sat down in our family pew. I even bowed my head in prayer. ‘Only for a minute, of course. You don’t keep your head down and pray for this one and that one, you can do that at home. People will think you’re showing off if you do that. Just do what I do and you’ll be right.’
I jerked my head upright and stared at the wooden pulpit, the focus of all that went on in this particular rite. No cross, no candles, no stained glass. Just a large wooden box of a pulpit and behind it, blocking the east end, the pipes of the organ. As a child, my eye had gone round and round the church looking for some interesting feature to rest upon. There had been nothing then and there was nothing now, except the broad pastel spaces of the unadorned walls and ceiling. Through endless hours of boredom I had covered those spaces in drawings and paintings. Bigger than the biggest drawing book, or the generous sheets of grey paper for free expression in school, those spaces were my comfort, my defence against the torrent of angry words which poured down upon us, Sunday after Sunday.
At the age of twelve, when I learned that Michelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it came as no surprise to me. I simply assumed he had suffered as I had and had come up with the same solution to save his sanity.
A door clicked open at the foot of the pulpit and the choir filed in self-consciously. I had once been a member of that choir and a Sunday school teacher as well. I had read the lessons on Children’s Sunday and sung solos at Harvest. I had been complimented afterwards by various old ladies and the good-natured verger and then I had been stripped down by Mother.
‘You weren’t nearly loud enough, couldn’t hear you behind a wet newspaper. You must remember half those men at the back of the church are deaf.’
‘Then why don’t they sit at the front?’
‘Don’t you be cheeky with me. You know perfectly well that no one sits at the front.’
There were never any answers to Mother, only the answers she expected from you. And woe betide you when you couldn’t come up with them.
She would sit throughout the service, her large family Bible unopened on her knee, a look of concentration on her face. Once home again, over lunch, she would declare her verdict on the congregation. It always seemed to me she was more acutely aware of the sins of her fellow men and women than the Almighty. Had He been a member of her staff and fulfilled His promises of retribution so ineffectually, He would most certainly have been given the push.
‘I don’t know how that man can sit there on a Sunday with his shoes shining, the way he’s carrying on with your woman in Lonsdale Street. Bold as brass he is, goes in and out, doesn’t care who sees him. Brings her bunches of flowers. At her age. And him with two good-looking sons and one of them the manager of Lipton’s.’
A voluminous, black figure appeared at the foot of the pulpit stair, mounted purposefully, ran his eye over the congregation and threw his arms in the air.
‘Brethren, let us ask forgiveness for our manifold sins.’
I bowed my head gratefully. I prayed for the energy to stand up and slip noiselessly down the aisle, now, when no one could stare at me too obviously, because they were supposed to be bowed in prayer.
But my prayer went unanswered. My legs received no strengthening power and my hands began to sweat profusely. I could shield my eyes from this ranting figure, but about my ears I could do nothing.
How I got through that service I shall never know. I remember I kept hallucinating on the sight of William Neill’s battered car. I could see myself crossing the road, hurrying across the White Walk and along the side of the cricket pitch to where it would be parked, but instead I sat with my head throbbing for over an hour, unable to shut out anything going on around me or coming back to me from a past so painful I had been doing my best to forget it for years.
When the organ finally gave the signal to depart, I had to hold on to the pew in front of me as I got to my feet. Of walking back down the aisle, I remember nothing. A crush of bodies in the vestibule, words I couldn’t distinguish. And then, the miracle. I have never stopped believing in miracles. Parked at the foot of the steps where no one except the minister ever parks was William Neill’s car.
He’d spotted me before I was able to distinguish his bent figure among the departing worshippers.
‘In you get, Deirdre,’ he said as he opened the door for me. ‘You got good value this mornin’. Our man must have been wantin’ his lunch.’
Dear William Neill. The sight of his whiskery brown face did more to restore my faith in humanity than a visitation from a whole delegation of angels. I sat back in my seat and watched the dispersing crowds who wandered in front of the car as if we were parked in a pedestrian area rather than waiting at a stop line to cross the main Armagh to Portadown road.
‘They’re always like this on Sunday mornin’,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So full o’ the Holy Spirit they think nuthin can git them.’
I laughed then, but inside my head I added, ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with the belief business. That’s why I want no part of it.’ As far as I could see belief was all about insulating yourself from the reality of life and particularly from anything you’d rather not face up to. I was sure at that moment that nothing would ever get me back inside a church ever again.
‘Look, Deirdre, look.’
We lurched to a halt with a disregard for the cars behind us equal to that of the pedestrians who had strolled across in front of us. I followed the pointing finger into the brilliant triangle of sky between the roof of the Courthouse and the distant twin spires of the Roman Catholic cathedral.
He said they were pigeons, but I could see only doves. Pure white against the blue, they were circling in close formation, rising and falling in an aerial ballet that was a pure delight.
Suddenly, I saw another dove and remembered immediately the small church where I had found it. Back last March, working on an article for Travelling East, I had driven around Norfolk and Suffolk visiting churches from a list the editor had made for me. The church with the dove was not a grand one, rather small as East Anglian parish churches go, with no beautiful glass or carving, but full of a marvellously clear light and a deep stillness. In the south aisle, on a tomb chest, I found a stone statue of St Francis and the dove was in his hands. At his feet someone had arranged a handful of violets in a piece of bark filled with moss.
I looked around me. The church was full of flowers, as it would be, the week after Easter. There were sprays of blossom, jugs of daffodils, some irises and forsythia and beech leaves just beginning to unfurl. Nothing from shops or garden centres. Some of the arrangements were in clean jam pots, some in metal troughs full of chickenwire, where fronds of ivy had been used to cover up disintegrating, much-used oasis and spots of rust. Offerings made in love that meant something to the people who made them. I so envied them.
As I knelt down to take my pictures of the gentle saint, whose story I have always loved, I thought of the generations of knees that had worn the chancel step, the bottoms that had polished smooth the ancient wooden benches. I knew I envied them too.
When I stood up, a great shaft of sunlight pierced the piled white cloud and filled the south aisle with sudden brightness, picking out every detail of the bareheaded saint. I lingered as long as I could, reluctant to go, but I got very cold and began to feel anxious about all I still had to do. I returned the key, as I had been instructed, to the peg basket in the garden shed of the cottage directly across the road, and drove off rather faster than I should have done.
‘Home
