You may be interested to know that you – yes, you, madam – are standing on the very spot where Jack the Ripper disembowelled his first victim… No, don’t be alarmed. This tour aims to provide a description, not a re-enactment. And although I’ve promised you surprises, I hope there won’t be any quite like that.
First a little social background: in 1860 there were estimated to be 80,000 prostitutes in London. That’s one woman in every sixteen; which on a quick head count would mean at least two of you ladies here tonight. It makes you think… Indeed there were thought to be 1,200 in Whitechapel alone. Though these, as you would expect, were very much the lowest end of the market, many of them being drunkards, and most of them diseased. And what led so many women to become prostitutes? Well, it must be obvious even to the most naive of us – amongst whom until quite recently I would have counted myself – that it was far removed from that conventional picture of the daughters of joy. It’s hard to imagine any woman coming out to this joyless street to be fingered and mauled and finally spluttered into because she enjoyed sex. But then it’s hard to imagine any man visiting a prostitute because he enjoyed sex. In my opinion it could only be either despair or perversity…
No, these women often became prostitutes very young, as their sole means of escape from their stifling families and unbearable living conditions; not to mention sleeping conditions, as whole families were compelled to share the same bed, together with the constant threat of incest to which this gave rise. But any respite proved short-lived, as they were thrown on to their own resources, which in effect meant on to the streets, where they looked for any likely man who might provide them with the fourpence they needed as the price of a bed for the night. And that was precisely what Polly Nichols, the first of the Ripper’s victims, was doing before she was murdered here.
Polly was a woman of forty-two, although she looked a good twenty years older: her way of life had taken such a toll. She’d informed a friend whom she’d met a little earlier that she’d already had three customers that evening, but that she’d spent her pitiful proceeds on drink. Now she needed fourpence – just fourpence, ladies and gentlemen – in order to buy herself a few hours’ rest. And so she dragged herself out again: for the fourth and tragically final time.
It may surprise you to learn that this deserted street – this heap of rubbish and rubble, flotsam and jetsam – was in 1888 a rather pleasant road known as Buck’s Row, with a schoolyard, coalyard, warehouses, terraced cottages and even the local curate’s house. But at about twenty to four in the morning of Friday 31 August, two carters, Charlie Cross and Robert Paul, made a discovery which was soon to make it one of the most notorious in the whole of London – so much so that shortly afterwards, the residents petitioned to have the name changed to Durward Street; by which it’s still known today. For it was here in this gateway that Cross came upon the body of a woman lying sprawled in the gutter. His first thought was that she must be dead drunk, although he was quickly disabused. But it wasn’t until her body had been removed to the morgue that the full horror was disclosed.
For although murder had long been one of the East End’s favourite pastimes, and throat-slitting a particularly popular variant, it wasn’t just Polly Nichols’ throat that had been cut, her whole stomach had been ripped open. And not just once but twice. Her windpipe, gullet and spinal cord had been hacked through. Her vagina had been pierced in two places. She’d been disembowelled and her intestines had been exposed… Yes, I can see even in this light that you’ve lost your colour. And I can assure you that I didn’t describe all that simply for stomach-churning effect – although I do hope, in view of what’s to come, that none of you had kidneys for your dinner – but rather to try to drive home the ferocity of the attack. And this was just the beginning. With each subsequent assault the Ripper’s hand became more and more frenzied, and his victims’ mutilations more and more extreme… So follow me, ladies and gentlemen, on the next stage of our terror tour.
Tell me, are you a Freudian? It never ceases to amaze me that anyone can still take his ideas seriously. I did an option on him at St Dunstan’ – we were taught to know our enemy – and I should like you to understand here and now that my faith is in no sense a neurotic projection. It’s the most real – it’s the only real thing in my life. Wasn’t it Wilde who said that a cynic was a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing? Well it seems to me that a Freudian is a man who knows the theory of everything and the meaning of nothing… You say nothing, but then I suppose there’s nothing you can say.
So what salutary topic do you propose for today? Sex? Aggression? Faeces? Would you like to hear how old I was when I started using the potty or when I stopped using the breast? It’s not that I want to put words into your mouth – although if you never intend to speak, I don’t seem to have much option – but I would like to know if I’m on the right lines… You’re not a doctor; you’re an emotional refuse collector. Well, I warn you; you’ll discover nothing in mine.
All right: let’s admit for the sake of argument – or rather to avoid it – that I had what you call a breakdown; although I myself much prefer the word stress. According to Father Leicester everyone else could see it coming. But then the wife is always the last to know. He was quite adamant that I mustn’t feel in any way ashamed about it, any more than I would if I’d tripped up on a step and broken my leg… Oh, sure. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on. Or is it still in plaster? I wouldn’t know.
Over dinner at college we’d often try to invent new beatitudes. My next-door neighbour stuck one of my favourites up on his door: Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light. I always used to smile when I passed it. Not any more.
So do you think I’m mad? You can give it to me straight; it wouldn’t be the first time. My aunt tried to send me to a psychiatrist when I was ten. It was after I’d declared I’d discovered my vocation. I can give you the time and place if you like, just as I quoted her chapter and verse. It was during morning prayers at my prep school: not usually the most inspiring of occasions; what with the assembled ranks of sleepy, sloppy schoolboys, with their shirt-tails hanging out, scruffy sleeves and scuffed shoes. I had no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary; when suddenly, in the middle of a hymn, my faith began to surge up inside me and to spill over into every part of me, and in one moment of ecstasy my whole life seemed to spring into place. At first I felt completely disorientated; I had no idea what’d happened. I was half convinced I must have spontaneously combusted; and I was astonished when I looked down to find myself still in one piece. I sat down; I even managed to follow the rest of the service. But I knew as I filed out of chapel I would never be the same again.
Unfortunately for you, I can’t claim to have heard voices, so you won’t be able to mark me down as a paranoid schizophrenic, less suited to a parish pulpit than to a padded cell. And I’m aware that you’d think far better of me if I were to confess that ever since then I’d been plagued by doubts; but it simply wouldn’t be true. Nowadays even at a theological college doubt seems a good deal more fashionable than faith. It suggests an open mind – even though the reality is far more of an empty one; intellectual humility – or at least the show of it; and of course respect for the other person’s point of view. But I can only state that from that moment on, my vocation has never wavered; and when I finally came to make my first communion nearly five years later, all my previous convictions – all my earlier convictions were triumphantly confirmed.
It remains to this day the most profoundly perfect moment of my life and one I can’t ever begin to put into words, not even for you; language itself is far too inadequate and my own command of it far too imprecise. But I’ll do the best I can… We’d been preparing for confirmation for nearly a year; although I at least felt that my whole life had been leading up to it. We’d been told to fast that morning, but I’d eaten nothing all weekend; so as I made my way up to the altar, my head was already strangely light, and I flung myself down so eagerly that I scraped my knee.
At last my moment came; I was offered the sacraments. I took them with trepidation; I waited for the transformation. I waited in vain. I felt betrayed by the underwhelming insignificance. The wafer was insubstantial and the wine tasted sweet. I rose to return to my seat, desperately disheartened, when I was stopped dead in my tracks. In one gulp I felt him inside me: his blood pouring into me, his body pounding through me, his spirit filling every part of me with fire. And I knew then that he’d chosen me; I knew then that he was one with me. And we would never be separate again.
The two things I feel sure that you’ll want to know, unless you’re quite unique in my experience, are did I convert simply as a way of hitting back at my family, and did training for the priesthood provide the ultimate revenge? Such cynicism used to sadden me, but I suppose to expect anything else would be unrealistic when to a good many people my name is virtually synonymous with my race. But I can assure you that over the years I’ve examined my motives from every conceivable angle, and I remain completely convinced of my own good faith.
Not that I’ve ever made any secret of my family’s religion; nor do I even regret the bitter struggle it’s cost. On the contrary I’ve felt it’s yet another tie that binds me to Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew who became the Christ. And although in the past, I admit, it may have caused a number of complications, I wouldn’t like you to think it’d caused me any complexes. I can truthfully report that I’ve no complexes of any kind.
But then you may not be a complex person at all – oh dear, was that a Freudian slip? – I mean a person who believes in complexes. And you may not even be a Freudian; you may be a Jungian. I’d prefer that. At least he allows for a degree of spiritual autonomy; he doesn’t reduce the whole of human behaviour to a residue of our earliest experiences, or an amalgam of our parents’ private parts… Or you may even be a Kleinian. I understand she was no less of a determinist than Freud. Only with him it all happened on the potty, whereas with her it was at the breast. And I find it very sad to see that universal conflict of good and evil reduced to a choice between two breasts. Besides, how do we know which is which? I find it hard enough to know what’s what on my own body. I always have to think long and hard when my tailor asks me on which side I dress.
It’s not that I wish to deny my early experiences, but I refuse to accept them as formative. Your founding father seems to allow us even less freedom of action than does Jonathan’s. And yet God gave us all free will, no matter whether we’re born in a castle or a cowshed, with all the love in the world or with none. And as I’m sure you’re well aware already, in my case it was the castle, or at least a late Gothic imitation. But I’ve nothing to hide; one day I’d be happy to take you on a personally guided tour – or are you an armchair traveller as well as an armchair theorist? And I don’t know whether you assign any mystic significance to place names, but it was called – is called – Edensor. So at least they must have had a sense of humour in mid-nineteenth-century Kent.
Edensor was my great-great-great grandfather’s folly: a castle in the air he’d had built out of Portland stone. In his determination to prove himself more English than the English, he’d commissioned a country house fit for an embattled Scottish earl. From the outside it appears as a vast, forbidding fortress: a bastion with battlements and buttresses, towers and turrets, and even gargoyles, the ugliest of which I was secretly convinced must have been modelled on my aunt – although not quite so weathered nor so worn. Whilst inside he’d allowed his fancy to roam even more freely, and to draw its inspiration from every period of history and every corner of the globe. So there’s a music room modelled on a Roman temple and a ballroom taken straight from the Farnese palace, a Chinese courtyard and an Elizabethan hall. Intricately carved choir-stalls from a Flemish convent panel the library. While in the corridors Baroque cherubim consort with Renaissance putti; and in the galleries Rococo seraphim hold canopies over Gothic saints.
It really has to be seen to be believed, and even then you can never be certain, as rooms with trompe l’oeil ceilings lead into rooms with ceilings over forty foot high. But it’s not only the sins of the fathers that return to haunt their children, for at night the fantasies of my great-great – oh, ever so many times great – grandfather came back to torment me, as coffers creaked open their lids and suits of armour rattled their halberds and mirrors threw out hideous distortions, and even his crowning glory, the celebrated malachite staircase, threatened to shake off its marble caryatids and send their swathes of swirling drapery tumbling about my ears.
And yet it wasn’t just at night that I had to tread gingerly. For every room was supposed to be admired but not touched in the same way that children were supposed to be seen but not heard. And it may have been the eyes in all the portraits that seemed to follow me spookily, or the spy-holes and secret passages that my great-great… oh, never mind – grandfather had had sneakily built into the walls; but wherever I was, someone would always be sure to be watching me. And history, which was so fascinating in books, was merely frightening in the privacy – or otherwise – of my own home.
Even the nursery seemed to have been designed without the slightest consideration for a child. It was right at the top of a tower and shaped like a hexagon; and so I always felt a pang of envy for other people who could talk of sleeping soundly within their own four walls. And it was so heavily embellished, that when the doors were closed, it felt like nothing so much as being locked inside a semi-precious jewel-box. The ceiling was an enamelled sky of cobalt blue with a burnished sun at the centre, from which issued six ribbed vaults, like golden rays encrusted with shooting stars. While the walls comprised mosaic panels of Hebrew history: the most unsettling of which, the massacre at Masada, was re-enacted nightly in the moonlight above my bed.
It wasn’t until a long time later that I realised that my mother must have felt even less at ease there than I did. I remember how she used to sing a song about being only a bird in a gilded cage. It never occurred to me that she could mean it literally; any more than when she thanked Heaven for little girls rather than for me. And her cage – her bedroom was genuinely gilded, and inlaid, or so I’m told, with sixty different kinds of marble. And when on sunny days the painted glass windows sent rays of colour over streams of dust, and the heat of the room brought out the incense-breathing scent of her perfume, it seemed to me more like the lady chapel of a Byzantine basilica than anywhere for a mere mortal to sleep.
But then she fell ill and spent longer and longer in bed, although whether she slept or not, I couldn’t say. And now, however far back I think of her, I always see her lying down, whether in bed or on a sofa, propped up on piles of pillows, as though she were trying to establish a buffer between herself and the rest of the world. And please don’t think I blame her. I know illness is nobody’s fault. But then I wouldn’t want to lay all the responsibility at God’s door, either. So what would you suggest? Still, the problem of human suffering is one that has exercised a great many cleverer minds than ours, if you’ll forgive the presumption. So I think on balance I’ll stick to prayer.
She began to take all her meals in bed, rather than just breakfast. I heard her nurse describe her health as delicate, and that was only one of the many words I was rapidly having to redefine. But unlike my baby teeth, I couldn’t simply put them under my pillow. And along with my new vocabulary came a new self-consciousness. I was no longer able to run up to my mother and fling my arms around her neck and cover her in kisses; but instead I had to think carefully where I put my clumsy, tell-tale hands.
And if only someone had taken the trouble to explain what was wrong, then I mightn’t have felt so helpless. I was still a child and so of course I understood pain – no one better – but not yet illness and still less death. I began to despair; not that anybody paid attention. Children aren’t allowed to despair; they’re simply stubborn or solitary or strange. And… Do you really need to put me through this? It all seems so unnecessary and so long ago. Very well, I can give you the entire story of my life in a single sentence: someone dropped a match; there was a fire; and my mother burnt to death.
Satisfied…? Oh! Oh no, you don’t! You think I did it, don’t you? Everybody always has: even my father; though he’ll never admit it. That’s why he hates me; though he’ll never admit that either. But I was at school. There was an inquest. The findings are there for anyone to see… And as soon as he decently could, he took himself off to the South of France. But he didn’t take me. And in due course, with undue haste, he married again; and he now lives on the hillside above Cannes, with his new wife and their two sons and their friends and their staff, and a Spanish gardener called Jesus.
He left me in the hands of his sister, my Aunt Sylvia, even though he himself detested her. So if I needed any further proof of what he felt for me, there it was. And yet he insisted I always be grateful to her for having given up her own life to look after me. But I didn’t see why. I’d never asked her to. And besides, as far as I could see, she had no life to speak of – at least not the sort that other women spoke of: she had no husband nor children. She’d had a mother, of course; and she was always droning on about not knowing what to do with herself since she died. Well, now she did; and it seemed to me that I presented a far more attractive solution to her problems than she did to mine.
She returned my loathing with a vengeance; and believe me, no one could be either as vengeful or as venomous as her. And she spoke as ill of the dead as of the living, taking every opportunity to deride my mother. For reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, she reserved her particular scorn for her former profession. To hear her talk, you’d have thought nursing little better than prostitution. I can only assume it was due to a similar proximity to the private parts of strange men.
Not, I’m quite sure, that she herself would have known one from Adam. I’d be very surprised if she’d ever even kissed a man outside the immediate family circle. She certainly seemed to take little enough pleasure in kissing me. Not that she spared herself, or me for that matter. But from the way she’d lift my cheek to her lips as though it were a piece of overcooked cabbage, she never failed to make her distaste abundantly clear.
And her logic was as warped as her love. She claimed that my mother was mad; and as madness was hereditary it would one day manifest itself again in me. Which is a filthy lie! I’m sorry… But do you wonder I was so reluctant to embark on this? Although if I had a fault, I’d say it lay in quite the other direction; I’m steady to the point of stuffiness. If only my hands were equally steady, I could pilot a plane… Not that it’s any thanks to her. She insinuated the idea of insanity whenever she could.
Though if pressed, the one thing she would grudgingly concede was that my mother had been a beauty. It was as if she felt safe to grant her that, since not only was physical beauty skin-deep, but we’d all look the same in the grave. And as proof, not long after the fire, she lured me into the Egyptian room at the British Museum, and led me gleefully to a mummy on a plinth. I took one look at the brown skin flaking off the bony face, like the scrawny claw of a roasted turkey, and I lost sight of any other meaning. All I could see was my own mother, not some ancient Egyptian, lying burnt and charred in her unsettled grave. I began to howl, which was precisely the reaction she intended, and the pretext she needed to haul me back home in disgrace. And if ever there were a curse of the Pharaoh’s tomb, I invoked it on her head then.
She could even give the kiss of death to Christmas. One year she almost sank the Sunday School nativity play. She’d long objected to my attendance in principle, but my taking part was something she claimed she couldn’t ignore. She insisted that I be replaced, and after endless appeals and consultations, they effected a compromise whereby I swapped roles with one of the three wise men. I felt humiliated, which, believe me, had nothing to do with my demotion. And even then I could see that her argument made no sense. For if anyone were indisputably Jewish it was Joseph; whereas the three wise men had come from much further East.
Of course from where I stand now her position seems even more untenable. I remember how she seized every opportunity to remind my father that to be a true Jew you had to be born of a Jewish mother. Which in itself ruled me out. Unless she’d proposed to apply for a rabbinical dispensation, which would hardly have been in keeping with her blistering contempt for all the fashionable marriages that had been ‘made in Heaven and annulled in Rome’. Not that she had any right to talk. No one had ever asked to marry her. I only wish someone had; she might have been a good deal happier. And so might I.
And there was one match I was continually plotting: between her and my Uncle Sinclair. He was my mother’s brother and my only uncle, just as she was my father’s sister and my only aunt. And to my historically charged imagination, it appeared the most perfect dynastic union since the roses of Lancaster and York. I don’t think I was particularly romantic; I simply hated loose ends. You may smile, but I was just a child, and children long for symmetry. And so I turned for consolation to the church.
It was the one place where I felt that my aunt couldn’t reach me and that I could reach out to God. It was the one place where no one was forever carping at me, and where they seemed to value me for myself. And as I fell to my knees behind the protective screen of my great oak box pew, I began to recapture that sense of security which I knew I’d lost forever at home. And although I was obviously far too young to take communion, I already felt part of a community; and it was a community I was determined to stay a part of for the rest of my life. And I think I was aware even then, however far away I might have been from expressing it, that I wanted to play a special part – to be a part and yet apart: to be a priest.
Please don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t because I felt myself to be especially virtuous. On the contrary, I’ve always been painfully aware of all my faults. And yet, whatever our inadequacies as people, they can become our strengths as priests. I expect that must sound the most appalling self-indulgence, or worse, a licence to sin; nevertheless to me it’s a spur to ever greater humility. For since I know that it isn’t merely in spite of all my failings, but in full acceptance of them, that God has called me, I must be even more aware of my own limitations, and hold myself back, allowing him the chance to speak through me… And that’s the way he works through the whole of creation: making virtues out of inadequacies. And it fills me with joy.
Which is why to become a priest, whatever the sacrifice, would for me be no sacrifice. And I’m quite prepared for all the hardships, even the much-threatened loneliness. Although it does seem a little disingenuous to speak of it as an occupational hazard, as if it were an industrial disease. There’s humility and there’s mock humility, which are two very different things. Besides for me it’s just the opposite; it’s the inability to become a priest which is lonely. To have to work amongst people who see no point to my existence. To see none myself. And then to be locked in my own inconsequence. Whereas a priest, although he may be alone, can never be lonely. To be a priest is to be peopled with God.
So what do you say? Here am I struggling to express my vocation: to put the ineffable into words. And I don’t even know whether you’re a believer. And I’m certain you’re going to tell me that belief ’s a very personal thing; but then so’s therapy. And I’ve given away so many personal things about my life; surely it’s not too much to ask for just one in return?
You evidently think it is. You prefer to play God than to let me know if you believe in him yourself. Then I’ll just have to fill in the gaps on my own. And one thing which I think is common to both my faith and your philosophy is that there are no such things as accidents. So where does that leave me? I keep returning to that fateful Eucharist. I know I said that it must have been the Devil who was in me; well, I almost wish I could be sure it were. Then at least I’d have the chance to redeem myself. But what if my rejection had been far more absolute? Father Leicester might have sent me to you, but what if God had already made his own feelings quite clear; and at the crucial moment – the very moment when we were about to celebrate the sacrifice of his son – he rejected my sacrifice as conclusively and contemptuously as he once had Cain’s?