Low life | 28 September 2017

As is traditional in this village, the Chapel congregation had walked the 100 yards up the hill to unite with the Anglicans for the Harvest Sunday morning service. The Chapel people are on the whole younger and more visibly filled with the Holy Spirit than the Anglicans. Retired postmistress Daphne was standing in the aisle, bubbling over as usual with love and joy, and bestowing hugs and kisses on anyone attempting to squeeze pass.

The Clarke contingent — mother, aunt, grandson — took a pew brazenly near the front. The service this year was led by the rural dean, who is an absolute babe. This was a rare visit, and we all of us, young and old, male and female, feasted our eyes greedily on her as she emerged theatrically from the vestry shooting her glamorous cuffs. ‘Is she going to do a pole dance?’ I said in a confidential aside to grandson Oscar, a once-a-year churchgoer since the age of five. At seven-and-three-quarters Oscar knows what a pole dancer is, I noted, because he tittered politely at his mad dog grandfather’s ludicrously anachronistic witticism.

My mother and her sister were too decrepit to rise for the first hymn, ‘God, Whose Farm is All Creation’. They had used up all of their strength extricating themselves from my 1.3 Fiesta at the church gate and tottering inside on their disability apparatus. The hymn, I read with surprise, was written by the ‘voice of cricket’, radio commentator John Arlott, and we sung it to a folk tune arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams. ‘How English can you get?’ I said to Oscar, indicating the attribution at the bottom of the page with my thumbnail. Although Oscar can read, he had heard of neither.