Mime without a harpsichord

Buried but not forgotten in an English village
IN Storrington I visited the grave of the editor of the Catholic Herald. I don't mean the present editor, but Donald Attwater who took over in the early 1930s.
People said at the time he was "too learned" to be a good editor of the Herald. He gladly gave way to Michael dc la Bedoyere who reigned for the next 30 years and took us to the verge of Vatican II.
If you asked him what he was, Donald would have to answer "hagiographer" or "hagiologist". Devise a mime not using harps illustrating that for What's-myLine.
During his military service in the Middle East during the First World War, he developed an interest in the oriental churches. Demobbed, he worked with Fr Herbert Thurston Si on the revision of Butler's Lives of the Saints.
His own Penguin Dictionary of Saints (1965) distills a lifetime of study, and includes some "oriental" or Orthodox saints not found in more conventional books.
Poet's patriarch
SO many Catholic intellectuals are buried at Storrington, not far from Bishop Murphy O'Connor's house, in the lee of the South Downs.
The patriarch among them must be Wilfred Meynell, editor of Merrie England, best known as the man who discovered the poet 'Francis Thompson. A confidant of Cardinal Manning, he lived to be 97.
Though he fell three short of his 100, he lived to celebrate the centenary of his wife's birth, a rare accomplishment. Alice Meynell, another poet, was four years older than her husband, and in 1946 there was a mass in Westminster Cathedral to mark her 100th anniversary.
1 learned all this from Barbara Wall, one of Wilfrid's granddaughters. Her own father was killed in the Battle of the Somme when she was about four, so Wilfrid, always known as the "gaffer", became her fatherfigure. One didn't hear people of that generation talking of the advantages of one-parent families.
Barbara's husband, Bernard Wall, is also buried at Storrington. An old boy of Stonyhurst, in 1934 he founded the quarterly review Colessevm (sic — he used a v for a u), a title that expressed his sense of the need for "Latin" order.
Bernard Wall was sometimes thought of as "a man of the left" because, inspired by Dorothy Day, he introduced the Catholic Worker to England. It was edited by Jack Ford, a Manchester docker, and distributed from the Wall's Garrick Street flat. They tried to sell it at meetings in competition with the Daily Worker. Parish priests tended to ban them.
The Spanish Civil War destroyed the illusion that Bernard was really a man of the left. He named his first daughter Gabriel Alcazar in honour of the intrepid defenders of the siege at Toledo.
Colossevm engaged in brisk polemic on the Spanish Civil War with the Dominicans of Blackfriars. You can read all about it in fictionalised form in Bernard Bergonzi's novel, The Roman Persuasion. Gabriel Alcazar Wall became Mrs Bernard Bergonzi, but alas died of cancer at the age of 46.
Bernard Wall wrote many books, mostly about Italy or the Vatican. Thaw at the Vatican was a joint husband and wife book about the second session of the Council. Victor Gollanz, a notorious unbeliever, was somehow persuaded to publish it.
In the end, Bernard turned out
to be more hostile than pro Vatican II. His last book was an autobiography call Headlong into Change. Far from being a boast, this title was an indictment of the post-conciliar church in which "liberals" rushed over the cliff
in imitation of the Gadarene swine.
Breathless
HIS second daughter, Bemardine Wall, was "famous for 15 minutes". She was the only convent-educated witness at the Lady Chatterley trial of 1961.
She told a tabloid paper in that breathless schoolgirl style: "1 felt terribly out of place among all those celebrities but they were awfully kind to me sitting on those benches outside and taking me off to lunch in a pub."
"Was she familiar with the four-letter words used in Lady Chatterley's (,over?" enquired the learned counsel. "Yes," confidently replied the 21 year old Newnham College, Cambridge, graduate. "And where exactly did you learn them?"
The judge ruled that question out of order as irrelevant to the literary merits of the novel. Also irrelevant is the name she works under now, for she is a therapist and prefers that her patients dcn't know much about her past.
While still under the name Bernadine Bishop and only 21, she published a novel called Perspectives which one critic described as "a malicious and deftly organised study in selfdeception," and another, more succinctly, as "this exquisitely spiteful book". It was about editing a little magazine.
Clutching straws FOR a time I thought we had a nouvelle theologienne in our midst. She made the best contribution to a 1967 book called The God I Want. The other luminaries included the late Andrew Boyle and Anthony Burgess, who did a dialogue between Anthony, his Manchester Christian self, and Burgess, his unregenerate self.
BB's conclusion is still worth recalling. "The God I want is the
God who enables us to love and lets us be, lets us be ourselves. The God I want is unknown to me, yet certain; as unknown and as certain as death." Not a bad motto for a therapist.
All this 1 learned from .Barbara Wall herself and her elder sister. Christian is married to Colin Hardy who taught classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has devoted his retirement — in the very house in which Wilfrid Meynell lived — to the study of Dante.
Barbara's first book, And Was Crucified, was published in 1939 when she was 29. It was in a Heinemann collection called "What I Believe". It has a chapter called "The Crucifixion of the Poor" which takes in a London slum, a big department store and a Jociste rally in Paris. It was her "option for the poor." There's nothing new in liberation theology.
In 1940 Barbara had a regular column in the called Column 7. The most astonishing thing about it today, apart from its unfailing liveliness, is that she was able to write from France during the phoney war and from Rome almost up to Italian entry into the war on June 10, 1940.
In Rome in April she muses about whether Italy will "join in." Signor Mussolini has fallen uncharacteristically silent. She reports: "The key to everything, people will tell you, is Badoglio. At the moment he is duckshooting, so we can breathe freely."
Like everyone else, she clutched at straws of hope. Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, had married Edda Mussolini, the Duce's daughter in 1930 (Barbara was at the wedding). Now, in 1940, the word is that Italy will not go to war against France because "Ciano has a French mistress."
She didn't reveal the name in 1940 in the family paper. But in 1991 I can tell you it was Corinne Luchaire, a celebrated film star. The theory was wrong anyway.
Flattered
GEORGE Bull tells me he is thinking of compiling the Oxford Book of Flattery and is looking for comments on or instances of flattery, secular or clerical, throughout the ages.
I should have replied: "Rack my brains as a might, I cannot think of anyone more suitable to compile a book on flattery than you. No one else has the range, the insight etc ..."
What fool said flattery gets you nowhere?