CHARTERHOUSE CHRONICLE BY GLENYS ROBERTS

The wise words of the Monsignor
IN TODAY'S YOUTH culture It is not fashionable to take much notice of the elderly. Yet if one could bottle their experiences, think what wisdom we would learn.
In this spirit, I have just spent three years working with 93-year-old Mgr Alfred Gilbey, putting together first his Commonplace Book, then a companion volume of his life's work, We Believe, for publication by my company Libri Mundi.
Our association was not without Irony. I first met Alfred Gilbey in the 1960s when I was an undergraduate at Girton College and he was about to resign as chaplain to the Catholic student of Cambridge university over the admission of women to the chaplaincy.
He has never wavered from his traditionalist views, both religious and social. I, in common with the rest of the libertine generation, have questioned just about everything and now I was curios to know whether we had lost more than we had gained.
At first we met weekly in one of the small visitor's rooms of Farm Street Church in Mayfair, where he says Mass in the House chapel on the first Friday of each month. He was always early for our appointments, waiting patiently, eyes closed in prayer, often bringing me little presents a catechism, a prayer book, a rosary, "My Job is to give you peace of mind" he said.
I doubted that he could, or that, in an era hungry for sensations, I would know what to do with it. I reckoned without his lightness of touch, so different from the thunder and retribution of my chapel childhood. Gilbey had acquired a seductive logic from his own classical education with the Tesults at Beaumont near Windsor. He had memorised long passages of wit, history and reflection on the human condition going back to Charles I's time and he put them at my disposal with
humour and relish. Those who discourage children from learning by heart today might reconsider if they could see the beatific smile that comes over this old man's face as he effortlessly recalls the poetry and prose which has comforted him over the years.
It did not take long for me to want to make a collection of these soothing quotes and so our meetings transferred to the Travellers' Club in Pall Mall where he lives, in order to have access to his books. Now we could look up chapter and verse by a roaring fire with a plate of anchovy toast on our knees. He was giving me the privileged oneto-one tuition, borne of personal experience, which was going out of style at our ancient universities even by the time I got there.
His teaching methods were kindness itself dinner in the club, lunch overlooking the river, a trip to his country home near Henley-onThames to see his own personal leather-bound library. There he knew exactly where each volume was and where each quote was oh the page. He copied out all the details for me on little cards in black ink and copperplate handwriting.
I soon discovered Mgr Gilbey was a stickler for accuracy and a creature of habits mostly learned during his grand country house upbringing, (he is a member of the Gilbey gin family). He was never pedantic, however, and I could never anticipate how he would react. He could be compassionate and constructive. He could be stubborn and even skittish. When my beloved Persian cat died he took me to dinner to cheer me up and brought along a poem to put on his grave. I hadn't expected this svmnathv for an animallover from a Catholic who still enjoys his autumn beagling expeditions to Northumberland.
Mgr Gilbey proved full of surprises. He once said he did not even like to drown
spiders in the bath because he felt such pity for them. And he told me to be proud of being a woman, just as his Spanish mother had been. He said Spanish women, unlike English women, thrust out their chests and advertised their femininity to the world. That was the same night he stood frail, bowed and umbrella-less in the pouring rain to hail a taxi for me and told me we would never dine together again if I didn't stay in the dry while he acted as a proper escort should. It was an alarming insight into the gallantry women expected from men before we abolished gender roles. Mgr Gilbey prizes individuality to the point of eccentricity so I doubt whether he would have been politically correct whichever era he had been born into.
As a writer I learned to value his appreciation of individual written style and his ability to teach it and write it himself.
It is difficult not to be envious of the clarity which makes We Believe, his simple explanation of faith, such a joy to read.
I came to realise this verbal elegance was the produce of a mind which knows exactly what it wants to say and that today's writing is invariably less accom plished because we have lost the confidence that comes from ordered thoughts. I was glimpsing the consolations of peace of mind.
If ever I had thought such peace would be a dull thing, Mgr Gilbey showed it was possible to have it and still enjoy life to the full. He always says that the first line of defense against any problem is a good meal and a glass of wine.
No wonder it is so difficult to get a date in his diary less than two months in advance. This year he is going to the United States for the first time, and hoping to make his first ever television appearance on Mother Angelica's coast-to-coast Catholic station, Eternal Word TV.
In the United States Mother Angelica is a byword for traditional Catholic views Just as Mgr Gilbey is here. Even so there won't be much that is familiar on the other side of the Atlantic to a man born in the era of the horse and cart. His on-going courage was his most important lesson for me. Mgr Gllbey thinks it less remarkable than fortunate and says it can only spring from a basis in complete faith.
The Commonplace Book of Monsignor AN Gilbey and We Believe, published by libriMundilBellew available at bookshops or telephone 081 673 5611.