AS EDGY as Rev and Touching Cloth, Richard Hughes’s memoir of his curacy in Mold, in 1959, has all the ingredients of a delicious clerical romp: a Church in Wales seemingly set in aspic after disestablishment in 1920; a Victorian incumbent striving for choral perfection; a plump spinster who invites him upstairs to try out her Dutch cap; an Ash Wednesday commination, from the Prayer Book, during which the ingenious officiant replaces “Cursed” with “Blessed”; a bunch of teddy boys who daub the public loo seats with the stickiest brown paint.
But, within the romp, Hughes skilfully weaves essays (disguised as conversations) on a galaxy of subjects: church history; architecture; Welsh history and language; Near Eastern creation myths; the mechanics of the Austin MG and VW Beetle. . . One page has six footnotes.
There is the pathos of a love story with “a sexually volcanic, randy, hot-blooded infidel who happens to have fallen in love with a curate”. Their honeymoon involves feeding pickled onions to an irascible parrot, and the roughest crossing to Bardsey Isle in the wake of the “pure and unsullied” Celtic saints.
He prays with a teenage girl from his youth club, dying of lung cancer; he founds a boxing club to harness the teddy boys; he reorders a graveyard, resurrecting skulls galore; and the Welsh skies burst in sympathy as he buries a man heartbroken at the death of his wife and new-born babe.
He highlights this verse sung on saints’ days at St Michael’s College, Llandaff:
Our Lady sings Magnificat
With tune surpassing sweet;
And all the virgins bear their parts,
Sitting about her feet.
(The English Hymnal, 638)
Speaking of parts, who knew that John Stainer, in his Cathedral Prayer Book, helpfully provided tenor and bass responsorial parts for newly delivered mothers to croon at their churching? Those were the days.
The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an hon. assistant bishop in York diocese.
A Curate in Love
Richard Hughes
Ember Press £9.99
(978-1-73928-444-2)