Country life
The priests of yesteryear
Leanda de Lisle
Ae the clergy all that they used to be? We have a lady vicar in Market Bosworth who seems very worthy and our Catholic priest is a most amiable fellow. I I suppose this is just as well, but my father and I enjoyed comparing notes on some of the more eccentric characters we have come across in the country.
My father particularly remembers Canon Green, the parish priest in New- bury just after the war. He preached against Mussolini and Oscar Wilde and when he got very excited he would get them confused. 'That great, fat, Pontine bullfrog, Oscar Wilde, who is most cer- tainly burning in hell,' he would holler at his shattered congregation. Strangely, my father's daily describes Canon Green as 'very down to earth'.
Perhaps he was, compared to the Cor- nish vicar of Warleggen who painted the inside of the parish church in black and yellow stripes like a bumble-bee. He must have been very potty because his congre- gation eventually deserted him, and he was forced to replace them with cardboard figures. In the end, the poor fellow fell downstairs and broke his neck, but that wasn't the end of the matter.
When Daphne du Maurier told his suc- cessor that she had seen the previous incumbent walking in the garden when she was a child, the new vicar replied, 'He still walks'. Well, so many religious folk do. Until about three years ago, we had a parish priest in Whitwick, Leicestershire, who would tell us all about the ghosts of his predecessors. He complained that they kept him up at night by tapping on his window.
This priest is one of the very few who have been able to shake me out of the (rather irreligious) trance I go into at the beginning of a sermon. On one occasion he complained that the bishop was trying to kill him — His Grace had insisted on having an enormous crucifix suspended just over where he stood when he gave mass. Perhaps he was right. He was a bit of a rebel, and the Catholic hierarchy don't care for rebels.
Another Sunday, he told us the bishop had instructed him to talk about our ecu- menical links with the Church of England. He started by discussing woman priests. 'Did you see those women wearing the Roman collar on the television last night?' he thundered in his broad Irish accent, 'Didn't they look ridiculous?' That was about as ecumenical as it got.
Sadly, however, he didn't go in for really hell-fire sermons. One of the best was sure- ly delivered by my father's old headmaster at St John's — the Jesuit prep school. He would tell the little boys to 'imagine a mountain of sand. Every thousand years a bird flies over and takes one grain. Imagine how long it would take for the mountain of sand to disappear. This is nothing com- pared to the length of time you would spend in hell.'
Great stuff — yet today it seems even Jesuits have mellowed and become quite ordinary. We were married by one, but the strangest thing about him was his back- ground. His grandmother frightened his grandfather to death. I never quite under- stood how, but it was something to do with hiding shoes. His parents were fabulously rich, and his brother lives a life of extraor- dinary luxury — he has never shaved, yet he has no beard; a barber has always done it for him.
Mind you, perhaps our friend seemed quite sane because he worked in London. Even the tiniest quirk seems bigger and more exaggerated in the quiet normality of the countryside. My father tells me the tale of a classical scholar washed up in Somer- set. `Ah, but you have Tertullian against you, I hear you cry,' he uttered during one of the erudite sermons he directed at bemused yokels. Doubtless he would have sounded less dotty in St Paul's cathedral.
My parents' new parish priest is African. As home-grown priests are in ever shorter supply, Africa now has to send missionaries to these godless islands. I have great hopes that amongst their ranks we will find priests with new and more exotic eccentricities. The glazed expression I have during ser- mons these days is giving the children a very bad impression.
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