Expelled from an atheist's funeral for improper conduct
Atheists' funerals always pose a problem. Where are we speeding them off to? Oblivion? Annihilation? It's all very well calling them a 'celebration'. But death, whatever else it is, is not an event to be celebrated. I was thinking about all this when I attended the service for Dee Wells in St Bride's. I suppose she was an atheist: anyone who married A.J. Ayer not once but twice must have been (though even Freddy had doubts towards the end, seeing tunnels of death with lights at the apex). Dee was the wittiest woman I ever met, a wisecracker in the pure American tradition of Henry Clay, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. I agree with Chesterton that really funny people always believe in God because they appreciate his gigantic celestial jokes. Anyway, when I get to purgatory. where I fear I am destined to spend a long time, I expect to find her there along with all the other chums who made me laugh — Philip HopeWallace, Lady Pamela Berry, Kingsley Amis, George Gale, etc. I am assuming the custodian angels will allow us to laugh. When Bertie Russell was in jail in 1918 for inciting troops to mutiny, someone gave him a copy of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and he laughed so loudly reading it that a warden poked his head into his cell and said reproachfully, 'Mr Russell, sir, may I remind you that prison is a place of penitence?'
The service for Dee had magnificent music, but I could not hear one word of any of the encomiums save a brief tribute from the ravishing Susan Crosland, who hobbled gallantly to the podium on her crutches, and a superb Dee joke told by her delicious daughter Gully, whom I used to know as Little Miss Naughty when she was a teenager. Gully said that she and her lover, and her mother and her lover, spent a night at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford (changed from my day, evidently). Dee's boyfriend was a handsome Caribbean called Highland Booker, whom I used to tease about not wearing a kilt, evoking glassy stares. until I learned that his Christian name was Hylan. When Dee paid the bill the next morning, she noticed that her room was charged £5 more than her daughter's identical one. Challenged, an embarrassed cashier muttered about differences of nationality, cultural formation and so forth. 'Oh, I see,' said Dee. 'You have to pay more for blacks. But, by God, they're worth it.'
I date the beginning of the modern atheist funeral from the death of H.G. Wells in 1946. I was not present, alas, but Kingsley Martin, who was, told me there was 'an unfortunate mishap'. At the crematorium, Wells in his coffin lay in splendour as the distinguished congregation filed into the chapel — meeting-house? assembly room? place of rest? In those days the mechanism for conveying the coffin out of the chapel on rails and ultimately into the furnace was still primitive. In particular there was no fail-safe device. A ponderous old friend of Wells, possibly Lord Castlerosse, the gossip columnist, possibly Baroness Budberg, Wells's substantial mistress. or perhaps even Kingsley's own 'companion', the enormous Dorothy Woodman, known in our office as 'the Bandung Cow' — one of these, being a little puffed at the walk to the building, leaned for a rest against the pseudo-altar rail and inadvertently pushed the button which set the coffin in motion. To the horror and dismay of all, 'KG.' sped slowly and irresistibly to the flames before the service had even begun, and the entire business had then to be conducted in a personal vacuum, with late arrivals asking, 'Where is he?' Would Wells have laughed? Who can say? His humour was patchy. George Bernard Shaw certainly did, and so did Hilaire Belloc when told the tale. As for the Baroness, she noted that 'HG. always had a fear of premature ejaculation'.
There was another curious incident at the crematorium when Aylmer Valiance had his service. Aylmer, one of the most engaging men I ever met in journalism, and the only one who taught me anything — how to write leaders — was an unfrocked editor of some notoriety. He was in charge of the News Chronicle during its glorious days in the 1930s when, engaged in a bit of athletic dalliance with his scrumptious secretary — on the camp bed he kept in his inner office for catnaps on nights when he saw the last edition to press — he was discovered in flagrante delicto by the snooping Quaker chocolatemongering proprietor, Cadbury. Being a sanctimonious and censorious humbug — jealous, too, I dare say — Cadbury sacked Aylmer, an editor of outstanding ability, 1 on the spot. He justified himself by saying, 'It was not merely the act itself, disgraceful as it was, but the fact that it was performed on company premises, and in company time!' Aylmer later became a colonel in Intelligence, and was serving on the New Statesman when I joined it, dying the next year. How I missed his wit and wisdom! His service was well attended but, again, had not actually begun when a hidden source of music, presumably an old-fashioned gramophone, which had been playing Bach's 'Sheep May Safely Graze', got its needle stuck. Again, panic and horror, particularly as the exact location of the gramophone could not he found and the endless repetition of the same bar about the beastly sheep went on for interminable minutes until an engineer was brought to locate it and turn it off. Kingsley Martin, who had hated and feared Aylmer, kept saying, 'It's a portent!' and let out what we called his dying camel's laugh. No doubt the eventual service was decorous, but the jammed needle was the only bit I remember, It was the same at the service for Aneurin Bevan. He was very kind and dear to Inc. and it has always been on my conscience that the night before he was taken ill I had a fearful argument with him about the Middle East at Howard Samuel's flat in Park Lane. I was at my arrogant worst, and he was rumbustious too. At the crematorium, the packed attendance was extraordinarily various, for Nye had friends in all circles. The muttered service, if you could call it that, was a peculiar mixture of watered-down deism, 'mysterious forces of the universe', empty religiosity and humbug. Suddenly, the presiding parson bellowed in a loud voice, 'Let us pray!' That galvanised those present into instant action, The atheists remained rigidly seated. The Protestants adopted the 'heretics' crouch' and leaned forward, heads on hands, bums on the edge of their pews. The Catholics knelt. The Buddhists made mystic signs, and the Jews stood up and put their hats on. This moment of total confusion displayed in a delicious flash the history of world religion — or the lack of it — and I chortled, out loud, I fear. I was reminded of Charles Lamb's remark: 'Anything awful makes me laugh. I was once nearly expelled from a funeral.' I am afraid it is easier to get expelled from an atheist's funeral than from any other kind.
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