The Daily Telegraph

How John Bradburne’s life of failure succeeded

- Christophe­r howse

It depends how you tell the story. John Bradburne fought a brave war in Burma in his early twenties and found it impossible to settle down afterwards.

The son of an Anglican clergyman, he had always been eccentric, not only climbing trees in adulthood but staying up them for hours, singing and playing the recorder. He tried joining a Benedictin­e monastery, and even the tough life of the Carthusian­s. He wanted solitude to talk to God and write reams of often autobiogra­phical poetry.

He lived in attics, huts, a hen run. He spent three or four years as caretaker of the house in Hertfordsh­ire that RH Benson had given to the Archbishop of Westminste­r. But Bradburne couldn’t see eye to eye with administra­tors and always moved on or escaped.

If he was good at anything it was living on nothing and travelling about without plans or visas – to Rome, Jerusalem, Libya. He hoped he might have a part in bringing the Jewish people to Christiani­ty, but came to realise that such a mission was not to be his. He was reconciled to being a failure.

He would have left a fading memory of charming eccentrici­ty had not his quest for prayer in solitude taken him to Africa, to what is now Zimbabwe. There he found a task that he felt unable to run away from, although it daunted him. From 1969, he shared the life of lepers in a colony at Mtemwa.

When he first met them, Bradburne found that the men and women with leprosy had not only been neglected, so that they had untreated sores and curling, uncut nails, but that they were systematic­ally regarded as less than human, being made to hide their heads in bags if a visitor came.

Though useless at paperwork, he could give time. He salved their wounds, drank with them, prayed with them and slept in a hut like theirs, happy when a swarm of bees arrived, distraught when a tame eagle flew away and died entangled in a tree. In 1973, he clashed with administra­tors who actually wanted to cut the lepers’ meagre rations. He was barred from the colony but set up a tent on a hill nearby. The clergy who knew his worth appointed him to bring the Eucharist to the lepers, and so he had to be admitted to perform his task.

Even when things were tranquil at Mtemwa, Zimbabwe was in a crisis of guerrilla war. It doesn’t really matter who did it, but jealous local cattle farmers and a group of young guerrillas were behind the abduction of Bradburne in September 1979.

Suddenly, the perspectiv­e changes. All his life led up to this. The binding of Bradburne’s hands, a forced march, his mockery by night and an unsatisfac­tory guerrilla trial, in which it was recognised he was a good man who had helped Africans, all suggest the last hours of the life of Christ. It often happens. I’d say it always happens that Christians share in the passion and death of Christ when they come to die.

In John Bradburne’s case, he rejected an offer to abandon the lepers and flee to a neighbouri­ng country. After kneeling to pray he was gunned down in the back with a Kalashniko­v on a remote roadside. His martyrdom was obvious. From that viewpoint it mattered not at all that he had never settled, never achieved anything.

Now his story is told in detail by Didier Rance’s John Bradburne: The Vagabond of God (excellentl­y translated by David Crystal, the linguistic­ian, who has edited his huge volume of poetry).

It left me with no doubt that John Bradburne was a saint.

 ??  ?? John Bradburne: martyr
John Bradburne: martyr

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