The Rector vanishes
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
The resignation last Sunday of Dagobert Frilling, the fourteen year old pop-dancer, front his position as 'Rector' of the Daily Telegraph Memorial Home for Retired Male Nymphomaniacs has caused widespread com- ment in the press. The post has in the past been considered to be an honorary one, the duties of the 'Rector' being chiefly to titillate the inmates and to bring a hint of 'show-biz' glamour into their darkening lives, but Mr Frilling appears to have been so incensed by a request that cocoa and evening prayers should replace the customary devotional 'striptease' after dinner by the Warden, ninety-three year old Miss Sadie Tamper, that he felt unable to continue in his present capacity. The sermon, which is printed in full below, was delivered from an eighteenth century Correction Desk, originally in the possession of the Marchioness de Sade. Mr Frilling was dressed in a navel-length Bonnie and Clyde-style mini-costume, his chubby pink face and innocent blue eyes were framed in a poke bonnet of sanforised tulle, and spoke in a curious drawl, emphasising his point from time to time with his now famous 'bumps' and 'jiggles.'
'King Solomon and King David'—so we read in the Old Testament—'led merry, merry lives; with hundreds and hundreds of concubines, and dozens and dozens of wives: but when old age came on them, then both of them got the qualms —King Solomon wrote the Proverbs, and King David wrote the Psalms.' There can be few spectacles so ludicrous as that of a body of elderly lechers such as yourselves, suddenly aware of the chill fingers of death upon their shoulders, hastily withdrawing their hands from the frilly petticoats of some struggling victim in order to clasp them in fervent prayer. Like the debauched patrons of some seedy exhibition, cowering back against the wall and protesting their innocence on the arrival of the police, you arouse among right-thinking teen- agers feelings not so much of cynical amuse- ment as of pity and contempt.
It will doubtless be argued that just as a pathetic hankering for prayers and cocoa represents a fashionable perversity in the face of those liberal ideas cherished by the youth of this country, so too it represents the mercifully unfashionable views of every senile reactionary in the land. It may be so. But as I look round this ancient and well-appointed withdrawing room, as I see you dribbling and blinking in your bathchairs, tenderly balancing one enormous swaddled foot on the stool in front of you, or mouthing incoherent obscenities as you grope feebly for your companion's knee,
I cannot believe that you, who still have the gleam of lascivious interest in your rheumy eyes, are prepared to be numbered with the impotent hypocrites of Surbiton and Tunbridge Wells, with the disciples of Billy Graham, or
with Moral Rearmament.
And yet, and yet. Not only is the demand for cocoa, the traditional tipple of the mindless toddler down the ages, it is also for prayers. Remember Thy Creator in the daze of thy dotage. How tragic, and yet how hilarious, to see the satiated guests at the feast, incapable of further excess themselves and intolerant of the self-gratification of others, dyspeptically reach- ing for the drugs cupboard and selecting of all things the dusty bottle of ancient opium pro- vided by Mother Church; Mother's Ruin, effective only in dulling the senses, in blurring the jagged outline of death, and in carrying away the addict into a dreamworld of fatuous Byzantine fantasies and humiliating postures of self-abasement.
It is perhaps ironic that the Virgin at whose feet you desire to grovel among a confusion of abandoned crutches and overturned wheelchairs in your precipitate flight from Miss Trumper must inevitably pour over your bowed heads not vials of compassion but pails of cold water. Unfitted to the disciplines of belief, deficient in charity towards those of divergent opinions, and proud in the assertion of your bizarre beliefs, you are doomed as sentimental deists taking refuge- beneath the banner of Christian- ity not only to suffer the buffets of the pagan mob spitting in your face, but also the rejec- tion of the orthodox kicking you in the behind.
It is, I would admit, attractive at first sight to find oneself in this way in the position of prophets and martyrs, denouncing the fleshly failings of Miss Trumper with the fire and passion of a Savanarola at the very moment that you are being assailed like a Saint Sebas- tian with the slings of ridicule and the arrows of physical incapacity. As I survey you now, some asleep, some absent-mindedly squinting in the throes of private and macabre fantasies, I recognise only too clearly the attractions of such glib self-canonisation. Secure beneath the solid investment of a guilt-edged halo, you can afford to look down with contempt on the rest of humanity wrestling blindly in the mire of passion : with salvation's walls surrounded, thou mayest smirk at all thy foes.
Nevertheless, as you pass by us in your cavalcade of motorised invalid carriages, cele- brating this moral triumph, remember that you are men. If this should prove impossible, remember that you were men. Cast aside, I beg of you, the rugs and blankets of senile impo- tence, strengthen your feeble knees, and chase Miss Trumper round the summerhouse. Reject once and for all these seedy appeals for cocoa and religious excess, and devote what failing powers you have to the pursuit and conquest of our lovely lady warden. Ten years ago, when I was four, I may perhaps have shared your penchant for inactivity and idle speculation. I am now fourteen, at the height of my powers, and a passionately keen fornicator. I am also, as you know, a prominent telly personality whose most trivial activities are reported on the front page of The Times, and I would throw the whole weight of such influence as I possess into urging you to join me in the mauve bath- room in a few moments for a session on the trampoline apparatus. After which, bored to distraction as I am by your ghastly slobbering faces and having wasted more than enough time and money on train fares to and from your benighted retreat, I intend to resign.
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