Driving force
ON A Saturday afternoon almost exactly five years ago, I had tea in the vicar’s garden, and he told me about that morning’s 8 a.m. reopening after three months of forced closure. “You know who was first through the door?” he asked, and I detected a slight tear in his eye as we both said her name: “Catherine Varney.”
Of course she would be the first one back. “Just you and me, Vicar?” she asked. “It’s like old times.” Catherine had worshipped at All Saints’ for 63 years. Four weeks before the country shut down, the congregation had toasted her 90th birthday; and her great-granddaughter had just been baptised there. She was as much a part of our fabric as the clock — and less in need of repair. No mere pandemic was going to keep her away.
I love such stubbornness, or sense of duty. The Vicar recalled that, years earlier, he had suggested to Miss Furneaux — another indomitable Blackheath matron — that she avoid the uphill walk to church the next day since snow was forecast and she was now 96 and on her fourth hip. She thanked him for his observations, and said that, as a priest, it was not his place to tell her when to receive the sacrament. She duly arrived at 8 a.m., through the snow.
There are higher, less easily ignored, authorities than priests. The DVLA, for a start. Just before Easter, I gave Catherine a lift to church so that she could polish the brass. She came to her door bearing a packet of biscuits for my son, and a still-burning grievance that the DVLA had taken away her licence on the spurious grounds that she couldn’t really see. “But I liked driving,” she protested. “I liked driving fast.” Indeed, our curate told me that he once accepted a lift from her and has still not recovered his nerves.
Real absence
EVERY church needs a Catherine (and we are lucky to have a few younger models). They are the glue that holds a community together. She was from that generation that was always prepared and never complained. When her late husband was president of Blackheath rugby club, Catherine would make sure that she had two dozen eggs in the fridge on the day of a home fixture, in case Freddy brought the first XV home and they wanted omelettes.
Besides buffing the brass, she was still on the flower rota, expressing a strong opinion if anyone arranged them the “wrong” way; and sang in the choir until she was 93. She threw magnificent parish lunches, and always had a smile for children as they ran around after (but not during) mass. She reminded me of those celebrated by John Betjeman in his poem “Septuagesima”: “. . . let’s praise the few Who are seen in their accustomed pew Throughout the year, whate’er the weather That they may worship God together. . . And though they be but two or three They keep the church for you and me.”
Catherine’s accustomed pew, when not in the choir, was by the aisle, five or six rows back. Central to the church. Often, she would sit with the next three generations: her daughter or former son-in-law, grandson, and great-granddaughter: Blackheath’s past, present, and future. I naïvely thought that one day we might see five generations together — she surely had a couple more decades in her — but there is a power even stronger than the DVLA.
Catherine slipped away suddenly last month, at 95, nine days after she had received her last communion in church, insisting that she walk to the altar, even though she had recently broken three ribs in a fall. As several remarked over coffee after mass two days before she died, it must have been serious for her to be on the prayer list, since she hated a fuss. She has earned her Nunc Dimittis. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. But, my God, we’ll miss you.
Drawing stumps
THE same day as Catherine died, I lost another friend. John Fingleton, universally known as Fingers, was one of life’s great characters, a legend in his own lunchtime. A charity auctioneer, whose gavel-work had raised £11 million, Fingers had opinions that were almost as loud as his blazers. He died after four months in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where, for years, he had bought a weekly carnation for his buttonhole from the Friends’ stall. His final day was spent listening to Test Match Special, as Ben Duckett — a batsman whom Fingers had known since he was seven — made a century as England beat India. As a soundtrack to a cricket-lover’s final hours, it could not have been better.
When word got round that he was heading to the eternal pavilion, a wave of friends came to say goodbye, and the nurses kindly overlooked the concept of visiting hours. As I arrived on his penultimate day, I met and chatted to one of Fingers’s oldest schoolfriends, who thought that he recognised my name, but not from my journalism. Finally, it came to him. “You once emailed me about your baptism,” he said.
So I did. A few years ago, seeking a belated confirmation, I needed to find out where I had been baptised. My mother could remember only that it was a church in Loughton; so I emailed the wardens of the various churches, and this man had (kindly but fruitlessly) checked their records. Our first encounter was to do with my birth; our second was at what turned out to be a mutual friend’s death. What were the chances? And yet moments of such serendipity seem to be more common than they should. God works in mysterious ways. Or, as Terry Pratchett once put it, “million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
Presidential U-turn
I AM now a president, having been given that position by my school’s alumni association. If I understand the powers of a president correctly, I will spend most of my time playing golf and bloviating in capital letters on social media about imposing tariffs on the girls’ grammar, though I think it will largely be making speeches at dinners.
Last summer, I returned to the school for my headmaster’s funeral. It was a humanist service that began, rather miserably, with the celebrant announcing that nothing happens to us after we die. Some of the teachers looked even gloomier when they got to the school field for the wake and discovered that there was no booze.
It was the absence of God which surprised and disturbed me; for one of the memories that I most strongly associate with school is the assemblies, run by the head, with proper hymns played on an organ — although on one occasion his deputy cruelly asked the boy who stood in for the music teacher why he hadn’t removed his oven gloves.
I am a mediocre singer, but have always enjoyed belting out Hymns A&M, and many of my favourites today have been with me since school. Play the opening bars of “All creatures of our God and King”, or “O praise ye the Lord” (with oven gloves or not), and I will feel instant nostalgia. This backfired at our wedding, when I insisted on having the Stainer tune for “Love Divine, all loves excelling”. That was what we sang at school, and was therefore “proper”.
As I have had to admit to my wife regularly over the subsequent 19 years, whenever the organist has played it to a different tune, Blaenwern is much better.
Patrick Kidd is a journalist, and a churchwarden of All Saints’, Blackheath.