Dear God
Jeffrey Bernard When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Donald Coggan, made his Call to the Nation some eight months ago it went by unheard as far as I was concerned. I expect Archbishops to make Calls to their Nations, since that's what they're in business for. If I did read about it then it didn't register. But I've got the message now. It's a fairly old-hat message which asked us to Nil our socks up. A long time ago, the Duke of Edinburgh called on the Nation to pull its finger out—a revolting phrase made even more revolting coming from a Royal Duke—but now, at last, I can see the sense of it. We were being asked to pull our fingers out in order to have them available for the sock-lifting to come. A shoulder to the grindstone here and there, remembering to leave no stone ttnturned, would no doubt put the Nation back on its feet. Once there, we would, I suppose, be able to relax for another fifty years and put our fingers back where they so obviously belong.
Now what really gets me about these sorts of message, and at best I prefer messages to come in bottles, is not so much the content but the impertinence of the sender. Did it occur to the Duke that the working classes should pull their fingers out while he was playing a chukka? What exactly had the Archbishop of Canterbury been doing during the weeks that led up to his message that we should put God first, others next and self last ? I don't know. I don't know what Archbishops do but I imagine that, apart from firing canons, attending garden parties and anointing very posh babies, they must lead very cushy lives from where the water must be nice and warm. Well, I'd like to come in but I can't swim. Furthermore I have very few socks to pull up and mostly because dayto-day existence scares the hell out of me, my fingers are irretrievably embedded in the anus of my mind.
Of course, any message from a man who's alright-thank-you is bound to have a refer ence to that wonderful old English institution—the family. Again I don't know any thing about Archbishops' families but I imagine they consist mainly of maiden aunts who write comforting wills, dead parents and minor relatives too distant to be troublesome. Had the Archbishop shared my parents not only would he have endured such an appalling shortage of hosiery that it would have been a miracle if he'd made even plain and simple vicar, he would also be too busy sending SOS's and Maydays to God on his own behalf to have time to tell others to pull their socks up, let alone put others first.
Mind you, it's very natural to want to send messages. It's in us all. I have a message I send God every morning after I've pulled my finger out, shaved and made some coffee. Dear God, it runs, for Christ's sake give me something to laugh about today. From time to time some of the messages are received and understood and I find myself giggling hysterically on my way to the deadline, psychiatrist, betting shop and County Court. But where the Archbishop is kidding himself and pulling his own gaitered leg is in thinking that since he had 27,000 replies to his Call to the Nation that his message is sinking in. Addressing a slightly smaller audience recently in a racing column I write for a magazine called Pacemaker and Horseman, I said that I thought that Empery would win the Derby. In reply to this message I received five letters, allof them written on lined note paper, three of them incoherent and one quite flattering.
All I'm saying is that some people just can't help writing letters and that the Archbishop shouldn't be taken in so easily. I would think it a shade of odds on that the majority of those letters that he got were written by people who think that trouble is a despondent souffle or rain on the Queen's birthday. I mean, can you imagine someone in desperate need of spiritual guidance and help asking for writing paper to be smuggled in to their padded cell so as they could write to the Archbishop? Those of us with no socks to pull up were probably in the pub when the message was delivered via the media in the first instance. The 27,000 respondents must have been sitting at home absolutely aching with pens poised to write a letter.
But again and again my mind goes back to the Archbishop's references to family matters. 'The best way to cut at the roots of a healthy society is to undermine the family,' he said. And he continued: 'So many yOung people who get into trouble with the law come from broken homes.' Too true; and yet so many people who get into trouble of any sort come from just homes, never mind broken ones. And some come from homes that perhaps should have been broken up in the first place. Take an interlude during my own sockless voyage through life.
Four years ago I participated in group therapy sessions in a funny farm in Hanwell. I went to the first meeting not knowing what toexpect but I came out of it, having listened to half a dozen tales of woe, firmly convinced that had the members of that group shot their parents as soon as they were old enough to hold a gun, then they wouldn't have been there. But the Archbishop, God bless his socks, like well-meaners and do-gooders, has over-simplified it all. Happy homes and a 'good day's work for a fair day's pay' is a lovely message, but somehow I'd prefer it to have come from the milkman or the barber than from someone sitting as pretty as the Archbishop of Canterbury. At one point he said, 'A bit of hardship hurts none of us.' Well, quite,right, but it hurts a lot less when you're sitting in Lambeth Palace and of course the reality released by the extraction of the digit is of a far richer quality at Buckingham Palace. From where I'm sitting it's time to send another message. Dear God, it's your round.
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