stating, and became very irritated with me when I tried to work out explanations involving theories of multiple personality and the power of hypnosis.
He was twenty years older than I was, so in that February of 1965 he was three months short of his eighty-fifth birthday. His health was excellent, and he lived alone in a small cottage which had been built for him after his second wife’s death. The cottage stood in the grounds of her manor house at Starrington Magna. Both the house and the grounds were now run by a small Anglican community, founded by Jon to preserve the inheritance for his son Nicholas, the only surviving child of the marriage.
I find it hard to give a thumbnail sketch of someone so unusual as Nicholas, so I shall simply say that he was a psychic like his father and a very odd young man indeed. He seemed popular with his contemporaries, who were apparently fascinated by his oddness, but he never had a special friend. He told me once that he did not need a special friend because he had his father. Lyle thought that he and Jon were much too bound up together and that it was a great burden for a young man to have such an ancient parent. She also said that Jon had made the greatest possible mistake by embarking on parenthood again when he was over sixty, but Lyle was always rather tart about Jon. I suspect it was because he was one of the few men who had always found her wholly resistible.
Jon had not been altogether successful in his attempts to forge partnerships with women. His first marriage, made when he was a very young priest, had been a failure but his wife’s death had released him from it, and as soon as the two children of the marriage were grown up he had abandoned his work as a prison chaplain in order to embark on a career as a monk.
When he left the Order seventeen years later, he had quickly – much too quickly, we all thought – plunged into matrimony again; I can see now how difficult life must have been for him as he tried to adjust to the world, and how the loss of his brethren’s support would have created a disorientating emotional vacuum. His new wife, Anne, was a sensible, down-to-earth, competent woman, very ‘county’, who ran her family estate and always behaved as if she had never heard of the word ‘psychic’ and never wanted to. She was twenty-eight years Jon’s junior and had extremely good legs. Jon adored her; she adored him; Lyle prophesied darkly that it would all end in tears. Much irritated I told her not to be such a cynic, but as time passed I realised that the marriage was indeed under stress, chiefly because Jon had only the haziest idea of how to live as a married man. He told me once that his parents had lived separate lives beneath the same roof, and I realised then that he had grown up in a home where marriage had been seen not as an integrated partnership but as an association between two people who had never become interdependent.
Pursuing his career at the Theological College after the war, he began to follow a policy of cramming far too many commitments into every twenty-four hours. His wife often complained and he promised to reform, but he never did. In fact after his retirement from the College in 1950 he became busier than ever as a spiritual director. Why did Jon overwork like this? Lyle said there was something wrong with the marriage and that he was using his work as an escape. I merely thought he found his work so rewarding that he had a hard time tearing himself away from it, but eventually I did begin to wonder if Lyle’s diagnosis was more accurate than mine. Elderly men who have young wives should expect to encounter problems as the years advance, and at last I wondered if Jon was frightened of impotence; I asked myself whether his immersion in his work, where he was confident his powers would not let him down, was his way of blotting out his fear of a physical decline.
Then in 1957, when his wife was only forty-nine, she suddenly died and he had to face up to the difficult truths which he had tried so hard to evade. Overnight he changed into a recluse. Probably a profound guilt that he had neglected his wife mingled with an equally profound guilt that he was glad to return to the celibate life, and the two produced intolerable feelings of shame and failure. Probably too one could say that he associated this failure with his life in the world and could only come to terms with the former by rejecting the latter. Certainly from a spiritual standpoint one could theorise that God, taking advantage of that compulsion to atone for past mistakes, had then given Jon his final call: to be a hermit, devoting his life to prayer.
It is one of the many unattractive features of the twentieth century that anyone who wishes to lead a solitary life is generally considered to be either wholly deranged or at the very least psychologically disabled. Christians, I regret to say, are not exempt from holding this fashionable view, although anyone who has studied the history of the Church knows there is a strong eremitical tradition in Christianity. The great question to be asked when confronted by a would-be hermit is this: is the withdrawal from society made so that he can be self-centred, freely indulging his neuroses without benefit to anyone else, or is it made so that he can become God-centred, using the drive to solitude as a means of serving others with fruitful spiritual results? Jon eventually became God-centred, continuing his spiritual direction by letter, still counselling a few of his oldest friends and constantly praying for the welfare of others, but for some months after Anne’s death I thought he was stuck fast in a self-centred groove. Indeed I was seriously worried about his mental health when his guilt-induced depression showed no sign of lifting, and no one was more relieved than I was when he began to recover his spiritual equilibrium.
No doubt he owed a considerable debt during this time to his friends among the Fordite monks who provided strong support and took special care of young Nicholas, then a pupil at the monks’ public school, Starwater Abbey. I tried to supplement this care as well as I could and we often had Nicholas to stay, but he was like a puppy pining for his master and he always seemed happiest when he was on his way home. Charley and Michael were very good, treating him as a younger brother, and I think he liked them in his cool, detached way, but I noticed that he never made any marked effort to maintain their friendship.
At that time in 1965 Jon had been separated from his beloved Nicholas for longer than they had ever been separated before, and the result was that the master was now pining for the puppy. Having come down from Cambridge with a degree in divinity, Nicholas had decided to do two years of voluntary work in Africa before proceeding to theological college to train for the priesthood. He had now been away for five months. Cool, laconic little letters would arrive regularly at the Manor, and Jon would pore over every one of them in a fever of quite unnecessary anxiety. Often I was shown the letters and asked for an opinion, but no matter how hard I tried I was unable to allay this somewhat neurotic paternal concern. Once I did say gently: ‘He is twenty-two. I think you must give him a little leeway now to make mistakes and learn from them,’ but poor old Jon, my former superhuman hero, remained beset with the problems arising not only from parenthood at an advanced age but from a recluse’s over-fearful view of the outside world.
When I arrived at Starrington Manor that night I drove past the main entrance and followed the boundary of the grounds for another mile until I reached a door set in the wall. This was the quickest way to Jon’s cottage, much quicker than following the path through the grounds from the main house, and Lyle’s call earlier to the Community had ensured that the door was unlocked when I arrived. Jon had no telephone at his cottage, not even a private line which would connect him to the Manor and those who looked after him.
Having parked the car on the
