relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.
‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’
‘Well, my theory is …’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.
This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. Anglo-Catholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.
‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.
‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’
There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.
God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.
IV
I must now say something more about my father in order to flesh out this lethal relationship which was developing between us as my psychic career went from bad to worse. This particular path which led to the crisis of 1968 needs to be examined in more detail.
By the time of the Debbie débâcle my father was very old. Born in 1880 he had been sixty-two when I had arrived in the world, and so every year of the 1960s was bringing him closer to his ninetieth birthday. By the time the Christian Aysgarth affair began in the spring of 1968, two years after the mess with Debbie, he was nearly eighty-eight.
Being over eighty was very difficult for my father because he finally had to face up to the fact that he was old. Previously, having excellent health and a strong will, he had avoided this truth by cantering around like a man twenty years his junior, but at eighty he was felled by a prostate operation and although the physical problem was successfully treated the psychological consequences lingered on. Old age now stared him in the face. My father was livid, then deeply depressed, then livid all over again. With his strong will unimpaired and his brain untouched by senility he regarded his body’s enfeeblement as nothing short of traitorous. Looking back I can see he was secretly frightened – not of death, which in his faith he could face with courage, but of dying without dignity. My father was a proud man. He always used to say that his pride was his biggest weakness. The thought of his body decaying in a humiliating fashion while his mind remained sharp enough to suffer every indignity to the full was intolerable to him.
I could sense all these secret fears and hidden rages, but I was too young then to understand the full dimensions of his psychological ordeal. All I could do was make renewed efforts to keep him happy. I had already realised that nothing should be allowed to worry him and impair his health; in consequence as he had wrapped his psyche around mine, keeping the Dark at bay, I had wrapped my psyche around his, keeping the Light alive, and gradually a sinister interlocking had taken place until we were like Siamese twins joined at the psyche. No wonder I now felt I would be unable to survive without him.
I suspected my mother had always feared my father and I might wind up in a muddle, and that this dread had stimulated her robust attitude to our psychic gifts. She was quite prepared to believe they existed, but she was determined that they should never be allowed to triumph over her resolute common sense. Early in their marriage my father had embarked on a short but disastrous ministry of healing, and I think this experience had made her nervous about any exercise of the ‘glamorous powers’, those gifts from God which were so susceptible to corruption.
She had been my father’s second wife, his first marriage having begun and ended before he had embarked on his career as a Fordite monk. This first marriage had been unsatisfactory, but my father’s big love affair with the monastic life had lasted for seventeen years before he had been called back into the world at the age of sixty. My father had been at first ambivalent about this return, but since the call had been judged genuine by his superior there had been no alternative but to obey it. Two muddled years had followed during which he had married my mother. She had eventually sorted him out, and before he had embarked on a successful career in theological education they had produced a son, Gerald, who had died at birth. I had arrived on the scene seventeen months later.
I could never make up my mind whether little Gerald would have been a bigger bore alive than he was dead, but I had no doubt that I resented the effect his memory had on my parents. They were shockingly sentimental about him. There was a grave in the churchyard which had to be visited. His birthday was never forgotten. As a child I thought this behaviour was all quite idiotic and I was very rude about it to Nanny. I liked being an only child. It was bad enough having to share my father with the two children of his first marriage, both of whom were well over thirty years my senior and lived many miles away. To share him with a sibling close to me in age and on the spot would have been intolerable.
Fortunately my parents had no more children after I was born, and by 1945 my father was running the Starbridge Theological College. To cope with the huge influx of ex-servicemen who felt called to train for the priesthood once the war was over, he opened an extension of the College at our manor house in Starrington Magna. I can clearly remember the students – the ordinands, as I soon learnt to call them – pounding across the lawn on the way to our private chapel in the woods. I became their mascot. Some of them even gave me their sweet ration. No wonder I wound up spoilt rotten by the time I was five.
However, all good things come to an end, even life as a pampered mascot. In 1950 when I was seven – eight at Christmas – the last of the exceptionally large intakes of theological students achieved ordination, the College extension at our home was closed and my father, now seventy, retired from his position as Principal. My mother had looked forward to this day because she had cherished the belief that he would then sink into a quiet life and she would see more of him, but she soon discovered that he was becoming busier than ever. As a monk he had won a reputation as a spiritual director, and now that he had fulfilled his call from God to steer the College through the difficult post-war years, spiritual direction reclaimed him full-time. Hordes of people turned up for consultations. He led retreats, wrote copious letters, made himself constantly available to those seeking counsel. My mother and I became somewhat overlooked but we never doubted that he loved us. The problem was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day.
Then in 1957 when I was fourteen, my mother suddenly died. My father was almost killed by guilt. For a long time he could barely speak. His longest silence was: ‘I didn’t make enough time for her,’ and I knew, reading his mind, that in his grief and remorse he wanted to die too.
