City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IHAD always heard that Fulham Palace was rather a dull house. 1 suppose this was because I had always heard about it from clergymen and they rarely like Georgian. But 1 saw it for myself last week and can give the lie to any derogatory rumours. It is very hard tb find behind blocks of flats and bushes and down a long lane off Fulham Palace Road. Go past a Gothic lodge and there is a courtyard of dark red Tudor brick, with diaper patterns in black glazed bricks. This leads to a Tudor hall which was much improved in the reign of George II and looks like a college hall, say that of Trinity, Oxford. The house itself which adjoins it was designed by S. P. Cockerell, the architect of Daylesford and, Sezincote. Gloucestershire, and Banbury Parish Church. Cockerell designed it for dear old Bishop Howley. that splendid opponent of all 'progress,' and devotee of landscape gardening, in 1814. Its garden front is of beautiful brownish stock brick with well-proportioned windows. In fact it is one of those subtle houses whose elegance is all in its proportiOn.
THE POWER OF PRAYER
The reason I went to Fulham was a private party to hear the Mirfield Fathers Hugh Bishop and Trevor Huddleston appeal for sending a community of contemplative nuns to Basutoland. This is an area about twice as big as Wales where Europeans are not allowed to settle and entirely surrounded by the Union of south Africa. It is hard to explain the value of nuns whose lives are entirely prayer without sounding churthy, but as Father Huddleston pointed out, the political problems of Africa, and I would add of anywhere else, are in the end only solved by prayer. The nuns to go out are from the Society of the Precious Blood, an Anglican Order at Burnham Abbey, Bucks. This place has in my own experience caused what seem like miracles to happen when I have asked for its prayers about particular personal problems. Father Hugh Bishop gave an instance of his own experience. When he was a prisoner in the last war in Germany, at a particular time a lot of strange things started to happen in the camp. Many more people began to come to his services and to be instructed. An embittered Communist suddenly applied to him for baptism and became an unembittered and active Christian. When Father Hugh Bishop was repatriated he visited Burnham Abbey and happened to mention to the Mother Superior that he was a prisoner of war in Germany. She asked the name of his camp and then told him that at one period during the war, the same period as when the strange things happened in his camp, the nuns had asked that their prayers should be given to one particular camp, and the one which they had chosen had been his.
BLUE BOOKS
I'm glad to see that Duckworth's have reprinted Ronald Firbank's V almouth, with coloured illustrations, appropriately fantastic, by Philippe Jullian. Firbank's disjointedness can be accounted for by the way he wrote. When some weird sen- tence or idea occurred to him, something like this for instance : `Trotting before his master, the fire-flies singeing his tail, ran the watch-dog Douce. From the humid earth beneath his firm white paws the insects clamoured zing-zing-zing', he wrote it doWn on a thick blue postcard bought from a special shop in Sloane Street. These were put into boxes and assembled by him into novels.
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