THE REVEREND BORIS GESTETNER,
HIS COLLECTED WORKS 34 pages, A5 booklet Published 1994 £2.30 |
The Reverend Boris Getetner is the Vicar of Avalonia, some-time curator of the Avalonian Museum of Theological Artefacts, and a member of the House of Lords. He is well known for his poignant sermons and cutting political rhetoric, as well as for his exotically inventive ecclesiastical dress. He is unmarried.
His career as a journalist began as religious correspondent for the ‘Times of Avalonia’. From there he went on to become Editor of the ‘Glastonbury Communicator’ magazine. He was sacked from the latter job after just one issue. A keen ecologist, he has also contributed to ‘Greenline’ and ‘The Green Collective Mailing’. The Reverend Boris Gestetner is 123. |
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Extract:
First published in The Times of Avalonia No 2
There are many things which inspire me to poetry, but none so profound and pertinent to the age we live in as that potent symbol of American nuclear prestige, the Cruise Missile.
On the one hand, the thought of this instrument leads me on occasion into exquisite raptures, at the realisation that it could bring about so quickly the dissolution of our tired old planet and so precipitate our union, one and all, with the Essence of the Cosmos in one blinding flash of heavenly light. On the other, the idea that it might go off half cock and leave us all mutilated and disintegrating from the gruesome affects of radiation sickness fills me with horror. I am one of the Great Undecided on the Nuclear Issue.
It was thus, open to persuasion either way, that I approached the nuclear base at Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, on the anniversary of the eviction of the Rainbow Village Peace Protesters from that place.
My intention was to interview in depth the chief protagonists in the Nuclear Debate: Monsignor Bruce Kent, Secretary-General of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Brigadier General Sir Michael Heseltine, Secretary of State for Defence. I arrived to find that the latter had recently resigned his military commission in order to become a politician, and that he would not be present at Molesworth that day. Bruce Kent, however, was somewhere about, leading a Human Blockade to close off the entrance to the base. I went in search of him.
The weather was so bad that all entrances to the base were closed off by 6-foot snow drifts anyway. The CND protesters nevertheless sat themselves down in the approach roads, contriving to turn the event into a species of winter picnic. Meanwhile, struggling through the blizzard-like conditions, I came upon the most extraordinary phenomenon. It reminded me so acutely of St Paul on the road to Damascus.
A group of Rainbow Villagers had returned to Molesworth, intending to celebrate their anniversary by making a bob or two out of the CND punters. Two of them were making their way along the road between the nearby village of Clopton and the main entrance to the base, pushing between them the most remarkable mobile soup kitchen I have ever seen. It consisted of an ancient tea trolley, and placed upon it a large red box which turned out to be a thermally insulated soup container. Also on the trolley, on the tray below, was a basket full of bread rolls; and strapped to the back was a broom handle topped with a tattered umbrella blown inside-out by the wind. There was a hand-chalked sign on the front reading 'HOT SOUP AND ROLL 35p. NUCLEAR FREE ZONE'.
The two of them were taking it in turns to push this astonishing contraption, whilst the other took hold of a rope at the front and pulled. As the tea trolley rattled over the ice-packed snow on the surface of the road, the basket of rolls would be forever falling out. The distance along the road was over a mile, and with biting winds and snow swirling around them, progress was slow.
As a man of God, what else could I do but stop to give this heroic venture into Free Enterprise a helping hand?
So the three of us now were working our way gradually along the road, taking turns to push the trolley, pull the rope, and carry the basket of bread rolls. The broken-down umbrella was flapping in the wind, the snow was sweeping fearsomely across the flat Cambridgeshire countryside. It was at this point that I saw Bruce Kent.
He came by in a car, travelling in the opposite direction back to Clopton. He must have seen us, but not a flicker of it showed upon his face. What was this soup trolley, this grotesque embarrassment to the Peace Movement's image? Bruce Kent's face was set in a fixed stare, his eyes averted from us. My chance to interview the great man was blown away like one more snowflake on the wind.
Eventually, one of my companions gave up pushing the soup trolley. He went off to fetch a battered old car, and when he got back we dismantled the mobile kitchen and, with the trolley itself and the brolley on the pole sticking upright out of the car boot, we managed to fit ourselves and everything else into the vehicle. We then drove up near to the base perimeter, somehow persuading both the police and the official CND stewards that we had an official right to do so.
There I left my friends to sell hot soup & rolls to frozen CND demonstrators on their way home from The Blockade, whilst I went to pay a professional visit to Molesworth Peace Chapel - an example of third world religious architecture which was built by Direct Action Peace Protesters inside the wire fence at the southern end of the base. Constructed during a daring midnight raid, the Chapel is unfinished, having only three and a half walls and no roof. It has however been dedicated by the Bishop of Huntingdon, and a notice outside the fence explains that permission to come and finish the job in civilised fashion has been eagerly awaited from the base commander for some months. Permission has not been granted.
I gazed at this holy spot with deep reverence, whilst peace protesters kept warm by doing the Hokey Kokey in the mud-churned snow around me and policemen watched them with the most peculiar admixture of boredom and astonishment. After several minutes, my religious duties discharged, I turned about to walk back to Clopton, hoping to find a warm place to sit and take afternoon tea.
Lost in transcendental reverie, I made my way around the perimeter fence past scowling guards on the inside and placard-bearing peaceniks on the outside. Lost in transcendental reverie, I once again missed my opportunity to interview Bruce Kent.
He came striding by in the opposite direction, perhaps himself on his way to pay his respects at the Peace Chapel. A true man of the cloth, he must have recognised me as his fellow, however well disguised I was under woolly hats, duffle coats and gumboots. He winked at me.
The significance of that wink I cannot tell. In the same second, he was gone, lost in the swirling blindness of the weather's Final Solution. He was gone, and with him my last chance of truly coming to grips with the myriad of arguments and opinions behind the Nuclear Question.
Should we all blow ourselves to smithereens or not? There can be no simple answers to such grave matters of international politics. We all have to weigh up the pros and cons, and make our individual decisions in the light of reasoned argument. But I failed in my journalistic quest to shine some useful light on the subject, much as I regret having to say so. So I myself am still, I must confess, undecided.
But my visit to Molesworth did nevertheless have a profound effect on me, and brought the possibility of nuclear warfare keenly into my mind. And, as such things as Life & Death, Love, Religious Conversion etc are prone to do, it stirred the muse within me. Instead of the candid article I had set out to write, in its place I can offer poetry.
I present this piece, a work of literature written in the inspired style of the late William Wordsworth, as my personal contribution to the Great Nuclear Debate. I realise that by writing in verse I am making my feelings obscure to the everyday reader, but only by doing so can I include and encapsulate the depths of meaning and significance demanded by a subject-matter so all-embracingly important. I entitle my poem 'Epitaph':
I wandered lonely as a mushroom cloud
And fell into the crater where the daffs used to grow.
Thankyou, good people; I pray that the Lord will grant you all, if not a long life, then at least an interesting one. God bless you'
Boris Gestetner (Reverend).
