LITMIR.BIZ

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Daa-da.’

      Nature had compensated Miss Dappleforth for her other frailties by making her profoundly deaf so she wore a hearing aid, a large bakelite box hung round her neck, its huge earpiece coloured bright pink to make it inconspicuous against her grey skin. In the buzz and rumble of crowded rooms, often the only word she picked up was her own name which led to a paranoid belief people were talking about her behind her back.

      On Thursday afternoons, by ancient convention, she gathered together with three other ladies to sit in a circle and saw out Haydn string quartets. As arthritis stiffened their hands, playing became more difficult and less satisfactory, paining the joints and so the ears. Nowadays, they still met and sat in a circle in the same places as before and still gripped their instruments but now just to listen in close harmony to gramophone recordings of Haydn string quartets. Sometimes Miss Dappleforth preferred to turn her hearing aid off and hear them just in her head.

      Lesbianism was in those days a purely literary possibility of London fringe groups who betrayed themselves by also practising nudism and alpine rambling, so local rumour invented for her instead a great heroic love tragically lost in the trenches of the Somme. It went without saying that her great age reduced any passion to either tragedy or comedy. In the godless but deeply superstitious world of the children, this explained the dedication with which she put on black and hung a dead fox around her neck every Sunday to wobble to church on her bicycle, attending both services, with a large hymnal in the basket before her like a loaf of bread. She had been appointed to her post from outside the town some thirty years before and local people felt she was starting to get the hang of it and might well stay. Familiarity bred content.

      In Jack’s school, the other members of staff were less substantial without being flighty, for the word 'teacher' still evoked great respect and overtones of dedication and had none of the implications of semi-literate sociologese and moral dubiety it would later acquire. There was always at least one male teacher, however, for it was obscurely felt that one master was obviously 'needed' amongst all those women, like a steadying white officer amongst unreliable colonial troops, to stiffen the backbone. Not surprisingly, these men often turned out to be made of poorer stuff than the women and constant re-postings alone preserved the male mystique. Several masters had disappeared quite suddenly in mid-week. One had openly chased lady teachers with a quite unreasonable optimism which had not passed unnoticed among the slum-wisdom of some pupils. Schoolboy folklore credited him with an enormous penis so that when he walked past a radiator one of them would always go, ‘Drrrr!’, the sound of a stick being run along railings. Another was sensationally crushed on his motorbike in Weyland's only major motoring accident, an event as rare as being struck by lightning and just as needful of moral explanation. He had been seen - shockingly for a man of learning - in the pub. Worse, in the village it was known that he had misused the advantages of his education for mere barroom wit. On one occasion he had pointed at his pint and asked the barmaid before a hushed audience. ‘Can you get a vodka in that love? You can? Then why don't you fill it up with beer you silly cow?’ His demise seemed only fitting at a time when films unanimously clung to the trite message that wickedness was atoned for by death.

      After the crash, one of Jack's exercise books was returned to him from the squashed paniers, corrected in the dead man's hand but with a glamorous tyre track across its cover and just a suggestion of what might be blood in one corner. It was like a letter from beyond the grave. Mum, unaware of the terrible administrative consequences, dumped it with finality in the salvage bin. ‘It's not decent, morbid, giving a boy a thing like that. You can tell them I said so.’ He knew they'd kill him at school.

      ***

      Jack felt that, for a man of the cloth, the Rev. Maclehose was a relatively godly person. Unlike the curate, he had not embraced that modern version of the Church of England that saw itself solely in terms of social work and the dispensing of soup instead of unpalatable moral direction. Instead, he clung to embarrassing residues of theology and ritual - even including a belief in God as an ancient man with a grey beard - that had the comforting virtue of familiarity for older villagers. For the curate, Man was good and all bad things therefore came from the Devil. God made little, green apples but the stomach ache they caused could only be from the Prince of Darkness. Jack found the notion of a world without a looming judgmental presence that cast down guilt, shame and thunderbolts confusing, since it contradicted everything he knew about life but, if it turned out that there was no Judgement Day of hellfire and damnation, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world and he gradually formed an idea of religion as a sort of deliberate incoherence. For Reverend Maclehose, God was good and so he sent bad Mankind bad things as deserved punishment for sin but he sometimes wondered what he had done to deserve his own curate. Such principles were the evocative objects - the equivalent of red pillar boxes, Victorian pennies and digestive biscuits - of his theological experience. His church was a place of sonorous organs and flower arrangements, hand-embroidered hangings and vestments, the warming glow of polished wood, brass and stone that his flock already knew from the saloon bar as the signs of a refuge from an unhappy world. And the Reverend Maclehose embraced joyfully his role of providing cosy ceremonial accompaniments for the major life-cycle rituals, a sort of loud-voiced MC of their lives. Many were baptised, most were married and almost all were buried at his hands. In the end, he won them all, adequate proof of the rightness of his calling.

      He was a tall, somewhat funereal man whose height was diluted by a stoop and perfectly, almost aggressively, bald. A mixture of vanity and deafness - the result of a wartime stint as chaplain to a gunnery regiment - led him to wear those glasses that had a deaf aid concealed in the chunky frames. Many a parishioner had been intimidated by his slipping them on and glaring, the better to hear what they were saying. When he and Miss Dappleforth got within a stone's shot of each other, the air pinged and howled with static interference and feedback.

      Except for the war, he had been made to lie down mainly in green parishes, encountering the curate’s devil mostly in his well-dressed and relatively urbane forms, cushioned by adequate Easter offerings and the possession of a large Victorian vicarage. He saw the world as basically a good place where the Church of England could indeed be defined as the Conservative Party at prayer and where things were to be made better and better by keeping them just the way they were. The face of evil was to be seen most clearly in any form of change. Every year when he was on retreat in a house run by nuns in Weymouth, the curate would run riot about the church, putting up large, hand-painted signs of evangelical tenor, lettered in orange. ‘Jesus - the rock that does not roll’ or ‘Despite inflation, the wages of sin is still death’ or ‘Jesus - not just a Christmas presence’ or ‘Noah's company stayed afloat when the whole world went into liquidation.’ As soon as the Rev. Maclehose returned they were plucked down again and obliterated. It was as much the vulgar, bright colours as the message that troubled him.

      It was his unrecognised misfortune to have two Scottie dogs, one black, one white, just like in the Dewar's whisky advertisements. He called them Whisky and Soda and thought himself waggish. Soda was the white one of course. The alternative had been to call them Warp and Woof. They were joyful, frisky dogs and ranged at will over the vicarage garden, rooting and fetching sticks in the shrubberies and bamboo thickets. At night, he would call them in and, after supper, it was like the warmth of old port to him to see them as they lay chubby and wet-jowled, snoring by his fireside. He thumbed his pipe with Three Nuns tobacco and rejoiced in the benison of nature's foison. The word 'dog' he noted, occurred eighteen times in the Bible, the word 'cat' not at all.

      ‘He drinks,’ said the parishioners. ‘He's a bugger for his scotch. You can hear him every night shouting for it, regular as clockwork. '”Whisky! Soda!” over and over again.’

      Many of the parishioners also drank. But Jack realised that vicars were somehow not real people, more costumed bit-players, and it was the recognised role of religious specialists to act out ‘Austere Virtuous Life’ on behalf of the secular laity, just as the Royal Family were expected to mime a model of ‘Domestic Bliss’ that their subjects no longer practised themselves. Yet tippling was acknowledged as a kiss-my-ring Catholic pursuit, the whisky priest a character who had wandered in from another play, so that here it bore overtones of popery and was therefore unacceptable.

      ‘It ought not to be allowed,’ Mum

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