Lynch’s love of easeful death wasn’t quite what it seemed; it was rather as if he saw in it the chance of the transfer the Church had always denied him. Death might be the far country from whence no traveller returned — and if so he was all for it. Anywhere must be better than this. Hence the constant warnings: ‘Hurry, my boys, I am not much longer for this life…’ and ‘Listen to these words of wisdom from a departing soul — the idealism of the Boer freedom fighters died with Kruger’s flight into exile. What followed was not a success for Calvinist nationalism but a policy of “get what you can and keep it” — only remember to call it God’s work.’
This urge to depart was more to be pitied than feared. Lynch knew that short of a miracle, or his own defection (and that meant air tickets and where was he to find the money?), he was condemned for life to this wild African place.
He suffered from dreams of money. Perhaps a rich relative would die and leave him a legacy? No, he was a practical man. But then again perhaps one of his altar boys would one day be rich enough to make a present to his old priest and mentor — enough to enable him to escape to what he called some serious country.
Perhaps this was the source of his fascination with the last days of the old Boer leader of the Transvaal Republic, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger. Father Lynch knew the Memoirs very well, and he owned also what he claimed was the last surviving copy of Further Memoirs of a Boer President; a fat, red leather-bound book of reminiscences and prophecies apparently dictated by the exiled president to his faithful valet Happé in the old man’s few remaining months of life in his rented house by the lake in Clarens, Switzerland, as the desolate, near-blind old lion mused over the future of his country and his people, broken by war and scattered in defeat to St Helena and Patagonia, Ceylon, Malaya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola and Tanganyika — a diaspora of Boers, the African Israelites, blown by history around the globe.
… And I shall use the short remaining time the Lord has been pleased to grant me to labour mightily, though conscious of my frailty and infirmity, to bring His people home to Him [Kruger promised in Further Memoirs], and since He has entrusted to my care the means whereby His will shall be accomplished I shall not rest until I find that place, ‘the land’, as the Lord said to Moses, ‘which I have given unto the children of Israel’…
Father Lynch would interpret this for his altar boys, saying that by that ‘place’ Kruger undoubtedly meant a physical location, a home for dispossessed and faithful Boers who would not return to serve under the hated English, and by ‘the means’ Kruger certainly meant the treasure which had accompanied him into exile, the famed Kruger hoard, the gold millions of legend (taken in the form of ingots, bullion-bars or dust, who could say?) — from the inexhaustible mines of the Reef and smuggled out when the President fled.
This obsession with the millions came to outweigh all of Lynch’s religious duties and the Further Memoirs became his daily office, his ‘familiar bible’ he called it, though it was widely believed among the altar boys he had written it himself.
It was precisely these unexpected ideas, combined with a complete lack of any religious scruple, which attracted to Father Lynch the boys from the nearby boarding hostel who were to form his little group of altar servers.
That Father Lynch was in disgrace with all the orthodox clergy appealed enormously to the wayward boys, handed by their parents into the care of Father Cradley, rector of the hostel: Ferreira, Blanchaille, Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, little Michael Yates, and, for a brief period, even Ronald Kipsel (afterwards the infamous Kipsel), these were the altar servers in Lynch’s little guild. The boys detested the Church and yet were drawn to Father Lynch, for, after all, did the Church not hate Father Lynch? Wasn’t it Father Lynch who insisted on integrating the two dozen black servants, washerwomen and gardeners who knelt in the two final pews on either side of the nave, into the white congregation? Until ordered by Bishop Blashford to restore segregation immediately, because, desirable though a certain mixing might be in an ideal world and certain though it was that such things would one day happen — though not in our lifetime — the move was premature.
And was it not Father Lynch some years later who refused to introduce the new form of the Mass with its responses in English and its furtive handshakes and blushing kisses of peace, saying that although he understood the move was designed to counter dwindling congregations by giving the laity the idea that they were a vital part of the service, a move which he understood was known among theatre people as ‘audience participation’, he and his congregation were too old to change and he would continue to say Mass in the old Latin rite? Threats were made. They were ignored. And eventually the point was not pursued. After all, Lynch was an old man ministering to an elderly and diminishing congregation served by a little band of altar boys so bound by loyalty to the obstinate priest that they were probably beyond salvation.
And of course it was Lynch who, some years later still, when Blashford announced the Church’s discovery of its new mission to Africa which meant reaching out to embrace its black brothers and sisters in Christ, retorted that having been ordered by his bishop to reverse his own attempt at integration some years before, he was not prepared to shame and humiliate his remaining black parishioners by ordering them back into the white pews from which they had been barred for so long. ‘It is the nature of all power structures, whether armed or not, to present changes, however contradictory or cruel, as necessary progress towards the light,’ Father Lynch, Parish Priest of St Jude’s, taught his boys beneath the Tree of Heaven.
The church of St Jude, gloomy Catholic stronghold built of rough-hewn local stone with a wide-eaved heavy roof of grey slate, was set right next door to the young and rampantly spreading Calvinist university, a rock in a Rome-devouring sea, Lynch declared. It was from the nearby hostel for homeless boys that Father Lynch recruited his altar servers, for whom he promised many surprises in the years ahead, terrible surprises for his little guild. This was Father Lynch’s way of dignifying his unpromising rag-bag of altar servers.
The hostel was presided over by another import, Father Benjamin Cradley, who came from England. He was soft, pink and mildly mannered and had come to them, as he so often said, from the Oratory. Of course they hadn’t the faintest idea where that was. Some deep note in the resonant openness of the vowels suggested to Blanchaille a giant orifice, echoing cave or great clanging iron canal down which ships were launched. The Oratory! What a round, empty ring it had, that Oratory which had sent Benjamin Cradley to this wild hostel full of discarded boys in ill-mannered Africa. When you saw how little he understood of it all you realised how much the early white missionaries must have mystified and terrified the natives. What crusading ignorance was there! He sat up at high table, this fat man, happy to be on top of his little heap, this hostel for the children of the destitute, dead, divorced, distant and decamped families. It was a magnificently incongruous appointment. Cradley was not interested in where he was, or who these boys were, but gazed out into the middle distance through narrowed eyes, faint watery blue, continually screwed up against the cigarettes he chain-smoked, a few wisps of hair greased over the big forehead, the brass crucifix behind the belt moulded into the big belly pushed out before him, meditating not upon God but on the meal to come.
He wandered down the gleaming corridors of the hostel with a curiously beatific smile on his face, scattering cigarette ash and dreaming of dinner time. His large fleshy head with its neat sleek hair seemed too heavy for his shoulders and he always carried it cocked a little to the left, the heavily veined lids lowered over the eyes. This gave him a slightly oriental, half-devious look, underlined by an idiot simper quite at odds with that meaty, pink English face. When angered he flushed from the chin up and one could watch the blood pressure rising rosily like alcohol mounting in a thermometer. He was waited on hand and foot by two little nuns from some obscure Austrian order, the name of which Blanchaille could not remember — the White Sisters of the Virgin’s Milk, or something exotic like that. Had it been? Anyway, they served and worshipped. Sister Gert, who was little and ugly, gnarled and nutty brown, looking not unlike Adolf Eichmann, and by her side the tall, plump, pretty Sister Isle, who spoke no English whatsoever but cooked, scrubbed, sewed and served with love and reverence verging on idolatory. Both of them called him ‘Milord’, and he spoke to them as one would to a pair of budgies: ‘Who’s a clever cook then?’ and ‘Father wants his pudding now — quick, quick!’ And they tittered and curtsied and obeyed. They fussed about him at the head of the table, heaping his plate with fried potatoes and bending to flick away the ash which had lodged in the broad creases his belly made in his dusty black soutane. These two sisters in their white cotton habits and their short workmanlike veils, with their tremulous lips and their soft downy moustaches, and the way they chirped and flapped about their solitary, beaming, bovine master reminded him of tick birds attending to some old, solid bull. One day he remembered being delegated to clear the dishes at the head table and he stood close up watching Father Cradley digging plump fingers into a mound of Black Forest cake rather as a gardener drills the soil to take his seedlings, and then Blanchaille thought he understood why the Boers had gone to war against the English. He told Father Lynch.