Vacancy blues
IF MONDAY of last week was “Blue Monday”, it may not have been the best day to start reading a new novel about a buttoned-up churchwarden who is heading for a breakdown during a difficult interregnum.

”Difficult” is an understatement here. But it is my use of the word “interregnum” which may be queried, since we are now enjoined to refer to a parish that is between incumbents as being “in vacancy” — though it is a mystery to me why it is ecclesiologically worse to imply that the queen bee (male or female) has left the hive than to imply that there are no bees at all.

In Margery Roberts’s first novel, The Churchwarden, the difference becomes increasingly academic, how­­­ever. The departure of the pop­ular high-church incumbent from St Benet’s, in London, is fol­lowed all too soon by that of his fan club. Holding the fort are two church­wardens, of whom the epony­mous one is an emotionally stunted bachelor whose chief comforts are the language of the BCP and con­tem­plating the fine workmanship of the parish’s excellent vestment col­lection.

To crank up the pressure, the diocese has hived off the parsonage house, and the Archdeacon is a curt and devious Evangelical with an animus towards congregations of a Prayer Book Catholic tradition. The unhappy Christopher is confronted with the prospect, he thinks, of having to fall in with a mumsy woman priest near by, or even of being church-planted by the wildly successful Christ Church, with its “blokes” of whom all speak well.

Mrs Roberts, a well-known figure in London in connection with
both the Society of the Faith and a certain church on an island in the Strand, knows her C of E, and how personal agendas can stultify parish life when the bigger picture is forgotten. Although some of the characters here may be a little more extreme than they would be in reality, her story gradually gets a grip on you.

It has something of the pro­gressive claustrophobia of Michael Arditti’s The Celibate (both tapping into the neurotic vein that most novelists, except, bless her, Barbara Pym, seem to find the most interest­ing aspect of Anglo-Catholicism).

I think the author misses a few tricks about the less winsome aspects of pastoral reorganisation and church-planting strategy — a world in which one or two of the Commandments can sometimes seem to have been sawn off the bottom of the board — but I suppose, as a colleague often re­­minds me, it’s a fine thing when any­­­one’s thinking strategically at all.

*i2i Publishing, £8.95 (CT Bookshop £8.05); 978-0-9554805-8-2

Lost and found
RECENT coverage of the centenary of the wartime National Mission of Repentance and Hope solved a mystery for the Revd Richard Thorn­­­burgh, whose benefice of The Saints, in Suffolk, includes St Mary’s, Flix­ton, near Bungay.

He discovered a banner “stored and forgotten” in the tower a couple of years ago, and, on the arrival of the First World War centenary, he displayed it on the north-aisle wall; but he had no idea about its origins until he read in these pages about the National Mission. In particular, the Revd Robert Beaken’s article (Faith, 4 November) suggested to him that Flixton must have been a recipient of the Archbishop’s Mes­sengers and Lady Messengers.

It seems likely that the banner is a rare survival of a liturgical prop that, dated for one occasion, could easily have been treated as ephem­eral and recycled.

At St Mary’s, now under massive and ex­­pensive roof restoration, it is go­­ing to be cherished. Donations wel­come, the Rector adds, showing that the word “Hope” on the banner isn’t wasted on one person at least.

www.suffolksaints.info

Labourer’s task
NO DOUBT the anniversary passed most people quietly by, but William Marsden died on 16 January exactly 150 years ago; and many have much of personal significance to thank him for, because I write of the surgeon, not the orientalist.

He founded both the Royal Free Hospital (1828) and what became the Brompton Cancer Hospital and is now the Royal Marsden (1851), whose expertise in the oncological field is of benefit to patients far beyond the capital.

The anniversary wasn’t forgotten at St Andrew’s, Holborn, in London last week, where Marsden has a monument, and where they cele­brated a special sung requiem for him on Wednesday evening. It was because he found a dying young woman on the steps of St Andrew’s one night, and was unable to find a place for her to be treated, that he sought to set up a free hospital to which “poverty and sickness are the only passports.”

OTHER STORIES

Diary

John Pridmore:  IT IS 2014, and we cannot but remember. Each of us will be observing the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in his or her own way. I dwell on a diary, the tiny 1916 Boy Scouts Diary that, 16 years ago, I picked up from a stall at a Salvation Army fête.

I am told that there were mem­bers of the congregation for that service who had been treated at the Royal Marsden, and were very much moved by the opportunity to do something for this great soul in return. There will be a “big” com­memoration later in the year.

Biblical misprint
I BELATEDLY report a biblical misprint that one of our features (2 December) failed to pick up, let alone the proofreaders of the first edition of the Jerusalem Bible.

The Very Revd Geoffrey Marshall, of Oakwood, near Derby, tells us that his father gave him a copy of that edition of the Bible for Christmas in 1966. Psalm 122.6 reads: “Pay for peace in Jeru­salem”.

Our correspondent com­ments: “Perhaps it wasn’t a misprint after all.”