father’s study was the source of all moral and spiritual authority in the world as we knew it. He was the births, marriages and deaths man. His
ex cathedra
statements on politics, social matters, sexual conduct were—it went without saying—the next-best thing that you could get to God’s own opinions on these subjects. It’s true that there was an impostor living in Pound Road who ran what my father called the “tin tabernacle,” also a vagrant Irish priest in the pay of Rome. At various times, as the landscape beyond the hedge shifted, there were Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Pentecostalists, Primitive Methodists and people who talked to the dead via planchettes on ouija boards. But no decent or sensible person would get involved with such superstitious lunacies: this was England, we were the Church of England, and that was that.
My father, with his parson’s freehold, was our Governor, and he held his office under Royal patent. When visitors from the outside world came to the parsonage, they came as if they’d made a sea crossing to reach us. As comeovers should do, they arrived looking formal, shy and ill at ease.
There would be the scrunch of bicycle tires in the gravel, then an unnatural period of silence, then a ring at the doorbell.
“Oh, drat, not
another
parishioner,” my mother said.
“Can you answer it, dear—”
“Are you Out or In?”
“I don’t know. See who it is, will you, dear?”
“They really might have the grace not to come at this time—don’t they ever
think
?”
But at the door, my mother would say “Oh, Mrs. Beale! Lovely to see you. How are you?
Do
come in!”
A dozen people a day would beach at our door like this. Skulking at the top of the stairs, I watched them with a cold and curious eye—the speechless couples, engaged to be married; the white faces of the bereaved, who always apologized for being there, as if death were an error they should have been able to correct; the loud deserted wives; the unmarried mothers-to-be, shielding their pregnancies like disfigurements; gruff men in bicycle clips who were sorry-to-bother-the-vicar-but; and elderly lone gentlewomen for whom the parsonage was the last remaining place where they could pay a social call. Lingering as near as I dared to the closed door of the study, I heard voices lowered as if the house itself were a church. Sometimes I heard grownup women crying. My father’s voice was wise and even-toned. Its slow, bass seriousness was what people needed when they came to a parsonage; it promised understanding, help and religious mystery.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes … yes.” But there was much more than that. Framed by his own Ancestors, by the institution of the Church, by his unusual personal proximity to the Creator, my father had a great deal of what Victorian writers called “bottom.” His
yeses
came from the depths; each monosyllable was a low rumble of compassionate assent. A
yes
from my father would stop a crying woman in her tracks or release a sudden bright cascade of words in the week-old widower. When the parishioners emerged from his study, they looked comforted and changed. I scowled and kept my own counsel about these transformations: I was unimpressible, as islanders are, by another islander’s achievements.
There were whacking financial differentials between the parsonage and the outside world. At about £700 a year, a vicar’s stipend in the 1950s was roughly the same as thewage of a skilled laborer living on the council estate outside. It was a small fraction of the pensions of the real live retired generals who lived in big houses on the outskirts of the village, let alone of the incomes of the people with double-barreled surnames, the directors of London companies, the doctor, the farmers or the rest of the comfortable middling classes. We belonged nowhere. We had the money of one lot, the voices of another—and we had an unearthly godliness which removed us from the social map
ex cathedra
statements on politics, social matters, sexual conduct were—it went without saying—the next-best thing that you could get to God’s own opinions on these subjects. It’s true that there was an impostor living in Pound Road who ran what my father called the “tin tabernacle,” also a vagrant Irish priest in the pay of Rome. At various times, as the landscape beyond the hedge shifted, there were Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Pentecostalists, Primitive Methodists and people who talked to the dead via planchettes on ouija boards. But no decent or sensible person would get involved with such superstitious lunacies: this was England, we were the Church of England, and that was that.
My father, with his parson’s freehold, was our Governor, and he held his office under Royal patent. When visitors from the outside world came to the parsonage, they came as if they’d made a sea crossing to reach us. As comeovers should do, they arrived looking formal, shy and ill at ease.
There would be the scrunch of bicycle tires in the gravel, then an unnatural period of silence, then a ring at the doorbell.
“Oh, drat, not
another
parishioner,” my mother said.
“Can you answer it, dear—”
“Are you Out or In?”
“I don’t know. See who it is, will you, dear?”
“They really might have the grace not to come at this time—don’t they ever
think
?”
But at the door, my mother would say “Oh, Mrs. Beale! Lovely to see you. How are you?
Do
come in!”
A dozen people a day would beach at our door like this. Skulking at the top of the stairs, I watched them with a cold and curious eye—the speechless couples, engaged to be married; the white faces of the bereaved, who always apologized for being there, as if death were an error they should have been able to correct; the loud deserted wives; the unmarried mothers-to-be, shielding their pregnancies like disfigurements; gruff men in bicycle clips who were sorry-to-bother-the-vicar-but; and elderly lone gentlewomen for whom the parsonage was the last remaining place where they could pay a social call. Lingering as near as I dared to the closed door of the study, I heard voices lowered as if the house itself were a church. Sometimes I heard grownup women crying. My father’s voice was wise and even-toned. Its slow, bass seriousness was what people needed when they came to a parsonage; it promised understanding, help and religious mystery.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes … yes.” But there was much more than that. Framed by his own Ancestors, by the institution of the Church, by his unusual personal proximity to the Creator, my father had a great deal of what Victorian writers called “bottom.” His
yeses
came from the depths; each monosyllable was a low rumble of compassionate assent. A
yes
from my father would stop a crying woman in her tracks or release a sudden bright cascade of words in the week-old widower. When the parishioners emerged from his study, they looked comforted and changed. I scowled and kept my own counsel about these transformations: I was unimpressible, as islanders are, by another islander’s achievements.
There were whacking financial differentials between the parsonage and the outside world. At about £700 a year, a vicar’s stipend in the 1950s was roughly the same as thewage of a skilled laborer living on the council estate outside. It was a small fraction of the pensions of the real live retired generals who lived in big houses on the outskirts of the village, let alone of the incomes of the people with double-barreled surnames, the directors of London companies, the doctor, the farmers or the rest of the comfortable middling classes. We belonged nowhere. We had the money of one lot, the voices of another—and we had an unearthly godliness which removed us from the social map
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