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Doing my duty
WHEN I looked at the diary the day before, I groaned. It’s one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time, but when it actually comes around, you wail: “But I really don’t have the space to sacrifice a whole day! I’ve my fees returns to do, and that pastoral visit that’ll turn into a funeral if I leave it much longer!”
You huffily get into your car and drive off; but, by the time you arrive at your destination, you’re emotionally as well as physically in a different place. I’m talking about doing Cathedral Chaplaincy duty.
For years I had, like most parish clergy, just binned the round robin asking us to help, but one day I thought “Why not?” and applied.
I love Chichester Cathedral, and have known it for most of my life. I remember, as a very little be-ruffed choirboy in the village-church choir, going to evensong and being spellbound by the sound produced by boys no older than I was.
Later, as a schoolboy in Chichester bunking off games, I’d wander round (after a sausage roll and chips from the Bishop Bell tea rooms) looking at the building with wonder: in the Cathedral Treasury there was (and indeed still is) from the tomb of an anonymous 13th-century bishop a chalice that I loved (strange child that I was) and always went to say “hello” to, with my nose pressed against the glass: it was with a reproduction of this chalice that I celebrated my first mass some 20 years later.
But, above all, it was my deaconing by the venerable Bishop Eric Kemp, as I knelt on the dais in front of the Arundel Screen, which makes me feel it’s my home cathedral and always will be.
Cake and tombs
YOU are supposed to read prayers on the hour every hour. You are encouraged to start at 10 a.m. (invariably I don’t), but aren’t required to stay till 4 p.m. (invariably I do). You are entitled to morning coffee (and cake), lunch (and cake), and tea (and cake). The cake is very good.
In return for all these calories, you resist the urge to nestle in a congenial corner with a good book. You wander round in a clockwise direction looking benign and approachable, which I’m quite good at doing.
During the six or so hours of wandering, you sense the fabric and feel of the building change as the light changes, beginning with the white morning light of the clear glass of the north transept, and finishing with the gentle, mottled coloured light of the south transept in the afternoon. (I was enchanted by the splash of stained-glass light which bathed the toes of Bishop Durnford’s buckled shoes, on his austere 19th-century funerary effigy, a perky rose pink.)
You have time to study the monuments and memorials, and they are fascinating, moving, and hilarious by turns.
Of course, the most famous are the magnificent 14th-century effigies of Richard Fitzalan and his Lady wife lying hand in hand, written about by Philip Larkin in his poem “An Arundel Tomb” (The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber), which begins:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely
shown
As jointed armour, stiffened
pleat,
And that faint hint of the
absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.
The poem finishes with one of his most famous lines: “What will survive of us is love.”
Thickening horror
THERE are, though, other wonderful memorials well worth a look. I was touched by the tablet to the unfortunate Archibould Noah Udny, sixth son of George and Temperance Sophia Udny, a Bengal civil servant who died in the 20th year of his age “on his voyage from India to this country for the benefit of his health”.
Then there’s my favourite, the gloriously florid memorial to the poet William Collins (a close relative, I suspect, of Jane Austen’s dodgy clergyman), who “Pass’d in Madd’ning Life’s Feverish Dream While Rays of Genius only serv’d to show The Thickening Horror & Exalt his woe.” Goodness!
People power
AS SO OFTEN, it’s the people you meet as you perambulate who make the day fun and help it to pass quickly. I met people from York and Coventry, Devizes and Bristol, South Africa and the Philippines — all enthusiastic and wanting to share their stories.
Some had never been in before; others were regular visitors. Some rarely darkened the doors of a church; others were cheerful retired clergy revelling in freedom (note to self: there is hope). There were even, I’m delighted to say, loyal readers of the Church Times.
But the memory I’ll keep is of a little boy called Joseph. Chatting to his parents, I discovered that only a couple of months ago he had been baptised at St Margaret’s, Ifield, in Crawley, the church where I served my curacy. I watched him running in the south transept, enthralled with the splashes of colour cast on the ancient flagstones by the painted windows, and jumping in them as if they were puddles of multi-coloured raindrops.
The Revd John Wall is Team Rector in the Moulsecoomb Team Ministry in Brighton.
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