Another voice

Face to face

Auberon Waugh

In a week overshadowed for many by the death of Douglas Woodruff, at eighty, the retirement of Mrs Jane Tarr from the headpersonship of Kingston St Mary Mixed Primary School has caused an almost equivalent amount of dismay in the smaller world of Kingston St Mary primary education which she made her own. Both events, in their separate ways, mark the passing of an era.

Although Mrs Tarr never met Mr Woodruff, and it is too late for her to do so now, the house at Norton Fitzwarren which is revered locally as the birthplace of the great Catholic editor, polymath and wit is only a few miles across the fields from the school where she has ruled for the last twelve years. Throughout that time, Norton Manor was used as an army camp housing junior leaders of the Service Corps, now called the Royal Corps of Transport. With rationalisation, the army has all but disappeared and with it the junior leaders, and nobody knows what will happen to the house. Suggestions have been made for a senior citizens' Holiday Camp and Amenity Area.

Douglas Woodruff was a man of enormous intelligence and insatiable curiosity. No information bored him, nothing shocked him, everything found its place in the huge jigsaw of his mind. It may seen blasphemous to describe his intelligence as Godlike, particularly in someone whose religious belief was absolute and inspired by an entirely genuine humility, but there was something strangely comforting in the knowledge that everything which happened on earth was being recorded somewhere in his kindly, hospitable mind, brooded over, compared to other things which had happened elsewhere at different times and settled into some timeless historical perspective: 'Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled And now a bubble burst, and now a world.'

Part of this process could be observed in his column 'Talking at Random' but it reached its fruition in the main leader column of The Tablet which rolled out week after week for the thirty-one years of his editorship from 1936 to 1967. So steeped was he in history and so relentless in his contemplation of the infinite that he found himself less dismayed than many of his contemporaries by changes in the Church which seemed to them to threaten its claims to unity, holiness, universality and historical continuity. Although by instinct a conservative, and as controller of much of the Catholic press the most influential Catholic layman in England, he never threw himself

into any crusade against the reformers. Perhaps he was right and we less knowledgeable and less reflective mortals were wrong. Be that as it may, he was the only man I ever knew who might have been able to reconcile the Church's history with present developments, especially in its alarming lurch from appeasement of communists to the adoption of many marxist proposals as a new interpretation of the Christian message. Whether from loyalty or simply from exhaustion, he kept his peace. Alarmed at specific excesses, he never fought the general drift or showed much sign of spotting the errors of communal churchmanship, the social gospel and secularisation.

But his determination never to leave the Church was matched by a determination not to let the Church leave him, and perhaps he will make a better job of the second task from his new vantage point: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

'And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.'

The New English Bible translates the last verse thus:

'In a word, there are three things that last forever: faith, hope and love; but the greatest of them all is love.'

Never mind that 'love' is a sloppy translation, meaning many things besides the virtue which St Paul is trying to describe; never mind that hope may abide but it does not endure, and it certainly does not last for ever, only until such time as it is realised; never mind that the phrase 'in a word' is an excellent example of Colemanballs, preceding, as it does, twenty words of explanation. The important thing is that the whole inspiration of the New English Bible — to put it in 'current' English for the 'modern' reader — is wrong and vile, as insulting to the English language and the English reader as it is to the Bible. More than that, it is part of an epidemic of wrongheadedness which, now that Mr Woodruff is dead, seems poised to conquer the world. My father, who was devoted to Douglas despite many acrimonious episodes of which the rights and wrongs are not clear, always maintained hat he was the Christian equivalent of the Wandering Jew, an ageless immortal who turned up in various civilisations in various guises. He it was who opened St Paul's Epistle to the E_phesians, and no doubt composed a dignified reply which has unfortunately been lost . . . If there is any truth in this theory, then his 'death' is more than the loss of a kindly, Wise and good old friend in the tiny communitY of civilised survivors. It is a Spengleriee omen, a sign that the battle for the West hes been well and truly lost. With the retire' ment of Mrs Tarr from her headpersonshiP of Kingston St Mary Primary School, I begin to feel that this may be the case. Last week I was lecturing to three hundred sixth-formers on the Isle of Wight when a member of the audience passed UP a leaflet issued by Transport House under the imprint of the Labour Party's national youth leader, Mr 'Andy' Bevan. It listed various `demands' thought suitable to he, put forward by the National Union d' School Students, one of which was that edu• cation should in future be administered hY `ordinary members of the working class'. At the time I put the leaflet away with approP' rate noises of flushing lavatories, but remembered it when reading of nation-Wide school riots last week in protest against the withdrawal of school lunches by teachers working to rule. Normally one would welcome such riots as a sign that sch000lchildren, at least, are not prepared to be inconvenienced by industrial action. At the time of the last rail go-slow, I urged that travellers should carry a length of rope with them in case it becaMe necessary to hang the train driver. But the was an undercurrent of parental approval in these riots which seemed to stem not from impatience with ordinary labour dispute processes nor even from class conflict or traditional working-class hatred of teachers. It seemed to mark a victory celeb; ration of some sort against the whole idea rn education itself. Needless to say there was no teachers `go-slow' in the last days of Mrs Tarr's rule at Kingston St Mary. A woman of suPer" human energy, enthusiasm and natural generosity, she was always a one-woman denial of the proposition that there is anr thing wrong with our educational systellt; Presiding over a mixed ability class 01 thirty-six pupils, she was somehow able rn impart at least a few of her abundant enthusiasms — for music, for great paiaters of the past, for natural history, for rbe French language and all things French, for, drama — to each and every one of them, well as having the energy to coach the ns°1 backward ones through the three

have no idea of her politics or social bac', ground but she represented the best ot

everything that the WEA ever stood for, tie. hope that was once almost universal Oa' education might hold the key to a haPPter democratic future. Ato

Perhaps I will be thought far ,-,

-fetche claim a link between last week's school rit'as and the English of the New English Bible, or, between the two forms of hope represente; in the careers of Douglas Woodruff an', Jane Tarr. The gloomy fact remains OW Douglas Woodruff and Jane Tarr have retired from the scene; school riots and the New English Bible remain.