(LifeSiteNews) — What struck me most about Joseph Bevan’s memoir Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council was the violence. Say what you like about The Good Old Days, there were an awful lot of beatings: fathers whacked sons, headmasters ferruled pupils, older brothers punched younger brothers, schoolmates used their fists to teach each other lessons they “would never forget.”
Joseph Bevan, both a member of a well-known family choir (Family 1) and the patriarch of a traditional Catholic clan in the south of England (Family 2), never forgot the lessons — and the beatings — of his 1960s childhood and 1970s youth. Bevan was one of 14 children, the son of an Anglican-turned-Catholic music master at the prestigious Downside Abbey school. Although he married young and had 10 children himself, Bevan does not romanticize big families. Instead, he tells a tale of terrible emotional and spiritual neglect.
Bevan suggests his parents, having grown lukewarm in their faith, did not reap many spiritual benefits from their openness for life. Having many children just went along with pre-Vatican II Catholic identity, like fish on Friday and going to Sunday Mass, and they had to be endured, educated and fed. The Bevan children, brought up in genteel poverty, didn’t look too closely at what they were fed although there was always money enough for their parents’ gin and martinis, Joseph recalls. And music, not the Catholic faith, was the organizing principle of their family life: The Bevans taught their children how to sing and made them into a choir.
Discovered by the BBC, the Bevans achieved a mild fame and, more importantly, supplements to all their incomes that — unfortunately — the young Joseph tended to squander: first on candy and then, as he grew up, beer and cigarettes. Both their identity as a family choir and their connection to aristocratic Bevan relations made the children insufferable snobs who looked down on everyone outside the family, especially those they termed “the lower orders,” even as they bullied each other.
Bevan is as tough on himself as he is on his first family, who are painted as vividly that of Gerald Durrell’s in My Family and Other Animals. He also attempts to excuse his parents’ shortcomings by blaming the changing Church. That said, his parents’ own culpability is never far away:
I do not think my family was as happy a God wanted it to be because the spiritual side of our existence was sidelined and ignored. I do not blame Ma and Pa for this, because they trusted the teachers and clergy of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, they were badly let down, and the result is that a whole generation of unbelievers has now been spawned by my brothers and sisters. It is still a mystery to me how my parents were so blind to the unfolding crisis and often uncritically supportive of some of its worst results.
That includes the liturgical experiments of the Vatican II and post-Vatican years, especially the music. The Bevans knew the difference between good music and bad, and Joseph is grateful to have been introduced by his parents to the best. Sadly, he was old enough to feel bereft, not only when beautiful cathedral liturgies were replaced by banal ones, but when the Byrd Masses his family sang at their parish had to be replaced by Roger Bevan’s attempts to please a congregation “restless for more change.”
The crisis moment came when the wife of the owner of a leading Catholic publishing company walked out on the beautiful old music. “Pa, like the Elizabethan composers before him, adapted to the demand for change and started writing ‘congregational Masses’ to be sung by everybody at Mass,” Bevan writes. “I have to say that these compositions were so trite and turgid that we got thoroughly bored with them.”
Bevan’s cultural Catholicism flames up into something immeasurably better after he finds traditional priests, refugees from the liturgical and theological shipwreck, who patiently re-catechize him in the traditional faith. Thus, the second part of the book provides a hopeful contrast to the first. It introduces the curious American reader to one solution for Catholics in Britain who want to provide their children with authentic Catholic education: SSPX boarding schools in France.
I have friends who went to one of those schools, and this is one of the reasons I found the book so interesting. The Catholic Church in Great Britain is small, but the TLM community is miniscule. Two Families is not just a memoir but a social history produced by a prominent member of the English branch. It also provides a witness to that curious shift — hidden from my own generation for as long as possible — between pre-Conciliar and post-Conciliar Catholicism.
Readers may be shocked by Bevan’s willingness to expose the faults of his parents and siblings. In his defence, both his parents and one of his brothers wrote memoirs of their own. It is also, we discover early on, part of Bevan culture to observe each other’s foibles in creative ways. In fact, the first Bevan family kept a cartoon book in which they mocked each other’s faults, real or imagined. (This was burned after one Bevan sibling was pushed too far. The author regrets its loss.)
Meanwhile, Joseph Bevan’s skill as a writer makes the book something other than a tasty dish of revenge served cold. At heart an English social history, it is a reminder and a warning that a lukewarm Catholic culture that remains “open to life” but closed to love, particularly to the love of Christ, is wholly inadequate.
Joseph Bevan, Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council, Os Justi Press, 2024 ($16.65 US/£13.18 GBP), 194 pages.
