WHEN Isabel and I had coffee with Trevor Huddleston in his room at Mirfield last Monday, we brought a new malt whisky bought en route from Iona the week before. ''I shall enjoy it enormously,'' he said, ''and have you seen this new book on the Theology of Forgiveness?'' Then followed a discussion on reconciliation and his inability to think well of former President De Klerk, ''who has done so much evil''. On his wall were framed documents of his investiture last month as a KCMG, and a telegram from the Duke of Edinburgh of which he was enormously proud. But not so proud as of the photograph of president Mandela standing behind his chair at Buckingham Palace. ''He's a remarkable man,'' he said, with the freshness of rediscovery. ''He always calls me Treevor, and I have a private line to him, but I try not to use it too much''
The visit encapsulated so much of the man I have known since I wrote to him as a gauche schoolboy 40 years ago after reading Naught For Your Comfort turned my world upside down. The passion for justice, the voracious interest in books, the fascination with the British establishment, the faith that sustained him and above all, Africa and its people, surrounded that frail figure whose spirit had far outstripped his declining health and who balanced a huge interest in life with a readiness to meet God.
For our generation, he was a legendary figure. Born the son of a naval officer and educated at Lancing public school and Oxford, he combined the ease of patrician England with a genuine aptitude for communication across racial, class and religious barriers. The delight he took in people made him relish each new challenge - in Stepney's multi-cultural community and in rural Tanzania. Those who knew him in both ministries were not slow to criticise an impatient, authoritarian streak that bore the marks of the surity of his upbringing. In that respect he mirrored George Macleod of Iona with whom he corresponded but never met. Both men shared the white heat of commitment to justice and the ability to get alongside a huge range of people and to challenge and change them. It made him at home with belted Earls and with the railwaymen of Swindon amongst whom he first ministered. He is fondly remembered
in Arran where he spent many happy holidays fly fishing, and preaching in the local Episcopal church. And in the poverty ridden streets of Sophiatown near Johannesburg he changed history by lifting his hat out of respect for a washerwoman, watched incredulously by her 12-year-old son, who later received a weekly hospital visit from him when recovering from TB. The boy's name was Desmond Tutu.
His spartan Christianity accepted the disciplines of an Anglo Catholic monastic community who recalled him from South Africa, but the rebel spirit was always dominant. So was the capacity to find a wider vision. As a teenager I found it difficult to comprehend what I saw as narrow Anglican prejudice in his declaring that the sharing of communion with other churches was an ultimate goal, ''but not yet''. 30 years later at St Andrews University Chapel he stood with students round the communion table and gladly shared the sacrament over which I, a Church of Scotland minister, presided. Later that weekend he told me that his time as Archbishop in Mauritius had made him totally committed to open, inter-faith dialogue. ''Maybe God can widen the mind of a 70-year-old man,'' he said, with a twinkle. He had also discovered that gender and racial justice went together and he backed the campaign for
the ordination of women in the Anglican communion.
When Scottish/Mauritian friends of ours paid the Archbishop a visit, they waited patiently to see him, politely asking an elderly gentleman in bright shirt and shorts who emerged from an old Volkswagen if he could help them. When the confusion was resolved they were overwhelmed by his kindness.
Children were Trevor's special concern. His room at Mirfield was full of photographs of his many Godchildren. Early South African photographs bear witness to the ''Pied Piper'' as the tall gaunt figure in the cassock is pursued by street kids. He was the mainspring behind a 1980s Harare conference on the effects of apartheid on children. The crushing of their future saddened and infuriated him, and he wanted to see their place in the new South Africa assured.
Six years ago, when Nelson Mandela received the freedom of nine British local authorities in Glasgow's City Chambers, it was from Trevor Huddleston. The reply came: ''It was your moral leadership, Father Huddleston, that sustained us all these years.'' Perhaps the most appropriate epitaph is ''the dauntless one'', coined by his friends in South Africa nearly a half century ago. From his early resistance to the Nationalist government in the late forties to his international presidency of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, his life's work was to hasten the end of this evil. My daughter once asked if he would see the end of apartheid in his lifetime. ''Nothing is surer,'' he said, ''than that apartheid will end. But I'm an old man and I won't see it.'' Last week he thanked God again for the privilege of overturning that prediction. Many of us give equal thanks for the privilege of standing in his
giant shadow as ordinary members of the Movement.
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