Returning to Iwerne Minster

I'm going to return to Clayesmore one more time - the A350 south from Shaftesbury, taking in those villages which almost sound like a great lost West Indies bowling attack, Compton Abbas*, Fontmell Magna, Sutton Waldron, then Iwerne Minster (bypassing the lesser known hamlets of Curtly Ambrose, Sheldon Cottrell and Ridley Jacobs).

*suppose that one’s more like a England-Pakistan trophy, eh, cricket fans.

A coach turning right, arriving at Clayesmore School, for the first time. The sights, the first time. The faces, the first time. For me, it’s been thirty years. That was the month Gorbachev was ousted.

Saw a fair few of the same faces last Wednesday, at Basil Moss’s memorial, in suits and ties, not singlets and questionable shorts.

Back in 1991, Basil’s was one of the first faces I saw, though as I recall, that August day, it was John Beastall’s turn to do the initial greeting and dormitory assignment.

The madness I’d entered! The interruptions! The disrespect!

On Wednesday, there were a lot of us with a slightly dazed expression saying “this is so weird”. 18 months of seeing the same 1 or 2 recognisable faces and no others every day, then suddenly 500 changed but recognisable faces, all at once.

 An inevitable consequence of the limitations of time and the conventions of adulthood is that we could all only talk to so many people and - in a way that didn’t necessarily happen on the house parties - people seemed to speak most to the people they knew well, their contemporaries and those they’d kept in touch with all the way through.

There were plenty of people I did talk to, so many others I didn’t but wished I had, even briefly.

I was struck, though, by the strange intimacy, altered but not destroyed. People, older people often, I hadn’t seen for the best part of a quarter of a century, almost entirely strangers now, except there remains … something … You, I remember a talk you gave where you could hear a pin drop, you, I remember a left-foot volley you struck, you, I remember a thoughtful word you offered at just the right time, you I remember when you had to pretend to be a bat in some preposterous late-night game and no one in the room could stop crying with laughter for five minutes.

Younger boys would hold older boys in a certain kind of disguised awe, awe perhaps at the example they were shown, at the kindness they were shown, one generation to the next, an example that begins with Bas, Tub and Gordon (or even further back, I suppose) and lives on.

On Wednesday, something a few us agreed upon was the simple fact that “it’s impossible to explain”. Even when we try, explaining the house parties to someone who wasn’t there just summons the ghost of a trace of a pale imitation of what they felt like at the time.

Best I can do, in terms of the memories it summons, is comparing it to something I hear in the music of Nick Drake – something in the mix of innocence and wisdom, in the still, safe, bucolic Englishness of it. There’s a 1985 Nick Drake compilation called ‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’, the title coming from William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ which begins …

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

That title is cited in a beautiful essay on Drake by Ian MacDonald called ‘Exiled from Heaven: The Unheard Message of Nick Drake’ in which the author describes the quasi-pantheistic vision within Drake’s songs.

Rereading sections of the essay, as I haven’t done for years, I’m struck by this sentence:

“Summer is Drake’s symbol of Blakeian innocence – an idyll of heaven on earth prior to meeting the world of experience.

Remind you of anything?

My favourite Nick Drake song is called ‘From the Morning’ which ends with the line “go play the game that you learnt from the morning” which is clearly an exhortation to play podex, if it’s anything …

Anyway, there was indeed something pantheistic in the way many of the CU officers who influenced me most described the sensation of faith on earth – God/heaven was something we might experience anywhere, anyhow.

Heaven … in a wild flower, in a sunset, in a kind word, in a moment of silence, in a conversation of shared confession, in a trumpet’s last post, in a perfectly played practical joke, in a boy pretending to be a bat.

I was struck, during the memorial service on Wednesday, by the natural emphasis on Basil’s faith, and how this was as close to faith as I’ve been in decades. Not in some revelatory way, just in the acceptance of what it was to Bas and so many other people with whom I was celebrating his life with.

For many years, I’ve rather lived by a line in a Rilo Kiley song which goes “the absence of God will give you comfort”. As with many non-believers, it’s not just that you do not believe in God, it’s that that fact is a strange source of strength to you. You feel it gives you a foot forward.

Thinking of Basil on Wednesday, without going so far as to renounce my apostasy, I felt the line between belief and unbelief disappear. I remembered what faith was and how profoundly and beautifully it could manifest itself in those summers.

The world was far away. Not out of sight, but far away. One thing I remembered is how news stories would kind of creep into the week. We weren’t watching TV or checking our phones. There’d be the odd radio, of course there were the papers. So, like I say, that first summer of 1991, I associate with the fall of the USSR, summers of 92 and 93 the abuse allegations against Woody Allen and then Michael Jackson, Easter 1994 was the death of Kurt Cobain. A backdrop of inescapable “reality”, yet we were in our own state of manic peace.

I’ve been thinking about the house parties a lot lately. I expect a lot of people have. For most of us, they’re long gone. We can recherche all we like, but we’ll never retrouve le temps perdu. Sometimes I’ll drink a cup of tea that tastes like Clayesmore tea, sometimes if I hear the word “concentration”, I’ll mutter “feel the rhythm, feel the rhythm”, sometimes I’ll, if castigating myself, call myself “McHoggy”, the nickname I was given in just about my first ever house party football match, never to shake off.

It remains. It’s impossible to explain. The words we use … fellowship, friendship, fun … in the end, love.

There’s another song I’m rather fond of, by Joanna Newsom, called ‘Time, as a Symptom’ which goes

Love is not a symptom of time, time is just a symptom of love

which, when I think about it all, sums it up pretty nicely.

And to finish, a couple of memories of Basil I've carried recently. Firstly, when Stephen and I were at Bas's house preparing for the 1996 Summer House Party and I sat on and broke Basil's glasses. I'm not saying being completely laidback about a clumsy teenager breaking your glass is the ultimate sign of a saintly temperament, but, still, I don't know many others who'd have responded with such equanimity.

The other is a more universal, yet indelible, memory - Basil playing trumpet on the bow of a boat on the Broads. I think, as I went on the Boat Trip a year late as I needed to go to university when my year group went, I'd been told that this was something I was going to see. It was a low, rainy evening, I remember the reeds, how they seemed to spread the sound. I was listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley, so in my head Bas was playing something like 'Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye' or 'Hallelujah', though, of course he wasn't ...

Basil knew how to choreograph our memories, of course. There was so much that was design, so much that might have felt like routine, but never did. Every second felt like a moment.