FOR those who thought that Richard Holloway’s Leaving Alexandria, in 2013, was his final memoir, it may come as a surprise that he has produced another, this time Last Words, written in autumn 2024. He revisits his Scottish childhood and what became his family home in Alexandria, north of Glasgow.
Here are the earliest memories, which he now muses on in old age: his loving and much loved mother; his stoic, hard-working father; a teacher who was special to him; and the parish priest who set him on the path to ordination at the age of 14. There are darker memories, too: the man in a cinema who touched him inappropriately, a particularly cruel teacher, and his debilitating bouts of rheumatic fever.
It is a strange experience to read this, remembering that the author influenced so many people as Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and one of the founding members of Affirming Catholicism. He was a tall, commanding figure with wit, presence, and perspicacity. He was one of the best preachers I can remember hearing. He proclaimed the gospel with persuasion and true conviction to a generation who were hungry for something richer and deeper than what was typically on offer.
All was not what it seemed. In Last Words, Holloway describes himself as an ageing melancholic, and recognises something Proustian in his search to recapture time before it is irrevocably lost. There is little here about his journey away from faith, which he described in the earlier memoir. Here, he simply assumes a weary agnosticism, repeating the old questions about God and evil, whether the universe has a point, and the mess that human beings have made of their common existence.
Aficionados of Holloway’s writings will be glad of this late work, written, as he says, in his “ruminative old age”. I was grateful for the photographs of seaside, moorland, parish church, and family and loved ones. They made the memories concrete in the way that only pictures can when they come from so long ago. They show that, in spite of the title of his earlier memoir, Holloway never truly left Alexandria: it is what continued to form and make him.
There is much poignant social history in these pages, alongside some wide philosophical questions. It all seems more real to him in his old age than his achievements as a priest and bishop. He chronicles a curious compulsion to walk which he experienced through much of his youth and later life — not with any sense of pilgrimage, but more for the sake of the physical effort and achievement involved. This volume, perhaps, gives some closure on that sense of journey.
The Revd Angela Tilby is a Canon Emeritus of Christ Church, Oxford.
Last Words
Richard Holloway
Swift Press £16.99
(978-1-80075-533-8)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29
