CAN YOU SEE THEM MARCHING AS TO WAR? NO, NEITHER CAN I
by Nigel Farndale

The Sunday Telegraph (LONDON)
November 26, 2006 Sunday

When I heard that a Church of England vicar was going on Radio 4’s
Today programme to urge people to boycott British Airways, I thought:
this is more like it, some fighting words at last. The Rev Andy Kelso
had, apparently, been provoked by the airline’s refusal to allow
a check-in worker to wear a small crucifix over her uniform. And
rightly. It is a demented policy. What does BA hope to gain from it?

Does it imagine Muslims will feel less inclined to bomb its planes
just because it cravenly bans Christian crosses?

I thought he was going to say what needs to be said: that we are
still a Christian country, culturally at least; that we still have
only one Established Church, whether BA likes it or not; that MPs
still say Anglican prayers at the start of the Parliamentary day.

I thought he might have some fire in his Anglican belly, this vicar;
that he might be a worthy heir to Bishop Winnington-Ingram who, in
1915, made a passionate demand for the men of Britain to band together
in a great crusade to kill the nation’s enemies: "To kill the good as
well as the bad; to kill the young men as well as the old; to kill
those who had shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends
who superintended the Armenian massacres and sank the Lusitania – to
kill them lest the civilisation of the world should itself be killed."

But no. Mr Kelso argued that we should boycott BA because it is
"discriminating" against Christians. It’s come to this: the church
that produced all those rousing, muscular hymns about marching as to
war is now complaining about being discriminated against; the last
resort of the truly impotent. In his grave, wherever that may be,
Bishop Winnington-Ingram must be spinning.

Incidentally, I’m not sure the C of E has quite as much right to feel
indignant about this crucifix policy – now under review by BA – as
has the Roman Catholic Church. Until Anglicanism as we know it today
was invented in the middle of the 19th century, Anglicans regarded the
crucifix as a wicked, heathen, Romish symbol. That was why there was
such a big stink about Elizabeth I wanting to keep one on her altar.

The Church of England prefers to worship… England. That is why its
churches go light on the crosses and heavy on the regimental colours
and roll calls of the Glorious Dead.

At the moment, while we’re looking for a house, we are renting a
farm cottage on the Hampshire-Sussex border. Our nearest neighbours,
living in a shed alongside us, are a herd of rare-breed Sussex cattle
– gorgeous, chestnut-coloured animals recently brought inside for
the winter.

They are sucklers, that is, mothers with their calves who have been
together out in the fields all summer. Now they have been weaned,
mothers in one half, calves in the other, divided by a feeding corral –
but not without much "bealing". For three days and nights the calves
and their mothers called to each other across the barn, then they
stopped abruptly. Their broken hearts had mended, it seemed.

Their emotions – if that isn’t too anthropomorphic a word – had been
cauterised. The ritual reminded me of being sent off to my (Anglican)
boarding school aged 11. New boys were not allowed to see their
parents for three weeks. We cried for most of that time, and then
never cried again. We had been successfully weaned. Three weeks.

Three days. The difference between man and beast.

It is good that attention is being drawn to the one in five patients
who are being forced into mixed-sex wards. Such indignity. While we are
about it, perhaps something can also be done about the way paramedics,
doctors and nurses routinely insult elderly patients by addressing
them by their first names, rather than by their surnames and titles.

I have a bad habit of dipping in and out of novels to read a page at
random, which is not what the author intended. Still, sometimes the dip
can be lucky. The other day, I came across this example of inflation
at work. In Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust, first published in 1934,
one female character says to another: "You look a thousand pounds!" She
means it as a compliment. Today it would be considered an insult.