Much of the recent debate on the Second Vatican Council has centred on whether it constituted a break or a continuation in the 2,000 year tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Conservatives have spoke of a “hermeneutic of continuity”. Those who reject that view have been characterised as advocates of a “hermeneutic of rupture”. But neither of these are very helpful
It is easy to see how this polarisation has arisen. The bishops who assembled in Rome in 1962 tossed aside documents which Curia bureaucrats had prepared. In three years of meetings they produced over a dozen seminal documents which hurled the church into the 20th Century. A bold manifesto for modernisation and renewal called for a new engagement between the church and other faiths, the secular world, and between Pope and bishops, clergy and laity, men and women, rich and poor.
Those who, like Hans Küng, feel those pledges have been comprehensively broken, have called for the 50th anniversary of the Council to be marked by an act of penance or even a funeral service. Those of an ultra-traditionalist mindset – who feel that the world has been allowed to infect the church with a silent apostacy – rejoice at the turning of the tide which is installing a new generation of Conservative bishops, priests concerned with outward piety and parish councils suppressed by clerics reverting to dictatorial mode.
Tides go in and out in church affairs. But though many in the pews feel they have, like followers of the Grand Old Duke of York, been marched pointlessly up and down the hill, the Church has been moved in a trajectory which is probably irreversible.
Consider the following. Religious freedom, described by a previous pontiff as an “absurd and erroneous proposition”, has been endorsed. The ban on Catholics participating in the funerals and weddings of other denominations has gone. So have centuries of Christian teaching which branded the Jews as an accursed race which laid the ground for the Holocaust. The Church has turned to address all men and women of goodwill, believers or not. Protestant baptism has been recognised. The laity have been given new status, as eucharistic ministers administer communion in the hand under both species. And they have been appointed parish co-ordinators, financial managers, tribunal judges, assessors and more.
Follow“I’d make you a sauce butty if I had any bread… and a bit more sauce.”
Lighthearted Intercourse, Octagon Theatre, Bolton
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This is a real theatrical curio. It is the premiere of a play by Bill Naughton – who created the Sixties classics Alfie and Spring and Port Wine. It has been stitched together by the director David Thacker from a dozen drafts and handwritten notes from the papers of the writer who died 10 years back.
The Sixties of Naughton’s heyday now feels like history but in Lighthearted Intercourse it the future. Set in a 1920s modest Bolton terrace, like the one where Naughton grew up, it begins as an engaging piece of social history centred round one of the three million unemployed, Joe, who fruitlessly searches for work each day while his wife Madge scrapes meals together. “I’d make you a sauce butty if I had any bread… and a bit more sauce.”
It projects a warm northern wit from an era before that became clichéd. “I’m what passes for a bit of an intellectual, in Bolton,” says Joe. “A motorway connecting us to Yorkshire? Who wants to be connected to Yorkshire?” quips another character. These were the days when the Tippler closet (an ingenious way of using water from the kitchen sink to flush the outside lavvy) was the height of sophistication.
There’s a panto feel to the humour. Nicholas Shaw, an assuredly jaunty Joe, just has to say local place names to get a laugh from the Bolton audience in a first act which is largely a monologue, counterpointed with some funny and gently sexy scenes of the couple in bed. Fiona Hampton gives Madge an attractive openness.
It feels slight and over-long – as is the gag of the woman whose job it was to knock on the window to wake those lucky enough to have a job. Director Thacker may have been over-indulgent here because she is played, in an off-stage recording, by Maxine Peake, whose first professional production was at the Octagon, with her victim voiced by Peter Kay, who used to work in the theatre’s box office.
But the second act whips up real dramatic tension with a mysterious visitor who knows more about Joe’s future than ought to be possible – stolidly played with nicely under-stated emotion by David Fleeshman. As jealousies emerge to threaten the marriage we begin to care about what happens to the vulnerable young couple. It’s a patchwork of a play, and the stitching shows, but a tenderness and intimacy wells up which becomes genuinely touching.
Three stars
Lighthearted Intercourse Bolton Octagon from 4th October – 3rd November.
A candle flickering pale against the dawn
Robin Ironside, Grosvenor Museum, Chester ¤¤¤¤
It’s a family kind of place, the Grosvenor Museum. This being Chester there is a child-friendly section on the Romans. There’s a Victorian Parlour where kids can dress up and play with traditional toys. Upstairs is a gallery of paintings with local connections. But to the side on the first floor is a small room which seems to belong to the eccentric uncle of the family. It is filled with small paintings, in water colours and ink. There elegant etiolated figures lounge in ruined classical landscapes and overgrown gardens. Images overlap and dissolve in dreams which turn to fevered nightmare. They are all exquisitely, obsessively drawn – and deeply odd.
The uncle in question is that of Virginia Ironside, this paper’s agony aunt. Robin Ironside was a painter, curator, writer, theatre designer and one of the most idiosyncratic artists of 20th century Britain. He was an extravagant dandified bohemian character in the style of his 19th century heroes Baudelaire and Berlioz. His was an extraordinary life. Despite his extreme poverty he dressed flamboyantly, surviving on a diet of boiled eggs and a patent cough medicine called Dr Collis Brown’s Cholorodyne which contained opium dissolved in alcohol mixed with tincture of cannabis and chloroform. He also experimented with mescaline and LSD. That addiction to hallucinogenic drugs explains a lot about the fantastical nature of his sensual paintings, all skeletal claws and blank faces, ghostly silvery light, and delicate mauves and pastels.
There is paradox at the heart of his vision. It combines cool classical and rococo settings with romantic sensuality. It mixes wild fantasy with a draughtsmanship so precise he painted using a magnifying glass. It is moody yet intricate, decadent yet fastidious. His Street Violinist at Victoria Station is typical, contrasting the discipline of the Edwardian Baroque architecture with the messy humanity of the street life beneath its central arch. As a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal there is, in the sinuous sexuality of his figures in their restrained settings, a recurring metaphor of passion unexpressed, frustrated and crying out from a desolate interior.
Ironside was hugely eclectic in his influences. He has the visionary imagination of Blake, the precision of the Pre-Raphaelites, the mystery of Goya and the subliminality of Dali. He is not a major figure, though reproductions give no idea of how breathtaking is the fineness of his touch. But he was a candle flickering pale against the dawn.
Four stars
Grosvenor Museum, Chester, 15 September – 6 January 2013
Three ways human beings cope with barbarity – the extraordinary story of Eric Lomax
We tell three stories about how a human being can respond to barbarity. One is the tragedy of revenge. One offers the hope of forgiveness. And one diverts itself with furious activity in an attempt to forget. But the story of Eric Lomax refuses to conform neatly to such templates.
Lomax, who has just died aged 93, was one of thousands of British soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942 and used as slaves to build the 418-mile railway to Burma which included the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai. There he was made to stand at attention for hours in the burning sun and then so savagely beaten there that afterwards there was not a patch of unbruised skin between his shoulders and knees. Nine hundred blows in six hours broke arms and ribs. Water was pumped into his nose and mouth. His screams were heard for miles. At night he was confined to a cage coated in his own excrement.
Somehow he survived. But the torture continued back in Scotland after the war. Haunted by the brutal and sadistic humiliation the Japanese inflicted those who had undergone what amounted, in their eyes, to the shame of surrender, For decades Lomax was tormented by nightmares. Post-traumatic stress led to estrangement from his father and the breakdown of his marriage. The mental scars refused to fade.
Then, on a long train journey, he met a Canadian girl 17 years his junior and began, for the first time, to talk about his wartime experiences, though he still refused to speak about anything of “the descent into hell” which happened after he was taken prisoner. Despite violent mood swings, which plunged him into week-long black silences, she married him. The trauma grew worse after his retirement and he spent the Eighties trying to track down his chief torturer and fantasising about revenge.
But then, some 40 years after the war had ended, his wife contacted at the newly-formed Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and took him on the 600-mile journey to its London offices. There a fellow survivor told him, he heard of a book called Crosses and Tigers written by the man who had been an interpreter to the torturers.
I have always thought that Jimmy Savile was very creepy. And I got in trouble for saying so some years ago. I was upbraided by an esteemed colleague – and fellow Roman Catholic – who described Sir Jimmy, as he had just been dubbed, as “a model Catholic layman”. You could see why. The DJ was a prodigious worker for charities, visited approved schools and children’s homes, and did direct voluntary work as a porter in hospitals in Leeds, Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor. And he did so while retaining a happy-go-lucky cheeky-chappie persona completely in tune with contemporary culture.
It was the persona which was the problem for me. I lived in his hometown, Leeds, for a decade. The suspicion had grown there that behind the image of the garish loveable eccentric “how’s about that, then” tracksuited clown lurked something cold, wilfully evasive, manipulative and even menacing. Yet when I raised my reservations in private conversation I was told I was being uncharitable and allowing taste to interfere with moral judgement.
Well, the tide has turned on Jimmy Savile. A clear pattern has emerged from a series of allegations which suggests that he routinely and habitually sexually abused underage girls. The accusations have come a year after the man’s death, leaving him unable to offer any defence. But, as with the crowds that bayed at the police van carrying the man accused of the murder of five year old April Jones in Machynlleth, society does not need to wait for evidence to convict. Plaques have been defaced, statues taken down, roadsigns removed and Stoke Mandeville is thinking of renaming its Jimmy’s Café. The Sun is campaigning for knighthood of the “paedo star” to be posthumously revoked.
For all my long-standing reservations about Jimmy Savile there is something about this wave of self-righteousness which makes me uneasy. Of course his behaviour needs proper investigation. My concern is over what will be learned from the process.
Eric Lomax as a young man
The words ‘war hero’ conjure up images of derring-do and courage in the field. Eric Lomax showed that bravery can take many forms. As a prisoner of war he was one of thousands of servicemen used as slave labour to build the Burma railway in World War II. He later described the terrible conditions there as a “descent into hell”. Post-traumatic stress plagued him for the rest of his life, along with a feeling that his service and sacrifice, like that of his fellow prisoners, had gone unnoticed. It only grew worse after he retired.
But when, half a century later, he finally came face to face with his principal Japanese tormentor he chose reconciliation not retribution. His act was one of the great testaments to extraordinary capacity of the human spirit for forgiveness. Eric Lomax, who has died aged 93, was a man of grace, modesty and exceptional generosity. Most of us may not capable of what he did but he sets a standard to which our society can aspire.
Why we don’t need permission to bash a burglar
There is nothing a Conservative Party conference likes as well as being told it has permission to bash a burglar. It goes down so much better than being told to hug a hoodie. The new Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Grayling, was therefore on a winner with his announcement that he will change the law to allow householders to use “disproportionate” force against intruders.
There are two problems with this. The first is that the law already says disproportionate force is permissible where a homeowner acts instinctively out of fear for their own safety. It does not matter whether, in the cold light of day, force is unreasonable so long as they thought they were acting reasonably in the heat of the moment. Any new legislation to change the language so that only “grossly disproportionate” force is outlawed will, in practice, amount to the same thing as the existing law.
The other difficulty is that under the new Grayling system the two cases which have so outraged Tory backwoods opinion – that of Tony Martin who fired a gun at a burglar who was running away and Munir Hussain who chased an intruder down the road and beat him with a cricket bat – would remain illegal. The new legislation will therefore change nothing.
What will make a difference is the way judges, prosecutors and police interpret the law. The necessary changes have already been made here. The Crown Prosecution Service updated its guidance on self-defence in May. It made clear that householders can use force if they genuinely believed they were in peril – even if in hindsight they were clearly wrong – and said they do not have to wait to be struck before they defend themselves. Last month the Lord Chief Justice Judge ruled that burgled householders should not be expected to exercise calm cool judgment. And if they legally own a gun burglars should accept they risk being shot.
The problem in the past has been that where intruders have been injured police arrested the householder until the CPS said prosecution was unlikely. It will still be incumbent upon the police to investigate such cases. But the recent signals from both judges and prosecutors should further inhibit the police from making unnecessary arrests. All this is already in place. So Chris Grayling’s new initiative amounts to no more than vacuous populism.
Beatles or Bond – the true legacy of the Sixties?
Philip Larkin reckoned that the Sixties began in 1963, the year that sexual intercourse was invented – too late for him – between the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Beatles’ first LP. But he was wrong. The decade that marked the watershed in 20th century popular culture began on 5th October 1962 – the day half a century ago this week when the first James Bond movie opened and the first Lennon & McCartney single Love Me Do was released.
That was, in the words of The Beatles’ musical svengali George Martin “the day the world changed”. Out went the received pronunciation Britain of the bowler hat and brolly. In came the flat drawling vowels of Liverpool and a hard-edged Scottish burr. Out went Mantovani and Danger Man and in came the raw energy of the Mersey Beat and the daring cocktail of action, sex and arch-eyebrowed amorality of the cinematic 007.
The suave good looks, cruel-mouth and ironic humour of Sean Connery had about them some of the same dangerous sexuality which screaming teenage girls saw in John Lennon. They were totems of a counterculture. The Beatles burned themselves out in less than a decade. But Bond has gone on to become the longest continually-running film series in history. The difference is instructive.
Grant Shapps has only been in the job of Conservative party chairman for a month and yet he will launch his party’s conference next week with an official investigation hanging over him. The Advertising Standards Agency has announced it has launched an inquiry into a get-rich-quick website he founded, which has now been transferred to the name of his wife. The advertising watchdog is inquiring into the authenticity of online testimonials on the site in which, under the pseudonym Michael Green the Tory chairman claimed that customers could make $20,000 in 20 days if they spent $200 buying his software.
Mr Shapps is no stranger to controversy. He has already come in for criticism for using pen names to sell products including a book How To Bounce Back From Recession. It has emerged that he appeared at a Las Vegas business conference as Mr Green. Google is reportedly of the view that the company he co-founded, which is now run by his wife, violates its code of conduct by selling software which the search engine bans for breaking copyright rules. Mr Shapps denies this and says he has had no involvement in the company since 2008.
That is far from all. Computers traced back to his office were found to have edited his Wikipedia entry to remove claims that he had only four O-levels. (He has five). Also excised were references to a 2007 byelection in which he seemingly impersonated Liberal Democrats online in an attempt to discredit his rivals. (He later claimed his account had been hacked). Details were also removed of the identity of mortgage brokers, an estate agent and a commercial property developer after political donations were made to his private office when he was minister for Housing.
Most recently claims were made by Lord Prescott that Mr Shapps was involved in a “cover-up” to smear Labour’s former deputy prime minister after officials in Mr Shapps’ former department made changes to a letter from the government’s most senior civil servant.
Mr Shapps has issued denials on all these accusations of improper conduct. But the gaffes and allegations are now mounting in a way which is politically embarrassing to the Conservative party and the prime minister David Cameron. It all goes to Mr Shapps’ character and opens him, at a time when he ought as chairman to be taking the party on the offensive, to constant jibes about “multiple personalities and questionable business practices”. It all raises questions about his suitability to hold the post to which he has been elevated.
Eric Hobsbawm’s final message to Ed Miliband
The death of one of Britain’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm, provided an ironic counterpoint to the attempt by the Labour leader Ed Miliband, to re-brand himself to the people of Britain at his party’s conference in Manchester this week.
Professor Hobsbawm was a historian in the Marxian tradition, much as Mr Miliband’s father, Ralph, was in the field of political philosophy – though that was not a fact overly-emphasised in the Labour leader’s recollections about his own childhood. Those consisted chiefly of recalling his own comprehensive school education and his birth in the NHS hospital in which his own two sons were also subsequently born. This was Ed as Everyman, rather than the policy wonk son of a Marxist intellectual.
In the glowing encomiums to Eric Hobsbawm much was made of his refusal to disown his Communist identity even after Stalin so cruelly put paid to the idealism with which many Western intellectuals had surrounded the Bolshevik Revolution. Ever the historian he demanded to be understood in his own context – as someone whose political identity was forged in the Nazi era when the Communists seemed on the right side of history.
Mr Miliband, by contrast, has in the past happily played the apologist card for Labour’s record in the Blair/Brown era. His task this week, despite that party political broadcast continuously re-emphasising his comprehensive school background, was to paint himself as common man rather than class warrior.
So it was intriguing to see the economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders in her BBC2 series Masters of Money report a significant comeback in academic and City circles for the analysis which Karl Marx brought to bear on the workings of capitalism. The depth of the present global slump adds credibility to his view that crisis is inherent in the capitalist system.
Black Roses – the Killing of Sophie Lancaster
My Black Rose, her mother called her, in homage to her inky eyeliner, dark dreadlocks and black clothes. Sophie Lancaster was a Goth with upwards of 20 piercings in her face, lip and nose and something different down at the core. Or so she liked to think. And yet despite the dog collar round her neck and her pleasure of being singled out in the mosh pit “by a shooting star of saliva from Marilyn Manson’s lips” – in the words of the poet Simon Armitage – she was in many ways an old fashioned soul.
She was happy reading, writing or painting, quietly at home, in the flat she shared with her boyfriend Rob Maltby. The rest of us would probably never have heard of her had the two of them not been, five years ago now, the victims of a brutal attack in a park in Bacup, Lancashire. The pair were kicked and beaten so badly that ambulance staff could not tell which was the man and which was the woman when they arrived on the scene.
Yet the strength of Armitage’s play Black Roses: The Killing Of Sophie Lancaster, which has been showing at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, is that it is about the gentle vitality of her life as much as the savagery of her death. It is the story of a lifetime’s love between a mother and her child and how, as she grew, that twinkling child met her soulmate, a man who was as “perfectly weird” as she, “with her banshee makeup and hurricane hair”. We get to know her, swiftly but profoundly, through Armitage’s deep shafts of poetic insight, and as a result we feel her loss all the more.
“I stand outside this house of justice, not as Sophie’s mother, but as her voice,” said Sylvia Lancaster when two 15 and 16 year old boys were convicted of murdering Sophie. Simon Armitage has become a voice of a more transcendent kind. And yet there is a massive emotional vortex at the centre of his poetic drama. It whirls around the question of why a gang of binge-drinking teenage yobs would, without the slightest provocation, inflict such ghastly violence on a pair of kindly innocents.
The reluctance of the young to give to charity tells the story of a society moving anti-clockwise
Twice a week I cycle through my local park. Near the middle is an old bandstand. Every time I come to it the old philosophical conundrum of freewill and determinism pops into my over-stimulated mind. Will I negotiate the bandstand by going clockwise or anti-clockwise? My cogitation and calculation is so rapid in my determination to demonstrate that my will is indeed free that I have been known to wobble dangerously with indecision, though I have not, to date, actually fallen off.
This week there was an added fact to my speed philosophy because I was factoring in a new element. This time it was more sociological than theological. What if the determinant factor was cultural?
The news which prompted this musing was the report from the Charities Aid Foundation that the over-60s are now more than twice as likely to give to charity as the under 30s. Charities are worrying about the growth of a “donation deficit” as the oldies die off. Half of all charity incomes now comes from the over 60s. The study offered an interesting potted history of change. It covered four distinct groups: the Inter-War Generation (born between 1925 and 1945); the Baby Boomers (1945-1966); Generation X (1965-1981) and Generation Y (1982-1999).
Those born between the wars grew up in a world in which religion and wartime social solidarity were dominant cohesive forces. Their children, born into ever-rising affluence, developed a more individualist vision in which idealism and altruism went hand-in-hand with a more self-focused vision of life. But both religion and socialism, which offered easily understood ways of talking about our interdependence and responsibilities, have withered.
Previous surveys from the Charities Aid Foundation have shown that religious donors give twice as much as those without a faith. And wealthy people give a smaller percentage of their income to charity than door the less well-off. As any Christian Aid collector will confirm you often raise more money from poorer areas than affluent ones.
