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Diary
by John Wall
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| Far from the pavilions
I BUMPED into Jenny in the street. In her late 50s, she was neat, clean, and above all, sober. She grinned and said, in a broad Glaswegian accent: “Fatha’ John, I’ve bin off the sauce now fa’ two years!” I was thrilled.
I remember the first time I met her, at the bereavement visit for her partner, Dave. It was in one of those strange bits of Brighton where opulence sits cheek by jowl with poverty. In a street two down from a former parishioner’s house complete with orangery, Regency silver, and a David Hockney original, Jenny and Dave’s bedsit was one of those places where you needed to think carefully about what you were going to wear — it had to be, if not disposable, at least washable.
It was early evening, and I rang the entry buzzer; after a few moments, a bleary Scottish voice let me in. They were sitting there on the bed and a chair: Jenny; a young friend of hers with beard and ponytail; and Mandy, a little mongrel dog. Mandy was the only one sober, but was much preoccupied with scratching. I sat down, gingerly, with a subsequent degree of regret when I realised I had sat in something wet.
We went through Dave’s life, his stint in the army, and then his gradual slide into drug dependency and alcoholism. We sorted out a hymn from Jenny’s childhood and worked out the funeral. I left feeling rather dispirited, but (judging from my own scratching) with a few of Mandy’s little friends.
I stuck my clothes in the washing machine and poured a large gin and tonic.
Not so bright or beautiful THE FUNERAL was a few days later, in one of the local crems. There were about 20 people there, all restless and in different stages of sozzledness. We had a go at “All things bright and beautiful”, and then I talked about Dave, with various nods and laughs from the congregation. I said how much his little mongrel had meant to him, and there was a heartfelt cry from Jenny: “Och, Fatha’ John, thank you for mentioning Mandy the dog!” I steered on to the committal, and the curtains closed. I had turned to do the final blessing when suddenly the ponytailed friend, now very much the worse for wear, lurched over to the curtained catafalque and, peering in, shouted: “It’s a load of ******* rubbish — he’s still there!” I saw Jenny a little while after, but then, when her housing block was demolished, she dropped off my pastoral radar. A rich reward IT ALL reminded me of one of my first glimpses of the grimmer side of Brighton life. A batch of pure heroin had been doing the rounds on the streets, and six users had died. I took the funeral of one of them — a young man in his thirties who had died alone on Brighton beach. I warned the crematorium staff that the service could well be a bit hairy: they nodded sagely, and then scarpered — not one was to be seen. The chapel was packed, and it was absolute chaos. The dead man’s girlfriend and little girl were sitting, traumatised, at the front. People were wandering in and out with their dogs and, almost at random, were standing up and giving stumbling but deeply sincere tributes. Some drifted over and, rather touchingly, left cans of Irn-Bru in tribute on the coffin: the pusher, who had supplied the man in it with the drugs that killed him, sat at the back crying uncontrollably. In the end, I decided to cut my losses and head straight for the committal before it all got too far out of hand. But, as I was intoning “earth to earth, ashes to ashes”, two mourners, howling, lunged forward to grab hold of the coffin. I gently but firmly pulled them off before the curtains closed. Yes, it was all a bit of a mess, with much brokenness and pain, but in it all there was a fragile and moving sense of community and belonging among this shifting group of people — the lack of which had probably brought them to their sorry state in the first place. In this job, we often parachute into people’s lives and then drop out again without ever knowing what happens subsequently. This was why I was so pleased to see Jenny. That is not her real name, of course, and neither are Dave and Mandy, but all the rest of the story is true. “Jenny” will stick in my mind as a concrete, crystalline proof that little miracles can happen. It is ultimately what makes a priestly life do-able. The Revd John Wall is Team Rector in the Moulsecoomb Team Ministry in Brighton. |
