Bad Blood (12 page)

All of this lent extra charm to the public service, his sermon the climax, when he'd nerve himself to solemnity, grip the pulpit edge with one hand and raise the other in the orator's timeless pose. His gestures were vigorous, I remember, and the diary offers confirmation of a sort, for after one of his
other
acts, the ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell' monologue, he notes the next morning that his arm is aching ‘from the acting'. The diaries don't have sermon notes, though, only teasing lists of his themes (in autumn 1934 ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray', ‘Priggishness', ‘The Ethics of Job'). For fuller versions he kept separate little red books, of which one has survived. This relic was definitely not preserved by Grandma, but handed on along with the books and pipes and walking sticks. It's a motley collection of outlines, ideas and scripts, some of them dating from years before he came to Hanmer. Nonetheless it helps to give some flavour of his preaching style.

He was best on other worlds. This didn't only mean heaven and hell, for his favourite writers were Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets, Scott, Dickens, Wilde, Wells, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. However, he was also surprisingly well supplied with earthy anecdotes. For instance, under the heading ‘The Mountain and the Valley' (ecstasy vs. prudence), there's a note that goes:

Illus: Martha and Mary
Countryman asked which he would prefer
Martha before dinner
Mary after dinner

And there's a pungent political fable – undated but surely designed for Bolshie South Wales sensibilities.

Illus: Tom Paine's
Rights of Man
was a book so obnoxious that the government of the day strictly interdicted its sale. An old bookseller in Glamorganshire strongly suspected of Radical proclivities discovered that he was being watched by government spies, and one day he wrapped up a book in brown paper and wrote on the back of it these words, ‘The Rights of Man', and placed it in his little shop window for sale. The government spies eagerly purchased the book for much more than its market value, hurriedly opened it, and found to their bitter disappointment that it was a copy of the Holy Bible. That old Welshman was a clever trickster; but he was something more – he was a true seer . . .

He rose to different occasions with relish, and like a jackdaw picked up eye-catching phrases and stowed them away. There's a list of famous last words, which – he notes – are often revealingly characteristic; and rather unfairly he juxtaposes Lord Palmerston (‘Where are those Belgian dispatches?') and Chesterton (‘Give the gentleman a chair') with Jesus – ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Even his humour tended to black.

The sermon for which the most layers of notes survive is a ‘Special Sermon for Holy Week' about the infamy and agony of Judas. You can see him working it up from fairly tame beginnings: ‘Ambitious . . . But his ambition was wholly secular . . . not repentance but remorse . . . A lump of ice.' Gradually Judas's character acquires new depths and his fate starts to look more dubious. The thirty pieces of silver for which he betrayed Christ are only about £4 in current money, so that the profit motive won't work; and there is something ‘horribly suggestive'
about the fact that there were no tears, for even Judas might have been saved if he'd truly repented. And then, in the final version, Judas becomes a fully tragic and paradoxical figure:

One heretical sect invented the story that Judas, knowing it to be the will of both Father and Son that Jesus should be brought to suffer death by an act of betrayal in order that the world might be free, had sorrowfully taken the eternal infamy upon himself. If this were so he would in a sense deserve as much merit as Jesus.

These enterprising interpreters were wrong, of course: Judas's real motives were to force Jesus to declare himself King and to take credit for his foresight by becoming a power in the new regime. When he found out how wrong he'd been he committed suicide in self-pity and disappointment. No tears, but ‘possibly there mingled with his agony . . . some confused thought that in the world of the dead, behind the veil, he might meet his Lord and confess his guilt'. Did Judas kill himself to rejoin Jesus? Well, perhaps not . . . Having sown the seeds of his own near-heresy, Grandpa returns to the fold with the metaphor of the frozen heart that cannot relent – ‘You might pound a lump of ice with a pestle into a thousand fragments but it would still continue to be ice . . . A man may try to make himself contrite . . . But come to Jesus. Let him bask in the beams of His Sun of righteousness.'

The real mystery lies in Divine Grace. But that leaves plenty of room for our own vertiginous speculations. He was very taken with the baroque devices of seventeenth-century poets, who also enjoyed punning on sun/Son and whose work was only then becoming fashionable again. His favourite seems to have been saintly but insidious George Herbert, whose poem ‘The Altar', which is altar-shaped on the page, he copies out
in full. ‘A broken Altar Lord Thy servant rears, / Made of a heart, and cemented with tears . . .' Herbert's habit of posing as a plain man, the mere vicar of a country parish, while actually cultivating deep, dizzying ironies, must have appealed to him a lot. It certainly intrigued me. Herbert figured large in the thesis on ‘Poems about Poetry in the Seventeenth Century' I wrote in the 1960s. I only realised later, with a small shudder, that I was dissecting Grandpa's quotations, recognising the lines he'd picked out. I must have filed them for future reference unawares. Now, not even a conscious effort of memory will put the words into his mouth and bring back his speaking voice, although I can see him readily enough in my mind's eye, gaunt and tense with the effort of persuasion.

That's how he was standing when the first stroke got him – in the pulpit, in mid-flow. A couple of basses from the back row of the choir scooped him up and he was carried cradled in their arms not, for some reason, across to the vestry, but straight down the main aisle and through the doors in the wooden screen into the belfry. The rest of the choir processed behind and then we all stood around waiting for the doctor for what seemed a long time, although one of the Drs McColl would surely have been among the congregation.

Grandpa lay on the floor with his head cushioned on some threadbare hassocks in the dazzling sunshine that poured through the high windows. The vestry was dark and stuffy; here it was bright, the bare wooden ceiling with the holes through which the bell ropes dangled was more than twenty feet up and there was a great expanse of empty air. On the walls hung a few brittle pieces of armour from the Civil War which Mr Downward's predecessors had unearthed in the churchyard. The Hanmer family were Royalists and Cromwell's soldiers had stabled their horses in the church, and left behind
gauntlets with missing fingers, bits and spurs to prove it. These flaking relics apart, the belfry was bare and clean and open, and Grandpa looked dreadfully out of place there, exposed in that flat light. For a long moment everything was still. Then the doctor bent over him with a stethoscope, we were shepherded away and when I saw him next he was in a chair in his study, back from the brink and in a very bad temper.

Finding him himself again I was even more sure that he was immortal. The permanence of grown-up people is something children tend to take for granted and my generation was doubly smug, for the war had given death by violence, bombs and bullets such imaginative currency that ordinary mortality faded out of the picture. Grandpa's closeness to death was part of his character and his job, so that his having got closer didn't alert me to the truth. He just became more bony and bloody-minded. He'd sit by the kitchen fire with a toasting-fork watching the bread blacken. Or he'd plan a feast and bury potatoes in the embers to bake, and then dismantle the fire an hour later looking for them, beating lumps of coal to smithereens with the poker. He'd dun visitors for extra, forbidden tobacco. One way or another he contrived to surround himself with a cloud of smoke, which kept Hilda at bay and added to the general grime. He even claimed he cleaned his teeth with soot, since it was gritty, which was all that mattered. But he had so few teeth of his own (and those so stained) that it was hard to tell if it made any difference. Housebound, for me he simply converged with his myth.

I needed him to stay the same so that I could go on playing the vicarage child. Even being locked down the horrible cellar by Grandma for being naughty, although terrifying, was not so threatening as the return of my father from the army and the birth of my brother when I was six. My real family didn't
seem congenial to me at all but – a bit like school – interested in tidiness and obedience, and things I was no good at. My claims to specialness were books, the church and my fund of creepy stories – Grandpa's gifts, all associated with the dark spaces of the vicarage and the vestry, and with the familiar feeling of discontent and want, in which Grandma shared too. So I clung to the idea of him in the face of his decline and I sided with him in secret, listening from the stairs when my father joined in the shouting matches about the bills and dilapidations, and deplored the muddle and irresponsibility of vicarage ways.

And it wasn't just a question of accounts that didn't add up. The grandparents stood for anarchy of all sorts. She was like a travesty of the new feminine housewifely virtues (too feminine to wash or clean) and he wasn't at all a manly man, despite his philandering. It was probably the way he colluded with women, at least the aspiring ones and the ones at a loose end, that made him attractive. His not having an outdoor job, even one that took him to an office, and his habit of living irritably in his imagination, charmed his spinster fans as well as me. What authority he had was actorish and equivocal. So post-war moral rearmament, with everyone conscripted to normality and standing to attention, didn't get far in the vicarage. My parents, though, were moving out into a new council house up the lane from Hanmer, a house designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert. I was going, too, but the upheaval happened in slow motion. We moved piecemeal. I called at the vicarage every day after school and we still went into church at all hours. The new open-plan living-room wasn't where I lived, yet.

Thanks to the vicarage I'd been programmed with a love of
dark corners and ingrained with disrespect. I knew how to hide in books. If need be I could build a kind of nest out of any old scraps of print I found around. The taste for words Grandpa had given me was thoroughly promiscuous. I read everything, in no particular order – Rupert Bear, Captain Blood, Tarzan, Alice, Valma's and Billy's adolescent annuals featuring biplanes tied together with string and schoolgirl intrigues made more mysterious by bobbed hair and gymslips, and games like lacrosse. Edgar Rice Burroughs has Tarzan learn to read all by himself in the jungle: he comes across his dead parents' camp and discovers mouldering books alongside their nice clean bones. At first he thinks the black letters are insects, and tries to pick them off the page and eat them, then he understands. But although he can read and even write, he can't speak at all. This was more or less my condition too, I got more and more clumsy in speech as I grew, and I felt for Tarzan. True, I hadn't figured out literacy alone and unaided, but once Grandpa had taught me to read, he simply set me loose to pore and skip as I pleased. There was nothing reverent about reading, nor was reading the only thing you could do in this paper forest. He licensed me to misbehave. Once, when I was five and bored, he'd shown me how to use the big scissors and I cut out – or cut up – the ladies from the Oxendales catalogue in their New Look long skirts and picture hats. This caused a memorable fuss when my mother and Grandma came home. Playing with sharp things was utterly forbidden, of course; and also – maliciously – he'd encouraged me to mutilate the very stuff of their dreams.

If he had lived longer we'd doubtless have grown apart. He'd have got fed up and I'd have lost faith in him. But he didn't betray me as he had all the others. Instead, he died and cunningly vanished into the dark with his mystique intact. The
second stroke, in 1952, a couple of years after the first, poleaxed him. He lay in bed in a coma in the small back sitting-room downstairs, the doctor came and drank whisky and left, callers were turned away and the house was full of hopeless whispers.

Grandma, unrelenting to the last, insisted on having him shifted, moribund as he was, so that she could change the bed under him – otherwise, she said, he'd only spoil the good mattress with the incontinence of his end. Nothing had changed for her, he was as offensive as ever, possibly even doing it on purpose. Death could not part them any more than life already had – but that meant that his dying didn't release her from her outrage and resentment. She was the only person at the time who made me feel better in my disbelieving and desolate state, because she made him seem still alive in a way. Sensing this, Uncle Billy – ever the zealous realist – was determined that I should see for myself that physical death was final and that was that. Despite my mother's protests he hauled me in, squirming, to kiss the corpse goodbye. Grandpa lay on the bed in his black skirts, not coffined yet, hands crossed on his hollow chest and his jaw tied up with a big white handkerchief knotted on the top of his head like Marley's ghost in
A Christmas Carol
. He was the first dead person I'd seen and would be the last for a long time, and if Billy had really wanted to dispel my sense of Grandpa's unique mystery he didn't succeed. This last scene, so dramatically in keeping with his character, completed Grandpa's apotheosis.

I blurted out at school the story of our last macabre meeting, with shaming results. On the day of his funeral, which I wasn't allowed to attend, the whole class was supposed to be sitting in respectful silence. Actually, we were whispering and smothering giggles. The church bell was tolling, almost directly over our heads it seemed (the school was next door to the church), and
we had worked ourselves up into a state of creepy euphoria. Maybe he wasn't quite dead after all. Nerys Jones, the pale girl I sat next to, sent a shudder round by suggesting that the noise of the bell would be bound to wake him up. He'd sit bolt upright in his coffin, his jaw bound up as though he'd got toothache – so we pictured him – and give the grand congregation a real fright. We convulsed with laughter at this tasteless vision and roused the headmaster from his reverie. He'd been about to slip into church at the last minute. Now he took extra time out to give Nerys a tremendous telling-off that reduced her to tears. Decorum dictated that I couldn't be held responsible and she became the scapegoat, poor Nerys, who died young herself of a heart weakened by childhood rheumatic fever. Although Mr Palmer didn't punish me, I cried bitterly too. My bad behaviour was, I suppose, part of the private ritual by which I buried Grandpa in my mind, where of course he lived on, my malcontent mentor. He was the source of my sense of having an inner topography, a sort of vicarage soul; also the author of my bookishness, who looked over the shoulder of the actual author of every book I read for years afterwards.