I HAD A HAPPY CHILDHOOD, I’m sure of it. I loved the vicarage; even the church. It was painful to witness my widowed mother having to abandon the vicarage this summer for a bungalow in Durham. Now that little church is vacant, vicarless, while the idiot bishop decides who should fill the post. I suppose I should take the bishop’s tardiness as a compliment to my father’s irreplaceability. To those few who bothered to come, Peter was surely irreplaceable. He dispensed a Christianity that was inseparable from life. The rhythms of the village, and of the seasons, were also the rhythms of my father’s ministry: rising Easter, and sunfavoured summer, and census-gathering Christmas, when, as if in mimicry of the story of Caesar Augustus, all the villagers came to be counted and for once the church was truly full. When I was a boy, I enjoyed all the festivals except the most important, Easter. The brutality scared me, and when I was older, the unconvincing insistence of the hymns sounded like one of my own lies: “He has risen! He has risen!” Well, who says so? Don’t those words resemble a school report about a delinquent who has finally moved up the class, something neither parents nor teacher quite believe? Accordingly, the little church’s congregants intoned the words flatly, in mournful accents, without much joy.
Father conducted a gentle service. Mother and I usually sat in the front row, and Peter, newly plump in his henlike clerical frocks, stood not at the altar but with the congregation,
in the middle of the nave. His clean, soft, bald head was filmed in light from several stained-glass windows. On Sundays he wore shoes with rubber soles (no one was quite sure why), so that he had a soundless and pious tread. Yet there was nothing else pious about him. He acted as if his church had no roof, as if it were an open theatre on which life simply shone its sun: his church, like his head, was uncovered. Into his prayers he folded every human occurrence, triumph, disaster, and banality. It was a Bunting family joke that Peter’s prayers were like life, and, as Mother put it, “take almost as long.” He stood, hands clasped and eyes closed, pursing his lips, and enjoined his congregation to pray to God for—everything. For the wonderful weather, for the lunch we will soon go and eat, for Muriel’s swift recovery, and so on.
Bowing my head to the pew so that I could smell the gist of the wood, my right hand caressing the old heating pipe that ran along one wall, I would listen to these prayers. “And we pray,” Peter intoned, “for the souls of the three priests murdered this week in El Salvador. Lord, hear our prayer. We pray also for the thousands made homeless by the recent flooding in Bangladesh, and ask you, Lord, to give them succour and shelter. Lord, hear our prayer. At this time, we also pray for Dr. Shields, whose cousin was involved in a car accident in Birmingham last Monday; and for Lance and Angela Menzies, whose son Austin died of leukemia on Friday. Lord, hear our prayer.”
I always felt I was hearing a page of atrocious international news and a page of tragic local news, each ripped from the newspaper. When I was a teenager, I used to hear my father with a kind of vindictive horror, my mouth and eyes open with amazement, convinced that such a list of misfortune
vandalized the very face of God. I’m more mature about these things now, I hope. Now I realize that, as far as Father was concerned, this catastrophe was God’s world, vandalized by man. It was because there was so much evildoing and pain that God’s correction was needed. Pain was not an argument against but for God. To tell you the truth, this argument still irritates me. Why should we need correction from Him who made us? And why has He made us so very flawed, and then just disappeared? The most charitable image of this particular God I can produce is that of a father who breaks his son’s leg just so that he can watch his son learn how to appeal to his dad for help in mending it.
At the end of the service, I used to greet the regulars: Terry Upsher (and, until two years ago, his deaf father), Susan Perez-Temple, Muriel Spedding. Terry did some gardening for my parents. He still lives on the main street in his father’s old house. When Terry’s dad was alive, they used to walk around together, Terry shouting at his unpleasant old dad, who walked always slightly ahead of him as if they were a Muslim husband and wife. Terry has never left the county, and has never been on a train. I am very fond of one of his verbal peculiarities. He says “the part of it is” when he means “the point is,” or “the thing is.” Sometimes, when I was little, we used to sit on the wall of the vicarage garden, and Terry might say, haltingly, “The part of it is … I don’t feel very champion at the moment,” or “The part of it is … that there bush is finished.” Then he would stand up and wander off.
Muriel Spedding was always at church. She is a kindly widow who used to take hot meals to Terry and his father when old Mr. Upsher was still alive. Otherwise, people said, the Upshers would have lived off bread and butter and jam.
Muriel is very trim, with tiny black lace-up shoes that seem, as is often the case with old ladies, to have become her feet. It is impossible to think of her ever taking them off. It is as if her feet are entombed in two little graves. Yet she is very alive and spry, and keeps her shape by dancing, and by playing an enormous electronic organ whose sound trembles. Muriel is worldly in an unworldly way, has travelled, and enjoys proving to me that she knows exactly where I live in London. “And how is Islington?” she would ask me conspiratorially, pulling girlishly at the buttons of her blouse.
And pompous Mr. Norrington was a regular, and also the old lady, Miss Ogilvie, who, curiously, used three sticks, one for the left leg and two for the right.
At the end of the service the fifteen or so worshippers clustered by the door and walked down the graveyard path very fast, with fugitive pleasure, as people always hurry the last room in an art gallery, eager to be done with all that observant piety. My mother used to say that this urgency had to do with their need to prepare Sunday lunch, but I’ve always disliked Sundays themselves—the awful calm of those afternoons—and I am sure that the sensible villagers felt exactly the same. Nietzsche, my old companion, wrote that only the industrious English could have invented the deep boredom of Sundays, the better to make us welcome a busy Victorian Monday.
No, the only people who clearly enjoyed every aspect of Sunday were my parents. After the service, in the vicarage kitchen, as the Sunday roast—beef, lamb, pork, in strict rotation—was dying a second time in the oven, my parents used to talk through the service. On the Sunday of my return last September, Mother lightly rebuked Peter.
“My dear, your sermon was a wee bit long and obscure today. I lost count of the number of literary allusions.”
“There were seven, precisely,” said Peter, mockwoundedly. “A biblical number.” He lit a cigarette, and dropped it.
“Twenty-five minutes is too long, my dear,” insisted Mother. “And I hope that cigarette stays on the floor.”
“Is it, now?” asked Peter gently, fiddling on the floor for the white cylinder. He stood up and smiled. “When I was a young man I once went to a church up in the Scottish Highlands, terribly strict and austere, where the antique minister, who must have been at least eighty, spoke for fiftyfive minutes—fifty-five minutes!—on the text ‘And Moses and Aaron fell flat on their faces.’ Now that was a sermon! Not a dry eye in the house by the end.”
“Nor an open one, I daresay,” laughed Sarah. “I thought that the church in the Highlands was the place where the minister was retiring and was giving his last sermon.”
“No, my dear, that was in Cornwall. Dick Hooper’s old church in Truro. Yes, it was his last sermon before his retirement, and the vain blighter was feeling very loved by all and very sorry for himself, and certain he would be missed, so he chose for his text ‘And they fell upon Paul’s neck, and kissed him.’ The vanity of it!”
Sunday always brought out my parents’ most ecclesiastical wit.