After graduation, I worked in printing and publishing in Cambridge for ten years, but, at the same time, started teaching Cambridge undergraduates. Having been a countryman all my life, promotion to a London firm of publishers didn’t appeal; so I accepted an invitation to teach English and Latin at the Leys School.
I moved to Magdalene as College Lecturer, and later to Wolfson as Director of Studies in English. I ended up teaching for many colleges and lecturing a lot for the Faculty of English and the Department of Continuing Education. I was also Director of Studies in Wolfson, St Edmund’s, and Hughes Hall — and Senior Tutor of the last.
I still teach, mainly for the English tripos, and, yes, students have changed as admissions processes change. But the young — wet behind the ears though many are — are still as wonderfully challenging and as much fun as they ever were. For decades, too, I have been heavily involved with mature students: they come from all sorts of backgrounds, and are a different game altogether. They are enormously rewarding. My oldest graduand at Wolfson was 72, and at St Edmund’s, 78. She went off to do a Ph.D. in her native Norway.
I’ve written about 60 articles, some of which I now regret, of course, and a dozen or so academic books. Plus others. Like frogspawn, once it’s coming, it keeps coming.
A character of A. S. Byatt’s remarks: “I write to know what it was I saw.” I wrote Crossroad about pilgrimages I’d made, and I wanted to share that experience with friends — including our lively community at Little St Mary’s, in Cambridge. Experience has extraordinary complexity, and, if you don’t write it down, you’re going to forget it. But the strange thing is, if I write about it, the words close it off and I can’t get back behind what I wrote to how it was when I felt it.
We’re all searching for something. Few could say exactly what. The worst trap is to think you can know and define and articulate, and then you start not being open, but being a prisoner in something you have built yourself, your own structures of understanding.
One of the things Cambridge taught me is to be sceptical of certainties and critical of assumptions. All stories — humans make sense of the world by telling each other stories — from the most scientific to the most fantastic, are provisional, not the things they attempt to describe.
I do have a sense of the numinous — sometimes, some places, stronger than others — and a strong awareness of our world as a sort of palimpsest of human and non-human experience, going back millennia. “Thin places”? Several; and I think it’s best to be alone. Iona; the church at Lakenheath; Chartres; an ugly church in Norfolk; the arena at Verona. . .
We evolved as nomads. Urbanisation stifles in us many things humans need; so many people become pilgrims or seek challenge, wilderness. In this field, Rob MacFarlane, Ronald Blythe, W. H. Hudson, Colin Thubron.
Hungry Heart Roaming is travel, a life, a lot of thought. It starts with us young, walking round Greece through the memories of an older world, the shockwaves of Troy’s fall. It culminates (but does not end) with me much older, thinking of the fall of Berlin, where my second wife’s father was a child; he escaped, or I would not have had Rosanna. The trajectory of European history, grief, and glory, from the Trojan women in their trailing gowns fearful, resigned, hearing an unfamiliar Greek spoken closer and closer in the corridors, to Berliners waiting, waiting as the Red Army fought its bloody way through the streets. . . History coming full circle.
I had a book about Chaucer out last year, and, four weeks after Crossroad, To Everything a Season came out. A country sort of book, a memoir, is brewing at the moment, and, for DLT, a book about people we rarely think about, who wrote the words of the hymns. Fascinating to explore the networks, who knew whom: Ambrose knowing Augustine, Monica, and Prudentius, for example; or how John Newton got to know William Cowper and William Wilberforce. And why did Randall Davidson forbid the use of The English Hymnal for some years?
Between the Tides was a memoir of growing up as the only child of elderly parents, by the windswept shore between Fleetwood and Blackpool. Out of the back door were fields of which I had the run — all now built over. It was homage and thanks to people I knew, men with whom I worked, on the trawlers out of Fleetwood, or on Ribble buses, or in hotels.
My father’s family were from Staffordshire and hadn’t much education, and my mother’s family were all clergy; so there wasn’t much money. But I thoroughly enjoyed going to sea, and being in charge of a bus at 18. It was a bus inspector who first introduced me to Aristotle, and I discovered one of our prettier conductresses reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in her tea break. Never underestimate people. Just because they haven’t had a university education doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
Two gifted English and Latin teachers at school set me at some high fences, and I enjoyed getting over them: Virgil and Horace, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I still drink deep at those ancient wells, but have found many others since: Dante, George Herbert, T. S Eliot, R. S. Thomas, Tolkien.
My first non-academic writing was A Field Full of Folk, a growing-up-and-leaving-home present for my children: a memoir of our time in this Cambridgeshire village, and of its people. When Jenny and I moved to Reach, I had to learn bricklaying, woodwork, how to grow things. I have huge respect for people who have no chance of doing anything else. It was written with a lot of affection, and people were kind and bought copies. Years on, at our 40th-wedding-anniversary celebration, a local farmer and JP said: “We all knew Charles poached, though he thought nobody did. But we didn’t bother. He had a family and not much money.”
The village is now affluent, desirable, with wonderful community spirit. But few of the old families are still here, and, for the first time in 4000 years, people aren’t drawing their major income and sustenance from the land around. Some people now have never been down the Fen, whereas our children had the run of it. Once everyone knew the Fen well, if only because that’s where mushrooms grew in autumn.
God was a sort of background noise until a moment of near despair in my twenties. Suddenly, there was this extraordinary sense of love and reassurance, as if someone was saying, “I’m here, it’s all right,” and my heartrate slowed down dramatically.
Sometimes, the desert seems to go on for ever, but there are unexpected oases. The key thing is to recognise that any grasp of reality I have is merely provisional.
Wastefulness of anything; lack of care for the fabric of life of which we are only a part; any sort of cruelty, even to plants, makes me feel homicidal. In global terms, the complete mismatch between the real needs of our planet and the goals, imperatives, and self-interest of business, and the folly of most rulers. A complete refusal to acknowledge that the global crisis is a crisis for us all, and you can’t keep on as you were, pursuing growth, conquering territory, cutting down the forests.
Happiness? In music, Bach and the usual suspects. The veil being lifted for a moment. Good talk round a table with food and wine, and the feeling that we’re all sharing in our different ways something we couldn’t name. A winter evening walking back, with friends, in the frost as the stars come out, with the dog happily tired after a shoot.
The cry of seabirds — even piratical herring gulls — is my favourite sound.
The future will never be, never has been, as humans desired or imagine. The wild cards keep coming. We are, indeed, in a right mess. But our extremity is God’s opportunity.
Praying as petition? Yes, we’re meant to do that: the Lord’s Prayer. But often it’s simply trying to be quiet, saying the Jesus Prayer over and over again, trying to be still and know.
Golly. Locked in with one of the great saints — they’d be too overwhelming for my poor conversation. I would not know what to say. So, too, with great writers, though I’d love to meet George Herbert or Chaucer. Perhaps, simply, my mother and father, or my friend, the late John Byrom, to say: “Sorry I was so dense, but I do see now what you were getting at. It’s all right.”
Charles Moseley was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
Read a review of Crossroad: A pilgrimage of unknowing