Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

The rector of St Biscop's was a sandy-haired man called Peter Reece who strode about his parish without a jacket and with what looked like bicycle clips on his shirt-sleeves, so that with these and his dog-collar and his way of walking — leaning forwards with his arms held close to his sides — it was as if he were in harness and pulling a great weight. Sometimes he would stop and look back as if the weight had slipped from him and gone rolling down a hill. He seemed to be wondering — It is my fault if people have to suffer? to die?

His parish was High Anglican; his church had a ceiling which was painted blue with golden stars; beneath it there were niches from which dapper saints looked down. Peter Reece lived on his own in the large rectory; some of the young men who came to work for him looked somewhat like the dapper saints. He lived in an attic at the top of the house and on the first floor were dormitories where the young men slept and on the ground floor were rooms where unemployed men and schoolchildren could be given free meals. Between the rectory and the church there was a piece of waste ground where there had previously been the parish hut and a tennis court; it was here that there was being built the new Recreational Hall. In this there were to be games — table tennis and snooker and whist and ludo — classes in woodwork and pottery, and lectures on current affairs in the evenings.

Peter Reece had got help from local builders to provide him with

materials and there was a rich widow in the town who gave him money for expenses. But he did not get much help in this work from the unemployed themselves: they seemed to feel that they might undermine their case for what they were entitled to. So Peter Reece had asked for volunteers from Cambridge where he had recently served as an assistant priest. He then worried that his volunteers might be seen as dispensers of charity: there was a certain amount in the Bible about the virtue in the dispensing of charity, but who benefited from this virtue seemed to remain obscure.

Groups of men in cloth caps and mufflers would stand at some distance from the half-built Recreational Hall and watch us working. We thus became somewhat self-conscious in our work. I would think — Perhaps virtue resides in the embarrassment of those who are charitable? Then — What would be really charitable, of course, for the people who are watching us working, would be if we could arrange for the building to fall down.

It was difficult to make much contact with the men in cloth caps. We would try: but the more we tried, of course, the more unacceptable we became as people who were seen as doling out charity.

My first job was to transport by wheelbarrow loads of bricks to the building site from where they had been dumped by a lorry. Children would watch me: I would sometimes manage to give them a ride in the wheelbarrow. Then I got the job of manhandling bricks up to the level where two men were constructing a wall standing on planks between trestles. I thought — So here, again, might it not cheer up the watching children and the men standing on street corners if we embarked on one of those slapstick routines that play such a part in pantomimes: clowns knocking each other over with planks swinging on shoulders; builders toppling off ladders and falling head first into buckets. And after a time we might have managed to provide better recreation than that which could be provided by a hall.

Then I got the job myself of laying bricks on the top level of the wall. I had not done such work before. I thought — Ah I will not think now that the wall should fall down!

I stood on a plank on the scaffolding and took some cement on my trowel from the bucket that had been handed up to me and I flicked the cement on to the bricks that were already there and the cement seemed to go everywhere; it was like birdshit, like pollen: I thought — I am doing something that could be called building a

wall? Bits, however, here and there seemed to stay in place; indeed like seeds, like pollen. I shaped the cement that had stayed on the wall and placed the new brick on top; I dropped a dab of cement in the crack and tapped at the new brick: I thought — Of course it is when you stop thinking, that something like building a wall just happens. Then there was the business of the plumbline: you dangled a piece of string with a lump of lead on the end; it went down into the depth to get the wall upright — so this was gravity! After a time the wall did seem to be building itself. I thought — Well most things living, growing, happen by themselves: you do not notice gravity?

— Gravity is people doing what they are supposed to do?

After a time, when the walls did not fall down, the groups of men who had been watching us drifted away.

I sometimes talked with Peter Reece in the evenings. We would sit in the church, which was the place where we were most likely to be alone. We would say together the service of Compline with its strange, beautiful words — 'Brethren be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour' — and we would talk beneath the images of dapper saints looking down.

I said 'But what is this resentment that stops people helping not just those who would help them but even themselves? It is the sort of death-wish that is talked about by Freudians such as my mother?'

Peter Reece said 'Have you thought about the parable of the Good Samaritan?'

I said'No.'

Peter Reece said 'People think that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about the obligation for us to help our neighbours who are in trouble, but it is not only that!'

I said 'What is it then?'

Peter Reece said 'Just before Christ told this parable he had been saying that people should love their neighbours and someone had asked him "Who is my neighbour?" It was in answer to this question that Christ told the parable. And at the end he asked the questioner "So who was a neighbour to him who was in trouble?" And the answer was of course "The Good Samaritan." So the point of the parable is that we should love people who help us, not that we should love people who are in trouble. People have not seen this because they have thought — Surely it is easy to love people who help us! But it is not! It is not! It is very difficult to love people who are good to us: it is easier to imagine we are loving people we can

condescend to. Perhaps it is easier still to feel at home with people who do us harm: at least they are not condescending! A burden is put on people we help: of course they feel envy and resentment! But perhaps easiest of all, yes, would be for the whole human race to be packed up.'

I said 'You mean, people choose to depend on people whose interest it is to harm them?'

Peter Reece said 'Oh I am not saying that one should not go on trying to help!'

I said 'You think that the Recreational Hall might miraculously fall down?'

Peter Reece laughed and said 'Oh I don't think they'll try to do away with us!'

There was a new radical political party that had sprung up in 1931, a local branch of which had established itself in the town. Its spokesman came to hold meetings on an open space in front of the half-built Recreational Hall. He would carry a portable platform like a prayer-desk on his back and set it up: I thought — But, of course, people pay attention to politicians because they are like clowns: they are always chucking about, and getting stuck in, buckets of cement.

This was at the time when the Labour Government of 1929-31 found itself sinking in the swamps of capitalist society: a bank in Austria had 'failed'; there was what was called a run on the pound. It was felt that the Gold Standard was something that had desperately to be clung to, like a banner floating in the waves. These events, words, were like dragons in children's fairy stories: but there, in fact, were the groups of men on street corners. I thought — We are all under the spell of dragons in the mind? The speaker from the new political party would set up his portable platform like that of a conjurer on the open space in front of the Recreational Hall.