Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway

Author:Richard Holloway [Holloway, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857860750
Publisher: Canongate Books

On the train back to Chicago, looking out the window of the elegant Santa Fe Railway car, I was contemplating another departure, making another circle in the windmill of my mind.

Early in 1968, well installed at Union, living with Jean and the girls a block from Broadway in an apartment at 49 Claremont Avenue, with frequent weekend visits to the Kennedys in South Orange in a tough old car Jean’s father had bought for us to make the visits easier, I got a letter from Ken Carey, the Bishop of Edinburgh. He wondered if I’d be interested in becoming Rector of Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh. If so, could I get away for a few days to meet the Vestry, the management committee of the congregation.

I knew Old Saint Paul’s a bit. When I was sixteen, at the beginning of one Easter vacation, travelling overnight with Aeneas Mackintosh – my fellow Scot at Kelham – we got off the train at Waverley at seven in the morning. We had a couple of hours to kill before his train to Inverness and mine to the Vale of Leven. There’s an interesting church up there, he said, pointing to the cliff of buildings that rose outside the station above platform 11. It’s called Old Saint Paul’s, and they should be starting the early mass soon. Want to come? We checked our cases at Left Luggage and made our way out of the Market Street exit and walked under North Bridge into Jeffrey Street. Aeneas challenged me to a race up the steep dirty steps of Carrubber’s Close. He won. Out of breath, we opened a little side door halfway up the close and stepped into the gloomy building. I’d never been in the church before, but I knew it was a homecoming. It was dark. An expectant darkness, a darkness that held something back even as it welcomed me. I saw seven white lights glinting in the distance, but we turned immediately under a small archway, through a dusty curtain, into a little chapel to the left of the side door. The chapel was in darkness, except for the glow of a golden reredos behind the altar, where a server was lighting the candles for mass. We were in the Lady Chapel, which sat a few steps above the nave of the church like a lifeboat strapped to a liner. A tall white-haired priest celebrated the mass. He invited us back to the rectory for breakfast. Lauder House was just along Jeffrey Street. We had porridge in a dining room shadowed by the tenements that crowded against the side of the house. I said little, but Aeneas charmed Father Lockhart and his curates with stories of Kelham eccentrics. It remained a potent memory in which the colours were smoky grey and black, like the platform scene in Brief Encounter.

This was where Ken Carey hoped to establish me on our return from America that autumn. It would mean leaving Gorbals, but the idea of Old Saint Paul’s excited me.

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