Colenso

11 November 2025

I’m reading Zaire by Harry W. Smart. A book about espionage in the Congo. Fiction. Its lone-silent-hero flavour is titillating my impressionable mind – creating damaging expectations that will later take years of therapy to correct. One of the characters has a rhythmic and catchy name which sticks in my mind’s ear. A fictional character I assume.

Later that same month "Towers of Dub" by The Orb plays over a car radio. In the track there is a voice sample of satirist Victor Lewis-Smith prank-calling London Weekend Television studios posing as Marcus Garvey (a Jamaican political activist and Pan-Africanist) to arrange a meeting with Haile Selassie.

The name crashes from the background into the present. Haile Selassie is also the name of the ‘fictional’ character that had caught my attention in the novel – yet the book and the song have nothing in common and were authored decades apart.

The coincidence perplexes: evidence of a schism between the paradigms of my mind, and those of perceivable reality. Incredulous to my young arrogant mind. But, distracted by hedonist pursuits, I soon forget this challenge to my certainty and drift back into a comfortable ignorance.

Another month of life passes by, perhaps more, and I find myself at a Sunday family dinner, struggling to make conversation with a well read and apparently aloof father – we’ve not yet learned how to find common ground. An aura of wet chalk fills my veins. I forget to breathe. Oxygen’s journey to my brain slows. The awkwardness is stiff and heavy.

And then I remember Haile Selassie, previously a cute name challenging my arrogance, now suddenly a possible salve for the horror of this awful awkwardness. And so I ask:

“Dad, who or what, is a Haile Selassie?”

“Well it’s funny you should ask…”

He offers, suddenly animated by having something to tell, and probably also relieved.

“…Haile Selassi was the emperor of Ethiopia, and the founder of the Rasta movement. After the Italian invasion of 1936, he sought exile in the United Kingdom, travelling the country building diplomatic support, and at one point stayed in the cliff-top home of an English newspaper editor in the town of Zennor, on the west coast of Cornwall.”

Ok. Go on.

“Years after Selassie’s stay in the house, the newspaper editor sold it to Patrick Heron and Delia Heron, who made the house their home, and where Patrick painted until he died in 1999. Patrick and Delia had two daughters, Katharine and Susanna. The adult Katharine Heron, choosing architecture as her profession, enrolled at the Architecture Association in London, where I met her. And together we formed the architecture practice Heron van Schaik.”

A pauses for wine and air.

“Katharine would often invite your mother and I to their family home – that same house, named Eagles Nest. And in this house there is a room named The Emperors Room.”

“And…”

He stops to check he has all ears in the room.

“ …this is the room in which you were conceived.”

The punch-line collapses the awkwardness of a room into a memorable lunch. Such is the skill of an orator telling a perfect story and rallying the room around him. Or perhaps its a father hoping to find common ground with a son young enough to be certain that a thirst for knowledge is best put to use as a dinner party trick.

The telling of this story took place some thirty years ago and the conception some twenty before that. I’ve been dining out on the story since. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows me that hasn’t heard it at least once, or even suffered it a second and a third.

One of my favourite places to tell it is at Eagles Nest now cared for by Katharine and Susanna, and being lovingly restored by Katharine and her partner Julian. It’s an informal museum to Patrick Heron’s work which was embedded in the place. “I paint the feeling of the feeling of the boulders coming up through my feet” he would say.

My connection to Eagles Nest is one small instance of many lives and histories – all far more substantially binding than mine. And yet I feel the urge to return there as regularly as the generosity of its caretakers allow. This hospitality is facilitated by Katharine, Kate as I call her, who is my godmother. And much of the wisdom she imparts to me in fulfilling her responsibilities as a god-parent, she does on our walks in-between the giant granite boulders of the house’s ever evolving gardens.

And so I’m here visiting again. I tell Kate and Julian I’ve put the story you’ve just read to paper. I read it to them hoping that writing it has polished it enough to warrant a further hearing.

Perhaps not, judging by the awkward silence that follows the retelling – albeit less urgent and palpable than the silence in the first part of this story. But it’s a silence I feel must be filled – and this time with a question about the house itself.

“When did the newspaper editor commission it to be built?”

I ask. Kate explains that it was in fact commissioned by its previous owner John Westlake, a lawyer renowned for having established the initial tenets of international law.

“His wife penned a biography on him after his death. There’s a copy here in the bookshelf”

She says as she pulls a once-red cloth-bound hardback with gold-embossed title text, from its home amongst an array of other books on the history of Zennor. I let the book fall open somewhere in the middle as I like to do when I have no intention of reading every word, and find myself amidst a chapter setting out the young lawyer’s relationship with his then maths teacher Bishop Colenso.

The old dust assuaging my senses, the fading serif typeface, the lisp of the thin pages, the hagiographic clumsiness of the author’s tone, and jet-lag all conspire to keep me at arms length from the context and details that the book is hoping will draw me in. A fog of apathy closes in on my interest.

Closed in but for Bishop Colenso. The name ambushes my attention. Another name that I know. But this time I know it’s not fictional, I know who he is, and I know exactly where I’ve heard the name before.

I know of John William Colenso as the first Bishop of Natal for the Anglican Church (in what is now South Africa). Colenso welcomed members to his congregation regardless of race. A practice that is linked to the origins of the African National Congress – the political party that won against the incumbent at the election that ended apartheid in South Africa.

Colenso’s then radical views were met with significant opposition from the local reverend James Green. A dispute between the two reached enough of a crescendo to draw the attention of the Church of England who took the side of Green, charged Colenso with heresy and ousted him from the church.

At this point the words of the book in my hands wind their way into the story: representing Colenso in the case brought against him was none other than John Westlake the original occupant of Eagles Nest – that one time home of Haile Selassie, the life-long studio of Patrick Heron, stage to many other here untold lives, and the site of the occasion of my conception.

The page where the book in my hands happened to fall open ties John Westlake to an instance of South Africa’s political history. My familiarity with this same instance comes from the many times I’ve been subject to the telling of my own family history – a story in which the role of the reverend who instigated the infamous opposition to Bishop Collenso is played by my own great great great grandfather Dean James Green.

——

It would serve this story well to end it here, and let the things rest in the narrative glory of showing you a remarkable and surprising coincidence. But I think more’s the point that as we cannot help but see the world distorted by the lenses of our own perception, we should only be surprised when we find that any two things are not a coincidence.