Pilgrimage to a lost faith

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2003 by Frank White

FOR what follows, the blame must lie squarely with Pevsner and those later writers who had the energy and dedication to bring his books up to date.

Not long ago, someone I hold dear presented me with a copy of Pevsner's Lincolnshire, relevant to me because I now live in that comfortably quiet and reflective county. Fingering through the densely printed pages, faintly intimidated by their liberal sprinklings of words which those in the know generally keep as secrets unto themselves -- words such as baldacchino, astragal and trumeau -- I came across an entry that gave me a sudden, delighted start.

Just across the fields from here -- so close that if I now cared to stand up and look through the window I could see its lonely tower against the western sky -- there stands the church of Covenham St. Bartholomew, sadly now redundant. And this is what Pevsner has to say about it: 'If the tracery can be trusted, the chancel and S transept are Dec to Perp, with ogee-headed lights. The nave windows have Perp style panel tracery. The FONT, a fine Perp octagonal piece with carvings in the East Anglian tradition ... has been transferred to All Saints' Parish Church, Newton Heath, Manchester ... BENCH ENDS. Fragments re-used in two chairs'.

What affected me about all that was not the ogee-headed lights, nor the Perp, nor the Dec, nor even the importance of BENCH ENDS which apparently justified capital letters, but the fact that in coming to live in this place I appeared to have exchanged places with a font in the East Anglian tradition.

Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I spent a great deal of my time in All Saints' Parish Church, Newton Heath, Manchester, singing my heart out as a chorister. Between there and here, then and now, lie not merely a hundred and thirty miles but, so far as I'm concerned, a complete lifetime and a long descent from blissful grace and certainty into intellectual arrogance and cynical old age.

However, cynicism does not always necessarily drive away remembrance. In the days that followed I found myself plagued with images of long forgotten faces, of stained glass windows and of ghostly white surplices drifting through vestry openings, all now as clear as day. Sudden organ chords, in major and minor keys, disturbed my reveries in the bath. I actually awoke one morning with the words, 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, Oh Lord', running through my head as though Evensong were just about to begin in the house somewhere, and in the end I decided that there was nothing for it but to visit my old church again after sixty years.

As a boy, my belief was inviolable. My God was in every beam of sunlight and in every shadowy corner. To sing His praise and hear His words were profoundly satisfying and I prayed not once but several times a day for everyone and everything in my life, including, I remember, my dog and someone called Mr. Baldwin who seemed to matter a great deal to my parents. The Rector, a certain Rev. O.S.S. Edwards, whose voice during services, murmuring gently into all the remote spaces of the church, delivered God's messages to us, was to me infinitely more than a mere mortal in fancy dress. Standing aloft in his pulpit, or kneeling at prayer, or emerging from the door of his vast rectory beyond the graveyard, he embodied for me always the awesome sanctity of Jesus and the angels. When he spoke to me, I was transfixed, although I have to say that that didn't happen very often. And recalling, as I do now, that acute religious devotion, I can actually feel something of its intensity, as though, from the deepest part of my mind where it has lain for so long, it is still able to whisper chiding echoes down the years.

At All Saints' Church, Newton Heath, there were something like twenty of us choir boys and half that number of men whose solid tones threaded their way neatly between our own. But in due course events brought changes.

One September morning, after Matins, I walked along Culcheth Lane, Newton Heath, to the cricket ground, at the perimeter of which my father had an allotment. During the journey I was accosted three times to be told that, during Matins, war had been declared. I found my father in his greenhouse and delivered the news. He had been a regular soldier and had gone to France with the first of them in August, 1914. He knew what war was all about. He sank on to the low wall of the greenhouse trough and I saw tears rolling down his face.

Thereafter, as a result of evacuation, that choir of twenty boys diminished to a choir of two and for a year the admirable Wilf Kirkland and I -- stout-hearted duo -- faced our front and braved it out alone, leading a congregation which in those days of tension and anxiety filled every pew.

How well I remember sitting there in the choir stalls at Evensong during those months, gazing away at my beloved 0. 5. 5. Edwards as he climbed the six steps into the pulpit. There he would pause for a moment. From the shaded light over the little ledge on which he had laid the papers of his sermon, a pale yellow glow reached up to his face and bathed it in halo tints. 'Before I begin', he would say.... And then, on to the motionless heads of the congregation, he would gently lay the names of those of the parish who that week had lost their lives in action.