Word: simeone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Force ROTC spend one hour per week in classes at MIT, while juniors and seniors spend three. Cadets also attend a one-hour "leadership lab" each week on "air force related extracurricular activities," and have to be able to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, says Air Force Major Simeon S. Tubig, a ROTC instructor...
Paradise Postponed combines some of the social sweep of Brideshead with the hugger-mugger of Rumpole, the overweight, conniving and lovable Old Bailey barrister. The novel's central mystery emerges after the death, in 1985, of Simeon Simcox, 80, Anglican rector of Rapstone Fanner, a village some two hours' driving time west of London. The clergyman's will contains a staggering surprise. He has left nothing to his wife Dorothy or his two grown sons Henry and Fred. Instead, the ardent Socialist once known as "the Red Rector of Rapstone" has bequeathed all of his shares in the family-owned...
With this problem firmly established, Mortimer backs and fills over the four decades of complications that preceded it. The fortunes of the Simcox family form one important skein. The successful end of World War II and the subsequent victory of Clement Attlee and the Labor Party inspire Simeon in his pulpit. He draws his sermons from Revelation 21: 1: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and earth had passed away." Firmly committed to social justice at home and abroad, the minister writes impassioned letters about the New Jerusalem to his bishop, signs...
...then does Titmuss turn out to be the beneficiary of Simeon's estate? The answer proves every bit as intriguing as the preparations that lead up to it. For Mortimer has attempted nothing less than a long case history of his native land, post-1945. Behind the narrow focus on the imaginary Rapstone and its inhabitants, larger events are disclosed: sugar rationing after the war, ban- the-bomb marches during the edgy '50s, the rise of swinging London, the Profumo scandal, strikes, strife and the sinking of traditions in a new tide of commercialism. The fate of the Swan...
...dreamed of the future. Nor does Mortimer seem especially enamored of what his country threatens to become. But Paradise Postponed is a remarkably judicious presentation of pros and cons, and extremely funny besides. Near the end of his life, watching TV reports of the war for the Falkland Islands, Simeon complains to his wife: "What we're doing is going round in circles. I mean, is this where we came in?" To enter this novel is to join an eddy of wisdom and comic resignation...