Wilfred De’ath

for a shoot-out with his ‘business rivals’). One day, when Mr H F took our dog Lupin out for a walk, I was so overcome with curiosity, I sent my spy, Betty, upstairs to see if she could find any of his mysterious poetry lying around the study. But she just came down with a stack of Viz magazines, a dozen mismatched socks and sixteen discarded National Lottery tickets.

A few days later, he took his eyes off a repeat of Bullseye to say, ‘Want to read my poetry, then?’

‘Er, if you like,’ said I, feigning only mild interest.

The verdict? Well, I’m no expert, but I’d say the old boy has something. He certainly seems to speak from experience. My favourite is All Bets Are

Off, his ode to betting shops. I like how it beats out a rhythm like the gallop of horses. Here is a snippet:

Damn Doncaster’s flats, the Epsom down slope,

Damn the stewards of Sandown for raising my hope. Cheated at Chester, flat broke by Perth, Bury my body in Haydock’s wet turf. Bless, Lord our sanctuary, nonsectarian, Christian and Jew, Sikh, Rastafarian Bonded by fags and betting and booze United we stand and together we lose. The only poem I didn’t quite understand was The Plain of Nineveh, about fighting Isis in the Syrian desert. (Mr H F didn’t actually fight Isis, he made a documentary about Kurds who did. He got to wear a bulletproof vest, and at one point was so near the enemy, ‘you could see the whites of their eyes’. Apparently.)

I then hinted, ‘Enoch Powell used to write a poem for his wife, Pam, every year on their anniversary.’

That night, Mr H F emailed me a poem called For Better or Worse. I was touched. Until I read it. For reasons of decency, I shan’t reproduce it here. All you need to know is that it is not Wordsworth (who, as far I know, never rhymed ‘marriage vow’ with ‘stupid cow’).

When I told the Aged P her son-in-law had taken up poetry, she said, ‘How extraordinary.’ Then, ‘Did you get my gin?’ It was the day after David Cassidy died. Photos of him were all over the Aged P’s copy of the Daily Mail. ‘He was my era,’ I said sadly. ‘And that was mine!’ she said, pointing at her latest library book on the Second World War. I fell silent. Enjoyable as my 1970s childhood had been, I knew David Cassidy and the three-day week could never compete with Hitler and the Blitz.

‘There’s a poem in that,’ said Mr H F when I told him. Last year, BBC Four made a rather pathetic attempt to show life inside three different Benedictine monasteries, Downside, Pluscarden and Belmont, at each of which I have stayed in my time. It is, in fact, impossible to depict a life of prayer and spirituality on TV. All you end up with is a group of elderly, even senile, monks pottering about in their gardens and workshops. That does not make good television.

Take the wealthy Downside, which presides over 500 acres of rich Somerset farmland. The day I arrived happened to be a feast day; so we were treated to an eight-course dinner with suitably refreshing sorbets in between.

St Benedict, in his rule, advises against ever eating too much, and he was right about that. The dinner played hell with my digestion, which is (was, at any rate) used to rich food. Goodness knows what it did to the poor monks.

I noticed from the film that they are down to about twelve monks (Downsiding?), all of them elderly. When I stayed in the 1990s, they had about twenty or 25, one or two of them quite young. There are just no vocations to the monastic life anymore; so the novice master has nothing to do. It is the same story, apparently, at Pluscarden and Belmont; these places are slowly dying out. I have to admit that, amid my many spiritual troubles and difficulties, Downside brought out class resentment on my part. All the monks seemed to have come from upper-class families, and the general atmosphere was that of a country-house weekend in the 1930s. Things came to a head when I bounced a cheque on their bookshop. The doublebarrelled bursar threatened me with prosecution. It would have been amusing to see the local Somerset plod arriving at the abbey to arrest me.

I was reminded of a religious foundation I visited in my youth. At the daily Mass, there was a lady (now long dead), an elderly Sloane Ranger, who would have made a good plain-clothes store detective in Harrods. I was warned by a novice (they still had these in those days) that she was there not to ‘pray’, but to ‘prey’! She preyed upon the boys, the schoolmasters, the fathers of the boys, the poor monks themselves. Spotting an interesting-looking guest (me), she turned her attention on him, but you will be pleased and relieved to hear that, experienced in what happens in religious institutions, I was able to see her off.

Belmont and Pluscarden were better experiences, but the only Benedictine abbey where I have felt easily at home and relaxed is Douai Abbey in Berkshire. I believe they have closed their school now, but there are still monks to be found there and, if you go along on a weekday, you may come upon the founder-editor of the magazine pottering about, not for TV purposes but researching another literary masterpiece. Please give him my best regards.