Book Reviews

Child of a Bygone Era

by Peter Hunt WPS’53 Austin Macauley 2021

Child of a Bygone Era is a delightful summary of the early life of Peter Hunt (the author) who grew up partly in Hong Kong and partly in England.

Born in Brighton in 1940, he experienced the German bombardment during the Second World War before leaving for Hong Kong in 1947 where his accountant father had been posted.

The book contains 60 small chapters summarising his early experiences in pithy detail and including some charming photographs of the old Hong Kong. As a resident in Hong Kong for 37 years, I found much of what he wrote of those times quite fascinating. He left Hong Kong in 1967 after an internship as a journalist and newsreader, presumably just before the 1967 riots (as they are not mentioned), and the Hong Kong world he describes is very different even to the reviewer’s experience some 17 years later. The 70’s were clearly a time of significant change.

The grey, rationed and bleak life he experienced in England post-Second World War is in stark contrast to the colonial life he enjoyed some 7,000 miles away with its exclusive private clubs, facilities and servants.

The short sharp chapters maintain the reader’s keen interest throughout as the story moves quickly from event to event.

Many of the clubs’ locations and buildings mentioned in the story still exist today and for the current local Hong Konger it is very much a step back in time.

Peter Hunt spent his early years at Worth junior school before moving on to Downside, where he completed his secondary education. He enjoyed his life in both schools, though it is clear that he missed the pampered Hong Kong life whilst at school, and the rigours of boarding school took considerable adjustment. Used to having servants pick up his clothes where they fell, at his first night at school he was told in no uncertain terms to pick up his clothes from the floor and to fold and store them in his bedside locker! No doubt, he also had to make his bed. Another issue which stands out from the book are the immense difficulties encountered in travelling by aircraft from England to Hong Kong and back, which in the 40s and 50s would take several days, and at some expense. Accordingly, for some of his less urgent summer trips Peter travelled by ship and/or remained in England in rented accommodation during short school holidays with his mother on her regular visits. Of course, these days a non-stop 11 hour flight is taken for granted.

I enjoyed the book and I found many of the Hong Kong elements fascinating as a comparison between then and now, and could readily relate to the quality of life then as a bygone era.

Nick Bodnar-Horvath C’72

A Life Above the Line – Just

by C. P. Altmann (aka Claude Keith G’69) AuthorHouse 2020

This is the third book by Claude Keith and he writes it under a pseudonym: C. P. Altmann. In the final pages Claude describes why he wrote it, saying that after a life in advertising he decided that what he had always wanted to do was to write.

Aspiring writers are often advised that they should write about what they know and Claude has certainly done this. He wanted, he says, to write “a good light-hearted romp” and he has succeeded. In terms of the subject matter, I am uncertain of the book’s appeal to people completely unfamiliar with the world of advertising – even Claude’s title is a play on a piece of industry terminology.

As for the story, the book’s hero, Christoph Aitkins, has adventures that do not rely too much on a knowledge of advertising. The reader is taken into fearsome boardroom battles and the wider context of international business in the last quarter of the 1900s, including a startling kidnap in west Africa.

This reviewer would have liked Claude to write in his own voice in the style of a straightforward autobiography, not least because his own voice is so vigorous. When you twig early on that the hero is not ‘Christoph Aitkins’ but Claude Keith, you can feel uncomfortable with self-descriptions. At one point, comparing ‘Christoph’ to another adman, the author says Christoph is “a refined, cultured thespian with a mischievous lack of respect for authority, seeking always to break the rules and always challenging in nature.”

Claude has a writing style that is engaging and pacy. If he embarks on work that is not autobiographical, as I hope he does, then I am sure that his own authentic voice will serve him well.

Johnny Harben G’69

The Complete Shot

by Shane Bisgood StB’71 Connemara Shooting School 2020

The Complete Shot is the fruit of a lifetime dedicated to mastering the sport of shooting, and the passing on of that knowledge to students.

Shane Bisgood began teaching when he was 16 years old, when a policeman practising shooting with his colleagues on the shooting ground alongside Conker Avenue beyond the farm at Worth Abbey asked his advice. His diagnosis of the man’s faults and his advice to remedy those issues proved to be correct. Many others turned to Shane, including his friends in Ireland. He became a trained professional by the age of 26 and has been a full-time instructor for 44 years.

One of the USA’s most famous Olympian shooters recently wrote a glowing review of the book. Gary Faules wrote, “What an amazing shotgunner’s book. In all honesty, I don’t feel there has ever been one written that can hold a candle to yours. Your methods of teaching far exceed that of any shotgun instruction to be found. You have a unique (and gifted) manner of making everything so ‘understandable’ be they a novice or an accomplished shooter such as myself.”

The book is illustrated throughout with correct elements to employ in this sport. It is also coloured with anecdotes from Shane’s life as an instructor, the characters who have asked him for help - the client who may be a celebrity in normal life turns to fellow human, smiling with achievement - these stories are in themselves worth reading.

There is no subject left uncovered, from the gun and the shooter, to safety, etiquette, teaching techniques, and even to hints of sartorial propriety. However, the greatest contribution to the sport’s literature is Shane’s lucid explanation of his method for achieving consistent accuracy.

This may well become a bible for generations of shooters and an indispensable read for lovers of field sports.

Patrick Slevin B’08

The Unmarriageable Man

by Suresh Madannayake C’75 writing as Ashok Ferrey Penguin 2021

Suresh Mudannayake from Sri Lanka - or ‘Muda’ as he was known at school - attended Worth at exactly the same time as I did - Junior House from 1968, then Senior School 1970-1975, followed by Oxford - where he read Mathematics at Christ Church. The 1980s saw the two of us still running parallel, both converting old properties in Brixton into flats. At the age of thirty Muda cashed in his chips and returned to Sri Lanka.

It was something of a surprise to us all, therefore, when he turned his hand to writing at the tender age of 42, under the assumed pen-name of ‘Ashok Ferrey’. Fast forward twenty odd years and he is now Sri Lanka's best-selling author in the English language, having left the pure mathematics far behind. All of which just goes to show what a first-rate Benedictine education can do for you.

In this, his fourth novel (and sixth book), Ferrey revisits his years in Brixton, during those "glorious blue-rinsed Thatcher eighties when every girl looked like Princess Diana though not every boy looked like Prince Charles." It is not easy writing a semi-autobiographical novel: creative non-fiction is a difficult art at the best of times. How do you make real life interesting enough for a perfect stranger to enjoy, yet not stray so far from the truth that the work loses all heft of credibility? As Ferrey says in an interview elsewhere, “In much of my work, it is the truth that has to stand good as fiction, not the other way around.” In The Unmarriageable Man he manages this delicate balancing act with great precision - introducing as counterpoint the protagonist Sanjay de Silva's difficult relationship in Sri Lanka with his eccentric domineering father, and his subsequent inability to deal with his death. Indeed at the heart of the novel is this question: Do we ever get over our grief at the death of a loved one? Ferrey’s answer is perhaps not the one any of us would like to hear. “All that exists at the end is the sheer animal act of forgetting,” he writes, “and the act of forgiving ourselves for forgetting, It is a physical thing born of years of harrowing repetition and replay: the road so often travelled that the scenery is no longer visible, the paragraph so often read that the sense is no longer apparent.”

But fear not, the novel is not all doom and gloom. Over the years I have been the recipient of each new Ferrey novel whenever the author visits the UK, and I can vouch that a certain lightness of touch is his trademark, even when he is writing on subjects of great import. This could be perceived as cynicism; or perhaps a certain survival mechanism from having lived the last thirty years on a war-torn troubled island. Neither of these do I feel to be the truth. Those of us who knew Muda before - with his execrable puns and his ghastly schoolboy wit! - will agree with me that this is quite simply the way he sees the world.

There can't be many mathematicians who have gone rogue, turning into writers in their middle age. Does the maths affect the writing in any way? “Every one of my novels has at its core a skeleton of mathematics,” Ferrey says. “My job as writer is to flesh out those hard mathematical bones so the reader will not be aware of them.”

Writers are thieves and magpies, borrowing indiscriminately where they will, and one of the dubious delights of reading a book by someone you know is to turn each leaf in dreaded anticipation, hoping and fearing at the same time that you will find yourself on the next page. Although Ferrey tries his best to keep off the grass, sharp-eyed Worth-watchers will spot the names Philip and Domenica Gaisford appearing early on in the novel; and I for one am delighted that the country house I grew up in, in the little village of Zeal Monachorum, performs a star turn towards the end of the book. So is there any likelihood that at some point in the future, Worth itself will make an appearance? “Who knows?” Ferrey says with an enigmatic smile. “Be very careful what you wish for . . . ”

Richard Breen StB’75

The Certainty of Being Loved

by Dom Martin McGee Dominican Publications 2021

In a retreat he gave in 1981, Blessed Pierre Claverie, the Algerian bishop who would be martyred 15 years later, spoke of Jesus’s parable of the grain of wheat that dies as “the central axis of my Christian life”. The passage from death to life “is part of his very being,” Claverie said of Jesus, who “passes constantly through this surrender which dispossesses death and that is why he is completely inhabited by the power of Life – of the Spirit.” This was the

“perpetual movement” that begins for every Christian at

Baptism, “a continuous passage from death to life through love.”

It is hard to imagine a life that so clearly testified to that belief as did Claverie’s. A Dominican friar who was installed as Bishop of Oran the year he gave that retreat, he was brutually murdered shortly after the March 1996 kidnapping and beheading of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine. The monks and Claverie were beatified by Pope Francis in 2018 together with eleven other religious - mostly French, but including two Spaniards and a Belgian - slain by Islamists in the Algerian Civil War (1992-2002). The story of the Tibhirine monks and their prior is best known of all, because their story was stunningly dramatised in the film Of Gods and Men. But the question posed by the film’s director, Xavier Beauvois - namely, why the monks chose to stay, tending vegetables and caring for the local poor - is one that can be asked of any of those martyrs: Why did they not leave, knowing from endless warnings what was to come? Why stay to die, when by leaving you can live?

The answer, of course, is love; but it is not a simple or straightforward answer. Martin McGee’s brilliant spiritual biography offers perhaps the best contemporary account of what kind of love this is, and whence it stems. In his prologue, Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, then master-general of the Dominicans, who visited Claverie after the Tibhirine massacre, knew then that “it was unlikely that Pierre would live for long”; yet rather than fearing the end, it seemed to spur him into a yet more energetic commitment to the Muslims he served. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for those whom one loves,” Claverie quoted Jesus in one of his final homilies: not for humanity in the abstract, nor for a principle, however inspiring, but for the people in particular given us to love.

Those Claverie came deeply to love were the mostly Muslims among whom he had grown up among as a Pied-Noir, as Algerian-born Europeans were known during French rule. As result of an awakening in France - McGee calls it “the turning point of his spiritual life” - he saw the colonial bubble he and his family lived in, and the way even the Church had screened out the Algerian people. Returning to Algeria as a Dominican priest, he would dedicate his life to pulling down the separation walls that colonialism and prejudice had built around hearts and minds. His life became a deep dialogue through friendship - “finding a way into their world by any means possible,” as he described this, “and learning to open one’s heart and one’s eyes.”

As Claverie learned to live in this way, so the Church around him was stripped of power. Some of the most compelling parts of The Certainty of Being Loved chart Claverie’s growing understanding of the role of the Church in a context of becoming poorer and simpler, unsupported by culture and power, and facing ever greater hostility from the ideology of Islamism, the one remaining path left open to Algeria after the nationalist rejection of colonialist capitalism and the subsequent failure of socialism. For Claverie, the Church’s mission was increasingly focused on evangelisation, not by proselytism but by becoming a “covenantal and reconciling Church”, serving the needs of all, entering into the lives and hearts of the other, and making known the face of Jesus Christ, revealing God in witness and action, with a “second mission” of welcoming and walking with those who discover Christ. Claverie’s deepening understanding, so clearly laid out here, offers a path for the Church not just in Muslim but also post-Christian cultures, one that is at the heart of the mission of the Francis pontificate.

Could this witness in Algeria signpost our future? Claverie was killed instantly, on the threshold of his house, together with his 21-year-old Muslim driver, Mohamed Bouchikh, who was devoted to him. Why stay to die, if by leaving you can live? Because as McGee’s beautiful account of Blessed Pierre shows us, sometimes to leave is to die and to love is to stay, to dispossess death, and to light the way for those who come after.

Austen Ivereigh G’84