An international conference of twelve thousand Mormons at Belle Vue,

Manchester, at the weekend was, I suppose, a striking tribute to the missionary zeal of this American cult. Meeting them on their home ground in Salt Lake City I found them kindly and hospitable people, and their Temple impressive if a little bizarre for my taste. It is when they start crusading over here and building, at a rate of two a month, their churches complete with electrically-operated fonts and basketball annexes that I start to get a bit uneasy.

All American

It is so obviously an all-American product, a growth out of one of those revivalist outbursts which periodically grips the States. It is so un-British. Their collective welfare programme is a blessing over in Utah but totally redundant here; their ten per cent levy on all income is admirable on Main Street but unappealing in the unemployment areas in Britain where they do their recruiting; their homegrown, quasi-biblical plagiarism (the Exodus across America, the tablets of gold revealed in New York State) makes some sense across the Atlantic, but is sheer nonsense in Scunthorpe or Shepherd's Bush.

Selling too hard

The single-mindedness of the eighteen year-old missionaries they send over here on two year tours of duty is quite chilling. Four years ago I spent a day with two of them on their hunting-ground in Dagenham. Oblivious to the miserable weather they knocked on every door in one area with the precision of a police investigation. They obtained their first ' entry ' quite early in the morning at the house of an anxious young couple. It being a Monday morning I wondered why the husband was at home, and in the course of the hard-sell (or in spite of it) I discovered. It turned out that their young baby had been injured in a car crash and was in hospital some miles away. The car was out of action and they hadn't got the price of the train fare. I waited for the boys to offer them a lift, but all they got were incomprehensible words of comfort from the appropriate part of the Book of Mormon.

The missionaries weren't being callous — it just didn't occur to them, until I suggested it on their behalf. They had been mechanically trained to preach, to demolish objections, to look smart and smiling. But their responses to real situations were mechanical, too, and I'll bet they didn't make a conversion there.

Tongue in cheek

Whatever else you might expect at a gathering of ecologists, you'd be forgiven for not expecting a tall lady in black wearing a live iron-grey anteater, which one of my colleagues encountered' on Monday evening. No doubt the object of the exercise was to discover, ecologically speaking, what the relationship of the Great Anteater of the South American tropical rain forests is to the environment of an English dinner-party. Research reveals that it winds itself tightly around a lady's thigh and waits patiently to get back to its electric blanket and supper of Complan.

Style of Strix

As Sir Rupert Hart Davies points out in our Letters pages this week, the late Peter Fleming among his many sporting and other achievements had a long and distinguished association with the Spectator. A former editor of this paper, lain Hamilton, tells of one encounter he had with Peter Fleming in the days when he was writing his Strix column. Fleming had dropped his copy in one morning and mentioned he had to go on to the West End for a lunch date. Hamilton, who also had an appointment there, asked if Fleming had his car and if so could he have a lift "Certainly," came the reply, "I've got it parked just outside." And indeed, there it was : the most gigantic Rolls Royce shooting brake. Stunned by the sheer magnitude of the vehicle, lain Hamilton inquired meekly whether it wasn't just a bit impracticable in London. "Not at all," Fleming explained. "You can get a stag in the back."

Case history

Quite by chance I found myself one evening last week involved in, or rather witnessing, one of those minor medical dramas which really do happen outside the wards of Dr Kildare's hospital. The doctor with whom I was dining was called away from his first course by a phone-call from his kidney-transplant unit. He came back from the phone to report, with understandable excitement, that a transplant was imminent that night. A kidney was being flown from Glasgow to Heathrow at that very moment and, he added triumphantly, its tissue-type was a 'four out of four match' with that of a kidney belonging to one of the patients at the hospital. Quite what that meant was too complicated to fully comprehend, let alone report to you, but the implication was that this gave the highest possible chance of the new kidney not being rejected, about an eighty per cent chance. A dozen phone calls later, surgeons, anaesthetists, police had been alerted, an operating theatre set aside, and my doctor friend was awaiting the final summons.

Rejected

When the phone at last rang, it was not quite what he had been expecting. It wasn't just the tissue that had been rejected but the whole operation. The patient in question would have none of it and was adamant about not being operated on in the face of all kinds of persuasion. He knew it could be five years or more before another chance like this came up, and that if the graft did not take he could always go back on to his kidney-machine. But no, he would not budge. My first, unworthy reaction was one of pique that so much nervous tension and effort had been wasted because of an irrational fear, but my friend graphically and succintly described the kind of mental torture that patient must have been going through even at that minute, and I understood I would never have made a doctor in a million years.

Time of year

Whatever happened to the silly season, Time magazine was asking in its editorial this week. This year, it points out, the warm season has brought out Mr Nixon's dollar crisis, the Peking thaw, lunar disasters and successes. Summer 1970 saw the Middle East skyjackings, 1969 the first moon landing, 1968 the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Chicago riots. But I reckon it's a sure sign of the silly season when you have to devote a whole column to ask where it went.

MWJ